Tracy can’t contain herself, one song is all they get. She turns the radio down, almost off. “Funny that she’s a college prof and you’re a truck driver. I mean, okay, I know you’re more than that. And I know you’re going to do a lot of cool things in life. It’s like you’re just waiting to clear the air with this family stuff. It’s hard to grow past all that. I have this student in my Intro section who just started college at thirty-six. She had to work out this major fear that she couldn’t do college. That she just wasn’t smart enough, you know? And it turns out she’d been more or less told this her whole life by her parents—they didn’t mean it, I bet—but they told her in a million ways that she wasn’t as good as her stupid gorgeous Harvard sister and her football hero loser brother. I mean, I know these people. She’s the excellent one. She had to dump the whole tribe. She dumped ’em. Said goodbye. Resurfaced a year later as her new self. Spectacular. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever had in class. The best.”
George drives a long time quietly. Finally he says, “That’s a nice story.”
And Tracy’s quiet a long time, too, before she says, “And I think you’re the sweetest guy I’ve talked to in about ten years.”
It’s the right address, and George and Tracy are standing beside the truck, which takes up the whole curb in front of George’s sister’s house.
“Let’s just forget it,” George says.
“We’ll tell her I’m your helper. Come on.”
They walk up the neat flagstone walk, side-by-side to the door. The place seems so nice, so tidy, so Tracy Lynn, somehow, that George wants to just walk away. He’s unpleasantly full from the diner dinner he and his new helper have just eaten. He’s got clouds in his head, the fragments of several hundred planned and replanned opening speeches. It’s absurd. She’s only his sister.
Tracy rings the doorbell, and in one second the door flies open and there’s an Asian woman standing there, looking slightly annoyed.
George seems to find himself, says, “I’m looking for Tracy Lynn Skinner-Peabody. Professor Skinner-Peabody. Or Kevin. Are they here?”
“Oh dear,” the Asian woman says, her face opening at the familiar names. She’s about fifty years old, George thinks. Just the kind of friend Tracy Lynn would have.
“I’m her brother,” George says, to move things along.
“You look like her. But you must know she on sabbatical this year. She and Kevin in Argentina. You know this?”
“Ah, yes. Of course.”
“We just have something for her,” Tracy says, professional tone, delivery person. “We have a piece of furniture George would like to drop off.”
George smiles, then starts to laugh, turns and walks into his laughter, trips back up the flagstones, leaving Tracy to chat with the woman. In a minute his helper is back, opening the rear truck door, and it’s all the two of them can do to tip the $30,000 Turner breakfront off the tailgate and through their laughter onto the dolly. They roll it into the garage together, supervised by the Asian lady, who is really pretty nice about their silliness, who smiles and nods her head—the antics of brothers!—as they push the ungainly breakfront up against the absolutely spotless sheetrock wall at the back of the absolutely spotless garage.
The Asian lady wants to get George a piece of paper for a note, since he’s refused tea, refused even to come inside, and though George has said, “Please don’t bother,” Tracy has said, “Thanks, some paper would be nice,” and George finds himself alone in the garage with a piece of notepaper, scarcely believing he’s about to steal the breakfront.
Tracy Lynn hello, it’s George. This is a little
wedding present from us to both of you. Thanks for
being patient. Welcome back from Argentina.
Sometime soon I’ll stop by to fix the gouge on the
side of this thing. Really, though, it’s a delicious
piece. Come see us in New York.
The us just sounds right, maybe means Bergenstaedtler, maybe Carl. In the truck Tracy and George giggle uncontrollably clear to the highway and for several miles through more farmland. “I’ve stolen it,” George says, suddenly depressed, “I’ve stolen a perfect Turner breakfront and I’m screwed.”
“Stolen it? You didn’t steal anything. You refused a defective piece and Carl the Blue Beret abandoned it in the hotel parking lot!”
They laugh, but not with quite the same silliness and abandon. They roll through many miles in silence. It’s getting late, and there’s the issue of the night, of where to stay. George is sleepy now, driving. It’s near eleven o’clock and Tracy says she’s not sure she can drive the heavy clutch of the 12-wheeler, or any clutch, not really.
So she puts the radio on and sings softly to several unfamiliar songs, sings nicely, looking at George, sings in that kind of serious singing voice that young women have sometimes, good enough to perform, if only they could do their singing a little more loudly or in front of more than a couple of friends.
Somewhere near Syracuse, Tracy undoes her seat belt, slides over on the long seat, and puts a hand on George’s knee as he drives, puts her hand on George’s knee and sings as the big truck bounces merrily, lullingly down the road.
“Let’s stop a while,” she says in his ear, and immediately, almost like magic, there’s a rest area, so George pulls in to comply.
Loneliness
Porter hadn’t seen a whole movie in years. At his kitchen table he ate babaganoush and pita (both of his own careful creation), thinking rather hopelessly of all the prints he’d worked on of all the rushes from all the films he and his colleagues at MegaArt Color Labs had processed, then dressed in his good coat and big slush boots and stepped from his rooms to the gray elevator, yellow lobby light, and out into the blowing and freezing New York night. Forty minutes early for the movie he stood indecisively and bent to the wind in front of the box office, thinking how prices had gotten higher since he’d been, gotten much higher—five bucks was what he expected but the letterboard said nine.
At length he bought a ticket, put it carefully in one pocket then another, walked up Broadway to a dismal small bar at 100th Street (not a perfect neighborhood but his own and familiar and in the cold at dinnertime mostly abandoned). He drank a fancy bottle of beer quickly, asked another of the unfriendly bartender, drank that, listened to the TV, listened to the lone game machine played by the other customer, thought about rising prices and the stasis of his wages.
He got back to the movie house, still a few minutes early. In the lobby a line had formed. Porter stood behind a young woman with long brown hair as thick and glossy as in any shampoo ad, a nineteen-year-old’s hair. He was at the end of the line, just against the doors, so when more people came in (laughing uproariously), he had to move up beside the girl. She eyed him neutrally. He tried to smile but something more like a grimace crossed his face. He thought she must smell the two beers, thought how his hair must be matted down by the woolen cap he’d removed, felt his mustache moist from his own breath in the extreme cold out there, wiped an arm across his mouth. The girl got disgusted in that instant and turned away from him, studied the poster beside her. Porter shrugged and thought, That’s how I look to a nineteen-year-old: balding, old, dripping with snot, leering.
He turned so as not to bother her, heard her parka swish as she turned too, relieved of having to look at the poster. Porter could see her face reflected without much color in the glass of the coming attractions case across the narrow lobby. Oh, she was pretty. He was careful not to look at her again. He didn’t want to scare her, remembered a night in Soho, back in Soho, back when he could afford to live there (when anyone could), another time when he was alone (just after Carolyn, and all that) but out stomping, drinking, dinner, a loud band someplace on Bleecker Street, coming home late and drunk, not stumbling (not Porter), marching rather, feeling well, not low with the solitude, but high and happy to be alone. Ahead of him on Wooster Street a woman walked slowly then briskly in her midi-leng
th skirt, swish-swish in front of him, then faster as she noticed he was catching up. One block, then her pace quickened. Something in her fear made Porter nervous, so he hurried, too. He just wanted to get home. He wasn’t thinking of her, didn’t connect her fear with himself. She walked faster and faster, two blocks, then three. She turned to look, frightened, and broke into a run. Porter understood suddenly and slowed down to allay her terror, stopped. She raced away and ducked into a doorway mid-block. Porter took a few steps and realized she’d ducked into his doorway. He walked the block between them, opened the outer door—it was his building after all!—meaning to say, Don’t worry! and to laugh, and to sigh their relief. But, elegant young woman, she screamed, which scared Porter so badly that he screamed back. She pushed past him and out the door, ran away down the street without hearing his explanation. He felt rotten with the incident for days, looked in the mirror to see how he had instilled such panic.
Terrible, he thought, standing there in line at the movies, terrible that she most probably still told people the story of her near rape on Wooster Street and dreamed horrified of Porter’s benign own face.
The crowd from the first show came out quietly, looking serious, as if they had liked the movie. Porter watched all of them, enjoying their different reactions, moved up with the small line as the usher took tickets and ripped them. The young woman was in front of him, her thin legs poking from her pillowy orange parka. He made sure not to look at her at all. Not a bit.
The theater was tiny, only about twenty rows deep from the screen, and narrow. Porter took a seat second row from the back at the aisle. As he worked to shrug out of his huge black coat he realized he’d inadvertantly picked a spot behind the girl—not directly behind her, and a couple of rows back to be sure, but behind her nonetheless. Elvis Presley over the sound system. Porter got the coat off and arranged it beside him, studied it. Perhaps, he thought, the grand old thing made him look odd, somehow threatening.
The theater wasn’t going to fill up. Scattered around the place were the fifteen or so people who had been in line. Four or five more couples trickled in. “Heartbreak Hotel” on the sound system.
The young woman took her parka off, then her sweater. Porter watched her, since she couldn’t see. What harm? She wore a white shirt, lacy fabric. Her sweater had made a mess of her luxurious hair so she stroked it back, made a ponytail, dug in her bag for a clip, doubled the ponytail into a faulty bun and secured it. Her neck was delicate. Very pale. Her ears were sweet, too. Porter thought if she were not she but some new girlfriend, someone he loved dearly, he would kiss her ears and her neck. He imagined doing so. She turned suddenly and looked at him and caught him at it—staring, daydreaming. Damn it! He didn’t want to scare her. He didn’t want to bother her. He didn’t want to meet her. He didn’t plan to say a word to her. Had nothing the least amount bothersome in any way at all in mind. Instead of looking away he tried again to smile, but he’d been alone for several days of a long weekend and his smile was simply not in service. She scowled at him, looked away.
Porter did not watch her. He wished fervently for the movie. The young woman sat stiff in her seat. A pair of gay men came in and sat in front of Porter in the row beside her. They left two seats between her and themselves, one piled with her coat, her sweater, her black bag. They took their own coats off and piled them in the other. Porter studied the men a long time so as not to look at her. As “Love Me Tender” began to play, one of the men turned and regarded Porter, gave him a grin, kept staring happily till Porter broke the gaze. The man kissed his date, looked back at Porter. So, Porter thought, maybe I don’t look so odd. He smiled at the man quite successfully, nodded a little to acknowledge him, a pleasant nod and smile he hoped would not be taken as flirtation, looked back at the girl.
Really, her neck was so delicate, quite small and strong. The stiff white collar of her shirt made her skin seem an angel’s. She rummaged in her capacious purse and came up with an orange, which she expertly peeled. She put the rinds back into the purse and groomed the fruit, pulling strings of the inner peel one by one from around it. She broke the orange in two, pulled a section nicely from one half and ate it. Porter would have liked to have seen her lips as she ate, her wide mouth. He would have liked to be her date, let’s admit it. Maybe her date twenty years ago. But he was an absolute gentleman and would not bother her or anyone else who asked as explicitly as she had not to be bothered. Yet he watched her.
She caught him again. This time he had the presence of mind to simply look away, no attempted smile, to just look away with the shape of her nose in his mind, a largish nose, bent a little, no real detriment to the marvelous lineaments of her face. She rose quickly and gathered her coat and her sweater and her purse and huffed past the gay boys and marched down the aisle toward the small screen, around the front row and to the other side of the theater, where she sat considerably closer to the screen than Porter imagined she wanted to.
He smelled orange in the air, sagged, sighed: terrible to have bothered her. But now the lights went down, and that would be the end of their lousy and unintentional meeting. Porter wished he could get the gay boy to tell her how handsome he was, and twenty old friends to tell her he was all right. Oh, they would say, he’s quite interesting really, our friend Porter, a fine cutter of filmstock and a gentle man whom a lot of smart women have liked quite well.
He looked across the uncrowded seats as the theater got dark, saw the young woman rummage in her purse one more time, saw her rummage and pull out some half-frame eyeglasses that she poked onto her face as the previews began to roll.
The movie started as a love story but quickly fell into violence and madness. In it an obsessed man tailed a pretty girl through enough scenes that you were glad when in self-defense she killed him. Lots of ennervating music. Porter preferred less violent fare, had misconstrued the title, had imagined the poster showed a hug, not an attack (this ambiguity certainly the poster artist’s intention). He looked across the theater in the dark of an alley scene, the stalker sneaking up on the heroine.
Now what would the young woman think, poor thing? Porter resolutely did not look at her and attempted to enjoy the movie. Not bad really; in fact, well acted, some nice nudes, interesting cinematography, elegant mise-en-scène, a good sense of light and air, amazing deep focus. The stuff about the heroine’s family was probably the best the writers had to offer, clever flashbacks showing how she’d left the Midwest for L.A., for big dreams. But the music was just awful, screechy and melodramatic. And the editing was hopeless—timed by a philistine. When the credits rolled Porter was surprised to get the sense that people around him had liked the movie. He heard the gay man ahead of him say, “Wow!”
Porter had had to urinate for most of the second half of the movie because of the two quick beers up the street. The moment the film ended he jumped up, first out of the auditorium. He ran upstairs to the bathroom and pissed with some pleasure into a cracked urinal, hating the movie more. Done, and still alone, he looked in the mirror. He looked (he thought) tired but otherwise fine. He put on his coat and looked again. Still not so horrible. He pulled on his wool hat. Still all right. Something of a bumpkin, but not a threat.
He thought back over the movie’s ending, trying to be fair. He almost never liked a movie when he saw it alone. Too bad his first in so long should please him so little. He thought of Janine at the lab, who was his age almost, robust and engaging. No reason he shouldn’t ask her out. They were equals, after all, worked in different departments: no issue of harassment. A movie, is all. Dinner always so awkward. A beer and a movie, what was so hard about that?
Downstairs the credits-watchers were exiting. Still the eerie music. Porter stepped past a few smokers, stepped out onto Broadway, walked forty feet before he realized he’d stepped out directly behind the girl. His big winter boots were noisy. She looked back and gasped at sight of him, jumped over the snow bank and into the busy roadway, began to cross, thought better of i
t, leapt back to the sidewalk, fairly jogged in front of him for a block and stopped, obliged to wait for traffic. Porter slowed so as not to catch her up.
When the last taxi had passed she tore across the double lanes of Broadway, made the opposite sidewalk, looked over her shoulder, and headed back uptown. Porter watched her rapid progress up the block and saw her duck into Bailey’s, an Irish place he’d once known well.
This isn’t right! he thought. He walked back up on his side of Broadway, almost to the theater, to give her time to calm down. He would tell her. Apologize—quickly, articulately. Show her she had nothing whatever to fear. Then he’d turn and leave without bothering her further, without asking anything of her, without so much as buying her a drink. It just wasn’t right to be so feared. It just wasn’t good for this lovely young woman to go around so fearful.
After five minutes Porter stepped into Bailey’s. Clank of beer mugs, lots of folks, a warm steamy closeness, buzz of the refrigerators. He stood near the door a minute looking for her, found her at the other end of the long bar, leaning awkwardly, too young to be served but waiting in any case for the bartender. Porter took off his hat and coat, draped the coat over his arm gentlemanly, held his hat, stood up straight. He found his image in the big mirror behind the bottles and fixed his hair. He looked fine: sweet, gentle, pleasant, nice, maybe a little lonesome. He made a smile, marched downbar to stand at the young woman’s side.
“Hello,” he said.
She looked at him, squinted, gave the strained smile of one trained to be polite.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. It was all a coincidence, and meaningless. I’m sorry.”
She smiled more, shook her head. “What?” she said.
“I’m sorry to have frightened you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“At the movie.”
Big Bend Page 10
