For a banker, Neville Senior was remarkably free of malice, and his great wish was to overcome the gap of loneliness that lay between him and his heir. It’s possible that he imagined that bringing Neville Junior into the randy orbit that seemed to include everyone but Neville Junior would have the effect of giving the two some ordinary common ground upon which they could begin to talk like a couple of guys. Boning up on TV Guide, as he had once done, proved futile. Real watchers like Neville Junior had a subtle language not easily penetrated by poseurs. He just stared when his father asked if there was anything good on tonight.
“Neville,” said the father, “two things: I wish I’d been a better parent.”
“You’ve been all right. Don’t sweat it. What’s the second?”
“Sex,” barked Senior. “Why aren’t you interested in sex?”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad, Dad. Virginity is no disgrace. At least it keeps you from weighing sixty pounds and being covered with giant sores.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“It only has to be that way once, and you can count me out.”
“It should be seen as a gift, a gift of love and joy that perpetuates the race.”
“Perpetuates the race? Are people still in favor of that?”
“I don’t know how you’ve become so cynical at your age.”
“You can’t accept that I’m happy, can you?”
“Are you?”
“Considering the cards I’ve been dealt.”
“Have they been such bad cards?”
“You tell me.”
“I guess I can’t.”
“Just because you named me after yourself doesn’t mean I have to turn out like you.”
“No, I suppose that wouldn’t be any good.”
“I’m not saying that. Different isn’t good or bad. It’s different is all it is. Get it?”
“You could change your name. I’d understand.”
“I’ve thought about it. I’ve never thought of myself as Neville.”
“What have you thought of yourself as?”
“Karl.”
“With a C?”
“With a K.”
Much later, when Neville Senior had decided that life was not worth living, he would give this Karl-with-a-K idea a final thought.
From his suite at the Northern Hotel, as a summer sun descended on city streets blue with heat, pressed in upon by angular store-fronts and shade-hunting pedestrians, Neville Senior called an escort service. Given that the city police had been recruiting undercover officers lately to nab concupiscent johns, this was risky business, but Neville Senior believed the scrutiny was directed at streetwalkers and so he felt relatively safe, if a bit frightened. Anyway, when it came to your own flesh and blood, risk was unavoidable. He had cash, plenty of it, and he intended to buy Neville Junior out of his dubious virginity and joyless view of things. More than that, he wanted to buy him the high road to the human race, which in his view was bound together more by fornication than anything else. In his life, courtship was fornication, life was fornication, and grief revealed but one road back to the light of day and that was fornication. The only answer to life’s complexity: fornication.
Dulcie arrived straight from her shift at the optometrist, and Neville Senior welcomed her in his most courtly manner. “Came right away,” she said. “Two saps in the waiting room with drops in their eyes.” She seemed taken aback at first by his nervousness and perhaps foresaw the long hard work sometimes necessary to overcome the anxiety of skittish customers for the sake of the almighty dollar. Bummer.
Dulcie kept her purse beside her; the cell phone inside it required only a single key to be pressed and her mission would be accomplished, either by an arrest or the heading off of an assault. It seemed she would have to buy time to size up the transaction. Some adjustment of plan was required because unexpectedly this geezer had a plan of his own. After a long day at the optometrist’s shop, Dulcie was glad to learn that the heavy lifting would come later, but at the very least they had old man Neville for procuring. That it was for his own flesh and blood was hardly extenuating, and one way or another she’d get paid. Anything to get away from dreary folks reading the acuity chart: “P. . E. . C. . F. . D — I can’t read that last line. . ” Of course you can’t, you need glasses!
He gazed at Dulcie with admiration: at first lustful but, when she noticed, adding avuncular overtones and calling her dear so as to assure her he wasn’t getting ready to whip it out. She might have been touched if she’d known this modest transaction would later in the year result in his suicide — though it was not easy to say what might get through to Dulcie Jones, barrel racer.
While Dulcie went off to spruce up in the bunkhouse, Orval gave Neville a tour of the place, apologizing for the disorder of the kitchen as they passed through. “It takes a heap of living to make a home a heap!” he said merrily. Neville said he bet Orval had a million more where that one came from. When they were out of earshot, Orval said, “You’re kind of a smart-ass, aren’t you?” He got right in Neville’s face.
“If you say so,” Neville said, as though trying to help Orval in the best way he knew how. Orval was thinking of slugging him and stared at the spot on Neville’s face where he imagined landing the blow. Overcoming the temptation he asked how Neville had met his daughter, making it clear by his tone that he was sorry it had ever happened. He’d been counting on a cowboy or someone in law enforcement.
“My dad introduced us. She’s going to be our new vice president. He wanted me to get to know her on behalf of our business.”
“Vice president? Vice president of what?”
“Of our bank, Southeast and Central Montana Bank. Member FDIC.”
“What about the optometrist?”
Neville remembered her looking without glasses at the road map that morning.
“I guess she doesn’t need him,” he said, suddenly wondering if Dulcie was farsighted. He might not feel as safe with her at the wheel. He’d been so relaxed watching his day go by in the rearview mirror, never going rigid against his seat belt as he did whenever he distrusted the driver. He so looked forward to what he expected from Dulcie, and yet he felt the responsibility of considering her as a candidate for vice president of the bank. He realized he didn’t quite understand the situation, but knew he would do anything in the world for his father, to whom he helplessly longed to reach out. But this was different. The bank had always been kept from him, so that his father’s asking him to do something connected with his livelihood suggested a change.
“You want to drive the tractor?” Orval asked. Neville understood he was being humored, but he hadn’t expected Orval to go rural on him this quickly.
“I doubt it.”
“Well, what would interest you, Neville?”
“You got any archaeological sites?”
Orval went outside, started the tractor, and backed it up to the loaded manure spreader. It was clear he had decided to go about his business, but Neville followed him innocently as he drove out into the pasture and then activated the PTO, showering the youth with turds. Neville saw right through his apologies and walked back to the house, looking for Dulcie. He had a mean-spirited impulse to tell her that her father would not be welcome at the bank. But all that was tempered by the attraction he felt for her, aroused by her various provocations and double entendres. His girlfriends had always acted as if being available was enough. It wasn’t; he required much more. Neville enjoyed this sense that Dulcie was after him like a bad dog, and knowing she was just trying to get the vice president’s job made it all oddly spicy.