Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  “What are you laughing at?” she demanded.

  “I had a completely inappropriate and unwelcome memory. I’m sorry. Lucy, have dinner with me.” He felt a little ashamed.

  “This early?”

  “I could eat.”

  “I could too, I guess. Well, sure.”

  “That’s good. Thank you, Lucy.”

  “You’re welcome, Frank.” They went down the street to O’Nolan’s, a quiet, unpretentious place filled with well-educated nouveau Rockies people whose bland love of recreation fascinated Frank. They sat opposite each other, silently looking into their menus as though they were secret documents. They knew each other well enough to read their menus without nervous chatter or commentary on the offerings. Frank was feeling a weird flutter.

  “It’s amazing this place is so busy at this hour,” said Lucy.

  “They probably want to turn in early. Wild-mushroom seminar at daybreak.”

  “What?”

  “I’m surprised too.”

  “Well, Frank, we left off on a sour note. But we’re mature people. I think we’re moving right along to a new tone and I find that very welcome.”

  “Hear, hear. Nutone.”

  “This is your treat, right?”

  “Right.”

  “May I say that I had no right to impose my romantic schemes without more input from you — please don’t make a rude joke about input.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  The waitress came and recited the specials. Frank had no interest in food. He wanted to say, Who gives a shit? He was always interested, though, in the way the waitresses could rattle off the specials along with a little description of the sauces and methods of preparation. And phrases like “fines herbes” and “crème fraîche” had a certain dorky melodiousness that seemed to work on the other diners and that Frank, therefore, wished would work on him. They did have a rib eye steak of splendid dimensions and he ordered that. He ate so fast that when he was in restaurants he had to order large-volume meals to avoid having a lot of time to kill. Lucy asked for a couple of the oddities. They also ordered drinks.

  Frank made a mental note to watch the drinks closely so that some immensely complicated stirring of the old trouser worm didn’t get started. Lucy was very real to Frank. Sometimes women got so real you couldn’t have sex with them anymore: you and the real person had to get involved with some third entity to have the atmosphere of wished-for intensity. It could be a child or a business or pornography or the desire to do away with your people’s enemies. Prowling suburban couples ambushed unsuspecting individuals in off-color lash-ups. Car, rooftop or diving-board sex. Love that referred to something. “Love.” Frank sauntered through these notions in what he thought was a pleasant atmosphere.

  “Frank?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t seem to have your attention, Frank.”

  So, okay, how do you field this one. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “Right, then. Say, what did I order?”

  “A steak.”

  “And you, dear?”

  “Veal Bolognese.”

  He knew very well this was not veal baloney. But a thought of a lone slice of flat meat, something isolated-looking even in a school lunch, went through his mind. “I’m looking forward to my steak,” said Frank. He thought of his cattle deal. He thought about the yearlings slowed to a stop by the depth of his Salvation Army lease grass. He saw those melting pounds forming along the calves’ ribs.

  Their drinks came. The bourbon went straight into his thoughts as he gazed across the room. He was quite conscious of their hands resting on the table. Lucy excused herself. He nodded slightly and watched with vague attention until he realized that she was not going to the rest room, she was going out the door of the restaurant, and if his eyes didn’t deceive him, she had succeeded in snagging her coat en route.

  He snapped to attention and quite properly chased after her out the door. He caught her at the curb. Her eyes were brimming.

  “I’m perfectly capable of buying my own dinner,” she said.

  “What did I do? What did I do, Lucy?” He knew that without their rueful camaraderie he could never ask this seriously.

  “You drifted off. You simply drifted off, Frank.”

  “Oh Lucy, it’s true. I’m guilty. Come on, let’s go back in. I did a big cattle deal and sort of scared myself. I started worrying about it. Come on. Our steak and baloney will be there in a jiff. One more chance.”

  “So of course she buys this,” said Lucy. “She plods back into the mediocre restaurant. Life is just going by a step at a time. He has his deals and their eyes never quite meet, much less their thoughts. She begins to ask herself, What sort of discount can I offer the Methodists for Machu Picchu? Does Royal Holland Lines have any interesting guest hosts this year? Was it Viking that had the bad comedians?” Frank’s eyes sparkled.

  They were back at their table in time for the entrées. Lucy looked abashed, as though she had forced him to pay closer attention to her. Frank thought he could see in Lucy a sort of formal decision to take her own destiny in hand. She had had an unsuccessful marriage; and Frank’s biggest reservation about her was that she was heading back into another unsuccessful marriage by hook or by crook. She never seemed to know which cards to play, and Frank was not attracted to women who wanted a lot of help with their cards. Everything else he liked about her. He was so much the sleepwalker lately that it may have been the peculiar floundering way she fucked that brought him back to the bright lights of the reality he craved. He was always interested in people’s businesses and Lucy had a business with some reality in the community. People wanted to get away from time to time and she helped them efficiently. She had a good feeling for the different ways they wanted out, and was a successful sales person. She had led a few tours, even did a Lindblad bird thing in the South Pacific with a group from the university, cramming bird lore and successfully staying ahead of a group that prided itself on being at an information advantage. Before the celebrated busts of the television evangelists, Lucy had a reliable Holy Land trade but that had fallen off, and the region’s reputation for violence took care of what was left.

  “Frank?”

  “?”

  “What’s it all for?” She made this seem a radiant question.

  “I knew you were going to ask that.”

  “But it makes sense I should ask you. We have our business interests. We’re beyond survival. What are we trying to achieve?”

  “Hm.”

  “Well, I think it’s important to find out.”

  Frank stopped eating for a moment. He often liked just being a businessman, much of the time, enough of the time. He was very absorbed in Holly’s emerging story. Maybe he had transferred too much of himself to that. He realized that his compulsion to watch people going about their lives, watching them through their windows as though they were in a laboratory, came from some sense that not enough of the right things were going on in his. If life seemed anything, it seemed thin. It had an “as if” quality. He sensed that everyone was living in an atmosphere of postponement.

  He wondered why people didn’t acknowledge this. If President Bush had said he felt “as if” he were waging war on Iraq, Frank would have seen it as a breakthrough in candor. “It’s as if bombs were falling on people.” It was for others, real people, to actually receive the bombs, to have nationalist struggles, to lose the crop, to suffer the red tide, to feel an inner joy at the way the new Audi handles the winding road, to be cheerfully fooled by the instant coffee served secretly to them at Antoine’s in New Orleans, to be disappointed by all the cotton wadding in their little bottles of aspirin. Yet there was a real bravery as Lucy decoded the birds of Micronesia for the know-it-alls who hadn’t taken the time, on those snowy days in Montana, to prepare for the intricacies of a cruise ship’s pecking order. This also put her cheek by jowl with the ship’s biologist and it was only a ma
tter of time before they pretended to make a baby in his stateroom. She told this to Frank once before, when she had wondered if you could always detect a lust scenario if you were diligent.

  “The Beatles used to call their girlfriends ‘birds,’ ” Frank said. “I remember John Lennon introducing his girlfriend as ‘me bird.’ ”

  “Me bird …”

  “Yes.”

  “Frank, what in the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You said you studied birds for your trip and ended up kind of a bird yourself.”

  “Oh, I get it. I don’t really remember the sixties.”

  It was warm and dark when they left the restaurant. It seemed easy, not needing a decision, to walk into the neighborhoods that spread to the north behind Main Street. Between streets there would be an unpaved road that divided the backs of two rows of houses, an alley where people had their garbage cans, rowboats, woodpiles, and where their windows looked out unguarded onto this cheerful lack of arrangement. Frank heard the sound of a stringed instrument and was drawn toward it as they walked. He saw the window and crept to its light, gesturing to Lucy to follow. From a few feet, he gripped Lucy’s arm and felt safe looking in. A man in a white undershirt was playing a cello, drops of sweat on his forehead as he stared grimly at the music stand. Next to him, in a plastic bassinet, a baby watched its own waving fists. It was an empty room with a wooden floor, and for furniture only the chair the musician sat on. Frank couldn’t make out the source of light and there wasn’t a shadow anywhere.

  When they got back to the alley, Lucy said, “That scared me.”

  Frank gave her a comradely squeeze to reassure her. “An original scene, wouldn’t you say?”

  They walked a short distance into a shadow and began to kiss. They kissed for a while and he slid her arm down until her hand was between his legs. He held her buttocks from behind and worked her dress up until he could get his hands into her panties. The globes of flesh felt cool. He stood back from her so that he could get his hand in front and his fingers inside. She stood in the alley and moaned, moving against his hand as it grew slippery.

  He led her into a garage. There was an old Buick parked inside and he opened its back door. God, it was just like his own Buick. Lucy hesitated, then sat on the end of the back seat, then slid back. He took his pants down and his cock was straight out into the air as he reached inside to lift her foot over the front seat. She undid her blouse and pulled it apart so her breasts stood up white in the faint light. She bit the side of her hand and watched him as he entered. She lost caution and tried to come before he did. Big tendons on the inside of her thighs stuck into his hips and her feet were on the roof. He wanted to make sounds as he felt the spurts loosening into her but kept quiet. “I’ll turn over if you stay hard,” she said. He said “Okay” experimentally, and stood outside the car where he could make out the pale curve of her rear. He felt crazy bafflement as phrases went through his mind, like “travel agent” and “Old World charm.” So, that part of it didn’t work out.

  Frank regretted that Lucy had such a time getting out of the car gracefully, the white awkwardness of her buttocks emerging from the door, her right foot pedaling toward the ground. Unable to pull up his pants because he was standing on his own cuffs, Frank did little better. A couple of creeps, he thought.

  They went on down the alley to where it opened up into a small park. Lucy was silently weeping. He could reach up in the dark and feel the cold, drizzling tears. There was not one thing he could say or had any right to say. Tears began to pour from his own eyes. What was this? He took Lucy into his arms in such a way that she could feel these tears of his, until a kind of easy solitude let them laugh rueful snot bubbles from their noses. Pretty soon they were laughing. At first they tried to laugh quietly. Then Frank tried loud laughter. So did Lucy. They began to guffaw like two people in an opera. It was literally, “HA, HA, HA!” They were bellowing. They were having fun at last.

  Frank walked Lucy to her car. It was parked a block behind Main Street and he could read the names of the old businesses: grocers, hardware merchants, even a blacksmith. The stores in front had long since become something else: florists, clothiers, boutiques, office supplies.

  “What is this?” he asked her.

  “A Toyota Corolla.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. Well, Frank —”

  “Lucy.”

  “I enjoyed it.”

  “So did I.”

  “Nice big laugh there at the end.”

  “You can say that again,” said Frank.

  “Nice big laugh there at the end.”

  “Good, Lucy.”

  “I’ll see you at the office.”

  “See you at the office.”

  28

  Frank liked to think he occupied some middle ground between his father and his grandfather. His father had been an Eagle Scout and a good scholar. He had also had a fanatical desire to better himself financially, a personal pride in the score, not unlike the athlete bent on achieving a four-minute mile, a thousand-yard season. Frank’s grandfather was a dour farmer who rarely said much but seemed to take in everything with his great stern eyes. When Frank’s father had first made money to any degree, he took Frank, then nine years old, and his father to the country club for dinner. He made everyone eat a lobster. He drank far too much and stuffed crumpled bills into the waitress’s hand. Frank’s grandfather watched this in silence, then finally boomed out over the lobster shells, “If you can’t drink any better than that, Bill, you had better not drink at all.”

  The whole country club heard it. Frank saw his father’s sudden, startling vulnerability, saw both his face and his pride fall at one time and understood the astonishing power of deflation fathers have over their sons. In a way, it made Frank happy not to have a son, on the slim chance he could ever accidentally use this terrible weapon, this atom bomb. He was having the opposite problem with his daughter: he daren’t say a word against the one with the nose ring for fear of receiving a good lecture. Or the head of the citizens’ group, who wished to save Montana for Montanans. He could only learn to feel something was missing from his life, not having a nose ring of his own, a butterfly tattooed on his butt.

  On Monday he did not go to work at all. This had almost never happened before. And instead of asking Eileen to hold the fort, he called early in the morning and told her to take the day off too.

  She was delighted and said she would go to Helena to watch minor league baseball. “Thank you, Mr. Copenhaver. I’ll be there bright and early tomorrow morning.”

  “As you wish, Eileen.”

  “Can I ask where you’re going?”

  “I’m looking for a mental health professional within comfortable driving distance.”

  There was a long pause and then Eileen said in beefy, almost British tones, “I’m going to take a chance here, Mr. Copenhaver, and assume that you are serious. I’m going to tell you that I think that that is a very good idea. I hope you realize that it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I do, Eileen,” Frank said thinly. In fact, he had already made an appointment with a therapist. He was looking at the picture of a movie star in People magazine who was attending a Crow Indian sun dance ceremony, hanging by thongs through his chest from the lodge poles of a prodigious tepee.

  A short time later, it seemed to make sense for Frank to stand inconspicuously in the parking lot behind Mullhaven Hardware, watching people park their cars. His eyes were covert slits. An old rancher came in, parked his big Toronado, with its pink and white paint job, and climbed out pocketing his keys. A heavy red-haired woman in jogging pants arrived in a green Wagoneer, thrust the keys under the seat and got out. A man who looked slightly costumed in his gardening clothes drove up in a white Ford station wagon and went inside without making any special movements toward the ashtray, the visor or beneath the seat. When he was out of sight, Frank went to the car and got in.

  The keys
were in it. There was a crisp, unopened Wall Street Journal on the seat and Frank took a moment to glance at the headlines. The Fed had cut the interest rates again but it was not expected to impact the recession. He started the car and backed out of the angled slot into the alley. He swung around to Main and turned east, enjoying the commodious volume of space behind, thinking of it filled with kids’ bicycles or fitted with a dog barricade or redolent of a well-used rotary mower, green polished off at the corners to a pewter gleam under its veil of 30-weight oil. Unfortunately, it was a brand-new shell of a station wagon and had the familiar, disconcerting, prop-like quality of the unearthly exercise equipment that freighted the yard sales of America.

  That feeling went right away as he tooled over the pass, eyeing the various gougings of the nearby mountainsides and looking forward to the prospect of pouring his guts out to a stranger. Then quite suddenly he lost all sense of what he was doing in this car and began checking in the rearview mirror for the police, staring between the retreating twin columns of mountainside reflected down toward his eyes, then scanning the silver-gray bands of pavement and the spheres of white clouds on a dome of blue sky: no cops. The fear passed and he resumed his confident occupancy of the station wagon, custodian of the deeply throbbing wheel and air-light accelerator as the pass opened to the shallow plains of cattle pastures.

  It was then that he spotted the cellular phone. It seemed comforting, as if a car thief would scarcely drive the speed limit and make a few telephone calls. First he called Lucy at her office. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said, “and you didn’t come in today.” She didn’t sound hurt, nor did she seem reticent about looking for him.