“And?” said Edward.
“She told me.”
“She told you the truth?”
“Yes.” Frank was thrilled to realize that Edward had never heard this story from Gracie, never heard it at all. Talk about anthropology! The fact that Edward had corrupted his marriage had somehow shrunk beside the fact that Gracie had withheld this tale of his moronic deduction. It was personal.
Edward chuckled a bit, maybe grimly, but chuckled. Frank felt the pain of absurdity. He had been happier among the Eskimos. His eyeballs felt dried out by helpless rage and sadness.
He looked around again. He didn’t see much chance of getting out of this. He wasn’t accusing himself of wanting to get out of this, but he wanted some sense he wasn’t falling into the hole he felt opening in the middle of himself. He tried imagining a time in the future when they were all gone and none of this mattered. And it didn’t help. Gracie once accused him of making her feel invisible. What if Holly had said, “You made my mother invisible”? What would there have been to say after that? “I’m going to make you invisible”? Frank remembered Gracie’s cry:
“I always was able to stand it, able to stand you making fun of my dopey little restaurant, able to watch the side of your head buried in the Wall Street Journal, even though it was the same head that was once buried in Carlos Castaneda, the I Ching, Baba Ram Dass, Richard Flanagan —”
“Richard Brautigan,” Frank had corrected.
“Because you had such a wonderful relationship with Holly,” Gracie had said, “and I could always remember you with hair down to your back and Holly sitting on your shoulders. But then, it seems unbelievable, Holly grew up and left. And I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.”
As though her cry from the heart had been nothing but a performance, Frank had said, “Let’s not take our eyes off the applause meter, folks!”
I hate myself, he thought. He had accommodated his tribe by living as he had. He found out too late that that wasn’t good enough. It was like one of the new-style muggings where you wake up and they’ve stolen one or more of your internal organs.
“I still don’t know what you want from me,” Frank said to Edward. He felt flat and hopeless. Edward looked a bit deflated himself. It was not a meeting between kings. Maybe this was the dreaded bankruptcy.
“I had to talk to somebody who’d know how it felt,” Edward said.
This artificial claim tripped something in Frank. He had had enough. Blank and murderous, he asked, “Who’d know how what felt, Edward?”
Edward seemed to examine Frank’s face for intention, sincerity, something. “To be left by Gracie,” he said.
What? Frank tried to hold it down. He wasn’t going to give this guy anything. He leaned back in his chair. Perhaps he could accommodate Edward a little, hands across the abyss. After all, it was something Edward would have to live with. But Edward seemed to be awaiting some payoff, a rare moment. All Frank wanted was verification. He still wasn’t sure.
“You got the gate, huh?”
“I’m afraid I did,” Edward said. “I guess I was just wanting some confirmation that this had anything to do with me in the first place.”
With a new pride and the sense of a pathway perceived at last, Frank told him he was the wrong person to ask. It was enough to know that Edward suspected that he might have been used.
Frank’s mind was racing. He had to find Gracie right this very minute. He wondered if he was getting ahead of himself. It was as if he were making notes for something he wanted to happen, defying postponement. Suddenly, Frank got to his feet. Edward looked on, open-mouthed. Frank ran outside and continued running until he was half a block from his house. He slowed to a walk and caught his breath. He found Gracie walking around the front lawn.
“What a funny house,” she said.
She barely let him talk. He thought they might gaze on the place together. But she was thinking about something.
“Let’s try to find Holly,” said Gracie. “She’s gone back to the one with a ring in his nose. She took down the douche bag and the picture of the Enola Gay.” Gracie seemed to be going right on to the next thing. Frank reluctantly saw this as a sign of strength. “Let’s put in an appearance.” She chattered on about the missing piece of time. She’d been to Europe! She’d been back to Louisiana! He lagged behind in one of the gray areas that subtended all his emotional changes of state. That, he was prepared to admit, was a weakness. But if he admitted all the things that got him out of bed in the absence of strengths, wouldn’t he lose what little footing he possessed? He should have taken that chance, he knew, back when Gracie stood solidly beside him. It was now a distinctly less propitious time for such a housecleaning.
“Gracie, if I had ever really thought about you going off with someone, I wouldn’t have picked Edward particularly as your type.”
“He’s not my type.”
“I guess I’m missing something,” said Frank. Gracie unlocked the Buick and they both got in. She gripped the wheel and looked down the road as though she were already driving.
“You guess you’re missing something! Well, that’s a start.”
Frank said nothing. His head seemed to be enlarging from the unmoving diameter at his shirt collar. He craned around behind the windshield, not even driving, not even knowing Holly’s address.
“I understand your business is falling apart,” Gracie said. “Wouldn’t that be a miracle?”
“I can fix it.”
“Can you.” It wasn’t quite a question.
“Yes, I can.”
“Have I nearly ruined you?” Gracie beamed. Frank didn’t reply. Then she said, wonderingly, and to no one in particular, “Who would have thought?”
They drove down an empty street lined with the fiefdoms of small homes in which discord over colors, shapes and roofing materials, fences, breeds of dog and shrubbery, seemed to end the westward movement in its provisional neighborhoods.
Gracie said, “I had the funniest idea. It was about children, I guess, and how bringing them up causes this sadness. Almost as if their life tells you you’re going to die? I mean, I know it’s love, but it sure is kind of a lonesome thought. You know what I mean? While I was gone, I went back home and paid a little visit to my old indigo plantation, quote unquote. You remember that? And where I used to think about vanished glory, this time I was just in mind of all those people gone. Frank, you know what I figured out?” She looked at him to give him a chance to answer. When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything, she said, “There’s nothing crazier than picking up exactly where you left off.” Then she smiled.
Finally, the houses thinned out and dropped away, and the street turned into a long, twisting road, and if there was a stop sign anywhere, it must have been hidden behind the curves.