Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

Frances produced a camera, one of the new sleek, molded operations designed by Japanese to look serious and professional, though it was actually cheap. Three times on the steep road up, she stopped the car and made them get out so she could take a picture of the desert. Twice she got him to take her picture, posing short-necked, stiff and squinting in front of a flagstone retaining wall. Once she took him, and once she got a man from Michigan to take them together with the empty sky behind. “These can be used in divorce court,” Frances said when the Michigan man could still hear them. “I’ll give you the negatives and you can destroy them. I just want a print.”

Howard was remembering how little he liked tourist venues, how you could never see anything 10 million yokels hadn’t already seen and shit on and written graffiti all over before you could get there. What they were doing now really had no purpose. Purpose ended last night. They were just doing this.

Frances stood beside the car, studying her camera, which she’d tried to make operate automatically but couldn’t. The camera made its soft, confident whirring, clicking, sighing noise. “There’s another one of my hand,” she said.

“I don’t think I’m going to get the Grand Canyon,” Howard said. She’d gotten different again now, become businesslike. She was different every hour. You needed a program.

“You haven’t experienced it yet,” she said, holding her camera up, pointing back at the retaining wall and the perfect blue matte of empty space. Again it whirred, clicked and sighed. “It has to be believed to be seen. Of course, I haven’t seen it either. Just pictures.”

“Me not know,” he said, but didn’t sound Japanese. It was more like Indian, and sounded stupid.

She smiled painfully as she turned the camera upside down and read something on the bottom. “Well, you will.” She shook her head and stuck the camera in her purse and started around the car to go. “Then you’ll want these pictures. You’ll pay me for them. You’ll have been exposed to something the likes of which you’ll never have seen or expected. And you’ll thank me all the way back to Phoenix.”

She loved it that the air grew cooler, and that the plant life changed, that there were little pine trees growing right out of the dry, rocky mountain turf. She loved it that the scrub desert floor looked, from high above, like a sand painting an Indian might do — reds and pinks and blues and blacks in layers you’d never see when you were in the middle of it. This was the lesson of the outdoors, she thought: how much that actually existed was hidden in the things you saw; and, that all the things you felt so sure about, you shouldn’t. It was hopeful. She would have to go outdoors more. Selling real estate wasn’t really being outdoors.

She still hated it, and couldn’t quit thinking about it, nearly three weeks later, that he’d said she was good in bed — like she was some carnival act he could give a score to and maybe clap for. Howard was her mistake, no matter that she’d tried to see it different, tried to make him happy. It was one thing, she thought, and maybe okay, to fuck Howard in a HoJo’s by the Interstate. But it was quite another thing — much less good — to move it all out to Phoenix, get to know him a lot better, risk being caught and fired, and still think it could turn out good. And it was stupid, stupid to take him to the Grand Canyon, given his little withholding, stand-on-the-sidelines, complaining self. Ed would’ve been better. Ed would be better because even though sex was out, Ed at least had once been a good sport. As a human being, Howard Cameron had been subpar from the beginning. She hadn’t read the fine print.

She glanced at him, musing away on his side about absolutely nothing, his long hairless white legs planked out in front of him like stilts, his pale knees too far below his shorts, his enormous feet with their giant gray toenails hard as tungsten, and his soft, characterless face, and his bushy unkempt eyebrows. And his basketball haircut. What had been wrong with her? He wasn’t interesting or witty or nice or deep or pretty. He was a pogo stick. And up here, where everything was natural and clean and pristine, you saw it. And that it was wrong. True nature revealed true nature.

But steering the big fire chief’s car up the winding, steepening road with the sheer drop to the desert twenty feet away, she understood she wasn’t going to let him ruin another day with his poor-mouth, sad-sack, nothing’s-perfect, pissy bad attitude. Today she felt exhilarated — it was dizzying. The feeling went right down into her middle, and set loose something else, a spirit she’d never realized was there, much less locked up and trapped. And, they were still on the road, not even to the canyon yet! How would it feel when she could get out, walk ten paces and there would be the great space stretching miles and miles and miles? She couldn’t imagine it. The profound opening of the earth. Great wonders all had powers to set free in you what wasn’t free. Poets wrote about it. Only the dragging, grinding minutiae of every day — cooking, driving, talking on the phone, explaining yourself to strangers and loved ones, selling houses, balancing checkbooks, stopping at the video store — all that made you forget what was possible in life.

Probably she’d faint. Certainly she would be speechless, then cry. Conceivably she’d want to move out here right away, realize she’d been living her life wrong, and begin to fix it. That’s why the people she sold houses to moved — to go where they could live better. They made up their minds — at least the ones who weren’t forced into it by horrible luck— that they and not somebody else ran their lives.

“Those were Navajos,” Howard said, staring out at the drop-off beyond the right road shoulder. He’d been nursing his thoughts. “Not Hopis, okay? I read it in your Grand Canyon book while you were asleep this morning.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“Do I scare you?” Howard said.

Frances braked as traffic on the two-lane road slowed ahead of them. “Do you scare me?” she said. “Are you supposedly threatening or something?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I really can’t think of a way right at this moment that you scare me.” They were already entering the village of South Rim, Arizona, which seemed to be an entirely separate town. A thousand citizens living on the edge of the Grand Canyon — going to the grocery, the dentist, watching TV, car-pooling … all here! Maybe it would seem like Connecticut after a month, but she couldn’t see how.

“Do you think you could ever be married to me?” Howard glanced at her strangely.

“I don’t think so.” She was inching forward, watching traffic. “It’s about the fact that I’m already married. And you’re already married. And we’re married to other people.”

“So it’s just barb-less fucking. Fuck-and-release.” He wasn’t paying attention, just blabbing. Bored.

“Like Etch-a-Sketch. You know?” She stared at the license plate of the Explorer ahead of them. Maine. A Natural Treasure. What was there?

“And so, do you feel guilty about it?”

“I feel …” She stopped. Whatever she was about to say could definitely jeopardize her first look at the Grand Canyon, simply because of whatever brainless thing he would then say back. And precious little happened for the first time anymore, so she didn’t intend to fuck this one up with a lot of idiot blabbing. Why wasn’t Meredith, her roommate who’d died of brain cancer, here now, instead of this guy? Meredith would’ve enjoyed this. “Communications are suspended for a period, okay?” She smiled over at him inhospitably. “I want to, you know, look at the Grand Canyon. No mas preguntas este mañana .”