Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

“Just fine, Randy.”

“’Cause if you’re not, let me know.”

“Is there something you take for it?”

“Evelyn, come on in for a moment.” He took a tentative step onto the snowy porch. “You need a break from the cold.” There were already globes of cold, hazy light around the streetlamps, and it would be nice to duck in somewhere close by until the car was ready. She could hear tire chains clanking away one street over and the weirdly clear whistle of a train north of town. Hastening into his front hall, she noticed how youthful Dr. Randy was, in college sweats and bare feet. He could have been fifty, but he cultivated a scrubbed, boyish dishevelment. She was less comfortable with the open inspection he gave her while helping with her coat.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said, leading her toward the Poggenpohl futuristic kitchen with its granite counters and deep black double sink. Next to it was a beautiful wet bar, bird’s-eye maple and stainless steel with little circular lights above like the cabin of a yacht.

“Where’s Juanita?” she asked. Juanita was a great girl, an Oklahoman with a powerful contralto voice who reminded Evelyn of tornadoes. On at least two occasions that Evelyn knew of, Juanita had slugged people who richly deserved it, including a fantastically pompous state legislator.

“That’s my surprise!”

“What do you mean?”

“No Juanita.” He dropped lime slices into two glasses and repeated, “ No Juanita.”

“It’s time for Larry King Live !” Evelyn said quite irrationally.

“Come on, Evelyn. Take a moment here: she left me.”

His own vainglorious disbelief in this helped Evelyn decide that silence was the best policy, silence without any comforting grins or the doctor was going to launch himself onto her before the two lovely drinks he’d just made were consumed. He touched a button activating the audio system and said at the first notes, “Pavane for a Deceased Infanta.”

She took a sip of her very strong vodka and tonic, which Dr. Randy had correctly remembered was nearly the only thing she ever drank. This one was a shade high-test.

They moved into the study and sat on a black, flowered sofa, where Evelyn registered a welcome feeling of nothingness or serene detachment, of letting it all go, that didn’t last ten seconds.

“And Paul’s out too?”

“Yup, regular grief workshop for the two of us, eh Randy?”

“Maybe Juanita’ll be coming back.”

“I’m sure she will.”

“Evelyn, you don’t know a thing about this.”

“I can spot a man in a hurry.”

“You’re a hard woman, Evelyn,” he said, slipping his arm around her.

She’d made the mistake of putting her drink down. Now he was trying to kiss her, his neck straining against her forearm. “Randy? Randy ! Stop this.”

He sat straight up, shoulders square, folded his hands in his lap and gazed around the floor, then said, “I have to make a call.” He went into the next room, and she could soon tell, from the sharp bursts and long silences, that he was talking to Juanita. Still, she couldn’t quite see the right way to walk straight out of here to her snow tires. She’d actually been up for a bit of this, had there been any way of skipping all the posturing. When the conversation in the next room stopped and Randy failed to return, Evelyn found herself searching for him, despite a feeling of queasiness. She discovered Dr. Randy in his den having changed into starched pearl gray pajamas with red piping, and sitting in a bay window, his handsome face profiled against the falling snow.

When Evelyn told him how sickening she found his performance, Randy turned his big pretty eyes toward her and his lips retracted from surprisingly small teeth. “So puke,” he said.

Evelyn rued the vodka on her breath as she pawed around in the closet for her coat. She flung open the front door, glad to be in the light-shot whirlwind of snow. Glancing back at Dr. DeRozier in his pajamas, fighting the door shut against the wind, she levitated her way toward Firestone, thinking, This is weather!

Surely this storm would paralyze the city. The great yellow plows were flashing lights in every direction, the powdery, weightless snow pouring from one side of the blade, burying cars and blocking alleys, leaving ghosts of diesel fuel in midair. As Evelyn lay in bed, she felt the luxury of stolen time as the burden of human planning was absolved by weather. Surely the intensity of this storm, with all its fury retained during long passage from the Gulf of Alaska, would have to abate. Because she was remembering her life with Paul, Evelyn began to weep, abandoning herself in this isolation to choking sobs, remembering two things: the breadth of his back and Mexico, somewhere near San Felipe, in low desert far to the south, when he had done something to the car. It looked as if it had tractor tires and you practically needed a ladder to get in it, but they’d parked right out on the sand next to the Sea of Cortez where Evelyn sunbathed in the most provocative bikini, one you couldn’t wear just anywhere, though their sense of reckless liberty was such that they made love in any patch of sand free of vinagaroons or sidewinders, the bikini generally dangling from the thorns of the nearest cat’s claw bush.

They’d hiked on a night as bright as blue day, and discovered a tiny owl occupying a hole in the arm of a tall cactus that stood above a trail where gaunt-ribbed Corriente cattle walked oblivious around them, horns rattling in the narrow passage.

Her love there had unfurled in agitated, unrecognizable cries, and she had no hope of getting a grip on herself. She trusted Paul and was fascinated by his sauntering style, judging him in his bleached-out Waylon T-shirt and canvas shorts held up by twine to be free of the usual claims that clipped the wings of most young men. She also understood that women suffering hypnosis by criminals or mama’s boys was nothing new. Good-looking, quick-witted, a soul rented to darkness, Paul had everything.

Evelyn had first met him at her parents’ house one nice night in May. Though she was in a rush to get back to the ranch, he seduced her on her walk to, and finally inside of, her car; it was that kind of abandonment, from the beginning. She didn’t even know what he did aside from turning up in Bozeman on a “fact-finding mission” for some agency. He’d met her father at a local association concerned with treason in national life, and the two became immediate friends despite their great difference in age. Had it not been for Sunny Jim Whitelaw’s success in conveying the glamour of the entrepreneur’s life, Paul might have satisfied his mother’s dreams and gone to graduate school.

Though sex probably caused her marriage, Evelyn had tolerated so many cautious suitors that she failed to notice that Paul’s admirable lack of self-pity was actually part of a cold and predatory nature. The marriage also improved her relationship with her father, something she’d longed for since childhood. Sunny Jim was happily fascinated by the unerring way Paul homed in on the bottle company and wasn’t so much surprised when Paul began stealing as he was enchanted by the impertinence. With disarming honesty, he told Paul he would recoup his losses by selling his vital organs, if these thefts should recur. His son-in-law, of course, didn’t believe him.

Whitelaw never backed away from his passionate approval of the marriage. Even when Paul was in prison, he kept him in control of numerous accounts. It was the opinion of Sunny Jim that here was a man’s man, one with real value to a fellow with a few skeletons in his own closet. They shared a lack of sense of humor and a conviction that the general population was crippled by the need to see only what it wanted to see. They both loved the Shakespeare-in-the-Park program and referred to their secret girlfriends as strumpets or jades. Sunny Jim was so swept by the feeling of youth restored that he sometimes described his marital endeavors with Alice in bed, racking his mind for high points and rare instances of pleasure. Paul found this, as he later confided to Evelyn, “icky,” though he was amiably wowed by the old man’s profound indecency. Once, when Sunny Jim told him he thought Alice loved someone else more than him, though he never said who, Paul was touched. He assumed it was God, or her gynecologist.