Nothing but Blue Skies

40

Third Street. A quiet neighborhood. The yards were orderly but not so well kept that plastic toy parts looked out of place. The lawns blossomed each year with campaign signs of one kind or another, from U.S. president to local county commissioners. Flats of petunias from local nurseries lined most entryways and, in warm weather, the smell of outdoor cooking reached the sidewalk.

Frank passed a young man playing his guitar and singing on a wooden porch. A mongrel bounced to a white fence alongside the sidewalk barking hoarsely, as though each time it landed on the ground the impact drove the barks from its lungs. Frank didn’t react and the dog gave it up as a bad job. An old Dodge rested on flat tires alongside the curb. Its hood was up and two teenage boys rested on their elbows and chests underneath it, contemplating the engine with such absorption that neither felt the need to speak. When Frank was a boy he wanted a car so much, he tried to study how they worked. He memorized the four-cycle engine — intake, compression, power and exhaust — so that if he ever got a car, he would know how to operate it. What could recommend itself better to a pubescent youngster than a rolling love nest with its own music system? It explained the dreamy glaze of teenage drivers.

Now he was nervous. He was only a few houses away. In fact, there was the Saab. He stood in front of an English-style cottage with tall trellises covered with honeysuckle on either side of a narrow porch. Frank tried to understand exactly what he was doing here. He tried to remember who used to live here. He thought it was a piano teacher. He hesitated, and would have retreated if he had been sure he was unseen. Then Edward Ballantine came to the door and said, “Ah, I thought you might still come. Good.” Gracie appeared behind him. Frank couldn’t see her face well enough to glimpse her thoughts. “I think I’ll just ease on,” said Edward. “I really ought to be out of the way.” He went out the door and, fixing Frank with a determined beam, down to the sidewalk. “Make the most of your visit,” he called back. “It’s for everyone’s good.”

Finally, Frank stood in front of Gracie in the doorway. The Saab went off with its airplane noise. Frank felt a little unsteady. He wished he’d brought something. Flowers would have been a laugh all right, but it would have been nice to do that anyway, nice and impossible.

“Hi, Grace.”

“Hello, Frank.” He must have looked blank because her face broke into a smile and she added, “Hi, I’m Gracie.”

He felt a panicky numbness. He had not expected this and didn’t feel he could be sure of anything he said. Gracie was wearing a pink cable-knit cardigan over her shoulders and her hands were clasped in front of her. She had her hair up and it emphasized the good way the years had firmed her face into a small strength. Her eyes were brown and deep-set, and there were times when she looked a bit Indian.

“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.”