The Grand Tour Read Free Page A

behind on her.”
    “She’s all right. But I was wondering if you have any advice you could give me about revising your work. How many drafts do you do?”
    “My second wife, Carole, had a behind like that. Bigger, actually. She was built like a tractor, big wheels in the back. Any physical exertion and her face would get splotchy, so it was like riding this big red tractor around when we made love.”
    Richard turned his glass up and chewed the ice. Vance looked up at the Budweiser clock over the bar and said, “Do you want to go now?”
    “No, damn it,” Richard said. “There’s an hour left.”
    “We need to leave time to drive and park, for you to meet everyone, get set up.”
    “Speaking of getting set up.” Richard initiated the process of standing and made a circular motion at the bartender.
    “You’ve had four of those already,” said Vance.
    “Getting limbered out. Up. You really don’t drink?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    Vance looked back over at the girl as she lined up a pool shot. “People do stupid things when they’re drunk.”
    “Great things, too,” said Richard. “Every important moment of my life, there’s been alcohol around. Why do you think people get so drunk after weddings?”
    “I don’t know why people get married at all,” Vance said.
    “Touché.”
    Richard got another drink and a Coke refill for Vance. They sat there listening to songs the locals were playing on the jukebox, all of them murkily familiar to Richard, as if he’d heard them once while he was asleep. One was about Mr. Saturday Night Special who puts you six feet in a hole, and in another, the singer shrieked about the jungle over a bunch of shimmery guitar parts that sounded like snakes being beaten into holes in the ground. He hadn’t listened to music in years, had completely stopped caring about music around the time of his second divorce. Carole had expensively—and needlessly, in Richard’s estimation—had their condo equipped with speakers in every room, even the closets. She was the kind of person who required a sound track at all times; even a trip to the bathroom for a number two had to be accompanied by some squelchy disco tune. When she divorced him, she pointedly kept all the music, a punitive maneuver wasted on Richard, who felt the silence in his new apartment as a Bedouin in his tent might feel a rare, delicious desert breeze.
    Vance said, “Like I said, the thing I gave you is rough, but I thought you might have some pointers. It’s kind of a memoir, like your book. It’s about me and my mother.”
    “Sounds like a barnburner.” The blonde girl walked back to the bar and smiled as she passed them. “She likes you.”
    A deep crimson blazed from the hollow of Vance’s long neck to his jawline and thin cheeks. “I don’t think so.”
    “So you don’t drink, and you don’t chase tail. What do you do for fun?”
    “Fun?”
    “Yeah, fun. ‘A good time.’ Things you do to distract yourself from the pain and terror of being alive.”
    Vance sat there for a moment, and it occurred to Richard that the kid might really have no idea what he was talking about. Finally, Vance said, “Well, I read.”
    “Oh boy.”
    “What? Reading is fun.”
    “Reading is great, but it’s not fun. People don’t read at parties.”
    “I do.”
    “Jesus Christ. I’m just saying, don’t waste your youth being too smart for beer and girls. What else do you do?”
    “I write.”
    “If writing is fun,” said Richard, “you’re doing it wrong.”
    ———
    The smallish auditorium was full and getting fuller. But then, he reasoned, there wasn’t much else to do in this piece-of-shit town. He sat in the front row in his hot green suit, sweating and reeking and looking, he knew, like some kind of mentally impaired car-dealership employee at a Christmas Sale-a-Bration. People continued to file in and stare at him all the way to their seats. It was an awkward arrangement, and he was glad he was