Vintage Ford (12 page)

“Of course she can,” Ned said. Ned was a heavy, beet-faced man who looked older than forty-six. He had gone to Harvard, then come home to work for his old man's company and quickly become a drunk and a nuisance. Austin had met him in MBA night school fifteen years ago. They didn't see each other socially. “But that's not the big problem,” Ned went on.

“What's the big problem?” Austin said, muddling an ice cube in his gin.

“Moi-même,”
Ned said, and looked grim about it. “She contends I'm a force field of negativism that radiates into all the north suburbs. So I have to move to Indiana for her to stay. And that's way too big a sacrifice.” Ned laughed humorlessly. He knew a lot of Indiana jokes that Austin had already heard. Indiana, to Ned Coles, was the place where you caught sight of the flagship of the Polish navy and visited the Argentine war heroes memorial. He was old Chicago, and also, Austin thought, an idiot. He wished Ned's wife a good journey to Arizona.

When Ned wandered off into the restaurant, leaving them alone at the lacquered teak bar, Barbara grew quiet. Both of them were drinking gin, and in silence they let the bartender pour them another two on the rocks. Austin knew he was a little drunk now and that Barbara was probably more drunk than he was. He sensed a problem could be lurking—about what he wasn't sure. But he longed for the feeling he'd had when he put the phone down with Joséphine Belliard that morning. Ebullience. To be fiercely alive. It had been a temporary feeling, he understood perfectly well. But he longed for it now all the more achingly on account of its illusory quality, its innocent smallness. Even realists, he thought, needed a break now and then.

“Do you remember the other night?” Barbara began as if she were choosing her words with extreme precision. “You were in Paris, and I was back here at home. And I asked you if you thought you might be taking me for granted?” She focused on the rim of her glass, but unexpectedly her eyes cast up and found his. There was one other couple in the bar, and the bartender had seated himself on a stool at the end and was reading a newspaper. This was the dinner hour, and many people were in the restaurant section. Someone had ordered a dish that required fire to be brought from the kitchen to their table, and Austin could see the yellow flame lick up at the ceiling, hear the loud
sssss
and the delighted diners say, “Oooo.”

“I didn't think that was true,” Austin said resolutely in answer to her question.

“I know you didn't,” Barbara said and nodded her head slowly. “And maybe that's exactly right. Maybe I was wrong.” She stared at her glass of gin again. “What
is
true, though, Martin, and what's worse—about you, anyway—is that you take
yourself
for granted.” Barbara kept nodding her head without looking at him, as if she'd discovered an interesting but worrisome paradox in philosophy. When Barbara got mad at him, particularly if she was a little drunk, she nodded her head and spoke in this overly meticulous way, as if she'd done considerable thinking on the subject at hand and wished to illuminate her conclusions as a contribution to common sense. Austin called this habit “reading the ingredients on the Molotov cocktail,” and he hated it and wished Barbara wouldn't do it, though there was never a good moment to bring the subject up.

“I'm sorry, but I don't think I know what you mean by that,” he said in the most normal voice he could manufacture.

Barbara looked at him curiously, her perfect Lambda Chi beauty-queen features grown as precise and angular as her words. “What I mean is that you think—about yourself—that you can't be changed, as if you're
fixed.
On your insides, I mean. You think of yourself as a given, that what you go off to some foreign country and do won't have any effect on you, won't leave you different. But that isn't true, Martin. Because you
are
different. In fact, you're unreachable, and you've been becoming that way for a long time. For two or three years, at least. I've just tried to get along with you and make you happy, because making you happy has always made me happy. But now it doesn't, because you've changed and I don't feel like I can reach you or that you're even aware of what you've become, and frankly I don't even much care. All this just occurred to me while I was ordering a title search this afternoon. I'm sorry it's such a shock.”

Barbara sniffed and looked at him and seemed to smile. She wasn't about to cry. She was cold-eyed and factual, as if she were reporting the death of a distant relative neither of them remembered very well.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Austin said, wanting to remain as calm as she was, though not as cold. He didn't exactly know what this meant or what could've brought it about, since he didn't think he'd been doing anything wrong. Nothing had happened two or three years ago that he could remember. Joséphine Belliard had had a small effect on him, but it would pass the way anything passed. Life seemed to be going on. He thought, in fact, that he'd been acting about as normal as he could hope to act.

But did this mean that she had taken all she intended to and was through with him? That would be a shock, he thought, something he definitely didn't want. Or did she only mean to say he needed to shape up and become more reachable, go back to some nice way he'd been that she approved of—some way he would've said he still was. Or maybe she was saying she intended to make her own changes now, be less forgiving, less interested in him, less loving, take more interest in herself; that their marriage was going to start down a new, more equitable road—something else he didn't like the sound of.

He sat thoughtfully in the silence she was affording him for just this purpose. He certainly needed to offer a response. He needed intelligently and forthrightly to answer her charges and demonstrate sympathy for her embattled position. But also he needed to stand up for himself, while offering a practical way out of this apparent impasse. Much, in other words, was being asked of him. He was, it seemed, expected to solve everything: to take
both
positions—hers and his—and somehow join them so that everything was either put back to a way it had been or else made better so that both of them were happier and could feel that if life was a series of dangerous escarpments you scaled with difficulty, at least you eventually succeeded, whereupon the plenteous rewards of happiness made all the nightmares worthwhile.

It was an admirable view of life, Austin thought. It was a sound, traditional view, absolutely in the American grain, and one that sent everybody to the altar starry-eyed and certain. It was a view Barbara had always maintained and he'd always envied. Barbara was in the American grain. It was one of the big reasons he'd been knocked out by her years ago and why he knew she would be the best person he or anyone else could ever love. Only he didn't see at that moment what he could do to make her wishes come true, if he in fact knew anything about what her wishes were. So that what he said, after admitting he was sorry to hear what she'd already said, was: “But I don't think there's anything I can do about it. I wish there was. I'm really sorry.”

“Then you're just an asshole,” Barbara said and nodded again very confidently, very conclusively. “And you're also a womanizer and you're a creep. And I don't want to be married to any of those things anymore. So.” She took a big emptying swig out of her glass of gin and set the thick tumbler down hard on its damp little napkin coaster. “So,” she said again, as if appreciating her own self-assured voice, “fuck you. And good-bye.” With that, she got up and walked very steadily and straight out of the Hai-Nun (so straight that Austin didn't wonder about whether she was in any condition to drive) and disappeared around the bamboo corner just as another fat lick of yellow flame swarmed into the dark dining-room air and another hot, loud sizzling sound went up, and another “Oooo” was exhaled from the dazzled diners, a couple of whom even clapped.

This was certainly an over-response on Barbara's part, Austin felt. In the first place, she knew nothing about Joséphine Belliard, because there was nothing to know. No incriminating facts. She was only guessing, and unfairly. In all probability she was just feeling bad about herself and hoping to make him responsible for it. In the second place, it wasn't easy to tell the truth about how you felt when it wasn't what someone you loved wanted to be the truth. He'd done his best by saying he wasn't sure what he could do to make her happy. That had been a place to start. He'd sensed her opening certitude had just been a positioning strategy and that while a big fight might've been brewing, it would've been one they could settle over the course of the evening, ending with apologies, after which they could both feel better, even liberated. It had gone like that in the past when he'd gotten temporarily distracted by some woman he met far from home. Ordinary goings-on, he thought.

Though women were sometimes a kind of problem. He enjoyed their company, enjoyed hearing their voices, knowing about their semi-intimate lives and daily dramas. But his attempts at knowing them often created a peculiar feeling, as if on the one hand he'd come into the possession of secrets he didn't want to keep, while on the other, some other vital portion of life—his life with Barbara, for instance—was left not fully appreciated, gone somewhat to waste.

But Barbara had stepped out of all bounds with this leaving. Now they were both alone in separate little cocoons of bitterness and self-explanation, and that was when matters did not get better but worse. Everyone knew that. She had brought this situation into existence, not him, and she would have to live with the outcome, no matter how small or how large. Drinking had something to do with it, he thought. His and hers. There was a lot of tension in the air at the moment, and drinking was a natural response. He didn't think either of them had a drinking problem per se—particularly himself. But he resolved, sitting at the teak bar in front of a glass of Beefeater's, that he would quit drinking as soon as he could.

When he walked outside into the dark parking lot, Barbara was nowhere in sight. A half hour had gone by. He thought he might find her in the car, mad or sleeping. It was eight-thirty. The air was cool, and Old Orchard Road was astream with automobiles.

When he drove home, all the lights were off and Barbara's car, which she'd left at her office when he picked her up, was not in the garage. Austin walked in through the house, turning on lights until he got to their bedroom. He opened the door gingerly, so as not to wake Barbara if she was there, flung across the top covers, asleep. But she wasn't there. The room was dark except for the digital clock. He was alone in the house, and he didn't know where his wife was, only that she was conceivably leaving him. Certainly she'd been angry. The last thing she had said was “fuck you.” Then she'd walked out—something she hadn't done before. Someone, he understood, might conclude she was leaving him.

Austin poured himself a glass of milk in the brightly lit kitchen and considered testifying to these very moments and facts, as well as to the unpleasant episode in the Hai-Nun and to the final words of his wife, in a court of law. A divorce court. He featured himself sitting at a table with his lawyer, and Barbara at a table with her lawyer, both of them, eyes straight ahead, facing a judge's bench. In her present state of mind Barbara wouldn't be persuaded by his side of the story. She wouldn't have a change of heart or decide just to forget the whole thing in the middle of a courtroom once he'd looked her square in the eye and told only the truth. Still, divorce was certainly not a good solution, he thought.

Austin walked up to the sliding glass door that gave on to the backyard and to the dark and fenceless yards of his neighbors, their soft house lights and the reflection of his own kitchen cabinets and himself holding his glass of milk and of the breakfast table and chairs, all combined in a perfect half-lit diorama.

On the other hand, he thought (the first being a messy divorce attempt followed by sullen reconciliation once they realized they lacked the nerve for divorce),
he was out.

He
hadn't left.
She
had.
He
hadn't made any threats or complaints or bitter, half-drunk, name-calling declarations or soap-operaish exits into the night.
She
had.
He
hadn't wanted to be alone.
She
had wanted to be alone. And as a result
he
was free. Free to do anything he wanted, no questions asked or answered, no suspicions or recriminations. No explanatory half-truths. It was a revelation.

In the past, when he and Barbara had had a row and he had felt like just getting in the car and driving to Montana or Alaska to work for the forest service—never writing, never calling, though not actually going to the trouble of concealing his identity or whereabouts—he'd found he could never face the moment of actual leaving. His feet simply wouldn't move. And about himself he'd said, feeling quietly proud of the fact, that he was no good at departures. There was in leaving, he believed, the feel of betrayal— of betraying Barbara. Of betraying himself. You didn't marry somebody so you could leave, he'd actually said to her on occasion. He could never in fact even seriously think about leaving. And about the forest service he could only plot as far as the end of the first day—when he was tired and bruised from hard work, his mind emptied of worries. But after that he was confused about what would be happening next—another toilsome day like the one before. This had meant, he understood, that he didn't want to leave; that his life, his love for Barbara, were simply too strong. Leaving was what weak people did. Again his college classmates were called upon to be the bad examples, the cowardly leavers. Most of them had been divorced, strewn kids of all ages all over the map, routinely and grimly posted big checks off to Dallas and Seattle and Atlanta, fed on regret. They had left and now they were plenty sorry. But his love for Barbara was simply worth more. Some life force was in him too strongly, too fully, to leave—which meant something, something lasting and important. This force, he felt, was what all the great novels ever written were about.