Brent flew the red-eye from L.A. to Minneapolis-St. Paul on Tuesday arriving at dawn and caught a limo service to St. Cloud where Debbie was supposed to meet him at the bus depot but she took the wrong road, and headed north instead of south and was almost an hour late. He was pacing outside in his navy blue linen suit and sandals, trying to get his cell phone to work. He had dropped it in the urinal in the bus depot and taken off his shoe to fish it out with but it was badly pee-soaked and meanwhile a V.I.P. was calling so Brent picked it up in a hanky which muffled his voice so the man couldn’t understand him and hung up and in all the turmoil Brent had lost his dark glasses. He threw his suitcase into the back of the van and got in the passenger side and looked straight ahead, livid. “I am really pissed,” he said, in case she didn’t notice.
“In more ways than one,” she said, and knew right away it was the wrong thing to say at that moment. “I am so sorry. You’re angry and you have a right to be. I’m so stupid when it comes to directions.”
He said he was not angry at her, he was angry at himself for being here. “I do not want to be here, believe me.” They stopped to get him a bottle of gin and the liquor store didn’t have his brand, Bombay. He said to skip it. In Bowlus, he changed his mind. He wanted gin. So they stopped at the liquor store there which only carried a no-frills gin called Calcutta, made in Toronto. Eight bucks a quart. “Cheaper than antifreeze,” said the clerk. He bought it, and vermouth, and three bottles of Pinot Noir. Clearly he was settling in for a siege.
“My parents don’t drink much,” she said. He said he had assumed as much.
“My dad has diabetes. We just found out. They’re as sweet as can be. I hope you like them.” That last sentence buzzed in the air. A fatal wish. She knew it the moment she said it. He would loathe them and they would try so hard and be desperately polite and he would loathe them all the more for trying. Brent could be rude when he wanted. And sometimes without knowing it. He was in a cutthroat line of work, shared-time luxury jets were the new thing. Competition was ferocious. The Russians were getting into the market, MiG-15s had been converted to passenger jets, they’d fly you cross-country in seventy minutes. Brent had come a long way from Berkeley and Sartre. He was a Republican now, or as he put it, “a nihilist in golf pants.” He made fun of the Sacred Spirit people mercilessly and God knows they were an easy target with their dinging and whanging and milling, their simple theology—children, trees, music, good; war, injustice, pollution, bad—but she loved them and they made her feel whole. They were nontoxic. How many people can you say that about?
He was slumped in the front seat, dozing, as the car came over the rise and there were the grain silos like an ancient temple and the lake and then the highway dipped into the town, and she slowed to twenty and he woke up.
“Where are we now?”
“We’re in Lake Wobegon, Brent. This is where I’m from.”
He looked and said nothing. They cruised slowly along Main Street, past the Mercantile and the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, all the highlights of her bicycle years. There on the corner was the old phone booth. She wanted to tell him about it. Some old mayor had insisted on the town buying one. (What sort of town had no phone booth?) So in it went and nobody ever used it. Why would you? Especially after drunks started using it as a toilet. But one day Clarence Bunsen was passing by and the phone rang. An odd high-pitched ring. He had never heard it ring before. He picked it up and a man asked for Maureen. “She’s not here,” said Clarence. “When is she expected?” He said he didn’t know. “Oh,” said the man and hung up, disappointed. So it became a saying. Whenever people complained, you might say, “Tell it to Maureen.”
This used to strike her as funny, but now that she thought about telling it to Brent it seemed dopy. So she didn’t. She drove down to the lake and parked under a red oak tree and snuggled up next to him. “We’re going to be married out there,” she said.
“But by your friend, right? So it’s not exactly a wedding.”
“To me it’s like a wedding. What’s the difference?”
“You and I agreed that we didn’t need some big legal whoop-de-do. This is our commitment to each other, right? It’s just between you and me.”
So he was already planning to leave her. Oh God. How stupid she was. The man had played along with the thing, consented to be here and say his lines and act the part, and now he was making it clear that it was nonbinding. He was thinking beyond Saturday, wondering who the next babe might be.
“But you would marry me if it came down to that, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean, ‘if it came down to that’?”
“If I asked you to.”
He looked out to the lake and he brushed his hair back and finally he said, “We don’t have that sort of proprietary relationship.”
“But we’re going to be true to each other, aren’t we?”
“Of course.” He said this in an odd tone of voice, the clink of a counterfeit coin on the counter. “Let’s head for home, okay? It’s been a day to remember. We’re starting a new print ad campaign.” He pulled a paper from his pocket and read: “The aura of authority is an indispensible element of leadership, and nothing says authority like a private jet waiting for you at the airport—to go where you want to go, when you’re ready.” He put the paper away. “This is going to be big, I tell you. Let’s go. I need a drink.”
She backed the car up and drove around behind Ralph’s and onto Main Street and up the hill toward her parents’ house and she thought, This is never going to work. How did you get yourself into this mess? You don’t need this. Cut this bozo loose. And then she thought, Maybe he just needs a good night’s sleep. Everybody has a bad day now and then. Give him a chance.