The Ice Age (16 page)

When we'd finished I said, ‘That was kind of crappy.'

Gunther flashed an amused smirk. ‘Yeah, it was, huh?'

‘I was hungry, though.'

‘Yeah.'

We drove along for an hour or so listening to the radio. We'd found a classic rock station. In moderation, the classics make good driving music. That was certainly the case today. All sweeping farmscapes and ‘Whole Lotta Love'. We stopped along the roadside to watch a horse being born. There was no one out there. Just a mare standing in the middle of a field, popping a foal out. As we happened to be passing. We stood there for ages, leaning on the fence, watching the tiny thing struggle to his feet, find the teat, follow his mother around on shaky little hooves. We could have been there for hours, for all I know. They walked over the crest of a hill and we got back in the car and drove away.

The seventies metal thing was still working for us. We drove along in comfortable musing silence. I don't know about him, but I imagine he was doing exactly what I was doing, and I was just letting those songs tell me what to think about. What to feel. What to imagine. A hawk was circling overhead. Over barns and wheat fields. Probably looking for field mice. It was almost quaint. It didn't quite fit the rock anthem sensibility, and all the thoughts that went with it. I thought of the vultures circling over stretches of barren desert, weird rock formations, and said, ‘Gunther, I want to head out west again.'

‘Spoken like a seasoned roadtripper,' he said.

‘Yeah.'

We were quiet for a while. He was still driving east, of course.

I said, ‘I'm just used to it now.'

‘Not tired of drifting?'

I said, ‘No.'

He said, ‘You will be.'

It came to me in rush. The feeling is always just under the surface, so it didn't have far to travel…

‘Gunther! What's wrong with me?' I grabbed his hand on the gear stick, and looked him square in the face.

He turned to me in confusion, surprise, and somehow managed to keep the car on course, despite continuing to hold my eyes. Which were pouring with tears. I was really sobbing now. I wanted this trip of ours to never end. And I wanted him to want it too.

‘We'll go to Cynthia's,' he said, ‘and get you a proper meal.'

It took him a while to finally come out with this. It was all he said about my outburst. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Or hoping for. But then, that's Gunther. Ever grounded.

We didn't make it to this Cynthia's house that night. We stopped at a seriously no-frills roadhouse well after dark and ate vending machine cupcakes for dinner. So much for getting a proper meal into me. I guess that would have to wait. Gunther was really letting his culinary standards slip. Three months ago he wouldn't have even considered those bite-sized snacks edible. He just wasn't putting the effort in anymore. I remember Murray witnessing one of our critical discussions, wherein Gunther was lecturing me about the finer qualities of something, the inferior qualities of something else. Murray, he of the cabin of rustic woodsy kitsch, told Gunther to stop patronizing me. I didn't see it that way at all. I like hearing Gunther tell me what's what. It always amuses me. And it always makes me feel as though he has bigger and better things planned for me; like I have something important lying ahead.

I had another dream. I dreamed the whole journey, all the driving Gunther and I have done over the past several months, all our time together, could be traced on one huge diagram. According to this dream, if you were to hover above the country and look down, you'd see a gigantic organ covering almost the whole land, just flapped across it like a dead fish, gray and fleshy. It was criss-crossed by straps, tethering it to the ground. On the other end of some of these ropes and cords were Gunther's various friends, the recipients of our visits. I stopped hovering and plunged to earth; wandered around and collected their chatter, their accusations. Apparently this was Gunther's heart. The cords: our path across it, or across the country as it were. They are one and the same. I saw Stephanie a ways away. And Murray. Delilah got right in my face and said, ‘We have to stop Gunther's heart from exploding.' I tried to digest this. She said, ‘Haven't you ever heard of a heart attack?' I said, ‘Yeah, but…' She turned and shouted, ‘Hey, you guys! Kid's never heard of a heart attack!' For some reason I was holding a needle and thread. Some dame I've never seen before came up beside Delilah and spat, ‘The fuck were you gonna do with that?'

The next day we were at Cynthia's. She's this gorgeous blonde. One of the only friends of Gunther's time has been kind to. She opened the screen door and stood there looking like a goddamn siren, all statuesque and self-satisfied. I think her hair was actually blowing in the wind. And I didn't even feel a breeze. Like some film crew lackey was standing behind us pointing a fan. Like it was a goddamn photo shoot.

This imaginary wind seemed to have caught Gunther, too. He was standing next to me, towering and swaying like a poplar in a gale. He has been a little off color lately.

Cynthia took one look at him and said, ‘Oh, Gun, no!' and grasped him squarely by the shoulders, as if he was in danger of keeling over. I'd never heard anyone use a nickname on Gunther. Except maybe Delilah. But let's face it, she's just a random word generator. Fucking journalists.

‘Cynthia,' he said at length, ‘I'm just…tired.'

‘Uh…OK?' Her voice was laced with something; maybe sarcasm, I couldn't tell.

‘And my young friend here is just hungry.'

She looked at me with mingled warmth and pity. And to Gunther she returned with a look of intense concern. Finally she turned on her heels and said flatly, ‘Well then. Come in and have some rest and food.'

She wasn't expecting us. Gunther hadn't called. And it was kind of late. I didn't want her to go to any trouble, so all I ended up having was toast. Gunther didn't have anything. And she had a cigarette.

She got up and took my plate, and announced, ‘Gun, you can crash with me. Bed's huge. Kiddie can take the couch.'

She got me some blankets and a fluffy pillow. She pointed to the remote and told me she had MTV if I wanted to watch it. I think I rolled my eyes. I wished a hundred wishes that Gunther would offer to take the couch; send me in with her. But he didn't. He trotted off obediently. God, who could blame him. She's just so smooth, there's no contradicting her. So Gunther was sharing a bed with another woman. A beautiful one, at that. And I lay essentially a few feet away, alone. I prepared myself to be visited that night by all manner of torment and anguish. But all I ended up feeling was a dull, throbbing numbness. I fell asleep, and awoke with a start, in a strange room with nothing but gray coming in the windows. I remembered something was wrong, and then remembered it was the fact that Gunther was in bed with someone who wasn't me.

Eventually we all got up, convened in the kitchen, and ate more toast. I wondered if Cynthia was one of Gunther's playmates from the heady days of hedonism. It wasn't hard to picture her in a drug soaked, leatherclad orgy. Then I wondered if she was a vampire. Talk about well preserved. Do vampires wear acid washed jeans? There's no need to be narrow minded, I guess. She was wearing a silk camisole.

She puffed out a big bluster of smoke and said, ‘Kiddo, you are going to need more than just toast to survive.'

I thought that sounded kind of hospitable of her. But kind of foreboding as well. Cool, I thought. I wonder if my vampirization is nigh. Maybe those two had some kind of Meeting of the Undead last night to discuss my future development. Hopefully there was no sex involved. I'm starting to think I'm the jealous type.

Cynthia blew a few contemplative smoke rings and addressed me again. ‘So I hear you're quite the existentialist.'

‘Huh?' (Bearing in mind I'm not a morning person.)

‘Gunther says you've read everything you can get your tiny little hands on.'

‘Huh? Oh, yeah. I guess.' There followed a lame silence during which I took a sip of coffee, then another, and finally decided I should gratify her with a slightly meatier answer. ‘Except Dostoevsky. I hate that prick.'

‘Shit, doesn't everyone.' She snorted, and blew smoke out her nose.

She stubbed out her cigarette, in an overstuffed ceramic ashtray that bore all the trademark awkward lumps of a child's school project. But her house was utterly, undoubtedly childless.

She blurted, ‘So Gun, you going to stay here until you get straightened up?'

This was all getting too cryptic for me.

‘Gun' said, ‘I am straight, Cynthia, I am…It's—'

She looked at him dubiously. He stammered on.

‘It's been hard.'

I wanted to get up from my flowery cushioned country-kitchen chair and wrap my arms around him. Us womenfolk studied him a while, from totally different angles, I'm sure. For one thing, she was standing up, looking down. I never look down on Gunther. He's right, it has been hard, especially these last few weeks; just out of control. Those watery blue eyes looked like they had clouds in them, like he was dreaming of Heaven, of floating away.

I took a shower, and Cynthia turned her attention back to me. I came out in an oversized shirt, with dripping limp hair.

‘That just won't do,' she said. I was marched back into the bathroom. We stood there side by side in what turned into a full-scale makeover. She put her own face on, and handed me recommended products intermittently. She lost patience with my haphazard application, and took over the entire exercise. She held my jaw in her slender hand, with its perfect red fingernails. My lips were painted. She told me to close my eyes, and did the upper lids. I was told to look up, and my lashes got a coat of thick starlet fake-eye-lash-style mascara.

‘You have perfect features,' she said, matter of factly, almost bored. ‘I mean, take them separately. That's a perfect nose. Perfect lips. Perfect eyes.'

She seemed like a straight-up kind of gal. ‘Cynthia?'

‘Yeah?'

‘What's wrong with me?'

She stopped looking like a high-class whore. The veneer fell away. She stood just behind me, gazing at me in the mirror. She smoothed my hair, from the scalp all the way down to the tips. She had one of those adult The World is a Shitty Old Place looks on her face. She dropped her hands to her sides.

‘Gunther?' I could tell this was rhetorical, and couldn't form an answer anyway. Does a dog want the biscuit you're holding in your hand?

‘Beautiful girl.' I thought she was going to leave it at that, she was quiet for so long after she said it.

‘You want him…Want to be like him?'

‘Yeah.' And I added, ‘I am like him.' Then wavered modestly, ‘…Becoming like him…I think.'

‘Yeah, well,' the five-star-hooker bravado was creeping back, ‘to be like him, you'd have to not want him anymore.'

She may as well have sprinkled pixie dust all around me. The room seemed to be going white. I felt like closing my eyes. Time passed, and I don't know how much of it. She looked a little smug for my tastes. I finally recovered with, ‘How zen.'

‘C'mon Princess,' she said, ‘let's go unveil you to the old critter.' I'm not a princess, and I hate being called one. I couldn't make any sense of this broad. Besides, Gunther doesn't need to see me all dolled up to get the notion I'm pretty. He's seen me with no clothes on.

Gunther was on the couch. He raised his eyebrows when he saw me. Cynthia trotted me toward him like I was on a catwalk.

He smiled, and scoffed, ‘That's one way to disguise natural beauty.'

I felt myself blushing. And smiling. I didn't know whether to be happy or embarrassed. Happy, I guess. Because the make-up I could wash off. The beauty was there for, well, a while anyway.

‘I
slaved
over this face, Gun,' Cynthia said, with mock pathos.

‘No need,' he said.

‘Look at you, you old slob,' she said tartly. ‘I think the kid and I should stage an intervention.'

He looked well annoyed, and said in a lazy, bitter monotone, ‘Leave the innocent out of this.'

‘The Innocent'; Gunther-speak, if ever I've heard it. You can see why I think he's a few hundred years old. Has anyone spoken this way for the past couple of centuries? I did wish Cynthia would get off his back about whatever the heck it was she was on his back about. She should be happy she's sharing a bed with the guy. I should be so lucky. I wondered if there was cuddling, a light fang on the shoulder. I doubt it. Maybe that's what all this is about.

And I can't believe he still considers me innocent after all I've gone through lately. I sat next to him. Cynthia turned on the TV, and was standing too close to it to hear us.

‘Gunther. I'm not really that innocent anymore.'

He looked at me with a steady sorrow. His eye looked moist. I thought I was going to have to get him a tissue. But then I remembered he always carries a folded handkerchief. We were sitting real close together, and just looked at each other for a while like that. Cynthia left the room.

He said, ‘You're a baby.' Sometimes it makes me mad when people say stuff like that. But he said it with such affection and conviction. For a second I felt protected, felt precious. As only he can make me feel. And then it swiftly dawned on me how much distance that verdict places between us, and I wanted to rid him of the notion so badly I thought I might cry, which would have been a pretty unconvincing rebuttal.

So I sat fuming, cursing the irony: every experience I've racked up that I consider a step closer to Gunther makes everyone, including him, treat me that much more like a fucking child. No one treated them like children when they cavorted around playing promiscuous hippies…They all pretty much scored lifetime memberships in the Promiscuous Hippy Club.