Keep the Change

7

Now Joe was seated at the end of a bar. There was a ball game on TV. He looked into the bottom of his glass for a big idea. He was sitting with a guy named Mack thinking about the ranch, about Smitty and Lureen, about his childhood enemy Billy Kelton, about Ellen and old man Overstreet, about the hills and all the moving water. It wasn’t just nostalgia; the lease money had quit coming in. And he wasn’t getting along with Astrid.

“It’s a tie game,” Mack said, staring over the silhouetted heads at the screen. “You think you’ll go up and see who?”

“My aunt and uncle. They live in our old house in Montana. I might just go on up there.”

“Call first,” said Mack. “They could be dead.”

“Don’t you ever feel like seeing your relations?”

“I think it’s all this roots thing. My kids go out and tape the locals. I must not be the right guy for this one. It’s a little off-speed for me. That’s three thousand miles!”

Joe went back to the apartment. Astrid had tied her black hair back with a strip of blue cloth. She smiled at Joe. Something was in the air. Astrid was not a worrier and you couldn’t make her worry if it didn’t really come to her on her own. She looked at him, held his eye. Silence fell over the room. He came over and kissed her slowly. She was sitting in a chair at the end of the dining table and he was standing over her, kissing her. She undid his pants and held him. When he stopped kissing her, she took him inside her mouth. He had one hand on the back of her head and supported himself with the other on the table. The mail was piled there and most of it was bills. He tried not to acknowledge that he had seen the bills but it was impossible, there were so many of them. He moaned and she sucked harder. He looked at the gas bill. Knowing it would be enormous, he moaned with particular feeling. She gripped his buttocks with both hands and tried to take him in farther. He shuffled the mail with his free fingers and came to a letter from American Express. Surely their card was going to be canceled. A particularly expressive wordless cry came from his lips and Astrid tried for it all. He could feel the irony all the way to the center of his stomach. He stood as long as he could, then sank faintly into a chair.

After a moment, Astrid said, “What do you have in your hand?”

She pulled the crumpled letter from his grasp. Her brow darkened. “They’re dropping us, huh?”

“Who?”

“Are you pretending you haven’t seen this?”

Joe shook his head.

A peculiar look flickered across Astrid’s face. “Has this been a great blow to you?” she asked.

“I can’t win,” said Joe. The thing was, he loved Astrid. And he could have brought out better things in her than he had. He brought out things in Astrid that were bad and went around disliking her for them. He sat in his chair and mused about his own unfairness as the wind pressed green masses of Florida holly to the window. “My character,” he said, “is composed almost strictly of things I hate in other people.”

They were under a new pressure. They were going to have to live on less because of Joe’s difficulty with his work and the sudden termination of the lease money. None of the explanations Joe received from his Aunt Lureen made sense or persuaded him. He was suspicious that his Uncle Smitty was somehow getting the money from his sister. At first, he’d felt that if it meant enough to them to just take it, they could go ahead and do so. Though it was a technicality, the ranch was in Lureen’s name and, as a technical thing, she could do as she pleased. But that was not the understanding she had with Joe’s father, blood to blood, and she knew it. On this note, Joe could get indignant. Sometimes it passed. Sometimes it embarrassed him and sometimes the whole thing made him feel guilty. The worst part of it was that Ivan would come to sense that Joe had less choice about whether or not to do his projects. Ivan said it pained him to see an old friend refuse to abandon himself to the fiesta of consumption that was our national life.

Astrid came over and sat next to him. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she said.

“I always promised myself that in the future I would quit living in the future. But I may have to do a little planning now.”

“Joe,” she said, “why don’t you call some friends? I’m going out. I’m tired of this. Or at least, I’m not interested in this. It’s time to do something.”

Joe made a few calls to people he knew out West. About the time he got off the phone, Astrid was back carrying packages. She set them down, picked up the hall rug, and gave it a pop. She popped the rug as if she was in a bullfight. Joe’s mood had sunk even further since he’d been calling around Montana.

The next time Ivan came down from New York, he took them out to dinner. By the time they got to the restaurant, which was situated next to the ocean on its own band of seagrape-shaded beach, the sun had gone down and the sunset watchers had finished their drinks and were heading home for dinner. Astrid wore her hair up, pinned with a rose-colored enamel flower. Joe accompanied her with his hand lightly rested in the pleasant curve in the small of her back. Ivan Slater seemed to be rushing, though he walked no faster than they did. “I hope I’m not late,” he said. “I got caught up watching TV, Oprah Winfrey squeezing the shit out of some little white lady.” He wore a blousy Cuban shirt and had rolled his pants up in some ghastly sartorial reference to peasantry; instead of appropriate sandals or huaraches, he wore the lace-up black street shoes of his more accustomed venues in New York. Nevertheless, he bounded along confidently without actually going faster than his companions. He was marketing a thing called “The Old Vermont Dog Mill,” which was a treadmill exerciser for overweight suburban labradors that also served to grind coffee and provide the power for a kitchen knife sharpener. It seemed impossible that he didn’t see the ridiculousness of this but he didn’t; he saw only opportunity. When Joe thought of the developing problems with the grazing lease and imagined he could be reduced to working with Ivan on the Old Vermont Dog Mill, he was chilled deep within.

They got a table on the deck under the seagrapes and immediately began to look into their menus as though they had a job to get through.

“That’s not good conch salad,” said Joe. “It’s chum.”

“Don’t start in,” said Astrid.

“Are stone crabs in season?” asked Ivan.

“Who knows,” said Joe. “I don’t know.”

“The tone is burn-out plus,” said Astrid.

“Ivan,” said Joe, “why don’t you get your own girlfriend? The waiter thinks this is a ménage à trois. Ditto the maitre d’.”

“You’ve asked this same question since our school days.”

“Never getting an answer.”

“I do have girlfriends but they are never presentable.”

“You could present them to us,” said Astrid. “We would be prepared to understand almost anything.”

“You talk brave,” said Ivan.

“We could take them if they were truly awful,” Astrid said. “It’s the little things that suck.”

When their dinners came, there seemed to be almost nothing on the plate. Joe understood that this was in response to current views on cuisine held in France; and of course that helped to justify the price, but Joe was hungry. He tapped the tines of his fork all around the empty areas of his plate as though probing for food. Astrid was annoyed with him and gave him furious looks, and the waiter sighed operatically.

“If you were back in Montana,” she said, “undoubtedly they would put a great haunch before you and you would be happier.”

“That’s right.”

There was a whirlwind of activity as Ivan began to eat.

“Joe,” said Astrid, “I’ve been here all my life and you are a classic snowbird. After basking in the sun for a couple of years, you got ironic about everything.”

“He’s homesick,” said Ivan through his food. “When you’re homesick and home is three thousand miles away and you’re broke and there’s a gulf of communication between you and the faggot waiter and the plate is half empty before you half start, your heart is sore afflicted.”

“Thank you, Ivan,” said Joe.

“You like a quality of care and selection in your life, Joe. I like life bulging at the seams,” Ivan said.

“I like it with loud music and hot sauce,” said Astrid.

“Because you’re Cuban,” Joe said.

“That’s racist, actually,” Astrid said.

“I’m serious, Joe,” Ivan said. “Don’t be so meticulous. Quit weighing things out. It’s neurotic. Man was made to consume. Say yes to fucking well everything.”

The waiter looked significantly at Astrid. They were friends. In three years, Joe had not gotten used to Astrid’s friends. The waiter accepted the little illness of her hanging around with straight men. A bright wave caught the lights of the restaurant and rolled obliquely onto the beach. The restaurant was beginning to fill. Joe felt the smile on his face fade pleasantly. Astrid put a cigarette in her mouth and waited for Ivan to light it. Joe enjoyed their friendship. He loved the sight of Astrid smoking, while angry people at neighboring tables waved into the air around them.

Astrid’s uncompliant nature made her the only woman friend of Ivan’s life. Joe watched with approval. Sexless friendships reminded him of children. Quite lovely until someone whipped it out.

So once again Joe and Ivan were going to work together. Ivan was inspired by this work he was doing; Joe was trying to accept its necessity. At one time he had painted and had some acceptance; but he painted so slowly at the best of times and was so seldom sufficiently moved by an idea that he had to take work that did not depend upon strong feelings. Lately, he wasn’t really painting at all. He was trying to “face it,” a phrase Astrid found overpoweringly bleak. He told her he had sold out; she said he lacked sufficient mental health to sell out. “I’m going to face it,” he said.

“Don’t face it, for Christ’s sake,” she said.

Now Joe watched gloomily as Ivan paid the bill. When the waiter went off with his credit card, Ivan asked, “What’s twenty percent of ninety-three dollars?”

Joe groaned.

“Crass!” called Astrid.

Out in front, intensity was building. The hostess had gold-rimmed glasses hanging on her bosom from a chain. She only put them on to check dubious reservations in the big book on the stand. There was a line and Joe was pleased they had eaten early. They walked onto the street where the suave shapes of automobiles, parked on the fallen palm fronds, glowed in the streetlights. The breaking surf could be heard and Joe admitted to himself the tremendous romance this seemed to imply, though it always seemed to remain in the world of implication. He felt like an old steer with its head under the fence straining for that grass just over there.

They got into Ivan’s rental car. Ivan did not start it up immediately. The streetlight shining through the coconut palms lit up all six of their knees. “Joe,” Ivan said, “you’re very quiet. And I know you, Joe. You are my friend since we stood shoulder to shoulder in the school lavatory popping zits, betting our pride on the hope of hitting the mirror. But this quiet, this looking off, is a calm before the storm, which I know and have seen before, Joe. I only ask that you remember a few commitments and that you be a gentleman about it, if it kills you. I say all this knowing it may be well out of reach for you.”

Ivan looked straight ahead through the windshield. Joe looked straight ahead through the windshield. Astrid looked at Joe.

Joe said, “Start it up.”