Free The Great Leader by Jim Harrison

large book she was looking at. It was a coffee table book about petroglyphs in the Southwest.
    â€œThat’s wonderful. My name’s Lucy. My mother served spinach, a vegetable I hate, at my birthday dinner. Maybe you’re like Kokopele, a mythic Indian with a fondness for ladies?” She showed him a petroglyph of Kokopele, the humpbacked flute player. The light was growing dim and she invited him to join her for coffee and a brandy. He followed her on a longish walk through gardens past rooms and bungalows a little worried that he wouldn’t find his way back to his room, which he saw as a deliciously childish worry.
    â€œKeep your hands off, buster. I’m happily married,” she said at the door.
    â€œI’m not happily divorced,” he replied.
    He wondered where her bed was because he was standing in an elegant living room with a couple of Chinese screens while she called room service. He had never felt so far away from the Upper Peninsula except maybe at a Frankfurt whorehouse forty years before.
    â€œMy parents were friends of the owner and used to stay here so my dad reserves the same room for me.”
    They sat at a table slowly turning the pages of the petroglyph book. He had seen a similar book at Marion’s house but had never bothered taking a look. When the room service waiter came he called her “Mrs. Caulkins.” Sunderson noted her conversation style was very much like Diane’s, light and deferential with an occasional edge of the abrasive. She spoke of the drawings on stone as the “roots of religion,” also “totemistic,” a word Marion used. She drank her large brandy more quickly than he did.
    â€œMy mother is making me gulp. Why are you on edge?”
    â€œI didn’t think it showed.”
    â€œIt does. You’re like my husband when he heard he was going to be audited by the IRS.”
    â€œI retired two days ago and I already feel a little useless.” He was hesitant at first but then went ahead and explained his recent life including the Great Leader, Dwight. With a bit of probing on her part he added the reasons for the divorce.
    â€œI’ve seen that a half dozen times. A couple begins quite romantically doing a lot of things together and then it begins to die if the man becomes overabsorbed in his work. It can go the other way. A friend of mine started working in an animal shelter and found it more interesting than taking care of her husband who was anyway less than fascinating. Another friend saw her kids off to college and then went back to finishing her nursing degree. Now she’s a surgical nurse and lives in New York City and her husband is still down the road from us in Bedford wondering what hit him.”
    Sunderson was looking down at the beautiful table before them feeling the full impact of his own shabbiness. His desk at the office had always been the most grungy of any of his colleagues with its accumulated gummy spilled coffee, dust, and scraps of paper. Roxie had never been permitted to touch the desk or he might lose track of what he comically called “important papers.” Now he thought of the old saying pigs love their own shit as he looked down at the finely made table and the frayed, soiled cuffs of his sport coat. There was a longish, more than awkward silence as if they were both asking themselves, “Why are we depressing each other?”
    â€œMarriages get moldy real slowly,” he said, then paused to take out the flask of whiskey from his coat pocket. She nodded and he poured into their empty brandy glasses thinking that she had likely never drunk cheap whiskey. Sure enough she winced at her first sip.
    â€œMy God what is this, paint thinner?” She laughed and took another sip. “Sorry, I interrupted you.”
    â€œI was saying that marriages slowly get moldy and then are no longer mutually vital. You just keep dancing the same polka steps.”
    â€œI never