The Spark and the Drive (27 page)

35.

“There’s a stolen Mustang, license number 7-1-5-G-L-E, at 161 Cooke. Look in the garage.” In the parking lot of Burger King, I said it in a deep voice with a rural drawl, and then like a New Yorker, and then like a Brit. Burning in my front pocket was the number for the Waterbury police department, and since I didn’t know if they traced incoming calls (my research had yielded only that grand theft auto landed you one to five in real jail time) I planned to make the call from the pay phone on the sidewalk when I finished eating.

I forced down one French fry at a time and was still partially outside my body, catching myself staring curiously at what my fingers were doing.

Bobby would hate me; that was a fact I needed to live with. I’d say I must’ve mentioned it all to Nick, even where the key was. Bobby would either think I was a jackass or he’d think I was much worse. But what was he going to do? He couldn’t save Nick without incriminating himself. I tried not to care as my intestines kinked and cramped, and then I was across the lot and inside the restaurant men’s room, landing on the seat just in time.

I was in there for fifteen minutes. I felt weak, the way even mild sickness can seem like a punishment, can make you wonder what kind of person you are at heart. What you deserve and don’t deserve, the karma you create. I remembered the look of puzzlement when Nick had a car come back, as if he didn’t recognize where he was. That was the expression I saw when they led him in handcuffs down an echoing hallway, that was his face—not even suspecting me, not bearing hatred for anyone except himself—as he sat on his bunk locked away somewhere. When he got out and Mary Ann was gone and his shop was gone, he’d be the disheveled, unshaven bum on the sidewalk, sitting in the park, standing at the rail of the bridge, old and mute at forty, nothing running through his mind but the constant-loop movie of what went wrong.

I couldn’t do it. He deserved whatever he deserved, but it wasn’t this.

Tomorrow morning early, before work, I’d come to the house and tell him. I’d say I was jealous of him and Rod, which was half true, and leave Mary Ann out of it. We’d get rid of the car somewhere. Wipe it down. I’d make sure to wipe it all down.

But Christ, I couldn’t wait. What if tonight was the night Mary Ann let him go in the garage again? Why wouldn’t he call the cops, who would then find his prints on the wheel and shifter and wonder why he was lying about not having driven the car?

It was full dark when I left Burger King. Daylight savings time was next weekend, after which night would come on before five. I looked at the dim blue clock numbers on the radio. They’d be done with dinner. Maybe I could signal to Nick in the window, and Mary Ann would never have to know.

I parked in the street so they wouldn’t see my headlights. The light was off in the kitchen and I went around to the window I’d looked in before, its buttery light casting a long rectangle on the driveway. Nick was alone on the futon, and I glanced back to make sure the Nova was there beside his car. It was. She was somewhere in the house.

I could see Nick pretty well from my angle. In the soft light of the overhead fixture his face was sunken and loose as he leaned over a legal pad on the coffee table, working something out with a pencil. I saw a flash of the picture when he held it up, some kind of a Venn diagram it looked like. Suddenly and in one deft motion he leaned forward and pushed the legal pad under the couch. He must’ve heard something I couldn’t, with the street sounds and, farther off, the highway sounds. And then he stood up and looked directly at me. I ducked down. I’d lost my focus watching him and wasn’t ready to speak. I closed my eyes for a few moments, and then whispered what I was going to say.

The familiar blue flickering appeared on the side of the garage, and I could hear TV voices. I don’t know how long I waited, but my toes were starting to tingle. I straightened, and at the exact second I looked in the window, Mary Ann appeared in the hallway parallel to the futon.

Her hair was wet and combed straight back, and she wore only a towel wrapped around it, which she held with her hands crossed over her chest. She stopped at the threshold, looked at Nick, at the TV, at Nick again. He hadn’t seen her yet, and her look, as she watched him, seemed uneasy, brooding. She blinked slowly, her eyes made up with liner and shadow, and then she swallowed and drew a long breath. “Here I am,” she said, the exact words she’d said to me from my bed, and she smiled what seemed a brave smile. When Nick turned to her she let go of the towel and stepped toward him.

And, oh, her body, pink from the heat of the shower. The twin moles, the deep navel, the curveless, girlish hips and thighs. Around her neck she wore a silver chain from which a small blue stone, a sapphire, hung over the valley between her breasts, where I’d never seen jewelry before, and she had trimmed her pubic hair to almost nothing for him, a stripe down the center. The glass between us and the distance made her seem like a version of herself, a lookalike whom I could touch no more than I could a woman in a photograph.

Nick had fallen back against the futon, and she took the remote control from his thigh and turned off the TV. She tossed the remote to the side and straddled his legs as she reached down—it all happened in one continuous motion—to hold his face on either side with her open hands, forcing him to look into her eyes as she had never had to force me, and kissing him. His arms thrown back, one hand compressed the corner of the futon mattress as if it were only a towel, but she was determined and he went limp in the kiss, letting go of the mattress corner, which sprang back to shape, and finally lifting his hand to her waist.

I watched without a specific emotion but with all emotions, frozen and pulsing, consumed. She was holding his face and kissing him from one angle and then another; his big rough hand on her waist was softening, patting, caressing. His legs unbent and slid forward. She drew back and began to speak words I couldn’t hear but that I knew were about the love I’d tried to make myself believe no longer existed, never existed.

Then he turned his head and started pushing her away, lightly at first, but his eyes became wide, the way they do when you sense danger in the dark and are trying to see it. She brought her face to his ear and spoke to him, and I saw her hand reach down between her legs, between his, and Nick tried to stand. He pushed against the back of the futon, which tipped a few inches into the wall, and Mary Ann yelled, “No!” and wrapped her arms around his neck.

Nick stood despite her weight and was only handicapped from a normal stride by her legs holding around his waist and her feet pushing into the backs of his thighs. He took a few steps toward me before he swung around and folded forward over the futon, holding himself by the back frame. But she wouldn’t let go. Her face was buried in his collarbone. With one hand he pried her arms off, and as she was falling she tore out his hair and he jumped back.

He stumbled, rubbing his head, and at the bookshelf he grabbed a little car, a metal model of the 1905 Olds Runabout, the first American production car, and he threw it at the framed picture of Cape Blanco Lighthouse, where they had been married. The little car splintered the glass, but somehow the picture didn’t fall.

“Look at me,” Mary Ann was saying. She got off the futon staring at him, and then stepping toward him as in a crime drama.
Please just hand me the gun.

“You don’t get to hate me, Nick. Look at me. What did I do wrong?”

Before she could reach him, Nick grabbed a ceramic bowl from the shelf and hurled it at the opposite wall. And she kept coming. He pulled the shelf over so that it fell between them, so that it crashed and exploded and shook the house—I felt it with my face against the siding.

She backed away, shaking her head. “What did I do?” She collapsed on the futon. Nick left the room. “What did I do?” Mary Ann called, rocking side to side, knees balled up to her chest. Had he hit her? Had I somehow missed that?

The kitchen door pulled open ten yards away and I fell back into a rhododendron bush. Nick came out, trying to light a cigarette with matches. He ripped off three or four and cupped the small torch, walking the whole time toward his car. I watched him from my cover. I was a coward, nothing compelled me from the heart. He dropped into the driver’s seat, and the outline of his dark head nodded and shook. Then the high whirr of the starter on a strong battery, the rumble from the tailpipes, and I started ripping out the sausage leaves of the rhododendron and kicking at the gravel. I came out as he was backing up. In the street he didn’t pull away—he’d seen my car and wasn’t moving. I ran down the driveway.

When I was in his passenger seat he rolled the car forward and banged into the curb. He slapped the shifter back and forth in neutral. All he could say was, “What? What?” He rolled down his window and threw out the cigarette. “Sometimes … you’re here. I don’t know if I’m awake sometimes.”

“You’re awake. Trust me.”

He looked back at the house, then at the park, where there was no sound, as if he were on some drug that heightened or distorted his senses. He was holding his stomach. “She wants a baby again,” he said. “I can’t. I should have told her I can’t. But you’re here now. I don’t know why you’re here.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. I could see that he was nearing a place where the possible becomes unlimited, where the laws of nature don’t hold. I tried to steer him back.

“You could’ve broken her foot with that bookshelf,” I said.

He leaned forward and the gauges cast his face in a red glow. He didn’t ask how I knew, how I’d seen it. He was breathing hard, and he leaned back against the seat. A car started somewhere on the street behind us. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then glanced quickly over as if he expected me to have vanished.

“Can you go see how she is?” he said.

I stared at him. “Me?”

As if the sound of the idling engine was more than he could bear, he lurched and shut it off. “She never wanted to come out here,” he said. “She said it’s not our kind of people. I said don’t worry about the people. But that was wrong. We should have. She should be with people.”

“But you didn’t tell her that,” I said, looking for my courage. Everything was going to come out tonight. “You can tell me, but not her.”

“Every day I think she’s going to ask why. How I could do that. That night she got rid of her car, I thought maybe you two talked about it. I thought she was going to leave me.”

“She gave up on you,” I said, looking down at the floorboards.

“She should.”

“She loves me,” I said. “We’re in love.” The words gave me a hot jolt of legitimacy. White noise came from inside my head in a finale of flashing neurons, any emotion possible from the great stew, until I looked up and found him watching me. His mouth hung open. “You mean you were together?” he said.

Before I said yes I began to say again that we were in love, but Nick looked as if he had turned off every thought in his mind waiting for my response. He had to have known. That’s what I realized I believed. It was impossible for him not to know, and yet he didn’t. “Yes,” I said.

I thought he might say my name, certain that if he did I would start to cry. But he gave only a weak, mechanical nod. After a moment he covered his mouth with the back of his hand.

“But she’s happy?” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s good,” he said. “You two. I don’t … How long?”

“Since July.”

“This whole time.” He leaned against his window, looking up at the dim city sky. He was sanctified by his inability to imagine such a betrayal, and I had to look away from him again. A hundred yards ahead of us the narrowing street ended in sodium arc light over a chain-link fence. Under the dark silhouettes of trees there was movement in the shadows, this park in the disguise of country, but it wasn’t country. It was dangerous with people. I stared at a pair of sneakers hanging from the phone lines.

“She should be in love,” Nick said. He was grinning when I looked back at him. “I’m glad she is,” he said. Amazingly he started to laugh, uneven spits of laughter at first, like the sputter of a cold engine, but then warming into the easy laugh of last summer when we’d run our cars into each other at the lights. More than a year ago. Only a year ago. “She seemed happy again,” he said. “Does she laugh?”

“All the time, Nick.”

“And April,” he said. “She brings home the crayon pictures. She has you and April now.” He smiled and breathed as he leaned back again in his seat. About tonight, her seducing him, I thought to explain that she must’ve been a little out of her mind. Thinking it was a different time. Understandable with all the changes. But I only got as far as telling it to myself, trying to believe it myself, because Nick didn’t seem bothered by the inconsistency. Suddenly he reached over and grabbed me around the shoulder. He pulled me into him and kissed me on top of the head. Then he hugged me and let me go.

“Let’s go talk to her,” I said.

“You go. I’ll leave you two alone. No, okay. Yeah. Tell her I’m happy about it. I’m happy for both of you.”

We sat there quietly for a few minutes. Just before I opened my door he said, “You know what I’d think sometimes? What made me feel better? I’d think what if Joey had turned out like you.”

*   *   *

The house was warm inside (it occurred to me later that she’d arranged their lovemaking right down to setting the thermostat), and I heard it as soon as the kitchen door clicked shut. One low droning pitch from the back of the house, a high stutter when she gasped for breath and then the enduring moan.

In the living room I stepped over the toppled books and mementos, already smelling her blends, cinnamon, lavender, frankincense, her potions. I picked up the towel where it had fallen off her body and put it to my face.

I took a few light steps into the hallway and listened to her moan that same note, broken only by her stuffed inhales; I began to hear a stretched-out word—“no,” or “don’t”—and it took some daring to walk farther down the hall.

The bedroom door was open. Mary Ann was on her side and curled, fetal, humming and sniffing, and, closing my eyes, I breathed her in. I saw her coming to Nick as she had never come to me, her eyes filled with yearning and fear, so determined, hungry, and insistent, so sexy. I could smell the clove now. The cypress and rose.