My sojourn in the Rust Belt certainly made me appreciate my homeplace more than before I left. We had beautiful mountain ranges that kept their snow all summer, though very few of those of us who lived there ever went into them. We thought only out-of-towners went into the mountains, as most Westerners lived in town and were town people like anywhere else. My father used to say that the only thing that set us apart was cheap electricity. Some of that had changed of course, once we learned to keep outsiders from glomming our assets by appreciating them more than we had. It had been a long time since we proudly pointed out that you couldn’t eat scenery. That sentiment belonged to an earlier generation, the ones with “Treasure State” license plates nailed to the garage. Tell someone today you can’t eat scenery, and they’ll put you in the old folks’ home. Where I came from, the wind was the big issue, until you figured out that wind was the price of space.
Anyone might wonder how someone as inadequate as I was could get even as far as I got. Here is where I learned from the aardvark, which the encyclopedia informed me was known for its diligence. I was diligent. All the survival skills I had learned growing up in a family adrift I now focused on my studies. I went from ineducable waster to a driven explorer of my own ignorance; learning was a treasure hunt in a land of facts and ideas. I lit on the health of the human body because it was such a complicated system and would hold my interest. But for the time being, the only human body that held my interest belonged to Shirley, and it was certainly good enough to keep me going even when, resigned to her own indiscriminate carnality, she embraced me and called me a sap. I even had a twinge of jealousy for poor deceived Karl; “deceived” would turn out to be the wrong word, but I was jealous enough to ask Shirley if Karl made love to her often. “Yes,” she said, “unfortunately.”
Naively, I asked, “Then why do it?” She told me to think of it as customer golf. We settled in on the island, but I never really grew accustomed to the parade of sunburned fat people carrying ice-cream cones, or the noise. I had never been anywhere as noisy as Florida. Airplanes went back and forth overhead, people sped around on various motorized things, and horn honking was as popular as in New York. The leaf blowers roared from sunup to sundown. That many people with no good reason to be there filled the place with a kind of giddiness, not just everyday giddiness but the kind that precedes despair and catastrophe. It was nice to be warm, but the television was dominated by weather reports holding out expectation of more warmth or a rootless fear of cooling. The local weatherman, a black homosexual in a Palm Beach suit, could say, “Some chance of precip” with the air of a man headed to the gallows. Inability to control the weather fed disquiet, since, except for the weather, most would rather be anyplace but here.
Time was running out, and we needed to add a little something to our fling to raise its tone, so we made dinner reservations at a nice waterside restaurant and skipped lunch. I think we both knew that if we ended up at a quality restaurant with leisurely service and candles on the table, but had no appetite and little to say, we would be in for a very uncomfortable ride. I was pretty much over the sex and acted about like a pump jack in an Oklahoma oil field, prepared to perform day and night with my mind elsewhere. It made absolutely no difference to Shirley, adding to my disquiet at being something of a tool.
Looking over her menu, Shirley grabbed my forearm in hilarity. “I should order red snapper! Get it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.” I did, but I didn’t want to let on. But I asked her if she’d tried the planked pork.
“Ha ha ha.” Then when I ordered a steak, she said, “Good God!” and ordered grouper, and another round. I was very pleased with the effect of the drinks. At first, sitting across the table, Shirley seemed aggressive and worried, her blond streaks symmetrical as the marks on a tiger, the way her nostrils flared when her mouth was closed, all worrisome. But the cocktails cast a spell, like the gauzy shots in the old tearjerkers, so that by the arrival of my sprawling T-bone I was in love. Even though I recognized that in this case love was a Russian import made from potatoes, it was enough to believe in for the time being. I reached under the table to put my hand in her pants as she grinned absently at the grouper. “I’m going to tell the waiter what you’re doing.” I withdrew and went at the steak with knife and fork like a drummer boy. The booze was rushing back and forth between my spine and my brain.
We couldn’t wait to get back to the room. We had dined with such languor that the waiter was startled when we abruptly asked him for our bill and to “make it snappy.” I don’t know what chemical combination had us in such a rush, but nothing was happening fast enough for us. I had such trouble getting the key into the lock of our room I was afraid Shirley would fly off the handle. Looking left and right while I struggled, she had already begun unbuttoning her clothes. I wasn’t handling the pressure and resorted to kneeling in front of the doorknob to sight in the key. Inside, the phone was ringing. Once the door opened, Shirley shot past me to grab the ringing telephone. Phone call no good. I remained on my knees as I listened to Shirley from the doorway. I smiled at several hotel guests as they passed. I heard her say, “I was just about to call you… I already thought of that. Is there a problem?” This question was the last thing Shirley said for quite a long time, then, “I don’t think there’s any need to speak to him… I don’t understand why you’re insisting, why you find it so important, except for your ongoing need to have everything your own way… Very well, Karl.” She held the phone against herself, her face drained of all color, and said to me, “He knows. He and Audra have gotten together. He told me not to come home.” I arose and crossed the room awkwardly, as my feet had gone to sleep.
“Hullo?” Then I was serenaded by Karl and Audra, “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” quite briefly, as they really didn’t know the words beyond those of the title, which they repeated. Then Karl alone on the line, in a barely recognizable voice, flattened by hate, telling me I should never have tried this with a lawyer. Addressing me as “Loverboy,” he asked me if I had “tried all the holes”; when I failed to answer he said, “How d’you like the smell?” Then, “I know you’re still on the line.” I confirmed that I was.
I said, “Karl, we wish you all the luck in the world. I hope you enjoy Audra. I know I did.” I could feel this one fall as though into a dark well. I hung up.
Shirley demanded to know exactly what Karl had said to me; I thought mentioning the holes was out of the question and so I said, “He wanted to know how I felt about the smell.”
“The smell! What smell?”
“I guess your smell.”
“I hope you told that sonofabitch I don’t have a smell.”
“I thought it would be best if I just didn’t say anything.”
“Maybe so. Never wrestle with a pig. You both get covered with shit and the pig likes it. My smell! He’s gonna pay for that one. When I get through kicking his ass, he’ll never get up.”
Shirley was gnawing the inside of her cheek, her eyes slewing around the room. Suddenly her face went calm. “You and Audra, eh? That could help.” In the little time remaining, we tried to enjoy ourselves in bed; the effort held no appeal. Shirley asked if she was as good a lover as Audra, and when I reminded her that I made up the whole thing about Audra, she jumped out of bed and shouted, “Don’t you dare say that!” We drifted off fairly early in our room overlooking a canal and a golf course. I awakened in the middle of the night to see Shirley standing, just her silhouette, in the dark window that gave onto the balcony. I then went back to sleep until outboard motors in the canal woke me up. Shirley was gone. I knew she was headed north.