“I’m not going to get a boner from this,” he had said to Diane leafing through the pages. Occasionally he liked irritating her with vulgarity.
“That’s scarcely the purpose of the magazine,” she had said.
When his seatmate seemed to frown at his dawn drink he wished he could fart but he was not a fart-on-demand kind of guy. Breakfast was an omelet of aerated faux eggs with two tiny sausages that had no pork flavor. He noted that his neighbor was wisely eating Cheerios with kiwi, a fruit he considered fraudulent.
“We winter in Tucson but I have to go back to Minneapolis to see my ill sister. Have you been vacationing?”
“Yes. In Nogales and Patagonia. Lovely places.”
“Really? I’ve heard they’re quite dangerous.”
“That’s nonsense. They’re both safer than Minneapolis. The violence is in the drug cartel wars across the border. Americans are always afraid of being mugged even after being scammed out of trillions by the financial community.”
“My husband is a banker,” she said in a mild huff abandoning her Cheerios for an article on two-thousand-dollar handbags.
That ended the conversation. He fell into a deep sleep in which he dreamed music, mostly a Scriabin piano piece that Diane loved that was played only with the left hand. He had studied the Russian Revolution so deeply in college and after that he sometimes dreamt of Russia though the idea of actually visiting the country seemed to be too large an undertaking.
Though groggy with sleep he felt at home in the Minneapolis airport, which was filled with the thickish, whey-faced citizens of the Great North, so many of whom he thought must be Scandinavian, or Germans from farm country. They all seemed to have a pork-and-potatoes businesslike sadness about them. Doubtless they chuckled now and then rather than laughing. His spirits rose further when he had a pot roast sandwich, the food of his childhood, along with a Bloody Mary and a beer. He managed to sleep again between Minneapolis and Marquette despite a bad-weather advisory that normally would have worried him. Dying in a plane crash had always seemed inappropriately modern to him whereas drowning in Lake Superior, like so many relatives who were commercial fishermen, was a logical conclusion to their profession.
Marquette was admirably bleak with a few feet of snow and a pleasant early-winter temperature of ten degrees and it began to get dark at four in the afternoon. He felt the hopeless sentimentality of the familiar driving up the snowy alley to the back porch of his house. He stood looking straight up at the snowflakes heading downward at his face. There was a sense of belonging, of being where he was supposed to be, that had been absurdly absent in the Southwest. He inhaled the cold air deeply and coughed waving at Mona who was waving from his brightly lit kitchen window. When he opened the door from the porch to the kitchen the smell of the roast pork shoulder and mashed rutabaga was wonderfully strong. They embraced and she slid his hand down onto her bottom and he quickly removed it. They kissed and he backed his tongue away from her emerging tongue.
“Mona, for Christ’s sake.”
“My analyst says it’s all obvious. I mean my crush on you. My dad cuts and runs when I’m seven and I think it’s at least partly my fault. You’re sort of my stepdad. I’m trying to hold on to you so I act sexy. I almost didn’t wear undies so I could give you a peek when I sat on the sofa.”
“It’s unhealthy.” He knew this was weak as he poured himself a strong whiskey.
“Don’t be such a silly fuck. What’s unhealthy mean? It’s harmless and I know you’re not going to touch me so what’s the problem with flirting and a little touch? I’d already be an old lady in India and Africa.”
“Well, civil authorities have established a law that you’re underage…” His mind ground to a halt. He may as well have been saying blah, blah, blah, blah. She was wearing a short-sleeved black sweater and a short black skirt. When she leaned way over to check the pork roast he looked out the window at the gathering dark. Her legs were smoothly muscled from running the eight hundred meters for the track team.
“Spare me the legal shit, darling.” She sat down and took a sip of his whiskey.
“I have an unpleasant question before Marion arrives.” He took Carla’s e-mail and the photo from a jacket pocket and passed it to her. “Here Carla says she went down on you and you told me nothing happened. Who’s telling the truth?”
“Who cares?” She was blushing ever so slightly.
“I care. If you’ll testify we can send Carla to prison for years.”
“No chance. Maybe a night in jail but not prison. You said yourself when you and Marion were talking about the Catholic priest sex scandal that a priest giving a sixteen-year-old hundred-seventy-pound young man a blow job wasn’t worth ten million bucks. Why didn’t he run for it?”
