Drives Like a Dream (15 page)

She found the number for Uncle Ed's in her wallet, picked up the phone and dialed.

The manager answered, "Hello, sweetheart."

Lydia paused. Had a love bomb detonated over southeast Michigan, and she was the last to know about it? "I was wondering if Marty was there?" she asked. "I'm the one whose car broke down in your parking lot."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Thought you were my wife. We closed a couple of hours ago. I'm doing the books, running late for dinner."

"So Marty has left?"

"Yeah, he's long gone. Can I leave him a message?"

"I've been thinking about it," Lydia said. "And I'd like to sell him my car."

"You sure? That beautiful Escort? It's just sitting out there saying 'Take me home.'"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"Well, I'll pass on the message."

"I appreciate that."

"And sorry about answering the phone that way. I could have sworn you were my wife. That woman is like clockwork. As soon as we hang up, I'll bet you she calls."

"I don't mind," Lydia said, which was true. It had been a long time since a man had called her sweetheart. "If you could tell Marty I'm sending him the title, I think we have a deal."

She got the address for Uncle Ed's plus Marty's last name, which was none other than Rose. She hung up the phone and dug out the Escort file, wrote a quick note, and signed a letter passing ownership of the car from herself to Marty Rose. She wouldn't even bother to wait for the check.

She went outside and walked down to the end of the block, where her neighborhood met the fence line of the zoo. A mailbox sat there, and beyond it Lydia could see the shelf of rocks and man-made caves where the sea lions often gathered to sun themselves, though none were there now in the day's disappearing light. She opened the creaky mouth of the mailbox, slipped the letter in, and listened to make sure that it slid to the bottom.

L
YDIA WAS SURPRISED
by how much willpower it took not to write Norm back immediately. She drafted a letter and revised it over the course of the evening, tinkering with every word:

Dear Norm,

Many thanks for your note. How nice it is to know that community does still exist—at least the community of ideas. In the motor city, as you might imagine, I have to proceed with caution when expressing my views.

Yes, I'm a Detroiter, born and raised. Little has changed—this is still the city of tomorrow. But I love it and have lived here all my life. I'm no longer married, only to my work. I'm more or less the same person in the photograph, only the bio has changed. My three kids have scattered east and west. I wish it were temporary.

Where do you live? Do you have children? Are you on the design or the engineering side of car-building? And why the interest in Preston Tucker? Might you be the next incarnation?

Always nice to find an ally in this world.

Sincerely,
Lydia

After debating whether to send the message, Lydia decided to wait until the morning. She saved the letter in her draft file in a new folder called Norm. Crawling into bed, she wondered if he lived in Ypsilanti. Tucker himself had lived there in the early 1940s, and though it was hard to merge the two characters in her mind—one a bow-tied salesman, the other a ponytailed activist—that's what Lydia was inclined to do. Maybe Norm was a scientist or an architect, an environmentalist or a designer. She pictured him hunched over a drafting table, working out the details of his own prototype. She lay there imagining what it would be like to have Norm living here in her house, setting up his shop out back, filling the empty space of her bed.

But the next morning, she woke up tired. Cold weather had returned, and overnight a sheet-metal gray had dropped over the city. Lydia got up, made herself a cup of coffee, and reread her note to Norm several times. It seemed too serious, too flirty, too strained, too playful, a little desperate, and somehow just wrong. She tried recasting the note entirely but only made it worse. She felt embarrassed by last night's fantasies. So, for the rest of the day, and through the next, she told herself to forget about Norm.

Thursday she awoke to the fourth straight morning of gray weather and made up her mind to deal with the task she'd been looking forward to least: calling the Spiveys.

"Bonjour," answered a woman in a throaty voice.

"Is it too early?" Lydia glanced at the clock: eight-thirty.

"Depends on who you are, my darling. If you're wondering whether I'm happy with my long distance, yes it is too early."

"This is not the phone company."

"Good. On the other hand, my long-distance bills are about to go up."

"This is Lydia Modine."

Just then, another voice came on the line. "Hello." It was a soft-spoken man.

"You're five minutes late, Casper. Pardon my husband. He's stuck in a lower gear."

"Goodbye." The phone clicked as the man hung up.

"Now what did you say your name was, again?"

"Lydia Modine. I'm Cy's ex-wife."

"I see." Ellen's mother seemed at a loss for words, which Lydia guessed did not happen often.

"Cy told me to call you."

"He did?"

"I'm sorry. I thought you knew."

"No, this is the first I've heard of it. What did he want you to call me about?"

"That's a fine question," Lydia said. "This is awkward. I honestly thought he had told you."

"It seems that my daughter and your ex-husband have made surprises a hallmark of their new marriage. Did it come as a surprise to you, too, that they were moving to Arizona?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"So this is very much in keeping with their style. It's nice of us to accommodate them, don't you think?"

Actually, Lydia was thinking that she'd like the Arizona earth to open its dry mouth and swallow the city of Phoenix.

"I have an idea," the woman continued. "Let's meet for lunch today. My name is Marie Jeanette, but please call me M.J. My husband is Casper. You can call him what you'd like."

Lydia had not expected to meet so soon, if at all. She had only been following up on a promise. "I'm not sure. I've only just—"

"Come on, it'll be good to talk."

"Well—" Lydia hesitated.

"Where do you go for lunch?"

"I don't usually."

"How about a for-instance? Where was your last lunch out?"

Lydia thought of Arby's and could almost feel the bile rise in her stomach. "The café at the DIA. I work nearby."

"Casper, pickup the phone," M.J. yelled. "Casper!"

After a moment Ellen's father was on the line again. "Hello," he said. "Make up your mind. Do you want me or not?"

"Better leave that one alone," M.J. said. "We're going to the DIA for lunch. Now be a good boy and dig up the exhibition schedule."

"Right away." Casper fumbled the phone.

M.J. continued. "We're lifetime members. We have three permanent tickets to special exhibitions. Me, Casper, and Ellen. We were about to buy a fourth for Cy, but I guess that's no longer necessary."

"Probably not." Lydia tried to sound as if she didn't care.

"Remind us and we'll lend you two of our tickets. Maybe you can take a friend. Are you seeing someone?"

This conversation was growing more personal by the minute. "Me?" Lydia said. "No, I don't think so."

Casper got back on the line. "So here's what's showing: it's called 'Abelardo Morell and Camera Eye.'"

"Yes, tell us about it, dear."

"It says here, 'Abelardo Morell explores the basic principles of photography and human vision.'" Casper read slowly. '"His subjects are familiar—ordinary domestic objects and interiors, illustrated books and maps, children's toys—yet his photographs reveal the extraordinary found in the commonplace.'"

"Well there we have it," M.J. said. "How does that sound, Lydia?"

"Okay, I guess." Actually, it seemed pretty interesting. "Lunch would be fine."

"How's noon?"

"Shall I pick you up?"

"How about we get you?" M.J. asked.

And because Lydia was not about to be her ex-husband's new in-laws' keeper, she said, "Sure." She gave M.J. directions to Franklin Street, adding with a certain pride in her voice, "My house is the only one on the block with a front porch."

"Au revoir," M.J. said and hung up.

Oddly enough, Lydia found that her spirits had lifted. She signed on to her e-mail account and sent her reply to Norm.

The Spiveys arrived in a long black Town Car, promptly at noon, and Lydia climbed into the squeaky back seat.

"Is that the zoo over there?" Casper nodded in its direction.

"Your old home, dear," M.J. said before Lydia could reply. "My husband is a fugitive—broke out of his cage."

Casper looked over his shoulder. "Hardly a fugitive. I live with the zookeeper."

"A left turn will do now." M.J. made a motion like steering, as if by doing this she could keep the car steady. Casper turned left, then followed his wife's direction—she seemed compelled to narrate the drive—turning right at Lincoln, then right again onto Woodward and down from there, somewhat precariously, to the DIA.

It turned out, though, that Casper had read the exhibition dates wrong. The Abelardo Morell photographs would not be shown for another month. When M.J. scolded him, he said, "You should have looked it up yourself."

"I'm not your seeing-eye wife. Can't you tell May from June?"

"You pressured me. I don't do well under pressure."

"Oh, for God's sake. I ask so little."

Lydia quickly said, "It doesn't matter. I love the permanent collection."

And so they spent more than an hour wandering the cool halls of the museum. M.J. took Lydia to her favorite places: the sixteenth-century chapel from Chateau de Lannoy, with its flamelike window tracery; the French Impressionist room with Seurat's
View of Le Crotoy, Upstream,
and to the Thomas Germain silver collection, once the table settings for eighteenth-century French royalty.

"What period do you like?" M.J. asked Lydia, and she told them about the Detroit Industry Frescoes, how the Rivera room had become her sanctuary.

"I haven't been there in a while," Casper said. "All I remember are these great machines and a lot of gray, yellow, and blue."

When they entered the room, Casper squinted up close to the main mural and walked from factory worker to factory worker, as if he were the foreman scrutinizing their productivity. He stepped back and faced the north wall. "So what's going on here? Describe it to me," he said.

Lydia thought of her father, who had been so proud of these murals because Ford had commissioned them around the time he had been working there.

"Yes, Lydia, tell us what we're looking at," M.J. said. "We understand you're the resident authority."

Lydia did not wish to say anything critical about cars, just as she had kept quiet when her father brought her here. Diego Rivera was a Marxist, so of course he had been fascinated by machines, seeing technology as a way of freeing the working class from exhausting menial labor. It was the most unlikely partnership: Edsel Ford, the son of the twentieth century's great industrialist, calling upon a Communist to render the assembly line.

As Lydia described the harmony between worker and machine, she couldn't help being amazed all over again by the frescoes. As often as she came here, the power of this room's idealism never diminished for her. Where else could the world's conflicting ideologies come together to make something beautiful? Where else could a believer in the commune, like herself, stand next to a Ford pensioner, like Casper Spivey, and be equally moved? Here was Detroit as it might once have been—Ford Rouge, 1932—but also Detroit as it could become again. Like the Renaissance art that inspired the frescoes, like the renaissance that Detroit was forever promising, this was a celebration of both the past and the future.

"It's really something how those images have come back to me," Casper said.

Above and set away from the main walls were the smaller panels, the green-hued warning signs: syringes and skeletons, warplanes next to predatory birds, scientists working on a chemical bomb, an embryo suffocating in clouds of poisonous gas. Even Rivera had to concede that as progress created, it also destroyed.

"So—" Casper interrupted her thoughts as they walked out of the room. "Where did your interest in cars begin? The second I get started on the subject, M.J.'s eyes glaze over."

"Like this?" M.J. tilted her head back and demonstrated.

Casper peered closely at her. "That's it," he said.

Lydia explained who her father had worked for. As an only child of one designer, she said, and the granddaughter of another, she'd grown up with gasoline in her blood.

"What was your father's name?" Casper asked.

"Gilbert Warren."

He put his hand on his cheek, and an odd look crossed his face.

"He was at Ford for a while, but probably before you got there," Lydia added. "He worked for Preston Tucker, then he went to GM."

"The name does sound familiar." Casper fiddled with a button on his shirt. "Small world, isn't it?"

They had lunch in the DIA's Gothic courtyard. Casper chose a Salisbury steak, M.J. a fruit cup and a bowl of cottage cheese. Lydia had a salad and a cup of tired-looking minestrone.

"You know why I like you," M.J. said all of a sudden. "You've raised good children. I had a nice time with Jessica. She's a gem."

"So people tell me."

"She gives you a hard time?"

"She's twenty-seven, still finding herself." Lydia opened a package of Italian dressing and drizzled it on her salad.

"There's no end to people finding themselves. The shame of it is, they'll keep searching, and one day they'll look up and what they thought they had, what they took for granted for so long—you, me—we'll be gone." M.J. looked up toward the ceiling for a moment, then down again. "What I'm wondering is, why now? I honestly thought we'd never lose Ellen. Foolish me," she said. "So, why is your daughter angry with you?"

Lydia was taken aback by M.J.'s bluntness. She was still plenty wary to be having such a conversation with these people whom she didn't know. Still, she answered the question. "I think she's just angry, and here I am."