The Grand Tour

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  ———

  Earlier that afternoon, Richard sat at a bar table in the Four Seasons lounge, waiting for his wife to arrive. His ex-wife. For the first time in his adult life, he’d ordered “Just a water.” An unrestrained ripple of loathing lapped across the broad lake of the bartender’s face, and Richard didn’t blame him. He hated people who drank water. But he hadn’t seen Eileen in nearly a decade and didn’t intend to confirm all of her correct assumptions about him.

  He wasn’t sure why she’d chosen the Four Seasons. Perhaps it was close to where she lived now, though he’d thought she was living in Brooklyn. Maybe she liked the view—through the tall rectangular windows, a tiny jade slice of Central Park’s southeastern edge was visible. It couldn’t have been that she liked the bar, a cavernous space decorated in an anonymous pseudo-deco style more Sheraton lounge than Algonquin Hotel. Tall puce vases against the far wall contained enormous plastic palm fronds, an unnatural green that nonetheless provided a visual break from the rectilinear earth tones. Two or three of the other tables were occupied, by businessmen and businesswomen with a distinct conventioneer air about them, all false bonhomie and strained laughter. The room’s corporate blandness might have prevented him from having thoughts of romance, if he’d had thoughts like that, which he didn’t. He wasn’t sure what he really thought, or even how he felt, about the meeting, but the hot sweat luxuriously bathing his armpits provided a clue.

  He looked down at the menu, and then someone was standing next to him—a woman. Her. “Hi, Richard,” Eileen said, draping her coat over the back of the chair.

  “Hey. It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, too.”

  Her face didn’t convey the sense that it was good to see him, exactly. Interesting to see him, possibly, or amusing or strange. Good, no. She half smiled as he awkwardly rose and embraced her across the back of his chair. She went to the bar and returned with a sweating glass of white wine. He now wished that, instead of just a water, he’d ordered a real drink—say, an octuple Manhattan served in an ale tankard. She nodded at the menu in front of him. “Anything look good?”

  He read from the menu in the most facetious voice he could muster. “Oh, everything. I’m trying to choose from an assortment of delectable light fare such as Kobe beef sliders and tuna sashimi.”

  “How are you,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said, putting down the menu. “Terrible, I guess. How are you?”

  “Good,” she said, and this time the word seemed sincere. She wore a gray pencil skirt and a thin, black cashmere sweater with a small string of pearls strung across the open V of her expressive throat. It was tanned and freckled and taut, and if there had been work done to it, it had been good work. Her lipstick matched the vases behind her. Again, he found himself thinking how radically differently time had treated them. Time was like a whimsically cruel father that had lavished gifts upon his daughter and taken his despised son behind the woodshed for daily beatings.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m fat now.”

  “You were always fat.”

  “Not like this. I don’t know what happened. Well, besides sitting on my ass and eating garbage for a decade. Anyway, you look beautiful. How are things?”

  “Good. Things are good. I mean, there’s the usual departmental squabbles and politicking, but work’s good. I’m publishing a new book next year.” She sipped her wine. “And Molly and I are engaged.”

  The expectant air was unmistakable, and he obliged. “Excuse me?”

  “Molly, my partner.”

  “Your partner? Are you ranch hands?” Eileen stared at him. “She’s a woman?”

  “Last I checked, yes.”

  “What. When did this happen?”

  “When did what happen? When did I become a lesbian? I’m not.”

  “You’re getting married to a woman, but you’re not a lesbian.”

  “It’s not an unusual position these days, Richard. A lot of people find those cultural boxes stifling.”

  “It sounds like you don’t find her cultural box too stifling.”

  She began to push up from the table, but he put his hand on her hand and she sat, warily. “Sorry, I’m sorry. This is just surprising. Cut me a break.” The table of business folk were looking over and talking under their collective breath. “How long have you been with her?”

  “Eight years.”

  “Wow. I didn’t know.”

  “Why would you know? It’s none of your business.”

  “You’re right,” he said, and slowly withdrew his hand from hers; swollen by food and booze and age, it looked like a catcher’s mitt next to the thin lines of her fingers, the fine, dignified ridges of her knuckles. Eight years. They had been together for ten—at the time of their divorce, it had been almost a full third of his life, the main portion of his adulthood. At this point, he’d already lived in the desert for eight. It was funny—though not at all humorous—how as you had increasingly less time remaining, your sense of time expanded; it seemed like it should be the other way, that increasing proximity to death should heighten your sense of urgency, but it didn’t work like that. You became lulled by the unscrolling of your own life. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. Why am I here?” she said. She twisted the stem of her wineglass between her fingers and seemed poised to spring from her chair at any moment.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, with more conviction this time, simultaneously realizing it was really true and feeling surprised by that fact. The feeling of not meaning the words as he said them was much more familiar. “Have you heard from Cindy?”

  “She called me yesterday.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, from Denver. She sounded happier than she has in years. I don’t know exactly what you said to her, or what happened, but whatever it was really seems to have helped. She said she’s making a fresh start.”

  “Yeah, I guess she is.” He pulled Cindy’s goodbye letter out of his jacket pocket and smoothed the Hampton Inn stationery on the table. Eileen leaned forward and read it and looked up.

  “Wow.”

  He’d decided beforehand against telling her about the money. It would only worry her, and he’d done enough of that over the years. He said, “I wasn’t sure why I wanted to meet, when I called you months ago. But I guess this is why, basically. I know we’re twenty years past that, and it’s completely meaningless at this point, but I am sorry. I’m sorry for how things went with us, and I’m sorry I didn’t do better.”

  She looked at him, clearly unsure of what she was meant to say. He knew she wanted to say it was okay, but he also knew it wasn’t and she couldn’t say so. She looked past his shoulder, and he looked where she was looking, at the thin green wedge of Central Park. A blindered horse cantered around in a circle, the cop on its back talking to another mountie. “Well,” she said, “it was a long time ago, and we both made mistakes.”

  “It wasn’t that long ago. And you didn’t.”

  “Of course I did. I dropped every ball in the book with Cindy. I still can’t believe I couldn’t get her to go to college, it’s disgraceful. I make things up when my colleagues talk about their little Rhodes scholars.”

  “You were there, though.”

  Eileen looked away from the window, at him, at his quivering bulk, at his fat cartoon hands, vibrating in his lap, clutching an ethereal drink. “Yes, that’s true. I was there.” She glanced again at the letter and exhaled. “But still, this is a little much.”

  “I disagree.”

  “What happened between the two of you?”

  “Had enough of me, I guess. A little goes a long way.” This was an old line between them, and he hated himself for recycling it, but he was just about out of new ones. He would have to make do with the old chestnuts, like the really old guy who used to shamble into the Tamarack, order a Jack and Coke, and tell the same story every time, about how he used to own a little cabin up in Saugerties, New Yor
k, right next to Big Pink, and how he one time saw Dylan walking around in his tighty-whities. Must have gotten locked out—Richard would grimly deliver the punch line along with him.

  But Eileen was gracious and smiled, cocking her head to the side as she did, and the full vision of her as she’d been when they met returned to him in an instant and with surprising force. She was beautiful now, yes, but my God, he thought, she had been incomparable. Long legs tapering into the thinnest ankles, like a fawn standing doubtful in a clearing, though she’d never been in doubt a moment of her life. In his mind, the image of her vibrated with the nervous shiver of youth and potential. He could see her, some forgotten Sunday afternoon, lying on their sofa with a book, and the sunlight through their small apartment windows gleaming so bright off her copper hair, it was as though it radiated from her person. The bartender rattled ice in a shaker, and that time was all gone. But even after the emotional impact dissipated, a ghostly afterimage seemed to remain, an aura that surrounded her.

  “Richard,” she said, and this time put her hand on his. He dumped the silverware out of a cloth napkin and pressed it for a moment to his face. Then he was clambering to his feet, bumping the table, sloshing wine over the lip of the glass, slipping his meathook from her grasp. How he’d missed her.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice gone soft and froggy. “I’m late for a thing. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She was saying something else behind him, but he was already in midscuttle, moving out of the misty, smudged room, down the red center line of the gray carpeting that led past a bank of elevators and into the domed lobby. As he passed through, a concierge with linebacker shoulder pads swiveled at his station with a bemused expression, like a robot attempting to fathom human emotion. Richard pushed through heavy doors out into heavy city twilight. The surrounding buildings seemed to huddle together and whisper as they looked down appraisingly at the frail figure escaping from the hotel.

  He felt simultaneously both very old and very young. He knew almost nothing, but he knew almost everything he was ever going to know. Why does baby cry? Baby is too old to cry! He raised his hand for a cab, for the moment the entire weight of all his unappeasable desire trained on getting the hell away from East Fifty-Seventh Street.

  ———

  He sat in the hotel drinking and watching TV. Alcohol and TV: in times of need it was good to have these staunch, reliable companions, stalwart allies who would never lead him astray. Someone knocked on the door. He opened it, and Vance stood there.

  “Okay,” said Richard, finally. “I’ll bite. What are you doing here?”

  “I decided to look up my dad.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I had your itinerary in my email. Can I come in? Do you mind if I stay tonight? I’m driving back tomorrow.”

  “Of course.”

  For some reason, this answer provoked a quiet fit of sobbing. Vance collapsed on the edge of the bed, and his shoulders slumped forward even farther, something Richard wouldn’t have thought anatomically possible. He muted the TV and sat beside the boy, experimentally putting his arm around him, then stopped doing that. He took a long draw of whatever the rotgut was he’d gotten from the liquor store down the block, manned by a babushkaed babushka who spoke nary a word of English and who furthermore didn’t even seem to understand Pointingese. In the end, he’d wound up gratefully accepting whatever the plastic bottle was her pink, wavering hand eventually settled on. He said, “I tell you about when I was a kid, what my first job was?”

  “No.”

  “It was tarring roads around Maryville. These country roads would get torn up, or else some rich redneck retiree would get sick of driving down gravel, scratching up his Corvette, and bribe a buddy on the zoning board. Anyway, it would be eight hours of walking behind this truck that sprayed smoking hot tar out of its asshole, spreading it around nice and even, throwing hay on top of it to cool it down faster. You ever seen Cool Hand Luke? Don’t say no.”

  “No.”

  “Well, anyway, there’s a scene in that movie where a prison gang tars a road, and it’s as bad as they make it look. Maybe worse. And the foreman was this fucking prick named Vallon Faire—I’ll never forget that name as long as I live. Vallon Faire. He was this skinny guy with big cheekbones and bulging eyes, like something in his face was trying to get out. No matter how hard or fast we worked, it wasn’t fast enough. He’d walk alongside us yelling, checking for lumps and bubbles in the tar, criticizing our technique. This is in the middle of summer—this was the summer vacation my father had planned for me.

  “So one day, I was on lunch break. We’d been working alongside this ridge that sloped down into a meadow. The meadow was filled with all these summer wildflowers I don’t know the names of, but these little yellow and blue flowers. And past that, there was this little stream. The whole thing looked like a postcard, and there we were, the crew, sitting alongside this reeking stretch of hell, eating our bologna sandwiches. I kept looking at this field down below us, and before I knew it, I was scooting down into it sideways, walking through the flowers.

  “I hadn’t realized just how bad the tar smelled, or how hot it was, until I got away from it. The wind picked up now and then and brought the smell of tar wafting into the meadow as a reminder. I lay down in that beautiful field, and all I could think about was how much I didn’t want to go back. I fell asleep. Then I heard Vallon Faire yelling, ‘Break time is over, you lazy son of a bitch.’ So I started up the incline, to where this carpet of white flowers thinned out. The smell of tar hit me full-force just as Vallon became visible over the ridge, his face bulging down at me. So I turned right around and walked back into the meadow. I expected him to be yelling, but there was no sound; the crew had already moved off down the road. I went and followed the stream for a while and found this spot deep enough to take my clothes off and sit in, cool off.

  “Later, when I got home, my father whipped my ass for quitting, but it was worth it. It would have been worth ten whippings. I’ve regretted lots of things in my life, but I never once regretted walking away from that job. I guess my point is never forget that quitting is an option. Quitting is underrated.”

  Receiving no response, he turned to find Vance sitting asleep. His long chin was tucked into his collar, and a filament of drool extended from his upper lip all the way down to a tiny dark spot on his corduroyed knee. “Right,” Richard said, “that’s the spirit.”

  He gently leaned the kid back, put a thin pillow under his head, and covered him from either side with the comforter on which he lay. The kid’s feet remained planted at the foot of the bed, but Richard didn’t want to wake him. He put on his old Carhartt jacket, grabbed his brown paper bag, and slipped out of the room, inching the door closed until the latch slotted with an almost-imperceptible snick. In the lobby, the same old man as when he’d arrived sat fast asleep, reclined and snoring quietly in one of the lobby’s worn cream armchairs. Richard envied him, whoever he was—he seemed to float outside time, outside worry and strife, in a river of his own happy oblivion.

  The night outside was either warmer than Richard had thought it would be or he was drunker than he thought he was, or both, and he took off the jacket, tucking it under his arm. But he felt clearheaded as he bobbed along—more clearheaded than he’d felt the entire tour or, for that matter, for years. With a peaceable, numb equanimity, he took in his surroundings as he walked. Hell’s Kitchen sounded like an intriguing area, but it didn’t live up to the name. The hotel was located next to a deserted glass building that advertised AMENITY-RICH LUXURY RENTALS! The several blocks on either side described a bland zone of warehouse space, green glass, and tasteful beige apartment towers, enlivened by the occasional Duane Reade drugstore. Skyscrapers in the distance confirmed that he was located somewhere in the vast cityscape, but the immediate area could have been anywhere else in the world.

  He moved slowly through the conv
ention-center-centric, parking-deck-bedecked, warehouse-housing limbo of west Manhattan. Two older men, around his age, walked by holding hands, and he not only had nothing shitty and knee-jerk to say about them in his head but found himself obscurely moved. The grayer of the two limped and leaned against the other. They were dressed up, maybe returning from a play or party, and bescarved against the chill. The chill—Richard felt it now, as they drew near—a thin wind slicing off the Hudson. The younger man nodded at him as they passed. This world, he thought, how fine it is, how lovely, let it go on and on and on; then he thought that if he needed a sign of his impending dotage, being moved right to the verge of tears by a pair of old queens would probably do the trick.

  Farther west, the wind blew harder, oily and lugubrious. He put his jacket back on. This was life: you were too hot and took your jacket off, then you were too cold and put it back on. Past Twelfth Avenue’s retaining wall, small ships bobbed in the water. As he watched them, he realized he had decided to end things.

  He continued walking north, the black rushing void of the river a cataract in his left eye. A small park appeared unexpectedly at the end of the block, catty-corner across a narrow cobblestoned street. He tripped twice crossing the road but persevered, strangely drawn to this little plot of green shadows. The path into the park was lined with streetlamps, solicitously curved at the top, as though in polite deference to his arrival. In the distance, a strange figure that he couldn’t make out interposed itself on the path. As he moved closer, he saw it was a man, a man standing stock-still and brandishing something at him. A knife? A gun? Richard moved toward the man, unafraid, thinking maybe this is it. It.