Driver's Education (17 page)

“It looks fake,” he says. “Everything here is so perfect it honestly looks fake.” And then: “Mrs. Dalloway, if you were behaving yourself, I'd let you see it.”

I tell them both, “We need to find somewhere to stay.”

•  •  •

Standing in the lobby, we clear our throats in rapid succession, sometimes on top of each other, to mask Mrs. Dalloway's staunch protests to
the Buckeye State. I'm wearing the pack, and I feel her shift and tremble, punching her paw into my spine.

The problem, we're being told, is that there's a medical supply sales representatives' expo in town this week, and that its attendees have reserved large blocks of rooms in the city's more affordable hotels.

“The rooms have been booked for weeks.” The receptionist clicks her nails, which are painted bone white, against the keyboard, but she doesn't type. She has smooth chiseled skin and she smells like jasmine. “They've taken over the city.”

They told us the same thing at the Best Western, we say. At the Courtyard by Marriot, the Holiday Inn, the Holiday Inn Express, the Days Inn, the Red Roof Columbus North. And now—now at the Hampton Inn, which is located across from the convention center and has air that tastes like new sofas and carpet, glue that hasn't dried. Behind us a revolving door pivots and there are two men wearing polo shirts that are tucked into beltless jeans and they wheel small black suitcases.

“There's got to be something.” I turn back to the receptionist. “Those people, those men, couldn't have booked every room in the city. How many medical supply sales representatives can there possibly be?”

“It's a national conference.”

“Still.”

“It's a multibillion-dollar industry.”

“So?”

“So there are a lot of people who make that happen.” Then: “Are you two sick or something?”

Randal turns to me. “Maybe you should get a glass of water.”

“I think I'm okay.”

“Then maybe you should get a cup of coffee or something.”

“I've had like thirty-seven cups of coffee today.”

“Then maybe you should . . . ” He licks his thin lips and clicks his jaw. Eyes the backpack with masked concern.

“Oh. Leave?”

“Yes,” he says.

I drink cold coffee from a pot in the lobby while I wait. From a
vending machine I eat purple fruit snacks and the corn syrup coats my tongue. I sit on a blue easy chair that faces the revolving door and I place the screeching, jostling backpack in my lap. I watch as more men, more women, more beltless jeans circle through its glass panes.

There is a woman, a few years older than me, name tagged, arms ringed, wrapped, stacked high with plastic leis of orange and yellow and green. A man in an oversized Hawaiian shirt follows her, carrying a sign I can't read. I look beyond them to the street where we've parked Lucy alongside the curb. It's just after three o'clock.

Randal is a spectacularly good negotiator, or a very good haggler, which I assume is due to his stint selling famous autographs that were actually his own. But the thing is, as opposed to the spiel of a used car salesman or a drug dealer, Randal's haggling takes nearly forever. So once I'm done with the fruit snacks and have finished the cold coffee and he's still fucking at it I stand up and stretch. I call Karen.

She doesn't answer so I call her again. But when I get her voice mail a second time, I buy her a postcard instead. It takes me a while to think of something to write. Because Karen—she can be peculiarly sensitive, particularly when she's stressed. So I select my words carefully. I write:

Dear Karen,

Pittsburgh blew. Columbus is clean. Please

don't let me get fired. For the kids.

Finn

“How is she?” Randal asks. He lifts the bag and gives it a gentle shake. From within, Mrs. Dalloway groans.

“Still miserable,” I tell him. “Did you get us a room?”

“I did.”

“But how?”

“Evidently there was a room in the block no one had checked into. I guess the guys just never showed up. A Mr. Carlisle and a Mr. Perez.”

“We could be a Mr. Carlisle and a Mr. Perez.”

“That's what I told her.”

“Is it going to break the bank?”

“I got us the corporate rate.”

“Oh?”

“A hundred, plus taxes.” He winks at me and I wink back, even though neither Randal nor I are especially talented winkers.

“You're very good at this.”

“I once sold a Paul Henreid for one hundred fifty-three dollars.”

“Is there free parking?”

“Forty for valet; twenty if we self-park in the structure across the street.”

“Self-park. We'll definitely self-park.”

He nods. “One hundred fifty-three for a Paul Henreid.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Yes. She said not to let the cat piss on the carpet, and that you should shower.”

•  •  •

The sheets on the beds are white and they crack like rice paper when we lie on them. The room is much too cold in a manufactured way, but we revel in it because we can't remember the last time we weren't hot. We pass Mrs. Dalloway between us: she waffles between hissing and purring, spitting and smiling, resisting and submitting.

Randal says, “We need a young priest and an old priest.”

On the nightstand between us there are two tote bags and pens engraved with industry slogans. There are T-shirts, and Mr. Carlisle and Mr. Perez's name tags, and packets of literature with primary-colored graphs on the medical supply sales industry. There are invitations for a conference-wide luau being held at the convention center. I'm on my back with the cat, my fingers combed through her sparse wiry fur. The air-conditioning pricks and bites my skin.

Randal reads, “In 2007 the top-performing firms in the industry had an average revenue of two hundred forty-five million dollars.”

“That's a lot of money,” I say. Mrs. Dalloway leaps from my chest to the floor, where she starts parading in oblong circles, meowing.

I leave Randal reading and Mrs. Dalloway protesting and I retreat to
the bathroom and lock the door, turn on the shower. I undress in front of the mirror as the water, scalding, runs into the tub behind me. My cheeks are patterned with the uneven growth of a red beard, and when I run my hands over them they feel like old sandpaper, the sort that should be thrown away, that's been overused. My hair hangs in clumped strands, greased ropes that I pull back from my forehead while I itch my scalp.

I realize I'm too skinny: when I put a hand on my stomach I touch ribs and count them. I try to flex my biceps, which feels ridiculous but necessary. I flex them harder when I don't see some mountainous lump, but rather a thin shadowed line on the inside of my arm, flesh pulled from bone. Fog spreads inward from the frames of the mirror and I continue to look at myself: I stare at my mucked hair, the peppered red on my white cheeks, my thin arms and waist.

I keep looking until there's no more clarity, till everything's gone opaque and I've been edited to just strokes of color on a silver wall, before I push back the curtain and step into the shower.

•  •  •

“I think we should go to this luau,” is what I say when I emerge, dripping, from the bathroom.

“Yeah,” Randal says. “All right.”

He's sitting on the beige carpet with his legs crossed, the cat curled around herself in his lap. The minibar has been opened and he is nursing Mrs. Dalloway with drops of Jack Daniels that he sets like beads on the tip of his thumb. She licks at each one, catching it with her rough tongue before it rolls down the contour of his hand.

When the bourbon has been emptied, he unscrews this airplanesized bottle of Absolut.

“I don't really imagine she's a vodka sort of girl,” he says, pulling her closer to him. “But this is the only thing that seems to shut her up.”

1964: Unbelieving, Part 2

By Colin A. McPhee

Four days after Clare showed me how film was projected, my father returned home. He was there for two nights, during which time he washed the dishes that'd stacked in the sink, phoned a dozen shrouded acquaintances, and paid the bills that had multiplied on the kitchen table. Then, on the third morning, he began the pattern of rituals that served as precursors to his next departure.

It began, always, with a map: an outdated guide to America's highways that he'd flatten across the kitchen table before circling the cities and towns that freckled its surface. The coffee table in the living room would become cluttered with month-old newspapers from other cities, certain articles and headlines circled in black and red and blue ink. He'd make sandwiches he wouldn't eat; he'd do a dozen loads of laundry and forget the clothes in the dryer. Each time the rituals began I would search through his desk drawer for my script; I would rub the corners of the thousand pages; I would look for signs that they'd been touched. That he'd read about the boy who was fighting and fucking and finding and losing, all behind a screen.

“Where do you go?” I asked him on that morning. I'd washed and dressed for the Avalon, and I was already sweating through the grey wool sports coat.

He stood from where he was hunched over the table. He extended a hand and tousled my hair. It was a strange gesture, I remember: I was taller than he was at that point. He had to stand on his toes to reach above my forehead.

•  •  •

“Why don't you just follow him,” Clare said to me, once I'd arrived at work and had relayed all this to her.

“I don't have a car.”

“I've seen that thing he drives. I doubt it goes too fast.” She opened a box of Red Vines that she'd taken from the glass candy display. “Just do it on your bike.”

Since
Cleopatra,
the conversations between Clare and me had become stilted. I stood at the other end of the concession stand, filling boxes with too much popcorn as I listened to her flirt with our male customers. When the theater was empty, she wrote in her journal alone. Whenever I alerted her to a way of doing something that was new—how to pack an attaché case with tear gas, per James Bond in
From Russia with Love
—she'd inform me that it was, in fact, old. That she'd seen it too many times before.

Still, as she chewed on the end of a Red Vine and I passed behind her, I placed a hand lightly on the small of her back.

“What?” she said, and her spine straightened.

“What do you mean,
what
?”

“You just touched my back.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It was an accident.”

She said nothing; she just peeled away a second Red Vine.

I didn't think I was in love with Clare, at least not yet. I had told myself that I wasn't in love with her when we kissed four days earlier, and in the time since I'd made every effort not to fall in love with her. I was also convinced that I didn't want Clare to be in love with me. But more than all this—more than Clare not loving me—I didn't want Clare to love anyone else. And if she did, when she felt his weight upon her, I wanted her to be closing her eyes and imagining me.

The movie playing that week was
A Shot in the Dark,
with Peter Sellers,
and when we'd completed our shifts Earl told Clare and me that we were welcome to stay and watch the evening showing for free. We both thanked him separately and politely declined.

“Have a good night,” I told her as we passed through the Avalon's front doors, one of which was spiderwebbed with cracks from where a rock had hit it a month before.

“Same.” Then, as I unhinged my bike's lock: “I still think you should follow him.”

•  •  •

If he hadn't been halfway down our street when I rounded the corner, I'm not sure if I would have taken Clare's advice. But he was, and so I did.

When I approached the car on my bike, he slowed and rolled down the driver's side window.

“How was work?” he said.

I told him
fine
. And then, again: “Where are you going?”

The hat tilted forward and blinded him; he pushed it up higher on his head. “This hat,” he said. “This damn hat.”

“All right then—when will you be back?”

“Soon.”

“What does soon mean this time?”

“There are clean dishes in the cupboard,” he told me.

I suspect on that evening he knew that he'd be followed. Perhaps it was the way I'd asked those questions: I'd asked them at least a hundred times before, but never with such unmasked defiance. Or it was the way that I paused, straddling my bike with both feet planted solidly on the asphalt; it was him seeing me seeing him in his rearview mirror as he inched toward the first intersection. It was that contrite sense parents get when their children have caught them. Because he didn't go anywhere that night. After I hid my bike behind a hedge in our front yard, I crept to the end of our block and I watched—half curious, half bored—as my father drove in tight circles on an adjoining street.

“Try again,” Clare said the next day. She paged through the journal. Found S—STALKING. “Try Sean Connery in
From Russia with Love
. The opening scene.”

That night, I waited. I heated up soup and changed from my uniform and into jeans. I sprawled on the couch and busied myself with an episode of
To Tell the Truth
. When he walked behind me, I watched in the reflection on the television screen as he, again, tousled my hair. When I heard the cannonball smash of the car's ignition, I turned up the volume and slipped on my sneakers.

In 1964, Sleepy Hollow was still a place that went black at night. The population hadn't changed substantially since I was born, and the houses, which were separated by meadow-wide lawns, existed in disconnected hazes of light. There were seven traffic signals and about as many streetlamps, and the darkness was left to wreath between them intact and uncut.