Driver's Education (25 page)

Or maybe that wasn't it. Maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe it was a story that was far less romantic but far more realistic; instead of dealing in stars and observatories and timid nights, this story dealt in something else, in something banal, in traffic. Specifically: the infamous and demonic gnarl of cars that knots around the 405/101 interchange during the evening rush hour. More specifically: Let's say that Clare, a terrible driver with a notoriously bad sense of direction, could be counted on with almost-perfect certainty to become plugged into this bottleneck (thus delaying her arrival at the house in Griffith Park by two hours) each time she returned from Burbank, where she was sent on auditions approximately twice a week. For the sake of this hypothesis, though, let's also say that after one of these auditions, Clare got smart. Before she inserted the keys into the car's ignition, she said to herself,
The 405 is going to be a mess. I know it's going to be a mess. I've been stuck in that mess. I'll take Victory to the 170 instead.
And lo! She made it out of the valley in forty-five minutes. Record time. Her plan paid off. Or, it paid off, but only just barely, and only in the beginning. Because when Clare pulled into the bungalow's leafy driveway, she had to wedge her Ford next to a late-model Toyota she didn't recognize. And similarly, when she stepped into the house's foyer and called Ron's name, she tripped over a pair of heels, a blouse, a skirt into which she surely couldn't fit. Then, in the pitch-black hallway outside the bedroom: a set of lace panties, a matching brassiere,
a thin ankle, her lover's too-meaty ass, a necktie, a tanned and toned arm, a fatty rib, a set of perky tits. And maybe, as her eyes adjusted and she took in the fleshy mesh, she didn't scream out quite as soon as one would expect. Maybe there was that brief moment of detached awe and objective confusion when she was left to consider just how wrong she'd been about him. That, in fact, a man with fogged glasses and a soft demeanor was just as capable of fucking a nineteen-year-old as anyone else.

There's also a substantial chance that it wasn't either of those things, that her shift in reasoning was inspired by a catalyst of which I'll never be aware, or ever understand. The important point is that she called, again, eleven months later.

“Colin? Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.”

“Okay. All right—good. I have a question. Or, not a question, necessarily. More just something to say. I guess that—”

“Just say it, Clare.”

She breathed. She held her breath, then said, “Do you remember that scene at the end of
Sabrina
? When Humphrey Bogart tells Audrey Hepburn to get on the boat and never come back, but because he's fallen in love with her, he experiences this huge change of heart and he chases after her?”

“Yes.”

“I think I understand that now. I think I understand what it's like to have a change of heart.”

•  •  •

Clare's family was at our wedding, and so was my agent, Sammy, but mostly the pews were filled with extras. Friends she'd met on the set of the few commercials and soap operas she'd done, or people who served as wordless mourners in the funeral scene of
The Family Room
. There weren't too many, though: For the ceremony, we'd selected a small church in Santa Monica, on Euclid Street. It couldn't have held more than forty-five people.

Her favorite flowers were peonies—she said she liked the way they looked bashful—and so the aisles of the tiny chapel were sprouting with
white and yellow blossoms that smelled like morning. They spilled out from the entrance—two propped-open wooden doors—and then onto a series of three shallow steps, where I sat waiting for my father, who was already thirty minutes late.

I'd called him every day since I'd proposed, and each time the phone rang unanswered. I sent him two invitations—one to the house in Sleepy Hollow, and one to the Sandpiper, the bar where I'd found him in Nyack. An RSVP came from neither. Still, I made sure a seat was reserved for him in the church's front row.

The sky was crowded with semidark clouds that moved east across the sky. Whenever a space opened up for the sun to break through, the sidewalk in front of the church became too bright; I'd stare at it for as long as I could before the corners of my eyes began to water and I was forced to look away. Seven months before, Sammy had taken me to a department store off Wilshire to buy a tuxedo for the Golden Globes, and I wore this suit on that day, the day of my wedding. I pulled loose threads from the jacket's cuffs and I tied the short black strings into knots, bows. Every ten minutes, Clare's mother would come and stand between the church's two open doors. At first I turned to her apologetically. But after a full hour passed, I started to ignore her; I pretended that I didn't notice her sighs. That I didn't notice her saying to Clare's father,
We don't even know if the bastard's coming
.

I heard the car before I saw it: that howl of cannonballs and broken glass. It turned north onto Euclid from Idaho Avenue and I noticed how the yellow paint had peeled off in larger sheets; how there was more rusted steel exposed around the rims of the tires, the curves of the front fender. My father parked in front of the stairs where I was sitting, and once he'd stepped out of the car I told him, “You're an hour and a half late.”

“The traffic in this town!” He held both my arms. He shook me once and kissed me on the cheek. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“And you never wrote me back. You never responded to the invitation. How was I supposed to know that you'd actually be here?”

He brushed dust from my lapel. Straightened my boutonniere and picked a peony's petal from my shoulder.

“Did you know that the longest traffic jam in history happened two years ago, on February sixteenth?” he said. “It happened in France, between Lyon and Paris, and the cars stretched one hundred nine miles. One hundred nine miles!”

“Come on, Dad,” I said. “Not today.”

“It happened because of bad weather and because all of France decided to go skiing on the same day. People made fondue in the middle of the highway. I know because I was there. But the traffic in this town—”

I pushed his hands away from my shoulders, where they were still dusting, working. “I said knock it off.”

He looked tired; the skin beneath his eyes pulled down in sagging crescents.

He said to me, “You're swimming in this penguin suit. You should've gone a size smaller on the jacket.”

Finn

My granddad arrived in Chicago on the morning of May 12, 1970—the same day that more than a billion cisco flies descended upon the city. They'd invaded once before, the flies, in 1895: On August 25, at about eight o'clock in the morning, they appeared suddenly, and without warning, in furry, frenzied clumps. Mainly, the ciscoes kept to within three or four blocks of the lake—they had a thing for water—but there were also swarms that buzzed up Halsted Street, up Wabash. That painted the sides of shops with their sticky toes and made dark hula hoops around the Loop.

Back then, in 1895, entomologists at Northwestern University estimated the number of flies to be well over a million. The 1970 invasion, though—the backdrop for my granddad and Lucy's debut on Lake Shore Drive—was said to be at least ten times as massive.

So:
one billion fucking flies
.

The way he tells it, the sole structure that escaped the wrath of the ciscoes, if only partially, was the Sears Tower—and that's only because the flies were afraid to climb so high as the skyscraper's upper floors. (“Don't be fooled, Finn,” my granddad used to say. “The folks who spend their lives in the clouds are the ones who are terrified most of falling.”) Everything else, though, was fair game, subjected to a slick, foamy coat of cisco grime. Windows, particularly those on the first through third floors, were covered with a dusting no less than a foot thick made up
of wings and legs and a hundred moving eyes. The old Water Tower, down on Michigan Avenue, transformed into a sort of gothic animation: its once-white stone walls and parapets now swayed and quivered, like pitch-black branches, as the flies landed, climbed over one another, changed their minds.

At Navy Pier, the USS
Silversides,
a submarine, submerged into the lake—an underwater escape.

Downtown, traffic stopped and started. Windshield wipers tossed folded fly heads into gutters. Stoplights had three colors, my granddad said: black, blacker, blackest. The ubiquitous, midvolume buzz of the flies' wings flapping was interrupted only by the crunch of their bodies being squished beneath the slow-rolling wheels of cars. Along the sidewalks, pedestrians stopped swatting at their necks, their shoulders, their cheeks: they allowed the ciscoes to perch on the edges of their noses, the ends of their eyebrows. They scratched at an itch only when they felt the absence of something, not the presence of it.

My granddad took pictures of the whole messy ordeal with a 1965 Polaroid Model 20 Swinger camera he'd picked up a few years earlier. He shook each photo until its screen fully developed into the image he'd shot: an intimation of a cityscape obscured by a thousand hair-thin legs. He sent them off to the Rev in Pittsburgh, who would die two years later; to Charlotte Sparrow in Columbus, who would always be alive.

The great-grandchildren of the Northwestern entomologists, who were now renowned bug experts themselves, gathered in their spooky Evanston labs. Huddled around pinned and preserved specimens of butterflies, of beetles, of foot-long ants, they endeavored in vain to conjure up an explanation for the Phenomenon of the Flies. The ciscoes' eggs were laid in the marshes along Lake Michigan, they knew, but the only way such a huge swarm could make its way to the city—at once—would be on the back of a robust breeze. And that day, May 12, had so far been eerily windless.

“They've just come because they wanted to,” the Northwestern entomologists said in a statement released that afternoon. “Because it's an especially nice day, and because Chicago is a nice city, and because they didn't have much else to do.”

The thing is, no one was particularly panicked. Because as my granddad put it, everyone was sure they wouldn't be around for long. It was widely known that the ciscoes, as a species, were ephemeral: after transitioning from larvae into fully matured flies, they lived for less than twenty-four hours. They flew, and they fucked, and they spawned in their soggy marshes, and then they died, clogging the lake with a billion tiny black corpses.
So,
the residents of Chicago said.
So, with a life like that, why cause a fuss? Why not just let the little bastards have this
—
their single less-than-a-day in the sun?

As such, the afternoon progressed like any other. The tour boats still floated along the Chicago River, stopping periodically to squeegee away insect bits from the Plexiglas windows. At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, commodity futures briefly spiked as industry speculators whispered that the flies could mean a prolonged and bountiful crop season. Outside the Art Institute, abstract painters set out teaspoons of acrylic in a thousand different shades next to long rectangular canvases: they hoped the footprints of the flies would reveal deeper truths about love, faith, humanity.

At Wrigley Field, grounds workers sported thick goggles as they tugged their nail drags along the outfield. As they drew the string line taut from home base's apex to third, to first. As they chalked out the batter's box into the infield's red dirt. As they prepped the stadium for that day's game.

My granddad lived his life in New York, but he's always nurtured a special love for the Cubs. The affair started in 1938: he listened on the radio as Chicago bested Pittsburgh during a life-or-death late-season game, with Gabby Hartnett clinching the victory with a walk-off home run. When the crowds at Wrigley stormed the field to escort Hartnett around the bases, my granddad leapt on his parents' couch in New York, jumping up and down till the springs snapped. His excitement hasn't let up since.

The man—on top of being a hero, and a heartbreaker, and a polymath, and exceedingly humble—is also a sports almanac. He can tell you what season was the Cub's best (1906, with 116 wins), and which
was their worst (1962, with 103 losses). He knows who has the highest career batting average (Riggs Stephenson—.336), who has hit the most career singles (Cap Anson, who hung up his uniform in 1896, with 2,246), who's got the most doubles (also Anson), who snagged the most triples (Jimmy Ryan). Even now, he could give you the play-by-play that led to the 550-foot-long home run Dave Kingman whaled on April 14, 1976—a rocket of a shot that ricocheted off the roof of a house on Kenmore Avenue.

He loves all the players, past and present. Even the guys like Hack Wilson and Sammy Sosa—guys who fell victim to boozing, or doping, or both. He's a forgiving man, and so he loves them despite their faults, and also because of them. But he's still human, my granddad, if only barely, which is to say there are definitely members of the club whom he likes more than others. And if you were to ask for that list—that desert-island, end-of-the-world, all-time-favorite list of ballplayers—I'm certain Ernie Banks would be at the top of it.

They called him Mr. Cub, and in 1982, eleven years after he retired, he became the first of only six players to have his number retired by the franchise. He was universally loved—not only for his spectacular skill on the field (in 1955 he set a record for grand slams hit in a single season that wouldn't be broken for another thirty years), but also for his almost freakishly sunny nature: Banks had a searing love for the game, the heat of which was rivaled only by my granddad's passion for stories.

On May 12, the day the flies quilted Chicago and my granddad went to Wrigley, the Cubs were playing Atlanta at home and Ernie Banks had hit, to date, 499 career home runs. The crowd that had gathered was sparse—only five thousand spectators peppered the stadium. Still, I'd wager that the folks who filled those seats didn't care who won or who lost, but rather whether they might witness one of those rare moments when history coalesces into itself. When Ernie Banks slammed his 500th homer.