by Jim Harrison
“She’s not doing too well. Her heart is weak,” Berenice said, clearing the table. “And you look like you could use a vacation. Couldn’t you go fishing someplace down in Mexico?”
“He could start work tomorrow,” Bob piped up, finishing his second piece of pie and rubbing his tummy as if he had accomplished something noteworthy.
He had left his cell phone in the car and noted that Diane had called for “no reason,” or so she said in her message. He called back before he got on the freeway back to Tucson. While they talked he watched an octogenarian shuffling down the street with his walker. Sunderson resolved to shoot himself in the head before he would live in a retirement colony. Diane joked about his “scandalous missteps” with Carla. She had always been amused rather than judgmental about human foibles, but then her voice weakened and she said that two days before her husband had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Since he was a doctor himself he had become immediately depressed about the inevitable prognosis. “I’m so sorry,” Sunderson offered. “Things had been going so well,” she said before hanging up. She had only been married half a year.
Heading north on the freeway he saw clearly again that like so many his marriage, the central fact of his life, had failed because the marriage and the job didn’t go together, couldn’t coalesce, couldn’t coexist in a comfortable manner. The simple fact was that when you worked all day monitoring the least attractive behavior of the species you’re going to carry the job home. Diane, a very bright woman indeed, couldn’t believe in the fact of evil, which always reminded him of Anne Frank’s deranged statement that people were essentially good. If you’re a cop long enough even songbirds are under suspicion. The daily involvement with minor league mayhem did not predispose one to large thoughts. His brain short-circuited again. His unused first name, Simon, only served to remind him of the Mother Goose verse, “Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair.” He signed his name S. Sunderson and no one he knew had the guts to call him Simon, except his mother. In his childhood any grade school boy that used Simon got his ass kicked while the girls tortured this sore point as did his sisters Berenice and Roberta. The family called Roberta “Bertie” because of the eccentricity of his parents calling the little brother Robert who had been the family’s long-term headache until he died of heroin in Detroit where he was the soundman for a Motown band. When Robert was a boy he’d had a terrible accident at the big saw at the pulp mill and Sunderson and the rest had all stood in a circle looking at Robert’s lower leg on the railroad siding. When the ambulance came the driver put the appendage in a small burlap bag. This item was large in Sunderson’s accretion of emotional mold.
When he reached the Arizona Inn in the twilight he saw that Diane’s near doppelganger was sitting near the vacant Ping-Pong table under the smoking cupola. He barely had the courage but joined her and was rewarded with a broad smile. This made him happily nervous so he lit a cigarette. To his surprise she lit one of her own.
“I rarely smoke but at dinner I had an argument with my mother. I’m fifty-five and she’s eighty but she tried to make me eat my spinach.” She laughed at the absurdity.
“I had an argument with mine, too,” he admitted.
“About what?”
“I misbehaved at my retirement party in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the news reached her by phone and e-mail all the way out here.”
“What did you do?”
“It’s too indelicate to admit.” He felt himself blush.
“Please. I’m an Episcopalian but I’m an adult. I want to hear some naughty talk,” she laughed.
“I sort of made love to a dancing girl out by a woodpile. There were witnesses looking out the window of the cabin.” He was pained to admit this but he liked the fullness of the laughter that ensued.
“You sort of made love! What did your mother say?”
“She said shame on you son.”
More laughter and Sunderson leafed through a large book she was looking at. It was a coffee table book about petroglyphs in the Southwest.
“That’s wonderful. My name’s Lucy. My mother served spinach, a vegetable I hate, at my birthday dinner. Maybe you’re like Kokopele, a mythic Indian with a fondness for ladies?” She showed him a petroglyph of Kokopele, the humpbacked flute player. The light was growing dim and she invited him to join her for coffee and a brandy. He followed her on a longish walk through gardens past rooms and bungalows a little worried that he wouldn’t find his way back to his room, which he saw as a deliciously childish worry.
“Keep your hands off, buster. I’m happily married,” she said at the door.
“I’m not happily divorced,” he replied.
He wondered where her bed was because he was standing in an elegant living room with a couple of Chinese screens while she called room service. He had never felt so far away from the Upper Peninsula except maybe at a Frankfurt whorehouse forty years before.
“My parents were friends of the owner and used to stay here so my dad reserves the same room for me.”
They sat at a table slowly turning the pages of the petroglyph book. He had seen a similar book at Marion’s house but had never bothered taking a look. When the room service waiter came he called her “Mrs. Caulkins.” Sunderson noted her conversation style was very much like Diane’s, light and deferential with an occasional edge of the abrasive. She spoke of the drawings on stone as the “roots of religion,” also “totemistic,” a word Marion used. She drank her large brandy more quickly than he did.
“My mother is making me gulp. Why are you on edge?”
“I didn’t think it showed.”
“It does. You’re like my husband when he heard he was going to be audited by the IRS.”
“I retired two days ago and I already feel a little useless.” He was hesitant at first but then went ahead and explained his recent life including the Great Leader, Dwight. With a bit of probing on her part he added the reasons for the divorce.
“I’ve seen that a half dozen times. A couple begins quite romantically doing a lot of things together and then it begins to die if the man becomes overabsorbed in his work. It can go the other way. A friend of mine started working in an animal shelter and found it more interesting than taking care of her husband who was anyway less than fascinating. Another friend saw her kids off to college and then went back to finishing her nursing degree. Now she’s a surgical nurse and lives in New York City and her husband is still down the road from us in Bedford wondering what hit him.”
Sunderson was looking down at the beautiful table before them feeling the full impact of his own shabbiness. His desk at the office had always been the most grungy of any of his colleagues with its accumulated gummy spilled coffee, dust, and scraps of paper. Roxie had never been permitted to touch the desk or he might lose track of what he comically called “important papers.” Now he thought of the old saying pigs love their own shit as he looked down at the finely made table and the frayed, soiled cuffs of his sport coat. There was a longish, more than awkward silence as if they were both asking themselves, “Why are we depressing each other?”
“Marriages get moldy real slowly,” he said, then paused to take out the flask of whiskey from his coat pocket. She nodded and he poured into their empty brandy glasses thinking that she had likely never drunk cheap whiskey. Sure enough she winced at her first sip.
“My God what is this, paint thinner?” She laughed and took another sip. “Sorry, I interrupted you.”
“I was saying that marriages slowly get moldy and then are no longer mutually vital. You just keep dancing the same polka steps.”
“I never danced the polka. We fox-trotted out East or waltzed.”
“I could show you but I’m sure that Tucson is not a polka town. Anyway, we had a lot of fun camping in the summers in our twenties and thirties. It’s wonderful to make love in a tent. In the winter we’d do a lot of cross-country skiing. When we got into our forties we stopped doing both. In the summer we’d rent a c
abin, which wasn’t the same as a tent, and in the winter we’d vegetate.”
He had made himself nervous and finished his ample whiskey in a single gulp. He could no longer bear her nominal resemblance to Diane and imagined her living in a colonial house with daffodils in the yard in the New York City suburb of Bedford. He got up to leave.
“Please don’t go just yet.” Her eyes seemed to be misting and her voice was less strong. “When you spoke about your new hobby of investigating the crime of religion, I found myself agreeing intellectually but emotionally I have to protect my own religion. We lost our baby girl, our first child, Lucy, when she was five months to a defective heart. My husband insisted she be called after me because he loved the name Lucy. Probably because of dreams I had the irrational belief that my little daughter became a bird and that her soul passes through generations of birds. I even became a bird-watcher though I had never much noticed them before Lucy’s death. We raised a son and a daughter but with them my feelings were never as intense as they were with Lucy. We knew that we were going to lose her for three months but I never accepted it.”
“We never got beyond a couple of miscarriages,” Sunderson said lamely. He began to finally feel the extreme fatigue of having awakened at three a.m. and also a niggling twinge of desire for her. It seemed crazed that he could hear this terrifying loss and it made him want to make love to the mother. He remembered that Diane, who knew so many nurses in her work as a hospital administrator, had said that they tended to be very sexually active because they’re around death so much. “At least fucking stands for life,” she had said, shocking him because it was the only time in their marriage she had used the word.
“I can’t believe it.” She suddenly burst into laughter.
“Believe what?” he asked timidly, already sensing that she had read his thoughts about her similarity to Diane.
“It’s outrageous. And funny. Maybe flattering.” She paused, and then added with mock seriousness, “You better go now.”
He took her seriously and headed for the door. She followed and put an arm around his neck.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Just teasing. I have a bottle of wine that’s perfect for a Sunday night.”
He slumped down in a chair by the door, looked at his scuffed shoes, and then watched her expertly opening the wine. Since Diane had left he had been strictly screw top. He made his way back to the table. The wine was a soft burgundy called Clos de la Roche and she said it was hard to get but her family knew the family that owned the vineyard. It was gradually occurring to him that she was rich, which had a dampening effect since he was an old-line left-winger and laborite, his sympathies deeply enmeshed in the fortunes of the union movement. He was honest enough, however, to admit that he had never really known a rich woman and the few he had met in Marquette were civil enough.
“How much would a bottle of this set you back?” It was certainly the most delicious liquid he had ever drunk.
“Oh God I could only estimate. My dad has it sent to me. Several hundred dollars a bottle I suspect. My dad’s from an old New England family though he’s a democrat. He says his family made a lot of money in the spice and slave trade and whaling so it’s his duty to try to correct certain ancient injustices. He’s always loathed my husband Harold who started as a broker and is now an investment banker. My dad refers to him as Swindler Harold. My dad was pleased when Harold’s firm went bankrupt. Harold has been in a depression for a couple of months. I support the family with my money but I could never leave Harold because the kids love their hopeless dad. Harold wants me to invest in a company he wants to start to recondition sailboats but dad has control of my money and won’t allow it.” She paused, almost frantic. “This must all sound strange to you.”
“It does sound remote. When my dad was dying of cancer at age sixty he was worried because he was three thousand bucks in debt. I paid it off with a loan from my wife. He didn’t know the money came from Diane but was proud that I had a good job.” He was pleased that they were talking nonchalantly about their families. “I never thought much about money because I had enough to buy books and live fine and now I’ll get by on my state pension okay.”
They were silent and drowsy drinking the wine and he suspected that his sexual feelings for her came out of the usual loneliness and that the wine had the curious effect of making her look even more like Diane. When you’re sixty-five, he thought, a fifty-five-year-old woman looks young.
She asked him if he’d like to go look at petrogylphs with her father early the next morning and at first he said no, that he was moving out to more reasonable quarters, would see his mother a few more times, then head out to find the Great Leader Dwight. She looked quite disappointed like Diane looked when he refused to go along with what she wanted to do so he changed his mind by saying “one more day won’t hurt” and then she smiled.
“Why do we seem to like each other?” she asked at the door.
“I have no idea,” he lied. He certainly wasn’t going to say, “You bear a resemblance to a woman I loved and lost.”
“Once, on a plane, I developed a crush on an anthropologist I was seated next to. I was turned on as the young people say. I told my daughter who thought it was hysterical. She asked, ‘Why didn’t you go for it mom?’”
Sunderson thought of this on his way back to his room, quite lost until he was helped by a night watchman. It was a troublesome night indeed as if he had just been on a fifteen-hour drive and couldn’t stop moving when he got into bed. Once he woke up weeping but twice it was laughter, and belly laughter. The tears were caused by a reality-based dream of when he had returned from a three-day meeting at state police headquarters and found her gone on a late Friday afternoon. He was in immediate tears as he had skillfully, he thought, remembered that it was their seventeenth anniversary and he had bought fifty bucks worth of cut flowers, a pointless gesture as it was late June and she had better flowers in her perennial garden. Some of their camping equipment was gone from the porch and it seemed odd that a woman fleeing from marriage would take this sort of gear. As a detective he might have figured out he was dulled from the four-hundred-plus-mile drive up from Lansing and a hangover from sitting in a disco rock bar watching college girls wiggle their toothsome asses. Fetching a beer from the refrigerator he saw the note. “Hoped you’d call last night but you must have been busy. Also hoping you remembered I’m camping this weekend at our spot near Big Bay. Your dinner in the blue Creuset is a blanquette de veau, a veal stew. I also made a salad dressing, etc. See you Sunday. Love, D.”
He played a little game that was usually successful in countering insomnia. He constructed a series of mental notes that wouldn’t be that hard to remember in the morning. At the university he had always memorized potent quotes from historical texts to use in blue book essay exams, so his memory had never been a problem. The only issue in using notes to battle insomnia was that the brain without benefit of light tended to be errant and freely waffled into the irrelevant.
As Mom used to say when I was slow to do chores, “Stop fiddle-faddling,” an expression no longer in use. Dad was more direct, saying, “Get your head out of your ass and get to work,” a difficult physical maneuver. Fifty years later I’m still my parents’ child. Fiddle-faddle. If I’m going to nail Dwight to the wall I better get started with full energy. Carla is possibly the key due to her volatility as in all witnesses who struggle to explain themselves to themselves. Despite everything Dwight teaches she wants him for herself.
A dim memory of Berenice giving her allowance to the Lutheran pastor for the African Mission effort. Mom was angry when Dad said that the clergy were “God’s pickpockets.” Back to money and religion. The central business of Lucy’s life seems to be inheritance. A portion of her emotional content died with her infant daughter.
A clear memory of ten years ago when Diane gave me Judy Crichton’s America 1900 for my birthday and also made a fine stewed rabbit she said was a French
recipe. At first the book seemed insufficiently scholarly but then this was a relief. I recall a passage from a 1900 New York Times unsigned editorial insisting that we hadn’t moved an inch forward from the Dark Ages. Ten years before in reaction to the Ghost Dance movement the Chicago Tribune stated that it might be wise to kill all of the Lakota. I had this sobering feeling that I was spending my life running around the Upper Peninsula applying tiny bandages to mostly superficial wounds.
The idea that history gives perspective is partly a hoax because it only functionally gives you perspective on history! Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.
It didn’t work. Here he was in a hotel room in Tucson drying his tears after he mistakenly thought Diane had left him, still feeling the fool. He turned on the light to change the pattern of consciousness. With Diane he had always felt a little vulgar and brutish and now Lucy was doing the same thing to him. Curiously his colleagues and many people thought him to be too refined and bookish to be a detective but they were victims of television and crime novels. He’d never wanted to be a tough-guy cop partly because the first two years of his state police career he had been stationed near Detroit where there were a phenomenal number of tough cops, real bruisers, first among them the “Big Four” who were called in for particularly violent situations. He was off duty after a Detroit Lions–Green Bay Packer game, always a volatile item, and had seen the Big Four cruise up in their black Chrysler sedan to settle a brawl between fans, locals, and a group of big krauts that had come over from Milwaukee. Sunderson stood well back watching with amazement as the lead man of the Big Four, an immense Polack named Thaddeus chewing a ten-cent rum-soaked Crooks cigar, waded into the brawlers and began throwing them left and right fairly high in the air, grinning as he worked. Later on a gory case Sunderson had had dinner with Thaddeus in Hamtramck, duck blood soup and fried muskrat, and the table next to them had been noisy and Thaddeus had said to them, “Shut up we’re talking about the fucking United Nations.” And the men fell silent. Thaddeus was melancholy that evening because a pimp had cut a nipple off of an Amazonian black hooker he loved. It was a famous pimp who was named Mink because he wore a mink coat even in July. Thaddeus had said, “That fuck is gonna go off a bridge. He don’t know it yet but he’s a floater,” meaning a dead body in the Detroit River. When Sunderson was transferred and he and Diane drove north there were tears of relief when they reached the Straits of Mackinac. The least fun possible was picking up a severed head in a drug slaying down near the Flat Rock drag strip.