“Mom, listen.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I need you and Dad to do me a favor.”
“What kind of favor, dear?”
“I need to borrow your car for a few days.”
“I don’t think your father is going to want to part with his car for a few days.”
She certainly didn’t. Mr. Mock was a man who disliked the slightest deviation from his routine. Just getting him to agree to a new brand of hand soap was an ordeal.
“He wouldn’t have to. I was hoping that the two of you would come with me.”
She laughed.
“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve gotten your father to go anyplace?”
“Well, see, it’s a good idea then.”
“Who will run the motel?”
“Dad told me the thing practically runs itself.”
“What your father means is that I run it, dear.”
“Can’t you get someone to take care of it for you?”
He could be so insistent. They both — in fact, they all could be. Each concession wearing her down a little further. Look up nub in the dictionary, and there she was. Where are we going? For how long? What was wrong with his car? She would ask, but she had the distinct feeling that she wouldn’t receive satisfactory answers to these questions.
“Where would we be going?”
“East.”
“Nearly everything is east of here, dear.”
“We need to drive to our place in New York.”
“You and your young lady.”
“Randi. Randi. But no. Not with her.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand at all. What happened to your car? Why can’t you take your own car to New York?”
“I really can’t discuss it over the telephone.”
“Then, dear, you shouldn’t have called to discuss it.”
“If you could just say yes, it would be so much easier for me to fill you in later on.”
“And how on earth could I possibly say yes for your father?”
“Believe me, it’d be great for him. He’d love it. You’d both love it.”
“Love what?”
“I can’t discuss it.”
Then the door opened, and Mr. Mock entered the owner’s unit, his beaten Hathaway shirtfront soaked with water and clinging to him. When he peered over at her, Mrs. Mock instantly felt as if she’d been discovered doing something that she shouldn’t. She was having a frustrating and, she hated to admit it but, unwanted conversation with her son and being made to feel as if it were the wrong thing to be doing and she was simply tired of being beset by bullies. She handed the phone off to Mr. Mock.
“Here,” she said, “it’s for you.”
From the designer living room she watched as he studied the phone for a moment before lifting it to his ear. See the Designer Color, to match any household decor? (The Moss Green tone matched the refrigerator and dishwasher, but all three were, in Mrs. Mock’s mind, unsatisfactory compromises.) See how the dial is Built Into the receiver, so that you can make calls more easily? See the lighted dial, allowing you to place a call in Total Darkness if the mood strikes you? See the long Tangle-Resistant Cord, so that you can effortlessly go about your business while enjoying a conversation? See the Contoured Design that rests easily in the hand and against the planes of the face? The Trimline. Mr. Mock finally laid the device against his skull.
“Dad.”
“Guy.”
“Dad, remember telling us about the war when we were kids?”
“I remember telling you. Ernest wasn’t listening to me much anymore by then.”
“He was older.”
“The firstborn.”
“It must have been rough on him.”
“Those were the best years of our lives we spent over there.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“What about the war?”
“Remember telling me how sometimes you just had to do something someone asked of you, do it without question?”
“Or else you’d end up in the brig.”
“But there was a reason, a principle behind the idea.”
“I guess. Mostly you just didn’t want to end up in the brig. All the nuts were in there.”
“Dad, I need to ask you to do something for me, and I need you not to ask any questions. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“What did your mother say?”
“We can’t expect Mom to understand matters of life and death.”
“Why not? She’s a mature woman.”
“She’s a wonderful mother. Ernest and I agree. I’ve no doubt she’s been a loyal and resourceful wife. Sterling reports from the PTA and such. A model citizen. But life and death?”
“Guy, your mother’s a senior citizen.”
“Well, I don’t blame Mom. But she wasn’t real receptive.”
“I’m glad you don’t blame her. What’d you ask her to do? What are you asking me to do?”
“I need you to take a trip with us.”
“Well, I don’t know that I can take a trip. I’d really have to check.”
“You know what you’re doing. You’re running around changing the bed sheets in that motel. Get that guy across the street to look after it for you. Taranutz.”
“Ha. I am not the one convinced of the infallibility of Dick Taranutz.”
“Still. I would suggest this trip. Whatever your final decision is, and I will respect that decision, I ask that you consider the benefits of a little change of pace, plus also these life and death aspects I mentioned. Not to put pressure, but because it really is a matter of life and death.”
“Whose?”
“Pardon?”
“Whose life and whose death?”
“Well that, that I don’t really feel comfortable discussing over the phone. Which I hope you understand. But I can tell you that Randi and I need your help driving a very important person from here, the Bay Area, to the East Coast.”
“Randi’s coming?” Mr. Mock’s face lit up. He liked Randi. In the designer living room, at the sound of the inappropriately mannish, she thought, name, Mrs. Mock wrinkled her nose.
GUY IS A DERVISH today. The phone, the car, the knocking on doors, the typewriter, the tape recorder: All this industry should have him flat on his back moaning for ice and Darvon and a deep-tissue massage of the variety that tends, in his experience, to lead to intercourse and the sort of acute, spirit-wringing orgasm he would feel compelled to note in a journal, if only he kept a journal. Instead, manic, he smokes a joint, feeling the air around him in the kitchen. It presses in on him, weighty. Vibes in here. There’d been an argument, of course. Here I am just getting it together here and you want me to head back to New York indefinitely? And so on. Randi is usually pretty pliant but he senses that in this case he’s run up against the limits of her patience.
It still isn’t exactly a question of will-she-or-won’t-she, but he’ll have to find a way to “make it up to” her. As he’s promised so many times.
In the meantime, though, he is on this energy jag that he finds just exhilarating. Just to have been able to put an end to the “discussion” with Randi — she remained unsatisfied, he could tell, as he backed out of the room, hands raised in the air as if she were an armed bandit — just to have managed that was a minor accomplishment of a kind.
Oh, the methodically thrown plates that had zipped across the room the day that shouted name, Erica Dyson, had hovered, charging the air between them, becoming taboo evermore. Shards of china progressively filled the checkerboard spaces of the kitchen linoleum, skidding across them, coming to rest in the corners. When finally one had ricocheted, breaking the rhythm, to strike him just above the left eye, there had been instead of pain the feeling of awakening from a dream.