Nothing but Blue Skies

7

Lucy Dyer was at her desk, didn’t really notice him in her doorway. The wall was covered with posters, tropical getaways for people in the extreme north. He always looked at the brown girl wearing little more than a dive watch under the waterfall in Kauai. Lucy had a long brown braid wound up behind her head and wore a navy blue jacket over a white open-throated silk shirt. Once when Frank worked on a road crew in Yellowstone, when he was young, a girl who looked like Lucy stopped in her convertible while a bulldozer crossed the road. They spoke briefly, Frank put down his shovel and got in the convertible. When he returned two weeks later, the job was gone. He could remember still the smell of the evergreens and dusty tar, hear the mountain stream that roared along that road, remember every instant of the two weeks. She was a lovely rich girl in her own Mustang convertible, but she did give him gonorrhea. He drove all the way to Laramie, Wyoming, to feel anonymous enough to see a doctor.

He sat down opposite Lucy and tilted slightly in his chair. He sighed and drifted forward in his imagination to winter, a scene in which one shoulders from the front door to the car through volumes of north wind. He rested on an image of jumper cable attachment, his imaginary self disappearing in the rooster tails of blowing snow that follow passing cars. Lucy was watching.

“How about a converted slave quarters on Nevis?”

“What month?”

“January.” She pushed a brochure at him.

“I don’t think so. I want something, I don’t know, something that would take me back to the glory days —”

“The early seventies.”

“But exactly.”

“How about a hammock on Cay Caulker, Belize?”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. It’s a straight shot across the gulf.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you could pick up an oldies station out of Houston.”

“Oh, Lucy.” He thought for a moment. “Is there a brochure?”

“I think that would be very much out of keeping with the spirit of my suggestion.”

“Quite right. How about the local weed?”

“I’m sure they can find you some…‘good shit.’ And if you like the hammock, you can always grow your own.”

“I see.”

The room fell quiet. A car antenna moved into view in the window, backed up and rotated to a stop. Something was coming up inside Frank. Voices outside, laughter, more voices, deals, assignations. I hope it goes on for a million years, thought Frank gratefully, defying gravity and cold. Now he was nervous. He thought about his mother on her last day in her own house. She had a purse that weighed about fifteen pounds that had a lock on it; she had lost the key to the lock long ago and carried this massive purse whose contents no one could any longer remember. She even took it with her when she sat down at the disc-driven grand piano, shouting, “It’s magic!” while the robot piano played Mozart like a barrel organ in a nightmare. It was a flat earth and they were all going off the edge.

“You’re never going to buy a trip from me,” said Lucy.

“I could,” he said and thought, Here it comes. We have these jokey meetings almost daily and they go nowhere. Because she was Gracie’s friend, I’m paralyzed to so much as ask her to dinner. We leave the lightest moments red-faced and sweating, out of fear one of us will ask, “What do you hear from Gracie?” You move toward something that could mean something and all it does is produce fear.

“You’re not like the others,” Lucy said. “You won’t go on a cruise. You don’t like other people well enough.”

“I deplore their eating habits.”

“You won’t go to the Bible lands.”

Frank reached across and covered Lucy’s hands with his own. “Not even Jesus had to worry about hijacking,” he said.

“What’s that have to do with it?”

“Didn’t he, more or less, put the Bible lands on the map?”

“That’s certainly a very strange way to say it, Frank.”

“My problem in planning a trip is getting time and place in the proper relationship. For example, I would love to go to New York, but certainly not after 1925.”

“That’s a problem, and by the way, my hands are beginning to perspire. Don’t keep coming on to me if you’re just going back to your cubicle.”

Astonished, Frank stood up. “You’re a hundred percent correct.” Her beauty was sudden phosphorus, ignited by her remark. He had a spell of immolating madness, wanting to offer himself in some way.

“How’s it going over there?” She nodded in the direction of his office.

“I had one good transaction.”

“Grain?”

“Cattle. How about you?” His mind was diving around like a hooked fish. If they could only get off this dead center.

“Pretty good. Mostly getting kids back from college. Nothing substantial in the way of trips. One screamer, didn’t get his diabetic dinner on a Seattle flight.”

Now Frank felt a wave of insubstantiality. The whole thing was getting away from them. The normal, pleasant prevarications of daily life were becoming unbearable. It would just zoom in like this and be awful. The terror had to be replaced by blind courage.

“Last night,” he said, “I was sitting in your apple tree.” This was it. This was it!

“You were?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing in my apple tree?”

“I was watching you … uh, get undressed and, uh, watch the news.” What an exciting new world this was. He was perspiring. But no matter what the consequences were, he was going to accept them.

She withdrew her hands from beneath his. There seemed to be no motion anywhere in the building. His eyes felt dry. She got up and went to the window, but moved away from it. He waited for her to talk.

“You’re quite a guy,” she said in an extraordinarily flat voice. Everything seemed in jeopardy. He couldn’t imagine what he had been doing there. He was walking home from the golf course in the dark. Two drinks. Not enough to explain anything. And suddenly he was there. It was too bad he told her. If he didn’t tell Lucy, he knew there could be another time and then it would become routine; then he would be headed off the end of the world. It was time to put himself in her hands. He could tell when she turned around to look at him that he was not going to get off lightly, but it had been his only chance to stop and now he was going to have to take it like a man.

“I think the best thing would be if you went back to your office,” she said. “I think you need a little vacation, Frank. Let me work on it. I’ll give you a ring when I get this trip put together.”

“When you get this trip together …”

“Yes. I’ll call you when I put this little trip together. I can’t do it in five minutes. But not to worry: this has been a long time coming and you’re leaving town. You need to leave town. You haven’t been anywhere since Gracie left. You’ve got to break the pattern.”

“Fine,” he said dully. “Call me.”

In a couple of hours, she dropped off his plane tickets and itinerary without a word. He read it with amazement. He swallowed several times but the feeling his trip gave him wouldn’t go away.