Driving on the Rim (10 page)

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Hanson asked me to help him in the yard. He did very little work around his property and was a fellow best seen in a suit and tie. In fact, on the weekends when he donned work clothes, usually worn-out elements of his office attire, he seemed almost a different person. As a fourth-generation lawyer in a small town, he supported a tradition that prided itself on its separation from people with work-hardened hands. He was not exactly prissy; delicate was more like it. He picked up any tool, even a leaf rake, suspiciously. But once he started, the lawyer came out and he became an authority—“You don’t do it like that, let me show you,” etc.—until the appearance of the first blister, which he regarded with an accusing and tragic air.

We raked leaves, but we didn’t rake them very long before he stopped and, clutching the rake handle against his chest, leaned toward me and said, “I hope you will extend all the courtesies of a gentleman to Audra.”

“I sure will,” I said.

“I’m confident Audra will offer no provocation whatsoever. She is a brave wanderer in a very cold world. I don’t want to say defenseless, but there it is. I know you’ll respect that.”

“Why even tell me this?”

A spark of irritation crossed his face. “Why? Because you’re an aardvark and you never know what an aardvark will do.”

I had no idea if this was a compliment or not. Later, I looked up “aardvark” without bringing any light to Hanson’s remark. I didn’t think of myself as a living fossil, nor did I eat ants and burrow at night. I was surprised, though, at Karl’s concern for Audra.

Hanson volunteered to walk Audra through change of address requirements for her green card, but it meant going to his office and getting some help from his secretary. Shirley offered to make lunch for me, and so I came back between classes and found bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches on either side of the dining room table, as well as a mountain of material about Florida vacations. Shirley sat down heavily and stared at the pile as though this were the source of her fatigue. “I’ve been through all of this and as soon as you finish lunch, I’m throwing it out. The trouble is, we’re stuck with the dates of your vacation and finding someplace in Florida that’s not a spring break hellhole has been a
problem. However, I have not failed us, Honey-Child. I’ve found a sedate little island where we can spend sunny days on the sand gazing out at the Gulf, a real change of pace. We’ll eat fresh seafood, collect shells, feed pelicans, ride bicycles—”

“Hide the weenie?” I asked through a mouthful of BLT. I thought I was being funny but Shirley didn’t take it well. She swept up the Florida material and left the room.

When she came back in, she said, “When people have time, and commitment, the full benefits of their God-given sexuality, they do not call it ‘hide the weenie.’ ”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Of course you are. You’re not stupid. You’re ignorant. That’s worse.”

In the evening, as the sunset watchers were leaving, the locals with their dogs and the vacationers, Shirley and I, with frozen drinks in to-go cups, followed the avenue of banyan trees to the Gulf. Then we swam, sometimes, shoulder to shoulder, as far out as we could go. We swam naked, out until our feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and made love in a silence disturbed only by the lapping of salt water stirred by our movement. Another time, during the day, with other swimmers nearby, this antic lawyer’s wife manipulated me underwater, surprising me when the sperm floated to the surface. Evidently I made a bit of noise, as the other swimmers stared and Shirley admonished me sharply to “get a grip,” adding that there was no reason to behave like a trained seal. This all was new. I had had the straightforward initiation at the hands of my libidinous aunt, but she seemed to know exactly what she wanted and what I ought to have. With Shirley it was quite different; lots of elements imperfectly understood by me bore upon our activity.

Anthropologists say that every sexual act is a cultural collision, and I think this was true of my Shirley days. Shirley, I learned, was a hometown girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and her marriage to Karl was widely regarded as a rapprochement between elements that had not mingled since the nineteenth century. When Shirley told me one dinnertime quite proudly that both of their great-grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, Karl said, “Mine was an officer” and Shirley said, “Mine
was born in America.” If Shirley ran up too many charges at the local department store, Karl said she was trying to ruin him. I don’t think Shirley understood any of this, and she had little contact with her own family or the people she’d grown up with, though they lived nearby. When Karl said, as he more than once did, that some social event was beneath him, Shirley said that everything is beneath you if you’re on Mars. Karl found most things to be “too new,” and he quaintly—I think this was him trying to be funny—viewed my home in the West as being on the frontier; he called it a “homestead” and asked if I, like Audra, wanted to apply for a green card. These days, Karl was full of merry jokes that left people uncomfortable. I did like Karl but noticed that he had no friends. To be fair, it’s hard to have friends in an old small town if you are born to be dignified.

My sojourn in the Rust Belt certainly made me appreciate my homeplace more than before I left. We had beautiful mountain ranges that kept their snow all summer, though very few of those of us who lived there ever went into them. We thought only out-of-towners went into the mountains, as most Westerners lived in town and were town people like anywhere else. My father used to say that the only thing that set us apart was cheap electricity. Some of that had changed of course, once we learned to keep outsiders from glomming our assets by appreciating them more than we had. It had been a long time since we proudly pointed out that you couldn’t eat scenery. That sentiment belonged to an earlier generation, the ones with “Treasure State” license plates nailed to the garage. Tell someone today you can’t eat scenery, and they’ll put you in the old folks’ home. Where I came from, the wind was the big issue, until you figured out that wind was the price of space.

Anyone might wonder how someone as inadequate as I was could get even as far as I got. Here is where I learned from the aardvark, which the encyclopedia informed me was known for its diligence. I was diligent. All the survival skills I had learned growing up in a family adrift I now focused on my studies. I went from ineducable waster to a driven explorer of my own ignorance; learning was a treasure hunt in a land of facts and ideas. I lit on the health of the human body because it was such a complicated system and would hold my interest. But for the time
being, the only human body that held my interest belonged to Shirley, and it was certainly good enough to keep me going even when, resigned to her own indiscriminate carnality, she embraced me and called me a sap. I even had a twinge of jealousy for poor deceived Karl; “deceived” would turn out to be the wrong word, but I was jealous enough to ask Shirley if Karl made love to her often. “Yes,” she said, “unfortunately.”

Naively, I asked, “Then why do it?” She told me to think of it as customer golf. We settled in on the island, but I never really grew accustomed to the parade of sunburned fat people carrying ice-cream cones, or the noise. I had never been anywhere as noisy as Florida. Airplanes went back and forth overhead, people sped around on various motorized things, and horn honking was as popular as in New York. The leaf blowers roared from sunup to sundown. That many people with no good reason to be there filled the place with a kind of giddiness, not just everyday giddiness but the kind that precedes despair and catastrophe. It was nice to be warm, but the television was dominated by weather reports holding out expectation of more warmth or a rootless fear of cooling. The local weatherman, a black homosexual in a Palm Beach suit, could say, “Some chance of precip” with the air of a man headed to the gallows. Inability to control the weather fed disquiet, since, except for the weather, most would rather be anyplace but here.

Time was running out, and we needed to add a little something to our fling to raise its tone, so we made dinner reservations at a nice waterside restaurant and skipped lunch. I think we both knew that if we ended up at a quality restaurant with leisurely service and candles on the table, but had no appetite and little to say, we would be in for a very uncomfortable ride. I was pretty much over the sex and acted about like a pump jack in an Oklahoma oil field, prepared to perform day and night with my mind elsewhere. It made absolutely no difference to Shirley, adding to my disquiet at being something of a tool.

Looking over her menu, Shirley grabbed my forearm in hilarity. “I should order red snapper! Get it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.” I did, but I didn’t want to let on. But I asked her if she’d tried the planked pork.

“Ha ha ha.” Then when I ordered a steak, she said, “Good God!” and ordered grouper, and another round. I was very pleased with the effect
of the drinks. At first, sitting across the table, Shirley seemed aggressive and worried, her blond streaks symmetrical as the marks on a tiger, the way her nostrils flared when her mouth was closed, all worrisome. But the cocktails cast a spell, like the gauzy shots in the old tearjerkers, so that by the arrival of my sprawling T-bone I was in love. Even though I recognized that in this case love was a Russian import made from potatoes, it was enough to believe in for the time being. I reached under the table to put my hand in her pants as she grinned absently at the grouper. “I’m going to tell the waiter what you’re doing.” I withdrew and went at the steak with knife and fork like a drummer boy. The booze was rushing back and forth between my spine and my brain.

We couldn’t wait to get back to the room. We had dined with such languor that the waiter was startled when we abruptly asked him for our bill and to “make it snappy.” I don’t know what chemical combination had us in such a rush, but nothing was happening fast enough for us. I had such trouble getting the key into the lock of our room I was afraid Shirley would fly off the handle. Looking left and right while I struggled, she had already begun unbuttoning her clothes. I wasn’t handling the pressure and resorted to kneeling in front of the doorknob to sight in the key. Inside, the phone was ringing. Once the door opened, Shirley shot past me to grab the ringing telephone. Phone call no good. I remained on my knees as I listened to Shirley from the doorway. I smiled at several hotel guests as they passed. I heard her say, “I was just about to call you … I already thought of that. Is there a problem?” This question was the last thing Shirley said for quite a long time, then, “I don’t think there’s any need to speak to him … I don’t understand why you’re insisting, why you find it so important, except for your ongoing need to have everything your own way … Very well, Karl.” She held the phone against herself, her face drained of all color, and said to me, “He knows. He and Audra have gotten together. He told me not to come home.” I arose and crossed the room awkwardly, as my feet had gone to sleep.

“Hullo?” Then I was serenaded by Karl and Audra, “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” quite briefly, as they really didn’t know the words beyond those of the title, which they repeated. Then Karl alone on the line, in a barely recognizable voice, flattened by hate, telling me I should never have tried this with a lawyer. Addressing me as “Loverboy,” he
asked me if I had “tried all the holes”; when I failed to answer he said, “How d’you like the smell?” Then, “I know you’re still on the line.” I confirmed that I was.

I said, “Karl, we wish you all the luck in the world. I hope you enjoy Audra. I know I did.” I could feel this one fall as though into a dark well. I hung up.

Shirley demanded to know exactly what Karl had said to me; I thought mentioning the holes was out of the question and so I said, “He wanted to know how I felt about the smell.”

“The smell! What smell?”

“I guess your smell.”

“I hope you told that sonofabitch I don’t have a smell.”

“I thought it would be best if I just didn’t say anything.”

“Maybe so. Never wrestle with a pig. You both get covered with shit and the pig likes it. My smell! He’s gonna pay for that one. When I get through kicking his ass, he’ll never get up.”

Shirley was gnawing the inside of her cheek, her eyes slewing around the room. Suddenly her face went calm. “You and Audra, eh? That could help.” In the little time remaining, we tried to enjoy ourselves in bed; the effort held no appeal. Shirley asked if she was as good a lover as Audra, and when I reminded her that I made up the whole thing about Audra, she jumped out of bed and shouted, “Don’t you dare say that!” We drifted off fairly early in our room overlooking a canal and a golf course. I awakened in the middle of the night to see Shirley standing, just her silhouette, in the dark window that gave onto the balcony. I then went back to sleep until outboard motors in the canal woke me up. Shirley was gone. I knew she was headed north.

Since she left me without enough money to get back to Ohio, I was obliged to stay in the room making frantic calls to anyone I thought could arrange transportation. In the end, good Dr. Eldon Olsson, way out in Montana, extended his credit card, and I was free to go. I had a lot of explaining to do, but Olsson said he’d seen through Shirley in the seventh grade when he had a crush on her, and if this was what it took to liberate his old friend Hanson, it was certainly cheap at the price. This did not incline me to help Shirley with a made-up story about Audra, but I was never asked and all my imaginary rehearsals for undermining
her cause came to nothing. She didn’t need my help; she made off with half of Karl’s estate anyway, and five years later Audra got the rest.

I’ve lost track of Shirley, who lived in Florida for many years. I saw her later at Dr. Olsson’s funeral, but by that time she was back in her hometown, residing in an assisted-living facility. Before addressing the issues having to do with finding new lodging and staying out of the witness box, I felt I had to absorb the full impact of this unsavory life episode, one that left me unnecessarily cautious in matters of ardor. This was too bad because I was an affectionate person who fell in love easily and might have brought greater enrichment to my life if I hadn’t always smelled a rat at the pleasantest times. Karl seems to have made the most of things in his own buttoned-down, impervious way. The following I learned from Eldon Olsson: after Karl lost the fine old family house and was living in a downtown condominium, he befriended the representative of Ton Yik Tailors who came through annually measuring businessmen for suits. On successive visits, the friendship deepened and Karl went to Hong Kong, where he met the consortium of clothiers, which took him on as legal counsel for their growing U.S. activities. Karl married a Chinese girl and only came to the States on business. “He finally found happiness,” said Dr. Olsson, adding, “I hope the same for you, Doctor.”