“If you were back in Montana,” she said, “undoubtedly they would put a great haunch before you and you would be happier.”
“That’s right.”
There was a whirlwind of activity as Ivan began to eat.
“Joe,” said Astrid, “I’ve been here all my life and you are a classic snowbird. After basking in the sun for a couple of years, you got ironic about everything.”
“He’s homesick,” said Ivan through his food. “When you’re homesick and home is three thousand miles away and you’re broke and there’s a gulf of communication between you and the faggot waiter and the plate is half empty before you half start, your heart is sore afflicted.”
“Thank you, Ivan,” said Joe.
“You like a quality of care and selection in your life, Joe. I like life bulging at the seams,” Ivan said.
“I like it with loud music and hot sauce,” said Astrid.
“Because you’re Cuban,” Joe said.
“That’s racist, actually,” Astrid said.
“I’m serious, Joe,” Ivan said. “Don’t be so meticulous. Quit weighing things out. It’s neurotic. Man was made to consume. Say yes to fucking well everything.”
The waiter looked significantly at Astrid. They were friends. In three years, Joe had not gotten used to Astrid’s friends. The waiter accepted the little illness of her hanging around with straight men. A bright wave caught the lights of the restaurant and rolled obliquely onto the beach. The restaurant was beginning to fill. Joe felt the smile on his face fade pleasantly. Astrid put a cigarette in her mouth and waited for Ivan to light it. Joe enjoyed their friendship. He loved the sight of Astrid smoking, while angry people at neighboring tables waved into the air around them.
Astrid’s uncompliant nature made her the only woman friend of Ivan’s life. Joe watched with approval. Sexless friendships reminded him of children. Quite lovely until someone whipped it out.
So once again Joe and Ivan were going to work together. Ivan was inspired by this work he was doing; Joe was trying to accept its necessity. At one time he had painted and had some acceptance; but he painted so slowly at the best of times and was so seldom sufficiently moved by an idea that he had to take work that did not depend upon strong feelings. Lately, he wasn’t really painting at all. He was trying to “face it,” a phrase Astrid found overpoweringly bleak. He told her he had sold out; she said he lacked sufficient mental health to sell out. “I’m going to face it,” he said.
“Don’t face it, for Christ’s sake,” she said.
Now Joe watched gloomily as Ivan paid the bill. When the waiter went off with his credit card, Ivan asked, “What’s twenty percent of ninety-three dollars?”
Joe groaned.
“Crass!” called Astrid.
Out in front, intensity was building. The hostess had gold-rimmed glasses hanging on her bosom from a chain. She only put them on to check dubious reservations in the big book on the stand. There was a line and Joe was pleased they had eaten early. They walked onto the street where the suave shapes of automobiles, parked on the fallen palm fronds, glowed in the streetlights. The breaking surf could be heard and Joe admitted to himself the tremendous romance this seemed to imply, though it always seemed to remain in the world of implication. He felt like an old steer with its head under the fence straining for that grass just over there.
They got into Ivan’s rental car. Ivan did not start it up immediately. The streetlight shining through the coconut palms lit up all six of their knees. “Joe,” Ivan said, “you’re very quiet. And I know you, Joe. You are my friend since we stood shoulder to shoulder in the school lavatory popping zits, betting our pride on the hope of hitting the mirror. But this quiet, this looking off, is a calm before the storm, which I know and have seen before, Joe. I only ask that you remember a few commitments and that you be a gentleman about it, if it kills you. I say all this knowing it may be well out of reach for you.”
Ivan looked straight ahead through the windshield. Joe looked straight ahead through the windshield. Astrid looked at Joe.
Joe said, “Start it up.”
8
In offering Joe the use of her car the next morning, a small pink convertible, Astrid had naively said to get a pound of snapper fillets and a choice of two vegetables and Joe had said he’d be back in a minute. Now clouds settled in the upper curve of the windshield, slowly wiped around, and disappeared. The yellow center line ticked in the side mirror. Lizards and tropical foliage managed to survive in the atmosphere of a New York subway. The traffic on the great divided parkway moved at a trancelike evenness maintained by the Florida Highway Patrol. He wanted to keep moving in case Astrid reported her car stolen.
In the end it was a day that was missing from Joe’s life. He didn’t turn on the radio until he left his motel near Pensacola the next morning. He realized he was about to hit the real torso of America and his spirits rose. He crossed into Alabama and took a few minutes out to view an arts and crafts fair in a vast baking parking lot. It was as if a thousand garages had been emptied onto a runway. Solemn people stood behind tables that held wan attempts at art in oil and ceramics and a twentieth-century history of appliances. Portraits of Elvis on black velvet. He pulled out onto the highway and resumed, having to go very slow for a mile until he could pass a pickup truck full of yellow lawn chairs. Battered, rusted cars passed with hard faces framed by Beatles-type haircuts. It seemed that before he even reached the Mississippi line, the sky had begun to grow, to widen: at the Escatawpa River the pines strained upward against a terrific expanse of blue sky. The highway was empty. The clouds stretching down to the horizon majestically ruled the scene. Joe was filled with a mad sense of freedom, free to eat fast food, free to sleep with a stranger. Instead of solving his problems, he had become someone without problems, a kind of ghost.
He passed a little bayou where a young fellow in knee-length surfer shorts covered with beer commercials watched a bobber rest on the mirror surface of water. This plain scene held a great mystery for him. There was a lovely waterland around the Pascagoula River with silver curves showing through the sea grass for a great distance while the road crossed in low, loping arcs. He stopped and watched fishermen unloading crab boats. He walked down and sat on a broken-off piling. A woman handed an old fisherman a pint of whiskey in a paper bag. She said, “If you beat me up like you did last weekend, I ain’t going to buy you no more of that.” Joe heard this with amazement.
He went to sleep in a motel. Outside in the parking lot, a couple leaned up against their car and listened to James Cotton sing the blues. “I don’t like white and white don’t like me.” Joe thought about that as he lay in bed. He couldn’t quite understand why, lying in this unknown motel in this unknown place, he felt such a desperate joy.
•
At seven in the morning, he was rolling through Danville Parish, Louisiana. Pine forests stood on the high ground between the bayous, pine pollen filling the air so that the car was covered with pollen and the air was so heavy with pollen there were times he thought he ought to turn on the headlights to see. But rush hour in Shreveport was different from other rush hours, the thickness of humidity, the crazy songs on the radio, flirtation between speeding automobiles. Secession had worked! The marquee in front of the Louisiana State Fairground announced county pig champions and English rock and roll bands. The radio advertised bass boats, fire ant control potions and the Boot Hill Racetrack.