Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“Think of the dog as a device. I’m saying I’d like to meet you. I’m quite safe, quite reliable, an old customer of the bank, endless paper trail and so on. Well, what do you say?” He was conscious of yammering.

“Okay, where?” she said in a lusterless voice that suggested she was on to his game but would meet him partway. The absurdity of having gotten into this with dog biscuits must have struck her by now, or it would soon.

He gave her his address and set the time at seven o’clock, a nice hour close to the crossroads between dining and tomfoolery. He hung up the phone and could have gasped with relief but for the helpless smile that spread across his face.

Joanie was on time. By some rude standards, she was not presentable. She was a hearty, open-faced country girl, big enough to play for the Steelers. Frank told her right off that Scott was dead, but she came straight in and looked around his house as though she were the most unimpeachable ticket holder in a public place of amusement. Frank then decided he would cook for her, an impulse he had but seldom. After dinner, he promised, they would walk around the neighborhood and distribute the dog biscuits. She beamed at these suggestions, pulled things from the shelves for examination.

Frank established Joanie on the comfortable sofa in front of the television. She made it even more comfortable by propping herself all around with pillows, removing her shoes and putting her legs up. She seemed to be in for the long haul. He gave her the channel changer and she made immediately for the baseball game. While Frank chopped and prepared, she called out key events in the game, the Indians and the Tigers, and at one point burst into such raucous laughter that Frank went in for a look: a Detroit player was shoving an umpire backward across the infield. Frank returned to his cooking, stir-frying chicken and raw peanuts, thinking about how welcome these coarse shouts from the living room were, when the doorbell rang. He took the wok off the flame and answered it. It was Lucy.

Frank said, “Um.”

“Is this a bad time?” she asked, peering into the hallway.

“Not at all,” said Frank, backing inward and gesturing toward the living room with his spatula. “Please come in and introduce yourself to my guest —” Frank didn’t know Joanie’s last name. “And be so kind as to join us for dinner.”

“Oh, I —”

“Of course you can. I know your habits.”

“What the heck.” Lucy came into the house in a cloud of jasmine perfume and by the time Frank heard her speaking to Joanie in the living room, he was back in the kitchen. Frank wondered what Lucy’s reflections were as to her spot on the totem pole of desire when she found this cheerful elephant on the sofa. He could hear the game and the conversation from the living room and was reminded how pleasant plain human noise could be.

This time when the doorbell rang it was June, straight from the car lot in the sensible suit she’d worn at breakfast. “You’re just in time for dinner,” said Frank without an invitation or explanation. He shooed June into the living room and went back to the kitchen to chop every fryable thing in the refrigerator. June knew where the bar was, and wanton cackling soon poured from the living room. It’s a shame I had to show up, Frank thought. He now had so much food in the wok it was hard to turn it over with the spatula and keep the bottom from burning.

“Anybody gonna help?” he called.

“No!” June said.

He ground up Szechuan peppers with the butt of the cleaver handle and sprinkled them into the cooking food. He tried it and added garlic, then rice wine vinegar. It was getting there. He opened the refrigerator with the toe of his shoe and looked for beer: there was plenty, and the food was going to be hot.

“Come and get it or I’ll throw it out!” While the women came from the next room, he piled bowls and utensils, placed the six-packs of beer on the table in their holders, shoved the soy sauce and other condiments to the center and set the wok on a pot holder. They swept into the room with an audible rush and sat down. Frank rubbed his hands and said, “New blood.”

“You wish,” said June. “They’re bad,” she said to the other women.

“It’s never new enough for these butterflies as they float from flower to flower,” Lucy said.

Frank was always surprised by the capacity of women for a kind of clubbiness with one another. These three already seemed to be old friends. Men would still have been eyeing each other’s shoes and watches, listening for accents.

“What do you think of this, Joanie?” Frank asked her.

Joanie looked rural and lost for just a moment, then focused on the food. “What is it?”

“Gallatin County Thousand Sighs Resfriados.”

“Oh.”

Frank dished out the food. It was like summer camp. The women were artificially elated, and the energy of unexpressed wit seemed to fill the room.

Joanie took one last doubtful look at her food and said, “Over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes!”

Frank quaffed a beer to catch up. June told about a customer who constantly complained about his Buick, coming to the agency to gripe about mysterious noises. Today, she finally gathered a group of mechanics and sales people and placed the complaining customer, a circuit court judge, in the middle and asked him to imitate the sound his Buick was making in the hopes one of them would know what it was. The judge made a series of whining chugs — which June tried to render — followed by a low whistle, repeated them five times for his appreciative audience, only to have June tell him, “We’ll have to get back to you on this.” Wild laughter filled the dining room. The immense Joanie rose to a semi-crouch and popped four beers. “More beer for my lieutenants,” she said, astonishing every sweating face around the table as she passed them out. June filled her mouth with stir-fry, widened her eyes and said, “Shit fire!” Lucy quietly slid her hand up the inside of Frank’s thigh and Joanie shouted, “Drop his dick, lady, you’re busted.” The gaping faces stared around giddily.

“What a dinner party!” Frank yelled, surprised at the volume of his own voice. He looked across at Joanie’s beef red slab of a face and wondered what would come out of it next.

“Guess who stood outside my window watching me undress last month?”

“Who?”

Lucy jabbed her thumb sideways in Frank’s direction. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, kept chewing. This wasn’t real insouciance.

“Oh, Frank,” crooned June. It was hard to tell whether or not she was disapproving.

“So what did you do,” Joanie asked, “call 911?”

“I sent him to the Arctic Circle,” Lucy said. She looked around at the bewildered faces and added, “I’m a travel agent.” It didn’t seem to clear up much, but she didn’t enlarge on it and “Arctic Circle” was absorbed as some sort of expression, descriptive of a deplorable state reached in many modern relationships.

It was here that Frank thought he would try to explain. He would tell them about the sense of freedom he had prowling around in the middle of the night, the sense of surprise, but Joanie jumped in to call, “Curiosity killed the cat,” and raised her arms like a choirmaster as the others cheered, “Satisfaction brought him back!”

“I was trying to get to the bottom of things,” he said, and got booed. He opened another beer and pushed his bowl away from himself. The others did the same. It was like a women’s locker room and he was the towel boy. Lucy belched without self-consciousness and looked off in thought.

“We should count our blessings,” she said with faint gloom, “that we haven’t arrived at the moon of the cruise and package tours.”