Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [146]
“What you need is a rabbit fur jock strap, the fur side in of course. You could make a fortune selling those.”
So, Frank never again forgot to pay attention to this matter, and not just for himself. A couple weeks later, when he clattered into Sleepy Hollow:
“Hey, Nosebleed.”
“Hello gentlemen. How are your penises?”
“Yarrrr!” Cackles, laughter: “Now the truth comes out! Now we know what he’s here for!”
“You wish. Are you managing to stay unfrostbitten?”
“NO.”
Various grumbles and moans.
“Look, there’s a shelter open over by UDC, it’s the closed high school’s gym and some classrooms too, it’s pretty nice.”
“We know. Fuck you.”
“Mr. Nose. Mr. Nosey Noser.”
“Mr. Nosey Nose That Knows It All.”
“Yeah well it beats freezing to death.”
“Yarrr, fuck off. We have our ways.”
“It is our fate to stay out here, but we will survive.”
“I hope so.”
Friday came and he went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant on Wisconsin near the Metro. He could tell already this would become his Friday night routine. It was an unpretentious little place where Frank could sit at the bar reading his laptop. Go to Emersonfortheday.com, search “fate”:
“Mountains are great poets, and one glance at this cliff undoes a great deal of prose. All life, all society begins to get illuminated and transparent, and we generalize boldly and well. Space is felt as a great thing. There is some pinch and narrowness to us, and we laugh and leap to see forest, and sea, which yet are but lanes and crevices to the great Space in which the world swims like a cockboat in the sea.”
So true. But that turned out to be from the essay “Fate,” not about fate per se. Try again, word search in texts:
“The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.”
Oh my yes. So well put. What a perceptive and eloquent worshipper of nature old Waldo was. And why not. New England had heroic weather, which often cast its prosaic forest right up to the heights of the Himalayas or the shores of the Arctic.
But it was almost nine. He hopped up and paid his bill, using cash, which he did as often as he could now.
The pay phone he had chosen was in the Bethesda Metro complex itself, down by the bus stop. There were several phones in a row, and he went to the one on the end and pulled out a phone card, ran it through the slot, dialed her number.
No answer. He let it ring a long time, then hung up.
He stood by the phone, thinking things over. Was this bad? She had said it might not work every week. He had no idea what her daily routine was. How did that work, with a husband you hadn’t slept with for four years?
When the phone rang he jumped a foot and snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Hi Frank it’s Caroline. Did you call before?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry, this was as early as I could make it. I was hoping you’d still be there.”
“Sure. We should have a kind of window anyway.”
“True.”
“So . . . how’s it going?”
“Oh, crazy. All over the place.”
“Everything’s okay?”
“Yes.”
Gingerly they re-established the intimacy they had inhabited the week before. It was hard over the phone, but that voice in his ear brought back a lot of it, and he took chances: How are things going at home? I thought of you. . . . Then she was telling him about her relationship, a bit, and the link between them was there again, that sense of closeness she could establish with a look or a touch, or, now, with her voice, clear and low. The distance between her and her husband had existed for years, she said; maybe since the beginning. They had met at work, he was older, he had been one of her bosses, now in a different agency, “blacker than black.” They had not had any huge fights, ever, but for some years now he had not been home much, or showed any interest in her sexually (“Incredible,” Frank said). But before they had met he had worked for a while in Afghanistan, so who knew where he was at.
That gave