“Never mind. I know the answer. I can’t make love to you if I remind you of someone else.” She began crying hard.
“I’m sorry.” His brain had become a knot.
“At least hold me,” she pleaded. Her voice was that of a girl, another explicit turnoff for him. Girls, unlike women, were only a turn-on at a distance, say the thirty feet between his peek hole and Mona’s bedroom window.
So he did with her face against his neck which was soon wet and slippery. He questioned whether there were a limit to tears and if her ducts might eventually dry up making love possible but that was unlikely.
“Too bad you don’t know how to lie,” she wept.
“Jesus Christ, Lucy!” He flung himself out of bed and went to the desk, flipping through the room service menu. He had given half of his sandwich to the Mexican kid. It was 9:00 p.m. in Michigan, well past dinnertime, and he was ravenous. There was a salad with jicama whatever the hell that was. He called in an order for two cheeseburgers, a bottle of Beaujolais that he remembered Diane liked to drink in the summer, and a full bottle of Canadian whiskey for sixty bucks, the cheapest full bottle on the menu. Maybe he could drown her tears.
“We’ve failed each other,” she wailed.
In answer he turned on the TV to Anderson Cooper who at the moment reminded him of a chipmunk. He segued to a film with a boatload of naturalists chasing a pod of killer whales off the coast of Alaska and hoped that the beasts would turn back on the boat and have a naturalist meal. He split the last of his travel pint into two drinks and she poked her head out from under a pillow at the rattle of ice.
When she finally walked out the door he looked at the whiskey bottle and was pleased that it was only half gone, which meant he wouldn’t have a hangover in his top five hundred. He thought of what his dad would say if he knew his son paid sixty bucks for a bottle of whiskey. Likely nothing. Lucy had eaten only half of her cheeseburger so he took a cold bite to get full value. With the light out and chewing slowly he remembered a professor saying that carefully read history will tell us everything. This seemed not to be true. This was one of those times when he felt the utter exhaustion of not making love as if he were a teenager necking in a car. She had ended up talking so glowingly about her children he once again wished that he and Diane had had a child.
Driving west at 7:00 a.m. on Interstate 10 toward Willcox into the bright headlights of oncoming commuter traffic Sunderson recalled that as a child he had devoutly wished for summer solstice all year round, when at least minimal light would tip the scales at over eighteen hours a day in the Great North. By early November it was down to about seven hours, clearly not enough to keep the soul together and one treaded the dark water in despair until after December 21, the winter solstice, when a minute or two of additional daylight helped the soul regather. Way back at Michigan State Kaplan’s course on the Russian Revolution had enthralled him. One day this great professor of Russian history with his wonderful big bald head had given Sunderson a few minutes after class and Sunderson questioned the morale effect of so much darkness on far northern countries. Kaplan had said how interesting as he packed his briefcase and when Sunderson aced the course his skin had tingled with pride.
Not so this morning. He had barely made it out of the lobby and peeked around the corner to see Lucy coming toward the desk with a bellhop, then he had to hide in the bushes of the parking lot across the street as she got into a black sedan limo with a black driver. How much did this cost? What’s wrong with a taxi?
He hit the radio off button when someone on NPR used the word turd iconic. He used to keep track of these obtuse Orwellian nuggets. A few years ago it was the relentless use of the word closure that raised his ire and then with Iraq the silly term embedded. In general Sunderson had no use for pundits. It reminded him of a recent article in the Marquette newspaper interviewing a local girl who had tried to make it in Hollywood who said, “Just about everyone you meet out there is a producer.” Pundits reflected his idea that everyone in America gets to make themselves up whole cloth, and also the hideously mistaken idea that talking is thinking.
He had gotten up at 6:00 a.m. to call Mona before she was off to school. There had been a juvenile urge to ask her what she was wearing if anything but she beat him to it.
“Without you here I get dressed right away. Mom has the thermostat turned down to save money. Dad sent his annual note saying to keep my chin up. Can you believe that miserable cocksucker?”
