After the store was closed he and Gabriele were driving back to the hotel room when they stopped for a few minutes in a McDonald's Drive- thru. There, waiting at the window for their Big Macs, Michael asked her if she could mortgage her house and sell "that nude thing" in the garage to "offset" the expenses of the new business. For some seconds she was discomfited if not dumbfounded, and then she scowled at the thought of having been dumb enough to marry him.
For a moment, the consternation was incommunicable. All that she could do was to turn her high head away from him, and allow her neck to remain stiffly turned. She smiled contortedly in nominal pain before releasing it in a guffaw. She faced him directly. His absurdity as a being seemed to exist for her insolent jeering and only this.
"What are you laughing that way for?" he asked. She stared into his eyes rudely and laughed contemptuously at the absurd monkey that was sitting next to her. She knew: every relationship was a self-interested transaction. There was nothing new to her in this assessment. She had known it since early childhood when she found out that her aunt was being paid by her parents, and that this was the impetus for the love and generosity of letting her stay with this second family. Maybe recently she had pretended to not know. For a while there had been that repudiation, that obfuscation of self, so that she might fit into a wedding dress as well as marriage. But now she was back home within the real perceptions of her brain.
She again deigned the hard plastic eyes of her stuffed polar bear countenance down upon him. They glittered a hardness that was like those of sapphires. "When is this Sapporo thing going to happen?" she spitefully abraded the contumacious Earthling coldly.
"Well, soon," he said mildly. He feigned a diffident smile as if he should not be asking for such a favor but would do it nonetheless. She, the new wife, took notice of this. He almost seemed contrite and she wondered if his bashfulness was less contrived than what she might suppose. Soon her insular hubris of indomitability began to thaw like Arctic permafrost. Then he went on. "There won't be any difficulty in expediting this from what I see. I mean an agent could sell your paintings. One of my assistants could have power of attorney to go to the bank and try to obtain a mortgage—I mean if you want to help in that way. I know it is a lot to ask. Of course it is your choice. The way I see it we'll need that money as living expenses for a short while until everything starts moving. The cost of living in Honshu is notorious but it is worse on the northern Japanese islands like Hokkaido."
"Well, I'll give it some thought. I'll decide when Nathaniel gets back." She stressed "I'll decide" obdurately but she had in principle made up her mind. She had in theory (there was nothing but theory in this interrelating) decided that if she were to go with him she could sell off her Jakarta paintings as well as the huge one in the garage but this would be all. There was an institution called a bank and to her it should not be a spouse no matter what self-interested gunk was naturally in a man's calculative logic of advantageous maneuvers when proposing to a woman — in this case an interest free loan to which even the capital amount might well be neglected; and in this case she had made the proposal.
"I was thinking that we might fly from Little Rock to San Francisco and then over that way." His hand pointed to the McDonalds arch and she smiled good-humoredly, careful not to insult the phlegmatic one by laughing at him because he just might scowl at her. "I mean without going back. Betty of course would pick up Nathaniel from the airport and she could help take care of both boys at my sister's estate. It might be better this way."
"Not see Nathaniel and Rick?" she roared incredulously.
"Good byes are messy," he said.
She thought for a moment. What did she know: Rick was well mannered and Nathaniel was restive if not intractable. Maybe Michael with his quick draw of the belt and his willingness to take his son on trips abroad was a better parent. A caring albeit phlegmatic male disciplinarian seemed to play the notes of fear and respect in male children with a greater sense of harmony if obedience to adult might were that one important anthem. She had to admit to herself that a sudden departure wasn't nonsense for she was ready to listen to the proposals of abandonment by a father of a well brought up boy when her own experiments in child rearing seemed effete and unsuccessful. She did not, for all her education, know anything much more than the average parent and what little she knew was theoretical. Ideas of child psychologists like Piaget were mere abstractions, premises like ghosts without flesh. Maybe, she thought to herself, Nathaniel needed a different influence since she was apparently not much of a role model. Maybe pursuing a floundering maternal role for the sake of a child, who would in a short space of years be engaged fully in instinctual and hedonistic pursuits, was foolishly myopic at best. At worst it might stunt her from any form of enlightenment and she would appear foolishly gauche and inept to herself. Was her reasoning so fallible? She knew that it was. She wondered whether she was just trying to justify the desire to jump on a tank with her mate and roll off into the sunset. Maybe she would be running over her child no differently than her craven and neglectful parents except that their rationale was to fulfill duties whereas hers would be less definable.