I fished in my slacks pocket for my keys and started the Golf. Hot air blew in my face, and the radio blared show tunes. South Pacific. I would be playing clarinet in the pit band up at the high school this fall, and there was no reason to put off getting ready. But suddenly the musical, all musicals, seemed shallow and pointless. I switched it off. You’re supposed to take the tape out first—the capstan can permanently indent the pinch roller, creating flutter and wow—but for the moment I didn’t care. I rolled up the windows and turned the fan on high.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I shouted.
I drove down to the strip and got in line at Wendy’s. Behind me was a giant Oldsmobile containing what appeared to be two identical men, pale, heavy, large-headed, with wispy blond hair and gigantic jaws and necks. I studied them in the rearview. The driver was alert and erect and blazingly illuminated by afternoon sun. The passenger wore a ball cap and his head hung low, so that his entire face was deeply shadowed; he seemed to be asleep. I’m no Chinese cosmologist, but there certainly seemed to be a yin-yang thing going on here, the driver bright, dry, robust; his passenger dark and weak and damp. Which was I?
The passenger, of course. The passive passenger, laboring in darkness, unrecognized and misunderstood, wet (with sweat, as the AC seemed to be completely broken), and subject to the whims of a higher and utterly arbitrary authority. To think that I just sat there nodding at Doug, taking it! Just taking it! I began to feel shaky all over again and kneaded the steering wheel. Sticky black stuff came off it and rolled itself into little cigars under my hands. Evolution, indeed. How very foolish of me, of all of us, to imagine there was constant and inevitable movement toward greater intelligence, efficiency, physical perfection!
Pretty soon my turn came. I accepted the food with a nod. Then I realized I was out of money.
“Do you take checks?” I asked the kid.
“Credit cards?”
“Checks.”
“Checks?” he said. I nodded. “Let me talk to my manager.”
Like all fast food managers, this one was slight of stature and frowned with a practiced authority. He had the requisite small black mustache. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m out of money. I just realized. I don’t do credit cards. Can’t. The check is local, it’s all current, I’ll give you my driver’s license …” I handed him the license and he looked from it to me four or five times, his frown deepening. At last he said, “We don’t normally do this, but I’ll make an exception.”
Whew! I borrowed a pen from the kid and wrote out the check. “Wendy’s,” I wrote in the PAY TO: line. Somehow, that act made me sadder than anything that had happened yet that day. Behind me, yang honked. I waved and pulled around to the lot.
When I was finished with my Cajun chicken sandwich and Frosty I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. How hard could it be? I thought. I took off my shoes and pushed the seat back and crossed my legs, then placed my hands palms-up on my knees. I said “Ummm …,” which did not sound quite right. I pictured a big naked bald man doing the same thing. In a little while a feeling of peace and well-being washed over me. Soon I was dreaming: I was a medicine ball, like the one they had in the school gym, simultaneously heavy and buoyant, girded by flexible metal rods. The children cheered as they propelled me through the air!
I woke to a tap. It was a girl wearing a Wendy’s hat. The atmosphere inside the car was stifling. I rolled down the window and the air billowed out. “Yes?”
“They sent me out to see if you were all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“They said I should tell you no sleeping in the parking lot?”
“Okay.” I looked at the time. Two thirty! How’d that happen?
I pulled out onto the street.
I didn’t want to go back to Betty Shaver Elementary. I couldn’t endure the humiliation, and besides, I had nothing to do: my plan had been to work on the bulletin board all day. I’d been planning to drive Gwen home, but she actually lives very close to the school and could comfortably walk, especially on a nice sunny day like this. So, exiled from Wendy’s, I drove around, looking for hidden neighborhoods I’d never seen before. In a hilly town like ours, such places really exist, carved out of mountainsides or tucked away behind copses of trees. But my search was in vain, as the last few had been. I had found them all long ago. Disappointed, I tooled around on pot-holed country roads for fifteen minutes or so, until one led me to Route 13, which gave way to the Southern Tier Expressway. I revved it up to seventy, and the whole car hummed, or maybe shuddered. I switched the radio back on and began to sing. What in God’s name was I doing? The road unscrolled before me like a medieval decree: the king of my subconscious had spoken.
I drove several hours until the sun dipped into my path, then I switched my glasses for the prescription shades that were stashed in the glovebox. That was better: the mountains and highways and clouds all sharpened and browned, as if they’d just come out of the oven. After a couple of hours I pulled over and got on the horn to Gwen, still at school.
“I was just about to leave. Where are you?” In the background I could hear a ditto machine, which in this age of electronic reproduction the Betty Shaver Elementary still maintained. Only a few ancient teachers used it, hooked as they were on the smell, that of fresh-baked cookies laced with acetone.
“That isn’t important,” I said importantly. “I just want to tell you I won’t be back for our dinner date.”
“Really? Why not?”
“It isn’t important.”
“Can I tell you something? About an idea I had? Or is this a bad time?”
“No, now is just fine,” I said. I have to admit, I was a little bit put off by her acceptance of my dismissal. Couldn’t she have pressed the issue? But that was just not her way. You can imagine how delighted I was to find her, five years after my divorce, trying to lift a graffiti’d desk-chair-combo thing into the trunk of her car out in the BSE parking lot. Can I say that she is beautiful? Can I mention her golden tresses, her too-large face, her twitchy little schnoz? I had thought I might never make love to a woman again.
Her twenty or so thin bangles chimed as she settled herself in the school office; I could imagine her hips shifting on the simulated-woodgrain surface of the buffet table where copies were collated and where people talked on the phone. She said, “This being the year 2000 and all, I was thinking about how everybody’s thinking about the future? You know, with the internet and everything, it’s all future, future, future.”
“Yes.”
“So I’m going to ask the kids to paint the future! First they’ll mix up their own colors and put them in Tupperware and make up names for them, Millennium Red or Future Blue or some such happy horseshit”—and here I noticed that the dittoing had stopped, and that Gwen was alone in the copy room, else she would not have said horseshit—“and those’ll be the colors they use all year. And then I’ll ask them to paint the future. Like what the buildings will look like, and the people, and the trees and plants and insects—”
“Probably they’ll all be dead.”
She tsked. “That’s exactly why I am not giving you this assignment, Luther, because you have no hope. But the good thing is that whenever I run out of ideas I can just whip out the whole future theme and make them paint that. And maybe we can do a storybook—like get Mrs. Greitz to have them write a futuristic story together—”
“Hah! Greitz! Good luck with that!” I said.
“—and then in my classes we can illustrate it, with our fancy new colors and all that. I wonder if it’s possible to get metallic paint? Since, you know, there are metallic crayons …”
She went on for a while in this vein, and I grew more and more jealous of the idea and more and more bitter about my own crushing defeat that morning. How was it that this woman, this gawky young thing, could bob so blithely down the rapids of life’s river? And how was it that my canoe was forever snagged
upon its tangled flotsam? I thought, the hell with it. The hell with it all!
“So do you like it?” Gwen said.
“I do. Like all your ideas, it is brilliant. But listen—”
“Oh! Maybe you can help me in reading and science! You can have them read a science fiction book and teach them about rocketry or computers!”
“Listen, I have to tell you something.”
A silence. “What, already?”
“I’m quitting. I’m not coming back to work.”
She laughed. “Whyever not?”
“You can ask Doug. Tell him I quit. Tell him no hard feelings. He’ll know why.”
More silence. “You’re serious!”
“Yes.”
“Luther, where are you?”
“That’s not important. I’ll be back soon, I promise. But tell Doug it’s over. I’ll see you.”
Hanging up, I did not feel the kind of masculine personal triumph I’d hoped to, and when I turned and regarded the Golf it seemed a trifle of a car, a mere toy, incapable of taking me anywhere, literally and metaphorically. Yet I climbed in. I had no choice!
The Expressway emptied onto Route 90 and Pennsylvania, and pretty soon I was in, you know, Ohio. More hours passed. It got to be around dinnertime. I ate at another Wendy’s, exactly what I’d eaten for lunch. It seems to me that if you eat something once in a day, it is simple nourishment, but if you eat the same thing twice it is a motif. As I polished off the last of the Frosty and endured the sudden headache, I found myself cheered. A motif! I stopped in the men’s room (surprisingly clean) and, when finished, used a match from the box I habitually carry to burn away all evidence of my efforts. This small act of propriety and self-negation felt right on the money, as did having quit. It was all for the best: removing myself from the future. I was a throwback, a species meant to atrophy. Back on the road, fully warmed up by South Pacific (now dormant), I began to sing in the operatic style, narrating my day in rhymed couplets:
I finally got fed up with BSE
I quit my job, albeit cowardly
Ne’er again shall I have to say this:
Plants make food through photosynthesis!
Mundane details took on ominous musical meaning. The major players earned their own melodies: a few plodding tones in a minor key for Doug, a staccato trill for Gwen, a repeating tritone (or “devil’s interval”) for me. In this manner I passed the last half hour of my trip and exited the highway at Toledo—or, more specifically, Northwood, the leafy suburb that was my ultimate destination.
It was not yet dark. I motored the quiet streets, slowing now and again for ballplayers, cyclists, joggers. Everyone was getting their last breath of summer; children frolicked with a desperate urgency; adults congregated at the ends of driveways, anticipating the blissful absence of the children. Somewhere, I supposed, teachers were growing tense, worrying about guns and drugs and standardized tests. Not me!
Once I’d found the house I wanted, I parked across the street. For a few minutes I sat in the car, reconnoitering. A white mock Tudor with an apron of sculpted yews. In a patch around a dogwood tree, tiger lilies grew impossibly tall. A cat sat in a window, staring. Nobody seemed to be home, though the garage was open and toys spilled out. I reswitched glasses and climbed out and stretched and unstuck my shirt and pants from my back. My necktie was still tightly knotted: duh! I loosened it and instantly felt ten times better. I crossed the street and yard and walked in the unlocked front door.
“Hello!” I called out. A thud: the cat jumping down from the sill. I scratched its head. It was a new one, barely past kittenhood; the old cat must have died. No, here he came, lumbering along like a sack of potting soil with legs, mewling in a very boring way. I couldn’t stand cats, but I felt a subtle solidarity with these two. I went to the kitchen and filled their bowls from a large glass jar obviously bought from some specialty shop (with a metal scoop inside, no less!), then I opened a cold beer and sat down to drink it. The clock read eight fifteen. People were finishing their dinners out and heading home … but they pass the ice cream stand … they sit licking their soft serve, watching cars speed by …
The beer went straight to my head. I stood, swooning, and made the rounds of the first floor. It was very tidy, but not the kind of tidy that you could say is concealing some sick personal shortcoming. The television was discreetly hidden in a painted pine cabinet, but the compact discs (mostly pop) were right out in plain sight. Books and magazines were neither at right angles to one another nor to the tables they lay open upon. They were not fanned in an attractive pattern. An empty tumbler, encrusted with the residue of some drink, stood on the floor beside an easy chair. I picked it up and gave it a whiff. Fruit smoothie. Banana, strawberry—something else? I fit it back into the depression it had made on the carpet.
It was dark outside now; the VCR read 8:52. I took a deep breath and went upstairs. A bathroom (more magazines), a little boys’ room (bunk beds, a basket of sports equipment and plastic trucks). The master bedroom, a little frillier than I might have chosen for myself or Gwen, but comfy-looking. I went in and sat on the bed. Yes: where did they get this wonderful comforter? Out in the hall again—ipeeked in the linen closet and at last entered the girl’s room. Perfect. Storybooks everywhere, stickers, a transparent plastic purse containing Smarties, fruit-flavored lipstick, an electronic game, and a ring of discarded keys, perhaps twenty in all. The bed was made and turned back, the pillow fluffed, a pink nightgown casually tossed over the post, ready for slumber. I sat down on the bed. It creaked. Excellent. No boyfriends sneaking in here at night, a few years down the road. I closed my eyes and smelled the room’s stale sweaty candy-corn scent. Downstairs the door opened. I remembered my empty beer bottle and felt a moment of panic, but relaxed when I found it in my hand.
Quietly, I got up and shut the door. I returned to my place on the bed. A television switched on downstairs. Laughter, the whining of the boys. Footsteps sounded on the stairs and hallway and my heart quickened. The boys entered their room, father in tow. Honest-to-God twins, no fertility drugs, three years old. The father dressed them, led them to the bathroom, supervised the brushing of the teeth, read them books in bed. A fine father, by the sound of it. He left and the boys giggled and talked unintelligibly until they slept.
Then there was only the television until a familiar voice said, “Anna, why don’t you go get your jammers on?”
“Can I stay up?”
“For a little while.”
Light footsteps skipped every other stair. The door opened.
She gasped but didn’t cry out. I had my finger to my lips. Her hair was longer, hanging free, fine and light, though clearly less fine and light than it once was. She stepped in and closed the door.
“Hi Daddy,” she whispered.
“Howdy,” I said.
Anna came to me and let me hug her. I stifled a sigh. She said, “Why are you here?”
“I wanted to see you.”
She frowned, glanced over her shoulder. “You can’t come out, I don’t think.”
“I know. Will they come in?”
“No. I’m a light sleeper. Remember? I get goodnight kisses before I go to my room.”
My God. “Yes, I remember,” I said.
She shook her head, awfully ruefully for a ten-year-old. She said, “I have to go down.” She took the nightgown off the bedpost, looked around the room, and entered the cluttered closet. I heard clothes sliding around on their hangers, and her small body brushing against the hollow-core doors. Whence this shyness? I would never again dress her for school. When she came out she seemed to be glowing. I suppose it was the light, what there was of it from the street.
“You look like an angel,” I said.
“Whisper.”
I said it again, quiet this time.
She went downstairs. “Comfy-girl,” said her stepfather. “Come,” said my ex-wife. To the sofa? They watched television for a long time. Please, Anna, I thought, don’
t fall asleep; don’t let them carry you up here. Sitting on her bed, it was easy to remember being her age, being in my room, the only place I truly liked, where nobody would bother me, and where all my books were. Weather! I loved weather; I had dozens of books on the subject. I made my own hygrometer and barometer, which were fastened to a ledge outside my window. I kept careful records of temperature and pressure and wind speed. When I told my fourth grade teacher, he said, “Well, Luther, if your instruments are right up against the house, none of the readings will be accurate. A house exudes heat and blocks the wind.” He was right. I put my notebooks away but left the instruments outside, where they remained until they were blown into the shrubs during a freak summer windstorm. Why was I so sensitive? Why did I give up, give in so easily? I could pay a shrink a small fortune to find out, but I never will.
Anna came back. The Winnie-the-Pooh clock on her desk read 9:45. I had given the clock to her, for one birthday or another.
“They let you stay up late,” I whispered.
“Sh.” She climbed into bed beside me and bent her body around my seated form. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, so I stayed where I was and found her hand under the covers. I held it and she held back. She fell asleep so quickly, with the speed of a child: it still takes me the better part of an hour. Yet I must have fallen asleep, too, for when I next looked at the clock, Tigger’s tail had swished nearly to eleven.
“Anna,” I had told her five years before, “your mother and I love each other very much.” It was the first and only lie, or at least the only one I remember. Since then my record has been unblemished. “But we can’t live together anymore. It isn’t because of anything you did, in fact you’re the best thing in our lives, and we love you more than anything in the entire world. Mostly you’ll stay with Mama but sometimes you’ll stay with me, too. We’ll have a good time together, I promise.”
See You in Paradise Page 21
