Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny

by Keillor, Garrison

  It was July and the temperature hit 102 one day. Where, six months before, we’d been looking at an icy grave, now we were on the verge of combustion. Minnesota, the Theater of Seasons, and whether it’s tragedy or comedy, we’re never sure. The Shropshire Arms sat baking in the sun, and my little window air-conditioner was weeping softly to itself. I sat perspiring in my skivvies and felt like Willy Loman, and Peyton made me feel like I might become Henry IV. I made an appointment for Tuesday at noon.

  MY WAISTLINE WAS DOWN TO 30, lean as when I was twenty-one, and oddly, my hormones were kicking in big time thanks to a brisk thirty-minute walk every day and all those crunches and push-ups and squats, and women were all over me. They couldn’t keep their hands off me. I was used to flirting with women and getting a sisterly pat on the shoulder and “Thanks but no thanks, Pops.” My last pretapeworm romantic escapade was through Mercy Dating-dot-com, a walk around the block with a sixty-five-year-old twice-divorced woman looking for a short-term relationship while the swelling went down from her plastic surgery. But now I was hot merch. In the Brew Ha Ha, young women, art students, twenty-one, twenty-two years old, would walk right up and grab my shirt and say how much they loved the nubbliness of the material, the color, the drape, the indescribable feel of it, and all the time their fingers were walking over my pecs, making my epidermis tingle and my heart go boom. A slight girl with flaming red hair approached and asked where did you get those cargo pants and she grabbed a handful of inner leg and said, “I really love this”—that never happened to me pretapeworm.

  It’s a man’s daydream to be accosted and jostled and fingered and poked by beautiful women. I sat working the Times crossword, and a young beauty brushed her breasts against my earlobe and whispered, “I don’t mean to interrupt but I think that twenty-one across, where you wrote INTOTHEFORESTQUICKLY—actually that should be INTELLIGENCEQUOTIENT.” And she put her finger on it—“Right there, twenty-one across”—which also brought her pelvic mound up tight to my right shoulder. Caramba! Lord, have mercy!

  “I see you here in the coffee shop a lot,” she said.

  “I see you just as much,” I said.

  “Are you a writer?”

  I shook my head. “Wouldn’t even consider it. Writers are snoops and sneaks and betrayers of friends and family. No, I’m a security consultant. I protect people. Do you need protection?”

  She gave me a look. “I think I can handle that,” she said. “But here’s my number if you want to talk some more.”

  The excitement of that dewy-eyed, fresh-faced physical presence—the unforgettableness of her—pretty much destroyed the rest of my day. She wrote her phone number down on a slip of paper, and I stared at it and asked myself, Does a twenty-two-year-old really need to have an aging PI in her life, and do I want to be a father figure to a naked person? The correct answers are no and no. I tried to argue myself out of the correct answers (Life is meant to be enjoyed, and what harm can come of a little romantic fling? Correct answer: A whole lot.) without success.

  But Sugar was crazy about me. Birch Bergquist, too, I was pretty sure. Sharon at the Brew Ha Ha hit on me. Twice. Told me she was “dying of loneliness.” Asked what I was “up to tonight” and did I want to “hang out” at her apartment? She thought we had “a lot in common”—this from a woman of twenty-seven to a man in what I think of as my extremely late fifties. I looked at her raven tresses falling onto her bare shoulders like dark chocolate on vanilla, and suddenly I had a craving for sweets. I told her I was busy tonight but to keep me in mind. “Oh, I’ve got you in mind,” she murmured, and she grabbed my butt and squeezed. Took the whole right cheek in her hand like she was checking out a melon and said, “I’ve got plans for you, sweetie.”

  What a pleasure. A mangy mutt becomes a show dog and—bow wow wow—what a difference a little glamour makes! My world was golden. A woman named Nell sought my professional help. She taught eleventh-grade English—though, looking at her, it was hard to see how boys in her class could stay focused on Shakespeare—and she’d created a computer program that could read and grade student term papers on Huckleberry Finn, Macbeth, Beloved, The Scarlet Letter, Death of a Salesman, and The Great Gatsby, and write cogent comments in the margins, a fabulous time saver, and she was looking for a way to market it.

  “You came to the wrong guy,” I said. “I’ve got no head for business.”

  “What do you have a head for?” she said in a seductive tone. She put her small, pale hand on my shoulder.

  “Eyes to behold you, ears to hear you, a tongue to speak.”

  She recognized the quote from something, I forget what, and she asked me what I wanted to say.

  I thought about that for a moment. “I want to be with you and make you happy in a way you’ve never been happy before,” I said.

  She said, “I told my husband I was going canoeing.”

  “With him?”

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t do outdoor things. He’s allergic to bug bites. One little mosquito bite, and he swells up like a puff pastry.”

  I nodded.

  “So let’s go canoeing,” she murmured.

  I tried to say no, but what came out was “Of course.”

  Love was in the air, and the sweet scent of apples and old leather, horses, smoke, dry leaves. The waves softly lapping on the shore of Lake Como, as she paddled the rental canoe into a secluded inlet in the shade of a weeping willow, my head in her lap, feeling her thighs twist as she pushed the canoe along. She leaned down and kissed me on the lips and inserted her tongue. She squeezed my arm and said I was exactly her type, whatever that means. I told her that her grading software would be a godsend to teachers and free them from the grind of paperwork so they could look at the bigger picture, my own eyes at the moment focused upward on her low-cut black blouse that gave new meaning to the words va va va voom. Her delicate fingers unbuttoned the top three buttons of my shirt and clearly we were headed for a collision in one bed or another. But which one? Her husband was at home, my apartment was a horror show. So I called up the Hotel Bel Rive and got onto a complicated touch-tone menu—pressed one for Reservations and then four for Today’s Reservations and three for No, I Am Not a Member of the Concierge Club. I was on hold for a minute, listening to a woman sing about a romantic weekend for two with complimentary champagne and in-room massage and floral bouquet, and then a live woman came on and asked if I would mind being put on hold for a minute, so I went back to the singer and the champagne weekend. A recorded voice thanked me for my patience and said someone would be with me shortly. It was a little aggravating, knowing that my inability to order up a room must be raising questions in the mind of the potential lover sitting patiently in the bow of the canoe, waving away the gnats and horseflies, so when finally the live woman came on and said, “Yes, we have a room with king-size bed for $149.50. May I have your credit card number?” I rose to my feet to pull out my billfold and, of course, capsized the canoe, and not in a grand or heroic way—I simply toppled over like a stooge in a movie—and Nell screamed and fell into the water too, which was about four feet deep there. We stood up, soaking wet, and looked at each other. She wasn’t laughing. I had dropped my billfold in the lake and also her cell phone. We felt around in the mucky bottom with our feet and didn’t locate them. This took twenty minutes or so. She asked me if I had ever been canoeing before. Her tone of voice stung me to the quick. And then she looked at her watch and announced that she had to be home in fifteen minutes, which clearly was a lie. Another insult. So that was that. Farewell, Nell.

  JIMMY THE BARTENDER ALWAYS ASKS me how my love life is, and I told him about Nell and Sugar and Sharon and all the twentyish ladies who took a shine to me, and he says, “See? I told you a dozen times. Get rid of the grunge look and rejoin the human race.” He was putting crushed ice in the martini shaker, and I told him not to put so much in, which he ignored. “You thought it w
as hip to look like a homeless person, and that may be true when you’re young, but past thirty-five it doesn’t work anymore, and that’s why you used to come in here all sad and rejected and feeling morbid and morose and needing a jolt of gin to pull you out of the nosedive, but would you listen to me? No.” He poured in too much vermouth, as he always does, but I said nothing. “Now you’ve lost forty pounds and your abs are no longer like a big pillow, and you got your teeth cleaned and found a good cologne instead of the sheep disinfectant you used to use, and no wonder the women are sniffing around you.”

  And then a woman walked up as I drank the martini and whispered that I made her think bad thoughts. Her name was Kendra. She looked to be in her late sixties but in fact she was thirty-seven—she’d taught eighth-grade English for ten years, and it had aged her. “I live not far from here,” she said. “Forgive me for being direct, but—do you want to do stuff?” she said.

  “Do stuff?”

  “Do stuff with me.” And she clicked her tongue. Jimmy stood rearranging bottles on the back bar, listening intently.

  I told her I had to get home to the wife and kiddos.

  She sneered. “You ain’t married, mister. I know Married, and you’re not in that particular league.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You look all cheery and shiny, that’s how. You look like nobody’s yelled at you in months.”

  “Four or five guys are out to shoot me in the head, but never mind that. Small detail.” I put down a ten for the drink and she and I strolled over to her apartment in the Angus Hotel on Selby Avenue. Books were strewn everywhere, and a brown shag carpet looked like buffalo had slept on it. The smell of burnt incense. A public radio station was in the throes of Pledge Week, and a weepy woman was on the air, crying, “Please, please call the eight hundred number now—if I don’t hear from ten of you right now, I am going to have my cat put to sleep! I’m not kidding. I don’t want my Mittens to live in a world where people don’t care about quality broadcasting!” And she broke down, sobbing, and Kendra turned the radio off and started unbuttoning her blouse as she asked me if I had read much Flannery O’Connor.

  “I don’t go for Southern literature,” I said. “It makes me perspire and it makes me itch.”

  “Unsnap my bra,” she whispered. “What about Faulkner? I love Absalom, Absalom.” The bra fell to the floor. Her nipples were large and funguslike. I looked away.

  “Are you into restraint?” she said.

  “Self-restraint?”

  She made a face. “Have you ever tied a woman’s wrists and ankles to a bed? It’s only an idea. We don’t have to do it. But if you would—and if you would sprinkle kitty litter on me, I get all hot and tingly.”

  “I don’t think this is going to work out,” I said. I got to the door, though she clung to my lapels and was swinging her breasts from side to side, trying to arouse interest. “Touch my perfect body with your mind,” she said.

  “I have to tell you something. I’m gay,” I said. And I sang a little bit of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” in a high trembly voice, and she kissed me good-bye. “I hope you find someone to love,” she said. “And call me if you decide you want to experiment.”

  THE PILLSBURY MILL CONDO THAT Peyton showed me was a two-bedroom on the sixth floor, with thirteen-foot ceilings and enormous windows overlooking the Mississippi waters churning below, the dam and locks, the Stone Arch bridge, the towers of downtown, and Nicollet Island—she gave me a full tour of the joint, and I couldn’t remember a thing except how my heart leaped up when she asked me if I would be living there alone. “I hope not!” I cried. Got any ideas? I thought. “I’m sort of in between relationships right now,” I explained. “Been thinking maybe it’s time to settle down,” I offered. A few minutes later I had forked over a down payment of $175,138 and signed the mortgage and shaken her hand on the deal.

  “Any advice on decoration?” I asked.

  “If it were me, I’d do minimalist.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that! It’ll be minimalist all the way. I can minimize with the best of them!”

  I was sort of distracted by Peyton, and not until I moved into 619 did I notice there were no cupboards, no stove or washer or dryer, and no wood flooring in the bedroom, just rough plywood with big splinters. Ah well. A person can always carpet a bedroom. I looked around my little domain and thought, Here is where I will be finally happy again. Here is where I will bring her, whoever she may be, and here she and I will make a good life together. I missed having a woman in my life. The pantyhose on the shower rod, the doodads around the bathroom sink. The cat hair. The wet towels on the bathroom floor. The monthly emotional meltdown and the weeping and accusations. The hour-long phone conversations with the girlfriend in California while the two of them paint their toenails. The handwriting with the little heart shape dotting the I on the note you find in the morning on the bedside table, darling i am so sorry i called you a shithead last night. i want you to know i love you & there is nobody like you. xxxxxoxoxox. The stuffed animals in the bed. The anger toward the mother. The vast arsenal of beauty products that takes over the entire bathroom. I miss all of that.

  I MOVED OUT OF THE Shropshire Arms on August 1, me and a U-Haul trailer, assisted by a pimply faced kid named Kevin. And my landlady, Doris, hands on hips, telling me what a big mistake I was making, that real-estate values were in the toilet, and that I was about to lose my shirt, and where’d I come by all that money anyway, was I selling drugs or what? If so, did I expect her to take me back after I was indicted and the condo gone back to the bank? Well, think again.

  I HAD SAVED HER LIFE one summer night when I whacked her on the back and dislodged an ice cube from her epiglottis as she was choking to death on her rum and Coke, and she never forgave me for the favor. “No good deed goes unpunished,” as they say. She was furious at her late husband Sidney, who ran off with a twenty-five-year-old named Chrysalis the day Doris had four wisdom teeth pulled and was heading home from the dentist zonked on Vicodin and a teenager stole her purse with her car keys in it so she had to walk twenty-seven blocks home and got there to find her husband’s note saying, “I have found a love so rare that I cannot walk away from it. Chrysalis completes me as I’ve never been completed before. I wish you all the best.” And also the toilet had overflowed. From this afternoon of horror she became a gimlet-eyed harpy, and I was the one available for harping on. Sidney was not, having died, drunk and desolate, when Chrysalis left him for a personal trainer. (Doris scattered his ashes in a hazardous waste site.) Doris’s apartment was just inside the front door and whenever I came home late I could hear her listening to my tippy-toe footsteps, trying to discern if two other feet were tiptoeing alongside mine. She loathed me, which was her form of love, and when I told her I had put money down on a two-bedroom in a luxury high-rise overlooking the Mississippi, she was heartbroken. “You’ll be living on the street before Christmas,” she said. “Wait and see. A big cardboard carton on the steps of a church and a tangle of ratty blankets and a hand-lettered sign: HOPELESS FOOL WHO NEVER LISTENED TO ANYBODY AND NOW LOOK AT HIM. HERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD, ETC. PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN. HAVE A NICE DAY.”

  “Why do you always assume the worst about me?” I said.

  “You really want to know?” she replied. “Are you not aware of what I’ve put up with for the past fifteen years?”

  “Why don’t you just say, ‘Good luck, Guy, and I hope you’re happy’? Why the insults and accusations?”

  “How can you do something so stupid as this? Where are your brains? In your butt?”

  I was getting hot under the collar. “Why is it so difficult for you to utter a simple declarative sentence? Why talk only in questions?”

  “You want a declarative sentence? Is that what you really want?” she said, jabbing me with her index finger. “Or are you just trying to irritate me by acting
like an irresponsible idiot?”

  “Why does a simple request always turn into an exchange of insults? Why are you so bitter?”

  “Am I supposed to care what you think? Why should I?”

  “When are you going to get over Sidney and find a life, Doris? When?”

  “What business is that of yours? What do you know about anything?”

  And then I lowered the boom on her.

  “May I have my damage deposit back, please?”

  She took her sweet time, examining every nook and cranny of my apartment, counting scratch marks on the floor, before she shelled out the deposit, $75.75. I took the dough and gave it to an old wino stationed in front of Central Presbyterian. He took it, blinked, cleared his throat, and said, “Think you could see your way clear to making it an even hundred bucks?” So I shelled out an additional $25. A reward for chutzpah.

  15

  Enter Mr. Freud

  I KEPT WAITING FOR MR. LARRY to come around and settle my hash, and he didn’t and didn’t, and I know that game, the waiting game. You want your prey to go crazy wondering where you are and when you’ll show up, and pretty soon you’ve taken control of their mind day and night. Where’s Larry? Is he standing just outside that door? Is he going to beat it down and come in roaring and bust me in the chops? It’s an old psychological game, Waiting for the Last Trump & the Judgment. The day I moved into Pillsbury Mill, he called, just so I’d know he knew where I was. “Nice apartment, pal, very classy,” he said on the phone. “But when I told you to get out of town, I didn’t mean Minneapolis—that’s just a suburb. I meant, way out of town. And you gotta hand over the worms. My patience is running out. And when I hit you, it’s gonna hurt. I’m gonna squash you like a June bug. Boom. You’re outta here. I got friends among the meathead element. Your punks, your shooters. They envy my lifestyle. So don’t jerk me around, Noir, or else. Boom. I want the worms in forty-eight hours, or else my boys are gonna put you six feet under where the worms can have their way with you.” I could hear him gnashing his teeth. He wanted me to know that he meant business.