One of the things about Rainey I like is that I don’t have to wait long for her to slip a knife between my ribs. I smile, inordinately pleased to see this woman. Her curly red hair is cut shorter than I’ve ever seen it. In profile her face looks boyish. I resist the urge to reach over and playfully squeeze her leg as I do Sarah’s. “I kind of panicked the other night,” I apologize to her as we head west on Maple to the nearest yogurt emporium. “I think I was born without a pain threshold.”
Rainey’s laughter is refreshing as a cool breeze.
“Gideon, you’re just awful! Poor Kim Keogh. I saw her on TV tonight and she looked frazzled. You’re really great for a woman’s ego, you know that?”
I can hear Kim telling her friends: the last guy I made love to had to go to the hospital an hour later.
“I’m too old for somebody like that,” I admit, turning my head so I can see her. She is sitting so straight it makes my back ache. If I had her posture, I’d be an inch taller.
As if she is commenting on the weather, Rainey, watching the road for both of us, says offhandedly, “That’s how men your age die-a massive heart attack and-poof!-you’re gone. Think of the guilt for the poor woman.”
As we climb the hill into Blackwell County’s most exclusive area, the traffic increases as if the heat had driven even the rich into the streets tonight. The poor woman? I feel a sudden twinge in my prostate, as if it is an early-warning signal for the rest of the body.
“Surely, it doesn’t happen all that often,” I argue weakly, wondering what the statistics are.
“It sounds like a line of bull cooked up by wives who won’t put out anymore themselves but who want to scare their husbands into lifelong celibacy.”
Rainey reaches over and pats my knee.
“I’m not your wife,” she says with mock tenderness. Her hand, as light and soft as a first kiss, immediately returns to her lap.
I turn onto Bradshaw and see the lights of the section called Riverview, a yuppie heaven for central Arkansans who demand proof we have the potential to be like everybody else.
Antique shops, pricey women’s clothing stores, pretentious restaurants with snotty-sounding names (Pompidieu’s, the Lion Tamer), business offices (a favorite area of therapists, dentists, and accountants) daintily line the street. A little too cutesy for me, but Rainey, however, has decided tonight that Turbo’s has the best yogurt in town, and obligingly, I turn into the drive-through lane, which, through a stroke of blind luck, isn’t backed almost into Bradshaw this time of night.
“You might as well be my wife,” I say as we pull up to the order window.
“I read a survey recently that married people hardly ever do it after a few years. Like just a little over once a week.”
After we order (she gets her pathetic kiddie cup), Rainey says, “God, Gideon, you sound like Rosa’s been dead so long you can’t remember what it was like to be married to her.”
Rainey hands me a five-dollar bill. It’s her turn, and she has become scrupulous about paying her share since we have decided to be friends. As I get her change from the girl at the window (she looks about nine have the child-labor laws been repealed or does it just seem as if kids are quitting school in the third grade to go to work?), I think about my sex life with Rosa. Have I been romanticizing that, too? It was good, but like everything else, it became a routine. In my present state though, it seems wonderful. Oblivious to the ritzy Buick full of kids that has just pulled in behind me, I roll my white plastic spoon around in my medium-sized cup, mixing the chocolate syrup and the yogurt together and then digging out as big a bite as I can manage to get into my mouth. If this is going to be my only sensual pleasure in life, then I’m going to get it right now.
We drive back to her house and sit on the sweltering concrete steps with the porch light out so as not to attract bugs.
Across the road, lit by the streetlight on the corner, two small children run shrieking through one yard into another chasing each other. The leader of the two, a girl about nine with a long ponytail and short, stubby legs laughs excitedly and blasts a tin can five feet into the air without breaking stride.
“No fair! No fair!” her pursuer, a little boy of no more than seven, wails, throwing himself despondently on the high grass in front of the house as she continues around the corner.
When I was a child in Bear Creek, we played endless games of Kick the Can, and my older sister, before she became obese, was that ponytailed tomboy across the street.
Dejectedly, the boy gets up and retrieves the can and places it upright on the sidewalk. Putting his head down on his chest, he trots around the corner, still muttering to himself.
I lean back and look up at the humid sky, which is packed with misty stars. Under my now sticky T-shirt I can feel drops of sweat slipping down my sides. “My air-conditioning went out tonight,” I say glumly. “If it’s not one damn thing, it’s twenty or thirty.”
Rainey, moving toward me but not touching, titters at my hyperbole. Her laughter is like tinkling glass.
“How you do go on, Gideon,” she says lightly.
“Do you want to sleep on my couch?”
I think for a moment. How nice it would be just to glimpse the woman I have loved for over a year in her nightgown.
Underneath she would be solid, her body still firm from five days a week of Jazzercise. Yet I know I would lie awake all night listening futilely for my name. Our friendship is too delicate to carry such a weight. Maybe in five or ten years, I think irritably.
“Better not,” I mumble, not daring to look at her.
“But thanks for the offer.” Above us I can hear the whisper of a breeze in the maples that flank her house, but ground level it is hot and still. Incessantly busy locusts provide a kind of white noise around us for the now half-dozen children who occasionally come charging into view from out of the shadows across the street.
I think I hear a sigh, but she is gasping at a shooting star that flashes by us from left to right. “Look!” she says, touching my arm. For perhaps a second I trace the star which then winks out of sight.
“Incredible,” I mutter, but I am thinking of the relationship between men and women. Why are things so difficult?
I have tried as earnestly as I know how to accept the terms of friendship she has offered, but times like tonight when I can smell the heat in every living thing around me, including Rainey, it is not easy.
We talk for about an hour. She tells me that she has begun to worry that she may lose her job at the state hospital. The state is struggling to convert itself to a community-based system, and the census is way down. Her offer to loan me money becomes even more astonishing. I’m so cheap I even hate to lend Sarah money. “I probably could get a job at a community mental health center somewhere,” she says offhandedly.
The idea of Rainey moving anywhere shocks me. Ever since Rosa died, I have told myself not to expect permanence in any situation, but as usual, I am always surprised and hurt by the prospect of change. How dare anyone disrupt my life?
I scrape desperately at my empty cup.
“It won’t come to that.” Yet it might. Nothing stands still. As usual, she lets me talk about Sarah. I tell her about the letter I received tonight.
“She doesn’t want to be a lawyer, that’s for sure,” I say irritably. Since I have been in private practice by myself, I have quietly entertained the thought that someday she would go to law school and then come into practice with me.
Page amp; Page, Attorneys at Law.
The right side of her face pressed against her arms which cradle her drawn-up knees, Rainey looks like a sleepy child.
“Who in their right mind would?” she asks, breathing deeply in the dense air.
“Some day historians will look back and regard lawyers as the dinosaurs of our culture. All you did was eat and fight. This country better learn quickly we can’t afford you, or we all better start learning Japanese and Korean
Absently, I lick my spoon, which has long been clean, and taste nothing but plastic.
“We’re like cops: nobody likes us until you need us.”
Rainey raises her head and gazes up at the stars again.
“That’s the problem. We only think we need you because nobody trusts each other in this country. It’s everybody for themselves. That’s what is killing us as a society. There’s no sense we’re part of each other. It’s
