Keep the Change

28

As Joe drove home, his mind wandered back a year or so and, as though for the first time, he could see Astrid, her very real beauty, the peculiar elegance of her every gesture, the air of mystery lent her by a gene pool across the Gulf Stream, the saddest river of them all, where some of the world’s most interesting races fell into the sugar kettle together. As he dodged the small cattle trucks on the way, he asked himself if he was remembering this right, about Astrid’s presence, if that was what it was, her aura, her allure, and if it was still there at all, through the intervening history.

When he drove into the yard, Astrid was knocking apples out of a tree with a stick. She stopped and leaned on the stick to watch him come in. He looked at her. It was still there.

Astrid felt good enough, it seemed. Joe had to take the position that the stress and colitis were gone and now she was better. She immediately made an attempt to fully inhabit the house, to rearrange it, and make it her own. This produced a pleasant feeling in Joe and he was happy to move furniture as instructed and even to dust the tops of tables and bureaus, and the surfaces of the Venetian blinds. Astrid had been raised in a conventional Cuban-exile household in Florida, had duly celebrated her quince in the tarted-up strumpet costumes that suggested the elders were putting their daughters on the open market. Her life until then had made a regular little wife-prospect of her, but an American high school and four years at Gainesville had flung her into the future. Astrid’s latinity became a romantic feature as she went from hippie spitfire to a goddess of the Florida night. Anglo girls in her company always seemed to feel both hygienic and anesthetized. Astrid liked that. She called them “white girls.” Now she was up on the sagebrush prairie getting over a broken heart. In a short while, they would both be on social security, trying to eat corn on the cob with ill-fitting dentures. If there is reincarnation, Joe thought, I want to come back as a no-see-um.

They sat down to dinner right after sunset. Coyotes came down close to the yard and howled back and forth. Astrid put the serving dishes on the table: black beans, yellow rice, chicken. Joe lit the candles. “That would be your coyotes?” Astrid asked, at the latest uproar outside the windows. Joe nodded. “You know,” she said, “I’m sort of beginning to appreciate this place.” She looked off. “Sort of.”

“Good,” said Joe, gazing in rapture at the tropical food.

“But this country, it’s the big romance in your life, isn’t it?”

“For what it’s worth.”

“The mountains?”

“I don’t particularly like the mountains,” said Joe.

“You like all that other stuff. The stuff that doesn’t look like anything. The prairie.”

“Yep.”

“Because why? Because it makes you feel big or because it makes you feel little?”

“Jesus, Astrid, how should I know? You don’t necessarily like things on the basis of the size they make you feel.”

“Very well,” said Astrid. Joe looked at her blinding and mischievous smile. He could feel his pulse racing.

“What a meal,” said Joe. “Like we never left.”

“Really, you left,” said Astrid.

“I guess.”

“I followed.”

“It’s sweet, isn’t it.”

“Because you stole my car.”

“Yes …”

“And because you hated me,” Astrid said.

“You followed because I hated you?”

“Hated me enough to steal from me.”

“Oh, let’s not make more of this than there really is. I needed to get home and my sense of style precluded catching the old outbound dog. Do you mind if we finish this nice meal before we pursue this?”

“You can’t hate and eat at the same time?” Astrid asked.

“I can if I have to.”

They were nearly finished eating. The rich dishes had left a lovely sheen on the plates.

“I wonder if there is some way we can have sex,” Astrid said. Joe felt a sudden tension in his stomach.

“It’s really up to you, I—”

“My God, Joe, you’re hard already!”

“Not for long, my darling.”

Astrid covered her face and let out a Cuban-coyote laugh of extreme merriness. When she was quiet, she allowed her eyes to gaze back. “It’s still there.”

“Astrid.”

“The unsightly bulge of legend,” said Astrid. “We’ll have to be very gentle.”

“Look!” Joe shouted as he stood up and pointed to his trousers. “This time it is gone!”

Joe began to clear the table. He didn’t like all these jokes. He rinsed off the dishes and thought how he disliked sharing chores. And he’d long since decided it was easier to eat out than show gratitude for home cooking. He’d rather do it all himself, or have somebody else do it all while he did something entirely different but complementary and useful. He wouldn’t mind looking after Astrid but he preferred doing it all. In general, he was appalled by the various duos: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, the Reagans. He looked around him and all he saw were these duos. It was like needing the prescription changed in your reading glasses; the world was made incoherent by duos or by people trying to cook side by side.

By the time Joe followed Astrid into the bedroom, she had undressed and was stretched out on top of the blankets. There was a small lamp in one corner with desert scenes depicted on its shade that gave only a small amount of light. He undressed and lay beside her. He put his hand on her and she closed her eyes. The light seemed to waver as he felt the wetness begin around his fingers. She tipped her legs open. He heard the coyotes start in again. He slipped down between her thighs and put his tongue inside her. When he moved up, she said, “You may now enter,” and he did. She pressed upward and shuddered; he sometimes felt that the Latin woman in Astrid was revealed in the indignation of her orgasm. Then he came and it was suddenly almost impossible to keep his weight off her, the feeling of an external force using then discarding him.

“I’m hungry again,” Joe said after a bit.

“Real hungry?”

“For a snack.”

“Make some toast. There’s some preserves in the fridge.”

“I love the word ‘fridge.’ ”

“Make me a piece too.”

“Like a fridge over troubled waters,” sang Joe.

“How can you be so happy with someone you hate?” Astrid said.

Joe looked at the toaster with its astounding automotive shape, its haunted black slots now showing the faintest smoke of the toast inside. He examined the glints on the toaster and found little curved details of his house. When it popped up, he buttered the toast and spread strawberry preserves. He headed back to the bedroom. Every other woman he ever knew now bored him.

“You ought to put on some pants,” Astrid said, “if you’re going to serve food.”

“You can’t please everyone.”

“It’s waving around.”

“It’s not ‘waving around.’ ”

He went to the window to look at the full moon. Everything was so clear, it was as if he was right out there with the moon. The stars showed in great sheets like the spray from a breaking wave. Beneath them were the curves of the prairie. Joe ate his toast and jam in the window and watched. He didn’t think it made man seem small to see the vastness of the natural world. I’m just going to stand here, he thought, drained of sperm, my brain in the constellations.

“I don’t know if I ever told you this, Astrid,” Joe said, turning back toward the bed. “But I used to be a pretty darn good caddy. I was captain of all the caddies when I was sixteen years old. Carried double with those big old leather bags. Nine out of ten of those golfers let me pick their clubs. I never played myself. I was saving up for college. My father could afford to send me to college but his drinking had made him so erratic, I wasn’t sure he would keep it together until I got there. Sure enough, he went tits-up on a land development deal and I was lucky to have my caddy savings. One time, I tried to help him. He was such a good fellow when he was sober that I was sure he had no idea of how he acted when he was drinking. So I bought a tape recorder and spent the evening with him. He went crazier than usual. The next day, while he was still hung over, I brought the tape into his bedroom, set it up on the dresser and turned it on real loud. Well, it should have worked. As a theory it was very much in the ballpark. But the actual sound of his own ranting and raving was much more than he could deal with. He bellowed. He smashed the machine. He kicked me out of the house. Not long afterward, he drank himself to death. Possibly, that is where he was headed. Sometimes I think I murdered my father with his own voice.”

“What got us started on this?”

“I look out at the stars and wonder if my folks are out there.”

“I see.”

“All their troubles gone.”

Joe got in under the covers next to Astrid. He turned on the bedside radio. A man was describing his visit to the great mall of Edmonton, Alberta. Joe lay with Astrid considering this mall in their warmth. The man couldn’t fully express the size of the great mall to the listening audience. He had picked out a shirt he liked in a men’s store in the mall. He went out to be sure that there wasn’t another shirt in another store, in another part of the mall, he might prefer. He concluded that it was the original shirt, a blue Western-cut shirt with snap buttons, that he wanted more than the other shirts, many nice ones — there’s no disputing taste! — he had seen. But the great mall of Edmonton, Alberta, was so vast, so labyrinthine, that he could never find the store again that sold the shirt he preferred. Question for the listening audience: can a mall be, somehow, too wonderful, too big? Specifically, does the great mall of Edmonton, Alberta, so surpass our hopes that we are no longer satisfied by it? Stay tuned.

Joe and Astrid were asleep.