Drives Like a Dream (21 page)

Lydia couldn't help wondering how much of this was meant for her. "You don't seem diminished to me."

On their way downstairs, M.J. insisted on looking into Lydia's office, even though the door was closed. Lydia knew she should just refuse, but the hostess in her had to be polite. She apologized for the scattered papers as M.J. studied every picture on her office wall—of the children, of Lydia's grandparents, of the old house in Indian Village—her eyes wide, as if absorbing it all. "When did you live in that lovely Tudor?" "Oh, look at Jessica. What a stunner," she said, and with each question and comment Lydia tightened up, spoke more tersely. What was M.J. looking for? She seemed to be scouring the house for clues. "Who's this?" she asked, finally, pointing to a photograph of Gilbert Warren standing next to a dapper Harley Earl.

"My father," Lydia said.

"So that's what he looks like."

"What do you mean?"

M.J. brought her finger to her lips, as if she'd said something by mistake. She turned to the framed ad on the wall of the Tucker Torpedo, Gilbert Warren's original design:
More like a Buck Rogers special than the automobiles we know today.

"Did you know my father?" Lydia asked. "Or did Casper know him?"

"Oh, I really shouldn't say."

"What is it? Tell me."

"Well." M.J. crossed her arms. "As a matter of fact." She looked down at the floor, not meeting Lydia's eyes. "I didn't exactly know your father—I just know
about
him. Casper told me not to tell you this, and I realize it's none of my business. But as a historian—as anyone, frankly—you might as well know the truth."

Lydia didn't like the sound of this. The office suddenly felt stifling.

"You've heard the talk about moles at the Big Three who helped bring Preston Tucker down," M.J. continued. "Even
I
know those stories, and I've never cared much for cars. Well, Casper's old boss Mickey Gibson told him something that he made him swear he wouldn't tell anyone else—the people at Ford don't like generating controversy if they can help it. He said he knew the mole, in fact used to work with him; he was a designer who had been at Tucker, then later GM. Gilbert Warren was his name. He ruined Tucker out of revenge because Tucker fired him."

Stepping back, Lydia bumped into the doorknob. "You're wrong," she said. She felt faint. "My father did no such thing. I should know, for God's sake. I've only been studying this my entire career. And anyway—" She gathered herself. "My father wasn't fired. I know for a fact that he quit."

"Are you sure?"

"He told me."

"What does it say in the history books?"

"It says my father left. There's no mention of the circumstances. But I've never seen anywhere that he was fired. That's ridiculous."

"Is there any record that he quit?"

"I'm sure there's a resignation letter somewhere."

"That's because he was asked to resign."

"Look, M.J. You're right about one thing: this isn't your business. But about all the rest, you're wrong." Lydia heard her voice rising.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. Sometimes I talk too much." M.J. backed off. "Maybe we should go downstairs and sit down."

"I don't need to sit down! I'm fine. Why should I defend my father in my own house? I don't know where Casper got these ideas, but I shouldn't have to listen to this. My father quit the Tucker Corporation. He handpicked his successor."

"I'm only the messenger, Lydia. Mickey Gibson had no reason to slander your father, and Casper trusted him completely. He said that Tucker asked for Gilbert's resignation because he wasn't happy with his work. I don't know the first thing about car design, but Mickey said that your father was pushing for speed and Tucker wanted safety. He brought in Alex Tremulus to make it more of a family car."

"I know what Tremulus did," Lydia said. "But my dad had already put much of the design in place."

"I'm no expert. I'm just telling you what I heard. Your father was furious about being fired, so he went to GM and said he knew all the details about Tucker's business methods and if they wanted to stop the Tucker '48' before it took the country by storm, they ought to hire him right away."

"My father was a great designer. There's no secret about that," Lydia said, but she felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. She thought of the papers that Walter had copied for her, with all the assorted history minus the smoking gun; she thought of Tucker's "Open Letter" complaining about certain people trying to bribe his employees. She remembered the edge of guilt in her father's voice that morning after Tucker died. She'd been struck then by what had seemed like unusual wistfulness for a man who tended never to look back. Reading the obituary pages, he had seemed almost angry that his old boss had passed away. Now Lydia wondered if her father might have regretted something far worse than parting ways with Tucker. But even if he
had
been fired, she could not believe he would have been that vindictive or helped destroy the man who had given him his start. "Harley Earl brought my father on for his talent, not for espionage," she said, but with less certainty than before.

"You don't have to believe me, Lydia. I understand and I'm sorry. I guess I couldn't help telling you what I'd heard, that's all."

"If you were looking to make a bad day worse, you've succeeded."

At the front door M.J. tried to change the subject. "I know your date was disappointing. Still, I hope you'll consider giving Norman another chance."

"We'll see." But Lydia had no intention of meeting Norm again, and she was thinking, too, that after today she would spend no more time with the Spiveys. As she said goodbye and watched M.J. descend the steps one at a time, carefully, a little sideways, she couldn't help feeling that something was deeply wrong with this friendship. She didn't understand M.J.'s motives. It occurred to her now that the shopping, the matchmaking, all the big-sisterly advice, couldn't be simple generosity. Maybe she wanted to annoy Ellen by befriending her husband's ex-wife. Or perhaps she hoped to learn some unpleasant secrets about Cy. Lydia wondered if M.J. took satisfaction in telling people's secrets, regardless of their veracity.

But Lydia did not want to think about this now. She would go to the car archives first thing tomorrow and find her father's resignation letter—or something from Tucker himself that proved M.J. wrong.

Lydia fixed a potato in the microwave and poured herself a glass of water. Once again, she thought of Cy in the desert, wondered what kind of a place it was. His Infiniti would sit in the garage, beside the rakes, tools, and weed trimmer, the chemicals and console for the sprinkler system that snaked under the yard. He'd have a high adobe wall and an iron gate blocking out his neighbors and a rock garden with flowering cacti. Inside, the track-lit rooms would have wall-to-wall carpeting, the pale kind that he'd always wanted. He would ask visitors to take off their shoes upon entering the house.

Ellen and Cy would file a homeowners' claim to cover the flood. Out to the curb would go the too-dark sofas and heavy wood tables, into the living room a teal leather couch, glass table and a Navajo rug. On the walls they would hang black-and-white photographs of Hopi women from the end of last century and close-ups of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands. They'd buy knickknacks from Robert Redford's catalogue and play CDs of wolves and coyotes, night sounds of the desert.

Upstairs, the master bedroom would be more or less complete—a king-size bed spilling with overstuffed pillows, and, Lydia imagined, a fat white teddy bear with a big red heart that read "Love me" in bubbly letters. In the guestroom they'd have a daybed and wicker furniture and a television and VCR where Cy could watch sentimental movies about aging baseball players and conflicted lieutenants, dramas of initiation into the world of men. And the third room, the one at the end of the hall—at the moment Cy would keep his treadmill there, and perhaps a radio, where he would play what the locals listened to, easy-listening country tunes for commuting professionals. Some day soon the exercise equipment would go down to the basement, and Cy would take a health club membership, because with a baby on the way they'd convert the room to a nursery.

A baby, Lydia thought now. Cy and Ellen were going to have children.

Lydia cut open the potato, salted it, and took the plate upstairs. Her office desk was stacked with papers, many of them Norm's e-mails, which she'd printed out and collected, as if she were an eighteen-year-old courted by an eager paramour. She gathered them up and tossed them in the wastebasket.

When the phone rang, she hesitated to answer it, thinking it might be Norm.

"Morning, Mom," Jessica said.

"Afternoon." Lydia sat down at her desk, relieved to hear her daughter's voice. She thumbed through the color copies of Harley Earl's dream cars, her manuscript pages covered with notes.

"It's still morning in Eugene." Jess seemed in a good mood. "I figured you'd be at the library."

Lydia shuddered as if she'd been found out. She wondered if Norm had driven to the library to look for her. She'd said that she did research there, had even told him about the car archives. Would he have tried to find her, or given up by now and gone home? "I'm
often
at the library." She considered for a moment mentioning Norm. "But today I'm not."

"So what have you been doing all day?"

Lydia pushed the potato aside. "Why does it matter?"

"Come on, Mom."

She paused, thought better of saying something, then changed her mind. "I met a man. There. Now you know."

"A man? You're kidding."

"No, I'm not kidding."

"Where did you meet him?"

Jessica's disbelief spurred her on. She did not want to say that she'd met Norm at the car museum on the same day that her ex-husband was getting married—that would have sounded desperate. "Lately I've been spending a lot of time with the Spiveys." She explained how Cy had stopped by the house to see if she'd look after his in-laws.

"Isn't that weird?"

"In fact, M.J. acted as my matchmaker."

"Now that's definitely weird," Jessica said. "And he's a friend of Casper and M.J.'s? He must be old. You're not dating a widower, are you?"

"No, he's divorced. His name is Norman."

"Norman? You mean like Norman Vincent Peale or Norman Schwarzkopf? Is he a man of God or a man of war? Norman Rockwell or Norman like the conquest? What kind of a Norman is he?"

"I'd rather not say."

"Come on, Mom. You can tell me."

"Do you tell me everything about your life?"

"How many times have you been out with him?"

"Is this twenty questions?"

"How about a hundred and twenty?"

Lydia was beginning to lose her mooring. As if to anchor herself, she pulled her office chair up close to her desk. She had been on one bad date and had no plans to see Norm ever again. But at the same time she felt a tremor of possibility—she liked being asked so many questions. "We've seen a lot of each other lately," she said all of a sudden. "I know him much better than you can imagine."

"And what exactly does that mean?"

"We've been friendly for a while."

"I thought you said you just met him."

"Actually I've known him for months, but the Spiveys helped to accelerate things."

"What do you mean?"

"They pushed me along, you know, told me to let my guard down. And it seems to have worked," Lydia said.

"You've known him all this time? Why didn't you tell any of us?"

"I wasn't sure it would go anywhere."

"Still." Jessica paused for a moment. "So how did you meet him in the first place, if not through the Spiveys?"

Here, she could only think to say that she hadn't actually
met
him in those early months and wasn't sure for a while if she ever would. She went on to explain that you can't know someone based only on words on the screen. There was no way to anticipate how two people would get along until they met, face to face, and had actual contact. "M.J. kept pushing me to meet him, so just after you all left I finally did."

"Wait a minute," Jessica said. "You're not saying that you found him on-line?"

Lydia was silent.

"I thought you could hardly use the Internet."

"Well, I've gotten better."

"Do you read the papers, Mother? Young girls aren't the only ones getting lured off the web by psychopaths. You have no idea what you're doing. There are freaks out there who prey on people like you."

"Norm is not a freak, for crying out loud," Lydia said. "And what do you mean 'people like you'?"

"They don't call it a frontier for nothing. You have to learn how to protect yourself."

"I know what I'm doing. I'm the mother here."

"Are you trying to make me nervous?"

"Why don't you calm down."

"Why don't you get some sense!" Jessica was yelling now. "You got lucky this time. He
could have been
a monster, and you know it. If I had done something as stupid as meeting a stranger on the Internet, you would never let me hear the end of it. Did you answer a personal ad? Did you meet him in a chat room?"

"We're not talking about this anymore, Jessica."

"Just last week I saw in the
Oregonian
that a woman got in a chat room and next thing she knew she was boarding a plane to Las Vegas with her purse stuffed with cash. Her new love interest had talked her into a gambling weekend. I'll spare you the details, but she never made it home to Portland. Strangled in the hotel bathroom."

"Don't get dramatic on me," Lydia said.

"Spoken like a true expert."

Lydia felt lightheaded, as if she were caught in the shadow world between waking and sleep. She got up and opened a window to let air into the room. "I can't believe you," she said. "I was going to let you know, and this is just proof that you'd rather I have no life."

"What are you talking about?"

"I don't think you understand what I'm telling you," Lydia continued. "You don't realize how serious this is. Norm and I have written every day, several times a day since—the end of last year. It's been many, many months, and it seems like forever to me."