Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“You can always slip out to the ranch. It’s an easy commute. Might help to hear some birds.”

“This is handier. I can walk downtown.”

“But Frank,” said Mike, his face clouding. “At the rate you’re going, you’ll be lucky to hang on to your house.”

Frank hadn’t heard that before. He went on wiping up the yolk with a wedge of toast. He thought he brought real insouciance to this moment. Take my house?

“Whatever blows their hair back, Mike. Some of these things are like weather. You just have to watch Willard and wait for another system.”

“All I want you to know is, I’m down there among those guys, the bank, whatever. I’m doing what I can to slow the process. But what you have to do, Frank, is to try to have a change of attitude.”

“Okay.”

“And remember I love you.”

“Okay.”

Mike left and went to work. Frank wasn’t thinking about anything but speaking to Gracie. He imagined it’d go something like this: “Hi, Gracie, good to see you again. No, no, no, I don’t think we should do that . I think we should build up to that , if indeed we do that at all. Without question, you would like a reprise of my activities, my accelerated life story, post your departure but pre my, how shall I say, decline? You look pretty much the same, how do I look? I suppose there’s been water over the dam but that won’t prevent our talking. Is this your lawyer? I don’t mind if he’s here, he looks pretty stupid, some of this will be too much for him to absorb. You see, Gracie, I’ve had a failure of faith at some level. That pyramid called America, of which I was but a small stone, has inverted and is now resting on its point. As you see (you took physics), this makes for a wobblier arrangement than the one we grew up with, with the big part on the bottom.”

He was now making an extraordinarily close examination of himself in the mirror: hairline, pores, teeth. He reminded himself not to compress his lips, which produced the effect of widening his face in a kind of, in a kind of … well, it was unattractive. He wasn’t going to work, he decided; he would do this first. So what was he thinking, putting on these drab clothes, this I-am-sincere hopsacking blazer? Women don’t want sincerity or any other foursquare merits. They want to look at a man and say, This animal is about to spring on me like a Bengal tiger, ease that big lever till it seats. With that stupid hopsacking sport coat she would assume he was about to fuck the lawyer or the lamp but not her in his vapid sincerity getup. Officer, he rolled in here doing sixty, and before you could say Jack Robinson, had his dick crosswired in the reading lamp. Do take him off, I’m trying to watch the news.

Frank sort of came to, still standing in front of the mirror. Slow down, hoss, he said to himself, whoa-up now, big fella. He put on his jeans and old cowboy boots and his nicest green sweater. He headed for 121 Third Street.

Third Street. A quiet neighborhood. The yards were orderly but not so well kept that plastic toy parts looked out of place. The lawns blossomed each year with campaign signs of one kind or another, from U.S. president to local county commissioners. Flats of petunias from local nurseries lined most entryways and, in warm weather, the smell of outdoor cooking reached the sidewalk.

Frank passed a young man playing his guitar and singing on a wooden porch. A mongrel bounced to a white fence alongside the sidewalk barking hoarsely, as though each time it landed on the ground the impact drove the barks from its lungs. Frank didn’t react and the dog gave it up as a bad job. An old Dodge rested on flat tires alongside the curb. Its hood was up and two teenage boys rested on their elbows and chests underneath it, contemplating the engine with such absorption that neither felt the need to speak. When Frank was a boy he wanted a car so much, he tried to study how they worked. He memorized the four-cycle engine — intake, compression, power and exhaust — so that if he ever got a car, he would know how to operate it. What could recommend itself better to a pubescent youngster than a rolling love nest with its own music system? It explained the dreamy glaze of teenage drivers.

Now he was nervous. He was only a few houses away. In fact, there was the Saab. He stood in front of an English-style cottage with tall trellises covered with honeysuckle on either side of a narrow porch. Frank tried to understand exactly what he was doing here. He tried to remember who used to live here. He thought it was a piano teacher. He hesitated, and would have retreated if he had been sure he was unseen. Then Edward Ballantine came to the door and said, “Ah, I thought you might still come. Good.” Gracie appeared behind him. Frank couldn’t see her face well enough to glimpse her thoughts. “I think I’ll just ease on,” said Edward. “I really ought to be out of the way.” He went out the door and, fixing Frank with a determined beam, down to the sidewalk. “Make the most of your visit,” he called back. “It’s for everyone’s good.”

Finally, Frank stood in front of Gracie in the doorway. The Saab went off with its airplane noise. Frank felt a little unsteady. He wished he’d brought something. Flowers would have been a laugh all right, but it would have been nice to do that anyway, nice and impossible.

“Hi, Grace.”

“Hello, Frank.” He must have looked blank because her face broke into a smile and she added, “Hi, I’m Gracie.”

He felt a panicky numbness. He had not expected this and didn’t feel he could be sure of anything he said. Gracie was wearing a pink cable-knit cardigan over her shoulders and her hands were clasped in front of her. She had her hair up and it emphasized the good way the years had firmed her face into a small strength. Her eyes were brown and deep-set, and there were times when she looked a bit Indian.

“Edward suggested that maybe we could talk,” he said.

“I’ve been expecting you.”

“I wonder, shall I come in?”

“I really don’t know.”

“I think you can trust me, Gracie.”

“It’s not that. I just don’t want to watch you noticing how we’ve furnished the place. I think you’re well capable of making that the issue.”

“I am curious. I suppose I’d say something. Well, we could sit out here. Or go somewhere to eat. It’s almost that time. Honestly, I wouldn’t make the furniture the issue. I’m not that bad.”

Gracie pointed to the street. “Eat it is, then.”

The Mine got a pretty good lunch crowd. It was an Italo-American restaurant featuring vaguely familiar Italian dishes with the usual local short cuts. It was designed to suggest a complicated grotto with lumpy white walls and dripping red candles in wall sconces. Despite the active clientele, the place seemed ripe for abandonment; but then it had seemed that way for more than a generation. On being seated by a distracted young man who pulled back Gracie’s chair and blindly handed them two menus, they confronted the very specific moment of quiet.

“Well, we’ve already seen each other once.”

“It was different, somehow,” said Frank.

“How is that?”

“You were on your own. If only for the day. And we were there for Holly, weren’t we.”

Gracie looked into her menu. “It’s unbelievable,” she said. “Your life goes upside down. You travel around the world. Nations fall. Wars break out. But the menu here never changes. It’s humbling to think your life could end, your family could move away, and this Lasagna Special would still be paper-clipped to the menu.”

Frank sensed her in some palpable way that was different from seeing her there holding her menu, a strand of dark hair hanging in her face. She braced the menu one-handed with her thumb in the crease, freeing her other hand to move the hair back over her ear. He thought he was safe watching her study it, but her eyes floated up and engaged his. She smiled.