Love Always

10

IN his fantasies, Hildon was a shit kicker. He honestly believed that people who were less intelligent had superior lives, and the more stubbed the toes of their Corfam boots were, the better. Someone had to keep the garages of the world pumping gas. Someone had to think that politicians were going to improve their life. Shit kickers were up front about wanting to be studs and down home with their cooking. Seeing the charcoal glowing in their barbecue grills as he drove by, Hildon felt the same sense of peace and contentment that people feel in front of the candles lit on the altar of the church. He was simply fascinated to live among them, after a lifetime in the Ivy League. He liked it that as he lit his after-dinner Gauloises, they were wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands. Although they barely noticed that he was alive, their existence pointed out to him that he was absolutely absurd. Little Hildon with the heart murmur, who had squinted over Plato’s arguments until he ended up with thick glasses at twelve, now read first-person accounts in Soldier of Fortune of men blowing away gooks and grizzlies. He bent his beer cans before throwing them away, sent $4 for an assortment of mail-order Superstud prophylactics and spread them out over his kitchen table with the reverence of someone laying out the Tarot. The summer before, he and Lucy had driven to another town to go to a summer street festival, and Hildon had totally indulged his fantasies. He had worn a Born to Lose T-shirt, torn jeans, pointed-toe boots with spurs and walked along paring his nails with a file clicked open from his knife. He ate hot dogs without spitting out his gum. He wanted to stop at a bank to apply for a loan to buy a dishwasher. That was the point at which Lucy put an end to it, and drove them back in the borrowed pickup, with Merle Haggard singing Bob Wills’s songs on the radio and a smile on Hildon’s face as though he had just gone to heaven.

Today Hildon stood next to Lucy at the horse auction. He had on a straw hat, a T-shirt full of holes, torn jeans, the boots with spurs. His face was burning in the hot sun. He should have been at work, but what the hell. Who was going to point a finger? The pointed finger was never feared anymore; if anyone saw anything so silly, it was meant as an impossibility come true: E.T.’s magic finger aglow, not the demanding Uncle Sam Wants You point or the crooked finger of the Wicked Witch.

It was Hildon’s theory that nobody was doing what people assumed in the afternoon — that whatever he was doing, millions were doing with him. Nothing erotic happened at night, but everywhere, all over, all day, people were pretending to be Tinkerbell or Mr. T or marine sergeants or Godzilla and being hung by their thumbs and checking into motels with their lovers to put on diapers and play patty-cake until they came. That was why the chief loan officer wasn’t yet back from lunch, why the mechanic called in sick, why the judge threw the case out of court when the prosecutor’s only witness didn’t show. Doctors were checking in late for surgery, accountants were filing extensions, roofers weren’t appearing to repair leaks, bakers burned the bread. All day, people were so lost in passion and fantasy that they could barely get the essentials accomplished so they weren’t fired, the mortgage was paid, the children fed. Discos were a farce, and only geriatric cases ever attempted romantic weekends, following the recommendations of New York magazine. Everything stopped at night, and on weekends. Summer vacation you could forget entirely. At best, it was when people rested from their double, triple, and quadruple lives and took a break from the frantic fun they had all year long. Who was going to envy a cat for having nine lives when huge numbers of people had that many and didn’t have to pay the price of eating Puss’n Boots. How many people were really going to go home and confess an affair? And if they did, how many weren’t going to live to tell? Wives who were told their husbands were in a meeting would never know that they were off at nude archery practice. The real big deals of the world were five eight and blonde. There wasn’t a traffic tie-up on the GW bridge — their husband was tied up, being flogged. Rapists were sleeping with their parole officers. Speeders were propositioning state patrolmen. And all the while, Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia, was committing adultery in his mind. Knowing how to move your fingers up and down the stem of your champagne flute was the new equivalent of dropping a glove. Platonic love was about as probable as the last game of the World Series being televised without Instant Replay.

And where, Lucy asked, did he think his wife was? “Sleeping,” he said.

They decided to leave and to eat lunch. As they walked away from the roped-in area, there was a boy, not yet a teenager, holding a pony. The pony was brown and white. It was eating clover, and the boy watched it with a real look of love on his face. Bees buzzed through the clover. In the distance, someone started a lawn mower. Many of the small willow trees that bordered the path to the parking lot had died.

They went to Montville, to the diner he liked. He ordered scrambled eggs and double-fried ham, and toast with extra butter. He was a little surprised when the waitress looked at Lucy, and she just smiled and said she’d have the same and handed back the menus. He put fifty cents in the juke box and played four Charley Pride songs. The Stanley Brothers were singing.

The waitress had a little hint of a smile this time. He thought that she recognized him. In the booth behind them, two men were talking about the train that had derailed in Burlington. “I don’t guess anybody on that train is going to be in much of a hurry to get to Montreal,” one of the men said. They had actually been there — seen the wreck. One of the men preferred Toronto to Montreal. The other preferred planes to trains. They ordered more coffee.

“Did what’s-her-name with the name nobody can say win at Wimbledon?” one of the men asked.

“I guess I don’t have time to pay attention to who won a tennis game,” the waitress said.

“Aw — what would you be doing that you didn’t have time to read the newspaper?” one of the men said.

“I guess picking it up off the floor,” the waitress said. She moved to their booth. “Coffee?” she said. Hildon said he didn’t want any.

“All right — I guess I will have some,” Lucy said.

“I guess it might help if I go get a cup first,” the waitress said. This time she did smile a delighted smile. She had one of those faces that looked entirely different when she smiled. Attractive, in a squarish way.

“Not gonna take up tennis yourself?” one of the men said, turning and looking over the back of the booth as she poured coffee.

“Way I move around here, it’s the same thing, except I don’t got a tennis paddle and a net,” the woman said.

“I don’t know that we could trust you with one of those,” one of the men said.

“My hands are pretty tough,” the waitress said. “Don’t know that you’d want to trust me without one.”

“I trust you,” the other man said. “I was at Henry’s the night you poured the coffee.”

“Go on,” the waitress said. “That was nothing.”

“What did she do?” the other man said.

“You don’t know about that? Henry put six mugs on the top of the bar and let her look for about six seconds, and then he put his bandanna around her eyes and damned if she didn’t hit every mug dead center.”

The waitress walked away from the booth, smiling again. In a few seconds, she came back from the kitchen with their eggs. “Nothing for you?” she said to Hildon, as she put a mug of steaming coffee down in front of Lucy.

“No thanks,” he said.

Crystal Gayle was singing. The food was heavy. He ate faster, because it didn’t taste good.

“It this the only lunch we’re having?” Lucy said, deciding to be the one to start the game.

“Are we going back to your house?” he said.

“If you want to drive that far.”

“What are my options?” he said.

“What’s this?” she said. “ ‘Mother, May I?’ ”

He put his legs on each side of hers and pressed hers together. She smiled. With her knees, she pushed his apart. Finally he stopped resisting and let her part his legs. She rubbed her foot in his crotch. She had taken off her shoes. He resisted the temptation to break eye contact with her.

“Coffee?” the waitress said, passing by. He looked at the steam. It was fascinating: a cloud of white steam. It was something to look at.

“No thanks,” Lucy said. She looked at Hildon. “Do we want the check?” she said.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything else?” he said. She had eaten half her eggs. The toast was untouched. She had cut three bites of ham. “No thanks,” she said.

“I think I’ll have a piece of pie,” Hildon said. “What kind of pie do you have?”

“Apple cherry blueberry,” the waitress said.

Lucy’s foot stopped moving. She brushed her hair back, looking at him.

“Blueberry, please,” he said.

The waitress walked away. A woman with a crying child came in and sat at the counter. “Because I said so,” the woman said to the child. “And you’d better quiet down and like it.” The men from the booth behind theirs were at the cash register, rolling toothpicks out of a dispenser and paying their bill. Johnny Cash was singing. In all the time he had come here, Hildon had never heard the songs he selected. Even with the rules of chance operating, he should have heard Charley Pride at least once.

The waitress put down his piece of pie and refilled Lucy’s coffee mug without asking. Lucy’s face was expressionless, but she was looking straight at him. “Some pie?” he said, turning the fork toward her.

“No thanks,” she said. “I don’t think it looks good.”

He cut a piece of pie and ate it. “It’s very good,” he said.

“And you want me to just wait while you eat it.”

“ ‘Mother, May I?’ ” he said.

He took another bite of pie. It was doughy and too sweet. He smiled as he swallowed. “I forgot to tell you. There’s a party at the Hadley-Cooper’s this weekend,” he said. “I’m quite taken with Antoinette. How about coming along so she’ll be jealous?”

She nodded. She got up and went to the bathroom. A dancing elephant, pirouetting like a ballerina, was painted on the varnished wooden door. He didn’t eat any more pie while she was gone. When she came back, she was smiling. She looked very pretty. Her hair was combed, and she had put on pink lipstick. She continued to smile. She folded her hands. She watched the woman, whispering in the child’s ear, as he tried to swirl his stool back and forth. She looked beyond Hildon, to the old man who had just come in and who sat in the booth behind them. He puckered his lips and blew a breeze across the table. She closed her eyes slightly and smiled.

“Going off to the bathroom and snorting coke’s not fair,” he said.

“Cheating is perfectly fair in any game.”

She thought about it. She unzipped her purse, reached in and took out a tiny glass vial with a coke spoon attached to it. The chain sparkled for a second, before he could clasp his hand over hers, so no one would see. Her hand was cold. She turned her hand in his and opened it to release the vial. The glass was colder than her skin. It made him feel colder than he was, the way putting a finger on an ice cube will freeze the sweat on your face on a hot day. He remembered the pony, light brown snout down, rooting around in the clover. The boy standing there, holding the pony. All the sun, outside the diner. He closed her hand around the vial and gestured for the waitress. The waitress came to their booth with the bill. “You have a good day now,” she said, slapping the bill onto the table, even though he was holding out his hand.

“Want to have a good day?” he said to Lucy, getting up.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “I think I might wait until the party to have a good time.”

She followed him to the cash register, but when the cashier dropped her pen on the floor and hopped down to get it, Lucy wandered out to the vestibule. Hildon looked at her, reading business cards that had been tacked up on the big bulletin board. He saw a large flyer from the ASPCA. Lucy walked out the door. He gave the cashier a dime and took two mints.

Lucy was walking ahead of him. She opened the car door and sat in the driver’s seat. The news on the radio droned on. He opened the door on the driver’s side. “Move over,” he said. She didn’t resist. She lowered the emergency brake and carefully maneuvered her way across it. Her lips were chalky pink in the sun. On the news, they were talking about the Montrealer. She sat in the passenger’s seat, with her hands folded in her lap.

He dropped his hands into his lap and looked straight ahead. She caught on and laughed. He leaned over and kissed her. He unwrapped one of the mints, one-handed, and put it in her mouth. The chocolate had already begun to get sticky soft. While she was sucking on the mint, he kissed her again. This time he waited for her to end the kiss. She ended it when she had to swallow. He put his arm around her, and put his other hand around the side of her thigh, stroking his thumb across the top of her leg. Someone started a car and drove away. He leaned over farther and kissed her shoulder through the material. “Where’d you get the coke?” he said.

“I visited one of the kids in my art class, who had a tumor removed. His mother had coke. We did some in the hospital bathroom. I bought this from her later.”