I eat standing up, leaning over the sink. I wouldn’t eat like this if anyone could see me.
Her voice is flat and coolly distant, so I imagine things aren’t over between us.
From the woe that is in marriage has come the Iliad and ten thousand novels, but nothing from me. I missed her voice too much. After talking to her on the telephone, I turn on the radio loud.
The distance between us is neither long nor short, merely imperishable, like the sentiment in an old song.
A huge fellow with the face of a powerful dullard stood behind the counter. He turned for items on the shelf and I saw that his pants had slipped below his hips, where he was chopped sheer from lower back to legs. No ass to hold up his pants. His bulk pushed forward and heaved up into his chest. He had a hanging mouth and little eyes with a birdlike shine. I bought salami and oranges from him, though I no longer felt any desire to eat.
Eddie said he ran into his former wife in the street in New York, and they talked. They talked as if neither of them knew how to say nice to see you, I’m expected somewhere, goodbye, goodbye. They went to a restaurant and ate and talked some more, and they went to her apartment, and they made love. Then she said, “So why did we get divorced?” Eddie smiled at me and said, “See?” as if he were the idiot of circumstances, shlepped into pain and confusion by his cock. “You know how long I was divorced before I remarried?” he asked. “Not three days,” he said. I was sad for him and for her, and her, and her. The feeling widened like circles about a leaf fallen onto the surface of a pond.
We left Berkeley on December 14, driving south on Route 5, straight, flat road policed by aircraft. Jesse, eleven years old, twisted the radio dial searching for rock music. Ethan, fourteen, in the backseat with the luggage, was reading. For no reason, they’d begin to fight. Holding the wheel with one hand, I smacked at them with the other until they stopped. They were bored. There was nothing to see but the canal, a vein that leaked life out of Northern California into the agricultural empire of the Central Valley and beyond that into real estate from Los Angeles to Mexico.
At twilight we checked into a motel near Barstow. The boys chased each other about the room and began wrestling. I stepped outside and waited until they’d wrestled themselves into a stupor.
Early the next morning I woke them and said, “Shower and pack. We’re going to the Grand Canyon. It’s ten miles deep and full of snakes and panthers.” They cheered. I left for the motel office. The sunlight was brassy, the air was cool. Big trucks running down the highway pulled at me. Get out in the energy. Go.
Behind the motel desk stood a woman about fifty, with a red loaf of hair, like body and blood mashed into her personal fashion statement. While figuring my bill she said, “Going home for the holidays?”
“I’m delivering my sons to their mother. We’re divorced, passing them back and forth. I’m doing it for the first time.” She looked up, startled. I was startled, too. I’d been babbling, as if I’d owed her a confession in exchange for what she offered in her hair. It got to me, bespeaking desire beyond consummation on this planet, bulging upward, packed and patted into shape, bursting with laborious and masturbatory satisfaction, like a bourgeois novel, the kind you live with for days or weeks, reading slowly, nourished by its erotic intimacies and the delicious anxieties of a plot, wishing it would never never end.
“I once drove my Labrador from Berkeley to Sacramento,” I said, “and gave it to a family that could take better care of it than I could. Then I had to sit by the side of the road for half an hour, until I could stop crying and drive.”
“You’re talking about a dog?”
“Yes. A Labrador retriever. Now I’m going to New York.”
“You’re going a funny way to New York.”
“We’ll stop at the Grand Canyon and have some fun. I’m taking a southern route to avoid bad weather.”
She stood very still, as my meaning sifted down and settled inside her like sediment in a wine bottle. I said again, “Bad weather.” Her head dipped, the red dome a second head, making a slow double bludgeon of assent. “But it’s better than none at all,” she said.
“That’s a fact.”
“It is,” she said. We smiled together. She was a nice lady. She had nice hair. I yearned to be within its fold. I yearned to be taken into her hair.
I returned to the room. The boys hadn’t showered. Their clothes were flung about everywhere. They sprawled on the beds, gleaming with violence that had ceased when they heard the key in the lock. Like my opponents in a rough game, evil half smiles on their faces, they waited for my move. I thought of strangling them, but nothing in me wanted to move. It was plain they didn’t give a shit about the Grand Canyon.
At a place called Truck Stop, I ate lunch. Truckers leaned toward each other, eating pills, coffee, and starch. They looked fat, vibrant, seething with bad health.
Checked into a motel in Manhattan, Kansas, and got the last room. Though it was midnight, people were still arriving. The highway was loud throughout the night. American refugees seek the road, the road.
Infinitely clear sky and prairie of Kansas. I felt vulnerable, easily seen, as in the eye of God.
A farmer came into the diner. He wore a baseball cap with a long bill. He was very tanned and dusty and moved ponderously with the pain of this long day. His hands were much bigger than the coffee cup in front of him. He stared at it. In his eyes, no ideas, just questions. “What’s this?” he asked. “A coffee cup,” he told himself. “What do you do with it?” he asked. He told himself, “Pick it up.” Between the first and second question, no words. No words even in the questions.
A young couple sat opposite of me. The woman was long and pale. Her husband was not as tall as she. His double-breasted suit and dark shiny tie were very ugly. He’d tried to dress impressively, perhaps for an official occasion. She wore a hand-knit gray sweater, setting off her lovely pale complexion. She could have improved her husband’s taste, but was maybe indifferent to it. He had thin, colorless hair and red-rimmed, obedient eyes. They flicked nervously in her direction, hoping for a command. He suggested a small-town bureaucrat whose every action is correct and never spontaneous, but he was in love with his wife and lived in agonizing confusion. He looked to her for sympathy. She offered none. She had what she wanted in life. It was this man, or such a man. She made him feel ashamed of himself, his need of her, specifically her.
New York. Mother’s apartment. Moritz visits, tells a story. One freezing morning everybody had to go outside and watch a man be hanged. He’d tried to escape the previous night. Beside Moritz stood a boy, the man’s brother. “His nose became red. It was so red,” said Moritz. “That’s what I remember.” Moritz’s eyes enlarge and his voice becomes urgent, as if it were happening again. His excitement isn’t that of a storyteller. He can recite passages from Manfred in Polish, but he isn’t literary. The experience is still too real to him. His memories are very dangerous. He fears another heart attack, but he tells about the camps. It should be remembered as he tells it. Freezing morning. The boy’s red nose.