Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

Drinkin’ wine

.

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-odee

Drinkin’ wine!

She said, “You’ve had enough. Shall we?” She waved for the bill, which I paid with my head down, and we went out the door into the cold air with a nearly full white moon lighting up the mountains to the north. When we shortcut through the alley to my parked car, Jocelyn detained me, and leaning against the old brick wall of the hotel, we kissed for a long time. I slid my hands down her lower back, feeling the heat from her face against mine. She began panting and said, “Let’s go to your house. I want you to see me.”

We were hardly through the door before Jocelyn undressed. I wouldn’t say that I was taken aback, but this was no striptease: she just wanted to show me something. She was lean and fit and well made, but it was hardly erotic. She seemed proud of herself in a guileless way. “Where’s the bedroom?” she asked. I pointed, without saying anything. “We go there,” she said.

Jocelyn’s ardor proceeded from one extreme inspiration to another. I couldn’t imagine what dark place needed such fulfillment. I was hoping I’d held up my end, but I honestly wasn’t sure. When she sat up on the bed, I asked, “Who exactly is Womack?”

Jocelyn arose and dressed. She said, “I thought you knew better than that,” and left. I looked at the doorway as though she was still in it.

I slept for a few more hours, got up, ate breakfast, and went to the paint store for rollers. When I got to the Haineses’ house, formerly amiable Mrs. Haines was waiting for me. Her husband, agog with worry, watched from behind the screen door.

“You scoundrel,” she began. “Are you ever going to finish painting my house? You’ve been scraping and showing up when you feel like it and leaving the ladder leaning against the front. The neighbors think we can’t afford to pay and a half-painted house is going to ruin their property values—” I looked over at the husband, probably for support. “Don’t look at him. He can’t help you. I’m in charge here!” She gazed at my hat and seemed to be spelling out the words, “Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’.”

So my hope of correcting the poor impression I had left with Jocelyn — and doing it that day — went up in smoke. I slaved away until sundown, when evening shadows crossed the surface upon which I was rolling Chantilly Pearl enamel — never saw either of the Haineses — and headed straight to the pharmacy for aspirin. I could barely move.

I was in something of a bad mood. Bad moods for me usually consisted in being unable to grasp the meaning not of life necessarily — that was hopeless, as witness the thousands of years of philosophical mishmash — but simply of the way people lived. Happily, this terrible impulse only surfaced occasionally. Today, with a bottle of aspirin in hand, I strolled the neighborhoods that usually cheered me, and arrived at the sort of overview I hoped would soon go up in smoke, even as I conceived it.

Staying in one place long enough, you saw the rise and fall of domestic arrangements and the physical appurtenances that accompanied them. At a certain hormonal stage, tempered by moderate practical knowledge, the couples formed and began to construct the cheese ball. The cheese ball consisted of a building known as the home, the transportation equipment, the sustenance gear including heating and cooking facilities, the investments and liquidity that kept the cheese ball from rolling backwards and ruining its owners; then, in most cases, the eventual collapse of the agreement that had generated the cheese ball in the first place and the subsequent deliquescence of the cheese ball itself into its component parts, to be reconstituted in the generation of new cheese balls by less-fortunate couples or, in some cases, the complete vanishing of the cheese ball entirely.

Only at the end of this rumination did I recognize that I myself had no cheese ball and, moreover, that I had always wanted one. Perhaps I was needy. Needy was bad. I knew needy was bad, but I embraced needy. Needy was human. My principle in life so far had been to avoid dying with a grievance on my lips; maybe that was not enough. Maybe I needed to change. I had two more days’ work painting the house for that poor old man and his asshole of a wife; after that I was hanging up my roller.

When I first saw the judge, Daniel Bowles Lauderdale, I thought I recognized him, if dimly. For a moment I wondered if he was a relative of some sort, or a friend of my parents. I was able neither to rescue his face from memory nor get it out of my mind. Until I heard his voice: this was the Billings lawyer of my school days who had declined to pay me for painting his cabin in Harlowton! He still had the perm but it had gone gray. I supposed the secretary he’d been squeezing in the cabin had been replaced with a fresher one. I don’t think Throckmorton had gauged the potential bellicosity of Judge Lauderdale. When he, Throckmorton, opened up the matter of Tessa’s previous brushes with the law, Lauderdale exploded. “That’s enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” And we went to recess. Throckmorton slumped briefly in his seat and said, “That’s the only piece of rhetoric the old turd ever learned. Nevertheless, I think I got us off on the wrong track, which I shall undo: crow is best eaten when it is still warm.”

Once we were before Lauderdale again, the judge said to Niles, “Attorney Throckmorton, I too survived law school at Missoula. I too endured life among woebegone professors and hippie degenerates. But that does not make us soul mates.”

“Of course, Judge, of course you’re right.”

“I’m going to wind this up until I can speak to and/or depose some of Dr. Pickett’s colleagues. Otherwise, I am obliged to listen to you, Attorney Throckmorton, and you are unreliable.”

As we sat in Niles’s Audi, ruing the day, his phone rang and he answered it. After he listened for a moment, he told the caller the police were taping the call. Then without further comment, he hung up and said, “Disgruntled husband. Idle threat. Stock item in the trade.”

When I was a boy, I made a few trips with my mother to Arkansas. My father stayed behind. Our trips to Arkansas were mostly taken up with Pentecostal doings which included my maternal grandparents and involved the usual strumming, staggering, falling out, and most alarming, “holy laughter.” To me, that was Arkansas; imagine my surprise when an Arkansan became president of the United States. A fellow medical student, a reasonable young woman with whom I fornicated purely as a relief from our studies, theorized that my experience in Arkansas surely left me with religious longing, a theory I tested by attending several churches, starting with the Catholic church, which astonished me by its morbidity. When I told the pleasant young priest that I thought I’d try some of the others, he said that I was wasting my time and that those churches were “spin-offs.” I tried them anyway and was briefly tempted by an Episcopalian congregation whose pastor was a lesbian in a tuxedo. I thought the discourse was at a higher level, featuring such concepts as “ecumenical” and “ecclesiastical,” but in the end it seemed bloodless. It was too bad that I found the Pentecostal church absurd, because that’s really where my heart lay. As insincere as my occasional episodes of falling out and jerking on the floor may have been, the approval I got as a child who had been touched by the Holy Ghost was transforming, even if my father, learning of it, called me a bullshit artist.

I remembered a conversation I had with Alan Hirsch about our work. He remarked that there was a fine line between a rut and a groove in a way that suggested we were in a rut, and that professional life necessitated recognizing that you were in a rut; but most pointedly I recalled feeling that this didn’t ring a bell at all and that I badly needed to get out of my very satisfying groove and broaden my life with travel, romance, etc., because I liked my work too much. Now that work was somewhat withheld, this was a painful thought.