He leaned forward and the gauges cast his face in a red glow. He didn’t ask how I knew, how I’d seen it. He was breathing hard, and he leaned back against the seat. A car started somewhere on the street behind us. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then glanced quickly over as if he expected me to have vanished.
“Can you go see how she is?” he said.
I stared at him. “Me?”
As if the sound of the idling engine was more than he could bear, he lurched and shut it off. “She never wanted to come out here,” he said. “She said it’s not our kind of people. I said don’t worry about the people. But that was wrong. We should have. She should be with people.”
“But you didn’t tell her that,” I said, looking for my courage. Everything was going to come out tonight. “You can tell me, but not her.”
“Every day I think she’s going to ask why. How I could do that. That night she got rid of her car, I thought maybe you two talked about it. I thought she was going to leave me.”
“She gave up on you,” I said, looking down at the floorboards.
“She should.”
“She loves me,” I said. “We’re in love.” The words gave me a hot jolt of legitimacy. White noise came from inside my head in a finale of flashing neurons, any emotion possible from the great stew, until I looked up and found him watching me. His mouth hung open. “You mean you were together?” he said.
Before I said yes I began to say again that we were in love, but Nick looked as if he had turned off every thought in his mind waiting for my response. He had to have known. That’s what I realized I believed. It was impossible for him not to know, and yet he didn’t. “Yes,” I said.
I thought he might say my name, certain that if he did I would start to cry. But he gave only a weak, mechanical nod. After a moment he covered his mouth with the back of his hand.
“But she’s happy?” he said.
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” he said. “You two. I don’t … How long?”
“Since July.”
“This whole time.” He leaned against his window, looking up at the dim city sky. He was sanctified by his inability to imagine such a betrayal, and I had to look away from him again. A hundred yards ahead of us the narrowing street ended in sodium arc light over a chain-link fence. Under the dark silhouettes of trees there was movement in the shadows, this park in the disguise of country, but it wasn’t country. It was dangerous with people. I stared at a pair of sneakers hanging from the phone lines.
“She should be in love,” Nick said. He was grinning when I looked back at him. “I’m glad she is,” he said. Amazingly he started to laugh, uneven spits of laughter at first, like the sputter of a cold engine, but then warming into the easy laugh of last summer when we’d run our cars into each other at the lights. More than a year ago. Only a year ago. “She seemed happy again,” he said. “Does she laugh?”
“All the time, Nick.”
“And April,” he said. “She brings home the crayon pictures. She has you and April now.” He smiled and breathed as he leaned back again in his seat. About tonight, her seducing him, I thought to explain that she must’ve been a little out of her mind. Thinking it was a different time. Understandable with all the changes. But I only got as far as telling it to myself, trying to believe it myself, because Nick didn’t seem bothered by the inconsistency. Suddenly he reached over and grabbed me around the shoulder. He pulled me into him and kissed me on top of the head. Then he hugged me and let me go.
“Let’s go talk to her,” I said.
“You go. I’ll leave you two alone. No, okay. Yeah. Tell her I’m happy about it. I’m happy for both of you.”
We sat there quietly for a few minutes. Just before I opened my door he said, “You know what I’d think sometimes? What made me feel better? I’d think what if Joey had turned out like you.”
* * *
The house was warm inside (it occurred to me later that she’d arranged their lovemaking right down to setting the thermostat), and I heard it as soon as the kitchen door clicked shut. One low droning pitch from the back of the house, a high stutter when she gasped for breath and then the enduring moan.
In the living room I stepped over the toppled books and mementos, already smelling her blends, cinnamon, lavender, frankincense, her potions. I picked up the towel where it had fallen off her body and put it to my face.
I took a few light steps into the hallway and listened to her moan that same note, broken only by her stuffed inhales; I began to hear a stretched-out word—“no,” or “don’t”—and it took some daring to walk farther down the hall.
The bedroom door was open. Mary Ann was on her side and curled, fetal, humming and sniffing, and, closing my eyes, I breathed her in. I saw her coming to Nick as she had never come to me, her eyes filled with yearning and fear, so determined, hungry, and insistent, so sexy. I could smell the clove now. The cypress and rose.
I got on the bed behind her, and she grabbed back for my hand and pulled it to her chest. For a few seconds neither of us moved.
“It’s me,” I said.
She let go of my hand and drew away from it but didn’t sit up. “How are you here?” she said, her voice wet and breaking, and with the hand that had only a second ago seized mine she wiped her nose. She turned over on her back. I could see only the outlines of her face, which was turned not to me but to the ceiling.
“He knows about us,” I said. “It’s okay now. He knows.”
There was no sound, no breathing from either of us, and then she shuddered. Her crying came in voiceless spasms, and her tears ran into her hair. I brought my arms around her and kissed the side of her face as she cried—I could feel her cheeks tighten as her eyes pinched closed, and the tears, the salt trickle, the sloppy wet. She started hitting me on the spine with the sides of her fists, the blows just enough to shorten my breath. I knew it wouldn’t last and it didn’t, and she was hitting me with unfisted hands that rested finally on the tops of my shoulders. I lifted my head, and she pulled my face down to hers and kissed me hard. I undid my pants and slid them off just enough, and her hand was on my tailbone pressing down as I entered her.
I told her I loved her through the frantic kissing. She started whispering, and I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting: “April needs you,” I said. “Mom forgives you. We’re okay, Mary Ann. Finally. We’re okay.”
Her lips kept moving, and I pulled up from her. In the dim light of the open door she drew her hands over her navel but didn’t look at me even as I was staring down, even as our lovemaking had stopped, even as I said her name. Her lips were moving. She was talking to the ceiling. “The baby,” she said. “The baby, Nick.”
I was spinning, weightless. When I clicked on the ceramic lamp she rolled into a tight ball and was quiet. After a moment she reached back for the comforter and threw it over herself.
The silver chain was gone from around her neck—had he torn it off? Had I? I touched her shoulder, and she recoiled right up to the edge of the bed. I backed away on my knees. I saw my erection and was disgusted by it. I pulled up my pants and got off the bed.
* * *
In the kitchen with my eyes closed I relived the summer, I looked down on myself making love to Mary Ann, I eavesdropped on our deepest conversations. Could she have been only wanting a baby? It couldn’t be, the evidence just wasn’t there, but the question already had a steel edge of truth.
I was slumped over the table when Mary Ann came out in her bathrobe and put the teapot on the stove. I was afraid, not of her but for her, that she’d lost her mind. But after a minute or so she spoke without looking at me. “You saw him?” she said. “Outside?”
I told her I had, and after I was sure that she was done asking questions I said, “You’re pregnant.” I wasn’t asking or telling, but just putting the tremendous fact into existence by saying it. The words weakened me, and right there I started to feel like I was getting a cold. My sinuses drained, and I
was almost shivering. I pressed my hands between my thighs and crouched forward a little. When I closed my eyes the silence became massive and dizzying.
The teapot whistled, and as she poured the steaming water into a cup it all became clear. Her not smoking. Her good-bye to April.
“How long?” I said. “How far along?”
“It was that night in your room. I didn’t have my diaphragm in.”
I couldn’t really digest this because I knew there was no hope, and yet the night I thought about constantly having been the night of conception gave me hope.
She held the cup under her nose and breathed the steam, still looking outside with her back to me. “I’m sorry, Mary Ann,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come in.”
She was still for a moment, and then she turned without looking at me and went out of the room. I stared at the tabletop. How had it happened? I didn’t recognize my hands. I couldn’t make myself move. I couldn’t do the right thing or do anything but stare at the flecks in the Formica.
I’d lost control of myself, I’d done what I never would have believed I could do, she’d trusted me and I was no one who could be trusted. What else would I watch myself do? I wasn’t seeing the flecks anymore but seeing myself on her, and hoping it was only a short time, a time she could forget, please God let it erase itself for her.
I mashed a dish towel over my mouth and cried. It was half an hour later when I looked at the clock again. I got out of the chair, my ribs sore, and pulled on my jacket. I blew my nose in a napkin and looked around for a pen and something to write on. Passing the doorway to the living room I just happened to glance in, not expecting her to be there, but she was on the futon, lying on her side in the kitchen light, watching me. And that lie inside me came alive again that maybe if we talked. If only we talked.
I stood over the bookshelf, and she wouldn’t look at me. I lifted it back against the wall—it was lighter than it looked—and put back on the shelves everything that hadn’t broken.
Mary Ann pulled her legs up, and I sat on the end of the futon where her feet had been. I propped my head back on the flat edge of mattress, feeling drugged from the crying and all the bad sleep. “I’m going. I’ll go,” I said, fighting a helpless, empty sleep I was afraid of.
When she spoke, the source of her voice seemed to come from inside my head. “He could have believed the baby was his.”
I nodded with my eyes still closed, and these were the last words of my consciousness: I’ll get him back for you.
36.
It was raining. I rubbed the hot cables in my neck, trying to remember, by the strength of my headache, how much I’d had to drink. She was dressed and standing by the window, the source of the dim grainy light in the room. Very slowly the night came to me, beginning with the awareness that I wasn’t hungover.
“Can I use your bathroom?” I said.
She didn’t turn around. “Where is he, Justin?”
“Did you call the shop?”
“All morning.”
The numbers on the wall clock took a few seconds to come into focus. It was seven thirty. No one would be there yet unless Nick had slept on the couch in the office, which I assumed he had, and wasn’t answering the phone, wasn’t, perhaps, ready to participate in the circumstances of his life just yet.
“I’ll see if he’s there,” I said. “I just need to pee quick. I’ll have him call you.”
But in the bathroom, mid-stream, the events of yesterday came flooding back with the sound of trumpets, and I couldn’t finish fast enough. I surged out to the living room and told Mary Ann about the Mustang in the garage, and I told her the truth—when I said I had wanted Nick out of our lives, she squinted at me as if she didn’t know who I was. I told her the plan I’d come up with just now. Mary Ann went past me into the kitchen and grabbed her purse. “Let’s go.”
I drove in front in the Mustang. The cold and the light rain came in where the door wouldn’t close. I stopped at every stop sign, trying to replay in my head a few minutes before, when I told her to just keep going if a cop pulled me over, to see if there had been anything at all sympathetic in her look when she nodded.
I parked the Mustang not far from where her Malibu had been taken at Holy Land and wiped everything down with the arm of my jacket. There were no other cars, no people that I could see, and no sounds of people. But it was early, and the rain looked to be the last of a front, the sky already lighter in the west, and there was a chance that the day would dry out completely and people would come.
I got in the Nova, and she started away as I was closing the door. As we drove it occurred to me that this was the last time I’d be inside my old car, and I touched the dashboard over the glove box. I thought about the person I was when I owned the car and the person I suddenly was now.
She didn’t speak until we were less than a minute from her house, when she said, “I didn’t plan this,” and looked at me. “Getting pregnant, any of it. This whole year, I didn’t plan.” She said this without intimacy or emotion, only to prevent me from misunderstanding. We weren’t going to talk again, at least not how we once had, after this car ride.
“When I came in the house, I heard you crying,” I said. “I knew you loved Nick. And I knew what was right, but I went in anyway. I’m sorry.”
She turned into her driveway and stopped so that I would have less of a walk to my car in the street. But she shifted to park, which gave me a small hope, though she wouldn’t look at me.
“Are you going to have it?” I said. If it came to an abortion, I’d go with her if Nick wouldn’t. But she was only angry now, and when she shook her head, it wasn’t in answer to my question but in disapproval of me. As I turned to open my door, she said, “Justin, what happened to you?”
* * *
I drove to the river. I wanted the sound of it, but as I sat with my window cracked in the spitting rain, wishing I had coffee, I heard only the wet rush of morning traffic on the Connecticut Avenue Bridge. I drifted off for a few minutes and woke with the sudden awareness that I had work today. I fell right into time, found myself pulling into the back lot only ten minutes late. Rod’s Dodge was there, Bobby’s AMC, and Nick’s El Camino—as I had figured it would be. Where else did he have to go?
I was ready to bury my head under a hood. Nick was right about engines. They didn’t change. Even the computer-controlled ones just became more efficient at what they did. Fuel and air and spark, for a hundred years. I wanted that mechanical simplicity to overrun my mind and wash out everything else.
But as I walked up the alley to the side door, I knew I was on my way to the back office, where I would tell Nick and tell him everything.
When he was done yelling at me or beating me he would go to her, while I packed my tools and silently eliminated myself from their life.
I fell against the greasy side of the waste oil tank, the strength suddenly gone from my legs. “My baby,” I whispered. The shiver the words gave me was detached from any image of what my baby would look like—I only saw her holding it in a blanket. Let them be happy, I tried to pray. What if raising my child would be enough penance for Nick? Let them be happy. My penance would be never telling the secret. I saw the future and was terrified and satisfied and alive. The only thing that mattered from now until infinity was being a good person.
Bobby opened the side door and stepped out carrying a drain pan, a cigarette in his lips. He saw me, jutted his chin, and went to the waste tank.
“Hang on.” I came around him to open the lid. As he started to pour it down, I apologized for the other day, and I wanted to keep apologizing—it felt cowardly to have so much relief. I was on the brink of telling him what I had done, this monstrous twenty-four hours, the Mustang, Mary Ann, all of it, when he brought down the drain pan and said, “Look, man, I’m not giving you a disease.” I followed him into the bays. “That’s all it is, a disease. The junk and the booze. Like one fag giving another fag AIDS. Go listen to ‘Puppets.’ It’s all
in that song.”
* * *
Rod’s voice came over the intercom telling me I had a phone call. In less time than seemed possible, just a second or two, I rocketed from the panic of the cops having found the Mustang and a fingerprint I’d missed, or that the guy, the fat man, had seen the logo on my hat when I was stealing the car, to the wavering relief that it was only Mom, wondering why I hadn’t come home.
But then Rod, seeing through the lobby window all my pale bulging expressions, continued, “Al Wickersham. Second time he called.”
37.
It had never occurred to me to look in the Dungeon, where I would have seen that the Corvette was gone. Wickersham said he’d heard a car out there this morning when he was milking cows. “Don’t know how he rolled it,” he said. “A car that low to the ground. Wasn’t even raining yet.”
He was quiet, and it wasn’t a quiet I could break, a moment of silence it seemed. I hadn’t said more than “Hello.”
Then came another voice on the line, and it was Dave Bowers. “I went by your place. Your car wasn’t there.”
“Did he die?” I said.
“What’s that?”
My hand—I felt it clamped over my mouth. But I couldn’t bring it down any more than I could open my eyes. Dave cleared his throat. “Me and Al were up in the stall barn. De-balling the Guernseys. We hear this motor revving down at the track, so we got on the quads. It’s barely daylight. He’s got the ’Vette, only he put fat cheater slicks on the back. Fifteen-inch baldies. He’s got that car doing wheelies. Jesus Christ, that goddamn car.” There was the first of a number of pauses as he told his story. I heard him exhaling hard through his nose. “He asks do we have a digital watch. I got mine on. He wants me to time him. He says he’s going to hit ten seconds.” As he paused again, I was there in the weak light, rubber in the air, and I made no sound, afraid to influence the story from other than the exact truth of it.
“I can’t tell if he’s nuts or what,” Dave said. “Ten seconds. Fuck. So I go down to the line and he takes off. But then I don’t know. There’s no brake lights. What the hell? He swings it, like he can one-eighty, but he’s got the slicks on and they must’ve grabbed and then he’s rolling. Side over side, rolling. Jesus Christ.”
The Spark and the Drive Page 22
