“Now I’m too excited to eat,” said Frank.
“Is it the thighs?”
“Not really. It’s more like seeing things as they are. Kind of like the old acid days.”
“Well, it gets you rolling in the morning.” She stood up abruptly with her purse under her elbow. “Call me,” she said, and went out.
Frank felt a little gust and thought, I will. He paid for breakfast and went outside where a parking lot full of cars rested, seemed to await their mission. Wonderful when day had not begun, when only the breakfast waitresses and airline crews were conspicuously there and ready for the rest of the world if it ever woke up. Frank looked off to the silhouettes of the city and the mountains beyond. Odd hours always took him back to the days of weirdness, to the exhilaration of being out of step. He went on contemplating the way the world was reabsorbing him and his friends, terrified people coming to resemble their parents, their dogs, their country, their seatmates, after a pretty good spell of resembling only themselves. This, thought Frank, lacks tragic dimension almost as certainly as podiatry does. But it holds me in a certain ache to imagine I’m actually as much a businessman as my father.
But Frank was apprehensive about going to work. He was, after all, across the hall from Lucy. That hadn’t changed. And he was disquieted about seeing her this morning. Despite twenty years of trying to reduce sex to the same status as the handshake, its reduction was unreliable and it frequently had an unwelcome larger significance. Lovemaking still seemed to test the emotional assumptions that led up to it, and in Frank’s case he somehow found out that he was never going to be in love with Lucy. It was important to act on this perception before her nose seemed to grow or her mouth to hang open vacantly, her vocabulary to shrink or her feet to slap awkwardly on the linoleum. He was going to have to drum up some drippy conversation about friendship, a deadening policy statement that would reduce everything to awkwardness.
He needn’t have worried. She was in the hallway when he arrived. She wrinkled her face at the sight of him, shook her head and disappeared into her office. He went into his own without greeting Eileen, his secretary. He tore down the Eskimo poster with disgust and, briefly, hated himself. A new set of tickets and itinerary lay on his desk. He opened the itinerary. It said, “Hell.” Nothing else.
He picked up his phone.
“Eileen.”
“Yes, Mr. Copenhaver.”
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“My mind was elsewhere.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Thank you. Now, can you get me Lucy across the hall.”
The phone rang only once.
“Lucy, Frank.”
“Yes.”
“Is there something wrong?”
“Is there something wrong …” she said. He knew now, of course, that there was.
“I thought we’d had a nice evening.”
“We had, to a point.”
“And at what point did you think it went downhill?”
“At the point you called me Gracie.”
“I did that, did I?”
“About seven times.”
“Sorry.”
“I suppose it’s not your fault, Frank. But I’m not your old wife.”
“Of course not.”
He hung the phone up and leaned on his hands. He could have said, “No, you’re not my old wife. You’re my wife’s old friend. Some friend!”
For some reason, he called June up at the dealership. They had to page her on the lot. By the time she came to the phone, he had forgotten why it had seemed so necessary to call her. Nevertheless, he told her what had happened. She listened quietly. He explained as discreetly as he could that he had said one or two inappropriate things during a spell of delightful lovemaking and it had ruined everything. June said, “I can’t get into it. When they’re doing their job, they can call me John Brown for all I care.” Frank thanked her anyway and hung up, then thanked her to himself for this burst of redneck health.
He went down to Lucy’s office and sat under the waterfall while Lucy watched him and waited for him to say something.
“Are you still angry?” he said finally.
“No. I never was angry.”
“I don’t want to lay this on you, but if you weren’t angry, you were hurt.”
“Then I was angry, but I’m not angry now.”
Some hours ago, he thought, she was chewing sheets and going “Oof, oof, oof!” while, evidently, I was going, “Oh, Gracie, oh, Gracie!” Quite a picture. Oh, dear.
Then she smiled and said, “This time, I’m not sending you anywhere.” The air had apparently cleared. Frank left her office, thinking, What a nice person.
Frank straightened up his desk and went back out through the reception area. “I’m going to the ranch,” he said.
“Can you be reached there?” asked Eileen.
“No, but I’ll be back.”
Frank drove north out of town, cutting through the subdivisions that lay around the old town center. Frank had a reluctant affection for these suburbs, with their repetitious shapes and lawns and basketball hoops and garages. He appreciated their regularity.
The road wound up through dryland farms of oats and malting barley, golden blankets in the middle of sagebrush country, toward the tall brown of snowy mountains. The city had almost disappeared behind him, yet from the front gate of the home place he could still make it out. A bright serration against the hills.
Frank stopped right in front of the house where his family once lived, a substantial farmhouse with a low, deep porch across the entire front, white with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof. The house sat on a fieldstone cellar with deep-set airyway windows at regular intervals beneath the porch. The house was locked up. In front, the tall hollyhocks his grandmother had taken such care of stood up boldly through the quack grass and competed along the border of the porch with the ocher shafts of henbane. The junipers hadn’t been trimmed and streaks of brown penetrated their dark green masses. It was a fine old house that gave Frank the creeps.
He drove slowly past it toward the barn and outbuildings, looking for Boyd Jarrell, his hired man. He had already seen Jarrell’s truck from the house, and when he crossed the cattle guard into the equipment compound, he watched Jarrell walk past the granary without looking up at Frank’s car. He saw that Jarrell would be in a foul mood, and felt a slight sinking in his stomach. Boyd liked Mike but didn’t like Frank. Mike came out here and played rancher with Boyd, building fence on the weekends or irrigating, and in general dignifying Boyd’s job by doing an incompetent imitation of it. Frank could never understand why this would ingratiate Mike to Boyd, but he guessed it was a form of tribute.
Frank parked the car and walked toward the granary. Jarrell now crossed the compound going the other way, carrying an irrigating shovel and a length of tow chain over his shoulder.
“Boyd,” Frank called, and Jarrell stopped, paused and looked over at Frank. “Have you got a minute?”
“I might.”
Frank walked over to him.
“I spoke to Lowry Equipment on Friday,” said Frank, “and the loader’s fixed on the tractor. So, that’s ready to go whenever you need it.”
“If that’s all it was.”
“That’s right. But I assume it’s okay.”
Jarrell looked away and smiled. Frank let it fall silent for a minute.
“I’ve got a buyer to look at our calves on Monday.”
“I hope he can find them.”
Frank looked at Jarrell. Jarrell had him by fifty pounds and ten years. But he had put down his mark.
“He’ll find them,” Frank said. “You’ll take him to them. Or you’ll get out.”