After their nap Marion and Sunderson took Mona to the Verling for supper. Sunderson was frantic for a mess of fried whitefish. A “mess of fish” was a localism. People would say that they “fried up a mess of brook trout” they had caught. Sunderson was in a peculiar mental state not having totally awakened from his nap and a dream in which he was a god in the sky but hadn’t done anything with his godhead except wander around the heavens. He had returned to earth in his mortal body and was relieved.
Mona was stunning in a black pantsuit she said a “friend” had given her. She was pouty because her father had called from Cleveland for the first time in months and had said he was buying her a car. She had told him “I don’t want your fucking car” and had hung up. She changed the mood by taking out a page she had ripped from Vanity Fair to which her mother subscribed. She read aloud to them an item that said that at an auction of the belongings of the deceased fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a single chair had gone for twenty-four million dollars. Marion had laughed so explosively that he alarmed the adjoining tables while Sunderson was merely puzzled to the point of melancholy and also irked that his whitefish and glass of beer had arrived and he had forgotten to order his habitual double whiskey. He thought he was losing his grip and corrected his error. Meanwhile Mona was thrilled at Marion’s laughter and asked him why he thought the chair’s price was so funny.
“Money would be great if we didn’t die but since we do it’s an absurd obsession.”
Sunderson was struck by Marion’s answer to the point of hypnosis. He couldn’t seem to move the forkful of fish halfway to his mouth. Mona tapped his arm and nodded toward the door. Carla and Queenie were self-consciously flouncing in wearing twin sheepskin coats. They took off their coats and shook out their short hair that didn’t move all that much and headed toward the table to say hello as if everyone were lifelong friends. Sunderson was startled to see Queenie and puzzled by her native dress and the pounds of turquoise jewelry hanging from her neck.
“Your dad is having you looked for in Tucson.”
“So I heard. I’m going back tomorrow. He wants to borrow money from my trust. He and some friends want to buy the Lions to save Detroit from further shame. I’m not loaning the asshole a single cent.”
Sunderson nodded thinking about girls and their daddies. He was relieved when his whiskey arrived because Carla was causing him discomfort. How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?
“Lunch tomorrow at noon at the Landmark Inn?” Carla asked.
“Of course, darling.” They left for their table and Sunderson downed his whiskey as if it were water.
“Why is she wearing that absurd Indian costume?” Mona laughed.
“I’ve met a number of American women who think they were Pocahontas or Sacajawea in their past lives. They’re never a miserable squaw shot in a tent by advancing United States Cavalry.” Marion loved this sort of irony. He was a speed eater and signaled the waitress for more fish.
Sunderson was so pleased to reach home and sit at his desk with a stack of books, relatively sober because it was quite a struggle for the single double whiskey to work its way through his belly full of food. Intending to stay up late he made a small pot of coffee and surveyed the glory of his home though in truth the carpet needed to be replaced. After Diane had left he had stopped wiping his feet properly and there was a lot of scuzz on the wall around the stove and sink in the kitchen. Also, all of the windows in the house needed washing. He and a friend had set up a window washing business for fifty cents an hour when they were fourteen and it had been horribly boring work. He reduced the stack of books to three: Deloria’s Playing Indian, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, and the Bible, King James version. He needed to go through the New Testament to remind himself of the gist of Christianity, which had garnered countless billions of dollars over the years. When on their trip to Italy he had stood with Diane in Saint Peter’s Square, he had been mightily impressed but had also wondered about the top-dollar cost of the project and how the construction workers had wended their weary ways home for a simple bowl of spaghetti. He took out his journal.
1. I read that in the 1940s we made fifty phone calls a year. Now we make five thousand. Reminds me of the cacophony of blackbirds in spring or wild geese who will honk for hours at a time. Actually I think I heard this on NPR.
2. All of the lachryma Christi in Italy. Why is Jesus always weeping?
3. At Marion’s shack I had this feeling of just how ordinary I was. I simply have to nail the Great Leader but the group is so intact I must somehow catch him red-handed. I talked to Roxie briefly and she said the cult father who filed the early complaint and then went off to Flint had now withdrawn the complaint. Possibly paid off.
4. The bitterness of history. At the Sand Creek Massacre our cavalry shot low into the tents at dawn but the warriors were off hunting so we only killed women and children.
5. The childish attempt to tie oneself to history. I used to say while drinking in bars that I was born during the Blitzkrieg in World War II but only three old men even knew what I was talking about.
The phone rang and the caller ID said it was Mona. It was unthinkable not to answer.
“I just danced naked to ‘Wild Thing’ and you weren’t even watching. The dance was in thanks for dinner. Is your peeking period over?”
“Yes, it’s over. I intend to become a white Christian gentleman.”
“Aren’t you worrying about losing your manhood?”
“I hope so.”
“A couple of items. My friend Freddy was looking into universities. He’s a senior. Anyway, at Tufts in the Boston area they have a course called ‘Sex, Religion, and Money.’ Maybe you should fly out there and enroll. I could go along and sleep on the sofa.”
“Thank you but no. I’ve proven myself ill-suited to leave Marquette.”
“I forgot to tell you at dinner but I talked on the phone to Carla when she was stoned and this spring the Great Leader aka King David is going to move his followers to Choteau, Montana, or Chadron, Nebraska, or Channing in Michigan. He insists that there’s mystical power in the letters ‘ch.’ Myself, I have doubts.”
“Good night, darling. I’m doing my homework. I have to read the New Testament.” He was thinking that the G.L. would know that the Hebrew “chai” held mystical powers.
It turned out that the New Testament was hard going. Reading Matthew brought on a specific memory of being wedged between his mother and Berenice in the Lutheran church so that he couldn’t escape. He had been a rawboned troublesome boy with difficulties trying to connect religion to his own life in a small town surrounded by forest and Lake Superior. Struggling with Matthew he began to think of Marion’s insistence that it is easily forgotten that character also emerges from the landscape of our early years. If your antennae are educated by following your dog through the woods all day and your major preoccupations are hunting and fishing you don’t lose this molding of your character by merely going to college, falling in love and getting married, or becoming a detective in an area with very little viable crime. No wonder he couldn’t deal with Nogales.
He pushed the Bible aside and fetched the proper volume of a 1920s edition of the Britannica, back when the writing was better and without the cruelty of the Warsaw Pact and atomic power, a fine place to check out the essence of Christianity. His eyelids immediately began to droop but then he was saved by the phone, this time a call from Mona’s mother in Lansing. A representative from University of Michigan would be in Marquette on Monday to talk to talented students and their parents. Would he mind showing up at 2:00 p.m. at Marquette High School and acting as a guardian? He’d be glad to. Unfortunately Mona’s mother was named Gidget, a product of her own mother’s fascination with the 1961 film Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Sunderson felt there was something to be said for biblical names.
He was suddenly fatigued with his feeble attempts at reading, poured a nightcap, and watched the 11:00 p.m. news in which he noted again that car bombs were much smarter than smart bombs. The weather forecast was pleasantly awful with an Alberta clipper, a vast storm coming down from the northwest across Lake Superior to bury them in an early blizzard. Splendid, he thought. Well back in his brain, a naughty place, he thought his noon lunch might lead to a sexual encounter. Their woodpile fusion had been electric indeed. Now the possible encounter was sullied by the fact that he had to be at the high school at two. He brooded about this as he poured a second nightcap to cure the coffee jangles, took the clicker, and segued to a satellite channel playing a non–Oscar winning movie called Ninja Cheerleaders. Marion had said that a central fact of our time was the triumph of process over content. In the movie these nubile but powerful girls would leap high in the air and viciously kick bad guys in the face in an explosion of blood and lost teeth. Despite some marvelous butt shots he dozed, waking in a couple of hours to one of those save the whales movies where a crew in a rubber boat cruised through bumpy waters pestering the marine mammals. Back at camp a geek in a black turtleneck said that male whales of different generations keep in touch with their moms. On the way to bed Sunderson imagined a mother whale introducing her newborn daughter to a forty-year-old brother, “Sarah, this is your brother Leviathan.”