Nothing but Blue Skies (27 page)

“I’m not hungry anyway.”

“Neither am I.”

They drove to a small park with modest houses around its sides, a concrete tennis court without a net, a swing set and a steel flagpole. There was a light overcast sky and it was pleasantly cool. The only people in the park were those crossing it to go elsewhere, including an old woman making agonizing progress on a cane. Sitting on one of the wooden benches, Frank looked around and thought how easy it was to feel sunk into one of these spots where the world goes by. He thought of the doctors decamping from his clinic, now a pathetic shell, and the bath he took on the yearlings, the sort of
faux pas
he once never made. You could sit in this park and in a couple of months get a warm sweater and sit in it some more and feel yourself either immersed in the small human routines of a town or perched on a cooling planet hurtling through time and space. It was dealer’s choice.

He couldn’t understand sitting next to Gracie. Either this was an illusion or she had never gone, never really gone; or if she had gone, she would be right back; or, how was this, she had gone but she’d
had
to go and then would be back. It was satisfying to think in little crazy units like this, kind of absorbing to avoid sweeping concepts. Gracie was there, then went forth, then returned. She was following her star! He was stuck in the mud. She was on a
high wire. He was sucking wind. Other times, it was his star and her mud. Other times, for each of them, it must have been like leaving the house to go to work while the old dog watched from the lawn and wondered why he didn’t get to go along. When he had been young he barked; when he was old he just watched; and then he was dead and gone.

And Frank remembered how poorly he had dealt with solitude — well to remember that, because he was going back to it — how he had slunk around like a coyote, encountering other lonely prowlers, joyless, glancing occasions, losing ground with every event in a steady regression. What was the name of that girl he met at Hour Photo? Picking up her nephew’s school pictures? Gone. He covered Gracie’s hand with his. She removed her hand and laughed. Out the window went his dream of mystery poontang.

“What are you laughing at?” Frank asked, wondering if she could read his mind.

“Remember when Holly was little, she used to drink out of the hummingbird feeders?”

“Yeah.”

“I was just remembering.”

“Well, it takes a big dog to weigh a ton.”

“Sure enough?”

“It seems funny, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The way things have flown by.”

“Flown by,” said Gracie. “They’ve flown by, all right.”

“I think once I get over being bitter, I’ll feel we had a pretty good run at it.”

“I’m already at that point. I never was bitter.”

“What did you have to be bitter about?”

“Oh, Frank, let’s not start.”

“Okay.” He was inches from an unproductive fugue state, the very trees in the park darkening as though in an eclipse. He looked around at the beaten paths in the grass, a lot of anonymous human use. He wished they were living together now in a raw Sunbelt subdivision with no history whatever.

“I feel kind of guilty about this,” Gracie said. “I promised that this trip would be highly focused on Holly’s situation.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I wasn’t anxious for any renewal of intimacy.”

“Is that what you think I have in mind?” No sense in trying to fool her, he thought. “I imagine you’re pretty loyal to Ed …”

“It’s not that. He’s been no solution to my problems. But his problems may be more serious than mine and I can’t push him off the brink, which is where I think he is currently living.”

“In what way?” Frank asked, his heart leaping. What did he hope for, cancer? bankruptcy? AIDS?

“I don’t want to get into it. He’s still married too.”

“Leave him —?”

“God, just look at you!”

“I can’t conceal everything, Gracie.”

“What’s the difference, Frank? You couldn’t get rid of me quick enough, a regular hanging judge. Anyway, I’m going to need to get a few things out of the house,” she said.

How was this to be understood? “To be continued”? She was certainly a bit agitated. “Okay,” said Frank boldly, “so you’re out of this relationship at some level and it’s, what, reconnaissance time?”

“Fuck you, Frank.”

“Uh-
huh
.”

“I hate it when you look so triumphant. What a disgusting man you are, Frank. Yes, disgusting.”

“You act like you lost match point and that’s not at all the way I’m viewing this, Gracie, honestly it’s not.”

“You’d just like to find some alpha male one-liner for the coarseness and lust that drove me from my home. I know your every thought, you rotten shit.”

Alpha male, that was a good one. Is that why he stared down from his bedroom window at the college couple as they waited for a summer shower to pass, jerking off into his curtain? Is that what an alpha male does? Frank knew perfectly well he was sinking into a pure shadow state as several of his dreams turned to dust.
One was showing a faint glow of light, but mostly it was a broad flowering of shadow.

“Anyway,” Gracie said, “I thought this was about Holly.”

“It is.”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“And?”

“It’s none of our business.”

“Gracie, I think that’s an abdication.
No más abdicación
.”

“Yes, I suppose it is. But I think that’s what you do. Abdicate. In fact, I’m going to get into it, on several fronts. I’m going to set an abdication track record.”

“I tried that. They’re stripping me of my belongings.”

“This must be a ball buster for you, champ.”

“Not as much as you might think. As discussed, your comprehension of me was never as deep as you thought.”

“Give me a call the day you learn to accept failure,” she said. “I’m in the book.”

She looked down into the wilderness of her purse, found some Carmex and slicked it onto her lips. She reflexively glanced at him to see if he saw her finger touch her lips, and then averted her eyes sternly. “There’s a tone, Frank, almost like dictating a letter. It’s unbearable.”

“They’re stripping me of my belongings. Tone’s the first to go. Plus, finding Holly infatuated with the Lord Haw-Haw of the northern Rockies —”

“Let’s not make it worse than it is.”

“Let’s not make it worse than it is!”

A youth with a punk haircut, riding a mountain bike one-handed and drinking an orange soda with the other, shot past them a few inches from their toes and Frank told him to slow down. The youth wheeled around in a big circle, came back at higher speed, shaking the soda can, and hosed Frank in the face with it as he surged past. Frank jumped up in pursuit but it was hopeless. When he turned back to the park bench, his face and hair sticky and wet, Gracie was doubled over with laughter.

Frank wiped his face on his sleeve and sat down. He decided
not to discuss it. He indulged a little reverie wherein he ran down the boy on the bike, shoved his head through the spokes of his front wheel, then kicked him in the ass at his leisure. Frank smiled to think that he was making less of a distinction these days between what he imagined happening and what actually happened. His carefree jerking off had come to seem advantageous compared to the time-consuming alternatives. But it was laziness, really, or weariness, a collapse of the casual utopianism of his earlier days in which ecstasy was but a hop, skip and jump away.

He watched a young woman in bombacha pants teaching her dog to chase a Frisbee, several robins stretching worms under a sprinkler. An extremely small Asian woman in her sixties set up an easel that faced the dun-colored hills behind the neighborhoods. He felt Gracie next to him. A robust and amiable erection tortured his chinos into an asymmetrical tent.

“My God, what a problem I’ve got,” he said, accepting that it was inconcealable. Gracie gazed around, pretending to search for the object of his enthusiasm.

“You’re all boy, Frank.”

“Thanks, Grace. Now why don’t you come on home. The coffee pot’s on. I’ve hobbled the old goat —”

“And what? We could make some feta cheese? I’m not following. The other thing is, an indecent-exposure rap would go a long way in weakening your case against Lord Haw-Haw.”

Frank thought for a moment. “I have a lot of faith in Holly. She’ll go through this thing and right out the other side.”

“I hope so. I also suspect it as something we’re using for our own purposes.”

“Exactly.”

Here was another ruse, the candid discussion, elevating essentials to a cooler altitude, often accompanied by bad acting and owlish solemnity. It was an ungainly moment. Frank wanted to fall upon his wife like a Saracen.

Just then, Gracie began to sob. Frank said, “Oh, dear, what’s this,” and had no idea what to do. With any slip of control he was going to join in, but he held on and stared off into nowhere to
contain himself, and felt sunk. His tear ducts ached under his eyes and a film dropped suddenly over the park as though the credits were about to run on the last scene. At that moment, the boy on the mountain bike shot past once more. Frank elevated his overwrought face in the boy’s direction in time to receive another blast of orange soda, and the can, which bounced off his head.

Frank jumped up and began to race after the boy, who was riding on the rear wheel only and pulling away. He followed him out of the park and into traffic. The boy darted between oncoming cars to an intermittent song of horns, his green shirt shrinking, then wheeled to the right down a side street. Frank himself went to the right and walked a block and a half to an alley, then up it a short distance, where he climbed into a garbage pail and waited, surrounded by a deep vegetable stink, trying to reconcile his desire to kill the boy with his desire to be close to Gracie. He was close to retching but confident the boy would circle back this way for one more look. He meant to explode from the can into the boy’s face and do what he had to do. While he waited, he tried to remember what it was costing to hedge yearling cattle. No one else was doing that, but it was probably a good and original idea for this part of the world. You could certainly do it and the bank would help. Well, maybe not his chickenshit bank.

Gracie wasn’t going to wait around indefinitely. He was beginning to cool down. He thought of Gracie’s tears and he wanted to see her now. He stood up in the garbage pail and found himself facing a screaming old woman in her bathrobe. The woman dropped the black plastic bag she was carrying and scurried into a door that opened onto the alley, yelling “Police!” in what Frank took to be an uneducated accent because she paused too emphatically between the syllables. He looked up to see the boy do a sliding U-turn on his bicycle and head out the opposite way.

Frank made a rapid trudge to the street, where he tried to blend in yet knock the loose garbage from his clothes. He crossed the park from another angle, but their bench — he could tell it was theirs because he could line up the swings and the flagpole — was empty. Now, from a distance, he could see the boy leading two
foot policemen his way. There was no time to think; he just had to run forward until he was out of the open space of the park, into an intimate blue-collar neighborhood, through back yards and under clotheslines, knocking a bird feeder out of his way in a spray of seeds, frantically navigating his way to Holly’s house, bursting through her front door and virtually into the arms of Lane Lawlor. Frank was acutely conscious of smelling like sweat and garbage. “Hello again,” he gasped, tilting his head and smiling, a gruesome shot at charm, ungainly in the extreme.

Lane watched him for a moment before speaking. “Let me build you a drink,” he said, making a point of forcing a smile, like pressing his own weight. “I came back to use Holly’s phone.” He paused, as though there was no telling what to expect from someone standing in a slight crouch with an unmistakable tincture of back yard garbage.

“Just catch my breath,” Frank said, moving to the living room and falling into a chair. He remembered seeing a redheaded man who had just had a heart attack at the airport, seated on the floor in a busy Salt Lake concourse, rushing travelers eddying around him, a look of perspiring embarrassment on his face, a morning newspaper at his side. Probably no one but his mother could have comforted him. His pupils were the size of dimes and he definitely seemed to be watching something coming his way.

Lane brought him a drink, the kind of strong drink you made when you meant to let your hair down. Frank was going to be careful of it. And it was a relief to be here with a highly objectified creature like Lane. It had been too much with Gracie. Every attempt to modify his emotions recently had gone upside down. He had just felt wild, and that was too much. He didn’t want that wild feeling taking him off. He wanted the type of steadiness that is always praised, in sports, in life, everywhere. With Lane it could be strenuous yet polite, like an old-fashioned sea battle: gentlemen captains getting their guns into position and altogether out of the question to act or feel wild.

Lane sat down. “Kind of a turbulent time for you,” he said.

“Afraid so.”

“Sometimes it helps having something to set all these tribulations against.”

“Yeah,” said Frank, “like, we sleep for eternity or something.”

“Not quite that dire. Maybe a few values.”

“What kind of values, Lane?”

“The kind you come in from the desert with, the kind that stand you in good stead. The kind that make you one with your own people.”

Lane probably had him here. The people who wanted to stop every river, kill every inconvenient animal and reduce every forest to usable fiber had a remarkable solidarity. They believed that every thing in the natural world was part of a conspiracy against the well-filled lunch bucket, the snowmobile with its topped-off fuel tank and the proper utilization of a deep clip of cartridges. Frank looked at him and tried to imagine him as a child, concluding that Lane had never been a child. He was born a full-sized spokesperson.

“You know,” Frank said, “I have a feeling if we share our philosophies we’re going to end by tearing this apartment up and it doesn’t belong to us.”