A Multitude of Sins (31 page)

Of course, it wasn’t the kind of experience that ever led to marriage, or to any lasting importance. He remembered what she’d said about the Old Norse word. She understood plenty. She and poor lame Ed probably had polite, infrequent sex, just like his parents, so that her own ravenous appetites were permanently back-burnered out of respect for whatever pitiful use he was. His own luck, Howard understood, was to play a bit part in their life’s little humdrum. Though it was way too good to miss, no matter where it led to or from.

One thing had surprised him. After their first epic session at Howard Johnson’s in September—this after three weeks of steamy meetings in shadowy bars and roadside cafes in little nowhere Connecticut towns between Willamantic and Pawcatuck—they had stepped out of the room into the laser
sunlight of the HoJo’s parking lot, with Interstate 95 pounding by almost on top of them. He’d looked up into the pale, oxidized sky, rubbed his eyes, which had grown accustomed to the darkness of the room and, without much thought, said, “Boy, that was really something.” He’d meant it as a compliment.

“What do you mean,
something
?” Frances said in her husky blondie voice—a voice that electrified him in bed, a voice made for sex, but that suddenly seemed different out on the harsh, baking asphalt. She was wearing red-framed sunglasses, a short blue leather skirt that emphasized her thighs, and what was by then an extremely wrinkled white pinafore blouse. Her hair was pressed flat on the sides and she was sweating. She looked roughed up and dazed, which was how he felt. Fucked to death would’ve been a way to say it.

He smiled uncomfortably. “I just mean, well … you’re really good at this. You know?”

“I’m
not
good at this,” Frances snapped, “I’m good with
you
. Not that I’m in love with you. I’m not.”

“Sure. I mean, no. That’s right,” he said, not happy being scolded. “We don’t do these things alone, do we?” He smiled, but Frances didn’t.

“Some people might.” She frowned from behind her shades, seeming to reassess him all in one moment’s time. It was as if there was one kind of person whom you met and maybe liked and thought was okay-looking and funny and whom you fucked—one kind of Howard; but then there was another Howard, one you never liked and who immediately started comparing you to other women the moment you fucked him, and who pissed you off. She’d just met that Howard. It was her “tough cookie” side, and she was dead serious about it.

Although maybe, he thought, Frances just wanted it clear that if somebody was going to be the “tough cookie” it had to be her. Which was fine with him. If you had only
one
situation in your life with no unhappy surprises and that one worked out just halfway well—the one his parents had had for thirty years, for instance—then you were a lucky duck.
His own marriage, all things taken into consideration, might be one of those rarities. He wasn’t hoping to make Frances Bilandic number two. He just wished she wouldn’t be so serious. They both knew what they were doing.

Frances had tiny, child’s hands, but strong, with deep creases in their palms like an old person’s hands. And when he’d held them, in bed in the HoJo’s, they’d made him feel tender toward her, as if her hands rendered her powerless to someone of his unusual size. He reached and took both her little hands in both of his big ones, as semis pounded the girders on I-95. She was so small—a tough, sexy little package, but also a little package of trouble if you didn’t exert strong force on her.

“I wish you wouldn’t be mad at me,” he said, bringing her in close to him. Her strong little bullet breasts greeted his maroon Pawcatuck Parks and Recreation Department T-shirt.

“I’ve never done this before, okay?” she said almost inaudibly, though she let herself be brought in. They didn’t have to be in love, he thought, but they could be tender to each other. Why bother otherwise? (He absolutely didn’t believe she’d never done this before. He, on the other hand, hadn’t.)

“Same here,” he said. Though that didn’t matter. He just wanted a chance to do it again sometime soon.

One of the tractor trailers honked from up above. They were standing out in the hot parking lot at two p.m. on a Tuesday in early September. It was sweet and touching but also completely stupid, since the Weiboldt Mystic office was only five blocks away. An agent could be picking up clients at the HoJo’s. If someone blabbed, it could be over in a flash. Boom … no job. Their colleagues would love nothing more than for two new agents of the year to be fired and to take over their listings. And for what? For a minor misunderstanding about Frances being good in bed—which she definitely was. It made him suddenly anxious to be touching her out in the open, so that he stopped and looked around the lot. Nothing. “Maybe we ought to go back inside,” he said,
“we’ve got the room the rest of the night.” He didn’t really want to—he wanted to get to an appointment in White Rock. But he
would
go back if fate required it. In fact, a part of him—a small part—would’ve liked to have gotten in his car, piled Frances Bilandic in beside him, and headed up onto the Interstate, turning south and never coming back. Leave the whole sorry shitaree in the dust. He could do that. Worry about details later. People who did that were people he admired, though you never really heard what their lives were like later.

“I’m afraid if I went back in that room I might not come out for a week,” Frances said, looking around at the green door of the motel room. She put her rough little hand flagrantly against his still-stiff cock and gave it a good squeeze. “You’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess there’s your evidence,” Howard said solemnly.

“Just checkin’ in on Garfield,” Frances said behind her shades. “I’ll save him for Phoenix. How’s that?”

“I can’t wait.” Howard realized he was grinning idiotically.

“You better,” Frances said. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

And that’s how they left it.

The sales conference, following the first day’s jet-lagged festivities and spiritless camaraderie, developed into a slog almost immediately. Frances kept running into the loud-mouth lesbians from Jersey, who kept repeating the punch line of the joke they’d told twenty times the first night. “Suck-off’s just a Russian general to me, soldier.” They’d bray that line in the elevator or in the ladies’ room or waiting for a panel to begin, then break into squalls of laughter. She couldn’t remember how the joke began, so she couldn’t tell it to Ed on the phone.

All the seminars, chalk-talk panels, motivational speeches and
mano a mano
sessions with the Weiboldt top management team were tedious and repetitive and usually insulting. They were aimed, she felt, at people who’d never sold a piece
of real estate, instead of Platinum agents who’d spurted past 4 million and would’ve been better off at home, fielding stragglers at the end of the summer selling season.

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.