But one day Claudia had returned from a flight and informed Lynn that she'd met somebody in Denver who'd "opened up new vistas" for her.
He asked, "Is it okay for you to ball someone out of state? I mean, if it's a different time zone is it still considered cheating? I'm just wondering."
Claudia answered by saying, "I hope you'll be man enough to deal with this maturely."
Lynn said, "I'll try to pinch off my tear ducts. Goodbye, Claudia."
He'd gone out and gotten hammered that night, relieved that he'd never again have to feed her Doberman, which she called her "DNA dog." The little charmer had trained it to eat anyone with a nonwhite genetic code.
His second ex-wife, Teddi: Now there was a woman nobody could figure out. She was about as understandable as acupuncture. On some days, her idea of a profound decision in life was whether or not to have her lug nuts chromed, but a day later, she'd drag him to a poetry reading at the University of California, Riverside, where some hairball who could make a rap group throw up would scream "poems" at them. As far as Lynn could discern, they were all about excrement, necrophilia, incest, rape, mayhem and vomit.
Teddi had gotten positively moist at their last reading, when they were allowed to shake hands with a poet and buy an inscribed copy of his work, published by some vanity press in San Francisco. As the poet took Lynn's bucks for the book, he asked whether Lynn had enjoyed the reading.
Lynn said to him in front of thirty people, "Oh yeah, very tasteful. I never once heard you mention pus or vaginal discharge."
On the drive home to Palm Springs that night, Teddi told Lynn that she thought they lived in two different worlds, and that his was without "texture, subtlety or nuance."
"You're not ready to change for me," she informed him that night.
"I got cut for you," he reminded her. "Your Siamese tomcat now has the only fully operating pair a balls in the house."
"You only see things in black and white," Teddi told him.
"You want Technicolor, you better hook up with Ted Turner," he responded, long before the mogul's merger with Jane Fonda.
A highway patrol officer-cum-lawyer had handled that divorce, giving him a police discount. The lawyer told Lynn that he knew a doctor who would reverse the vasectomy if Lynn ever got married again.
But Lynn had informed the lawyer that women were about as impenetrable as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that as a single man he was happy as a rutting rabbit, intending to stay that way forever.
His "dates" in recent years usually began at The Furnace Room, but all relationships withered after a few weeks or months. Wilfred Plimsoll announced that Lynn had the staying power of a cherry popsicle.
Lynn had forced himself not to have more than half a dozen drinks the night before, but hadn't gotten to bed early enough. Still, he'd set the alarm and managed to arrive at the home of Clive Devon in Las Palmas at 6:30 a. M.
The desert sky was breathtaking at that hour. Cloud shadow made the Indio Hills shimmer in dappled silver light. All of the pastels in the desert landscape had deepened. The sky was dove gray, with burgundy smears behind pink cotton cumulus, as he sat in his car and drank coffee from a thermos.
At 7:00 a. M. Clive Devon drove out of his driveway in a black Range Rover. He was wearing a floppy hat, a knit shirt, chinos and hiking boots, dressed very much like Lynn except for the hat. He meandered slowly through the narrow streets of Las Palmas, traditional home of Palm Springs' old money. It wasn't an ideal place to hang a tail on somebody. The streets twisted too much, and there were too many huge homes with whitewashed adobe walls and ten-foot oleander hedges for privacy. There was no place to hide on streets like that, and there were no cars to get behind at such an early hour. Mostly there were just gardeners coming to work in pickup trucks, with mowers and gardening tools stacked in the truck beds. Clive Devon turned on Via Lola because it flowed into Palm Canyon Drive, and you could go either way on that main artery.
Fortunately, Lynn Cutter's old Nash Rambler looked like it could belong to a Mexican gardener, or to a black maid from north Palm Springs. Lynn had gotten a good buy on the car from a used-car dealer in Cat City whom he'd once stopped for drunk driving on Christmas Eve. Instead of booking the guy he'd driven him home, mostly because the lawyer for Lynn's second wife had opened Lynn's veins and he figured it might be prudent to make pals with a guy that dealt with rent-a-wrecks and second-hand wheels, the kind of cars he could afford. And at least the Rambler had a new engine and retreads.
They drove past Gene Autry Trail and the Desert Princess Country Club, finally heading to the south end on Highway 10. Lynn began to wonder if this guy was one of those eccentrics who drove several hundred miles on a whim, maybe to see the Phoenix Suns play the L. A. Lakers? Lynn figured he had enough gas money in his pocket to get back if Clive Devon didn't travel more than sixty minutes from home. He was glad when the Range Rover turned off the freeway, heading back to Highway 111, passing by the little airport that had made a lot of cops breathe hard the night before, during the long and fruitless search for a fugitive.