“What are you wearing right now?”
She hung up and he had to redial and apologize, explaining that it was just a joke.
“I want to start a business with my hot spring,” he said. “Nobody would believe in my idea. But you would. The others would take me for a crackbrain.”
“You’re right,” said Suzanne, the kind of woman healthy men dream of. “I’d probably buy it.”
“Suzanne! I want you to come back. I want you and James back! I’ll do anything!” There was no hint of insincerity in Lucien’s voice. “I can see clearly now!”
“Absolutely not.”
He knew she’d say that, but he was distracted with sudden wild and sourceless yearning that rode right over the predicted rejection.
“Can we just try?”
“Lucien, I really don’t think so. My famous optimism is gone. And let’s face it, you haven’t achieved a thing since you went back to Montana.”
“That I don’t believe.”
“Besides, I’m no longer optimistic enough to feel lonely.”
“You don’t have to feel lonely. We can try again.”
“What I’m saying is I don’t feel lonely.”
Lucien’s heart and groin ached, all the right signs. He’d done well to take to the phone. But even Lucien riding the long swell of revelation could see this one had gone nowhere fast.
“It’s still snowing!” he cried.
Another call yielded little more.
“You and me and James can have a beautiful life here. James could grow up on the ranch—”
“That ranch?”
“Yes …”
“Oh, Lucien.”
Upon thought, it seemed a little early for issuing invitations even to Suzanne and his boy. Suzanne was right, he didn’t have much of a record. But he went on feeling he could change that. He knew he had to.
Finally spring began to come, and with it, new merriness. New merriness sent Lucien down the road of vintage tequila; and that resulted in a hiatal hernia from throwing up. Sometimes now even well-chewed food seemed to get stuck before heading toward his stomach, a disconcerting thing. He’d read about well-off citizens choking on big steaks and dying in front of maître d’s, and he didn’t want to go that way. With his new merriness, he didn’t want to go at all.
He was so excited and, really, agitated that he ended up with his former companion Dee. They took a cooler filled with ice and drinks and snacks, wonderful things that she had made with her own hands, and went to the drive-in movie, a fine old concrete thing that stood in front of the great mountains of the wilderness, playing to an amazingly small parking area on a spring night. It was such an early-day drive-in that it should have been one of the primary artifacts, alongside the buffalo jumps and Calamity Jane’s favorite bar, of this good little town. When Lucien was learning to smoke, now among his most demeaning habits, he used to go up to the projectionist’s chamber. The projectionist, a woman in her sixties, would draw out the glowing carbon rods from the projector and light Lucien’s cigarette.
Now many years later he was parked again in this lonely spot in a row of less than twenty cars. We’ve put a bad hurt on this cooler, thought Lucien, and now it’s mostly gone. The car had become a very private place where Lucien went in and out of focus. He had long since quit trying to understand what Fred MacMurray was doing up on that screen, squinting down through his pipe smoke at a freckled redhead with a newsboy’s sack.
The engine was running to keep their naked bodies warm, and Lucien could feel its RPMs registering through the seat cover. “It’s too early to open a drive-in,” he said. The reason why they were sitting at opposite ends of the seat was that Lucien had learned that Dee was having her period, and he was discouraged. Now and again he would tear his eyes from Fred MacMurray and look quizzically at the small trailing white string, trying to think what to do. She was not a little disgusted by his squeamishness. He felt like a touchy town kid confronted by his first lusty country maiden. And it didn’t help when she indicated for him to come to her side, with the same gesture used by zoo bears asking for a peanut. Still, it was already clear he would have to come through.
He leaned over and cupped the heated weight of one breast. Then he kind of bounced over to her and got the string between his thumb and forefinger. At first it wouldn’t come loose; then it came all at once and hung between them like a rodent. She wrinkled her nose and pointed sharply at the window. Lucien gave it a toss, but somehow the string and the thing’s actual weight were such that it flew way too far and landed on the windshield of one of the other cars. Lucien stared over there in real fright. It was stuck right in the middle of the windshield. As Lucien watched, the wiper blade moved up and bumped it without moving it very much; the blade retreated and then moved upon it again, this time sliding it to the top of the windshield where, anyone could see, it was going to stay.
Then the door of the car opened up and a bruiser in a cowboy hat got out and began to look around. Lucien felt his organs shrink dramatically, an ancient prelude to flight. The big cowboy moved boldly from vehicle to vehicle staring into each one, quietly asking a few questions. When he was only one car away, Lucien felt he should engage the transmission. A moment later he shot away, spraying ancient drive-in gravel while the cowboy shouted, “I got my fiancée here! She don’t want to know about your little world!” And in a short time Lucien was tearing along, bare and alert, while the golden lights of his car lit up the canyon south. “This is the life!” he cried. “They can have that Fred MacMurray!” It was the first movie he’d seen in a year.
The next morning was another thing entirely, another day that began with the query, Where am I? This time it was the ranch. Immediately he began to remember the events of the previous night; now of course they were devoid of the verve that actually made them happen. Lucien felt the heat of shame start up the back of his neck and then consume his entire face with the burning, prickling agony of remorse. Back somewhere in Lucien was a residue of puritanism that surfaced on mornings like these which would convince some of his enemies that he did in fact pay in the end. Lying in bed, with late-morning light on him, he thought the veins in his hands were too prominent, and his scalp itched. His previously clever mouth was a cup of variegated scum; and his poor old dick was a grim souvenir of infamy and inconsideration. He shivered and pulled up the covers around his neck, a move which only revealed his bird dog and his feet. Now he hated his feet, which were white paddles. They were not the honest arched dusky feet of the world’s real people. They were the splayed white paddles of the superfluous. He staggered across the hall into the bathroom and sat down. His bowel movement was so shocking it sent his dog scurrying for cover as a blast of discolored water arced from his ass to the crockery. “What lucky girl will get me next?” he moaned aloud. When he made it to the sink and had an opportunity to stand before the mirror, he was not cheered. His face was colorless. His eyelashes seemed to be irregularly spaced. There were greenish-gray shadows in the bottom of every wrinkle and crease. When he pressed down on his teeth, one incisor seemed to send out a little red signal of meaningless pain. A guy ought to bag it, Lucien thought, right here. But who would feed Sadie? Who would rattle the vitamin-enriched kibble into the little sucker’s spun-metal bowl? Who would refill her water and run her in her roading harness off-season? Tears filled Lucien’s eyes. He knew she needed him, that no one else would remember her points and retrieves. They would take her for a brown and white cur with no master. It would be sadder and more sickening than Old Shep. How would Sadie watch me die? I suppose with a mixture of pride and dismay. At this thought, Lucien laughed miserably. More than anything, he wanted to grow up. But today he was going to do something about it.