Chapter 2 #3
“Three years,” she says. She focuses on the unfamiliar branches and low stone walls rushing by.
Inside herself she surrenders to the situation, the relief of someone else taking control.
You didn’t want to quit, she tells herself.
Not like that. Not without a plan. She just gets carried away sometimes.
But the houses growing broad and secluded around her rub it in; she lacks the financial means to be reckless.
Like it or not, he saved her from herself.
“It must be hard, a role like that.”
“Gotta collect a lot of toadstools,” she says. “Snakeskins, that sort of thing.”
He laughs, loud and surprisingly high with a note of astonishment, as though he has never encountered a woman with a sense of humor.
When did she last make anyone laugh like that?
In profile, she can only see the coyer half of his smile, its hint of dissatisfaction, its reserve.
It’s not the first time she’s taken a chance on an older man.
The pleasant smell of him infuses the car, starchy with an undertone of sweat.
She settles into the ease of mutual interest.
“So,” she asks, “how long have you been a liar?”
“I’m not a liar!” he says with mock affront. When she looks at him, his eyes are dancing. “Well, at least, I try not to make a habit of it. I only lie on behalf of pretty girls. Or, you know, for the greater good.”
“The greater good?”
“Yeah, sure. I would lie to save my family.”
“What kind of a situation would require you to do something like that?”
“I don’t know. If they were in trouble with the law or something.”
“Is that very likely?”
“No. White collar, maybe. But they’re far more plausible victims. Ransom-paying types.”
“I see.”
“Though my sister ran away about ten years ago, so who knows. Maybe she was fleeing the scene of a crime. Or just, you know. My parents.”
He says it as though he expects her to laugh, but something makes her feel sorry for him. His hand rests easily on the gearshift, and she closes her eyes.
“I’ve always thought, not that this will make you feel any better, but I really think nobody leaves unless it’s really, really for the best.”
He waits, he watches the road. He does not rush her. Is it strange to feel so comfortable? Does he know that tone in a man’s voice?
“My dad,” she adds. “Every day he stuck around was a living hell. You never knew what you were going to come home to.”
He only hit her twice. Once when she returned late from Angie’s house.
Another time when he had just come out of the shower.
Barefoot, towel dripping. Some vocal exercises just out of her mouth.
Me-may-mah-mo-moo. Can we not have a moment of quiet in this fucking house?
Most of the time it wasn’t physical. Most of the time he loved to see her act.
She could always hear his laugh from the audience, a loud barrel roll, like he wanted her to know he was watching.
But it could turn on a knife’s edge. If you weren’t listening to him. If he felt insulted.
“Well, one thing you should know about me is I’m predictable as sin.” Al smiles. Refuses to look at her with pity. “Your mom still around?”
“Barely.”
“Is she not well?”
It has been several years since she spoke about her mother in the present tense.
Someone capable of acting and reacting. Of opinion, of argument.
“She’s glazed as Jell-O,” she explains. “She only ever talks about things that happened decades ago. There is no point trying to get her to see you. And I’m here trying to keep my sister organized and our whole weird ship afloat, which—to be honest—isn’t my strong suit.
So be careful what you wish for, if you want a family who needs you. ”
“So, you wouldn’t lie for them.”
“I guess it would depend what the lie is.”
“How so?”
“Well, there are just certain things that I would never lie about.”
“Like what?”
“Like… something fundamental about myself…” She presses her lips together, desperate to say something clever.
It disturbs her slightly that she can’t think of anything she wouldn’t be willing to change.
But adaptability is freedom, isn’t it? “Or something I cared about,” she offers. “Like… human rights?”
“Well, I find that surprising, considering you’re paid to lie.”
“Acting isn’t lying.”
“Well, what’s the difference?”
“Well, good acting is all about being sincere. Emotionally.”
“Sincere even when you’re not being honest.”
“You’re getting too hung up on this honesty thing. Everyone knows it’s a character. Obviously, I wasn’t actually born in, like, the seventeen hundreds.”
“Sixteen hundreds.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“I just don’t get where the one thing ends and the other thing begins. How do you know what’s you and what’s not you?”
“Well, that’s where all the fun is, isn’t it?”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.” He grins. They pass a low brick public school, dense pines, a large boulder. “Is it frustrating for it always to be the same outcome? Every time, guilty?”
“You have to play it like it’s the first time. Like anything could happen.”
“But on some level, you must know. That must be hard to ignore.”
“Well, I don’t want to get stuck, if that’s what you mean.”
He nods. “I hear you. I wouldn’t want to get stuck in the sixteen nineties either.
Hadn’t even invented the spinning jenny yet.
” He says it like she is supposed to get it, like anyone else would.
Who is Jenny? Why is she spinning? No, he has mistaken her, formed some false idea, watching her play at somebody else.
As she begins to wonder whether this was a mistake, he says softly: “But you don’t strike me as the type of person who would want to leave in the wrong way. ”
She considers his silhouette, his steady gaze, the light flickering against the far side of his face, and a soft wonder settles over her, that he has looked at her and seen some fundamental goodness.
“No,” she says. “I’m not.” She drums her fingers on her bare leg.
“Can we play some music?” She reaches for the radio button before he can answer.
Low, brooding strings jump from the speakers.
“Put on what you like,” he says, so she scans to the Top 40. A minute passes before he asks, “Who is this?”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“It’s Annie Lennox,” she says. “Don’t you watch MTV?”
“I don’t have a TV.”
In the back seat of the car is a pile of clothing and a toppled stack of books. “Do you live in here?” she asks gently.
“No!” He laughs. “I’m just taking some things to dry-clean.”
“You can afford to get things dry-cleaned, but you can’t afford a TV?”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t afford it.” He is shaking his head, bemused.
“We just never had one growing up. So I guess I never got in the habit. My dad hated it—television was everything wrong with America, he would say. It’s making us depraved.
Ruining democracy. Like people would stop thinking for themselves.
Betsy—my sister—she couldn’t stand it.” The house was quiet, he says, except for classical FM and their ill-tempered beagle.
“At school, though, we had a color TV. We all watched Westerns. And I Dream of Jeannie.”
“That was a good show.”
“We were all in love with her. But I never liked how everyone talked about the characters like they knew them, like they were more real than people in real life. I don’t know, I started to think maybe there was something to it, that maybe television does numb people.”
His soft shirtsleeves, his steady wrist. What type of man finds dry cleaning more essential than television?
Still, she always looks in at the shop on Canal Street, all those garments sheathed in plastic like a morgue.
She thinks of her underwear drying on top of the radiator.
Maybe one day she will take her things down there.
After all, this is America. Never rule anything out.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Well,” he says. “There’s a place around here. It’s just the most peaceful spot. You can swim, can’t you? You seem like a swimmer.”
She starts to laugh, smacked with the whole situation. “Sure.”
“Good,” he says. “But I have to confess I’m lost.”
“Lost!”
“In fact, I’m turning around.”
“We could go somewhere else.”
“No,” he says definitively. “The problem is, once you’ve been to the most beautiful place on earth, it’s very difficult to settle for anything else. But I haven’t been since I was a kid. So, bear with me.”
It is impossible after that not to see his face layered with earlier, more vulnerable versions of itself.
Impossible not to feel tenderly toward him as he tries to rechart a route through the landscape of his memory, at first tentatively and then with agitated force, like he’s trying to push an earring through a closed-up piercing.
But eventually he finds the way, a dirt road slipping off through an embrace of elm trees.
As the shade draws cool relief over their faces, she feels the romance in his stubbornness, his insistence on beauty.
Al has always been told he was clever, but never has he felt more pleased with himself as right now, having written them into this moment, created just the right mood, the sun hitting the treetops of this quiet, sublime world, the lick of water against the reservoir rim, the birds whooping and the humidity glistening.
And even for all his planning, he couldn’t have invented her.