Nothing but Blue Skies (7 page)

Frank looked around the dirty parking spaces under the trees and felt a wonderful lightness. “Remember Gram Parsons’s ‘Grievous Angel’?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

He sang: “ ‘Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down, and they all led me straight back home to you.’ ”

“How extremely sweet!”

“This is a perfect time and place,” said Frank sincerely. They walked into the restaurant. It had that wonderful feeling of restaurants that had recently been houses: walls in the wrong places, the waitress emerging from what seemed to be a parlor, carrying a tray. The room was nearly full, with couples, families and even two cowboys who, Frank noticed with irritation, had not removed their hats.

“Hello, Frank,” said one of the cowboys.

“Hello,” said Frank, staring fixedly at the unremoved hat.
Behind them came a great big man in overalls, freckled arms as big around as most people’s legs. Frank looked at him. “Hello, Paul.”

“Hello, Frank.”

“Lucy Dyer, this is Paul Smith.”

“How do, ma’am.”

“How do you do, Paul.”

“Frank,” said the immense man, his face creasing in two with a pained smile, his head settling down and driving out one more row of wrinkles around his sunburned neck. “I burned the feed bunks and farmed right up to the walls of the barn.”

“You’re better off,” said Frank. “You’re much better off, Paul.” It was nice to tell someone they were on the right track. It was nice to notice that people sought his approval in their business decisions. He decided not to tell Paul that he was even deeper into feeder cattle. With his current low spirits, he wondered why he had ever let that happen.

The waitress seated Lucy and Frank at a small table slap against the wall and handed them their menus. Ordinarily, Frank ordered Mongolian beef extra hot and kept washing it down with beer until he felt somewhat crazy.

“I nearly froze up there.”

Lucy stared at him. She said, “It was supposed to be
a joke
.”

“It wasn’t a joke to me.”

“I mean the travel arrangements.”

“I don’t have much of a sense of humor.”

“Here she is, let’s order,” Lucy said. “He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor,” she said to the waitress.

“You don’t need one for Mongolian beef,” Frank said.

The waitress was looking on to her next table. The two cowboys were staring past each other in silence, waiting for their litchi nut. Paul Smith, the farmer, was now at a table by himself, looking like a freckled mountain. Frank turned around: every time the kitchen door opened, the music of Neil Young poured out. Frank loved these sentimental tunes. “I’d cross a mountain for a heart of gold …”

He looked back and it wasn’t Gracie. It was Lucy. His face broke out with sweat. He was starting to go loose with panic.

“I gotta go.”

He stood up and abruptly went out the door.

“Do you have any idea where he was going?” Lucy asked Paul Smith. Smith looked embarrassed. He got redder. “I mean, what was that all about?”

In the parking lot Frank thought, I’m not gaining, I’m not getting anywhere. Lucy came out of the restaurant a minute later. She stopped in its lighted doorway and stared around at the cars parked under the trees. “There you are,” she said. She came over and gazed at him. Frank could just make out her face; she came up to about the middle of his chest and she was not looking at him. She took the edge of his shirt in her fingers. He smelled violets.

They crossed in front of the car and got in. As soon as she began to drive, he felt a tension in his legs from wishing to work the pedals himself. They drove out of the parking lot to Deadrock Street. Homebound traffic from the mall kept them tied up at the stop sign in silence.

Lucy pulled into the takeout line at McDonald’s and, seeing that it would be a wait, turned on the radio low, too low to really make out the music or the excited patter betweentimes.

“We’re down among them now,” said Frank, listlessly contemplating the menu painted on the side of the building. But when the food was handed to them in a bag, the car filled with the appealing trash aroma of fast food. He reached into the bag and felt the hot, salt-grainy ends of the french fries as they wheeled back onto Deadrock. It was wonderful to stare openmouthed into traffic with the radio muttering and the lousy food steaming on the seat between them. Splendid to take what you are given. He smiled, felt the happiness go over the top of him. A long-ago day came back.

“It’s 1964 and news of Dad’s hole in one has just shot through town.”

“What are you saying?”

“I was just thinking back … It must be hell being a travel agent.”

“It’s not so bad. You get so you don’t want to go on a trip.”

“I got some slides from the Far North. Would you like to see them?”

Frank ran the projector. The air was warm and stale in his house. Lucy sat next to him in the dark while he listlessly clicked one snapshot after another of Eskimos passing the time on the banks of an arctic river, working on their Japanese ATVs and smoking cigarettes. They had a way of smoking that looked like they were eating the cigarettes. He had bought these souvenir slides hoping they would trigger reminiscences when he got home. The trouble was, they didn’t. They scarcely mitigated the effect of the humid old couch.

“I wonder if we’re missing something, giving up cigarettes,” said Lucy. She saw the deep satisfaction of the smoking Eskimos.

“I think we are.”

The last slide clicked through. The wall lit up with a white square. A car passed on Assiniboine Avenue and light wheeled on the ceiling and again it was so dark.

“It’s something how lonely life is,” said Lucy.

Man, thought Frank, she just chirped that out. He thought of her at work, helping people plan their trips. It had been outlandish of her to suggest his going to the Arctic, outlandish of him to accept. It had been a way of saying something they couldn’t say in any other way. He didn’t know if it had gotten through. It probably hadn’t. He hated travel. When he was away, he just thought about being the child of deeply unhappy people, something he forgot about when he was at work, never having such a thought. But that first airport and, wham, there he was alone with his people. Besides, he thought, it’s not true; they’re not deeply unhappy, they’re dead. The Eskimos were up there watching the river melt, go by, freeze, melt and go by, and it was simply very familiar. And Lucy went on sending people on vacations, drew herself up each morning to design a holiday, people of the world
staring at each other, all somehow more real in brochure form, just as the solitude of the Eskimos came to him on his living room wall in the mustiness of his semi-absent housekeeping.

Lucy stood up in the square of light on the wall.

“Is this better?” she said.

He froze. “Are you going to do something?”

“Yes, I am.”

Frank watched the small television set atop the dresser while he shaved. A new “young country” singer was performing, his long curls falling out from beneath his ten-gallon hat. “Put a futon on your wish list,” he hog-called into the microphone while his hair fell over his harmonica rack, “I’m kicking you tonight!” Perhaps it was very good music. He simply didn’t know anymore. It could be great.

He turned off the television set. Then he sat down and thought about the previous night, the previous brief evening and its lovemaking, which might well have been less an episode of spontaneity than an unfolding of earlier matters, something fearful, a sort of cowering behind one’s loins for want of a better idea. Not like the old days of rear back and let it rip. In these times, there was a surfacing of themes, the collision of culture, a pilfering of one’s own existence to direct dial three abdominal nerves. Life itself, thought Frank wearily, and at these prices!

From his shower, Frank could see lights on in a few houses, but most of the roofs from his angle huddled in the dark of their trees, scarcely outlined by moonlight. He felt he was up alone with the news crews of New York.

He dressed and went outside. It had been a warm night and the air was filled with the smell of juniper and damp garden beds. The
sidewalk shone slightly, and as the road mounted the hill toward the south, the houses were raised in increasing angularity until they stood silhouetted at the crown against the stars and foothills.

He walked into the dining room of the Holiday Inn and waited for a seat. There was one gentleman reading
USA Today
, a Northwest Airlines crew of pilots and stewardesses, and June Cooper. Frank hoped the waitress would take him to an empty table before June spotted him, but no such luck. She seemed to realize that that might have been his hope and flagged him to her table grimly. Frank went over and sat down.

“Join me,” she rasped. “You don’t have that many friends, at least not at this hour.” June was a striking forty-year-old with almost black hair and blue eyes, an amazing combination. She had blown in from Oklahoma twenty years before as a veterinarian’s assistant, gone through three marriages to three previously married men and ended up with a successful Buick agency of her own, a gleaming single-story showroom and office that scattered its inventory of sparkling Buicks across one of the most valuable commercial lots in town. Her last husband hadn’t made much of it, and it seemed, after a decade and a half as a barracuda, June’s real gift was in running a business. She once told Frank, “The way I was raised, the only business open to women was marriage. I opened a chain. Right?”

“If you don’t want to sit with me,” she drawled, “don’t have breakfast at the Holiday Inn. I eat here every day.”

“Got you.” He liked June very much but she was so shrewd that he feared her seeing how dilapidated his spirit had become since Gracie left.

The waitress arrived and filled Frank’s coffee cup.

“He’ll have bacon and eggs and hash browns,” June said. “Eggs over lightly.”

He nodded. “I ought to eat a bowl of cereal.”

“You can have cereal at home. This is where we turn our backs on the things we do at home.”

Frank looked around the room, gathered in the footloose merriment
of the Northwest crew, the bleak movements of the waitress, noted the silver cast of the windows as sunrise commenced. He lifted his coffee cup.

“How’s your love life, June?”

“I’m sublimating. And you?”

Frank thought, actually thought, about his current situation. He could hardly tell her that after learning he had peered at her from an apple tree, Lucy had virtually shipped him to the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, he told her the truth: “My love life is nonexistent too.”

“I don’t love anyone,” said June, pulling the little square of foil off the marmalade container. “Life is a highway and love is the potholes. I don’t say it’s good, but that’s how it is.”

“How about the Buick Family? I see on television there’s this nationwide thing called the Buick Family.”

“I don’t love them piss-ants neither.”

“So what do you do?”

“Occasionally, I get some sleepy type to go to bed with me. There is a burst of excitement but then they sense my needs are fairly much physical, and that’s all she wrote. We get a good bit of turnover. I do try to keep several of these donkeys on line, however.”

Frank’s breakfast arrived. “What about surrogate children?”

“I still have that dog, what’s his name, Jake. I still have Jake. I’d hardly call Jake a surrogate child. He’s supposed to be a trained retriever. But what is there to retrieve in my life except possibly self-esteem, and I can hardly expect Jake to do that. I have a niece at Oklahoma State, a real bum. She tried to work me for a car, but it didn’t take and I no longer hear from her.”

“Everyone used to have one of those overtrained water dogs. They were socially required.”

“Exactly, Frank. I noticed that when I came up from Oklahoma, but to no avail. I married three duck hunters in a row. Quack, bang, quack, bang. Such a life.”

“Now I’m too excited to eat,” said Frank.

“Is it the thighs?”

“Not really. It’s more like seeing things as they are. Kind of like the old acid days.”

“Well, it gets you rolling in the morning.” She stood up abruptly with her purse under her elbow. “Call me,” she said, and went out.

Frank felt a little gust and thought, I will. He paid for breakfast and went outside where a parking lot full of cars rested, seemed to await their mission. Wonderful when day had not begun, when only the breakfast waitresses and airline crews were conspicuously there and ready for the rest of the world if it ever woke up. Frank looked off to the silhouettes of the city and the mountains beyond. Odd hours always took him back to the days of weirdness, to the exhilaration of being out of step. He went on contemplating the way the world was reabsorbing him and his friends, terrified people coming to resemble their parents, their dogs, their country, their seatmates, after a pretty good spell of resembling only themselves. This, thought Frank, lacks tragic dimension almost as certainly as podiatry does. But it holds me in a certain ache to imagine I’m actually as much a businessman as my father.

But Frank was apprehensive about going to work. He was, after all, across the hall from Lucy. That hadn’t changed. And he was disquieted about seeing her this morning. Despite twenty years of trying to reduce sex to the same status as the handshake, its reduction was unreliable and it frequently had an unwelcome larger significance. Lovemaking still seemed to test the emotional assumptions that led up to it, and in Frank’s case he somehow found out that he was never going to be in love with Lucy. It was important to act on this perception before her nose seemed to grow or her mouth to hang open vacantly, her vocabulary to shrink or her feet to slap awkwardly on the linoleum. He was going to have to drum up some drippy conversation about friendship, a deadening policy statement that would reduce everything to awkwardness.

He needn’t have worried. She was in the hallway when he arrived. She wrinkled her face at the sight of him, shook her head
and disappeared into her office. He went into his own without greeting Eileen, his secretary. He tore down the Eskimo poster with disgust and, briefly, hated himself. A new set of tickets and itinerary lay on his desk. He opened the itinerary. It said, “Hell.” Nothing else.