“Sure. You’re fine.”
I made my way to the cash registers. I paid the bill to a made-up girl who bit her nails. I smiled at her, waiting for the change. She didn’t react. I was the five-thousandth guy who’d smiled at her like that since the beginning of the week. I got my money and split. In spite of everything, the sun was still shining when I came out. It was a good thing, too. If there’s one thing I hate it’s being abandoned by everybody at the same time.
Betty was waiting for me. She was sitting on the hood of the car like in the fifties. I couldn’t remember what shape car hoods must have been in during those years, but it served them right. And I didn’t care. I didn’t want her crumpling the metal. If we paid a little attention, we could make the car last till the year 2ooo. Fifties, my ass. I wasn’t about to start wearing pleated pants big enough for three people, with suspenders that make them ride up your nuts.
“Been waiting long?” I asked.
“No, just warming my buns.”
“Try not to scratch the paint job getting down. The guy at the garage just polished it…”
She said she wanted to drive. I gave her the keys and put the things in the trunk, reveling in the warm air, momentarily transfixed in space by the supernatural stillness of things-their intensity. I grabbed a package of spaghetti and heard it all break in my hand, like glass, but I didn’t kid myself-who ever heard of a guy getting touched by grace in a shopping center parking lot, especially with a girl drumming her fingers on the steering wheel and fifty-seven bottles of things left to unload from the shopping cart, beer included?
I sat next to her and smiled. She jammed the motor a little before getting it started. I opened my window. I lit a cigarette. I put my glasses on. I leaned forward to turn on some music. We started down a long street, the sun slamming through the wind shield. Betty was like a golden statue with half-closed eyes. Guys were stopping on the sidewalk to watch us go by, cruising at twenty miles per hour. What did they know, the poor fools where were they at? I let the air run over my arm-it was almost warm. The radio played nontoxic music. It was all so rare that I took it for a sign. I thought that the moment had come at last, that we were going to make up with each other there in the car, and finish the trip laughing. At first I had actually thought there were birds in the shopping center, no fooling.
I took some of her hair from the headrest and played with it.
“It’d really be dumb if you kept pouting all day…”
I’d already seen this scene in
“Hey, you hear me?”
No response. I was wrong. I’d been fooled by a ray of sunshine and a light breeze. I’d been a chump. The last words fell from my mouth like stale candy. It must have been around four o’clock. There were no cars in front of us. I was feeling understandably edgy. After the business in the shopping center, was it too much to ask that she give it a rest? There was an intersection with a green light on the other side. It had been green for quite a while- an eternity, I’d say. By the time we went through, it was bright red.
So she went through a red light without batting an eye. So I told her that if she kept that up we could walk home, and so that’s where we left off. I waited there resolutely. She got out of the car and held the door open as if it were me who had screwed up. “I am not getting back in this car,” she said.
“No kidding,” I said.
I slid over behind the wheel. She crossed the curb to the sidewalk. I put it in gear and took off up the street.
After a few minutes, I realized I was in no hurry. I made a detour over to the garage. The guy was sitting at his desk with his legs crossed, hidden behind a newspaper. I knew him, he owned the place. It was he who had sold me the Mercedes. It was nice out, it smelled like spring. There was an open pack of gum on his desk-a brand I liked.
“Hello,” I said. “Could you check the oil, when you have a minute…?”
I was trying to read the headlines upside down, when the newspaper crumpled, and suddenly there was his fat head. His head was much bigger than normal-half again as big, you get the picture. I wondered where he went to buy glasses.
“Jesus Christ… WHY???” he said.
“Well, don’t want to get low…”
“But this is the fifth time you’ve been here in the last few days, and every time we check it it’s full-I’m not joking, you know-it’s not down one drop. Now are you going to come here every day and drive me nuts? I told you, the car does not
“Okay, this’ll be the last time. But I want to make sure,” I said. “Listen, understand something: selling cars like this at prices like that is not what’s going to set me up for life. I have more important things to do. You follow?”
I threw him a bone:
“Okay, I’ll come back and get it changed at fifteen hundred,” I said. He sighed, the asshole. What could I do if the world worked like that? You don’t lose a drop for a few days, then one morning the car hemorrhages all over the street. He called over to a bright looking guy with a sprinkling can.
“Hey, you. Drop that and go check the oil in the Mercedes.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Don’t worry, the level’s line, but the customer isn’t. Go look at it carefully. Check it out in full sunlight. Wipe it off and put it in again, and make absolutely sure that the level is up there between the two little marks. Make sure that you both agree before you put the thing back in.”
“Thanks. I’ll feel better,” I said. “Mind if I take a piece of gum?”
I went out to the car with the junior mechanic to open the hood. I showed him where the gauge was.
“This is the car of my dreams,” he said. “The boss doesn’t understand.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Never trust anybody over forty.”
A little way up the road, I stopped for a drink. As I was getting ready to pay, the article about Betty and the paint-bombs fell out of my wallet. I asked the bartender for another drink. Later, I stopped in front of a newsstand. I looked at all the headlines, one by one. I was drunk. I bought some rag that was about cooking, and another one that wasn’t.
In my travels I’d gotten far away from the house. I found myself in a part of town I didn’t know. I drove slowly. I was almost at the edge of town when I realized that the sun was setting. I started home calmly. Night had one foot on the ground by the time I pulled up in front of the pianos. It had fallen suddenly. It was an eerie night-a night I wasn’t going to forget.
It was simple. When I walked in she was there in front of the TV, eating a bowl of cereal, with a cigarette in her hand. It smelled of tobacco. It smelled of sulfur.
There were three obligatory-girls-with-feathers dancing on TV, and a guy braying into a microphone- something exotic and mushy. I noted how it did not at all go with the tension that reigned in the room. I was not, after all, strolling along a deserted beach in the third world, with miles of fine sand on either side of a hotel terrace, and a bartender making me a special cocktail with curacao in the shade. No, I was merely on the second floor of a house, with a girl who had swallowed fire, and it was night. Things took a turn for the worse right away. All I did was go into the kitchen, lowering the sound on the television on my way. I had barely opened the refrigerator when the thing started booming.
After that it was the usual story-nothing too original this time. I drank my beer and threw the can hard into the wastebasket to set the mood. Who would be crazy enough to think you can live with a girl like that without incident? Who’d want to deny that such things are necessary?
We had already attained an honorable state-a few lingering lightning bolts in our eyes, the kitchen door swinging open and slamming shut-and for my part I would have been happy to stop there. My comebacks were losing their punch, and the temperature was stabilizing. I was ready to settle for a tie game, if it would keep us from having to go into extra innings.
I have never been able to explain certain of the things she did. I have never understood them either, thus
