Nothing but Blue Skies (33 page)

“Edward suggested that maybe we could talk,” he said.

“I’ve been expecting you.”

“I wonder, shall I come in?”

“I really don’t know.”

“I think you can trust me, Gracie.”

“It’s not that. I just don’t want to watch you noticing how
we’ve furnished the place. I think you’re well capable of making that the issue.”

“I am curious. I suppose I’d say something. Well, we could sit out here. Or go somewhere to eat. It’s almost that time. Honestly, I wouldn’t make the furniture the issue. I’m not that bad.”

Gracie pointed to the street. “Eat it is, then.”

The Mine got a pretty good lunch crowd. It was an Italo-American restaurant featuring vaguely familiar Italian dishes with the usual local short cuts. It was designed to suggest a complicated grotto with lumpy white walls and dripping red candles in wall sconces. Despite the active clientele, the place seemed ripe for abandonment; but then it had seemed that way for more than a generation. On being seated by a distracted young man who pulled back Gracie’s chair and blindly handed them two menus, they confronted the very specific moment of quiet.

“Well, we’ve already seen each other once.”

“It was different, somehow,” said Frank.

“How is that?”

“You were on your own. If only for the day. And we were there for Holly, weren’t we.”

Gracie looked into her menu. “It’s unbelievable,” she said. “Your life goes upside down. You travel around the world. Nations fall. Wars break out. But the menu here never changes. It’s humbling to think your life could end, your family could move away, and this Lasagna Special would still be paper-clipped to the menu.”

Frank sensed her in some palpable way that was different from seeing her there holding her menu, a strand of dark hair hanging in her face. She braced the menu one-handed with her thumb in the crease, freeing her other hand to move the hair back over her ear. He thought he was safe watching her study it, but her eyes floated up and engaged his. She smiled.

“What are you having?” he asked.

“I hadn’t really looked.”

“Better look. This place gives you one moving shot at the waiter and it’s over.”

Frank stared at the menu and thought, before he had found it: club sandwich. The first time he had eaten one, when he was a young caddy spending his fees at the country club patio restaurant and imagining that the club sandwich somehow expressed the social superiority of country club people, he sank the hidden toothpick into the roof of his mouth. He had always wondered why that teary moment, wagging his free hand in agony, had begun his long love affair with the club sandwich.

Gracie said, “You’re having the club sandwich, right?”

“You got it.”

“That’s the summit of local cuisine, isn’t it.”

“Probably.”

“Republicans have been able to evolve over a long period of time without disturbance,” said Gracie. “I know they didn’t invent the club sandwich but they have certainly made it their own.”

“I just smile at these remarks.”

“You were never really typical, except for your eating habits.”

“Incidentally, I haven’t ordered a club sandwich yet. And I don’t feel absolutely locked into that choice.”

“Where is the waiter, anyway?”

Frank craned around. “I’ll try to flag him down.”

“Now don’t get on a tear. He’ll be here soon enough. They’re very busy. Besides, I’m having the lasagna. They never run out of that. Never.”

Frank was looking over at a table of four businessmen he knew. One was a broker at D. A. Davidson, Bob Klane, great racquetball player. Two were guys at Century 21, Terry Simcross and Vance James. They’d done Quail Run, north of town, forty or fifty single-family dwellings. It had fascinated Frank because there were no quail in Montana. The fourth was Dr. Alioti, an ob-gyn formerly of his clinic, what Phil called a “cunt doctor,” an active investor in local businesses. Frank didn’t blame him, having built a fortune staring into all those multishaped, disembodied vulvas, for wanting an activity on a very broad scale. The point was, he
had caught the four of them peering over at his table and then inclining toward each other to have a little discussion.

“Do you mind terribly if I find a waiter?” Frank asked.

“Yes, I do mind,” Gracie said. “I want you to be patient and quiet. We have lots to talk about.”

“Those four shits came in after we did and they’re already eating.”

“I want you to show repose and wait to be served.”

A waiter glided under one of the arched grotto entries. He seemed to be headed their way. Gracie caught Frank staring and said, “Be patient.” The waiter sailed right on past and out an archway on the other side. Frank elevated his eyes to the gondoliers in the shiny print beside their table and tried to stay calm. He wanted to talk to Gracie, but what seemed to him an abusive atmosphere was oppressing him. The four business acquaintances exploded into laughter. Frank aimed his eyes on them.

Gracie was watching him. Maybe she knew what they knew, that he wasn’t doing well, that his careless capacity for earning money was backfiring, that events were overtaking him, that the man who had always been just ahead of events was now slightly behind them. He could soon seem to be a victim. Already, he had begun to notice a smiling attitude in people around him. He could try a leveling explosion somehow, but that would just be a matter of buying time. And people understood that. They knew what desperation was in others. They knew it as a prelude to bottom-feeding time. Frank could start right this minute by calming down about not being served. He would do as Gracie said: he would calm down. He would wait his turn. As far as he was concerned, the waiter could shove that club sandwich right up his ass if he wanted to.

“Are we okay?” Gracie asked. She was looking closely at him. She knew him thoroughly. No one else did, really. It was a damned shame that it was now apropos of nothing. Still, she had beautifully smooth round arms.

“So,” said Frank, “I take it you’ve been traveling.”

“Yes.”

“Any place in particular?”

“Not really. A couple of places with mountains, one with cactus. One had a beach.”

“Were the rooms comfortable?”

“ ‘Were the rooms comfortable …’ Yeah, the rooms were comfortable.”

He thought of the tall, hip, draping posture of Edward Ballantine. He thought about standing in a river when nothing was wrong, or sitting on some hill watching the weather change, smelling the south wind come across a rain-soaked prairie. He was tired of thinking. He wanted to get a box lunch and go watch a car wash in action.

“I’m really hungry,” Frank said.

“It’s the lunch hour. They’re doing all they can. You have to take a more positive view of other people. Frank, I can tell you this. It’s a major problem with you. You expect the worst of other people.”

“I want something to eat.” He knew it wasn’t true. He perhaps expected the worst of her.

In a little while, the four business associates got up from their table, paused for a moment to chip in on the tip. The doctor turned with some apparent upper-body stiffness and acknowledged Frank with a nod. One of the realtors, Terry Simcross, raised a hand as if to say “How.” The racquetball player placed his hands flat on the wall and did some limbering up, and they all went out under the low arch. There were now very few people in the restaurant. Frank wanted so much to begin talking freely to Gracie but he simply couldn’t get it out of his mind that they had not been waited on.

“You know, I suppose that I have been having a rather glum spell in business.”

“I had lunch with Lucy yesterday. She filled me in.”

“I see,” said Frank. Gracie tightened her eyes but said nothing. Maybe she had nothing further to say. He did a quick evaluation and concluded that Lucy probably didn’t say anything to her. Still, he thought the eye-tightening represented an instant of being evaluated by Gracie. Call it a draw.

He remembered imagining his former home life: tasteful, spacious, comfortable, cheerily caught up in routines they devised themselves, routines they amiably pretended to wish to escape. They used to talk about foreign travel, second homes. He watched a couple at the table behind them pay their bill and get up to leave. He gazed at the gondoliers.

“We are not in a particularly good business era here in town, as you saw with Amazing Grease. And I haven’t been paying attention the way I should have. There used to be a virtue in being so diversified, but it is now perilously close to scattered. And right now, I’m pretty scattered.”

“Scared?”

“Scattered. I think I’m in a kind of adjustment period, you know? I think others might handle it better than I do. It just takes time.”

Gracie leaned across the table until she was close to his face. His heart started to speed up because he thought he was about to be kissed. She said, “You shouldn’t fuck Lucy so much if it doesn’t mean anything to you.” Then she leaned back.

“I know.” What else could he say?

“Lucy was my friend.”

“It takes a certain amount of gumption to find a stranger,” Frank said. “You have to really mean it.”

Gracie looked off, her eyes snapping. Frank tried to ease out of it by explaining the period when he relied entirely on self-stimulation.

“It was like being a jai alai player.”

She didn’t laugh.

The waiter came into the room, empty except for Gracie and Frank, and swiped at the empty tables with a cloth. He wore a white apron over a green-and-white-striped soccer shirt and pump-up basketball shoes with silver speed streaks on their sides. When he got close enough, Frank told him, as levelly as he could, that they would like to order. The waiter, with a voice much deeper than his youthful face would have suggested, said, “I’m sorry, but we’re closed.”

“
Oh, no you’re not
.”

“Frank —”

“We’ve been in here an hour,” said Frank.

“You should’ve asked for a waiter,” said the waiter.

Frank got up in a way that caused his chair to skid across the room at considerable speed and bound around like some live thing.

“Frank, please.”

The waiter jumped backward on his pump-up sneakers and spun toward the kitchen. Frank tried to pick an even gait in following him. When he got around the corner, the waiter had disappeared into the kitchen and the manager was standing at the swinging door, a small man in a sport jacket, dark-complected with a sharply outlined widow’s peak. His full cheeks were stippled by a heavy beard.

“May I help you?” He smiled.

“Yuh, you may. My wife and I would like to have lunch.”

“But we closed at two.” He looked closely at Frank.

“This I realize,” said Frank, picking this odd locution in an attempt to match the manager’s reasonable tone. “But we’ve been in there waiting for over an hour.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“And you expect me to believe this?”

“I can prove it. Several acquaintances of ours were in here with us.”

“I’m Federico,” said the manager, holding out his hand.

Frank shook hands with him. He said, “Frank.”

“This must be no treat for the missus,” said Federico, “but we’ll see if we can patch it up.” He gripped Frank by the shoulders, tilted his own head and looked at Frank closely. “Is everything okay?”

Frank went into a loose Robert Mitchum posture. “What’s not to be okay about except I can’t get anything to eat here?”

“You looked pretty crazed there, Frank, when you come around that corner. You looked about a bubble and a half off plumb.”

“It was getting to me,” Frank allowed.

“Frank, I am going to prepare lunch for you and the missus. It’d be my great pleasure to cook for you. After that, you’ll wonder how you ever ate that stuff on the menu.”

Federico followed Frank back into the dining room, which was now completely empty. Well, it was no wonder and it was no surprise. Frank immediately realized that Gracie wasn’t going to sit around while he caused a scene. Besides, he was doomed. His complete failure to control his impulses had again prevented him from doing what was most important to him. He was deeply shaken. He stared into the empty room until Federico moved around in front of him, spread his hands in inquiry and, with wide sparkling eyes, asked, “Where is the little woman of our earlier discussion?”

“She bugged out,” said Frank, still defensively locked into his forties movie slouch. He didn’t know how to go on to the next thing. This little Mediterranean type seemed maddeningly precise. It brought out the dormant galoot within him.

“Frank, I repeat my earlier question: are you okay?”

Frank decided to try something. He said, “No, I’m not okay.” He let his face collapse. The hell with being okay.

“Was there really a wife?”

“There was. It doesn’t matter if you believe me. We were just hungry. We were going to eat together.” Then he added in stifled despair that could have broken out in a howl, “
We could never get a waiter.”

“Frank, have a seat. I am going to cook for you. Don’t panic, Frank. I believe you. Do not, I repeat do not, jump to your feet and chase the little wife around the town. Take some time out for a beautiful meal. You have to change your timing. You look like a lunatic. The little woman will run from such a face.”

Frank sat down obediently.

“I am going to prepare you a meal and then I am going to sit down with you and tell you how to be with the woman.”

It seemed a legitimate challenge not to blow sky high, not to race into the street in geekish pursuit, not to be so blatantly needy, though it was questionable what he might hope to conceal from Gracie. Eating mysterious food with this swarthy man, whose restaurant had given him such poor service that he lost a longed-for opportunity of contact with his estranged wife, was going to test his great desire for grace under pressure. He was jumping out of his skin. He didn’t want to hear about the woman and how to be with her.

“And now,” said Federico, “I am going to the kitchen.”

Frank kept up the slouch and waved him on his way. The hand with which he waved, resting across the back of the chair so recently occupied by Gracie, swung idly at the wrist. Oh, this is good, thought Frank. He pursed his lips in an expression of leisure he had sometimes observed, eyes elevated into a middle distance. He had lost all sense of natural behavior. He found himself to be peckish and tried speculating on the approaching meal. He imagined that Gracie was somewhere nearby, expecting his footsteps at any time. That’s not a crazy idea, he thought.