Howard skipped most of the sessions and found some new guys from western Mass. he could talk sports with—a bald Latvian he’d once played against in a state tournament in the eighties. “It comes from being one of five,” he said to Frances on day three, when they’d broken their rule and allowed themselves lunch together in the hotel’s food court, which had an OK Corral theme, and the servers were dressed like desperadoes with guns and fake moustaches. “I spent my youth listening to my parents telling me for the thirteenth time something I already knew.” He seemed pleased, grazing at his taco salad. “I mean, I don’t really mind somebody telling me how to sell a house when I’ve already sold five hundred of them. But I don’t need to seek it out, you know?”
There were certain qualities about Howard Cameron that would never grow on you, Frances thought. He was always happy for somebody to tell him something, instead of generating important data himself. It was a passive aspect, and made him seem sensitive at first. Except it wasn’t really passive; it was actually aggressive: a willingness to let somebody else say something wrong after which he could sit in judgment on the sidelines. You learned that attitude in sports: the other guy fucks up, and when he does—because he always will—then you’re right there to reap the benefits. It was a privileged, suburban, cynical way of operating and passed for easy-going. And he made it work for him. Whereas someone like her had to scrap and hustle and do things in a straight-ahead manner just to get them done at all.
Of course you’d never convince him his way was wrong. He was genetically hard-wired to like things how they were. “That’ll work” was his favorite expression for deciding most issues—issues such as whether to solicit a higher bid on a property after a lower one had already been accepted, or quoting a client an interest rate lower than the bank’s in order to string them along. Things she would never do. Howard, however—long-armed, solemn, goony-faced, harddick Howard Cameron—would do them; had done them countless times, but liked to make you think that he wouldn’t. It was a surprise—something learned from being alone with him two nights running—but she’d already decided that if she saw him again once they were back home, she’d be shocked. He wasn’t a con man, but he wasn’t much better.
Across the noisy food court she saw two of the New Jersey women waiting beside the big chrome sculpture in the middle of the room, scanning around for someone to eat lunch with, and yakking it up as usual. The food court occupied a wide, light-shot, glass-roofed atrium, architecturally grafted onto the Radisson and rising twenty stories, with real sparrows nesting in the walls. Protruding upward fifteen stories from a central reflection pool was a huge, rectangular chrome slab that had water somehow drizzling down it. People had naturally thrown hundreds of pennies in the pool. The New Jersey realtors were looking up at it and laughing. They thought everything had a sexual significance that proved men were stupid. Frances hoped they wouldn’t spot her, didn’t want the Howard Cameron issue to get them going. They should never have come here together.
She had a good idea, though, that she thought she’d enlist Howard in if the two of them were still hot and heavy by midweek. It was more fun to do things with somebody, and she still liked Howard okay, even if he had personal qualities she was starting to be sick of. “Do you know what I think we should do?” She wanted to seem spontaneous, even if the idea wasn’t really original. She smiled, trying to penetrate whatever he was thinking—sports, sex, his parents, his wife—whatever.
“Let’s go up to my room,” Howard said. “Is that your idea?”
“No, I mean do in a real sense.” She tapped the back of his hand with one middle finger to seize more of his attention. “I want to see the Grand Canyon,” she said. “I brought a book about it. I’ve always wanted to. Do you want to come with me?” She tried to beam at him.
“Is it in Phoenix?” Howard looked puzzled, which was how he registered surprise.
“Not that far,” Frances said. “We can get a car. Tomorrow’s our free day. We can leave in an hour and be back tomorrow afternoon.”
Howard shoved away the remains of his taco salad. “How long do we have to drive?”
“Four hours. Two hundred miles. I don’t know. I looked at the map in the welcome kit. It’s straight north. We’d have a good time. You always wanted to see it, I know you did. Take the plunge.”
“I guess,” Howard said, pushing out his livery lips in a skeptical way. He probably looked like his father when he did his lips that way, she thought, and he probably liked it.
“I’ll drive,” Frances said. “I’ll rent the car. All you have to do is sit there.”
“Mmmm.” Howard attempted a smile, but didn’t seem to share the enthusiasm. Which was, of course, his self-serving way: let the other people—his poor, innocent wife, for instance—present him with a good idea, then cast pissy doubt on it until he could let himself get talked into it, then never really seem appreciative until it turns out good, after which he takes all the credit. She could just go alone, except she didn’t want to. If Ed was here, he definitely wouldn’t go.
“Well look,” she said, “if you’re going, I vote we go right after the amortization panel, so we can see the desert in twilight. We can spend the night on the road, see the Grand Canyon as the sun’s coming up, and be back for dinner.”
“You got it all figured out,” Howard said, smirking. He was beginning to go for it. In his mind, agreeing to go made it his idea.
“I’m a good planner,” Frances said.
His smirk became a proprietary grin. “I never plan anything. Things just work out, whatever.”
“We wouldn’t make a good team, would we?” She was already standing beside the table, primed to head for the Avis desk in the lobby. She was thinking about a big red Lincoln or a Cadillac. The car could be the kick—not the company.
“I guess we might as well enjoy it,” Howard said and suddenly seemed amiable. “We’re out where they blew up the atom bomb, right?” He gazed at her with dumb pleasure, as if he’d forgotten he liked her, but had just suddenly remembered. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe she was confusing him with Ed—lumping men in the same heap and missing their finer distinctions. Exactly like the lesbians did.
“It’s New Mexico,” she said, waving at the New Jersey gals, who were making gestures with their hands to indicate they thought something was up between her and whoever it was she was having lunch with. “Where they blew up the A-bomb was New Mexico.”
“Well, whatever. Same desert, right? Bottom line?” He looked pleased.
“Bottom line. I guess so,” Frances said. “You get to the heart of things. You probably already know that.”
“I’ve heard it before,” Howard said, and rose to head for his room.
In the car he wasn’t on the proper side to see the sunset. Interstate 15 to Flagstaff was nothing but arid scrub, with forbidding treeless mountains on the other side of the car, where the sun was setting. Mostly all you saw was new development—big gas stations, shopping malls, half-finished cinema plazas, new franchise restaurant pads, housing sprawled along empty streambeds that had been walled up beside giant golf courses with hundreds of sprinklers turning the dry air to mist. There was nothing interesting or original or wild to see, just more people filling up space where formerly nobody had wanted to be. The reason to live out here, he thought, was that you had lived someplace worse. These were the modern-day equivalent of the lost tribes. The most curious feature of the drive were the big jack-rabbits that’d gotten smacked and were littering the highway by the dozens. He quit counting at sixty. Mary believed atmospheric conditions humans weren’t sensitive to made animals throw themselves in front of cars. In Connecticut it was deer, raccoons and possums. Someday it would start happening to people—maybe these people out here. Maybe they were members of a cult that was planning that.
Frances had rented a new red Town Car—the ultimate Jew canoe, she called it—a big fire chief’s sedan with untouched white-leather seats, red floor mats, unspoil
ed ashtrays and a heavy new-car smell. He wasn’t allowed to drive because he wasn’t Frances’s husband, which was perfect. To get comfortable, he’d ditched his conventioneer clothes for his green terry shorts, a white T-shirt and an old pair of basketball sneaks. With the seat pushed back, he could stretch his legs and doze on the headrest. The whole thing was set up right.
Frances was in high spirits behind the white-leather steering wheel. She’d brought her Grand Canyon book, her cell phone and some noisy Tito Puente CDs that featured a lot of loud bongo music. She’d changed into tight white Bermudas, a blue sailcloth blouse with a white anchor painted on the front, some tiny sapphire earrings and a pair of pink Keds with little tasseled half-socks. She’d also bought a quart of cheap gin, which they both started drinking, minus ice, out of white Styrofoam cups.
The plan was to eat dinner in Flagstaff, drive ’til after dark, then stop at whatever motel was near the canyon entrance, and be up early to see the great empty hole at daybreak, when Frances believed it would be its most spiritually potent. “I never knew I wanted to see it. You know?” She was driving with a cup in one hand. “But then I read about it, and knew I had to. The Indians thought it was the gateway to the underworld. And Teddy Roosevelt killed mountain lions in it.” She’d already poleaxed one of the big jackrabbits. “Oooops, sorry. Shit,” she said, then forgot about it. “Conquistadors came there in fifteen-ninety-something,” she went on, casting a mischievous eye at Howard, who was thinking about the run-over rabbit and staring moodily out at a big cinema complex built to look like an Egyptian jukebox. A vast, unlined, untenanted expanse of black asphalt lay between the theater and the highway. Soon enough, he thought, it would be stuffed with new cars and people. And then in ten years it would be gone.
“I never thought about it,” he said to whatever she’d said, considering what movies the cinema would specialize in. Westerns. Space movies. Idiot comedies about golf. It was California all over again out here, just worse. “Californicate” was the word that went around realtor circles two years ago. The gin might be affecting him, he thought.
“As big as the Grand Canyon, isn’t that what people say?” Frances had gone on dreamily. “My father used to say that. He was an immigrant. He thought the Grand Canyon meant something absolute. It meant everything important about America. I guess that’s what it means to me.”
“‘In one sense it’s a big hole in the ground formed by erosion.’” He was reading aloud now off the back of her Grand Canyon guidebook. Up ahead, another big gray-and-white jackrabbit sat poised on the shoulder as cars whipped past. He stared at it. The rabbit seemed on the verge of venturing forward, but was waiting for what it must’ve felt in its busy rabbit’s brain to be the perfect moment. In the opposite lane, semis were hurtling south toward Phoenix in the twilight. This rabbit’s got problems, Howard thought. Overcoming man-made barriers. Circumventing unnatural hazards. Avoiding toxic waste on the roadside. “Watch out for the rabbit,” he said, not wanting to seem alarmed, taking another sip of his warm gin.
“Roger. That’s a copy, Houston,” Frances said. She had the lip of her white Styrofoam cup pinched between her fingers, letting the cup dangle under the top arm of the steering wheel. She made no effort whatsoever to steer clear of the bunny, poised on the berm. She was drunk.
And just as the Town Car came almost abreast of the big rabbit, a critical split second after which it would’ve been spared and perhaps made it across all four lanes to sleep easily one more night in the median strip—in that split second—the rabbit bounded forward straight into the car’s headlights, never looking right or better yet left. And whump! The Lincoln sped over it, bopping whatever part of the rabbit was highest and tumbling it senselessly across the highway.
“Ouch! Damn! Oh shit. That’s two. Sor-ree little Thumper,” Frances said. “Bummer, bummer, bummer.”
“Why didn’t you change fuckin’ lanes?” Howard said.
“I know.” Frances had not even looked in the rearview. “It’s on my karma now. I’ll be paying for it.”
“It’s really ridiculous.” He glared at her, then back out into the darkening scrub. It’s fucking idiotic, he thought.
“I’ll get shaped up here,” she said.
“Not for that rabbit you won’t.”
“Nope. Not for that Mr. Bunny Rabbit,” Frances said. “He’s part of history now.”
He wished he was back at the Radisson having a glass of Pinot Grigio, not cheap warm gin he didn’t even like. He could be enjoying the glowing amber grid of nighttime Phoenix, and getting ready to call Mary.
“Do you think you can find something to be jovial about?” She looked at him and smiled a smile that exaggerated her face’s angles. “Try to think of one thing.”
She was hateful, he thought. Flattening a rabbit wouldn’t be the half of it. It was probably how she sold houses: a steamroller; never relenting, never seeing anything but the sale; driving buyers crazy with cell phone calls from her car; working every weekend.
“Put on some new music, why don’t you, Mr. Moody?” Frances said. The insane bongo drumming had stopped miles back, rendering the car peaceful. “Put on the Rolling Stones,” she said. “Do you like them? I do.”
“Whatever,” he said, fingering through the stack of cassettes she’d lodged on the leather seat between them. He tried to think of one Rolling Stones song but couldn’t. He’d drunk too much for sure.
“Put on Let It Bleed, in honor of the brave rabbit who gave his life so we could see the Grand Canyon and commit adultery.” She didn’t even look at him.
This was fucked up, he thought. Just all of a sudden, she was a different person. The best thing would be to find the bus station in Flagstaff and let her drive off drunk into the night and never see her again. A smart man would do that.
“I was kidding about Let It Bleed.” She sniffed. “It’s not there. Put on some more Chiquita banana music and give us some gin. We’ll be seeing the bright lights of Flagstaff pretty soon now. Surely something there’ll make you happy. Isn’t it a famous place?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Howard said, then under his breath added, “I hope so.”
“So do I, sweetheart,” Frances said, handing over her empty cup so he could fill it. “Or else, we’ll just have to make it famous.”
In Flagstaff, they found a dim little strip-mall sushi place, facing a wide avenue clogged with evening traffic. He was tired of Mexican and spaghetti, and wanted fish even if he had to eat it raw. He would never make a westerner, he realized; he needed to see the ocean once a week and seafood was healthier. Though he also realized, as they were searching for a restaurant, traffic lights blooming into a blue-lit distance, that he’d actually been to Flagstaff—in the eighties, on a ten-day overland vacation the whole Cameron family had made to Disneyland. He’d somehow forgotten it. Though naturally, nothing looked the same. The streets were all widened twice as big and there were now a thousand motels and burger franchises and car washes. It was weird to have been in a place, and then to have blotted it out completely. It was possible, of course—and he was already beginning to forget the memory again—that he’d only dreamed about Flagstaff, or possibly seen it on TV.
From the fake teak table by the window, Frances had begun eyeing the phone booth outside in the parking lot. She wanted to call Ed. He’d be in bed soon, though the sky was still lighted over the mountaintops here. She couldn’t remember when she’d called him last. And she was sorry to have gotten smashed, sorry she’d run over a rabbit, sorry to have forgotten all about her husband. It was so unusual being this free, and fucking somebody she absolutely didn’t care about, or for that matter fucking anybody at all. It was disorienting and actually embarrassing.
Howard was eating sea-bass tempura and was happy for her to go make a call. She walked outside into the warm evening and stood beside the Lincoln to make the call on her cell phone. A police substation was set up in one of the empty mall store spaces. Through the windows you could se
e police inside sitting at desks, talking on phones and writing under fluorescent light. A young black man was also standing inside and appeared to be wearing handcuffs, his hands behind his back. Two police officers standing with him were laughing as if he’d said something funny.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said brightly to Ed across the vast distance. She wanted to be upbeat. “Guess where I am? In Flagstaff.”
“Yeah. So?” Ed said. “Where’s that, Texas?” Ed suffered from an unusual blood disease that made his bones disintegrate from the toes up, and he was in pain a lot. He took steroids and maintained dietary restrictions that made him either hungry all the time, or else nauseated, and he was almost always in a bad mood. When she’d met Ed, who was fifteen years older, he’d been strong as a racehorse and had run his own jet-ski business. Now he couldn’t work, and just watched TV and took his meds.
“No silly, it’s in Arizona,” Frances said. “But guess where I’m going. You won’t believe it.” She wondered if she’d said, “Guess where we’re going.”
“Bulgaria,” Ed said. “Iran. I don’t know. Who cares? I won’t be there.”
“The Grand Canyon,” she said, manufacturing enthusiasm. She felt her mouth break into an involuntary smile. She was smiling for Ed, standing alongside a big red Lincoln.
Silence opened on Ed’s end.
“The Grand Canyon,” she said again. “Isn’t that great? I’m going to see it tomorrow.” She needed to be careful about particulars. She could say she was with one of the lesbians. Ed would think that was a riot.
“And what?” Ed said irritably. “You see it and then what?”
“I don’t really know.”
Silence again. Ed had become distracted by something in his room, possibly the Red Sox game. The thought flitted through her mind to say, “I’m going to the Grand Canyon with a man I’m fucking every night and who’s got a cock as hard as a hoe handle.” Though it didn’t make Howard any more interesting for that to be true. He might as well have not had it.