Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale by Chuck Kinder Page B

unemployment).
On one occasion when Lindsay had flown down from Montana for a
romantic rendezvous with Ralph at his Berkeley apartment, she had
gone along with him to the Tuesday-afternoon writing workshop at
Stanford, where Ralph was scheduled to read a story that
day.
     
    Lindsay was thrilled with
the lovely, sunny day and the silly ride down the East Bay,
laughing their heads off, singing along with golden oldies on the
radio, windows wide open, the hillside houses and downtown
buildings of San Francisco shining white as bones in the distance
against a glorious blue cloudless sky, sailboats blowing about the
green water of the bay. In the intense clarity of the light that
day shapes were luminous, surfaces seemed to swell. Then they
strolled across a campus of stone colonnades like caves full of
Spanish sunlight and shadow, sprinklers lifting blue bells of light
above fiercely green lawns, dogs romping in fountains, woodpeckers
pounding high in palms, hordes of absolutely beautiful, blond,
sun-browned people pedaling bikes everywhere, pictures of such
perfect health and happiness and confident hope they made Lindsay
want to barf. Lindsay and Ralph stopped at a plaza display table
loaded with turquoise and silver jewelry, where Ralph helped
Lindsay select a tiny ring of silver fish, which Ralph pledged he
would return to purchase as soon as his next ship came
in.
     
    In the second-floor library
rooms where the writing workshop met, Ralph had introduced Lindsay
around to a blur of faces. She was his fiancee flown down from
Montana, where she worked as a cowgirl, to witness his literary
lionization is what Ralph told everybody. (Then it must be true,
Lindsay had thought, her heart soaring. Ralph really had separated
from Alice Ann.) Lindsay had loved the two high-ceilinged rooms the
writing class met in, with their book-lined walls and comfortably
shabby couches and stuffed chairs, and the huge, oblong table in
one room the writers sat around as they listened intently to Ralph
read in his soft, almost whispery voice between long drags on a
cigarette. Lindsay loved Ralph’s looks, a large, shambling man with
dark, woolly hair and dark eyes, who had such a sensitive, shy,
gentle nature, yet radiated an inner strength she found comforting,
compelling. Ralph smoked continuously as he read the story, and he
often laughed out loud at lines that cracked everybody else up,
too, and Lindsay felt like his wife.
     
    The story Ralph read that
day was the one that became so famous in years to come, about a
couple on the verge of bankruptcy who had to unload their Cadillac
convertible before some creditor could slap a lien on it. The wife
in the story, who was smart and had personality and business sense,
would have to do it. The wife in the story was gone for hours
before the half-drunk, stir-crazy husband got call one. The wife
was making the deal over dinner, she said. Returning home finally
near dawn, drunk and disheveled, the wife called her husband a
worthless bankrupt and dared him to do anything about her being out
all night doing God-knows-what with some greasy used-car salesman,
and then she had stumbled on off to bed and collapsed. After one
sad thing and another, the story ended with the husband tracing his
fingertips over the stretch marks on the backs of his naked wife’s
legs and hips while thinking about how those blue lines looked like
dozens, perhaps hundreds, coundess really, roads running through
the flesh of the wife in the story. The story was a great hit with
the other writers that day.
     
    Lindsay had listened to
Ralph read his story that day and she had thought about how Ralph’s
hands had felt on her own flesh the night before while they had
made love, how warm they had been, and gentle. Could Lindsay go out
and unload a Cadillac convertible in a hurry like the wife in the
story? If Lindsay had been the wife in the story, what would have
had to have happened to drive her to such desperation and
betrayal? The