He hated his silence, his inability to announce his own desire, to tell her what he wanted to do to her, what he wanted done. With his high-school students, in conversations about the stories and poems and plays they read, he was forthright, casually explicit, when discussing sex. Paul Kehoe had warned him, of course, that he had to watch what he said, that there were parents who didn’t approve, who perceived his candor as a dangerous enticement.
All art, Henry had wanted to tell Kehoe, is a dangerous enticement, thinking of his father’s passion for music, his mother’s paintings, but he’d said it to Amy instead.
“And food,” Amy had answered. “Food is the first enticement.” It was food, Amy claimed, that had lured the fish from the sea, that had drawn man from his cave, that had led him to spark fire from the dull inertia of tree and stone.
It was indeed food that had enticed Henry to ask Amy out on a date. He’d approached her at a local bookstore where she had set up a table of dishes she had prepared, the scent of each dish so wonderful that at first Henry didn’t notice how beautiful Amy was—or how ridiculous she looked in the tall white chef’s toque and matching white canvas apron she was wearing, a silk-screened portrait with her signature beneath it on both, something her publisher had insisted she wear. She was the author of a series of witty cookbooks that led the reader on fanciful, intrepid excursions across various continents in search of exotic meals; she was at the bookstore to sign copies of the latest installment.
A Pilgrim’s Provisions, the series was officially titled, though Amy told Henry over drinks that night that she preferred her original alliterative proposal, A Forager’s Feasts, which seemed more in keeping, she said, with her modest, decidedly secular aims—and the books’ equally modest sales, she added, which were just enough to send her to her next volume’s exotic destination.
“Which is where?” Henry had asked her.
“Japan,” she said. “In two months.”
And Henry had ended up going with her, even though he hated traveling, hated the dislocation of it, the sense that he had been set adrift. Right after they returned, he suggested they get married. “That way,” he said, as if the issue were one of logic and convenience, “you could, for instance, get a dog and not have to worry about how long you were gone. You’d have someone to watch him for free.”
“What if I don’t want a dog?” Amy had answered, laughing.
“Even better,” he’d said. “The truth is I’m not very good with dogs.”
“So what are you good at?” she’d asked him, and he’d just looked at her, then he’d lowered his head as if he were thinking, and he’d waited until his silence had become comic, had set Amy to laughing again.
“Nothing,” he said finally. “I’m good at nothing.”
He understood, of course, the charm of such apparent modesty. But in this case, what he’d said was actually true. He didn’t have a clue, really, about history or philosophy or biology or chemistry or economics. He was at a loss on the subjects of medicine and law and meteorology and comparative religion. He could not play chess or garden or sew and did not understand the stock market or car engines or actuarial tables. He could not locate or name any constellations; he could not tell a finch from a nuthatch, a birch from a cypress. He had never held a gun or a blowtorch or a power saw; he’d never been a bartender, a roofer, a ranch hand, a roughneck, or a smoke jumper.
“Sex,” she’d said. “You’re good at sex.”
“No,” Henry said, more seriously, more honestly, than he had intended. “You’re good at sex. I’m just the student. An eager student, mind you—”
“Books,” Amy said, triumphant. “You know books. That trumps them all.”
No, he’d said. There too he didn’t know most of what he was supposed to know. He hadn’t read The Iliad or The Odyssey and certainly nothing obscure like The Tale of Genji or Tristram Shandy or The Faerie Queene or The Decameron.
“Yeah, well, who has?” Amy had said, but he held up his hand.
“Listen,” he said—like his father, or like some reverse image of his father, who had of course known everything he was supposed to know and a million other things as well: how to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew, how to count cards in blackjack, how to make a Sazerac and an Old Fashioned.
He hadn’t read Henry Miller, he told Amy, much less Henry Fielding or Henry James. “You’d think, you know, given my name, that I’d have read at least some Henrys.”
“O. Henry?” Amy asked.
Henry shook his head. And he hadn’t, he said, read Jane Austen or Tolstoy or much of Hemingway besides The Old Man and the Sea. In a seminar in college he’d been forced to make his way through Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, about which he now remembered exactly nothing, and Moby-Dick, much of which he couldn’t remember even as he’d read it. Mainly, he told Amy, he had tried to figure out which of the two books was a more useful prop to spark conversation with the beautiful, sullen young graduate students who, with their spiked bangs skimming their lashes, studied at the café tables in the student union.
“Which one was better?” Amy had asked.
“Neither one. Nothing,” Henry had said. “I tried everything. Kerouac and Ginsberg and Bukowski and Borges. I even sank as low as Kahlil Gibran. Nothing worked.”
“Well, now it has,” Amy had said, taking his hand.
“You’re a sucker for Kahlil Gibran?” Henry had said. “Do you know how pathetic that is?”
“Not Kahlil Gibran,” Amy had said, smiling, crying now. “You. I’m a sucker for you.”
“Worse,” Henry had said. “Much, much, much worse.”
He hadn’t meant it, of course. He had believed that he could make her happy, that he could offer her his devotion, his attention, his admiration. And he had believed that she would erase—that she had already erased—his peculiar proclivity for melancholy, his abysmally romantic attachment to sorrow. He was, had always been, his father’s child, not in intellect but by temperament—and yet for five years with Amy, he had mostly managed to swear off the pallid and grim, the mournful and forlorn. Amy had cooked for him, and just this was enough to summon in him a dazzling joy—the real thing, complete and total. He felt the same mixture of delirious gratitude and dizzying overindulgence after Amy’s meals that he felt after sex. Amy, notebook in hand, planning her next book, bombarded him with questions, the very questions he might have asked her when he lay exhausted in bed: How good was it? What in particular did you like? How soon would you want it again?
What man would walk away from such a woman, would hurt her the way he had hurt her?
Yet he had walked away. He had hurt her. And now—now he had lost everything. He had executed with unlikely depth and precision his grand and transcendent plan for ruin. Sitting at his table at What a Blessing, listening as Miles Davis gave way to Oscar Peterson and then to some tenor player he didn’t recognize, he tried to picture the past year or so of his life as a line drawn on a page. It looked like a child’s scribbles, like a madman’s preposterous treasure map. He finished his lunch, paid the check, and went back to his car. He took out the road atlas, pulled out a pen from the windshield visor, and put an X over the spot where Marimore stood.
Here, he said to himself. Here. He carved the X into the page as if that would make everything more concrete, more real. Here is where I am.
And where would he go? How far might he get? He considered the fact that Amy, somewhere near, would be only an inch or two away on the map. An inch or two. Maybe he would find her if he just drove and drove, winding his way from one town to the next, looking for the sort of farmhouse where Amy would be living, some beautifully weathered clapboard and tin-roofed cottage tucked beneath great towering trees, surrounded by a garden of hostas and peonies and phlox and a dozen other flowers and plants whose names he knew from Amy but couldn’t identify, not even if a gun were put to his head. Maybe he could roll the car windows down and drive until he detected the scent of her cooking
, of whatever recipe she was trying out.
Was it possible that Amy already knew he was here, had felt some change in the atmospheric pressure, some subtle signal in her dreams that announced his arrival, the same way she’d known, three years ago, that she was pregnant but that something was somehow wrong, that her body and the baby weren’t right?
She’d had a dream, she told Henry, that she was growing taller, a little more every day until she no longer fit into her clothes, her sleeves inching their way up her arms, her toes punching through her shoes. She had to bend down to step through doorways, had to sleep curled up on the bed. This time she hadn’t asked Henry what the dream meant, hadn’t wanted him to explain. Six weeks later she’d had a miscarriage, and for the next few months she’d cried every night when she got into bed, curled on her side exactly the way she had imagined herself curled up in her dream, her hands tucked between her knees. Henry, who had been both terrified and thrilled at the prospect of being a father, had not known how to comfort her except to say that they could try again, that he was sure the next time everything would be fine.
But there had not been a next time, and Amy had gradually set aside her sadness in the manner she always did, with a kind of ferocious energy that Henry admired but could never muster for himself. He was always amazed by Amy’s capacity for joy. She’d had plenty of tragedy in her life—her parents had died a few years before she and Henry met, in a plane crash on their way to visit her brother in Sierra Leone, where he worked for a relief agency. But sadness never managed to take hold of her the way it did Henry; she seemed to emerge from it with a kind of burnished regard for all that was remarkable and fortunate in her life.
“It’s all a wonder,” she’d said one Saturday morning to Henry as he lay next to her in bed. His eyes were still closed; he hadn’t moved but she knew he was awake. It was spring, and when he opened his eyes he saw that she was sitting up and looking out the window, running her hands through the tangle of her hair. He told her he’d misunderstood her for a moment, thought she’d said wander.
“That too,” she said. “It is all a wander.” And she lay back down and started in on one of her favorite games, reciting whichever list she’d been forming in her head: ideas for future volumes of A Pilgrim’s Provisions, or the places in the world she’d like to go that she had not yet been, or the foods she most longed to eat again—tropical Filipino fruit salad and Indonesian fish eggs and Australian wild boar and roasted Basque peppers with cider.
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” he’d once said to her as she spoke, her eyes closed as she imagined a trip down the Amazon, stopping at each village along the way to find out which foods they considered their greatest delicacy. Everywhere in the world, she’d once told Henry, it was the foods that were considered aphrodisiacs that were deemed to be the most delicious, no matter how disgusting they actually tasted.
“Except here,” Henry had added, sneaking his hand beneath the sheet, beneath her nightgown. “I don’t want to go anywhere except here.”
“You’re an idiot,” she’d said, but she kept her eyes closed, let his hand work its way up her leg.
“Yes, but I’m your idiot,” Henry had said.
“My idiot, yes,” she’d said. “All mine.”
He returned to Route 29 and headed back to the motel. He figured he would get his bag and say good-bye to Latangi. He would thank her for her kindness, ask what it was she wanted to speak with him about, and then be on his way. Only then would he decide where it was he was going next. To stay with his sister. To find Amy. To continue wandering. To decide to decide what he needed to decide.
Up ahead, Henry could see, the pale blue prison bus was still parked on the highway’s shoulder, exactly where it had been before. The prisoners, though, had switched sides, as had the rifle-toting guard. Most of them were scattered across the sloping berm at the highway’s edge, slowly moving forward in unison, but three of the prisoners stood just beyond the yellow stripe on the shoulder.
The men appeared to be staring at something on the ground or perhaps shielding their eyes from the sun as they talked. Just as Henry approached, he saw one of the men, an old black man with gray hair, step across the yellow stripe. Henry wasn’t sure what was going on. Then the old man took another step and then another and then, now, he was directly in front of Henry’s car.
Henry did not have time to swerve or even slam his foot on the brake before the awful collision.
Later, when it was done, he would wonder if he really had seen what he thought he remembered seeing: the old man, as soon as he was out in the road, raising his arms at his sides, raising them as if what he meant to do, in the moment before Henry’s car struck him, was fly.
Four
IT MADE no sense to him. A man was dead, not by his hand but by his car. Not by his choice but by the man’s own choice. Even so, a man was dead, and Henry had killed him, had spilled the man’s red blood all over the black stink of the highway and across his car’s bumper and hood and windshield, the bumper and hood now smashed as if he had struck not a man’s body but a tree, the windshield cracked into a jagged puzzle. Henry lived nowhere, had nowhere to go—yet he’d been told that although it was clear he wasn’t to blame, that he bore no responsibility for what had happened, he ought to stay put awhile.
Those were the precise words the Marimore County sheriff had used, and though he had posed it as a question, Henry had understood it was not a question. “You’ll stay put awhile, Mr. Garrett?” the sheriff had said, peering up from the papers on his cluttered desk, the late-afternoon light angling through the windows, illuminating the dust, and Henry had nodded, his hands still shaking, knuckles white as though he still gripped the steering wheel. He had never been in a sheriff’s office, had seen them only on TV and in the movies, but this one looked exactly like those, like a stage set from The Andy Griffith Show or some John Wayne Western. The wooden furniture was chipped and faded and worn. Giant hoops with large keys hung on the wall near two cells with sliding metal-bar doors. A bulletin board displayed faded posters of wanted men, their faces unshaven and their eyes glazed, and of missing children, and on a bookcase beneath a dirty window, dishes and wooden plaques were stacked haphazardly on the top two shelves while old magazines and plastic three-ring binders spilled out of the shelf below.
When Henry looked out the dirty window, he saw a young woman and a little boy stepping out of the hardware store across the street. The young woman was carrying the boy’s stuffed animal—it looked to Henry like an elephant, like Ganesh on the lampshade at the motel, but he figured that he must be wrong, that it must be something else, a bear or dinosaur or pig or some fanciful imaginary creature. The woman was also holding a brown paper grocery bag, her purse slung over her shoulder. Henry watched as the woman awkwardly tried to shift everything to one arm so she could take hold of the boy’s hand, but the boy ran down the block ahead of her. Henry could see that the woman was shouting for the boy to wait but couldn’t hear her. He felt panicked, as though the child were in terrible danger of darting out into the street, of getting hit by a car—or maybe just of winding up lost for a few awful, frightening moments. He turned away and looked back to the sheriff, who was saying something that Henry had missed.
“Excuse me?” Henry said, and the sheriff explained that he’d provide Henry with a copy of the report once it had been processed.
Earlier, right after the accident, a deputy had arrived at the scene, asked Henry a few questions, and then driven him into town to the sheriff’s office and brusquely handed him over to the sheriff as though Henry were being taken into custody. Henry figured he must be in shock. He had considered giving the sheriff a false name when he began to fill out the report. The idea had come to him almost immediately when he stumbled from his car. He’d blindly hit the brakes after he struck the old man, desperately trying to see through the broken windshield as the car skidded off the road and slammed into something. He had pushed open the car door, heard piec
es of the windshield crack and fall, felt his legs give way as he tried to stand. A small V-shaped cut on his forearm bubbled to his pulse; he put his hand over the cut and slumped down to the ground. He heard shouting and saw the guard herding the prisoners across the highway and back onto the blue bus; he heard the prisoners yelling, cursing, saw them waving their arms in protest. Only then did he see the man’s body, all the blood. He retched and looked away.
Who are you? Henry had heard in his head, the question somehow a threat, and he had begun to scroll through a list of names as though he were randomly calling the roll on the first day of classes at Ben Franklin: Louis Stieb, Arthur Ganucheau, Harry Tomeny, David Delery, Jerry Giorlando, Emile Broussard.
Emile Broussard. No, that wasn’t a real name. That was the father in the family that Henry and Mary had invented—that Mary had invented, actually. It was Mary who’d come up with it all on her own. Henry had simply agreed to play along.
He’d sat on the ground, felt the heat against his thighs and hands, the small trickle of blood beneath his fingers. He looked again at the man lying there, his body circled by the dark stain of his blood. A few cars had stopped; people rolled down their windows, stared. No one spoke to him, though. A crowd gathered on the side of the highway—men with sunburned faces and arms, a woman wearing a green scarf and sunglasses, her hands covering her mouth—but no one approached him. No one approached the dead man facedown on the road either. Maybe they thought Henry was dangerous; maybe they thought he had killed this man on purpose. But why didn’t someone rush over to the dead man, kneel beside him, turn him over? Henry waited, trying to calm the shaking in his arms and legs. He took his hand away from the cut. It had already stopped bleeding.
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Page 6
