I can tell I need to sleep. I’m experiencing sleep deprivation, which is causing me to stand there long after she’s walked away, not moving, staring at the concrete staircase. Later, in my own room, in my bed by the window, I think about her. I would like to go to sleep but I keep having these thoughts, and although they’re my thoughts, they have a mind of their own.
3
In Melville’s Billy Budd, the eponymous young sailor is called — in an expression from another time — a natural man. He’s a man with grace and generosity of spirit. And Claggart, his nemesis in the story, can’t stand the natural attraction people feel for Billy, including his own attraction. Holding on to the dwindling lie of his own superiority, he torments Billy and plots against him, and all because of his inability to live without some barrier between him and what he sees as a threat to what he believes he is. We don’t know the whole history of Claggart so we don’t know if maybe his obsession with destroying Billy Budd is a way to avoid looking at some lack of something in himself. But there he is.
And there I am, walking out my door to the motel parking lot, which is empty except for the dark Mercedes, nose to nose with the maroon station wagon. I walk across the parking lot, like walking across a frozen lake, walking to what may or may not be my old car, and when I get to the car, Linda is sitting behind the steering wheel rolling down the window.
“I see you’re still fascinated by the car,” she says.
“I didn’t see you here,” I say.
“No?” she says.
“No,” I say. “Not really.” Looking down from the scarf on her head to the handle of her door, I notice some pieces of broken glass beneath the left front tire of her car. I don’t tell her about the glass, but because I want to think of myself as a good person, I offer her a ride in my car. “Do you need a ride?” I say.
“I’m fine,” she says. And she notices that I’m looking at her door handle, not her, and she says, “Do you need a ride somewhere?”
“I have a car,” I say, pointing to the Pulsar, which is parked by the empty swimming pool.
So she starts the car, and it sounds like the old maroon Tracer. I can see that when she drives away she’ll drive over the glass, and you might think: How can I do that? How can I let her drive off with the glass beneath her tire?
How I do that is called interpretation. I’m trying, in my mind, to interpret my actions as the actions of a good person. But it’s not that easy because, although I intend to tell her, and in fact am thinking of a graceful way to do it, at some level I want to deny her the happiness that ought to be mine, or had been mine, the happiness that I thought I wanted. As if, in the universe, there’s only a limited amount of happiness and it’s either hers or mine.
So when she puts the car into gear I’m waiting, still intending to say something about the glass on the ground, still intending to be good, but before I get an opportunity, she shifts the car back into park. She turns off the engine. “You know,” she says, “I think I will take you up on your offer.”
She gets out. And I’m a little nervous now, walking to my car, opening my passenger door, and excusing my mess. She settles into the plastic seat and I get in behind the wheel and then I start the car.
“Thank you,” she says. “It’s pretty far away.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. And as we drive off I can tell that she’s looking at me, and that by looking at me she’s giving me a signal to reciprocate.
But I don’t.
She offers to pay me, but I say, “You just tell me where to go.”
We drive along, past stoplights, moving with the flow of traffic until the town is behind us. The road begins to wind up into low hills. She’s still looking at me, and I’m staring straight ahead, past the dashboard to the terrain outside.
“Have you ever gone off the road?” she says.
“You mean in an off-road vehicle or do you mean like…?”
“What’s your name?”
“Out of control?”
“What do people call you?” she says.
“Friends, you mean?”
“You must have a name.”
“Several names. That different people call me.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to tell me your name?”
“What’s your name?” I say.
“I already told you. I hate my name.”
“Jack,” I tell her.
“Like Kerouac.”
“Linda,” I say.
“Right. And your name is Jack.”
I can feel her looking at the side of my face.
Although I’m not aware of any barrier or wall between us, there is something. And what it is, in a sense, is Anne, or my belief in Anne and my life with Anne, and because the person next to me is not Anne, I’m creating or constructing this particular wall or barrier or screen.
“Are you married, Jack?” she says.
“You mean because I don’t wear a ring?” I say, lifting my left hand.
“I’ve never been married either. Officially,” she says.
I look straight ahead and see the arc of the wiper traced on the window, and the window itself. “Are the people you’re with … I’ve noticed you’re traveling with some people.”
“You really like looking at the road,” she says.
“I’m driving.”
“But we’re also talking.”
“True,” I say.
And she points to where I need to turn. “We’re getting close,” she says.
“What would I look at?” I say. “I mean I’ve noticed your friends, the people you’re with…”
“Look at me, for instance.”
And looking straight ahead I tell her, “I’m concentrating on the road.”
“That’s all right,” she says. “Except maybe you’ve concentrated enough. It’s not really all that complicated, is it?”
And I can feel a million things going on in my mind, and to avoid the confusion of all of them happening at once, I turn and look at her face.
“There,” she says, pointing to a barn up ahead, off to the side. “You see that barn thing? That’s the barn.”
I slow down, turn right, and drive up a gravel driveway. I park on some level ground near a propane tank. I kill the engine. “We made it,” I say.
She unties her scarf and shakes out her hair.
And it might not be clear from our words alone, but what was just happening was that I wasn’t doing what she wanted me to do. I wasn’t looking at her. I was seeming to be doing it, or seeming to be trying to do it, but I wasn’t.
She wants a little attention and there’s nothing wrong with that. She wants to break through the barrier between us, thinking that breaking through will make her happy. And maybe it would. But my happiness is different. My happiness — I wouldn’t even use the word “happiness,” my form of satisfaction — comes from keeping her from what she wants. She seems to have enough happiness as it is, and because I don’t have enough or don’t feel I have enough, I want to keep it from her. If I can’t have it, no one will.
4
There’s a red house nestled in the hill, and across the road there’s a tumbledown chicken coop. An older man appears at the door of the house with a bright red stocking cap on his head, smiling and waving. He walks to her side of the car, and immediately they embrace. I watch the hug until, after a while, she introduces me, referring to me as a friend, and the old man walks over to me, looks into my eyes, takes my hand, and embraces me.