She takes a deep breath and does her best to look detached, amused, yet some smaller version of herself that lives within her spits out the words she would never allow herself to say aloud: I am carrying seven-eighths of the financial burden of this house and our life and you suddenly decide to give away half of your business to a twenty-five-year-old girl who is clearly in love with you?
“Uh-oh, the birdy angel is back,” Ruby says, pointing to the wall. All those outsized, inexplicable, seemingly unsupportable emotions she has been displaying over the past year or two suddenly seem like rehearsals for this moment, because now when her eyes widen and her voice rises in dismay and she shrinks back into her chair as if from the fires of hell, there seems not a jot of play or exaggeration in it. Whatever Ruby has been practicing for is here.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Hey Sonny,” says Kate, “may I ask you a question?” Though Sonny is her driver, he is also an AA pal. They meet every Wednesday evening in a church basement with about twenty other Leydenites ranging from a retired pediatrician to a young shoplifter. It was Kate who, sensing his alcoholism when he first drove her—the smell of that metabolizing booze was unmistakable, as were the sea-creature eyes—teased Sonny into the program, and though there is a bit of Kabuki theater ritual in how they both acknowledge and ignore each other at meetings, Sonny always brings her a cup of coffee before the meeting begins and Kate always gives him a little kiss, which in her case means a foil-wrapped chocolate drop from Hershey. “I’m curious about the bumper sticker on the back of your car. ‘All Men Are Idiots and My Husband Is Their King’? Why do you have that?”
“Oh boy,” Sonny Briggs says. “I meant to scrape that little son of a gun off it.”
Sonny has made an effort to elevate his level of service, which he realizes is more about presentation than it is about driving, though he does, in fact, pride himself on his driving style, which is contained and relaxed, steady in speed, with a minimum of lane changes. So that he may appear more businesslike, his hair, once a monument to hell-raising testosterone, in the style of his father’s old favorite, Con-way Twitty, is now closely barbered, and he wears what he hopes will pass for a chauffeur’s cap but which is, in fact, an Amtrak ticket-taker’s hat, given to him by his cousin. The job of driving Kate to New York, waiting the hour and a half it takes her to make her radio broadcast, and then driving her back to Leyden pays Sonny more than half of what he needs to get by every week.
They are nearing the city. They pass a cluster of houses and a large, glassy pond completely overtaken by Canada geese, a thousand of them at least. Kate marvels at the beauty of all those elegant birds with their long necks and pompous waddle and white chin straps, but her view of them is mixed with dread—why would so many geese be gathered here a mile or two outside of Tarrytown? And with that thought the entire landscape seems to tilt—the rambling white houses look suddenly shabby and in need of paint jobs, the green of the grass appears to be too dark and maybe it’s more goose shit than grass, the trees seem pitched at odd angles and unstable, and the sky, which moments ago was a bright, goofy blue like a pair of golfing trousers, now has darkened to purple, the color of a funereal sash worn by a minister standing next to an open grave. Get me out of here, Kate thinks.
“So Sonny,” Kate says, “talk to me.” She sees his questioning eyes appear in the rearview mirror and just as quickly they disappear. “How’s business?”
Sonny can never decide if it’s better to tell people you’re doing well, or if you should accentuate the negative and perhaps put them on your side. He has plenty of problems he could talk about. Insurance rates are going up. His back feels like the vertebrae are getting compressed by all the sitting. Yet his wife, Chantal, gives him massages at night and when they go out together she insists on driving because she says it’s his turn to relax and let someone else do the work. And as boring as this job is and as uncertain, it’s still better than roofing, which he did for eight years, with the wind in his face, the doomy stench of tar in his lungs, and his legs shaking from fear because not a day went by when he didn’t have a premonition of sliding off the roof and landing on some flagstone patio, and his head exploding like a jar of jelly.
They are closing in on the city now and the traffic, negligible on the Taconic Parkway, is getting heavy on the Saw Mill. Open space, which turned into single-family houses, has become apartment buildings now, modest brick five-story dwellings, close to the road, interspersed with industrial yards, small offices, a parking lot for trash-collecting trucks.
“The thing I love about driving people,” Sonny says, “is the people. All sorts of people. I figured I’d be driving bankers and the cream of the puff, but half the people I drive around are poor folks. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”
“You’re right,” Kate says, her voice almost giddy with her relief over having something to talk about. “What are poor people doing with a car service?”
“Poor people sometimes don’t have cars. And up where we live, you got to have transportation. Can’t take a bus because there ain’t no bus, and you can’t walk it because most things are too far. So this one lady, every Monday at one in the afternoon I pick her up and I take her to the Grand Union and she does her shopping for the week, and then I drive her home.”
“That must cost more than her groceries,” Kate says.
“It ain’t cheap,” Sonny agrees. “I got another customer who needs me to pick him up for doctor appointments, and I drive one guy in to see his parole officer. I guess back in the day you used to have neighbor helping neighbor, but now it’s pretty much everyone for themselves.” He shrugs, realizes how good that feels, how it relieves the tension in his shoulders and his neck, and he shrugs a few more times, just for the pleasure of it, and the pleasure somehow emboldens him. “That’s one thing I think a new president might bring back,” Sonny says. “Neighbor helping neighbor, and not everyone looking up to some powerful government bureaucrat to fix everything.”
“Like what new president?” Kate asks, fearing the worst.
“I don’t know, just not what we’ve got right now,” says Sonny. “I was pretty much behind that Senator McCain, mostly because of what he went through. But you know that Governor Bush out of Texas is one of us.”
“George Bush?” exclaims Kate. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That little spoiled brat?”
Sonny smiles. You’ve got to be a damned fool to argue politics with a customer. “I guess so,” he says, “but doesn’t it sort of make you sick the way Clinton was cheating on everyone like that?”
“I don’t care, Sonny,” Kate says, leaning back, adjusting her legs. “All men are idiots and my president is their king.”
Kate’s eyes come to rest on her black silk-and-linen pants, and she sees a couple of long, curled brown dog hairs pressed into the fabric, like veins in a leaf. Shep. The hairs are oddly resistant to her efforts to pluck them free. At last, using her thumbnail and fingernail as tweezers, she lifts them off her pants, but when she drops them to the floor of the car, rather than fall they outwit gravity and rise and drift right back to her leg.
She is not now nor has she ever been particularly fond of dogs, or cats, or any other four-legged creatures, and a lifetime spent listening to various friends prattle on about their pets has been an ongoing marathon of false smiles and empty nods. Their anagrammatic relationship to God notwithstanding, it has always struck Kate that something fundamentally foul is at the root of every dog. Anus, tongue, cascading fur, farts and meaty breath, black claws, icy teeth, and ostensibly adoring eyes, eyes that Kate perceived as primarily watchful, the eyes of a hunter mated with a scavenger. In high school Kate had a boyfriend named Rick Laval, a half-Cajun son of a local lawyer, and a boy of delicate bone structure and limited interests. Rick spoke on very few subjects, but one of them was Dolly, his family’s water dog, and it was from Rick that Kate learned the immutable law governing men and their dogs, which is you don’t want to stand between t
hem. Rick, who seemed tongue-tied when it came to making an apology or stating his feelings or even making a plan, never ran out of things to say about Dolly, even going so far as to touch on her dream life, which, according to Rick, was full of cross-country chases and heart-pounding pond crossings. Kate did not mind Dolly’s company, nor did she begrudge the ferocious affection she inspired in Rick; all Kate asked was to be spared having to join in the hysteria surrounding the dog and to be likewise spared having to pretend that the dog had complex feelings that were not appreciably different from Joni Mitchell’s or Vanessa Redgrave’s.
Paul is not that sort of man, his adoration of Shep notwithstanding. His affection is cleaner, more reasonable. The very thought of him makes Kate want to pull her cell phone out of her purse and call him. She won’t, though, because he maintains a mid-century attitude toward telephones, believing that they’re for the transmission of important, brief messages. The idea of talking on the phone aimlessly and at length because you miss someone makes as much sense to him as looking at pictures of food because you are hungry.
Yet she would love to hear his voice right now, even its tinny approximation through the ear holes of her mobile phone. Memories of his many kindnesses swarm within her. Holy is the silence he affords her when he sees she is thinking, holy are the windows he has placed in her house, in her life, and her soul, holy is the smell of wood, holy is the carpenter, holy is his gaze when she is speaking, holy is the catch in his breath when she kisses him, holy is his come, holy are his balls, holy is the weight of him, holy is the sweet attention he pays to Ruby, holy is his love of trees, holy are the steps he takes upon the face of the earth, holy is his driving fast behind her car and catching up with her to give her the notebook she has forgotten, holy are the stacks of firewood beside her stove, holy are his folded hands as he listens intently to what she reads aloud, holy are the hands that gently pat her to sleep when it’s one of those nights, holy holy holy is the touch of his fingertips as he passes her chair, holy are his tears when he thinks of the harm he has done, holy is his sudden thirst for absolution, holy is his stumbling circular path to God…
In front of them, the George Washington Bridge is so vividly reflected in the Hudson’s still waters that it looks like the top and bottom of a playing card. The sky is a soiled metropolitan blue, and beneath it, all along the curve of Manhattan, the buildings line up to display their wealth and accomplishment, from the Parisian placidity of Riverside Drive to the clunky exclamation points of the World Trade towers on the island’s southern tip.
Her show is not a live feed but is taped, and Todd Hoffman, the show’s producer, will wait for her, but nevertheless Kate’s stomach churns nervously at the prospect of a long delay. She doesn’t want to inconvenience anyone, and she doesn’t want to be perceived as someone who makes others wait for her. Beyond that, if she can get into the station by one, be out of there by two-thirty, she will miss the afternoon rush out of the city, which sometimes begins as early as three, and be home again not much later than four o’clock. If Kate misses her opportunity to get out of the city before the commuter exodus she is faced with postponing her return trip until eight in the evening. Sonny doesn’t mind crawling along, but her own psychic metabolism is thrown into a tumbler by rush hour’s frequent, inexplicable stops followed by little forward bursts of ten or fifteen seconds’ duration. So far, she has been caught in the city only once, and it is not something that she wants to put herself or Sonny through again.
Her impatience to get back to Leyden is about having time with Paul, before Ruby needs to be picked up at Children First, where she sees a learning specialist—if, that is, Paul is willing to end his workday and Evangeline can pick up on the conjugal vibe and go home.
Most of the planning and machinations that are necessarily a part of their love life are done by Kate. It is not that Paul is indifferent to their life in bed together, but he is in this matter as in every other matter maddeningly ad hoc. He does not seem to understand that if they are both awake at seven in the morning they have exactly thirty minutes before the duck-shaped alarm clock starts quacking on Ruby’s bedside table, nor does it seem to occur to him that if he has an appointment to give blood on Wednesday, that makes Tuesday a good time to have sex because they have both learned—at least she has, and he ought to have—that exhaustion follows his biweekly pint. Also on the subject of blood: Paul remains thoroughly unaware of her menstrual cycle, letting the precious days before her bleeding begins go by without any particular sexual interest and then approaching her with urgent, open kisses while she is all plugged up and cannot bear to be touched.
There have been times when she has wondered if his failure to ride herd over time and to force it to yield as many moments as possible for them to be together is not so much a function of his wild-child, creature-of-the-woods spontaneity and his lifelong aversion to structures and schedules, but is really some passive-aggressive tactic to keep their sexual contact down to a minimum, or to have their lovemaking coincide with the ebb and flow of his desires. Or it could be—and this is the most disquieting possibility—a way to make her responsible for their sexual and emotional health, turning her in effect into a human metronome who maintains the rhythm of their intimate life.
She doesn’t mind doing the work, because of the reward. The slow fill of him as he notches his hips inch by inch closer to her, she enjoys the anticipation of the bright delirium sex unleashes in her, an extremity of emotion and abandon that she has never before experienced and never actually believed other people experienced, either, and she enjoys moving things around in her schedule so there is more time for them to be together. It’s like clearing brush so the flowers can be seen. But there is no question in her mind that if Paul were in her position right now he would not be thinking of how to get out of the city in time to be home so that there was a chance to lie next to her.
Paul in the city is subject to a thousand and one diversions. He might stumble on a Korean restaurant that strikes his fancy, he might run into an old buddy who needs his help unloading a truck, or he might spend an extra hour wandering Central Park trying to find a sycamore tree that he loved as a teenager. These are all lovely traits, part of his casual charisma, but there is one minuscule problem, barely worth a mention: sometimes she wants to wring his neck. After all, not so long ago, he was in the city checking out a job, and if he had turned around immediately and gone back home to her they would have had a whole afternoon to themselves. But what did he do instead? He drove to the East Side and looked for the apartment house where he had found his father’s corpse. And of course he further delayed his journey to Leyden by stopping in Martingham State Park to clear his thoughts, whereas Kate, had she been at the wheel, with Paul up in Leyden, would have been pushing the speed limit trying to get home, and to think of him flicking on his turn signal—no, forget it, he wouldn’t even do that—to think of him suddenly pulling off the Saw Mill and heading for some cathedral of trees where he could make his solitary and inchoate prayers to nature, and to think of all that could be at this very moment so profoundly different in their lives had he not done so, fills Kate with rage, by the way, total, hideous rage, hardly worth mentioning…
They arrive with Kate’s customary half hour to spare, time she needs to stretch her legs, organize her notes, pee, hydrate, pee again, and chatter amiably with the studio’s staff, seven men and women who seem to Kate to be part of some underground species, highly intelligent denizens of a world in which people make no visual impression on one another. A couple of weeks into her show, Kate took her sartorial cue from the station staff and came to work in sweatpants and one of Paul’s green-and-black checkered shirts, but it was the worst show she had ever done and now she dresses for each broadcast as if it were a public event, believing that taking some care in her wardrobe has an invigorating effect on her mental processes, a theory that was borne out in a television show about some legendary basketball coach who preached the importance of putting
your socks on and lacing up your shoes just so.
“Maybe you can park the car and come in,” she says to Sonny, as she slides across the seat and opens the back door.
“Nah, I’m good,” he says.
“They have a fabulous water cooler,” Kate says. “And a state-of-the-art Naugahyde sofa.”
“I’m good,” Sonny repeats, gripping the steering wheel more tightly.
“Okay then, sir,” Kate says. “I shall see you…” She checks her watch, a Cartier tank watch and a gift from a particularly devoted fan. “In exactly ninety minutes, which would be two-thirty, I will come racing and we will get the fuck on the road, okay?” Kate realizes that her profanity is mildly offensive to Sonny, but she likes to swear, especially on the day of her broadcast, when it serves as an inoculation against the occupational hazard of piety.
Heartland Radio, with broadcasting facilities in Burbank, Phoenix, Chicago, Orlando, Richmond, and now in New York, has secured a spot in the low numbers of the FM dial, where the frequency is strong. On the air from five a.m. to midnight—people awake later than that are presumably beyond salvation—Heartland features several hours of good-natured Christian rock, distinguishable from the music on the secular stations only by the lyrics that, to the boom-boom rhythm of pelvic thrusts, extol the virtues of virginity. Its programs include Live from the Alliance Tabernacle, Ask the Experts, God and Country, Faith and Family, The Eleventh Commandment, and Kate’s show, the highest-rated. Just as her book’s sales and the crowds at her personal appearances indicated, there are a lot of people like her out there in the whole vast confused, tragic, mysterious country: single mothers, recovering drunks, good old-fashioned Christian do-gooders, and, of course, people simply interested in Kate Ellis—her self-doubts about her mothering, her memories of her past as a child beauty queen, her faith as it is tested in AA meetings when boredom threatens to overcome empathy, her wondering if Jesus thinks any less of her when she prays for a good haircut or the loss of ten pounds.
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