Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

By dessert, they were venturing into more sensitive areas — Frances’s junior college roommate Meredith, who’d died of brain cancer in June at thirty-four (Frances’s age); Howard’s father’s tachycardia and his unfulfilled wish to play Turnberry before he died. Napkins across their empty plates, they moved on to life’s brevity and the need to squeeze every second for all its worth. And by the time decaf arrived, they’d eased over onto the subject of sex, and how misunderstood a subject it was in the culture, and how it was all the Puritans’ fault that it even was a subject, since it should be completely natural and unstigmatized. They each spoke lovingly about their spouses, but not that much.

Seated at the long head table full of fellow award-winners and bosses, and directly in front of a Ramada Inn banquet room full of noisy, laughing people they didn’t know but who were occasionally casting narrow-eyed, flaming arrows of spite through the two of them, sex infiltrated their soft-spoken conversation like a dense, rich but explosive secret they, but only they, had decided to share. And once that happened, everything, everyone in the room, everything Frances and Howard planned to do later in the evening— drive home to their spouses, Ed in Willamantic, Mary in Pawcatuck, down dark and narrow, late-night Connecticut highways; the chance visits they might have with zany colleagues at the bar; voice mail they might check for after-hours client calls — any and all thoughts about this night being normal ended.

Most Americans don’t even begin to reach their sexual maturity until they’re not interested in it anymore, Frances observed. The Scandinavians, indeed, had the best attitude, with sex being no big deal — just a normal human response (like sleeping) that should be respected, not obsessed over.

Americans were too hung up on false conceptions of beauty and youth, Howard agreed, sagely folding his long arms. He was six-foot five, with big pie-plate hands and had played basketball at Western Connecticut. His father had been his high-school coach. Howard had dull gray, closely spaced eyes and still wore his hair in an old-fashioned buzzed-off crew cut that made him look older than twenty-nine. Orgasm was way overrated, he suggested, in contrast to true intimacy, which was way under rated.

Nothing in a marriage could ever be absolutely perfect, they agreed. Marriage shouldn’t be a prison cell. The best marriages were always the ones where both partners felt free to pursue their personal needs, though neither of them advocated the open marriage concept.

The word marriage , Frances said, actually derived from an Old Norse word, meaning the time after the onset of a fatal illness when the disease has you in its grip but you can still walk around pretty well. This was her father’s joke, though she didn’t mean it to sound like a sourpuss complaint. Just a yuck, like Howard’s Alzheimer’s story. She found she could joke with Howard Cameron, who was witty in the blunt-to-gross way nerdy ex-jocks who weren’t complete idiots could be funny. She was impressed she knew him well enough to relax, after only two hours. With Ed she hadn’t gotten that far in six years.

“I’m the fifth of five. All boys,” Howard said, watching the Mexican waiters collecting banquet dishes off the tables. Their own table had emptied, and the crowd was filing out through the back doors, leaving the two of them conspicuously alone behind the white-skirted dais table. People were saying goodbyes and telling lame jokes about spending the night in the car on the Interstate. The lights were turned up bright to move people out, and the room smelled of sour food. He was aware they were obviously lingering. Yet he felt intimacy with Frances Bilandic. “I’m sure my parents had a solid sex life until my dad had to go on the blood thinners,” Howard went on solemnly. “But then, well, I guess things changed.”

“Technology took over, right?” Frances said and smirked. She was spunky and had snapping blue eyes, an attractively mannish little blond haircut and a barely noticeable overbite that displayed the bottoms of her incisors. She was the only daughter of a Polish widower from Bridgeport, had performed the balance beam in high school, and was as hard as a little brickbat. She’d probably seen plenty. Though he knew he was getting serious too fast, and that could spook her. Only she had to know what was what. It was a game. “He went on the pill? Or the pump, right?” Frances made a little up-down pumping motion with her thumb, up-down, up-down, and a little “eee-eee-eee-eee” squeaky sound. “That works out better for older people, I guess.”

“He’s not the type,” Howard said. He thought then about his father standing sadly out in their broad, freshly mown back yard that sloped all the way to the shining Quinebaug River, in Pomfret. It was the late-spring day his father had come back from the hospital after having his veins surgically ballooned. Geese were flying over in a V. His father had been wearing faded madras shorts and stood barefoot in the cool grass, staring off. His legs were thin and pale. It was heartbreaking.

But heartbreaking or not, Howard thought, it just showed that life had to be seized and squeezed before somebody came after you with a vein balloon. Marriage, kids — these were certainly ways you could squeeze it. His parents’ way. (Though maybe they weren’t so happy about that now.) But there were also alternatives, avenues that society or their employer the Weiboldt Company — red-and-white FOR SALE and SORRY YOU MISSED IT signs littering the seaboard from Cape May to Cape Ann — wouldn’t necessarily condone; and avenues you definitely wouldn’t start down every day of your life. Except of course those very avenues got chosen every day. Every second probably somebody somewhere was squeezing life on that alternative avenue. Probably in this very Ramada, while their banquet was ending, somebody was squeezing it. Why fight it?

“I hope I haven’t made light of a serious subject,” Frances said somberly referring to his parents. She was wearing a white pants suit with a green polka-dot blouse that did nothing, she knew, to show off her curves. But what she had wanted tonight, her special night of recognition, was to look drop-dead gorgeous, yet also to look like business. She, after all, had sold more real estate than anybody in her part of western Connecticut, and done it by working her tail off. And not by listing water-view contemporaries and Federalist mansions in Watch Hill, but by flogging attached row-houses in Guatemalan neighborhoods, four-room Capes, and buck-and-a-half condos downwind of the Willamantic landfill — units they buried you with in anybody else’s market. And she knew business didn’t take nights off, so you had to look the part. She thought of herself as a smart, tough cookie, a Polack go-getter, an early riser, a quick study who didn’t blink.

But that didn’t mean you couldn’t wander into some fun with a guy like this big Howard. A long, tall, galunky-jocky guy with some mischief in his eye, who could use some release from his own pressure cooker. Having an intense, private conversation with Howard Cameron was the reward for doing her job so fucking well.

“I’ll bet if we adjourned to a bar where there aren’t so many familiar faces, we wouldn’t have to be so solemn,” Frances said, touching her napkin to the corners of her mouth. She liked the sound of her voice saying this.

Howard was already nodding. “Right. I’m sure you’re right.” He picked up the cheap fake-wood-framed certificate he’d gotten for selling huge amounts of real estate and making everybody but himself rich. “I intend to hang this over the can at home,” he said. The certificate had a stick-on gold seal below his name, and the words In Hoc Signo Vinces embossed around the rim in Gothic-looking letters. He had no idea what this meant.