Nothing but Blue Skies

53

A small flagstone walkway led from the sidewalk on Grant Avenue to the honeysuckle-embowered entryway to the Friends Meeting Hall. Frank thought that there must be very few Quakers in town, but he was comforted by their vague reputation for peacefulness, and hoping, above all, that this fucking thing didn’t turn into a slimefest. He just had to get the poison tide stopped. Gracie would meet him at the house later.

He let himself in and found that Edward was already there. Edward was wearing a tropical-looking white shirt with short sleeves that hung outside his baggy cotton slacks. His shock of brown hair stood up from the center of his head like a cockscomb. He rushed up to Frank and welcomed him with a double-handed handshake and a deep look. Frank found himself suddenly shy. A sissy smile bloomed on his lips, and incomprehension expressed as a little puff of air through his nose. He felt a gust of overpowering conventionalism. He wished to look past the insulting horrors of his situation and be well bred in every way.

Edward abruptly left the room. Against the wall were several old brown folding chairs with white stenciled codes on their backs. Frank took it upon himself to set two of them out. They were of some patented design, and at first he couldn’t figure out how to get them open. He tried to think of a proper arrangement for them, then gave up, placing them across from each other. He looked at the tall, double-paned windows that revealed the trees and sky, and he longed to fly away; in fact, sitting down in one of the chairs he had unsuccessfully tried to arrange, he escaped into thoughts of migrating birds, wheeling southbound flocks gazing down at the gentle curves of the planet.

Then Edward returned. “Shall I get a pitcher of water and some glasses?” he asked.

“No. In fact, I’ve got to use the bathroom before we have our talk.”

Frank locked the bathroom door and stood for a long time looking at his face in the mirror. He couldn’t understand why he was going to enter into what would have to be a grotesque discussion. Not so long ago, he could have done one of several drugs and come out filled with wit and leadership, an overview even. Without any expression at all, he projected all sorts of histories and motives on this bland face. In one story, he was an extra playing a youthful tar in Wake of the Red Witch; in another, he was Lincoln freeing the slaves. He went back out into the hall, then into a kitchenette with its Mr. Coffee and paper towels and under-the-counter refrigerator. He made up a pitcher of ice water and found two glasses. He placed these on a tray and returned with dread to the meeting room.

For some reason, just now, he feared that his covenant with Gracie had run out of time. Frank’s romantic streak never accounted for time. When he was a boy, a sparrow sang at his window every morning for a whole summer, but it always quit at exactly eight forty-five. His father had said it was nothing but a union sparrow. Frank wanted that bird to sing without reference to time. Maybe he could face that his life with Gracie had just been time-bound and now it was her fate to be a moving target. Still, it was hard not to feel that they were trapped by other people and situations. It was hard not to look for something to blame because the stakes were so ominous.

Edward said, “I think that it is important that we try to be orderly about this. I have to tell you my story, Frank. Let me just get on with it. When I was up at the college museum, designing the Trail of Tears exhibit —”

“Wait a minute,” said Frank, “I’m lost. What do you do?”

“I’m an anthropologist,” said Edward. “That’s my first love. Which doesn’t pay so great. Which is why I have gone into other things.”

“Oh. And what’s this thing you were designing?”

“An exhibit for the museum showing the retreat from Nebraska of the Northern Cheyenne Indians. It’s a gold-plated consciousness raiser if ever there was one, and we had a grant to do it up right, no short cuts and no compromises. We built almost full-size models of one of their typical camps, with a big blue sky overhead, a real firmament, and a religious feel to everything that would help us sense that this was a holy story, which of course it was. We needed models for some of the life-size sculptures of the Indians. These we found very easily from among the Native American students at the college.” Edward was settling into his amiable narrative. “And I put up a little notice in the health food store for a well-preserved fortyish woman with dark complexion and hair.”

Frank felt panic sweep over him. “And Gracie answered the ad?” he asked.

“Gracie answered the ad. Look, we just have to get the facts. We don’t need to drag this out. But Gracie arrived in the evening while I was bolting together a sagebrush. And one thing led to another.”

“In the museum?” Frank cried. “One thing led to another!”

“Well, not just baldly in the museum. In … one of the historical reconstructions of an Indian dwelling.”

An image of the dwelling seemed to scorch Frank’s mind. “My wife? In a fake tepee?”

Edward seemed to try politely to take in all this turmoil. “That’s one way of putting it, Frank.”

Frank just held his face and moaned. With unwelcome irony, he reflected that Edward wasn’t just whistling Dixie when he said “Trail of Tears.” He wished for details yet found himself repelled. The alternation of these impulses was maddening.

His first thought was that it was now final that he could never feel the same about her again. This was sort of an assertion. Another desperate assertion was that he would never feel the same about anthropologists or museums or Indians; and as for tepees, anything that even remotely suggested their conical shape would be too much to contemplate. He was plunging into an unbearable misery. For one acute wave, he thought his limbs would fly off in agony.

“How did you ever find out Gracie was seeing me?” Edward asked.

Well, of course it was a good question. Frank had found out, hadn’t he? “Gracie told me.”

“Why?”

“I was suspicious,” Frank said. Really, who else could he tell this to? He remembered Gracie weeping, remembered all their tears. What was this ghastly need to say all this? It felt disgraceful. Maybe disgrace was more comfortable than holding it in. “I always loved to fish. I fished with my father. I fished with my daughter. I pleaded with Gracie to fish with me.” Frank leaned forward in his folding chair and looked into the middle distance. He wanted to see a healthy outdoorsman out there, insouciant, above the fray, but he saw a big sap instead. “One day she said she was going to learn how to fish, but she didn’t want me standing over her, telling her what to do. Okay, so I don’t stand over her and tell her what to do. I was really happy about that. I mean, how far is minding your own business from abdication? I thought, We could fish together. We could go to New Zealand and catch lunkers together under the Southern Cross. To me, this presents a very romantic picture.”

In his agony, Frank leaned farther forward and the folding chair snapped shut on his buttocks, propelling him onto his knees, the chair retaining its grip like an alligator. He struggled to his feet, reopened the chair and sat down again. Resisting a keening tone, he addressed his remarks to Edward, as though he were entitled to an explanation of this chain of events. “She left the house several times a week with her rod and reel, waders and tackle vest. I wanted to go with her but she wouldn’t let me. Which makes me, what, a nice guy? an asshole? Do they have a book on this? It went on for months. She said she was improving but she wasn’t ready. She was improving. She wasn’t ready. So far, so good. When I told my friend June that Gracie was fishing, June said, ‘So, that’s what she’s calling it.’ Finally, the season was almost over. I absolutely insisted on going with her. I got my tackle together. We drove to the Madison, a spot I have there, a great spot where two channels come together, a long gravel bar with willows along its banks —”

He could see that he didn’t need this much detail. It was as if he were making sure Edward caught lots of fish. “I parked the car and watched Gracie get her stuff together. It became pretty obvious that she didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know how to put the reel on the rod, or the line through the guides, or tie on a fly, or anything. She knew absolutely nothing about fishing! I looked at her waders. They had never been in the water. Suddenly, I had this stab, this recognition, that she was up to no good. I was silent. She must have known I saw through this. I kept thinking: we’re middle-aged, we’re pathetic, this shouldn’t be the occasion for a lot of accusations. But I had to know.” He paused and blew his nose. “So I asked her.”

“And?” said Edward.

“She told me.”

“She told you the truth?”

“Yes.” Frank was thrilled to realize that Edward had never heard this story from Gracie, never heard it at all. Talk about anthropology! The fact that Edward had corrupted his marriage had somehow shrunk beside the fact that Gracie had withheld this tale of his moronic deduction. It was personal.

Edward chuckled a bit, maybe grimly, but chuckled. Frank felt the pain of absurdity. He had been happier among the Eskimos. His eyeballs felt dried out by helpless rage and sadness.

He looked around again. He didn’t see much chance of getting out of this. He wasn’t accusing himself of wanting to get out of this, but he wanted some sense he wasn’t falling into the hole he felt opening in the middle of himself. He tried imagining a time in the future when they were all gone and none of this mattered. And it didn’t help. Gracie once accused him of making her feel invisible. What if Holly had said, “You made my mother invisible”? What would there have been to say after that? “I’m going to make you invisible”? Frank remembered Gracie’s cry:

“I always was able to stand it, able to stand you making fun of my dopey little restaurant, able to watch the side of your head buried in the Wall Street Journal, even though it was the same head that was once buried in Carlos Castaneda, the I Ching, Baba Ram Dass, Richard Flanagan —”

“Richard Brautigan,” Frank had corrected.

“Because you had such a wonderful relationship with Holly,” Gracie had said, “and I could always remember you with hair down to your back and Holly sitting on your shoulders. But then, it seems unbelievable, Holly grew up and left. And I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.”

As though her cry from the heart had been nothing but a performance, Frank had said, “Let’s not take our eyes off the applause meter, folks!”

I hate myself, he thought. He had accommodated his tribe by living as he had. He found out too late that that wasn’t good enough. It was like one of the new-style muggings where you wake up and they’ve stolen one or more of your internal organs.

“I still don’t know what you want from me,” Frank said to Edward. He felt flat and hopeless. Edward looked a bit deflated himself. It was not a meeting between kings. Maybe this was the dreaded bankruptcy.

“I had to talk to somebody who’d know how it felt,” Edward said.

This artificial claim tripped something in Frank. He had had enough. Blank and murderous, he asked, “Who’d know how what felt, Edward?”

Edward seemed to examine Frank’s face for intention, sincerity, something. “To be left by Gracie,” he said.

What? Frank tried to hold it down. He wasn’t going to give this guy anything. He leaned back in his chair. Perhaps he could accommodate Edward a little, hands across the abyss. After all, it was something Edward would have to live with. But Edward seemed to be awaiting some payoff, a rare moment. All Frank wanted was verification. He still wasn’t sure.

“You got the gate, huh?”

“I’m afraid I did,” Edward said. “I guess I was just wanting some confirmation that this had anything to do with me in the first place.”

With a new pride and the sense of a pathway perceived at last, Frank told him he was the wrong person to ask. It was enough to know that Edward suspected that he might have been used.

Frank’s mind was racing. He had to find Gracie right this very minute. He wondered if he was getting ahead of himself. It was as if he were making notes for something he wanted to happen, defying postponement. Suddenly, Frank got to his feet. Edward looked on, open-mouthed. Frank ran outside and continued running until he was half a block from his house. He slowed to a walk and caught his breath. He found Gracie walking around the front lawn.

“What a funny house,” she said.

She barely let him talk. He thought they might gaze on the place together. But she was thinking about something.

“Let’s try to find Holly,” said Gracie. “She’s gone back to the one with a ring in his nose. She took down the douche bag and the picture of the Enola Gay.” Gracie seemed to be going right on to the next thing. Frank reluctantly saw this as a sign of strength. “Let’s put in an appearance.” She chattered on about the missing piece of time. She’d been to Europe! She’d been back to Louisiana! He lagged behind in one of the gray areas that subtended all his emotional changes of state. That, he was prepared to admit, was a weakness. But if he admitted all the things that got him out of bed in the absence of strengths, wouldn’t he lose what little footing he possessed? He should have taken that chance, he knew, back when Gracie stood solidly beside him. It was now a distinctly less propitious time for such a housecleaning.

“Gracie, if I had ever really thought about you going off with someone, I wouldn’t have picked Edward particularly as your type.”

“He’s not my type.”

“I guess I’m missing something,” said Frank. Gracie unlocked the Buick and they both got in. She gripped the wheel and looked down the road as though she were already driving.

“You guess you’re missing something! Well, that’s a start.”

Frank said nothing. His head seemed to be enlarging from the unmoving diameter at his shirt collar. He craned around behind the windshield, not even driving, not even knowing Holly’s address.

“I understand your business is falling apart,” Gracie said. “Wouldn’t that be a miracle?”

“I can fix it.”

“Can you.” It wasn’t quite a question.

“Yes, I can.”

“Have I nearly ruined you?” Gracie beamed. Frank didn’t reply. Then she said, wonderingly, and to no one in particular, “Who would have thought?”

They drove down an empty street lined with the fiefdoms of small homes in which discord over colors, shapes and roofing materials, fences, breeds of dog and shrubbery, seemed to end the westward movement in its provisional neighborhoods.

Gracie said, “I had the funniest idea. It was about children, I guess, and how bringing them up causes this sadness. Almost as if their life tells you you’re going to die? I mean, I know it’s love, but it sure is kind of a lonesome thought. You know what I mean? While I was gone, I went back home and paid a little visit to my old indigo plantation, quote unquote. You remember that? And where I used to think about vanished glory, this time I was just in mind of all those people gone. Frank, you know what I figured out?” She looked at him to give him a chance to answer. When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything, she said, “There’s nothing crazier than picking up exactly where you left off.” Then she smiled.

Finally, the houses thinned out and dropped away, and the street turned into a long, twisting road, and if there was a stop sign anywhere, it must have been hidden behind the curves.