Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“I think we are.”

The last slide clicked through. The wall lit up with a white square. A car passed on Assiniboine Avenue and light wheeled on the ceiling and again it was so dark.

“It’s something how lonely life is,” said Lucy.

Man, thought Frank, she just chirped that out. He thought of her at work, helping people plan their trips. It had been outlandish of her to suggest his going to the Arctic, outlandish of him to accept. It had been a way of saying something they couldn’t say in any other way. He didn’t know if it had gotten through. It probably hadn’t. He hated travel. When he was away, he just thought about being the child of deeply unhappy people, something he forgot about when he was at work, never having such a thought. But that first airport and, wham, there he was alone with his people. Besides, he thought, it’s not true; they’re not deeply unhappy, they’re dead. The Eskimos were up there watching the river melt, go by, freeze, melt and go by, and it was simply very familiar. And Lucy went on sending people on vacations, drew herself up each morning to design a holiday, people of the world staring at each other, all somehow more real in brochure form, just as the solitude of the Eskimos came to him on his living room wall in the mustiness of his semi-absent housekeeping.

Lucy stood up in the square of light on the wall.

“Is this better?” she said.

He froze. “Are you going to do something?”

“Yes, I am.”

Frank watched the small television set atop the dresser while he shaved. A new “young country” singer was performing, his long curls falling out from beneath his ten-gallon hat. “Put a futon on your wish list,” he hog-called into the microphone while his hair fell over his harmonica rack, “I’m kicking you tonight!” Perhaps it was very good music. He simply didn’t know anymore. It could be great.

He turned off the television set. Then he sat down and thought about the previous night, the previous brief evening and its lovemaking, which might well have been less an episode of spontaneity than an unfolding of earlier matters, something fearful, a sort of cowering behind one’s loins for want of a better idea. Not like the old days of rear back and let it rip. In these times, there was a surfacing of themes, the collision of culture, a pilfering of one’s own existence to direct dial three abdominal nerves. Life itself, thought Frank wearily, and at these prices!

From his shower, Frank could see lights on in a few houses, but most of the roofs from his angle huddled in the dark of their trees, scarcely outlined by moonlight. He felt he was up alone with the news crews of New York.

He dressed and went outside. It had been a warm night and the air was filled with the smell of juniper and damp garden beds. The sidewalk shone slightly, and as the road mounted the hill toward the south, the houses were raised in increasing angularity until they stood silhouetted at the crown against the stars and foothills.

He walked into the dining room of the Holiday Inn and waited for a seat. There was one gentleman reading USA Today , a Northwest Airlines crew of pilots and stewardesses, and June Cooper. Frank hoped the waitress would take him to an empty table before June spotted him, but no such luck. She seemed to realize that that might have been his hope and flagged him to her table grimly. Frank went over and sat down.

“Join me,” she rasped. “You don’t have that many friends, at least not at this hour.” June was a striking forty-year-old with almost black hair and blue eyes, an amazing combination. She had blown in from Oklahoma twenty years before as a veterinarian’s assistant, gone through three marriages to three previously married men and ended up with a successful Buick agency of her own, a gleaming single-story showroom and office that scattered its inventory of sparkling Buicks across one of the most valuable commercial lots in town. Her last husband hadn’t made much of it, and it seemed, after a decade and a half as a barracuda, June’s real gift was in running a business. She once told Frank, “The way I was raised, the only business open to women was marriage. I opened a chain. Right?”

“If you don’t want to sit with me,” she drawled, “don’t have breakfast at the Holiday Inn. I eat here every day.”

“Got you.” He liked June very much but she was so shrewd that he feared her seeing how dilapidated his spirit had become since Gracie left.

The waitress arrived and filled Frank’s coffee cup.

“He’ll have bacon and eggs and hash browns,” June said. “Eggs over lightly.”

He nodded. “I ought to eat a bowl of cereal.”

“You can have cereal at home. This is where we turn our backs on the things we do at home.”

Frank looked around the room, gathered in the footloose merriment of the Northwest crew, the bleak movements of the waitress, noted the silver cast of the windows as sunrise commenced. He lifted his coffee cup.

“How’s your love life, June?”

“I’m sublimating. And you?”

Frank thought, actually thought, about his current situation. He could hardly tell her that after learning he had peered at her from an apple tree, Lucy had virtually shipped him to the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, he told her the truth: “My love life is nonexistent too.”

“I don’t love anyone,” said June, pulling the little square of foil off the marmalade container. “Life is a highway and love is the potholes. I don’t say it’s good, but that’s how it is.”

“How about the Buick Family? I see on television there’s this nationwide thing called the Buick Family.”

“I don’t love them piss-ants neither.”

“So what do you do?”

“Occasionally, I get some sleepy type to go to bed with me. There is a burst of excitement but then they sense my needs are fairly much physical, and that’s all she wrote. We get a good bit of turnover. I do try to keep several of these donkeys on line, however.”

Frank’s breakfast arrived. “What about surrogate children?”

“I still have that dog, what’s his name, Jake. I still have Jake. I’d hardly call Jake a surrogate child. He’s supposed to be a trained retriever. But what is there to retrieve in my life except possibly self-esteem, and I can hardly expect Jake to do that. I have a niece at Oklahoma State, a real bum. She tried to work me for a car, but it didn’t take and I no longer hear from her.”

“Everyone used to have one of those overtrained water dogs. They were socially required.”

“Exactly, Frank. I noticed that when I came up from Oklahoma, but to no avail. I married three duck hunters in a row. Quack, bang, quack, bang. Such a life.”

“Now I’m too excited to eat,” said Frank.

“Is it the thighs?”

“Not really. It’s more like seeing things as they are. Kind of like the old acid days.”

“Well, it gets you rolling in the morning.” She stood up abruptly with her purse under her elbow. “Call me,” she said, and went out.

Frank felt a little gust and thought, I will. He paid for breakfast and went outside where a parking lot full of cars rested, seemed to await their mission. Wonderful when day had not begun, when only the breakfast waitresses and airline crews were conspicuously there and ready for the rest of the world if it ever woke up. Frank looked off to the silhouettes of the city and the mountains beyond. Odd hours always took him back to the days of weirdness, to the exhilaration of being out of step. He went on contemplating the way the world was reabsorbing him and his friends, terrified people coming to resemble their parents, their dogs, their country, their seatmates, after a pretty good spell of resembling only themselves. This, thought Frank, lacks tragic dimension almost as certainly as podiatry does. But it holds me in a certain ache to imagine I’m actually as much a businessman as my father.