MISS VALIANT: Only one way to find out.
OLD BUNS: Go for it.
8. THE NAKED MOMENT
He spoke to the Boy Scout troop the next day about the Fourth of July but it was Angelica on his mind. He told them the Fourth is special because it’s the day we honor our country and it’s important to do this right and not just roast some weenies and blow off bottle rockets. This is our country and it’s worth it—and meanwhile he was imagining the country of Angelica’s body, the ridge of collarbone, the beautiful mounds, the ribs, the meadow of her belly, and the sweet valley beyond.
He asked for questions and one boy asked if they were tall enough to be in the Living Flag (yes) and another if there really had been a naked lady in the Fourth of July parade last year. “Some people thought so,” he said. “But no.”
No, the naked lady was not naked in the parade, she was naked in his imagination. He called her that night from Clarence’s office at the garage. He told Irene he was going for a walk. (“When did you start taking walks?” she said. “Since you told me I ought to.” Badonkadonk.) It was the third week of April. Angelica sounded happy. So he got right to the point.
“I want to meet you,” he said.
On the phone she spoke so fast, words tumbling down the line and stutter phrases like like you know and so she goes like and I go like and we were like, that she was like almost incomprehensible though he picked up references to lemonade and Gemini and Christmas in Miami (or isthmus of Panama?), her voice was more like water running than actual language but he said, “Aha” and “Interesting” and “Maybe so” and that was like good enough.
She said something about conflict.
“Well, yes. Of course. I’ve been conflicted since I was ten.”
“I don’t believe in, like, forcing these things. When it’s right, it’s right, and until it’s right, you’re, like, just a fly or something beating its wings on the window glass.”
“I’m a fly who’s been pounding glass for a long time.”
They talked for almost an hour. She was 28. She grew up in Oregon with hippie parents, he thought she said, and had worked with puppets, and now she supported herself by modeling, teaching yoga, counseling, and “selling stuff.” The website was a sideline. She danced three nights a week at a club. Topless. Her contract ran through the end of June. She’d be moving on then. Being psychic, she knew this.
It was a gift she’d had since she was seven years old when she had clearly visualized her mother falling down the stairs.
“What happened?”
“She sprained an ankle.”
“Did you warn her?”
“No, I did not. I wasn’t aware of it as a gift. I thought it was a dream.”
“And you still have it?”
“Sort of. Like, glimmers. It takes a lot of discipline, though. Sometimes I lose it and after awhile it comes back. It goes, like, in cycles.”
She told him he was calling from an office, he was standing and not sitting, and there was a brand-new car nearby. Bingo.
“What am I wearing?” he said.
“If I were there, you wouldn’t be wearing anything.”
He laughed. “Great minds think alike.” But he was thrilled. A lusty young woman. “I’m sixty, you know,” he said. “I like older men,” she said. “They’re not so goal-oriented.” Hmmmm. And then she said something about condominiums, it sounded like.
He stood there in the garage at Daddy’s old high desk with a shelf of old account books below and arranged to meet her in St. Cloud for lunch the next day. Across the street, the Mercantile, the battered manikins in their antique sport clothes, and after Angelica said, “Good-bye. I love you,” and they hung up, he thought about calling her back and canceling the whole thing. He could imagine her looking him over and getting that wooden expression women get when you don’t measure up. That flicker of the eyelids and then they look beyond you. He got that a lot around here. People look at you and think, Auto mechanic, and they glance around for someone more worthy of attention, a movie actor maybe or an interesting criminal. It’s a good job though, fixing cars. People can get along without the Christian faith, and by God people have, but they can’t get along without a car. That’s a fact, son. You change air filters and tune up engines and install mufflers and your mind can roam and you don’t have to suck up to anybody. Your mind is free, unlike, say, Pastor Ingqvist’s which is toiling day and night to uphold orthodoxy and rationalize the Resurrection and frame up a sermon on the parable of the unjust steward and maybe figure out what to tell Clint about marital infidelity. To be pastor of Lake Wobegon Lutheran is rather prestigious compared to the modest task of replacing sparkplugs. And yet—and yet—your mind is wonderfully free to recall girls whom you parked with in your old ’56 Ford with the bench seat. Both of them, Irene and Maggie. He married Irene. Maggie went to San Francisco. She was a permanent memory. Tall, strong legs and shoulders, and when she kissed she nibbled at his mouth and she was a very good girl and yet she welcomed his advances and when he reached down to touch her she opened her legs and sighed so beautifully, long sweet sighs.
You couldn’t work up a sermon on the unjust steward and think about Maggie at the same time, and there was one advantage of auto mechanics—it permitted freedom of thought.
He did not cancel. He went to St. Cloud the next morning and promptly at 1 p.m. she walked into O’Connell’s and sat down in the booth opposite him and smiled an enormous smile. She was tall, long reddish hair pulled back in a yellow clip, jeans, sandals, a spangly T-shirt, and that brilliant smile. Absolutely stunning. Shockingly beautiful. She smelled sweet and rich, like lima beans.
“You’re still conflicted about knowing me,” she said, “but I have to let you worry about that. How are you?”
“Thrilled.” He’d worn his blue blazer, jeans, a black T-shirt, hoping to blur his identity as a mechanic, though she knew that about him already. She knew a lot, some that he’d told her, other things she intuited. “You’re mulling over a big decision that could take you away from here,” she said. “And it’s dangerous, but, like really really exciting.”
He had the shepherd’s pie, she had a salad, which she barely touched. She sat holding a pendant on a chain, watching it, then looking him straight in the eye. She was reading his chakras, the meridians of energy emanating from his polarities, trying to align them psychically.
She took his right hand between her palms and closed her eyes. She said, “I see engines. A water sprinkler. I see horses pulling a large red and yellow wagon. I see flowers, like a whole lot of them. There is a woman you’ve known for many years and this relationship is in a state of change. I see a heavyset bald man in a suit. I smell burning coffee.”
“My brother Clarence.”
“Thank you. I was going to say Charles. Clarence—”
“Charles was the name of my parents’ first child.”
“He died.”
“Yes, he did. He was premature. They put him in a cigar box and set it on the oven door to incubate him. He only lived a few days.”
It was rather astonishing, her intuition. She was way off the mark on some things—him being deeply religious (not even close), him playing the stock market (never), his son being a musician (ha!)—but when she hit the mark, she hit it straight on. His wife Irene was a grower of champion tomatoes and had a caustic tongue, and his brother Clarence was sentimental and sometimes walked through his house at night touching things and weeping, and Clint was worried about his daughter Kira’s sexual orientation, and he had come in for a lot of flak about the Fourth of July—one fact after another, she ticked them off. And then she said, “You’re not going to run for Congress. It’s not going to happen.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Right. Totally. And I see you and me going to a motel.”
A delicious thought, being in a dark room with the fragrant Angelica, and he carried it home with him and took it to work and thought the thought over
and over as he pulled Mr. Berge’s engine and dropped in a new one—thought of a 60-year-old man, a 28-year-old woman—whispering and nuzzling, clinging to each other, and the loosening of clothing and slipping your hands underneath. The unclasping, unbuttoning. The great anticipation. And lie naked, the whole front of him pressed against her flank and his hands roaming, spreading goodwill. His lifetime of failure behind him—all of those casual friendships that failed to satisfy, the afternoons of longing among the pretty lawns and shady boulevards, dreaming of upstairs rooms with shades pulled—now this naked moment when, entwined with her, he could become a nameless animal with no story, obeying a simple urge to couple in the dark—a beautiful urge whether you are president of the United States or a wheat farmer in Nebraska, the same exaltation. The intimate dark, the whispering, the skin on your skin—you search for the naked moment at great risk of embarrassment. Oh my God. Bill Clinton endured waves of public humiliation and thousands of hours closeted with lawyers trying to fend off the great hairy hand of history, and all for a little lovely intimacy—the screwing he got was not worth the screwing he got—and yet what a simple urge. And what can you say about those who resist it in order to protect their careers? To deny the animal within so as not to jeopardize cash flow. Irene was furious at Bill Clinton for bogging the country down in a year and a half of controversy. Sat and read the paper and fumed. Clint listened in silence. He objected to plenty about Clinton but surely a man who sends men off to shoot and be shot at can be forgiven for allowing a lovely young woman to unzip his pants. And the moment Angelica mentioned a motel, he looked forward to the day. Or night. Anytime, darling. I’ll be there.
9. GARDENS OF AVON
Angelica, Angelica, light of his life, a breath of light-heartedness in his metric life, a haven of tenderness on the frozen tundra of monogamy. She was telephathic and moved with his moods, lifting him up, leveling him out. How small and pitiful is a man, crying out for the mere touch of a woman’s hand, someone who is glad to see him—and there she was! “I’ll be giving a speech at the Kiwanis in St. Cloud on Monday,” he said. “I’ll come see it,” she said. She came and he went all out and made a good speech, all about daring to be better than what people expect of you. Aspiring to greatness. Defying the force of mediocrity, the curse of the prairie, that old egalitarianism turned in on itself like a cancer, eating its own seed—“Why can’t Minnesota produce genius? Genius awakes in each of us every morning”—oh they loved that line and didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. “There is an opening for genius in every work given to us to do,” he cried. “And when I took over the Fourth of July parade in Lake Wobegon, I decided I wanted to make it phenomenal.”
The word stunned them. Phenomenal. In Lake Wobegon??
The very name brought visions of sad-sack football teams getting chewed up and mashed into the grass by lopsided scores and those pitiful Whippets motoring around in the asthmatic orange bus, stumbling onto the field and serving up gopher balls and getting hammered, and the 1941 grain elevator explosion (caused by a dimwit who switched off a ventilator, thinking it was the light in the toilet), and the 1965 tornado that dumped bowling balls on the town.
And yet the town had been seen by millions on CNN. A heck of an accomplishment.
She hung around afterward and waited for his admirers to disperse.
She was tall. Slim, with strong shoulders. Big legs. She wore a dress the color of dawn, she smelled like young corn, buttered. Red hair pulled back in a yellow clip, a good strong nose, green eyes. Pale freckled skin. Hands behind her back and she bounced on her toes. “How about coffee?” she said. They sat at the counter and he turned toward her, his knee pressed against her leg, and she did not flinch or pull away.
“You don’t think people are going to resent you for saying all that? About mediocrity?”
“People know it’s true. People in Lake Wobegon love this big parade—they hate to give me credit for it, they resent the hell out of me for making them happy, but they love it—because they remember how grim that holiday used to be. Standing around eating burnt weenies with your old relatives who’ve had nothing to say for forty years—it was torture. Cue the orchestra. Bring in the elephants.”
Angelica was talking about California. Her father had married a woman from Santa Barbara, and in their late seventies they ran up mountains and practiced tantric sex and were learning Arabic for the fun of it. Every day was a new day in California. You woke up and even if you had lost your shirt the night before or contracted dysentery or been convicted of manslaughter, nonetheless you had big new ideas and a goal for yourself and something exciting to look forward to.
And two days later he met her at a supper club in Avon. In the bar, a skinny kid with a shock of blond hair curled himself around an old Gibson Archtop and played a sweet choppy version of “If I Had You.” Angelica wore green warm-up pants and a salmon tank top. He took one look at her and his heart sank from the weight of feeling. God, she had the walk, she had the rocking motion in the hips, she had the sweet talk, and she wanted to be loved and there he was. Ready, willing, happy to be of service. She said, “I knew the moment I met you online that I wanted to know you.” Her skin glowed, her eyes shone. She believed that what delights us expands us and loosens the living spark buried under our studied complacency. We embolden each other, she said, we give each other courage. He was emboldened to turn on the stool so that his knee pressed lightly against her flank. She pressed back. He pressed harder against her and he leaned in close to hear her over the music—the guitarist was deep into “I Got Rhythm” now—and then he put his hand lightly on her shoulder—for emphasis—when he told her the joke about the grasshopper who walked into the bar and the bartender said, “Hey, we’ve got a drink named after you,” and the grasshopper said, “Why would anyone name a drink Bob?” She laughed hard. She’d never heard that one. Oh, he had a lot more like that one. A lot more.
“I can’t hear you with the music so loud,” she said. “Let’s go back outside.”
They walked across the parking lot to Lake Watab glimmering in the moonlight and sat down on a picnic table. He pulled out a cigarette. “I’m quitting,” he said. “Slow motion. I let myself have six a day. This is my fourth.” That was a lie, it was actually his tenth. He lit it and took a drag. “What do you hope for in life?” he said.
“I hope for what I already have. Adventure. I can’t live without it. That’s why I’m leaving for California. And what do you hope for?”
“I hope for courage.”
“Courage to do what?”
“To kiss you.”
She smiled and touched his arm. “I’m leaving soon so there’s no point in playing hard-to-get,” she said. She kissed him lightly and didn’t pull away. She stayed and he parted his lips and her tongue flicked against his tongue and her arms were around him and then she was kissing him hard.
She put her head on his shoulder. She told him she adored him. She had adored him for two weeks now. It eased his heart. Astonishing, how this lovely young mammal could make him forget the languors of marriage and the troubles with the Committee and the problems of Bunsen Motors, all of that stuff, gone. She murmured something about finding a place to kiss some more and he led her over to his pickup and drove her to the Gardens of Avon motel and ten minutes later they walked into Room 6, and as soon as the door was shut, she was unbuttoning his shirt and unzipping his pants, her lips locked to his, and the tank top was on the floor and then the green pants, and she sprang up on the bed in an advanced state of nudity and bounced up and down and jumped into his arms. He was naked, it was his skin and her skin, and onto the bed they unfolded and she wrapped herself around him and whispered in his ear something about gladness. Oh what a fine body. Her flat, firm abdomen between the expanse of womanly hips and the fine bush of dark hair and the tender lips so delicately pursed and folded and the sweet-salty taste of her and she sang and whimpered and cried out and moaned—her pleasure was so generous and elaborate, as
if he were the world’s greatest lover, which he wasn’t, except maybe right at this moment to a woman of combustible imagination—he’d never known a woman who enjoyed being made love to so much—Irene was mostly quiet and businesslike in bed, same as in the kitchen, making pie crust—you didn’t moan and whimper as you did it or cry out, “More flour! Flour! Flour!” And the two other women he’d been with in the course of his marriage were each so stunned by guilt and remorse that they lay flat and inert and then wept afterward—but Angelica was a great enthusiast. She went to town. She had decided to have sex and so, by George, she was going to have all of it and not leave anything out. Man on top, woman on top, woman on top reversed, man from behind on bed, man from behind standing at the window, over and over, up and down, in and out, and meanwhile her scat singing which thrilled him, her Oh yes yes yes Oh my God yes yes yes Oh Jesus God yes like that Oh yes Oh
yes and then there was a faint ripping sound and the smell of stale gas. “Was that you?” she said. “Or me?” “It’s okay,” he said. And then she needed a drink of water and she tiptoed to the bathroom leading him behind her, her hand grasping his tool, and then she sat on the bathroom counter and opened herself and they did it there, and then back to bed—a long, careening rush down miles of steep slope until he finally burst the bonds of earth and briefly flew and they lay quietly together, breathing hard, and he asked her, “Was that nice?” and she said, “Was what nice?” “Making love,” he said. “I liked it a lot,” she said. “Couldn’t you tell?” “I thought you did,” he said. He heard music from next door. The man in the next room had turned up his radio to drown out their lovemaking and it was a band playing “In The Mood”—
Oh, baby, was it good for you?
You drove me wild, doing the things
you do.
I’ll never forget the night we screwed.
So mahvelous—guess we were In The Mood.
Liberty Page 5
