Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

Sunderson was looking down at the beautiful table before them feeling the full impact of his own shabbiness. His desk at the office had always been the most grungy of any of his colleagues with its accumulated gummy spilled coffee, dust, and scraps of paper. Roxie had never been permitted to touch the desk or he might lose track of what he comically called “important papers.” Now he thought of the old saying pigs love their own shit as he looked down at the finely made table and the frayed, soiled cuffs of his sport coat. There was a longish, more than awkward silence as if they were both asking themselves, “Why are we depressing each other?”

“Marriages get moldy real slowly,” he said, then paused to take out the flask of whiskey from his coat pocket. She nodded and he poured into their empty brandy glasses thinking that she had likely never drunk cheap whiskey. Sure enough she winced at her first sip.

“My God what is this, paint thinner?” She laughed and took another sip. “Sorry, I interrupted you.”

“I was saying that marriages slowly get moldy and then are no longer mutually vital. You just keep dancing the same polka steps.”

“I never danced the polka. We fox-trotted out East or waltzed.”

“I could show you but I’m sure that Tucson is not a polka town. Anyway, we had a lot of fun camping in the summers in our twenties and thirties. It’s wonderful to make love in a tent. In the winter we’d do a lot of cross-country skiing. When we got into our forties we stopped doing both. In the summer we’d rent a cabin, which wasn’t the same as a tent, and in the winter we’d vegetate.”

He had made himself nervous and finished his ample whiskey in a single gulp. He could no longer bear her nominal resemblance to Diane and imagined her living in a colonial house with daffodils in the yard in the New York City suburb of Bedford. He got up to leave.

“Please don’t go just yet.” Her eyes seemed to be misting and her voice was less strong. “When you spoke about your new hobby of investigating the crime of religion, I found myself agreeing intellectually but emotionally I have to protect my own religion. We lost our baby girl, our first child, Lucy, when she was five months to a defective heart. My husband insisted she be called after me because he loved the name Lucy. Probably because of dreams I had the irrational belief that my little daughter became a bird and that her soul passes through generations of birds. I even became a bird-watcher though I had never much noticed them before Lucy’s death. We raised a son and a daughter but with them my feelings were never as intense as they were with Lucy. We knew that we were going to lose her for three months but I never accepted it.”

“We never got beyond a couple of miscarriages,” Sunderson said lamely. He began to finally feel the extreme fatigue of having awakened at three a.m. and also a niggling twinge of desire for her. It seemed crazed that he could hear this terrifying loss and it made him want to make love to the mother. He remembered that Diane, who knew so many nurses in her work as a hospital administrator, had said that they tended to be very sexually active because they’re around death so much. “At least fucking stands for life,” she had said, shocking him because it was the only time in their marriage she had used the word.

“I can’t believe it.” She suddenly burst into laughter.

“Believe what?” he asked timidly, already sensing that she had read his thoughts about her similarity to Diane.

“It’s outrageous. And funny. Maybe flattering.” She paused, and then added with mock seriousness, “You better go now.”

He took her seriously and headed for the door. She followed and put an arm around his neck.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Just teasing. I have a bottle of wine that’s perfect for a Sunday night.”

He slumped down in a chair by the door, looked at his scuffed shoes, and then watched her expertly opening the wine. Since Diane had left he had been strictly screw top. He made his way back to the table. The wine was a soft burgundy called Clos de la Roche and she said it was hard to get but her family knew the family that owned the vineyard. It was gradually occurring to him that she was rich, which had a dampening effect since he was an old-line left-winger and laborite, his sympathies deeply enmeshed in the fortunes of the union movement. He was honest enough, however, to admit that he had never really known a rich woman and the few he had met in Marquette were civil enough.

“How much would a bottle of this set you back?” It was certainly the most delicious liquid he had ever drunk.

“Oh God I could only estimate. My dad has it sent to me. Several hundred dollars a bottle I suspect. My dad’s from an old New England family though he’s a democrat. He says his family made a lot of money in the spice and slave trade and whaling so it’s his duty to try to correct certain ancient injustices. He’s always loathed my husband Harold who started as a broker and is now an investment banker. My dad refers to him as Swindler Harold. My dad was pleased when Harold’s firm went bankrupt. Harold has been in a depression for a couple of months. I support the family with my money but I could never leave Harold because the kids love their hopeless dad. Harold wants me to invest in a company he wants to start to recondition sailboats but dad has control of my money and won’t allow it.” She paused, almost frantic. “This must all sound strange to you.”

“It does sound remote. When my dad was dying of cancer at age sixty he was worried because he was three thousand bucks in debt. I paid it off with a loan from my wife. He didn’t know the money came from Diane but was proud that I had a good job.” He was pleased that they were talking nonchalantly about their families. “I never thought much about money because I had enough to buy books and live fine and now I’ll get by on my state pension okay.”

They were silent and drowsy drinking the wine and he suspected that his sexual feelings for her came out of the usual loneliness and that the wine had the curious effect of making her look even more like Diane. When you’re sixty-five, he thought, a fifty-five-year-old woman looks young.

She asked him if he’d like to go look at petrogylphs with her father early the next morning and at first he said no, that he was moving out to more reasonable quarters, would see his mother a few more times, then head out to find the Great Leader Dwight. She looked quite disappointed like Diane looked when he refused to go along with what she wanted to do so he changed his mind by saying “one more day won’t hurt” and then she smiled.

“Why do we seem to like each other?” she asked at the door.

“I have no idea,” he lied. He certainly wasn’t going to say, “You bear a resemblance to a woman I loved and lost.”

“Once, on a plane, I developed a crush on an anthropologist I was seated next to. I was turned on as the young people say. I told my daughter who thought it was hysterical. She asked, ‘Why didn’t you go for it mom?’”

Sunderson thought of this on his way back to his room, quite lost until he was helped by a night watchman. It was a troublesome night indeed as if he had just been on a fifteen-hour drive and couldn’t stop moving when he got into bed. Once he woke up weeping but twice it was laughter, and belly laughter. The tears were caused by a reality-based dream of when he had returned from a three-day meeting at state police headquarters and found her gone on a late Friday afternoon. He was in immediate tears as he had skillfully, he thought, remembered that it was their seventeenth anniversary and he had bought fifty bucks worth of cut flowers, a pointless gesture as it was late June and she had better flowers in her perennial garden. Some of their camping equipment was gone from the porch and it seemed odd that a woman fleeing from marriage would take this sort of gear. As a detective he might have figured out he was dulled from the four-hundred-plus-mile drive up from Lansing and a hangover from sitting in a disco rock bar watching college girls wiggle their toothsome asses. Fetching a beer from the refrigerator he saw the note. “Hoped you’d call last night but you must have been busy. Also hoping you remembered I’m camping this weekend at our spot near Big Bay. Your dinner in the blue Creuset is a blanquette de veau, a veal stew. I also made a salad dressing, etc. See you Sunday. Love, D.”