“I’m afraid if I went back in that room I might not come out for a week,” Frances said, looking around at the green door of the motel room. She put her rough little hand flagrantly against his still-stiff cock and gave it a good squeeze. “You’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess there’s your evidence,” Howard said solemnly.
“Just checkin’ in on Garfield,” Frances said behind her shades. “I’ll save him for Phoenix. How’s that?”
“I can’t wait.” Howard realized he was grinning idiotically.
“You better,” Frances said. “I’ll know if you don’t.”
And that’s how they left it.
The sales conference, following the first day’s jet-lagged festivities and spiritless camaraderie, developed into a slog almost immediately. Frances kept running into the loud-mouth lesbians from Jersey, who kept repeating the punch line of the joke they’d told twenty times the first night. “Suck-off’s just a Russian general to me, soldier.” They’d bray that line in the elevator or in the ladies’ room or waiting for a panel to begin, then break into squalls of laughter. She couldn’t remember how the joke began, so she couldn’t tell it to Ed on the phone.
All the seminars, chalk-talk panels, motivational speeches and mano a mano sessions with the Weiboldt top management team were tedious and repetitive and usually insulting. They were aimed, she felt, at people who’d never sold a piece of real estate, instead of Platinum agents who’d spurted past 4 million and would’ve been better off at home, fielding stragglers at the end of the summer selling season.
Howard skipped most of the sessions and found some new guys from western Mass. he could talk sports with — a bald Latvian he’d once played against in a state tournament in the eighties. “It comes from being one of five,” he said to Frances on day three, when they’d broken their rule and allowed themselves lunch together in the hotel’s food court, which had an OK Corral theme, and the servers were dressed like desperadoes with guns and fake moustaches. “I spent my youth listening to my parents telling me for the thirteenth time something I already knew.” He seemed pleased, grazing at his taco salad. “I mean, I don’t really mind somebody telling me how to sell a house when I’ve already sold five hundred of them. But I don’t need to seek it out, you know?”
There were certain qualities about Howard Cameron that would never grow on you, Frances thought. He was always happy for somebody to tell him something, instead of generating important data himself. It was a passive aspect, and made him seem sensitive at first. Except it wasn’t really passive; it was actually aggressive: a willingness to let somebody else say something wrong after which he could sit in judgment on the sidelines. You learned that attitude in sports: the other guy fucks up, and when he does — because he always will — then you’re right there to reap the benefits. It was a privileged, suburban, cynical way of operating and passed for easy-going. And he made it work for him. Whereas someone like her had to scrap and hustle and do things in a straight-ahead manner just to get them done at all.
Of course you’d never convince him his way was wrong. He was genetically hard-wired to like things how they were. “That’ll work” was his favorite expression for deciding most issues — issues such as whether to solicit a higher bid on a property after a lower one had already been accepted, or quoting a client an interest rate lower than the bank’s in order to string them along. Things she would never do. Howard, however — long-armed, solemn, goony-faced, harddick Howard Cameron—would do them; had done them countless times, but liked to make you think that he wouldn’t. It was a surprise — something learned from being alone with him two nights running — but she’d already decided that if she saw him again once they were back home, she’d be shocked. He wasn’t a con man, but he wasn’t much better.
Across the noisy food court she saw two of the New Jersey women waiting beside the big chrome sculpture in the middle of the room, scanning around for someone to eat lunch with, and yakking it up as usual. The food court occupied a wide, light-shot, glass-roofed atrium, architecturally grafted onto the Radisson and rising twenty stories, with real sparrows nesting in the walls. Protruding upward fifteen stories from a central reflection pool was a huge, rectangular chrome slab that had water somehow drizzling down it. People had naturally thrown hundreds of pennies in the pool. The New Jersey realtors were looking up at it and laughing. They thought everything had a sexual significance that proved men were stupid. Frances hoped they wouldn’t spot her, didn’t want the Howard Cameron issue to get them going. They should never have come here together.
She had a good idea, though, that she thought she’d enlist Howard in if the two of them were still hot and heavy by midweek. It was more fun to do things with somebody, and she still liked Howard okay, even if he had personal qualities she was starting to be sick of. “Do you know what I think we should do?” She wanted to seem spontaneous, even if the idea wasn’t really original. She smiled, trying to penetrate whatever he was thinking — sports, sex, his parents, his wife — whatever.
“Let’s go up to my room,” Howard said. “Is that your idea?”
“No, I mean do in a real sense.” She tapped the back of his hand with one middle finger to seize more of his attention. “I want to see the Grand Canyon,” she said. “I brought a book about it. I’ve always wanted to. Do you want to come with me?” She tried to beam at him.
“Is it in Phoenix?” Howard looked puzzled, which was how he registered surprise.
“Not that far,” Frances said. “We can get a car. Tomorrow’s our free day. We can leave in an hour and be back tomorrow afternoon.”
Howard shoved away the remains of his taco salad. “How long do we have to drive?”
“Four hours. Two hundred miles. I don’t know. I looked at the map in the welcome kit. It’s straight north. We’d have a good time. You always wanted to see it, I know you did. Take the plunge.”
“I guess,” Howard said, pushing out his livery lips in a skeptical way. He probably looked like his father when he did his lips that way, she thought, and he probably liked it.
“I’ll drive,” Frances said. “I’ll rent the car. All you have to do is sit there.”
“Mmmm.” Howard attempted a smile, but didn’t seem to share the enthusiasm. Which was, of course, his self-serving way: let the other people — his poor, innocent wife, for instance — present him with a good idea, then cast pissy doubt on it until he could let himself get talked into it, then never really seem appreciative until it turns out good, after which he takes all the credit. She could just go alone, except she didn’t want to. If Ed was here, he definitely wouldn’t go.