“Hypothetical? ‘What do you do?’ is hypothetical?” Ivan asked.
“I think it is.”
“Joe, no you don’t.”
“You guys mind if I turn that down?” Joe asked, pointing to the air-conditioning register. He held his throat with his thumb and forefinger, swallowing emphatically. “I’m not sure how healthy those things are, actually.”
7
Now Joe was seated at the end of a bar. There was a ball game on TV. He looked into the bottom of his glass for a big idea. He was sitting with a guy named Mack thinking about the ranch, about Smitty and Lureen, about his childhood enemy Billy Kelton, about Ellen and old man Overstreet, about the hills and all the moving water. It wasn’t just nostalgia; the lease money had quit coming in. And he wasn’t getting along with Astrid.
“It’s a tie game,” Mack said, staring over the silhouetted heads at the screen. “You think you’ll go up and see who?”
“My aunt and uncle. They live in our old house in Montana. I might just go on up there.”
“Call first,” said Mack. “They could be dead.”
“Don’t you ever feel like seeing your relations?”
“I think it’s all this roots thing. My kids go out and tape the locals. I must not be the right guy for this one. It’s a little off-speed for me. That’s three thousand miles!”
Joe went back to the apartment. Astrid had tied her black hair back with a strip of blue cloth. She smiled at Joe. Something was in the air. Astrid was not a worrier and you couldn’t make her worry if it didn’t really come to her on her own. She looked at him, held his eye. Silence fell over the room. He came over and kissed her slowly. She was sitting in a chair at the end of the dining table and he was standing over her, kissing her. She undid his pants and held him. When he stopped kissing her, she took him inside her mouth. He had one hand on the back of her head and supported himself with the other on the table. The mail was piled there and most of it was bills. He tried not to acknowledge that he had seen the bills but it was impossible, there were so many of them. He moaned and she sucked harder. He looked at the gas bill. Knowing it would be enormous, he moaned with particular feeling. She gripped his buttocks with both hands and tried to take him in farther. He shuffled the mail with his free fingers and came to a letter from American Express. Surely their card was going to be canceled. A particularly expressive wordless cry came from his lips and Astrid tried for it all. He could feel the irony all the way to the center of his stomach. He stood as long as he could, then sank faintly into a chair.
After a moment, Astrid said, “What do you have in your hand?”
She pulled the crumpled letter from his grasp. Her brow darkened. “They’re dropping us, huh?”
“Who?”
“Are you pretending you haven’t seen this?”
Joe shook his head.
A peculiar look flickered across Astrid’s face. “Has this been a great blow to you?” she asked.
“I can’t win,” said Joe. The thing was, he loved Astrid. And he could have brought out better things in her than he had. He brought out things in Astrid that were bad and went around disliking her for them. He sat in his chair and mused about his own unfairness as the wind pressed green masses of Florida holly to the window. “My character,” he said, “is composed almost strictly of things I hate in other people.”
They were under a new pressure. They were going to have to live on less because of Joe’s difficulty with his work and the sudden termination of the lease money. None of the explanations Joe received from his Aunt Lureen made sense or persuaded him. He was suspicious that his Uncle Smitty was somehow getting the money from his sister. At first, he’d felt that if it meant enough to them to just take it, they could go ahead and do so. Though it was a technicality, the ranch was in Lureen’s name and, as a technical thing, she could do as she pleased. But that was not the understanding she had with Joe’s father, blood to blood, and she knew it. On this note, Joe could get indignant. Sometimes it passed. Sometimes it embarrassed him and sometimes the whole thing made him feel guilty. The worst part of it was that Ivan would come to sense that Joe had less choice about whether or not to do his projects. Ivan said it pained him to see an old friend refuse to abandon himself to the fiesta of consumption that was our national life.
Astrid came over and sat next to him. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she said.
“I always promised myself that in the future I would quit living in the future. But I may have to do a little planning now.”
“Joe,” she said, “why don’t you call some friends? I’m going out. I’m tired of this. Or at least, I’m not interested in this. It’s time to do something.”
Joe made a few calls to people he knew out West. About the time he got off the phone, Astrid was back carrying packages. She set them down, picked up the hall rug, and gave it a pop. She popped the rug as if she was in a bullfight. Joe’s mood had sunk even further since he’d been calling around Montana.
The next time Ivan came down from New York, he took them out to dinner. By the time they got to the restaurant, which was situated next to the ocean on its own band of seagrape-shaded beach, the sun had gone down and the sunset watchers had finished their drinks and were heading home for dinner. Astrid wore her hair up, pinned with a rose-colored enamel flower. Joe accompanied her with his hand lightly rested in the pleasant curve in the small of her back. Ivan Slater seemed to be rushing, though he walked no faster than they did. “I hope I’m not late,” he said. “I got caught up watching TV, Oprah Winfrey squeezing the shit out of some little white lady.” He wore a blousy Cuban shirt and had rolled his pants up in some ghastly sartorial reference to peasantry; instead of appropriate sandals or huaraches, he wore the lace-up black street shoes of his more accustomed venues in New York. Nevertheless, he bounded along confidently without actually going faster than his companions. He was marketing a thing called “The Old Vermont Dog Mill,” which was a treadmill exerciser for overweight suburban labradors that also served to grind coffee and provide the power for a kitchen knife sharpener. It seemed impossible that he didn’t see the ridiculousness of this but he didn’t; he saw only opportunity. When Joe thought of the developing problems with the grazing lease and imagined he could be reduced to working with Ivan on the Old Vermont Dog Mill, he was chilled deep within.
They got a table on the deck under the seagrapes and immediately began to look into their menus as though they had a job to get through.
“That’s not good conch salad,” said Joe. “It’s chum.”
“Don’t start in,” said Astrid.
“Are stone crabs in season?” asked Ivan.
“Who knows,” said Joe. “I don’t know.”
“The tone is burn-out plus,” said Astrid.
“Ivan,” said Joe, “why don’t you get your own girlfriend? The waiter thinks this is a ménage à trois. Ditto the maitre d’.”
“You’ve asked this same question since our school days.”
“Never getting an answer.”
“I do have girlfriends but they are never presentable.”
“You could present them to us,” said Astrid. “We would be prepared to understand almost anything.”
“You talk brave,” said Ivan.
“We could take them if they were truly awful,” Astrid said. “It’s the little things that suck.”
When their dinners came, there seemed to be almost nothing on the plate. Joe understood that this was in response to current views on cuisine held in France; and of course that helped to justify the price, but Joe was hungry. He tapped the tines of his fork all around the empty areas of his plate as though probing for food. Astrid was annoyed with him and gave him furious looks, and the waiter sighed operatically.