Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

Although maybe, he thought, Frances just wanted it clear that if somebody was going to be the “tough cookie” it had to be her. Which was fine with him. If you had only one situation in your life with no unhappy surprises and that one worked out just halfway well — the one his parents had had for thirty years, for instance — then you were a lucky duck. His own marriage, all things taken into consideration, might be one of those rarities. He wasn’t hoping to make Frances Bilandic number two. He just wished she wouldn’t be so serious. They both knew what they were doing.

Frances had tiny, child’s hands, but strong, with deep creases in their palms like an old person’s hands. And when he’d held them, in bed in the HoJo’s, they’d made him feel tender toward her, as if her hands rendered her powerless to someone of his unusual size. He reached and took both her little hands in both of his big ones, as semis pounded the girders on I-95. She was so small — a tough, sexy little package, but also a little package of trouble if you didn’t exert strong force on her.

“I wish you wouldn’t be mad at me,” he said, bringing her in close to him. Her strong little bullet breasts greeted his maroon Pawcatuck Parks and Recreation Department T-shirt.

“I’ve never done this before, okay?” she said almost inaudibly, though she let herself be brought in. They didn’t have to be in love, he thought, but they could be tender to each other. Why bother otherwise? (He absolutely didn’t believe she’d never done this before. He, on the other hand, hadn’t.)

“Same here,” he said. Though that didn’t matter. He just wanted a chance to do it again sometime soon.

One of the tractor trailers honked from up above. They were standing out in the hot parking lot at two p.m. on a Tuesday in early September. It was sweet and touching but also completely stupid, since the Weiboldt Mystic office was only five blocks away. An agent could be picking up clients at the HoJo’s. If someone blabbed, it could be over in a flash. Boom … no job. Their colleagues would love nothing more than for two new agents of the year to be fired and to take over their listings. And for what? For a minor misunderstanding about Frances being good in bed — which she definitely was. It made him suddenly anxious to be touching her out in the open, so that he stopped and looked around the lot. Nothing. “Maybe we ought to go back inside,” he said, “we’ve got the room the rest of the night.” He didn’t really want to — he wanted to get to an appointment in White Rock. But he would go back if fate required it. In fact, a part of him — a small part — would’ve liked to have gotten in his car, piled Frances Bilandic in beside him, and headed up onto the Interstate, turning south and never coming back. Leave the whole sorry shitaree in the dust. He could do that. Worry about details later. People who did that were people he admired, though you never really heard what their lives were like later.

“I’m afraid if I went back in that room I might not come out for a week,” Frances said, looking around at the green door of the motel room. She put her rough little hand flagrantly against his still-stiff cock and gave it a good squeeze. “You’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess there’s your evidence,” Howard said solemnly.

“Just checkin’ in on Garfield,” Frances said behind her shades. “I’ll save him for Phoenix. How’s that?”

“I can’t wait.” Howard realized he was grinning idiotically.

“You better,” Frances said. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

And that’s how they left it.

The sales conference, following the first day’s jet-lagged festivities and spiritless camaraderie, developed into a slog almost immediately. Frances kept running into the loud-mouth lesbians from Jersey, who kept repeating the punch line of the joke they’d told twenty times the first night. “Suck-off’s just a Russian general to me, soldier.” They’d bray that line in the elevator or in the ladies’ room or waiting for a panel to begin, then break into squalls of laughter. She couldn’t remember how the joke began, so she couldn’t tell it to Ed on the phone.

All the seminars, chalk-talk panels, motivational speeches and mano a mano sessions with the Weiboldt top management team were tedious and repetitive and usually insulting. They were aimed, she felt, at people who’d never sold a piece of real estate, instead of Platinum agents who’d spurted past 4 million and would’ve been better off at home, fielding stragglers at the end of the summer selling season.

Howard skipped most of the sessions and found some new guys from western Mass. he could talk sports with — a bald Latvian he’d once played against in a state tournament in the eighties. “It comes from being one of five,” he said to Frances on day three, when they’d broken their rule and allowed themselves lunch together in the hotel’s food court, which had an OK Corral theme, and the servers were dressed like desperadoes with guns and fake moustaches. “I spent my youth listening to my parents telling me for the thirteenth time something I already knew.” He seemed pleased, grazing at his taco salad. “I mean, I don’t really mind somebody telling me how to sell a house when I’ve already sold five hundred of them. But I don’t need to seek it out, you know?”

There were certain qualities about Howard Cameron that would never grow on you, Frances thought. He was always happy for somebody to tell him something, instead of generating important data himself. It was a passive aspect, and made him seem sensitive at first. Except it wasn’t really passive; it was actually aggressive: a willingness to let somebody else say something wrong after which he could sit in judgment on the sidelines. You learned that attitude in sports: the other guy fucks up, and when he does — because he always will — then you’re right there to reap the benefits. It was a privileged, suburban, cynical way of operating and passed for easy-going. And he made it work for him. Whereas someone like her had to scrap and hustle and do things in a straight-ahead manner just to get them done at all.

Of course you’d never convince him his way was wrong. He was genetically hard-wired to like things how they were. “That’ll work” was his favorite expression for deciding most issues — issues such as whether to solicit a higher bid on a property after a lower one had already been accepted, or quoting a client an interest rate lower than the bank’s in order to string them along. Things she would never do. Howard, however — long-armed, solemn, goony-faced, harddick Howard Cameron— would do them; had done them countless times, but liked to make you think that he wouldn’t. It was a surprise — something learned from being alone with him two nights running — but she’d already decided that if she saw him again once they were back home, she’d be shocked. He wasn’t a con man, but he wasn’t much better.

Across the noisy food court she saw two of the New Jersey women waiting beside the big chrome sculpture in the middle of the room, scanning around for someone to eat lunch with, and yakking it up as usual. The food court occupied a wide, light-shot, glass-roofed atrium, architecturally grafted onto the Radisson and rising twenty stories, with real sparrows nesting in the walls. Protruding upward fifteen stories from a central reflection pool was a huge, rectangular chrome slab that had water somehow drizzling down it. People had naturally thrown hundreds of pennies in the pool. The New Jersey realtors were looking up at it and laughing. They thought everything had a sexual significance that proved men were stupid. Frances hoped they wouldn’t spot her, didn’t want the Howard Cameron issue to get them going. They should never have come here together.