So, brash and foolish, yes, but not quite young. Nor was I well-off. I was okay, I was doing okay. I taught filmmaking and video art at the college in the small southern city where I lived. I had two kids, three and five, and a wife I loved who no longer loved me. I drove an old Nissan Pathfinder that was, like the rest of us, doing okay. It had four-wheel drive and I thought it could handle the trip even if things got wet. That was how, Monday morning, I found myself walking the thirty or so blocks north from Mark and Celeste’s to the cheap lot near Penn Station where I’d left the car. The sky that morning was clear and pretty, a violent, indecisive wind the only sign of the storm to come.
It was on my way to the lot that I saw Susan. The streets were a mess but I picked her out at once, and then, because it was so improbable to see her, I convinced myself it wasn’t her, couldn’t be, watched for another minute wondering whether she hadn’t said something about a conference, ducking and pushing through the crowd to catch her face (she was in front of me), only to realize, unbelievable as it was, that it was her, and I called out, half in jest, I suppose, “Dr. Duranti,” and when she didn’t respond to that and yelling “Dr. Duranti” sounded ridiculous, I called out “Susan,” which she responded to at once, turning and seeing me, and then we had to acknowledge each other’s existence as people outside the rarefied context in which we habitually encountered each other.
“Ben,” she said, a bit the way you say hello to an ex you’ve run into on a date. At times she seemed tense around me, I thought, as though worried I might bind her to my distress, but Susan was a therapist and you would have been forgiven for thinking she was prepared for this.
“Of all the places,” I said.
“Yeah, this is funny,” she said, like it was maybe the least funny thing ever.
“You told me you were out of town, I forgot. What was it?”
“Conference,” she said. “APA, or last week. I saw my sister over the weekend.” People streamed by us, an island with our luggage in the middle of the sidewalk. “Actually, I was supposed to head back yesterday. My flight got canceled.”
It came back to me then, a conversation the week before, the schedule juggling. I was teaching three classes and trying to keep a few of my own projects afloat. I was preoccupied. Maybe I preoccupied myself to keep from being alone with my thoughts. Susan’s eyes were red, I saw. Her hair unwashed. She looked like she hadn’t slept.
“So what’s the plan?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think I can get anything,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I’ve been bouncing between Penn Station and Port Authority all morning. It’s a nightmare. People are paying five hundred dollars for bus tickets. Five hundred dollars! I can’t even withdraw more cash from the ATM. I’m just really—”
She stopped herself. I was so used to telling her things while she listened quietly that this speech surprised me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her string as many sentences together.
“Well,” I said, knowing it would make her uncomfortable, but still myself, a person who doesn’t believe in rules or in standing on ceremony, life’s too strange, “I’m just on my way to the car. I’m driving back now.”
We had moved onto Thirty-Fourth Street to stand aside the flow of pedestrians. Susan’s bag kept slipping from her shoulder. She looked small next to the rolling suitcase in her hand.
“I don’t know, Ben. It’s what, an eleven-hour drive? Do you think that’s such a good idea?”
“These are pretty exceptional circumstances,” I said. “I think we need to triage the bad ideas.”
I wouldn’t go so far as say I was invested in her coming with me, but I thought it would be silly of her not to. And I liked her, I liked her company. I thought it would be fun.
“It’s the kids, though,” she said. “They’re at Karen’s, and I told her I’d be back last night. I told them I’d be back. They were upset on the phone…” She wasn’t saying it to me. “It’s all such a disaster.”
“Literally,” I said. “Look, this is stupid. I’m driving back right now. We can listen to music the whole way if you like.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She smiled, but her smile seemed mostly to convey that she was too tired to say no.
We got the car. We braved Hell’s Kitchen and the Lincoln Tunnel, which was clogged many blocks back. At last we dipped beneath the river, lurching forward and stopping, watching the taillights of cars paint crimson streams on the white tile. For a time it seemed that the rest of our lives would take place in that tunnel, but finally we emerged. It took maybe two hours to reach 95, and 95 was a mess too. By then the clouds had begun gathering. A breath of luminosity lit them, but you could tell the thickening would continue, that the sky would turn brown-gray, then gray and darker, that the rain would come. And still it felt okay in the Pathfinder, which was warm and dry, it felt okay to be driving into the storm.
We were in stop-and-go traffic among the oil refineries of northern New Jersey when I said, “You mentioned that the kids were unhappy on the phone last night?”
“Yes, well, they’re young — what do you expect? They’ve been at a friend’s place for five days.”
“I’m just asking.”
“Sorry,” she said. She seemed to mean it. She had two kids, a boy and a girl. Alice, the younger, didn’t talk much, which worried her. Like certain other people I know, I thought, realizing how easy it had been at points to take Susan’s inscrutable silence as tacit approval of me, of my life and my decisions, and how in many ways this assumption was the basis of our relationship.
“Is your husband worried?” I said.
She looked at me. I thought she almost rolled her eyes. “You’d have to ask him.”
In the river of cars ahead an ignition of brake lights rolled back to us like a wave. I told her it wasn’t really fair, how I told her such intimate things and she conceded so little. I hardly knew what was fair game to ask.
Our eyes met and she gave me that look I knew so well, which said that just because I had stopped talking didn’t mean she was obliged to speak.
“What’s fair game?” I said.
“Ask,” she said, a hitch of exasperation in her voice. “I can tell you if I don’t feel like discussing something.”
“Okay, your childhood then. Tell me about your childhood.”
She laughed. “Now you’re just fucking with me.” It was playful the way she said it, playful and warm, and with this lightness the drive seemed to open out before us as faceted and lovely as a long descent into a twinkling valley. Was Susan pretty? Sort of. Not extravagantly, not at first. But she grew on you. Maybe anyone who listens to you attentively for seven years will.
“Start at the beginning,” I said. She played along. “This is where I come from,” she said and spread her hands to include the scene before us.
“You were born in an oil refinery. Continue.”