The Grand Tour (22 page)

He walked once more around the perimeter, collecting himself. The night sky overhead could not have been vaster. Through a strip of patchy grass, he moved onto the concrete of the pool deck. Her wet, fading footprints on the ground were like a bread-crumb trail leading him into the hotel, to the elevators, and up to room 332.

I
n the morning, Cindy lay in bed with damp sheets stretched to her chin. This was a compromise position, as she had managed to simultaneously freeze and burn up throughout the interminable night. Her muscles ached, especially her lower back, which felt like it had been stood upon for a long time by a very fat person. Vance emerged from the shower, wearing a towel around his waist, as though to put his impressive physique on display.

“Good morning,” he said to the room, and Cindy responded with a few quadriplegic blinks. He turned to Richard, on the other bed, who also didn't say anything, who also had the covers pulled up, in his own private misery of renewed consciousness. She had inherited her father's constitutional inability to be friendly or productive until about three hours after waking. Even at the best of times, when she wasn't withdrawing from pharmaceuticals, she felt every morning like her joints were filled with Elmer's glue.

“When's the thing?” Richard asked Vance. “And where?”

“Denver, eight o'clock. We should leave soon.”

Cindy groaned. Richard turned to her and said, “You good to go, champ?”

“No.” She got up and went to the bathroom. She ran hot water in the bathtub, stole two of her father's lorazepam, dry-swallowed them, and climbed into the water. As she did, she noticed a thin thread of blood between her legs. She was both irritated at having her period and relieved; it had been two months since she'd had one, and it also helped explain and excuse how truly horrible she felt. She unwrapped a complimentary soap, tossed the wrapping paper at the adjacent trash basket, and washed herself with the little cream-white seashell. When she got up, a single fresh drop of blood was suspended for a moment in the rusty water, spinning, before it helixed into a pink cloud.

The desk clerk looked mortified when she asked, but nonetheless provided her with gratis sanitary napkins, tampons presumably violating some stricture of Joseph Smith's. In the car, Vance drove, and Richard again rode shotgun. Cindy again sat in the backseat, which suited her fine. Although it made her feel like a child being ferried around against her will, it also absolved her from talking as she glazed out at the land passing by. There was plenty of it to look at—in the open range of southern Wyoming, there was nothing but land to look at—and the air blowing in through the cracked window was cold and refreshing. She was reminded of a family vacation when she was six or so—during an unexpected stretch of relative sobriety and employment, her father had managed to get it together enough to take them down to Mexico. Their ancient Volvo station wagon had lacked air-conditioning, and her six-year-old legs had become almost molecularly fused to the hot vinyl of the backseat, but she'd nonetheless loved every second of the trip. Her parents had bickered their way down I-5, through Orange County, San Diego, and across the border, taking the argument international, but it had seemed distant to her, faint radio chatter as she'd stared out the window.

On I-80, outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a dark quilt of clouds was pulled over the enormous white sheet of the sky, and the temperature fell twenty degrees in ten minutes. Huge drops of rain pelted the car, so large they sounded individually on the roof. Vance took the first exit that appeared and pulled into the gravel parking lot of a diner called, cryptically, Pie O'My! Inside, pink neon lights, Frankie Valli, and the smell of rancid grease waged a terrible, pyrrhic battle for sensory dominance. A teenage hostess, chewing gum with her mouth agape, led them wordlessly to a booth by the window. A miniature silver plastic jukebox affixed to the wall next to their table featured tunes like “He's a Rebel” and “Surfin' Safari.”

“What is it with people and the sixties?” said Richard. “I remember this stuff. It was already bad the first time around.”

“Hmm.” Cindy was looking at the menu and intently not listening.

“I don't know why this country always has to enshrine the past. People call baseball the national pastime, but really it's nostalgia. Anything that happened over twenty years ago automatically becomes worthy of a statue. People's memories are way too short. Christ, Richard Nixon got a parade and library. He should have been shot out of a cannon into a brick wall a foot away.”

She glanced up. “What are you babbling about?”

“They call it the past for a reason, you know? It doesn't matter.”

“Hmm.”

Outside, the sky seemed to release all of the water it had been holding at one time, and the car wasn't even visible where it was parked, thirty feet away. Cindy and Vance sat across from him, and for the second time that day, the awful thought occurred to him that something had happened between them. Were they sitting a hair too close? Did Vance's knuckles brush her arm when he reached for a napkin? Did she glance at the boy while looking out the window? And who cared anyway? Obviously, he did—that was the answer, he knew—but the caring came in a reflexive way he recognized as being absurd on its face. He hadn't been there when Cindy had gone on her first date, hadn't provided a single word of advice or warning about the hazards of unprotected sex or the awfulness of teenage boys, couldn't have named any of her boyfriends at any age—was he really going to start now?

“You two stay up late last night?”

“What?” said Cindy.

“You look a little tired today.”

Cindy gave him the Hate-Eyed Death Stare, as he thought of it, a terrifying, familiar look of murderous incredulity—familiar because he'd seen Eileen do it a lot over the years. But come to think of it, Carole had done it as well, so maybe this look was one of those things all women were just born with, like having exquisitely hyperacute emotions and no governing control over them whatsoever. All of the blood in Vance's face seemed to have traveled to his pimple-dusted cheeks, which looked set to erupt with embarrassment. They were rescued by the heavy approach of a waitress with the body of a retired battleship and a name tag reading
BECKY FANASTIC
. The pad she clutched in her left hand seemed to be just barely preventing her from attacking them with the pen she clutched in her right. “You ready?”

“What kind of pie do you have,” asked Richard.

“We don't have pies.”

“You ran out?”

“No, we don't carry them.”

“But the name of the restaurant.”

Becky Fanastic drew several quarts of air into her ample, irritated bosom and said, “It used to be a famous pie shop. Was bought out by the current owners eight years ago. They hung on to the name. You ready?”

She took their order and left, and Vance hobbled away to the bathroom without comment. Richard and Cindy didn't talk until Becky Fanastic returned with their coffees. Stirring in an endless column of sugar, Cindy said, “You just can't resist, can you?”

“Resist what?”

“Being an asshole.”

“It's hard for me,” Richard said, “try to remember that.”

“What's hard for you?”

“Not to be an asshole. It's hard not to be one when you are one.”

“Way to let yourself off the hook.”

“How does that let me off the hook? I'm putting myself on the hook for being an asshole. I'm putting myself on the asshole hook.”

“No, you're copping to being an asshole, which allows you to continue acting like one. It's a preemptive excuse for your behavior, since no one can expect a real asshole not to behave like an asshole. But then people have to give you credit for at least admitting you're an asshole, right? Basically, it lets you off the hook of behaving like a normal person. Normal people act like assholes all the time, but when they do, they feel bad about it and try not to act like assholes in the future. They don't evade responsibility by saying, ‘Well, what do you expect, I'm an asshole.' ”

“Right,” he said, “because they're not assholes.”

Drinking his coffee, Richard realized that he felt better than he'd felt in months. Not good—let's not go crazy—but not ostentatiously bad, either. Unwretched. He glanced at his daughter. She looked absently over her shoulder as lashing fingers of rain streaked the window and left behind little scuttling beads. For a moment, everything seemed to be poised in a kind of equilibrium. It was a feeling to which he was unaccustomed; like most drinkers and writers (two circles slightly off-center, a Venn diagram like the coffee-mug stain on his napkin), he was used to experiencing life in binary terms; it was either the World of Shit, in which everything was already predetermined, mitigated, compromised, contingent, and comprehensively fucked, or else it was a numinous paradise of possibility and unknown pleasures. But in between is where most human life exists—small victories, small failures, the hard, slow effort people make, straining blindly upward like green shoots through pavement, easily trampled. He took hold of Cindy's hand across the table.

“What,” she said, startled. She tried to pull away, but he held on.

“Listen. I have a proposition for you.”

“Oh, God.”

“Why don't you come live with me in Arizona for a little while?” She stared at him in silence but didn't lunge at him with her knife or run screaming out of the restaurant, which he took as encouragement. “You don't have to say yes right now. You don't have to say anything—just hear me out.”

“Okay.”

“I got some money for the book. Not a ton, but enough. I'm set up right now, for the first time in ever. I bought a house. It's ugly and in the middle of nowhere. But it's big and there's a room you could stay in. There's a TV and a fridge you can put food in. I have a dog. He looks like me, unfortunately. But the point is, the place exists, and you could stay there while you got on your feet.”

“Richard—”

“Hold on. I'm not going to give you a lecture, but we both know you haven't been doing so hot. I don't need to know the details. I don't want to know the details. But I know you shouldn't go back to where you were. I know you need to regroup and start over somewhere, and Phoenix wouldn't be the worst place for that. I mean, it's a shithole with no water, but there are jobs and people and colleges and so on and so on.” She drummed her fingers on the table and again looked over her shoulder out the window, and he could see she was upset, though which particular variety of upset, he couldn't tell. He'd always been bad at that: he would go to his grave without correctly reading a female mood. “I know I haven't been there for you in the past, but I feel like I can be now.”

“You could have then, too.”

“That's true. But that doesn't mean I can't help you now. Think about it.”

She turned to him, seemed about to say something, and stopped, shaking her head. Instead, she rummaged in her pocket and produced two quarters. She dropped them into the jukebox and dialed up “Crocodile Rock.”

In the bathroom, Vance tried and failed to rearrange his genitalia into some kind of tolerable position. The erection he'd had for the last ten hours was so rigid and insistent that it was like a steel Maglite jammed sideways into his jeans. He was worried about it, having seen warnings in Viagra commercials about prolonged erections potentially causing blood clots. But even imagining a blood clot dislodging from his painful member and killing him was not enough to soften it one micrometer. As he'd driven, he'd tried visualizing other things against the empty screen of the Wyoming badlands, but none of them had worked: his mother, wasted and empty eyed under her sheets like a pile of rotten sticks; his dead grandmother in her faded floral nightgown with the lacy collar; a decomposing bird someone had tossed into his locker in sixth grade. The boner's equanimity through this mental montage made him fear for his sanity. Sitting in the booth next to Cindy, grimly impaling his own stomach for ten minutes, he finally couldn't take it anymore. He'd tuck-and-hunched his way across the parquet floor, and thereupon did he find himself masturbating in a bathroom stall at Pie O'My! outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Someone had scratched the words
JEWES LOL
into the brown laminate of the stall divider next to him. He closed his eyes and was back in the bed with Cindy. No, he wanted to think about before that, from the beginning. How she'd been lying there in the far bed staring at golf replays on TV with the sound off, the room already filled with a concerto of Richard's wheezing snores. How he'd brushed his teeth and laid a blanket on the floor and turned the light off and how, a minute or two after he'd shut his eyes and was just starting to doze, he felt fingers brush his shoulder. How his heart whipsawed in his rib cage and for a moment he'd kept his eyes shut, not wanting to open them and see the errant edge of the blanket touching his chest. How he'd opened them to see a hand dangling down, her eyes staring over the edge of the bed, pupils barely visible in the flickering dark.

He climbed up into bed with her, hoping she would do everything because he had no idea what came next. It was like deplaning in a foreign land, one for which he had no phrasebook—one in which he didn't even know what the language was. To his relief and disappointment, but mainly relief, she didn't try to initiate sex—however it was you did that—and, instead, she held him against her, burrowed into his thin, broad chest as deeply as she could. She was like a blind, nocturnal creature desperately trying to dig its way underground, and she pressed herself against him so hard that he coughed. The snores issuing from ten feet away momentarily faltered, and Vance went rigid with fear. When they resumed, he relaxed into her.

He put his arms around her waist, tentatively feeling the marble curve of her lower back. The sensation of it under his fingertips was so intense that his leg juddered in response. Even more intense was the dawning reality that she was allowing him to move his hand to her hip, down the long curving line of her thigh and back up. The thought of her entire body, or most of it, anyway, being suddenly available was like having a gift of almost-unimaginable value bestowed on him. It was as though some eccentric billionaire's Edenic preserve, previously fenced off and viewable only at a great distance, had suddenly thrown its gates open to the public.