“Don’t be crude,” she said, and when I didn’t respond she said, “Oh, that was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Pretty bad,” I said. But it made me happy — the silliness, the lapse.
“No, a little farther down the turnpike and to the west. One of those nice suburbs without any ‘urb’ to really do the whole sub-dom thing with.”
“That was a little better.”
“I guess I’ve said that before.”
I switched lanes and the lane I’d abandoned, of course, pulled forward. “Shit,” I said.
“Do you really want me to do this?” she asked.
I said I did. She was my age or thereabouts. It had been a long time since I’d really investigated my choice in her, but her being my age and a woman surely mattered. I didn’t need someone who would explain me to myself. I wasn’t in the market for psychological insight, really. I may have wanted a little mothering. A sense of stability, attention, a place to be heard. I am not too old as a man approaching forty to admit it. I wanted the warmth and understanding a mother teaches you, wrongly, to expect.
“I come from a big family,” Susan said. “There are four of us kids, I’m the oldest and — let’s see — my mother’s kind of this all-American mom. Soccer practice, dinner on the table at seven. Dad’s a real guy’s guy, owns a drilling company. Wells, abandonment, pumps, irrigation … I guess he’s doing exploration for gas companies now too, the whole fracking thing.”
“I saw that family in a truck commercial.”
“It was a little like that.” She smiled at the memory. “When we were little, Dad used to say he could drill through anything — rock, metal, you name it. We’d ask him if he could drill to the center of the earth and he’d say, ‘With enough pipe, sure.’ Silly.” She shook her head. “He was Jersey Italian, you know. I told someone at school once that he worked for the mob. Maybe he did.”
I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen Susan this way, lighthearted, gushing a little. It gave me a warm feeling even if her father’s machismo got on my nerves. I seemed to remember having once read about a Soviet attempt to see how deep they could drill into the earth, how around seven or eight miles down the pressure, or maybe the heat, had become too great to continue, but that nonetheless it had confirmed how little we know about what lies even a short way underfoot.
“We were a close family,” Susan went on. “We did everything together, as this big family unit. Our house had this huge communal room and meanwhile our bedrooms were like closets. Our parents wanted to see us, you know?”
I said that it must have been hard — omertà, the lack of privacy. I was joking, but Susan didn’t laugh.
“We liked it,” she said. She looked out the window, retreating, I felt, a small way into herself. The traffic had eased a little, the clouds growing thicker, the sky darker. The car listed in the wind.
“Well, I come from a traditional American family,” I said. “Broken.” She knew this, of course, but I was trying to make amends. “We children of divorce, we’re used to thinking there’s something creepy about marriages that last, a Mayberry fanaticism or something. Probably we’ve just confused creepy with healthy.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes it’s healthy to split up, right? Healthy.” She shook her head. “God, what do we even mean?”
And who are we talking about now? I thought, but I held my tongue. I said the no-privacy thing must have given her a terrible time with boys.
“Oh, boys! I had to wait until college, really. Dad was Catholic, you know, and owned guns.”
“Fathers with guns,” I said and hypothesized that we’d never get around to fixing the gun problem in this country with so much teenage pussy to protect. I wasn’t really thinking when I said it, but Susan laughed, a real laugh, not the polite one she used in our talks to let me know she understood I’d made a joke. “I guess so,” she said after a minute. But as the laughter faded we found ourselves left with the idea, and behind the idea the image — of Susan’s teenage pussy — and I scrambled to move us along so that we wouldn’t have to consider the other considering Susan’s teenage pussy and the awkwardness of our shared understanding of what we were both simultaneously considering.
“I don’t think I ever had a gun in one of my films,” I said. What a stupid thing to say. “Are you hungry?” I said, because what I’d said before had been so stupid.
“Actually, I’m starving.”
The traffic wasn’t too bad and it seemed like a decent time to get off the highway, fuel up, and eat. It wasn’t yet noon but I was hungry too, looking forward to the junk you permit yourself on the road, when the trial of the day overtakes and obscures any thought of the future. I was worried Susan would want to find a Starbucks and I’d be stuck with a cheese plate with like two red grapes, but when we pulled off into the clutter of roadside chains there wasn’t a Starbucks in sight, and Susan suggested Denny’s, which made me want to kiss her, and so Denny’s it was.
Over breakfast Susan asked about my current projects and I told her. One involved filming violent criminals remembering happy moments from their childhoods. For another I was following around a trucker I’d met who liked to dress in drag. Susan asked what interested me about these projects and I said it was difficult to talk about them that way; it was the fact that you couldn’t summarize them that made them art and to try to capture their effect in words would only lead to my sounding pretentious and evasive. She said that all sounded pretty pretentious and evasive so why didn’t I just try, and I said, Fine. I was interested in our response to seeing people in situations that seemed to run directly counter to their public identities. Imagine a group of Fortune 50 °CEOs at a petting zoo, I said. Imagine leaving them there too long. If I could get Fortune 50 °CEOs to give me an afternoon, that’s what I’d have them do.
“Interesting.”
“Do you think so? When people say ‘interesting’ they usually mean ‘not interesting’ or ‘I’d like to stop talking about this immediately.’”
“No, it is interesting,” she said. “Just, how do you make sure it’s not gimmicky?”
I told her this was always the worry. It was why these projects took so long. You had to film for a long time before people got so used to the scrutiny that they stopped playing to the camera, before authentic moments of self-discovery could occur. “You can always tell an authentic moment,” I said. “I don’t know how, but at some point you can see that a person has stopped trying to manage your perception of them. The true self peeks through.”
“I wonder if I believe in such a thing,” she said.
“Well, forget the word ‘true,’ if that seems problematic. I mean the self that’s not an actor. The self we are in private and with our best friends, our spouses. The effortless self, let’s call it.”
She looked at me, but past me, to the point in space where the truth of words is judged against reality. She was quiet. The look on her face, as she gazed off, passed from caught-up to sad and then, I thought, to something like a premonitory glimpse of the possibilities and limits of a life. It was brief, this terror — if that’s what it was — and I longed and dreaded to know what she was thinking. In another second, though, she had returned to the moment and to picking the crusts of her chicken sandwich, which I had found and continued to find a strange order.
It was raining when we left the restaurant, light, sparse drops shuttled about by the wind, a pleasant rain that seemed to be cleaning you rather than getting you wet. The lights of restaurants and gas stations shone wetly all around, and it was lovely, in the rain, at a Denny’s, in New Jersey.