I didn’t know what glam rock was, but I was so averse to having Lane explain it to me that I told him I liked it very much. That seemed to satisfy him and he sank into a steady concentration on the road ahead.
We dropped my car in the parking lot of a repair shop. A cold wind blew. I paid Lane and walked to the Grand, where I got a room and tried to figure out how to get hold of Jocelyn. Nothing worked; it sounded as if she just had her cell phone turned off. I crawled into bed in a vague state of worry and managed to go to sleep. In the morning I went downstairs to check out. Womack and Jocelyn were sitting in the lobby reading the Big Timber Pioneer. I said, “My car broke down.”
She said, “Whatever.”
I chirped, “Good morning, Jocelyn!”
“Right.”
Without looking up from the paper, Womack said, “You needed to get rid of that piece of shit a long time ago. Don’t look to me like being a doctor is doing you no good.”
I stood in front of the hotel, furious, as I watched the two of them drive off. I think that describes it. I knew I was offended and belittled by my own jealousy. I disliked caring about Jocelyn so much, but there it was: her swagger, skills, and independence were so attractive. Our lovemaking was something of a clash, but it was powerful and showered sparks. She regarded the missionary position as an ironic exercise and threatened me if I closed my eyes. I felt vacuumed by orgasms and rarely regained full consciousness before finding myself admiring her naked body through the bathroom door as she concentrated on brushing her hair. She was very unconscious of her body until she needed it to make something happen; when she thought there was a chance we’d make love again, she would stand next to me as I lay on the bed, and brush her teeth in a mischievous way, blowing bubbles in the toothpaste. Then with a laugh she would whirl away, giving me time to think and knowing I’d be ready as soon as she had rinsed. She was never wrong. And if she thought that by luring me into this erotic cellar she could addict me to her with no other effort at being thoughtful, she was right. It was not good for my self-respect.
I resolved to discuss it with Jinx. The Olds was out of the shop and the hands of reluctant mechanics, who urged me to haul it to the wrecking yard. The weather had abated and I was heading for the Corral Motel in Harlowton, plying the heaving road across the northern half of Sweet Grass County, not a cloud in the sky. I was no longer a sitting duck in my house — though I felt the tug of possibly missed walk-ins, and the day-and-night worry over Jinx’s plan to move away. And that was just about how specific a plan it was: away, a yawning destination to say the least. I wanted to forbid it. Was this friendship?
The desk clerk — or I guess he was the owner — just said “five,” leaving me to work out that it was room 5. I left the Olds parked by the office and walked around the front of the building in a rising disorientation that made my feet on the gravel sound like someone was following me. And yet the smell of pavement and sagebrush, the cloudless sky and great distances visible all around, were almost pleasant intimations that I was in a story and it was my story.
I knocked on the door of room 5, which produced a scurrying noise from beyond. Finally, the door opened: Womack. He didn’t open it very far but we were face-to-face. As though he had never seen me before, he said, “What can I do for you?”
I held his gaze and said, “Jocelyn, may I speak to you, please?”
Womack said, “Who?”
I said, directly over the barely exposed left shoulder of Womack, “Jocelyn, may I speak to you?”
Womack said, “Pardner, I think you must have the wrong room. Go back and ask the desk clerk to get you a way safer room number. That’s today’s tip.” I was prey to sufficient self-doubt that I had a moment of thinking that I actually had the wrong room and this was not Womack. Somehow an idea penetrated my nausea: “5” was the only room number I was going to need.
Throckmorton said, “My God, are you okay? You look okay. Jesus Christ, I hope you’re okay. I don’t know if you realize this, Mr. I. B. Pickett, but everyone hates you.”
“No doubt. Where’ve you been?” I asked wanly. We were at the threshold of his office and his secretary was staring at me with the same gaze she would have bestowed upon Lazarus. I preceded Throckmorton just to get away from it. We flopped in our respective overstuffed leather chairs, Throckmorton scooting his around the side of his desk to better see me.
“Tahiti.”
“Seriously?”
“Always wanted to go. It was full of surprises. The first thing I saw when I got off the plane was a billboard for Colonel Sanders chicken. Those Tahitian pricks tried to clean me out, but I’m home now, I’m okay.”
“I thought I’d see how we’re doing.”
“Well, it looks like it’s still going to be Judge Lauderdale. I made the mistake once of citing the jurist Benjamin Cardoza, which inspired Lauderdale, once he had me in chambers, to caution me against confusing things by ‘citing some obscure wop.’ ”
“How’s he going to feel about me?”
“Hard to say. We hope for ‘valuable citizen.’ But he might suspect immorality in your relationship with the deceased.”
“Tessa.”
“For our purposes, ‘the deceased.’ ”
“Whatever he’d want to call it, it was a long time ago.”
“For the Lauderdales of this world, immorality never dies. First, we try for a dismissal. You had an enemy on the hospital board, old moneybags—”
“Wilmot.”
“Whatever. I want to see if we can’t neutralize him. He is connected through common stupidity to a number of state legislators. So it might not be easy.”
I abruptly knew that it was not certain I would be absolved, and that it was possible I could no longer do the work at which I was most useful. Previously, I had dreaded loss of freedom. Now I was uninterested in freedom. I wanted to be useful and I wanted it more than anything — or almost anything, because I was also raring to be with Jocelyn.
I think it must have been late, at least eleven. I was still awake, in fact, not even sleepy. The neighbors were fighting and I helplessly listened in. “I don’t care what it smells like! I care what it looks like!” I hadn’t seen Jocelyn in several days and I was worried. While I felt she cared for me as much as ever, I did consider she had become somewhat perfunctory in our lovemaking, as would be appropriate for a preoccupied person, is what I believe I thought at the time. Or something. Whatever misgivings I might have had were canceled by a kind of gratitude — yes, somewhat stupid gratitude, but all of my thoughts were of Jocelyn, her grace and particular self-propulsion, which in my enforced idleness I possibly overvalued. So what, I loved her. And even so what if she didn’t love me. Of what final good was love if valued only when reciprocated? As I ran this rhetorical question around my thick skull, I recognized for the first time that Jocelyn did not love me. However obvious it was, I found this a disquieting discovery. Nevertheless, I figured I could go on loving her anyway, and her willingness to make love with me could be a stand-in for actual love until I could make her love me. But how? What if I learned to fly an airplane? There was something about all this that was arousing memories of a long submerged state of mind, that period of my college days when I slipped off to Florida with my host’s wife. That world of eroticism, subterfuge, guilt, and fear set against meaningless vistas of sea and tropical vegetation had produced a sort of disorientation that I felt for the first time in a very long while. Happily, my mind shifted effortlessly to Jocelyn and her marvelous limbs. But it wouldn’t stay there. I should have jacked off, slept, and gone to breakfast, but I wasn’t that smart. I was in that moronic oblivion that makes the world go round. To make things worse, my neighbors were still fighting and I could hear them all the way across the street. The man with the bass voice shouted, “There’s cat hair on my ChapStick!” And shortly after that, “For Christ’s sake, hold the snow peas!” And back came the woman’s tiny, shrill voice: “I won’t let you spoil one more Christmas!” This was just too troubling because we were nowhere near Christmas. I had to get out of there.