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.The final trip they took together began, fittingly enough, in San Francisco late one August.Jim had been on sabbatical leave that year from the Eastern university where he considered himself in deep disguise as a deputy professor.He had spent that year more or less bumming around, even hitching back and forth across country, perhaps in some final effort to recapture what he could of some romantic, rudderless, vagrant vision of himself.As Ralph had a new collection of stories out, he agreed to give a series of readings around the Bay Area to promote the book, as though at that point in his career any book of his needed promotion.The plan was to tie up in San Francisco, and Jim would carry Ralph’s coat while he knocked off the readings, and then they would head East together, pretending that they were outlaw authors on the lam like in the old days, making the perfect clean getaway in Ralph’s brand-new BMW.Ralph had standing-room-only crowds at each of his readings.He would read a few poems first, and then a story he had only recently completed based on the protracted death of Chekhov, which, as it turned out, was the last story Ralph ever wrote.Ralph and Jim arrived in Iowa City early in the evening of their third day of cross-country driving.Although he had never lived there long, in many ways Iowa City felt like a hometown to Ralph, a sort of hometown of the spirit, for it was there that he felt as though his life had been released into significance as a writer, and where, for better or worse, he and Alice Ann had drifted firmly into that mythology that had carried their marriage forth for so many more years.They had been young and full of hope when they had first arrived in Iowa City, but while hunting for what they thought was the beginning of their real life together, they had merely figured out ways to inhabit their daydreams.Ralph and Jim had taken a room at a large, new motel at the edge of Iowa City, and then Ralph suggested that they drive into town for dinner at a joint called the Mill, which Ralph described as being a big smoky barn of a bar and family-style restaurant popular with the young, hip faculty and students, and where Alice Ann had once waited tables in another lifetime.The grub at the Mill would be decent sturdy fare and plentiful and cheap, was what Ralph promised.At the Mill they would be able to get huge platters of spaghetti loaded down with fat meatballs, Ralph promised and, with any luck coming their way at all, laid.The joint would undoubtedly be packed with the current crop of young, hungry, would-be famous writers of tomorrow, bevies of horny writer- babes just clamoring to fuck their way to fame.Ralph had given a highly successful reading in Iowa City just a few months earlier, and because of the current critical and popular-press attention being given to his new book, Ralph was as hot as the old proverbial firecracker on the literary front.If he, old Running Dog Ralph Crawford, proclaimed high and low as the American Chekhov, could not get his load lightened in Iowa City, that hotbed of naked ambition and brazen, hungry heir-apparents, then he might as well pack up his pecker and go home to Momma, for what would be the worth then of fame for any man? Jim thought that this was a splendid idea.For surely simply being Ralph Crawford’s sidekick meant that he, too, might get a shot at cheap romance in Iowa City.Before they ate, though, Ralph wanted to drive around Iowa city for a spell and wax nostalgic.A light rain had come up as Ralph took Jim on a tour of a town transformed by nostalgia, where the wet night streets shone purely with the lights of the past.Ralph drove them out to a small trailer-park at the western edge of town, where out front there was a ramshackle motel and tiny restaurant, which appeared to be closed up.Off to the right among a strand of stunted pines were a half-dozen little frame cabins, also apparently boarded up and nearly overgrown with wild shrubbery and vines.When Ralph and Alice Ann had first come to Iowa City, they had rented one of those tiny cabins, number 6, for a couple of weeks while trying to arrange for student housing on campus.They had left their daughter with Ralph’s mother in California until they got settled, so they were really alone together for the first time in ages, except for the fact that Alice Ann was pregnant again.But that didn’t frighten them, for they were green and fearless in the face of the future.They felt as fixed and steady in their course as those stars which were as fat as fish in the vast Iowa night.Sure, the facts of their lives didn’t match the myth they had begun to make of their marriage, but those two weeks of pure, wondrous, abandoned six-and-seven-course sex in that shabby cabin fed the fantasy of their lives for years to come.There, deep in the heartland, they took new heart in themselves.They refound the freshness in themselves, and they were never more certain that they would offer each other solace and companionship forever, and that over the years their faithfulness to each other would become legendary, and that they would be able to submerge fully in their perfect passion forever.Night after night, Alice Ann would come into Ralph’s arms an illusion, like the future, of untouched territory.My green, growing girl was just what Ralph would call Alice Ann, and press his face into her only slightly as yet bulging belly, as they lay on that old, violently creaky metal bed, night after night in the hot Iowa dark, the steam rising from their wet, slick flesh, after having once again made the most amazing abandoned love of their lives.Even the cockroaches running across the nighttime linoleum sounded like creatures transporting themselves joyfully into new lives, and the faint, cross-fading voices on the old radio in the corner sounded like whispery calls of encouragement from that beyond we call the future
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