Richard Ford - Independence Day

“Got any better ideas?” My stomach produces an audible querking noise as if on cue.

She takes a drag on her Winston and turns her head slightly to the side and blows smoke the other way. I can see the magazine she’s reading is Achieve Super Marital Sex (something you might get mail order). I can also see she’s not wearing a wedding ring, though that’s not my business. “If you want to drive down to Oneonta, there’s a Chinese stays open till midnight. Their egg drop’s almost edible.” She yawns and stifles it halfway.

“That’s a pretty fur piece,” I say, grinning witlessly. I sniff a gamy pilot light/old stale food smell reminiscent of Ted Houlihan’s house. I of course hate egg drop soup, know no one who actually likes it, and hold my ground.

“Twenty-five air miles.” She flips the pages of her magazine to one that has pictures I’m not close enough to see.

“Nothing else open in town, then, huh?” I am less convincing, I can tell.

“Bars. This is just a little hick burg. It pretends different. But what else is new.” She flips another page nonchalantly, then leans forward to get a better look at something — possibly a defter “mounting strategy” or some fancy new penetration protocol, a tricky Swedish “apparatus” for manipulating previously undiscovered parts and zones, ingenuity for making life better than ever. (My own parts, I realize dimly, have not been manipulated in a coon’s age, except in the age-old way; I wonder bleakly if Paul might not be somewhere in the menaceless warp of Cooperstown, having his own parts ardently worked over while I’m here begging a little supper.)

“Look,” I say, “you think there’s any chance I could get a little leftover spaghetti? I’m as hungry as a bear, and I’d be glad to eat it cold. Or I’d eat something else that was handy. Maybe some tapioca or a sandwich.” I edge in the door to make my presence more a feature in the room.

She shakes her frizzy head and thumps her Genny, still intent on her sex magazine. “Jeremy hangs a big lock on the fridge so nobody can come down for Dagwoods, which used to happen, especially with the Japanese. They’re apparently always starving. But I’m not trusted with the combination, ’cause I’d just stand back and let you have it all.”

I look to the dimly shining Traulsen cold box, and indeed there’s a hasp and bail soldered right onto it, and a big impregnable-looking lock — something it’d be a lot of trouble to jimmy off.

I’m close enough, though, to see the diagram that’s captured the chef’s special attention: a full page of four-panel drawings showing a man and woman, both naked, and painted using translucent, unprurient pastels, in front of a completely nonsexual pea-green background of hazy bedroom details (all emblematic of marriage). Fido-style is the theme here. In panel #1 they’re both on their knees; in #2 “he’s” standing and “she’s” half draped off a bed, fully “offered;” in #3 they’re both standing, and I can’t see #4, though I’d like to.

“You finding some new recipes in there?” I leer down at her.

Her head twists around and up, and she gives me a brazen, pouty-mouth look that says: Mind your own business or I’ll mind it for you. It makes me immediately like her, even if she won’t unlock the fridge and build me up a Dagwood. This, I think, is the end of dinner, though my bet is she’s got the combination committed to memory.

“I thought you wanted a sandwich,” she says, looking back, amused at the canine escapades of two idealized pastel versions of married people who look like us. “Whatta you think she’s saying?” She points her short finger, which has some flour dried on its fingernail, at #1, in which the female is looking back around at the already hooked-up male, as if she’s just had a good new idea. “‘Knock, knock, Who’s there?’” the chef says. “‘Did you hear the garage door?’ or ‘Do you mind if I balance my checkbook?’” She tours her tongue roguishly around in her cheek and looks mock-disgusted, as if this were all just shameless.

“Maybe they’re talking about a sandwich,” I say, experiencing a gradual resituating of my own little-thought-of below-decks apparatus.

“Maybe they are,” she says, leaning back again while she smokes. “Maybe she’s sayin’, ‘Now, did you remember to buy Bibb lettuce, or did you get that old iceberg again?’”

“What’s your name?” I say. (My talk with Sally has been more serious and relieving than actual fun.)

“C-h-a-r, Char,” she says. She has a pop of her Genny and swallows it down. “Which is short for Charlane, not Charlotte and not Charmayne. My older sisters are blessed with those.”

“Your pop must’ve been named Charles.”

“You know him?” she says. “Great big loud guy with a tiny little brain?”

“I don’t think so.” I’m waiting for her to flip another page, interested to see what else our panelists come up with.

“Funny,” she says, putting her Winston between her teeth so the smoke makes her squint, and pushing the bulky chef’s sleeves above her fragile elbows. She is more delicate on second notice. Her outfit is what makes her look chunky and tough. The “chef look” is not a good look for her.

“How’d you get to be a chef?” I say, happier, even just for a moment, to be here in the lighted kitchen with a woman rather than scrounging a burger in the dark or struggling to make contact with my son.

“Oh, well, first I attended Harvard and got a Ph.D. — let’s see — in, ah, can opening. Then I did my postdoctoral work in eggs and toast buttering. That must’ve been at MIT.”

“I bet it’s harder than English.”

“You would think so.” She lays the page over to reveal more pastel panels, this time spotlighting fellatio, with some vivid but tasteful close-ups showing everything you’d ever want to know from a picture. The female panelist, I notice, now has her hair tied back in an accommodating ponytail. “My, my,” Char says.

“You a subscriber?” I say archly. My stomach makes another deep, organic-sounding grumble-gurgle.

“I just read what the guests leave after meals. That’s all.” Char pauses longer at the fellatio panels. “This was left under one of the chairs. I’ll be interested by who asks about it tomorrow. My guess I’ll get to keep it.”

I picture ole horseface stealing down after lights-out to give the room a tumble.

“Listen,” I say, with the sudden realization (again) that I can do anything I want (except get a plate of spaghetti). “Would you like to strike out to one of those bars and let me buy you another beer while I have a gin and maybe a sandwich? My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way.” I give her a smile, wondering if we should shake hands.

“And by the way?” Char says, mocking me. She snaps the magazine shut back-to-front, and on the back is a full-page color ad for a thick, pink, anatomically audacious but rather fuzzily photographed dildo that some comical prior reader has drawn a red Happy Face on the business end of. “Well, hel-lo,” Char says, peering down at the pink appendage grinning back off the tabletop. “Aren’t we happy?” The dildo is referred to in the ad as “Mr. Standard Pleasure Unit,” though I’m dubious about what it has to do with the standard marriage realities. Under standard circumstances, “Mr. Pleasure” would be a hard act to follow. “He” in fact doesn’t have a particularly good effect on my own enthusiasm and leaves me oddly glum.

“Maybe I’ll let you walk me over to the Tunnicliff,” Char says, sliding the magazine out across the slick tabletop, rejecting Mr. Pleasure Unit as pie in the sky. She pushes back in her metal chair and turns her attention finally to me. “That’s halfway home. And we’ll say good night at that point.”