Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“Get us a table at the Red Lion and I’ll be along in just a minute,” Gracie said.

“Okay,” Frank said. He turned to Holly and squeezed her. “Bye, pet.” The embrace had become awkward. Holly was unresponsive.

He drove several blocks to the restaurant and went into the air-conditioned semi-darkness. He bought the newspaper from a stand next to the cigarette machine and got a table overlooking the Clark Fork River. The staff far outnumbered the customers. He ordered a Löwenbrau and leaned up against the plate glass window with his paper, trying not to think about family matters at all. He turned to soybeans in the Chicago Board of Trade report, then remembered you couldn’t really tell where things stood, as it would be another month until their moisture requirements peaked. And here was real live news of the drought elsewhere: corn stockpiles were the lowest they’d been in eight years, with estimates lowered by a hundred million bushels. He danced through his favorites: barley, flax seed, feeder cattle, orange juice, cotton, heating oil — no surprises, no atmosphere of opportunity. Maybe because he wouldn’t know an opportunity if he saw one.

Throughout the business world, there was a desire for clout. Clout was what Frank would want if Lane tried to investigate his financial health. Clout would prevent his bank from cooperating with Lane or any other lawyer. Cloutlessness sent politicians to pollsters. Frank wanted clout. Clout enabled you to fly your daughter around the world. Without clout, you grabbed your ankles and waited for the big boys to shred your undies. Frank’s curiosity about clout had sent him staring into the windows of neighbors to see what they were doing with what clout they had on the off hours. It seemed quite proper to seek information in a covert way — what the police called a fishing expedition.

A negligible domestic instant like meeting Lane made Frank want to start a riot, a civil disturbance that would ventilate his own malaise and sense of peril. Frank had felt for years that the new man in him was prepared for a debut, but it was locked in a lingering postponement. A galoot was after his baby.

“I’m devastated by this clunker,” Gracie said, as if reading his mind. She had pulled her coat off her shoulders and was standing next to the table.

He stared at her and attempted to think. “As who is not?”

This was not conciliatory. Frank had made the least of the opening. He just wanted to be in motion, not caught flat-footed, and he came up with something not so nice. But he jumped up to hold Gracie’s chair. She made a wry smile and sat down. He glanced at the top of her dear little head, then took his seat in despair. He could just make out the soup of the day on a chalkboard: cream of broccoli. His life reeled past, continuously taxiing, rarely airborne. When the waitress arrived, they vied to order drinks, Absolut vodka and grapefruit juice for both, pharmaceutically powerful choices.

“For some reason,” Gracie drawled, as though they’d been talking all along, “I don’t think we’re the quality of people who can finish some long-term thing like raising a child. I should have known that what we thought we’d done with Holly would turn out to be an illusion. That cluck is far from what I had in mind for her.”

“Your great anthem was, Never give up your illusions.”

“There’s illusions and there’s illusions.”

“Well, Holly’s illusion is that this water-hoarding bozo is a romantic figure.”

It was hard to be indignant about this. He didn’t really know where Gracie had been and the look of defiance he had expected wasn’t there. Gracie was mostly a practical person and she looked as sad as it was practical to be. The biggest thing that they had once had together had been themselves — not some third thing, not a business or a child or even a view of the future, but just this enveloping situation that had lasted a long time — had lasted, in fact, right up to the very second that it didn’t. And then it was truly gone.

“How did you get here?”

“I drove. Frank, do you know what? I don’t think I can sit in this depressing place long enough to get something to eat. Would you mind terribly if we went someplace else?”

“No, not at all. I — not at all.”

“Maybe we can get the girl to put our drinks in to-go glasses. Or I’ll tell you what, we’ll just gulp them and split.”

“I’m not hungry anyway.”

“Neither am I.”

They drove to a small park with modest houses around its sides, a concrete tennis court without a net, a swing set and a steel flagpole. There was a light overcast sky and it was pleasantly cool. The only people in the park were those crossing it to go elsewhere, including an old woman making agonizing progress on a cane. Sitting on one of the wooden benches, Frank looked around and thought how easy it was to feel sunk into one of these spots where the world goes by. He thought of the doctors decamping from his clinic, now a pathetic shell, and the bath he took on the yearlings, the sort of faux pas he once never made. You could sit in this park and in a couple of months get a warm sweater and sit in it some more and feel yourself either immersed in the small human routines of a town or perched on a cooling planet hurtling through time and space. It was dealer’s choice.

He couldn’t understand sitting next to Gracie. Either this was an illusion or she had never gone, never really gone; or if she had gone, she would be right back; or, how was this, she had gone but she’d had to go and then would be back. It was satisfying to think in little crazy units like this, kind of absorbing to avoid sweeping concepts. Gracie was there, then went forth, then returned. She was following her star! He was stuck in the mud. She was on a high wire. He was sucking wind. Other times, it was his star and her mud. Other times, for each of them, it must have been like leaving the house to go to work while the old dog watched from the lawn and wondered why he didn’t get to go along. When he had been young he barked; when he was old he just watched; and then he was dead and gone.

And Frank remembered how poorly he had dealt with solitude — well to remember that, because he was going back to it — how he had slunk around like a coyote, encountering other lonely prowlers, joyless, glancing occasions, losing ground with every event in a steady regression. What was the name of that girl he met at Hour Photo? Picking up her nephew’s school pictures? Gone. He covered Gracie’s hand with his. She removed her hand and laughed. Out the window went his dream of mystery poontang.

“What are you laughing at?” Frank asked, wondering if she could read his mind.

“Remember when Holly was little, she used to drink out of the hummingbird feeders?”

“Yeah.”

“I was just remembering.”

“Well, it takes a big dog to weigh a ton.”

“Sure enough?”

“It seems funny, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The way things have flown by.”

“Flown by,” said Gracie. “They’ve flown by, all right.”

“I think once I get over being bitter, I’ll feel we had a pretty good run at it.”

“I’m already at that point. I never was bitter.”

“What did you have to be bitter about?”

“Oh, Frank, let’s not start.”

“Okay.” He was inches from an unproductive fugue state, the very trees in the park darkening as though in an eclipse. He looked around at the beaten paths in the grass, a lot of anonymous human use. He wished they were living together now in a raw Sunbelt subdivision with no history whatever.

“I feel kind of guilty about this,” Gracie said. “I promised that this trip would be highly focused on Holly’s situation.”