“Gee, Jen,” Lester said. “Never heard that before, have you?”
“It’s genetic,” she said to T. “I’ll always look a lot younger than I am. Mom’s still like that.” She reached into the rear seat and returned with a denim backpack that T was seeing for first time. Out of it she pulled a drawstring purse, Indian in design, maroon and decorated with elephants and multiarmed goddesses. She found a Tennessee driver’s license in the purse and handed it to T.
T held the license in front of him, at the top of the steering wheel.
Cross, Jennifer. Born 10/02/79
. “Cross?” he said. “Does that say something about—”
“Don’t even.” She held up a hand like a stop sign. “I’ve heard every possible.”
“And yesterday,” T added. “Day before yesterday,” he corrected himself. “Day before yesterday was your birthday?”
“All day,” Jen said. “Well, technically, I wasn’t born till five before midnight so, technically, about five minutes of day before yesterday.”
“Did you have a party?”
Lester and Jenny both laughed. Jen said, “We’re losing track of the game. My turn: How old are you?”
T glanced again at the picture on the driver’s license. Even with flattened features and poor color reproduction, she looked good. Cut her hair and put her in a tasteful black dress and she’d turn heads at a gallery opening in Manhattan or a Broadway premier, the kind of events he had actually attended on occasion. “Fifty-seven,” he said, and handed the license back to her.
“Now who’s bullshitting who?” she said. “You’re fifty-seven?”
“No shit,” Les said. “I thought you were old, but fuck.”
“You look forty-five, late forties top,” Jen said. “And I’m usually pretty good at ages.”
“Fifty-seven,” T repeated. “Want to see my license?”
“No,” she said. “Past twenty-five, guys don’t lie about being older.”
“What about women?”
“Past twenty-one.”
“I’d be more flattered,” T said, “if you asked to see my license, as if you absolutely just could not believe I was fifty-seven.”
“I believe it,” Les said, “now I look at you good.”
“You’re in great shape,” Jen said. “Your stomach’s flatter than Lester’s.”
“Only’cause I drink too much beer,” Lester said.
Jenny pushed her hair back and held it pressed to either side of her head under the heels of her hands. “You work out?” she asked.
“Used to go to the gym every day for many years,” T said. “Lately I just walk and do calisthenics.”
“Really? What kind of calisthenics?” She clasped her fingers in her hair and rolled her head gently side to side. “I try to work out every day, at least a little bit.”
“This is fascinating,” Lester said.
“You’re just jealous,” Jen answered.
Lester leaned into the front seat again. “It’s my turn to ask a question.” He folded his arms over the backrest. “T?” he said. “How much money you carrying with you?”
“Not much,” T said. “A little over two hundred in my wallet. Mostly I use a pair of credit cards.”
“Wouldn’t be lying, would you? Guy dressed in a cashmere sweater looks like it cost a few hundred easy, haircut looks like a week’s salary for a working man, driving a brand-new Land Rover that’s, what, a fifty-thousand-dollar vehicle?”
“I have a Porsche at home.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“So you’re worth some serious money.”
T made a face suggesting that was at least partly true. He
said, “A lot less than I was worth about a year ago this time, which was when my divorce was finalized.”
“Oh, yeah,” Les said, as if sympathetic. “I bet.”
“Do I get another question?” T asked Jen. She had turned solemn during Les’s interrogation.
“Sure,” she said. “Keep going.”
“Hey, wait.” Les put a hand on T’s shoulder. “Slow down.” He crouched and pointed out the window to an approaching overpass, where T could make out two figures looking out over the highway with something between them, resting on a railing. The sun was just above the horizon, a red ball sinking toward a long line of hills, turning the clouds pink and salmon and orange. They were on a straight stretch of 81, just beyond Syracuse, heading for the Canadian border.
T slowed down. “You want me to pull off the road?”
“No. Just watch those two on the bridge. What’s that between them?”
T’s eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. The people on the overpass appeared to be leaning on the railing and looking out over the highway the way someone might sit back against a rock and peer out over the ocean. A beautiful day was coming to an end. He assumed he was approaching two people talking while they looked out at the hills and the long stretch of road. “What about them?” he asked Lester.
“Just watch what they got between them there.”
“It’s a baby.” Jen fell back into her seat. “Pair of morons, putting a baby up there like that.”
“Jesus, you’re right,” Lester said.
“Don’t worry, Les,” she added. “I don’t think they’ll drop a baby on us.”
“These days…” he said.
T had to wait another few seconds before he could finally make out what Les and Jen were talking about. There, on the overpass, was a baby strapped into what appeared to be a car seat, with a young woman holding the car seat on one side and a young man holding it on the other. The baby stared off happily at the hills while the two people faced each other over the infant. After he passed under the bridge he checked the rearview and saw a car pulled off the road on the other side of the overpass. “Kid was probably driving them crazy crying,” he said.
“You think they’d throw it onto the highway?” Les asked, as if suddenly frightened.
T and Jenny both laughed at the notion.
“What’s so funny?”
“You,” Jen said. “You’re a screaming paranoiac, I’ve told you that.”
“Why? He just said—”
“It probably calms the baby looking at the cars going by. For God’s sake.” Jen looked at T as if searching for commiseration. “Throw the baby off the bridge…”
“If I’m a little paranoid, Jen,” Lester said, “it’s not like I don’t have reason.”
“Point,” she said.
“So my question—” T allowed himself a dramatic pause.
For reasons he fully grasped, he decided that he was actually at this point enjoying himself, though
enjoying
wasn’t the right word. If there was indeed a right word for what he was feeling, he didn’t know it. It would have to denote the pleasure one felt at the prospect of being engaged in any human activity with the potential to surprise as well as the potential to elicit real human feelings, even if the elicited feelings were potentially going to be very bad; especially, the word would suggest, after a long period of emotional isolation, or of emotional repression, or, simply, after a long period of emptiness, a period devoid of genuine human contact and intimacy.
The pleasure at anticipating something exciting about to happen involving other human beings
. Something like that.
A species of exhilaration
. “Is this,” he continued after his pause, “something you two do on a regular basis: random hitchhiking and robbery?”
“Who said anything about robbery?” Lester said.
Jennifer said, “We told you where we’re going. We’re going to the Thousand Islands.”
“Yes, that’s what you told me. But you were lying. Just as you’re lying about Lester here being your brother.”
“This guy’s sharp,” Lester said.
“Shut up, Les.” Jen stretched her legs across the seat so that her foot touched T’s thigh. “You want to know the truth? Play the game. Ask us direct questions.”
“All right,” T said. “Lester is not your brother, is he?”
“No. He’s not.”
“Who is he?”
“Ex-lover. Past mistake. He appears out of nowhere— what? three days ago now?—having totally screwed up his own life and needing, apparently, to screw up mine too.”
“Jesus, Jenny,” Lester said. “How many times—”
“Be quiet, Lester.” Jenny pulled her hair away from her eyes. “Really,” she said. “Just be quiet back there. Let me play this game with T, okay? It’s amusing me.”
“Fine,” Lester said. “Play.”
“My turn,” she said. “Do you really own a Porsche?”
“Yes. Bought it new last year.”
“And you really are wealthy?”
“How do you define wealthy?
“A million or so, that you have access to, pretty easily.”
“Yes, then, I’m wealthy, though I have to add, as a caveat, that’s a pretty meager definition of wealth.”
“Obviously,” she said, “we’re from different backgrounds.”
“Obviously,” he said. “My turn. Do you plan on robbing me?”
“Right now?” she said. “This moment?”
“At any moment, from the time I stopped for you till now.”
“That’s not easy to answer directly.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” She pulled her foot away from his thigh, tucking her feet under her again. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts as if trying to hug and fold herself into as small a space as possible. “Because,” she continued, “though the plan
was to rob you, I wasn’t ever really sure I’d actually let Lester go through with it.”
“Just out of curiosity,” T said, “what exactly was the plan?”
“I play like a hooker,” she said. “Which I’m not nor have I ever been, for the record. But I come on like a country tramp or a hooker or whatever once I figure you out; then I offer to go in the back seat with you while Lester drives.”
“And this is something you’ve done before?” T asked.
“No. It’s not. Though I think Lester here might have some similar past experiences. Lester?”
Lester didn’t answer. He leaned back in his seat with his arms spread out grasping the backrest to either side of him.
“Then what?” T pressed. “Once I get in the back seat with you?”
“You don’t make it to the back seat. Before you get there, Lester hits you over the head with a piece of pipe he’s got stuck down the back of his pants.”
“That’s great, Jen,” Lester said, breaking his silence but not moving. “Thanks for taking away the element of surprise. What am I supposed to do now, hit him over the head while he’s driving?”
“Why don’t we drop the whole hitting-over-the-head thing?” T said. “It won’t be necessary. I already planned on taking you wherever you want to go.”
“Really?” Les said. “And did you plan on giving us your car and your money?”
When T didn’t answer, the Rover filled up with a silence that felt pressurized, as if it were pushing against the windows
and doors. The vehicle continued rolling on, and Jennifer continued to sit with her feet folded under her, holding herself in her own arms, though she had turned to look out the front window and appeared to be quietly watching the sky as the last light faded and the somber clouds deepened toward darkness. T held the steering wheel with both hands and watched the road. Behind him, he could feel Lester’s presence where he occupied the whole of the back seat as if it were his throne. He hit a button and opened his window a crack to let in some fresh air, but the roar of wind was so loud he closed it again immediately. Jennifer sighed, as if saddened by the whole situation. She let her head fall back against the headrest. T noticed for the first time the slightest whiff of perfume. It was a faintly sweet odor that he both smelled and felt distinctly on the tip of his tongue. It was strange that he hadn’t noticed it before, as if the sense of smell were somehow enhanced by silence. When he saw, glancing at her, that she had closed her eyes, he took the chance to look more closely. Unquestionable that she was beautiful physically, with the allure of youth and lucky proportions: a narrow waist, full breasts, a sleek frame…But there was something else about her, something he could see more clearly through the silence, something in the cast of her face, in the way her lips were parted as if she were full of words waiting to be spoken. It made him want to touch her face, and when he found himself imagining how soft her skin would be, he turned away and pushed his thoughts back to the road.
The stillness lasted for a full forty-five minutes, a space of time that felt at points like eternity. It grew dark. He turned on
the lights. The surrounding hills and farms disappeared and were replaced by the nothing of darkness. The stars came out. They were more than an hour past Syracuse, having just passed Watertown, which would be the last urban center of any size in the U.S. They were approximately another hour from the Thousand Islands and the Canadian border, with nothing in front of them but farm land and marsh and eleven hours of night. T worked on a sentence in his mind.
It seems to me
, he thought of saying,
that we’ll need to make a decision
. But as soon as the sentence was fully formed, he rejected it as too dramatic. What he really wanted to say was something very simple, like:
Okay. So what are you going to do?
But he also wanted to inject into that question some rhetorical method of developing an argument to dissuade Lester from answering him with a pipe over the back of his head. He wanted to ask them what they were going to do and he also wanted to argue against anything that included serious injury to the driver, and he was having trouble finding a rhetorical tack that didn’t sound wimpy or desperate or, on the other hand, ridiculously nonchalant, as if it didn’t really matter to him at all what they decided—though, strangely, that was probably the closest to what he actually felt.
He kept driving, figuring that someone at some point was bound to say or do something. He had spent most of the past year alone and doing nothing in Salem, Virginia, where after more than half a century of life, he found himself isolated, trapped in an indolence that manifested itself through addictions to computer games, chess, jazz, and good wine. The chess,
jazz, and good wine were at least somewhat socially acceptable. The computer games he kept secret. Now at least he was interested. He was interested in what might happen next.
“All right,” Jenny said, as if only a moment had passed since the conversation had come to a halt. “Look,” she said to Lester, “we’re not robbing this guy. Period. Okay?”
“Thank you,” T said. “I appreciate that.”
“Shut up,” Lester said. To Jenny he added, “What do you mean we’re not robbing him? What the fuck are we doing then?”