On the other hand, he remembered his first joke and there was a connection. He’d heard it from his Brooklyn-born barber when he was a kid. Somebody put an orange in a robin’s nest and when the young birds came back, one said to the other, “Look at the orange Mama laid.” In the barber’s accent, it sounded the same as “orange marmalade.” There was a time when he thought that was a really fine joke.
Many people he had talked to on the phone, before he came home, used the phrase “What are you going to do about …” Frank thought about this locution as though it were a specimen phrase from a foreign language. It seemed to imply that the person addressed was a kind of lever or something. He wished to state that he was no lever; he was a bystander, and on days he felt a little better, a pedestrian. He thought of himself and Holly singing “Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” and he began to weep in silent bitterness. People magazine was always talking about the glitterati. Well, he belonged to the bitterati. This thought caused him to burst out in a laugh, but snot flew from his nose onto the bed covers. He wasn’t about to be overpowered by snot, and so, covering first one nostril, then the other, he recklessly blew snot all over everything, then lay back in thought. This was meant to show he didn’t care about anything. He turned on the radio next to the bed, at low volume, and fell asleep.
36
When he awoke the next morning, he had the sense that complete chaos was occurring outside his window. Horns were blowing and some piece of roadworking equipment was backing up with its fierce signal going. People were trying to go to work and, with admirable simplicity, were flying off the handle at any delay whatsoever. A new sun shone an all-creating light over the vehicular uproar wedged between two lines of sidewalk. A single construction worker strode between the cars giving the finger to men and women headed for work, to students and to families. “Can you see this?” he asked through windshields and side windows. Magpies flew through the trees. Frank watched the motorists staring straight ahead, not seeing the mad construction worker whose rage showed through every shambling stride he took. At all times, someone was blowing a horn and it was clear that the construction worker would have keenly murdered everyone.
Frank didn’t think he could go out to get any food. He tried to watch the news but it seemed totally out of kilter. There was Gorbachev. He looked like a fucking mouse. A college football player showed the new convertible he got from his dean for improving his forty-yard-sprint time by a full second. Then an enormous weatherman, the beloved Willard, completely out of control. He turned it off and called June. She was already at work. She said he sounded terrible.
“For many perfectly good reasons,” Frank said, “nobody loves me anymore.”
“You’re probably right,” said June.
“June, is it true?”
“No, Jesus! What ails you, Frank?”
“I’m sick. And I’m starving to death. Junie, I can’t quite get it together to take care of myself. I’m running a fever. Everything is so bad, it might be psychosomatic, though I doubt it. Eileen said it was going around.”
“So, you’ve seen Eileen.”
“June, please, I can’t handle much.”
“Okay, I’m coming over. It might take a bit. I’ll stop by the grocery.”
June brought him some sweet rolls and coffee and a carton of orange juice. She spread a towel on the side of the bed and set these things out. Then she pulled up a chair, sat down, crossed her legs and got a paper cup of coffee out of the white paper bag. Frank was propped up in bed and was conscious of the disarray of his room: drawers half pulled out, closet door ajar, one end of the rug rolled up, an overflowing wastebasket. The curtain was still pulled aside from watching the traffic jam.
June blew on her coffee and said nothing. Frank ate. She was wearing a navy blue dress with a string of pearls. She had her hair twisted up into a bun. She had a thin, off-center cheap Oklahoma face that was appealing and self-sufficient. June was his friend. She was a fighter. Unlike most women he knew, she wasn’t astonished to find that life was a fight. So her feistiness lacked the indignation, the bruised quality, that gave relationships between men and women these days their peculiar smelliness. She had once said, quite evenly, “I can look after myself,” when Frank had offered to intervene with a supplier trying to gouge her at the dealership.
“I have underestimated what a delicate thing life really is,” Frank began. “I was rolling along there like a house afire for well over a decade. I knew this thing happened with Gracie. It wasn’t what I wanted. But I certainly thought I would survive it and I guess I will. But I’m certainly not the same guy and it sort of pisses me off.”
“I love it when you’re lonely,” said June.
“That’s really not it.”
“I thought this was some bug going around.”
“It is. But you know Gracie better than anybody. You’re both from the South. Is Oklahoma in the South?”
“Sorta. And yeah, that’s half our trouble. You don’t have the love of people that we have. When you go to falling out here, there’s no bottom to it. They’ll just watch you fall.”
“Huh. Do you think Gracie agrees with that?” This hurt his feelings. He wanted everyone to love the West.
“She had you. She had Holly. She had friends. She was making a beginning. But these are the meanest white people in America. Your kids up and grown, your marriage fails, nothing holds you.”
“What holds you?”
“The ’ninety-two Buicks. They’re beautiful. Make your mouth water. Each one is a little world.” She smiled. “The ’ninety-threes will be even better.”
God, it was wonderful to hear someone looking forward to something that was actually going to happen. Next year’s cars. He told June that.
“Well, it isn’t going to last,” she said. “You’re gonna have to take aholt, son.”
“I know this.”
“And Gracie’s in town. So, maybe you ought to spend the time to polish off those jagged edges. You’ve both got to go on. You don’t want to leave off like you did. And this is the first time in your life since I’ve known you when you didn’t seem to care about making money. You better take advantage of it.”
“Okay. But Gracie’s okay. That guy’s probably got a lot of money. I know money isn’t everything …”
“He’s a sharp one, that Ed. He knows how to make it. Do you know what his big trick was?”
“I hadn’t really heard. I suppose Gracie told you.”
“She did and she wasn’t happy. He used to be a dealer of Indian artifacts but he got crossways with the law. I guess he married one of his wealthy customers but she was in a bad car wreck. Now he buys life insurance policies from people who have been diagnosed with AIDS. He cashes them out at a discount. He says that gives them money for medicine, which he knows won’t work, and it allows them to buy a little dignity, which it may. That’s quite an idea, isn’t it, Frank?”
“Quite an idea,” Frank said numbly.
“He still sort of has this wife, but she throwed him out on account of the wreck. He was sad about that because she was sure enough well fixed. So, have I helped you?”
“Thank you, Junie-friend. You’ve helped me.”
“For what it’s worth, I never heard Gracie say she was in love with him.”