by Meghan Daum
“See, I love this,” Joel said. “You just tell it like it is. That’s how we used to do it back in Brooklyn. Something’s meshuggeneh, then it’s meshuggeneh. No B.S. You’re really refreshing, Lucinda.”
He leaned toward me slightly. Or maybe he didn’t. I wasn’t sure. But something became awkward. We were silent for a moment and I looked around the bar and pretended to survey the scene.
“Where did you say Valdette was tonight?” I asked. “At the synagogue?”
“She takes a class,” he said. “Jewish cultural studies. She enjoys it. She’s really open to other cultures.”
“She’s not Jewish?”
“Oh no, she was raised Lutheran. She’s from Kansas.”
Joel ordered me another drink even though I hadn’t finished the first one. I wondered what would happen if I went in my house before the allotted four hours for the flea bomb. Would I die of gas poisoning in my sleep, not to be found for days until Toby smelled something strange?
“What initially brought you to Prairie City?” I asked Joel.
“Couldn’t turn down the job offer,” he said. “KPCR is a serious station, a well-regarded station. Granted, I was just an office clerk. But I knew there was room for movement. And here I am more than twenty years later. Station manager. Making good money. Producing quality programming.”
“Yeah, I caught that thing on the native grasses,” I said. “I thought that was really well done.”
“Actually that’s a Canadian production,” he said. “We just aired it here. Did you ever see Parent Talk with Loni Heibel-Budicek? That’s ours.”
“Hmm.”
“You know, it’s funny,” Joel said. “The way life goes by. You grow up in the sixties. You think you’re going to change the world. I mean, I went to marches. I smoked pot. I still smoke pot. I mean, sometimes, you know, occasionally. Not, like, all the time or anything. But you grow up. You get married, you live in a place thinking you’re not going to live there forever. Valdette and I had a farm outside of town. We lived off the land. We baked bread. But then the commute got to be too much, so we moved into town. We lived in a kind of rough section. There were gangs.”
“There are gangs in Prairie City?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Big time. Especially back then. Not that it bothered me, being from Brooklyn and all. Growing up I got beaten up by the blacks and the Italians on a regular basis. But after a while we sold out and moved to a better neighborhood. I got promoted to station manager. We go to Europe, the whole fucking bourgeois scenario. Sometimes I think about packing up a tent and living in the desert.” He gestured to the street outside, which was completely empty except for a hippie-looking kid unlocking his bicycle from a parking meter. “Away from all this.”
“Everyone has his alternative lifestyle fantasy,” I said. I wished I was at Bar Barella with Daphne. Or that she was here. She would be so impressed with my apartment.
“You know, Lucinda,” Joel said, “I don’t mean to be out of line but there’s something I want to say. And I say it because I’m a firm believer in saying what I mean. No B.S. I know you’re the same way. So do you mind if I say it?”
“I guess not,” I said. My stomach lurched.
“What I want to say,” Joel said, “is that I think you’re really, really interesting.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“And I think you’re really brave to do what you’ve done and I want you to know that if you ever want to talk, if you ever feel like being with someone who, you know, is on the same wavelength, I’m here.”
“Oh, thanks.” This was quickly turning hideous.
“And I also, forgive me if this is out of line,” he said, “I think that you’re really sexy.”
I don’t know how long Joel stared at me because after making eye contact for no more than two seconds I laughed and looked away and blushed, which he probably interpreted as giddy excitement but was in fact an involuntary reaction to the complete horror I felt about the immediate situation and the creeping feelings of regret I felt about the general situation of having left New York, where the one thing you could usually count on was not being told you were really sexy, at least by married men with tiny silver ponytails. And because I was incapable of confrontation, because I could spend hours by myself working up long, bitingly eloquent speeches designed to chew someone out but had never actually implemented one of these speeches, I said, “Oh, thanks. That’s nice of you.” Then, after a long pause, I said, “I’m wiped. I should get home.”
I’m wiped? Who uses that word?
Joel seemed to realize he had stepped over the boundary. But on the other hand, perhaps he didn’t. He was now sitting so close to me that he could have easily attempted some sort of kiss, but I reached for my wallet as if to pay for the drinks, which he didn’t allow, and put on my jacket. Inside out.
On the drive home I chattered nonstop. I asked Joel about the weather patterns in that part of the state, about the percentage of nonwhites in Prairie City, about gang-related activities in his old neighborhood, and about whether or not the local public radio station aired Talk of the Nation. He answered but also seemed to be pouting. When we reached my house, Joel offered to go inside before I did to make sure the flea bombs were finished.
“I’ll be a canary in your coal mine,” he said.
“Oh no, no, no, no,” I said. “That’s fine. Really. I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Thanks for coming out,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. And then something awful happened. Because I was from New York, where everyone kisses everyone on the cheek when they say good-bye, usually not even touching the skin but kissing the air next to the skin, I sort of moved toward Joel like I was going to do just that. I did this because I literally did not know what else to do. In New York, not kissing someone on the cheek when you say good-bye is tantamount to not saying “hello” when you answer the phone. You have not met a basic requirement of social discourse, you have drunk the tequila but forgotten the lime. Joel, also being from New York, moved toward me similarly, except we ended up not kissing the air or even each other’s cheeks but actually touching lips, which is a common fumble in all social kisses but, given the circumstances, a grave misfortune.
“Good night, Lucinda,” he said. He looked at me as if something had transpired between us, as if we’d shared a moment. I jumped out of the SUV and ran into my house, pretending I could hear the phone ringing.
There were two messages on my answering machine. I pushed the button, praying for Daphne or Elena. The first was from my mother, asking me what time zone Prairie City was in. The second was Leonard inviting me to go to the Bruce Willis movie the following weekend.
The air reeked from the flea bomb and yet somehow the ferret urine smell was still seeping through. The minute I got in bed, Toby Vodacek tromped up the stairs outside, shaking the entire house. I heard his door slam, then the screech of his computer modem, then a blast of heavy metal from his stereo. I put in my ear plugs and tried to fall asleep but my legs were itching again. I turned on the light and found a flea on my pillow, then another on the sheet.
The Lay of the Land
The next day, my twenty-third day in Prairie City, was the worst day yet. I felt so bad that I did not call any of my friends. I couldn’t let them see me like this. I sat at my computer and tried to write my script. I wrote two sentences. Around noon, I e-mailed Faye and said that I was very close to finishing but would need an extra day to polish it. By the late afternoon, I was feeling so sorry for myself and disgusted about the Joel situation that I decided I had to exercise. I’d gone swimming at the YMCA once but had been asked not to return until the open sores on my legs had healed. The only thing left was to go jogging, though I had no idea where. I took out my map of Prairie City and looked for the nearest recreational area. There was a place called Nemaha Park a few miles from my house, so I put on the Reebok running gear I’d purchased for seventy-five dollars in my last
days in New York and got in the Sunbird.
After several wrong turns, I found a wooded area on the other side of the highway that appeared to have some running paths. There was a small parking area with one beat-up pickup truck taking up two spaces. I got out of the car and was spraying myself with insect repellent when a man emerged from the wooded area. He was wearing nothing but cut-off shorts and flip-flops. He carried a tank top in his hand and had a beard and wore small round glasses. My first instinct was to be frightened. But then he waved hello nonchalantly and I noticed that he looked like Brad Pitt might have looked if Brad Pitt had lived during either the Civil War times or the late 1960s. I realize this is an odd mixing of genres, but this guy had them perfectly mixed. He was a sort of Jeremiah Johnson meets Brad Pitt. His blond hair had a strawlike quality. The glasses were more like spectacles. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm—not a Budweiser kind of eagle but an actual eagle-in-the-wilderness kind of eagle. He walked over to the beat-up pickup, took out what appeared to be a library book, and headed back toward the wooded area. There didn’t seem to be any jogging paths.
“Excuse me,” I said to him. Was I actually speaking to this bearded stranger? “Do you know if there’s anyplace to jog around here?”
“To jog?” He said this as if I’d asked him where the skating rink was.
“Or, you know, walk,” I said. “I just don’t want to get lost.”
“Ah hell, you won’t get lost,” he said. He had a slight drawl, sort of like Valdette’s, although his wardrobe changed the effect totally. “If you make a left through those trees up there you’ll run into some water. I think there’s a little path that follows the crick through there.”
The crick. Had he actually said that? Crick. I assumed that meant creek. He had nice eyes. Blue and squinty with nice crow’s feet. I thanked him and headed left through the trees. “Watch out for poison ivy!” he called after me.
“What?”
“Just stay on the path when you get to the crick. You should be fine. Other than the plethora of poisonous snakes.”
“What!” I yelled.
“Just joking,” he said. He walked back into the woods where he must have been before. I couldn’t believe he’d used the word “plethora.” He was sexy in a way, in a redneck, woodsy, serial killer sort of way. I hadn’t seen a guy in flip-flops since the mid-1970s, when I was a preschooler. I tried to jog but the trail by the creek, which was nearly dried up and littered with beer cans, was covered with roots and twigs and I was afraid I’d fall. I walked for a half hour or so, thinking about the Jeremiah Johnson guy. He was interesting. Not necessarily interesting, since we’d barely spoken, but intriguing, largely due to the combination of “crick” and “plethora” and his squinty blue eyes. He seemed closer to the kind of guy I’d hoped to meet in Prairie City than anyone I’d met so far, even though I hadn’t met many men other than Joel and Leonard and Toby and wasn’t in the mood for meeting one anyway. But still, if I was to meet a guy, this guy represented a step in the direction of someone who might be a good candidate for a Prairie City boy friend, not to mention what Samantha needed for the bad boy segment. Even though I’d never see him again and he seemed inappropriate anyway, it was heartening to know that at least there were people like him out there. But what was he doing in the woods in the middle of a weekday? I wondered. He could easily have been a rapist or murderer. In retrospect, it had been unwise to talk to him. A close call, really. On the other hand, though, maybe he was a wildlife biology professor or a fish and game warden. Maybe he’d traveled all over the world studying the migration patterns of cranes and was at that very moment supervising a bunch of students (far off in the bush, which was why I hadn’t seen them) who were observing the mating patterns of the red-shafted flicker. More likely he worked at the Firestone tire plant, I thought. And it didn’t matter because I’d never see him again.
Except that I did see him again. I saw him that very moment. As the creek circled back toward where I’d started, I smelled a campfire. Then I saw Jeremiah Johnson/Brad Pitt sitting on a log by the fire reading the library book. He waved at me.
“Nice run?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. And then I tried something. Even though the reference made little sense, I said, “It just looks like the set of Deliverance back there. I didn’t want to go much farther.”
“You ran into a mutant banjo player?” he said.
Unbelievable. He’d gotten it. Despite the hopelessly collegiate nature of this tactic, I’d somehow made it to age twenty-nine without figuring out a better acid test for cultural intelligence than dropping a reference to an obscure (or semiobscure) movie or book to see if the other person picked up on it. I still think I fell in love with my Last Serious Boyfriend the moment I said, “I want the truth” and he said, “You can’t handle the truth!” Even though, in retrospect, A Few Good Men is hardly esoteric. Of course, the test often backfired, as in my pseudo rapport with Joel about The Buena Vista Social Club. But getting the Deliverance reference, while less than an astounding feat, was more than I expected from a guy in flip-flops sitting by a campfire on an already hot afternoon. I noticed his book was a collection of Gary Snyder poems. I was suddenly self-conscious about my scabby legs.
“How is it that you live here and don’t know where to go jogging?” he asked, effectively opening the door for what in the last month had become the greatest conversation piece in the state’s history: Lucinda Trout’s Unlikely Presence in the Heartland and What Prompted It. I knew this would lead to his asking me on a date, though I was shocked by my sudden confidence that, after years in New York with nary a proposition, any random midwestern man would ask me out.
“I just moved here,” I said.
“From where?”
“Manhattan,” I said.
“Manhattan, Kansas?”
“No,” I said. “New York. New York City.”
“Why would anyone want to live in New York?” he asked.
“That’s a narrow outlook,” I said, smiling.
“So you want to go out sometime?” he said.
Lucinda Trout, girl psychic.
“That depends,” I said. “Are you a serial killer or anything?”
“Other than that one time, no,” he said.
“If it was just once, then it wouldn’t be serial, I guess,” I said. Such a wit.
“Good point,” he said.
It went on like that for a while until he walked me back to the parking area and I gave him my phone number, which he wrote down on a matchbook he had on the dashboard that said JIM’S BAIT AND STEAKS. He said his name was Mason Clay. I’d always admired people who had last names for first names.
He was forty.
“And as long as you’re asking so many questions, I’ll tell you that I’m an Aries,” he said. “And I hate Chinese food. It tastes like bugs.”
“What were you doing out here anyway?” I asked.
“Reading,” he said. “I got off early from work and I’m killing time before I go pick up one of my kids.” He lowered his head and looked at me over the tops of his glasses as if to issue a warning. “I have three kids.”
“Oh.”
“So,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“So I’ll call you,” he said. “Do you like to camp?”
“Do I like to camp?” I said. “Not on first dates.”
“We’ll figure out something else, then,” he said.
“What do you do?” I said, hoping against hope for wildlife biologist.
“For fun?”
“For a job.”
“Oh shit, not much,” he said. “I work in an elevator.”
Not the ideal answer, but, then again, not the Firestone plant. I couldn’t imagine a building in Prairie City tall enough to have an elevator operator. He must have been lying, although why would you make up a profession like that? Besides, he’d never call. Except that he would. As I watched him lie down on the log, holding t
he poetry book in front of his face to block the sun, I was certain I hadn’t seen the last of him.
I DIDN’T TELL DAPHNE OR ELENA or anyone else that I’d given my phone number to a guy I met in the woods, a guy with three kids who worked in an elevator, made jokes about killing someone, and, come to think of it, hadn’t said he wasn’t married, which, in light of the Joel encounter, didn’t appear in Prairie City to be a deterrent in asking women on dates. I didn’t tell anyone that when Mason called a few days later—“Uh, hi I think we met in the park,” he said when I answered, invoking neither his name nor mine—I agreed to meet him, albeit in a public place. He suggested we go to Effie’s Tavern.
As I explained earlier, Effie’s was legendary not just in Prairie City but also throughout the region for being an equalizing force among all socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Though some chalked this up to Effie’s affable, low-key atmosphere (there was a pool table but no keno gambling) I soon learned what all the regulars knew—that the equalizing force had less to do with things like open arms and open minds than with the fact that Friday afternoon happy hour drafts at Effie’s were $1.00 and at Applebee’s, just a quarter mile down the road, they were $1.50.
IT WAS A TUESDAY EVENING when I met Mason at Effie’s. There was hardly anyone in the place, just a handful of overweight white women with muscled black boyfriends, every single one of them with a shaved head. Mason was sitting at the bar wearing the same outfit he’d worn in the park, except his tank top was actually on his body. I had on my J. Crew pants, a linen Brooks Brothers shirt, and a strand of freshwater pearls.
“I didn’t think you’d show up,” Mason said.
“I always keep my appointments.”
He surveyed my outfit. “I don’t think they have wine spritzer here,” he said.
“I’ll just have a beer,” I said. “I’ll have a, uh, a Heineken.”