He didn’t have much of a temper — one of the things I still loved about him — but I could foresee the cabin strewn with bits and pieces of the smashed frames.
You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time.
But there it was again, the girl’s spreading bloodstain.
I tried to catch the waitress’s eye. She was leaning on her elbows on the counter, chatting with the men. Something about their urgency trilled through the room. I coughed loudly and smiled across at her again. She sighed as if to say that she’d be there, for God’s sake, don’t push me. She rounded the counter, but stopped once more, in the middle of the floor, laughed at some intimate joke.
One of the men had unfolded his paper. Nixon’s face on the front page rolled briefly before me. All slicked back and rehearsed and gluttonous. I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come. My father had part-owned a car company in Detroit and the whole enormity of our family wealth had disappeared in the past few years. It wasn’t that I wanted the inheritance — I didn’t, not at all — but I could see my youth receding in front of me, those good moments when my father had carried me on his shoulders and tickled my underarms and even tucked me in bed, kissed my cheek, those days gone now, made increasingly distant by change.
— What’s going on?
My voice as casual as possible. The waitress with her pen poised over her writing pad.
— You didn’t hear? Nixon’s gone.
— Shot?
— Hell, no. Resigned.
— Today?
— No, tomorrow, honey. Next week. Christmas.
—’Scuse me?
She tapped her pen against the sharp of her chin.
— Whaddaya want?
I stammered an order for a western omelet and sipped from the water in the hard plastic glass.
A quickshot image across my mind. Before I met Blaine — before the drugs and the art and the Village — I had been in love with a boy from Dearborn. He’d volunteered for Vietnam, came home with the thousand-yard stare and a piece of bullet lodged perfectly in his spine. In his wheelchair he stunned me by campaigning for Nixon in ′68, going around the inner city, still giving his approval to all he couldn’t understand. We had broken up over the campaign. I thought I knew what Vietnam was — we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak. The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth. He had swallowed them all, even plastered his wheelchair with stickers. NIXON LOVES JESUS. He went door to door, spreading rumors about Hubert Humphrey. He even bought me a little chain with a Republican elephant. I had worn it to please him, to give him back his legs, but it was like the firelight had faded on the inside of his eyelids and his mind was punched away in a little drawer. I still wondered what might have happened if I had stayed with him and learned to praise ignorance. He had written to me that he had seen Blaine’s Clock Tower film and it had made him laugh so hard he had fallen out of his chair, he couldn’t get up, now he was crawling, was it possible to help him up? At the end of the letter he said, Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry. Still, when I recalled him I would always see him waiting for me under the silver high school bleachers with a smile on his face and thirty-two perfect shining white teeth.
The mind makes its shotgun leaps: punch them away, yes, in a drawer.
I saw the girl from the crash again, her face appearing over his shoulder. It was not the whites of her feet this time. She was full and pretty. No eye shadow, no makeup, no pretense. She was smiling at me and asking me why I had driven away, did I not want to talk to her, why didn’t I stop, come, come, please, did I not want to see the piece of metal that had ripped open her spine, and how about the pavement she had caressed at fifty miles per hour?
— You all right? asked the waitress, sliding the plate of food across the table.
— Fine, yeah.
She peered into the full cup and said: Something wrong?
— Just not in the mood.
She looked at me like I was quite possibly alien. No coffee? Call the House of Un-American Activities.
Hell with you, I thought. Leave me be. Go back to your unwashed cups.
I sat silently and smiled at her. The omelet was wet and runny. I took a single bite and could feel the grease unsettling my stomach. I bent down and extended my foot under the table, pulled in yesterday’s newspaper, lifted it up. It was open to an article about a man who had walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers. He had, it seemed, scoped out the building for six years and had finally not just walked, but danced, across, even lay down on the cable. He said that if he saw oranges he wanted to juggle them, if he saw skyscrapers he wanted to walk between them. I wondered what he might do if he walked into the diner and found the scattered pieces of me, lying around, too many of them to juggle.
I flicked through the rest of the pages. Some Cyprus, some water treatment, a murder in Brooklyn, but mostly Nixon and Ford and Watergate. I didn’t know much about the scandal. It was not something Blaine and I had followed: establishment politics at its coldest. Another sort of napalm, descending at home. I was happy to see Nixon resign, but it would hardly usher in a revolution. Nothing much more would happen than Ford might have a hundred days and then he too would put in an order for more bombs. It seemed to me that nothing much good had happened since the day Sirhan Sirhan had pulled the malevolent trigger. The idyll was over. Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn’t much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.
In the paper there was no mention of a crash on the FDR Drive, not even a little paragraph buried below the fold.
But there she was, still looking at me. It wasn’t the driver who struck me at all — I didn’t know why — it was still her, only her. I was wading up through the shadows toward her and the car engine was still whining and she was haloed in bits of broken glass. How great are you, God? Save her. Pick her up off the pavement and dust the glass from her hair. Wash the fake blood off the ground. Save her here and now, put her mangled body back together again.
I had a headache. My mind reeling. I could almost feel myself swaying in the booth. Maybe it was the drugs flushing out of my body. I picked up a piece of toast and just held it at my lips, but even the smell of the butter nauseated me.
Out the window I saw an antique car with whitewall tires pull up against the curb. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t a hallucination, something cinematic hauled from memory. The door opened and a shoe hit the ground. Blaine climbed out and shielded his eyes. It was almost the exact same gesture as on the highway two days before. He was wearing a lumber shirt and jeans. No old-fashioned clothes. He looked like he belonged upstate. He flicked the hair back from his eyes. As he crossed the road, the small-town traffic paused for him. Hands deep in his pockets, he strolled along the windows of the diner and threw me a smile. There was a puzzling jaunt in his step, walking with his upper body cocked back a notch. He looked like an adman, all patently false. I could see him, suddenly, in a seersucker suit. He smiled again. Perhaps he had heard about Nixon. More likely he hadn’t yet seen the paintings, ruined beyond repair.