“I’m afraid it’s Eileen.”
“What do you know about that?”
“I’m waiting to hear.”
“Do you know this station?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a good one?” Frank asked.
“I’m afraid it is. Out on an empty stretch of road toward Whitehall. I mean, there’s about one living in it, but it’s doing eighteen percent, pretax. She runs it tight as bark on a tree and makes damn sure she preserves her margins.”
“I taught her to speak and now she curses me.”
“She will when you turn her in.”
“Who said I was turning her in? Did I say to you, George, that I was turning in my old secretary?”
“Frank, you’re not yourself. This head thing. At your worst, you’d always have been able to spot someone bending over backward to save you.”
“Unlike others in the business community, I’ve taken a pause to relocate some meaning.”
“You took a pause when Gracie left, Frank, and now your pause is jammed. When I get back to the bank, the VPs are going to be on me like flies on shit. They’re gonna ask me. And what am I gonna answer? I’m gonna answer, It’s irreversible.”
“You can read about it in the papers, George. Consumer pessimism is on the upswing. Besides, I am not going broke. I’m just relinquishing day-to-day responsibilities.”
George had had enough. He left. Frank rolled up in the covers, forming a tube with just his face sticking out. He looked out at the big blue sky. It made a pleasant abdication to think of himself as an atom compared to outer space. He had a sense no one was buying his reevaluation of his life. Soon it would be time for him to ask if he was buying it himself.
50
“You’ll have to sit up.” He opened his eyes and there was Lucy with his dinner on a tray. He was woozy from codeine but glad to see her. She was wearing a pure white linen blouse and skirt. It seemed a miracle to find the only person he knew who lived in this peculiar zone.
“It’s like being in the hospital,” he said with a puzzled smile. He hoped he would seem to be referring to something far larger.
“You might as well be in the hospital.”
“Where’s your nurse’s costume?”
“Very funny.” She pinched his cheek. “Very funny.”
She put the tray on his lap. It looked appetizing: a breast of chicken encrusted with some herbs, butter beans, half a roasted yam, a little salad, quite nice indeed.
“Are you eating?” Frank asked.
“I already ate. I’ve got stuff to do.”
She moved as if to go. Mouth full, Frank raised his hands to stop her. He tried to say “Stay for a moment,” but the yam caused it to come out very differently. A crease of annoyance appeared between Lucy’s eyebrows, partly concealed by her extraordinarily precise bangs. He plucked orange specks of yam from his blanket and swallowed with an audible gulp. “I was hoping perhaps you might stay and visit for a moment.” He was conscious of a sluggish spasm moving the yam down his gullet while he tried to suavely murmur a few niceties.
“Gracie said I could bring your dinner because no one else planned to. But she said that if I hung around for quote a little tête-à-tête unquote, she would quote tear my fucking face off unquote.”
Frank’s spirits were careening wildly. He considered himself completely recovered except for the small matter of the blinding headache and faint codeine buzz. He was ashamed to realize that it was but a matter of time before his crooked heart was consoled by Lucy finding a way to have sex with him. They seemed to have an odd lack of control over this. Waiting for the inevitable, Frank marveled druggily at the curious way women betrayed each other. It seemed wildly at odds with their stated policies. His sluggish perceptions took this in voluptuously.
Lucy was fussing with the curtains now. Soon she would be carried toward him by an invisible conveyor belt. She had raised Gracie as a menace not to herself but to both of them. Lewd conduct, like teenage love, required abstract opponents to reach full flower. Frank allowed his silence to become loaded silence. With hieratical signification he moved the tray, with its burden of pimpled chicken skin, rind of yam and sheen of salad dressing, to the table beside the bed. Moronic speechlessness found its counterpart in a faint smile of Lucy’s. Frank thought, I have won the toss and elected to receive.
The blast of a car horn outside seemed to announce the beginning. Vague and adrift, Frank permitted the uncoiling of his cock until its jaunty presence was visible through the sheet. He put his hand up Lucy’s skirt with a boardinghouse reach. Lucy was like a tree shedding its leaves in the fall. She stood naked beside the bed knowing he was now helpless. I suppose she’s having a good time, he thought absently; and now comes the “tally me banana” part. She mounted him in reverse, a position that enabled her to watch the street. She was shivering, then hooting faintly like an owl in the brush. He held her buttocks so as to participate in their motion. By spreading them slightly, he was able to take a more precise measure of their activity, concluding that the vertical travel of the asshole, which seemed so dramatic, was actually only a matter of inches. Then came her voice. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was not the dragonish bellow that sometimes announced the onset of her orgasm. It seemed to be a call-and-response thing, more than one voice in spirit, high and low or, more properly, here answered by there. Then Lucy shouted without much of what Frank took as conventional passion, “I’m coming!” But before Frank could join her in ecstasy, she had climbed off him and was standing next to the bed, getting back into her clothes in a hurry. There had indeed been two voices: Lucy’s and, from the bottom of the stairs, Gracie’s. “I’m coming as fast as I can!” Lucy yelled down to the first floor in a fearful rage.
Gracie appeared in the bedroom doorway and, fixing Frank with a metallic smile, said, “How could you?” Lucy finished dressing, staying well out of Gracie’s reach, and they both went downstairs. He felt unwilling to breathe.
There was an immediate uproar from below. For several moments, Frank was certain that it was composed entirely of voices; then he wasn’t so sure. Worse, he felt it was getting closer, possibly moving up the stairs. He sensed that this emotional violence favored his situation, if he lived through it. But this ill-construed tone seemed to follow him everywhere like a pox. He knew the two women were in pain, but the only thing he thought he could offer was the suggestion that they ought to dump their growth stocks and get in on these tax-free Montana highway bonds while there was still time. He saw right away that there was no chance they’d listen. They’d probably just get madder.
“It is typical of the situation we held on to for so long,” Gracie was saying, “that anything we try turns into chaos.” She was working her way down the clothesline at the side of the house on Third, clothespins under her chin, hanging out sheets, towels and Edward’s voluminous boxer shorts. “I have not been back for long, but all the harrowing scenes of my recent history have taken place in that short time and they have all involved you in one way or another.”
“Did I tell Holly to accompany Hitler on the piano?” Frank said.
“He’s not Hitler. He’s not good, but he’s not Hitler.”
“Sorry. I know what you’re saying. Honey, you were great out there.”
“Gee, thanks. I especially wish that we could do as Edward suggests: meet in a civilized way and make sure we have left clean wounds so that the healing process can begin.”
“I’m very suspicious of this ‘healing’ concept,” Frank said. “I’ve heard a good bit about it lately and it always leads into a discussion of some unbelievably tedious ‘inner journey.’ I’m afraid I’ve grown much too old for that sort of thing. The messages of my formative years all came from Little Richard, who has never soiled himself with an inner journey.”