Waiting for the Man (25 page)

“I guess,” I said, feeling strangely shy about the whole thing.

“Neighbors. And we had to come to Wyoming,” she said. She didn’t mean it that way, but I heard the reproach. Blame. I heard regret and perhaps hints of a future that might have been.

I put my pants on. The clammy feeling one gets at the end of a long walk on a humid day. “Thanks,” she said, and she kissed me on the cheek. “We could have done that a long time ago.” I stumbled for words.

We left the restroom and walked toward the Odyssey. Dan was sitting on a picnic bench, smoking a cigarette. Jealousy wracked his face. We walked to him. “You guys stink,” he said.

“For real?” Angie asked. “Or are you just unhappy?”

“We cleaned up,” I said.

“You can’t wash that kind of smell away,” he said.

I held out two fingers and Dan produced a pack of Marlboro Lights. I took one out and lit it up. “I’m spent,” I said.

“Fuck off,” Dan said.

We heard clapping and saw the media stepping out of the bus one by one, applauding us. “Care to share your thoughts?” Dan asked.

“Very funny,” Angie said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I got in the minivan and started it. Angie got in. We did smell. We smelled of sex and blood and something powerfully rank. “Keep the window open,” I said.

The eastern sky was a light blue. The next day was approaching quickly. “Is there anything to talk about?” I asked.

Angie thought about this. “Is there?”

We drove into Montana in silence. Angie stared out the window at the grassy hills and mountains that rolled away from the interstate. The sky seemed closer to us and ahead the interstate looked as if that’s where it went. A sign told us we were in an Indian reservation of some kind. The land and the sky schemed to inspire thoughts of the Man. We passed signs for Little Bighorn and Custer’s Last Stand. Angie took my hand and squeezed it. “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said dully. Hours later I didn’t believe her, even though I had nothing to say.

Accept Yourself

Athena says, “Do you know why you’re here?”

I say nothing, my silence perhaps all the answer she’ll need. “How I got here doesn’t matter,” I say.

She says, “I didn’t say how. I said why.”

It is an unfair question. It can have no answer. “I came here to talk about some ideas I’m mulling over,” I say.

She says, “I’m curious.” She stands behind her desk, arms folded. The questions, I’m assuming, are the result of something Lindsay has disclosed. I don’t even care why Athena is asking them.

“I’m here.”

She asks, “Are you happy?”

“I believe I am.”

Athena lets slip a small, indiscreet smile. She has spoken to Lindsay.

“I got short-hopped, but adjusted,” I say.

She says, “I’m not American. I have no idea what that means.”

“It’s a baseball term.”

And Athena makes a face. She’s not American. “Maybe I don’t care either. Maybe I only care if it will affect your work here.”

“There’s an irony to what I’m doing,” I say. “I came all this way to do something I was doing before. Sort of.”

“Anyone who can get away with living an ironic life must be doing something right.”

“Irony isn’t safe,” I say. “It’s a dangerous way to live. It can be complicated. Irony is someone else’s tragedy. I don’t want irony or tragedy. I want things to be simple. And that’s why I like it here.”

Athena sits in her chair. She fiddles with a pen. “The owners have five other properties across the West. Arizona. Colorado. Washington. One in Canada. In Alberta. One in Idaho. They want to get this place right and then move the brand forward. They want to test all the ideas we come up with here. They are suddenly obsessed by plunge pools. They want to be a luxury ranch and spa brand. Very American. They see equity in a western concept. They know, I know, that this place is trying too hard. It’s all over the place. They want to be hoteliers. They want to take their ranching background and make it a luxury brand. A fetish really.”

So this is the plan. “So this is the plan,” I say. I’m about to be offered a job.

She says, “If they are pleased with your proposals here, they will offer you a job. Director of Marketing. Chief Branding Officer. Something like that.”

And so this is the hotel business. I’ve arrived in the hospitality industry. In the lobby of a brand with aspirations. I’m thinking like someone I might have mocked before. And yet it feels oddly natural. Who am I?

“And you?” I ask.

“I’m along for the ride.”

“That’s a very American expression,” I say. She’s withholding the extent of her involvement.

“I just don’t like baseball.”

A long pause. I am deciding to accept the offer. Lindsay’s cloud hasn’t lifted. Athena doesn’t care. And I can’t do anything about Dan’s ambitions either. I will be found one day, discovered. Its inevitability is like the rising of the sun. Or death. I will once again attain some status, some middle class of fame. Perhaps I will become the spokesman for the place. Tell everyone I found what I needed here. Every few years a tabloid will interview me for a “where are they now?” feature. Dan’s book will get published. A movie will get made. My celebrity will ebb and flow.

I can’t decide whether Lindsay’s email should feel liberating or not. “I don’t know why I’m here,” I say. “I understand even less how I got here. There’s no answer for it. But I’ve found myself here and I may have even found myself.”

“Lindsay sent me a curious email.”

I nod. “It’s all true.”

“You don’t know what she said.”

“I can guess.”

“Does this mean you’ll shave?”

“I’m growing fond of this look.”

“I finally Googled you.”

I can only imagine what she’s found. I can only imagine the type of information, the amount of information, out there. I once held a slice of the public’s consciousness. “I don’t understand fame,” I say. “Or why anyone would seek it.”

Another pause. “When can you share?”

“Share what?” I ask. My past? The reasons why?

“Your ideas,” she says.

“Am I giving a full presentation? To you? Do I have to do some kind of awful PowerPoint thing? Because I hate PowerPoint.” So many questions. I ran away from work to discover answers to the unknowable. And it turns out that I ran to work. To an odd but definite happiness.

“Do whatever you want. Use puppets. I don’t care.”

I take a long walk. A cold wind slaps my face. I walk to the spa and the wind gets colder, fiercer. It’s a seasonal wind, with a certain menace. It swirls around me now and I run into the spa, out of breath. A couple walks by in fluffy bathrobes, each with a cup of herbal tea in hand. They are glowing. The man slides his hand down the woman’s back and rests it on her ass. They walk to the desk and a general mumbling takes place. His hand strokes the contours of the woman’s back. Their level of contentment is astounding. Enviable. They are in their late fifties. Satisfied. Writing another chapter in their lives. Accumulating stories.

The woman behind the counter walks them through a door that will take the couple to what we call the Wet Bar, an area devoted to hydrotherapy. The couple will shower together, receive a variety of water-based massage treatments side by side. Later, they will enjoy dinner, share a bottle of wine. Retreat to their room. Explore their newly softened skin. Sleep the deepest sleep they have known in months. Tomorrow they will repeat it all. Tomorrow they will seek out the same feeling, the same comfort. Tomorrow they will write another chapter in their life story.

I stick my head out the front door. The wind shows no sign of abating. It’s a windy day. I should get used to it.

I’m thinking this place should align itself to a kind of celebrity in a low-key way as it expands. This person and the overall brand should be intertwined. Or it could be a series of people, good mid-level celebrities not yet tainted by the public’s expectations and prejudices. All appearing in tasteful print ads shot onsite. People who mean good taste, who mean something. Whose own brands go beyond their own celebrity. To a value.

The ranch needs a new name. I keep calling it Special K. Tomas called it Four Creeks once. That’s an evocative name for an overall brand but it doesn’t sound western enough. It sounds falsely international and ambitious. I don’t know if I’m supposed to brand the future or just worry about this one place, right now. Was Athena telling me what to do or what I should expect?

At my computer, I sketch out an overall feeling for this place. The offering needs to be focused. Simplified.

We all desire simplicity. It’s why people come here.

This place should be about people’s stories. We crave narrative. We believe we are uninteresting without a compelling story. This is the guiding principle behind reality TV and its replacement, the participatory web. A narrative validates us. It makes us tangible. As the world grows larger, we need to break its component parts down to manageable bite-sized chunks. We live surrounded by more people now, more density, and so we are more anonymous. With our own narrative, we feel a part of the world. Stories connect us. They intersect.

And then this narrative is finally about empowerment. Which is what a spa is about. Luxury is power. The ability to add luxury to your narrative is the totem of everything we strive for. Luxury itself is not a goal. This place is about vanity as well, but again that’s not a goal. It is the ability to proclaim your indulgence in luxury. To be vain and not feel shy about admitting it. To not apologize for what you want or who you are. To be able to tell the world that you can experience it. That you have experienced it. And how that experience makes your narrative appear richer and more robust than anyone else’s.

Over dinner with Athena, I say, “We’re going to need some creatives.”

She says, “I understand.”

“An agency. More than PR.”

“I can recommend that.”

“We’ll need to create a bible.”

“I know the branding game.”

“It’s a racket, isn’t it?” This is most obvious to those who do the work.

“It’s necessary.”

I cut through my steak. I’ve been craving Chinese food of late.

She asks, “Will everything change?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at what I ate.” Chicken marbella. A maple squash puree. Accompanied by a white wine from South Africa. And not a very good one at that. An uneaten profiterole on her dessert plate.

“I haven’t thought the entire thing through,” I say.

“We need to be thorough.”

“I agree.”

“They’ve been drinking their way across the world. They’re taking notes. Suddenly they think they know a lot.”

The owners are phantoms to me. Athena has no idea when they will return. It doesn’t seem to matter.

A waitress comes by and pours Athena a coffee. “The wine is terrible,” Athena says.

The waitress takes this in. “Should I tell Frank?” she asks. Frank is the sommelier. He is South African.

“I’ll speak to him tomorrow,” Athena says.

I have spent the day putting thoughts about this place on paper. I have enjoyed myself. I have used the process to block out my narrative. I can’t tell whether or not I have a story anymore. I’m the same person who drove across the country. I’m not the same person who drove across the country. “Tomas told me he doesn’t want to change,” I say.

Athena takes a sip of her coffee. “He will. He’s done it before.”

I take another bite of my steak. “How many hits?”

Athena gives me a look, of being spoken to in a foreign tongue.

“On Google.”

“More than I would have imagined.”

“What did you imagine?”

“I had low expectations.”

“And?”

“In the hundreds of thousands.”

“Not millions?”

She sips her coffee some more. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

I’m relieved actually. It’s a relief I need. My past is a shadow that I can’t outrun. Even when the sun sets, a shadow hides. It waits. My relief is the hope that my shadow recedes into something else. Something less than memory. A small tattoo, perhaps. A tiny scar. A snake that has shed its skin.

Alone Again

I drove through the endlessness of Montana in a daze. My head was cluttered with what Angie and I had done. By what it might have meant in another time and place. By the road not taken. And the Man. The endlessness of him. The mystery of him and his whereabouts. I searched deep inside myself and he was not there. The relentlessness of the ordeal I was suffering. I felt the force of his hand on the steering wheel. This looked like his place, something I’d been feeling a long time now. And nothing had happened.

Outside Billings, I turned off the interstate and drove through town and past the airport and headed north again. Dan phoned and asked me where I was going and I thought the question stupid and funny and I hung up without saying anything. I drove blindly. I did not see the countryside. I have some memory of mountains. I remember the haze that surrounded me. I remember that I could not really see. I remember that I don’t remember. I could have been driving anywhere. I know I drove through Montana but I could not tell you what the roads looked like.

Angie had been sleeping but she woke up now and stayed awake as I drove through the night. We kept our thoughts to ourselves. There’s nothing to talk about, she had said. I drove slowly, carefully. The long road was almost over. This is all I remember thinking. And Angie. I replayed our washroom tango like a loop.

I stopped for gas at a place that was remote and desolate and I remember being amazed by the gas station as it appeared alongside the road. And things became clearer again. The black bus pulled up to the gas station and Dan came out and walked straight toward me. “You trying to get us lost?” he asked. The media got off the bus to stretch, everyone’s face puffy with sleep, the toil of their jobs, the inanity of this job, causing them to rethink their lives, relive the many paths that led them to this point, to this remote gas station in a remote part of Montana.

“I can feel him,” I said to Dan. “I don’t know what that means but I can feel him everywhere.” I was lying.

Dan’s eyes brightened. “Here?”

“I don’t feel as if I’m driving,” I said. “I can’t explain it.”

Dan walked back to his colleagues and told them what I had just told him. They craned their necks to look at me, to look around, to take in the scene, wondering how the visuals of the place enhanced the story, wondering what the event would look like on television. A cameraman came out of the bus and started shooting some footage. It was a nice enough place. Computers were produced to update blogs. Camera phones. The lone gas station set amidst the plains. Mountains surrounded us. The trees in the distance that covered the mountains gave the whole place the appearance of a toy train set. Even the gas station looked like something you could buy in a box. An accessory.

I asked Angie if she was hungry and she said no. The reporters went into the small store and emerged with chips and chocolates and jerky and a giant bottle of soda. I felt sorry for them. I felt sorry for what had become of their diets. I felt sorry for the ones who had children. I felt sorry for the children. I felt sorry for the ones who thought they were signing up for a few days driving along the eastern seaboard and now found themselves in Montana with no resolution in the offing. The only person I didn’t feel sorry for was Dan.

Angie ran into the store and emerged with a paper bag. “Can you believe it?” she said. “They have tampons!” She ran to the ladies room and did what she had to do.

We got back in the Odyssey. I drove off. When I felt I should turn onto a different road, I did. I let my hands go off the steering wheel just to see if the minivan would drive itself and it veered toward the shoulder.

We drove. We drove through great forests that edged close to the road and made every bend another mystery unsolved. We drove through Great Falls and got on another interstate and still I did not see the Man. We were heading north, always north, and the further north we went now, the further my heart sank. My disappointment mounted. I was starting to give up hope of ever seeing the Man again. I felt dead suddenly. Or at least like I was driving to a funeral. Mine.

There was nothing ahead of us but rolling hills and tall grass. Ranches. Some forest. Campgrounds. The Rockies were everywhere and nowhere. In the distance I could see snowcapped peaks. Lonely mountains sprung out of the plains like popcorn in all directions. I took Angie’s hand and she pulled away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry we did what we did.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It makes everything complicated. I had an itch that needed scratching.” She sighed. “That sounds so crude. I’m sorry. I had a moment. I think. I don’t know what to think.” She leaned her head against the window, her eyes blank. “I needed to. I needed to with you. I wouldn’t have done that with anyone else. I felt something. I needed that feeling.” And that was that, obviously. “We had our chance once. I think,” she said. I felt my heart turn brown and wither up inside me. I had not invested anything in our coupling and now I was because its potential had been taken away. It was now an event. History.

I didn’t know what to say anymore. I felt like stopping. I felt tired. And as I drove north, I had an urge to once again lose the interstate and I did. I got off at an exit and turned onto a desolate road that went straight toward the horizon and lost itself there. In the rearview mirror, I saw the black bus continue on the interstate. “Say goodbye to the bus,” I said.

Angie reached for my cell phone and threw it out the window.

I could imagine Dan’s face at that moment when he’d figured out he’d lost us. I felt sorry for him now, finally, because everything he had invested in me would amount to nothing. Without the end of my story, the money Dan had seen for himself remained a wish. Was his story valuable? He had endured the journey because of the money. The payoff. And now . . .

“I didn’t take any photos with that thing,” I said. I’d just realized it. Everyone around me had documentation. About my life. About this. Except me.

I drove on dirt roads and over creaky bridges. Past lonely oil rigs pumping away heroically. I remember the Odyssey surrounded by hundreds of steers, angry-looking beasts that seemed to comprehend their collective fate already. We drove through little villages that looked like abandoned movie sets; the road widened, a building appeared, pickup trucks parked in front of feed shops, and then the road narrowed again and the town was behind us. “This is too much,” Angie said at one point. “You’re lost.”

And I remember thinking the concept of lost was inapplicable. I wasn’t lost. I was definitely near something, I was no longer waiting for the Man to come to me. To appear before me. I had the sense that perhaps I was going to him. This was his home. There was an energy I could feel, a force, that kept me going. When I turned the steering wheel and drove down another empty dirt road I did so because something was telling me where to go, something was guiding me. I gave myself up completely to this feeling. It was all I had now. Angie was already someplace else. Why she was still in the minivan with me was a mystery. In her mind she was back home. Far away. I was already past tense. She couldn’t even look in my direction. Perhaps she was taking it all down. Perhaps she was writing a book in her head.