Crossroads

In his bare feet, with his hitching gait, he lumbered into the rear of the house, where the dog howled again. His eagerness, the shift in power it represented, was somewhat alleviating Perry’s fear, and he wondered what the something else might be.

The guy returned shaking a glass jar like a maraca, a Planters Peanuts jar with several hundred pills in it, a quantity that told Perry they couldn’t be valuable. Amphetamines, presumably. Not a substance he’d ever had reason to try.

“Take a handful,” the guy said, “there’s no such thing as too many.”

The lid of the jar hit the entry rug with a dull clank and rolled away. The open jar was offered with a trembling hand.

“What have we here?” Perry said.

“Take like four of ’em and chew ’em—you’ll see, there’s no such thing as too many, you’ll forget about your weed. Chew ’em up and wait a minute, it’ll hit you. The first four are on me, because, shit, man, it’s Christmas, I’ll give you another forty for your twenty dollars, you’ll forget about your weed, this shit’s like a bomb, take take take. If you like it, which you will, I can set you up with the big bomb. Take take take.”

The dark crater had appeared in front of Perry; it was both behind him and in front of him, which could only mean that he was falling into it. He held out his hand.

Having performed the task that Frances had set him, having secured a place on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, Russ returned to his office in a state of exultation. On the desk where his lady had sat in her hunting cap, her legs parted, he saw an Arizona landscape unfolding. In his mind, he was already driving deep into this landscape. He was tempted to call her immediately and report his accomplishment, but all afternoon, all evening, she’d been running the show, provoking his ardor, withholding rewards, and this needed to stop. It was he who’d slain the dragon! He who’d had the guts to knock on Ambrose’s door! Better, he thought, to leave her in suspense. Better to let her wonder until she finally had to ask. And then, casually, let drop that he’d forgiven Ambrose and was going to Arizona.

He locked his office and went down to the parking lot. In the snow on his Fury’s rear window, some teenaged hand had inscribed the word OOPS. Hearing the music from the function hall, he recalled that he and Frances wouldn’t be alone in Arizona; there would also be busloads of potentially hostile young people. It occurred to him that he was still wearing his sheepskin coat.

He had a guilty impulse to go back for his other one, but he was done with being gutless. He could wear whatever goddamned coat he pleased. He no longer cared if Marion knew he’d spent the day with Frances. In the future, yes, if he commenced an affair and it grew into something larger, a new life, a second chance, the repercussions would be daunting, but for now his only detectable crime was the little lie he’d told at breakfast. If Marion remarked on the sheepskin coat, made the mildest insinuation, he would blast her with the news that Perry was a pot smoker. Even better, he would tell her about Ambrose. For three years, she’d been maligning Rick, reinforcing Russ’s grudge against him, and when she learned that Russ had forgiven him, unilaterally, without consulting her, she was bound to feel betrayed. No doubt she’d imagined she was being a loyal wife. But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn’t been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago. Frances had restored him to his courage, his edge, by believing he was capable of more.

Not trusting his tires on the unplowed hill on Maple, and being in no hurry to lay eyes on Marion, he drove the long way home to Highland Street. Again and again today, for six hours, he’d glanced at the face of his female companion and liked what he saw. It was such a simple thing, a lightness that so many other men took for granted, to walk into a McDonald’s with Frances and not be embarrassed to be seen with her, but to him the relief of it, the contrast with the daily disappointment of seeing Marion, had felt almost miraculous. Where Frances’s hair, even flattened by the hunting cap, had flattered her, each of the hairstyles that Marion had tried in recent years had been wrong in a different way, too short or too long, each serving to accentuate the redness of her skin, the thickening of her neck, the pinching of her eyes by adipose and insomnia. He knew it was unfair of him to care. It was unfair that his eye should be more painfully affronted by his wife than by the many objectively worse-looking women in New Prospect. It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness. Sometimes, when she looked especially dumpy at a church dinner, he sensed a satisfaction in being unsightly to him, a wish to make him suffer along with her for what he and their marriage had done to her, but most of the time her unhappiness excluded him. Hating her looks was yet another of the jobs she quietly and capably took on for him. Was it any wonder he was lonely in his marriage?