Driver's Education (22 page)

I squint and scratch three fingers against my right temple. “Maybe it's the tuna,” I say. “Maybe it's, like, stopped her up.”

“Maybe she's not actually alive.”

Randal unzips his backpack and lays it flat on the floor, the wide opening facing the cat.

“Get on with it,” he says.

Mrs. Dalloway looks at him and yawns. She licks her wet chops apathetically and lumbers her way in, the tip of her tail twitching as she curls herself into the shape of a fist.

After we check out we drink coffee and eat stiff cheese Danishes in a high-ceilinged lounge area called the executive level that's really just the second floor of the hotel's lobby. Small round tables and low-seated chairs are mostly filled with weary, hard-worn attendees of last night's luau. They rest their elbows on their black suitcases and they stare into the milk clouding their coffee, at their cheese Danishes, just as we do—apologetically, with a certain degree of self-reproach.

Randal has asked for my granddad's map. He shoves his fingers into his backpack and allows Mrs. Dalloway to lick the cakey glaze from their tips before he takes it from me, unfolds it, flattens it atop the table. He measures the distance between Columbus and Chicago with lengths of his thumb, counting off hundreds of miles.

“This is going to take us like six hours. Maybe more,” he says. Then: “And tell me again what we're doing there?”

“We're paying a visit to a man called the Gangster.”

“About?”

“A baseball.”

“Of course.”

I swill the dregs, the bits of ground beans, in the bottom of my cup. I consider the unpaid hotel bill.

I say, “I need to get hold of Karen.”

“You can do that from the road.” He adds, half of his hand still tucked inside the backpack, “Dalloway's getting feisty.”

“I think you're starting to like her.”

He says, “Stop insulting my character.”

I push myself away from the table and snake through the other guests, their matching forgettable suitcases, until I reach an industrialsized Mr. Coffee machine that's brewing and spitting and steaming on the other side of the room. I'm leaning over the pot's mouth so I can feel the heat and breathe in the bitter burnt smell when Nancy Davenport says hello and touches me, with just the tips of her fingers, along my right arm.

I say, “Oh.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, oh,
hi
.”

There's a line that's formed behind us, and so we step aside, away from the Mr. Coffee machine and toward a plastic platter where Danishes have been arranged in a flaky pyramid.

“Are you . . . staying here?” I ask.

Nancy Davenport nods.

“But don't you live just—”

“Sometimes it's nice to get away,” she says. “To just sleep in a different bed.”

Her skin looks slick—it carries a faint sheen. As if she slapped on some suntan lotion and neglected to rub it in. She reaches for a Danish and begins tearing off the outermost layer of crust, rolling the pieces of dough between her thumb and forefinger before placing the tiny, greasy balls onto a napkin she balances in her left hand.

I tell her, “If I'd known you were staying here, I would've walked you home last night.”

“Oh, ha. It's fine. I was liking the fresh air, anyway. I mean—that's very nice of you to offer. But I was—”

“Liking the fresh air.”

Across the room, Randal has his lips pressed to the backpack. They twitch as he whispers.

“Thank you for the story last night.”

I say, “You don't need to thank me.” Then: “It was my granddad's, anyway.”

“Well. Please thank him for me, then.”

I watch as the dough balls pile and multiply and I realize that I'd like very much to take the napkin from her, fold it into squares before discarding it in the trash. Hold her hand instead. That last night in the absence of knowing anything about each other that would've felt perfect and necessary, but that now—next to the Mr. Coffee machine—the action would feel edited and put-on.

“You could stay,” she says then.

“Here?”

“Not for forever, ha. But another night, maybe.”

Nancy Davenport smiles, but it's weak, or at the very least a bit unsure—she's trying to decide if it's the right thing to do—and then, very suddenly, she begins to cry. She sets the napkin on the table and she laughs: it's as if she's finally been surprised by herself. And this causes the tears to spill over her cheeks erratically, varying in degree between waterfalls and leaks.

I tell her, “Oh, Nancy, you'll flood the Olentangy.”

And she laugh-cries harder, saying, “I won't.” Then: “No. No, of course you can't stay.”

When I return from the Mr. Coffee machine, Randal doesn't lift his head from the backpack, with which he is still very engaged. Instead, he speaks into it, as if he's addressing Mrs. Dalloway more than me: “Who was that?”

“No one,” I say. “Somebody my granddad might've known.”

•  •  •

The western half of Ohio, between Columbus and the border, is not flat—or, is not as flat as I suspected it was the countless times I've flown over it. But that's the difference between flying and driving, I suppose. From a plane it all looks the same: millions and millions of rectangles and squares patched in browns and reds and greens. You can't see the way the earth rolls when you're 33,000 feet in the air. You can't see the way it slopes and lifts; the way it sprouts hills when it's become bored with how things are. Lakes and rivers and a thousand tributaries when it's sad. The way it reflects light in pixilated domes instead of broad composite pillars.

We speed under a billboard that reads JESUS IS REAL in Comic Sans when we cross the border into Indiana. We pass the exits to Brooksville and Connersville and Losantville; Lewisville, Rushville, and Shelbyville. As we near Indianapolis, the slapdash intervals of isolated towns give way to more consistent urban sprawl, interchanging highways reaching out like balls of tangled concrete string. Ohio's blue-eye sky darkened when we crossed the border, and now, now rain falls softly, patiently on us. It taps against Lucy's windshield, scuffing lightly along her canvas top, two different sounds synching together in a lovely lulling melody. Randal passed out when we merged onto 465, and as he breathes against the window, mouth open, he blows circles of fog that expand then shrink then expand again.

Near Lafayette, I wake him by shaking his elbow lightly. I've pulled Lucy over to a dirt shoulder along Interstate 65 and I tell him, “I'm going to need you to drive for a while.”

“What?” He rubs at his cheeks, which are shadowed with stubble. He squints out the window. Obtains a sense of his surroundings. “Why?”

“I need to see if I still have a job.”

•  •  •

Karen picks up on the third ring and the first thing I say to her is, “You've been avoiding me.”

“I haven't been, Finn.” Her voice is strained, pulled like elastic at its ends. “Really, I haven't been.”

“Did you get my messages yesterday?”

“I did. Both of them.” Then: “I'm sorry I haven't been able to call back.”

Randal has trouble shifting gears from second to third. At first I figure he's anxious, because he does it too soon, before Lucy's ready, and she shakes. She has trouble accelerating, slouching forward slowly, like we're driving through half-dried glue, until, finally, she's ready to be brought to fourth. And then, after the next stoplight, he waits for too long: Lucy's engine whinnies and clucks. At my feet, Mrs. Dalloway shifts and repositions herself within the backpack, vexed.

“What's that sound?” Karen asks.

“It's the car.”

“That thing won't last for long.”

“It'll last for long enough.” Then: “Well?”

“Yes,” she says.
“Well.”

Karen began her work on the show in 1998, a decade before I did. Whereas I've edited roughly 35 lives, she's reconstructed more than 133 of them. And this is a fact I too often forget, I think. I forget that when she first started editing lives, the program was only six years old, that it was still being considered a movement—as opposed to a relic that needed to be dusted off, retooled, reborn. She still talks about those days often—and not with some washed-up football star's sense of vacant nostalgia, but rather with confusion, like she woke up one morning and found herself wondering, quite suddenly, where those years went.

“We had some of the first openly gay characters on television,” she told me the day of my first interview. “We had people—young people, real people—debating race and reproductive rights and homophobia. We had addicts and AIDS activists.”

It had recently rained, and I remember how we were standing at the window in her office, looking down at the puddles that'd pooled on the roof of the T.G.I. Friday's.

“And what do you have now?” I asked.

“Drunk girls, mostly,” she said. “And usually some guy from the Midwest who shaves his chest.”

As Karen explained it to me on that day, the problem was that instead
of the roles creating the show, the show was now creating the roles. There'd been some sort of seismic shift sometime around 2002, she said. Location scouts abandoned the gritty for the glossy: New York for Hawaii, Cancún. She didn't know who was to blame: audiences, executives, advertisers, ourselves. Across the board, we'd become greedy, she said. Too preoccupied with the present. Instead of teasing out the rawness, Karen's task was increasingly aimed at fortifying the gussied-up artificial.

“Can you help me do that?” she asked.

I told her, “I don't know. But I can tell a fucking good story.”

She nodded.

And so. Over the preceding few years, Karen and I have embarked on this clandestine mission: to quietly change what so much of this has become. To reclaim what this show has forever intended to be. We've had minor successes: we've woven together some trueish moments from a transgendered man in Brooklyn, from a bisexual in D.C. More and more, though, the vision Karen inherited is being eclipsed. By bigger hot tubs and double shots of tequila. By three-way kisses and sexually promiscuous Mormons. By Las Vegas.

Randal shreds the clutch by releasing it too early and I spit:
Christ.

“Jesus, she's touchy,” he says, even though she isn't—not at all, in fact.

Into the phone I plead, “Karen, please tell me if I still have health insurance.”

“I met with the Ax again yesterday,” she begins. “After—”

And then—then the signal goes dead.

•  •  •

I'm staring at my mobile's screen, at the taunting NO SIGNAL message displayed in the upper left hand corner, and Randal says, “What happened?”

I hold the phone above my head; I press its face against the windshield. I roll down the window and hang half my body out into the open air, offering the device up to the sun.

“The signal died. The signal
fucking died
.” Then: “I hate this state. I hate Indiana. Give me your phone.”

“It's out of power.”

“What do you mean it's out of power?”

“It's. Out. Of. Power.”

There are long flatbed trucks, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. They race around one another, playing in one another's exhaust, sleek darts of fish cutting through waves. Atop their broad backs they carry white hollow cylinders the size of school buses. The sun shines through them, dazzling off their steel walls.

“I wonder what those are,” Randal says.

“They're what I'm going to impale myself on if I can't find a fucking signal.”

“They almost look like parts of missiles, don't they?”

There is a gust of wind, the sort of unexpected and unbridled flurry of air that can only happen on long open roads in the middle of nowhere. The white cylinders sway on the steel beds.

“We need to find a pay phone,” I say. “We need to pull over.”

The wind switches directions, rocking the cylinders the opposite way.

Near Rensselaer, we spot a gas station and a mini-mart that's been unfolded on the side of the road. I dig for loose change between Lucy's torn seats, in the deep pockets of my shorts, in Randal's backpack, beneath Mrs. Dalloway's bony ass. I emerge successful with a buck ninety-five, mostly in dimes and nickels, and I bolt from the car before she's rolled to a stop.

We are at the edge of the Benton County Wind Farm, a sign says, and they're everywhere, the mills. White three-bladed stalks dotting the flat green plain. They're arranged in rows, like soldiers or corn, and they spin inconsistently—one going, one stopping, one somewhere in between. I feed my fistful of coins into the pay phone's rusted slot.

I'm breathless as I say, “Karen, I'm sorry, I'm in Indiana. The signal cut out. I'm at a pay phone.”

She says, “I was worried I'd miss you when you called back. I'm on my way out.”

“You're leaving the office?”

“I'm leaving the city. Hugo and I are going upstate for a while. My train is in forty-five minutes.”

“But—”

“They're going with the famous babies, Finn.”

I notice that I've wrapped the phone's steel cord around my right wrist so tightly that my fingers have gone numb.

“Did they give you a reason?”

“Nothing more than what we talked about the other night. I suppose it's because we've become just like everything else, but only not enough.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“It means you're fired. We're fired.”

I don't hang up the phone—I just leave it hanging, like some prisoner on a noose. One hundred yards to the left of the windmill spinning above me there is a deconstructed unit. Its three propellers lay unused, unattached in a heap; its stalk is divided into four white cylinders of equal length, the same size as the sections we just saw on the flatbed trucks. I walk to the closest piece and kick it as many times as I can before the pain begins radiating in splinters through my toes and my ankles, finally twanging behind my kneecaps. I yell
Fuck!
at the top of my lungs and over and over again and until I'm out of breath and because there's nothing—no mountains or hills—off which my voice can echo, it explodes out in each direction for miles and miles and miles. Randal and Mrs. Dalloway play in the dirt—the cat, flat on her back; the boy, rubbing her orange stomach gently with his toes. They both turn to stare at me.