Pilgrims (14 page)

T
he pilgrims were resting in the lobby of the Giorgina when she came back, all except Carl who was upstairs napping and Evelyn who had eaten a doughnut from a street corner vendor that turned out to be a meat pie and it hadn't agreed with her. And Mr. Keillor—“He went to visit friends,” said Irene, raising her hand with uplifted pinky.
La-
di-
da
. “Too good for the likes of us,” said Wally. “The more I see of him, the more I wonder,
Where did this guy come from?
” said Clint. “You know what I mean?” They did, indeed.

For years the man had spoken in a plummy semi-Brit voice that bore no resemblance to how anybody in Lake Wobegon talked—had he learned it from old Charles Laughton movies? Of late, he seemed to be aiming for boyishness (a little late, at 66) and greeting people with a big warm howdy and a wink. The producers of his show had teamed him up with a chimp named Bombo who was supposed to humanize him somehow (according to a story in the paper). Margie wondered if he might've been fired from
A Prairie Home Companion
and if his traveling with them to Rome might be out of desperation, to
cushion the shock. What if he were devastated and on the verge of taking a fistful of pills and what if he called her at 3:00
A.M.
one of these nights, sobbing, and asking why he shouldn't just kill himself right now and save everyone the misery of his presence? What would she tell him?

“How are you doing, Margie?” said Lyle.

“I am having the time of my life.” And she was. Three days in Rome and she didn't see how she could possibly go back to being the little country mouse she used to be. A Lake Wobegon woman was expected to go along with things. If people snub you, smile and move on. Smile at insults. Water off a duck's back. If men say stupid sexist things in front of you, be a good sport, laugh, and move on. Boys threw snowballs at you. They called you names, said you were ugly, stupid. Smile and turn away. Don't make an issue of it. Drop it. Grandma Schoppenhorst gave her a plaster plaque for her birthday, the Blessed Virgin in her blue smock and underneath
BLESSED ARE THE MEEK FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH
and like Grandma, Margie was wellschooled in meekness. Last fall she went in to see Dr. DeHaven about the lump in her breast and his secretary Gloria called Margie up to the counter and as she approached, Gloria sang out, “So this is about the bladder leakage?” And all around the room, people with their heads buried in People made a mental note,
Margie Krebsbach pees her pants. Guess that's why she gave up
wearing white ones. Too bad. Must be embarrassing for her. My
uncle had that problem, but he was eighty-three
. And she wanted to turn and announce to the room, “No, I don't. She's got my mother-in-law's folder, not mine. Myrtle suffers from occasional
incontinence. She is pushing eighty. Or pulling it, we really don't know. I am fine. If you must know, I do have a little problem with hemorrhoids, and if you'd like a close look, let me drop trou and bend over, okay?” But she smiled and said, “No, that's my mother-in-law, Myrtle.”

“Oh!” Gloria shrieked. “You're here for a boob check then?”

What could you do with these people?

But now she was a new woman. She had had an illicit meeting with a man she met in a coffee bar. It happened in slow motion, giving God time to alter events unless—what?—did God intend for it to happen? And now she was considering divorce and pondering what to do with half a million dollars. Maybe she wouldn't go home at all. She could take twenty grand out of the bank and find a room to rent, enroll in Italian class, advertise for work on Craigslist, and get to know Paolo better and better. Maybe move to Milan. Her kids didn't need her. Mr. Halvorson could find a sub to finish out the year. There would be talk—
She stayed in
Rome. She and Carl are separated. Irene thinks she met someone
there. Isn't that unbelievable?
She'd need to find friends. But she had found a close friend. In just a couple of days, Maria had become her closest confidante.

A miracle of a sort. Buried all her life in Lake Wobegon, now she had (sort of) shacked up with a man she'd just met—sat on his bed and let him touch her in the Hotel Paradiso. Would Audrey have done this? You bet your boots she would've.

She tried to visualize life without Carl. The man who lay next to her reading yet one more book about the Civil War, blue pajama
bottoms, the furry chest, the sheer Carlness of him, his bouquet of sawdust and motor oil and Mountain Lake deodorant. If she wanted him to come over, she used to be able to simply touch his arm, and he'd snake his foot over and find her foot and then she could snuggle up close to him, put her chin on his shoulder, and if he was in an amorous mood he'd turn the light out and they'd neck in the dark and then undress and follow their routine—Missionary, Spooned On Side, Cowgirl, All Fours—and for years it was always on Tuesday nights until Carla's basketball games knocked them off the pace. But no more. He had gone across the hall. His choice. So if he wasn't going to return to duty, why not give him his discharge papers?

Last winter, she caught an old movie on the movie-classics channel,
Lassie Brings The Pie
, about the couple who split up and the dad moved to San Francisco, far from the mom and kids in Idaho. They missed him on Thanksgiving Day and Lassie, ever sensitive to human feelings, took a pumpkin pie that the mom had brought home from the bakery and trotted down the street with it. It was in a box, tied up with string, and Lassie held the string in her teeth, and carried the pie through a blizzard and over rickety swinging bridges and fought off a cougar and over the Sierras and down to the Bay and across the Oakland Bay Bridge, trotting between lines of rush-hour traffic, too late for Thanksgiving but just in time for Valentine's Day, and found the dad, who was about to go out on a date with a sexy model. He saw Lassie and burst into tears. “You never told me you had a dog!” the model said in a pouty voice. “I'm allergic to dogs.” Lassie set the pie at his feet and untied the string and the model sneezed and stepped in the pie, and fell down and fractured her leg, and in the
next scene the dad and Lassie were on a bus heading for Idaho and he was singing “Let the Rest of the World Go By.”

Maybe Carl's problem was stress. He'd promised to build that huge lake home for Mr. Ladderman, a handshake deal—Carl assumed that a big Minneapolis investment mogul who drove a Lexus was good for the money—and then in November, Ladderman's wife found the letters he'd written to Honey Bunny and the wife fired both barrels at him as he jumped naked out a secondstory window of their home in Aspen. He suffered buckshot wounds in his left calf. “How can you fire both barrels at a man from fifteen feet away and just hit him in the calf?” said Margie. “How could you not get him in the chest?” Had the man been killed, Carl would've been paid off by the estate, but now Ladderman was sued for divorce and was living in El Paso under an assumed name because the bloodhounds were on his trail as his investments tanked and his notes came due and he was six months in arrears on payments to Carl for this monstrous half-finished structure that Carl had stopped work on and mortgaged his own home (for the first time in his life) to keep the business afloat, and now was getting urgent calls from Hjalmar at the bank to come in and talk, all of which might take a man's mind off the pleasures of the flesh.

Maybe he had wilted in the hot sun of parenthood. It happens. You're in love with a woman and the next thing you know she turns out to be the mother of three children. And dang it, they're yours!

Sleep apnea?

Claustrophobia?

Allergy?

A side effect of cleaning chemicals? Perhaps the fumes rising from her sparkling clean floors had denutted her husband and turned him into a hermaphrodite.

She called Dr. DeHaven and asked him straight out if Carl's prostate medicine might affect his sex drive and Dr. DeHaven said, “No. Why?”

“Just curious,” she said.

How about fear of vaginal entrapment?

Maybe he was just trying too hard. You start down the slope, kissing and touching, and it picks up speed, and then what if you think “What if I can't?”—it becomes self-fulfilling. The woman is breathing hard, panting, rearing up, and crying, “Do it! Do it, Baby! Pound that nail in! Sock it to me, big boy!” And the poor man lies there with a wilted daffodil in his pants.

And then there are wood ticks. One of them crawls up your leg and finds a place where the moon doesn't shine and feeds off you and at the same time releases a toxin that attacks your libido. It's the wood tick's way of protecting itself—if you don't undress in bright light, you're less likely to find it—and that's why Thoreau didn't date girls and that's why our rural population is shrinking.

Could Carl be gay? Had he lost interest in her because he had discovered Another Side of Himself?

She found an ad in the back of
Christian Cavalier
magazine for a “love potion” that gave a man “more energy and sustaining power” but it was offered by a company that also made a metal disc to put in your mouth that enabled you to sing in perfect pitch, “no more whinnying or quavering.”

In high school they spoke of Coke and aspirin having aphrodisiac powers, but not for men, only for girls. A man was supposed to have those powers in his back pocket. She Googled “aphrodisiac” and found an article about garlic and Cajun dishes such as blackened catfish (“Spicy food can backfire. Passion is a fragile mood and may be disrupted by stomach gas.”) and alcohol, of course (“It is easy to overshoot the mark when plying a lover with drinks. Alcohol reduces a woman's level of judgment to where her affection for you doesn't mean so much.”). One article said that an exchange of clothing between lovers can stimulate hitherto unexpected levels of passion, that a small-town banker in Illinois who, in the privacy of their bedroom, tied one of his wife's long silk scarves around his neck, suddenly stripped the clothing from her body and also from his own and cast himself down at her feet and engaged in various exciting actions with her toes that inexplicably made her cry out with pleasure and thus began ninety minutes of loud and passionate entanglement that wound up in a climax that, according to his stopwatch, lasted for thirty-seven seconds.

Or maybe Carl had never loved her, in the sense of actually truly loving her, in the sense of searching high and low for the Beloved and finding her and crying out, “I want to be with you for the rest of my life, O you magnificent one.” In Lake Wobegon, you worked from a small pool of appropriate partners and a man stepped in where the woman had signaled a vacancy and if she thought he was okay, not an incipient drunk or child molester, she didn't dismiss him, which was the Lake Wobegon equivalent of falling in love, and thus, quietly, obediently, like
schoolchildren falling into line two by two by two on a field trip, people formed pairs and marched to the altar.

Except for some, like her older sister, Linda, who escaped to become a flight attendant for Continental, lanky Linda, hair dyed bright red, devoutly single, jetting off to Delhi, Rio, Copenhagen, Rome, phantom Linda who returned home rarely, who existed in postcards and the 4
A.M.
phone call. She called from Beirut in February, to ask how things were, and for once Margie told her the truth. “Take him on a trip,” Linda said. “Shake up the routine. You people get so deep in your trench, you can't see over the side.” Linda was bisexual. Women were more pleasant to be with, not so scary, and there wasn't the erection problem or the semen to deal with or such dreadful diseases. No strings attached. You just lay together, the two of you, and then you said thank you very much and moved on. Or vibrators were nice, too. Or you met a nice man who knew how to show you a good time and then go away. Linda had no desire to have children. God, no. She loved hotels. She loved to take a nice hot bath with a stack of magazines on the edge of the tub, and lie in bed with a good novel, and then turn out the lights, pet the cat, and go to sleep. Dreamland. Who could ask for more?