Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

Their drinks came. The bourbon went straight into his thoughts as he gazed across the room. He was quite conscious of their hands resting on the table. Lucy excused herself. He nodded slightly and watched with vague attention until he realized that she was not going to the rest room, she was going out the door of the restaurant, and if his eyes didn’t deceive him, she had succeeded in snagging her coat en route.

He snapped to attention and quite properly chased after her out the door. He caught her at the curb. Her eyes were brimming.

“I’m perfectly capable of buying my own dinner,” she said.

“What did I do? What did I do, Lucy?” He knew that without their rueful camaraderie he could never ask this seriously.

“You drifted off. You simply drifted off, Frank.”

“Oh Lucy, it’s true. I’m guilty. Come on, let’s go back in. I did a big cattle deal and sort of scared myself. I started worrying about it. Come on. Our steak and baloney will be there in a jiff. One more chance.”

“So of course she buys this,” said Lucy. “She plods back into the mediocre restaurant. Life is just going by a step at a time. He has his deals and their eyes never quite meet, much less their thoughts. She begins to ask herself, What sort of discount can I offer the Methodists for Machu Picchu? Does Royal Holland Lines have any interesting guest hosts this year? Was it Viking that had the bad comedians?” Frank’s eyes sparkled.

They were back at their table in time for the entrées. Lucy looked abashed, as though she had forced him to pay closer attention to her. Frank thought he could see in Lucy a sort of formal decision to take her own destiny in hand. She had had an unsuccessful marriage; and Frank’s biggest reservation about her was that she was heading back into another unsuccessful marriage by hook or by crook. She never seemed to know which cards to play, and Frank was not attracted to women who wanted a lot of help with their cards. Everything else he liked about her. He was so much the sleepwalker lately that it may have been the peculiar floundering way she fucked that brought him back to the bright lights of the reality he craved. He was always interested in people’s businesses and Lucy had a business with some reality in the community. People wanted to get away from time to time and she helped them efficiently. She had a good feeling for the different ways they wanted out, and was a successful sales person. She had led a few tours, even did a Lindblad bird thing in the South Pacific with a group from the university, cramming bird lore and successfully staying ahead of a group that prided itself on being at an information advantage. Before the celebrated busts of the television evangelists, Lucy had a reliable Holy Land trade but that had fallen off, and the region’s reputation for violence took care of what was left.

“Frank?”

“?”

“What’s it all for?” She made this seem a radiant question.

“I knew you were going to ask that.”

“But it makes sense I should ask you. We have our business interests. We’re beyond survival. What are we trying to achieve?”

“Hm.”

“Well, I think it’s important to find out.”

Frank stopped eating for a moment. He often liked just being a businessman, much of the time, enough of the time. He was very absorbed in Holly’s emerging story. Maybe he had transferred too much of himself to that. He realized that his compulsion to watch people going about their lives, watching them through their windows as though they were in a laboratory, came from some sense that not enough of the right things were going on in his. If life seemed anything, it seemed thin. It had an “as if” quality. He sensed that everyone was living in an atmosphere of postponement.

He wondered why people didn’t acknowledge this. If President Bush had said he felt “as if” he were waging war on Iraq, Frank would have seen it as a breakthrough in candor. “It’s as if bombs were falling on people.” It was for others, real people, to actually receive the bombs, to have nationalist struggles, to lose the crop, to suffer the red tide, to feel an inner joy at the way the new Audi handles the winding road, to be cheerfully fooled by the instant coffee served secretly to them at Antoine’s in New Orleans, to be disappointed by all the cotton wadding in their little bottles of aspirin. Yet there was a real bravery as Lucy decoded the birds of Micronesia for the know-it-alls who hadn’t taken the time, on those snowy days in Montana, to prepare for the intricacies of a cruise ship’s pecking order. This also put her cheek by jowl with the ship’s biologist and it was only a matter of time before they pretended to make a baby in his stateroom. She told this to Frank once before, when she had wondered if you could always detect a lust scenario if you were diligent.

“The Beatles used to call their girlfriends ‘birds,’ ” Frank said. “I remember John Lennon introducing his girlfriend as ‘me bird.’ ”

“Me bird …”

“Yes.”

“Frank, what in the fuck are you talking about?”

“You said you studied birds for your trip and ended up kind of a bird yourself.”

“Oh, I get it. I don’t really remember the sixties.”

It was warm and dark when they left the restaurant. It seemed easy, not needing a decision, to walk into the neighborhoods that spread to the north behind Main Street. Between streets there would be an unpaved road that divided the backs of two rows of houses, an alley where people had their garbage cans, rowboats, woodpiles, and where their windows looked out unguarded onto this cheerful lack of arrangement. Frank heard the sound of a stringed instrument and was drawn toward it as they walked. He saw the window and crept to its light, gesturing to Lucy to follow. From a few feet, he gripped Lucy’s arm and felt safe looking in. A man in a white undershirt was playing a cello, drops of sweat on his forehead as he stared grimly at the music stand. Next to him, in a plastic bassinet, a baby watched its own waving fists. It was an empty room with a wooden floor, and for furniture only the chair the musician sat on. Frank couldn’t make out the source of light and there wasn’t a shadow anywhere.

When they got back to the alley, Lucy said, “That scared me.”

Frank gave her a comradely squeeze to reassure her. “An original scene, wouldn’t you say?”

They walked a short distance into a shadow and began to kiss. They kissed for a while and he slid her arm down until her hand was between his legs. He held her buttocks from behind and worked her dress up until he could get his hands into her panties. The globes of flesh felt cool. He stood back from her so that he could get his hand in front and his fingers inside. She stood in the alley and moaned, moving against his hand as it grew slippery.

He led her into a garage. There was an old Buick parked inside and he opened its back door. God, it was just like his own Buick. Lucy hesitated, then sat on the end of the back seat, then slid back. He took his pants down and his cock was straight out into the air as he reached inside to lift her foot over the front seat. She undid her blouse and pulled it apart so her breasts stood up white in the faint light. She bit the side of her hand and watched him as he entered. She lost caution and tried to come before he did. Big tendons on the inside of her thighs stuck into his hips and her feet were on the roof. He wanted to make sounds as he felt the spurts loosening into her but kept quiet. “I’ll turn over if you stay hard,” she said. He said “Okay” experimentally, and stood outside the car where he could make out the pale curve of her rear. He felt crazy bafflement as phrases went through his mind, like “travel agent” and “Old World charm.” So, that part of it didn’t work out.