by Lily King
“Oh, shit, she’s leaving,” Dan said, and since he knew Jonathan from a writing class, he introduced us.
I’d noticed him before, the lean body, short dreads, round glasses, angular face.
“You still writing?” Dan asked him.
“Just my dissertation.”
“On what?” I asked.
“Hegel and Gramsci, supposedly.”
“Not going well?”
“I’d rather be writing stories.”
“You should,” Dan said. “You were good. That story you wrote about the two boys and their dying uncle. I can still remember whole sentences of it.”
We picked at the food. The room was hot. I told Jonathan I’d thought he was one of those precocious seniors who took graduate courses. He laughed and said he was thirty. I didn’t believe him.
“Let me see your license,” I said.
“I don’t have one.”
“What do you mean?” Dan asked. “It get taken away?”
“No, man,” he said, irritated. “I grew up in the city. Never needed one.”
“Shit. Really?”
“True. And my cousin just dropped off this truck she doesn’t need at my apartment, and I can’t even use it.”
“You’ve gotta get taught,” Dan said.
“I know it.”
People were still squeezing in the front door. An old boyfriend was at the other end of the table, debating whether to come over. I needed to get out of there. “I’ll teach you,” I said, and handed him the keys to my Datsun.
It was late afternoon, the third week of September. The day had been warm, but now the sun was low and the trees on the chancellor’s street shook out a cool breeze. In the car I helped him adjust the seat. He needed to put it all the way back. “I’m nervous,” he said, before he turned the key in the ignition. I couldn’t believe how beautiful he was. “I really don’t want to crack up your car.”
But he knew what he was doing. He just went very slowly. A line of cars grew behind us. I directed him out of town onto a back road, but still cars were behind us. He didn’t seem to notice. Every time a car approached from the opposite direction he veered off onto the gravel shoulder and I shut my eyes. He slowly moved the car back onto the road after the line of cars had honked passed. He drove in a straight line. He didn’t seem ready to make turns. Occasionally I’d offer up a tip I remembered from driver’s ed, but mostly there was silence between us. And then, eleven miles out of town, he asked if I liked to sing.
Thursdays were the only afternoon we both had free. We met at the car and we drove and we sang. The first song, that first day, was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” It took us the next three Thursdays to exhaust our repertoire of Beatles songs. Singing helped the driving. He went a little faster. Fewer cars trailed behind us. He began to argue with some of my driving suggestions. We came to a stop sign and I waited for him to slow, and when he didn’t I screamed for him to stop but we sailed through it anyway. I called him Mr. Magoo after that. He retaliated, saying I reminded him of Tweety Bird.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been called worse cartoon characters.”
“Like what?”
“My brother calls me Hermey.”
I didn’t think he’d get it but he said, within seconds, “The dentist?” and he looked at me. “I see that.” He kept looking and laughing. “I definitely see that.”
When we were through with the Beatles, he suggested Elton John.
“Which song of Elton’s do you think crossed over to the black community?” he asked. It was the first time he’d mentioned his race. It felt strangely intimate, and I wanted to get it right.
“‘Benny and the Jets,’” I said.
“Exactly,” he said, with a little smile. “We had no idea what the hell it was about, but, man, we loved that song.” Then he started pounding out the beat on the steering wheel.
“Watch the road, Magoo.”
“You watch the road. I’m on drums.” He made the intro noises and we sang, right on the same beat, “Hey, kids.” Then he sang “walking in the ghetto” while I sang “talk about the weather,” and we looked at each other and cracked up. Jonathan’s smile felt like the full sun on my bare skin.
After Elton, he launched into “Thunder Road.” And then we sang every Springsteen song we could think of, the fun ones like “Rosalita” and “Cadillac Ranch” and the mournful ones like “Independence Day” and “Nebraska.” When we ran out of Bruce, we were driving through a small town surrounded by open fields and I started to sing “Little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane” without really realizing it, and he screamed “No!” and stopped the car in the middle of the road.
“Why?”
“That song is too fucking white.”
“Every song we’ve sung so far is white.”
“I know, but—”
“The Beatles and Springsteen are absolutely fine, but John Mellencamp is out?” I felt myself blushing for having made such a blunder. I worried that it had revealed everything to him: my father, Myrtle Street, Ashing—everything I’d worked so carefully to cleanse myself of.
He grinned. “I switch-hit, don’t I? Shit, they talk about double consciousness, but I’ve got triple, quadruple—I’ve got origami consciousness. But I can’t sing that song. People get lynched in towns like that.”
I couldn’t fake it when he wanted to sing songs by groups like Cameo and the Whispers. I didn’t even know the choruses of those songs.
“This is tragic. Where’d you grow up, under a rock?”
“Pretty much.”
We settled on Marvin Gaye.
He told me he grew up in Philadelphia with four brothers, that his mother was a nurse from Georgia, that his father had come to Philly from Trinidad as a boy and had died from a heart attack when Jonathan was fifteen, that his mother had never remarried, that he had a friend from college named Stella who did improv in comedy clubs. I pictured it: the wooden stage, the confident voice, the room erupting. I knew I couldn’t compete with that.
I told him about my fieldwork in Mexico, twelve months in a village in the Sierra Juarez northeast of Oaxaca, and how the children I’d gone to study ran away from me for the first three months. When I did get close enough to observe their play, I found that the villain in many of their imagined stories, someone they called the See-through Demon, was me.
Once we passed an accident, a car on its side in a gully and three police cars and a fire truck along the shoulder. Jonathan drove slowly by.
“My mother was hit by a car,” I said. It felt like something he should know.
“When?”
“Nine years ago. She died.”
“Right away?”
“Yup.”
I saw his hand flinch on the steering wheel, lift off, and plant right back down again, all in less than a second. It gave me hope, that tiny impulse to touch me that he’d checked.
Sometimes Jonathan would see an animal out of the corner of his eye and stop the car. A fox cutting across a field, a porcupine at the base of a tree. Once we saw a long wide V of Canada geese drop down into a small farm pond all at once, forcing up a great white fan of water. We rolled down the windows and heard all their honking and wing smacking. It was dusk. Jonathan kept binoculars in my glove compartment by then, so we took turns looking at their long dark necks and prim white chinstraps, laughing at how loud and rowdy they were at the start of their long road trip.
When we got back on the road, we passed a sign that said STRATHAM 2 MILES. “I’ve read about that place,” he said. “It’s the Knights’ headquarters.”
“The Knights?”
He looked to see if I was seriously asking. I was. “The Klan,” he said. “Not the place you want to be stopped driving a white girl’s car without a license.” The road was empty and he made a wide U-turn.
Just a few miles out of Ann Arbor, and it was a different world for Jonathan.
We never did anything together after driving. We said goodbye on the st
reet. In the car, while he watched the road, I watched him: his severe profile, the heavy ledge of his brow, the taut muscles of his jaw, and then when he turned unexpectedly, laughing at one of my nervous quips, that smile, his cheeks suddenly boyish. Sitting beside him in my car was becoming a form of torture.
“You’ve got to just kiss him yourself, Daley,” Julie said. “Anyone can see that he’s crazy about you.” But she didn’t know what she was talking about. We’d run into him once on campus, talked awkwardly, that was it.
I couldn’t make the first move. I never had and I never would. She thought I was anachronistic. She proudly claimed that she made the first move in every serious relationship she’d ever had. Men are the tortoises of love, she often said. But my interest and attraction felt too strong. In the car I had to rein in everything: my hands, my questions, my fascination. Sometimes it felt like there was a part of me inside him that I ached to get to.
There was a general store on our route, the only store in a tiny town that we often passed through. One day in early December, he said he was thirsty and pulled into a parking spot. We’d never gotten out of the car during our drives before, not even for animal sightings. An old couple sat on stools behind the counter, and there were several men in the aisles, one lifting out a six-pack from the cooler, another at the magazine stand. Everybody seemed to be talking at once until they saw us and stopped. It reminded me of walking into the kitchen when my father and Catherine weren’t expecting me. The same suspicious glares. Before I knew what I was doing I’d taken Jonathan’s hand. It was the first time we’d touched, though I’d longed for weeks to put my hand on his thigh as he drove, longed to kiss the side of his long neck, had already imagined, I admit it, straddling him, my back against the steering wheel. It was such a relief to touch him, to feel him squeeze my hand with his. We picked out cookies and sodas and I let go reluctantly when we had to pay.
“You did not have to do that,” he said when we walked to the car. “I didn’t need your protection in there.” He slammed the door.
I was stunned by his anger. I thought we’d get back in the car and laugh. I thought he might kiss me. My whole body was still straining toward his. I felt like he’d already touched me everywhere, the way his hand had felt in mine.
He started the car, put it in reverse without a word. I did not explain how to turn going backwards, and didn’t need to. Before we went into the general store we’d been singing “O-o-h, child, things are gonna get easier,” but now we drove back toward Ann Arbor in silence. I wanted your protection, I thought to myself. The man with the six-pack had scared me. But I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what was the truth. For the first time in my life I’d made the first move. My hand had gone out to his and he had taken it and now he was angry at me. I felt like a child. I wanted him to get out of my car so I could cry and cry. I watched the road signs. ANN ARBOR 12 MILES; ANN ARBOR 9 MILES. And then he turned down a road we’d never taken before. I hadn’t seen a sign, didn’t know how he knew it. It bumped along for over a mile, a dirt road with huge ruts and a rise of grass in the middle that scraped the bottom of my car. I thought maybe he was going to drop me off down here as a punishment, make me find my way back. His profile looked particularly harsh then, the jaw working, shifting. The road ended at a lake. The sun had gone behind the tall trees and the still water reflected the purple dusk plushly, like fabric. We stayed in the car and did not look at each other.
“You probably won’t believe this,” he said finally, staring straight ahead, “but I’ve never crossed the color line before. It just never seemed worth it somehow. I wasn’t raised to believe that we’re all the same deep down. My grandmother used to say to me and my brothers, Stay away from white girls. Stay away from them. She was from Vidalia, Georgia, and had a million stories from her childhood. They all ended the same. The black man ended up either dead or in jail. Where I grew up in Philadelphia, there weren’t white people. Not in my neighborhood. Not on the streets, not at school, not in the shops. I knew they existed—I saw them on TV or if we got in my uncle’s car and went somewhere—but I didn’t think there were very many of them. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about white people. And then one day my uncle came by and took me and my cousin to a movie. I think we were six. He had some discount for a theater across town. We got there and there was a thick line of white people down the entire block and around the corner and down another block. All white. I didn’t understand where they could have come from. I still remember the feeling in my chest, terrified, utterly terrified, but also something else, a little thrill or something, because the world was different from what I had thought.” He was still looking straight at the lake, fingers looped around the steering wheel. I wanted to touch him again. “In there, holding your hand, I got that same feeling.”
We reached for each other at the same time. Hands, then mouths, then our bodies pressing against each other. I could not stop tears from leaking out, so great was the relief of his touch and the end of his anger. I hoped he wouldn’t notice but he did; he found them and licked them and apologized for yelling. I wasn’t used to apologies. It brought on a few more tears.
I’d always paced things carefully with men, offered up my body piecemeal, resisted exploration of theirs until I felt certain the emotional connection was keeping pace with the physical. My mother had told me not to make love without love, but I had become a freakish air-traffic controller, determined to land the two, love and sex, at precisely the same time. It rarely worked. The orchestrating itself derailed things. With Jonathan I lost interest in control, lost the ability to control. And that first sex in the car by the lake was always with us, every time we made love afterward, and never once did I regret it.
I can’t offer anyone a real goodbye at the end of the night. When people hug me, I insist I’ll see them soon, I’ll see them around. Julie squeezes me hard. This is the end of our life together. I took all my things out of our apartment this morning and crammed them into my car. There is only a little hole for me to squeeze into tomorrow and drive to California.
“I hate this,” she says. “I hate that I’m not going to find all your dirty dishes in the sink tomorrow night.”
“Please don’t make me cry. If I start, I won’t stop.” But I feel numb, nowhere close to tears.
She kisses me on both cheeks and leaves them wet. She promises to visit in the fall. It doesn’t feel real, my future, all that I have worked so hard to make happen. But the future always sits uneasily with me. I’ve never been able to really trust it. I’ve trained myself not to look forward to things very often. And I’m tired. I’m bone tired. Part of me just wants to curl up on a couch and sleep for a few years.
Dan is the last to leave. From his car he asks, “Can I use that bit about your father not going to the funeral?” He means in a story. “Please? I’ve already wrung my own childhood dry.”
“Go ahead,” I say, and then he is gone, just a hand out the car window, and then that is gone, too. He was my very first friend here.
Jonathan and I stack the dishes in the kitchen and lie on his bed in our clothes. It’s how we’ve always done it, like teenagers, as if each night we spend together is our first. My old boyfriend David used to have to brush his teeth and change into a clean T-shirt and fresh underwear before he got near the bed, and liked me to do the same. I couldn’t stand the sterile marriedness of it. I make sure I don’t always sleep on the same side of Jonathan’s bed when I stay over. I don’t want ritual or routine in a relationship. Ever.
Jonathan traces a finger along my temple and around my ear. When he takes off his glasses you can see that he has little stripes of tawny gold in his dark brown eyes. “You were so funny when people were toasting you. You looked like they were giving you an enema.”
“I hate watching people have to come up with nice things to say.” I kiss his finger, the tender pink pad of it. “Thank you for the party.”
“You’re so welcome, my Daley bread.”
He pulls me on top of him. I feel him hard beneath me under his jeans. I push against him lightly, then harder, feeling the rush, the swell, the want. “Everything on earth should be just this simple,” I say. I take his earlobe in my teeth and feel him moan. “Tell me what it’s like again,” I whisper, still grinding against him, feeling the exact shape of him through our clothes.
It takes him a second to find his voice. “You know it’s Paloma Street when you see the big fence covered in bright red flowers. And then five houses down you see a tree out in front. Enormous. Maybe a eucalyptus. Please take off your clothes.”
“Tell me about the front door.” He flew out to California last month and found the cottage for us.
“Yellow. It’s yellow.”
“And the little window in the door?”
“The color of pale green sea glass. Please.”
I pull off my jeans, clumsily. I’m like a drunk when I’m horny, completely without fine motor skills. Jonathan scoots himself down and pushes my legs apart. He grins up at me, then slides a finger up inside me. I’m wet and swollen and it goes in easily. He pushes it in and slides it out and pushes it in again. Unable to wait, I press myself to his mouth, feel the warmth of his tongue on my clit and the finger drawing back and forth inside me. I can feel the orgasm now, assembling in the distance then moving swiftly in, opening up, opening me up, coming, coming closer, coming to split me down the middle.
But the sudden ring startles me. “Just the phone, tweety,” he says without lifting his head.
Three and a half rings, then the machine catches it. The orgasm veers off. My brother comes on. “Jesus Christ, Daley. Where the fuck are you?” There’s a panic in his voice I’ve never heard before.
