Truck (17 page)

 

I was going to grab a cab for the airport, but several people have recommended that I reserve car service. A cab is cheaper, as I understand it, but if you get caught in traffic, or get a navigationally impaired cabbie, you may find yourself stuck with a prodigious bill. With a car service, you pay a set fee no matter how long it takes, and you can be confident that the driver knows the best route to the airport. So I make my reservation, requesting the simplest and cheapest vehicle, which in most cases is a plain black Lincoln Town Car.

I am waiting in the lobby when a driver appears and calls my name. Grabbing my shoulder bag and carry-on, I follow him out the doors. A gigantic white stretch limousine is double-parked and blocking the street.
I look ahead of it and behind it. No Town Car. The driver is popping the limo trunk, and now he is waving me over. I look at him with some confusion, but he beckons for my luggage, so I let him take it. As he draws open the passenger door and steps aside to usher me in, I shoot a look over my shoulder. A small crowd of tourists—all their luggage tagged by the same tour operator—is staring at me. As per usual, I am unshaven and wearing togs to match. I wanted to tell them, “Hey, I didn't ask for this…” But then I remember the Monkey Bar, and straighten up a little. Pay attention, folks, I am Possibly Famous.

I've never been in a limousine before, not even for prom. Very early in my writing career, I wrote an essay about the pretentiousness of limos and those who use them. And now here I am, pulling away from the proles in who-knows-how-many-feet of polish and chrome. How much am I paying for this? I wonder. From his seat one football field distant, the driver must have looked in the mirror and seen the look on my face. “Same price!” he says. “Same price!” I can't understand his accent perfectly, but I scoot up front to hear him better through the little window, and from what I can gather, the driver of my original car took ill and the company couldn't find a replacement in time. This limo was nearby and available, so they sent it.

Well, there you go, I think. This will make a great little story for the folks back home. I journey back across the football field and settle in. The driver's cell phone rings, and while he takes the call, I run my hand over the leather seat and stare out through the smoked windows at Manhattan in the rain.

Now the driver is speaking to me again. Telling me we must return to the hotel. Again, I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but he is saying something about someone else calling, about them renting the limo “for ten hours!” He is beaming. And why not. He takes a left, and then another left at Columbus Circle, and then we pull right back up to the hotel, where a standard black Lincoln now waits at the curb. Eight blocks and maybe three minutes after my grand departure, and of course the tourists are still there.
Downgrade!
they are thinking, as the Mystery Celebrity is hustled out of the limo to the waiting Lincoln. “Well, that was a quick trip,” says the bellhop, raising one eyebrow.

 

Back in New Auburn, I knock around like the bachelor I still technically am. My first night back, I go to the kitchen to make coffee before settling in to write awhile. I punch the button on the CD player and listen to Greg Brown sing “Steady Love” as I'm spooning out the beans. Anneliese bought the album after we went to the concert up in Bayfield. If you're going to be a bachelor, it's good to grind your own coffee and know a girl in Colorado loves you. I write until 2:30
A.M.
, when the fire department pager goes off and we drive through warm fog to a trailer house where an elderly woman gasps for air. We put the oxygen on, hold her hand, calm her, wait for the ambulance like we always do, and then it's back to the hall, where four of us including Bob the One-Eyed Beagle sit and tell Snook stories, one after the other, cuss words and all, until 4:30
A.M.
, when Bob has to go cut up beef.

I sleep a couple of hours, but am up at 8
A.M.
doing laundry. When you have lived alone as long as I have, you develop some systems, and I am especially proud of my efforts to streamline wash day. It begins with the aforementioned Kmart socks. You may buy them at the discount store of your choice, but always make sure you get the ones that come packed six to a plastic bag, always buy the same style (I go crew-length), and always—this is critical—buy them in nothing but gray. By maintaining a strict sock monoculture, you eliminate the need for postwash sorting and can cram them all into the same plastic crate. In a rush? Grab any two socks from the crate and you are guaranteed a pair. The gray sock credo also eliminates the need for prewash sorting, as their standard grayness means I can safely wash them in the color load. Which is the only kind of load I ever have because I keep my closet clear of all whites, lights, and “bleeders” such as your reds and your maroons. A load is a load is a load. I call this my Unified Laundry Theory and you are welcome to it.

After hanging the last batch of wet clothes on the line strung between the back of my garage and the big maple by the alley, I peruse the raised beds. I have two big peony bushes out back, and by this time in July the leaves remain deep green but the flowers have pretty much had it. A few white petals cling, but the rest are just so much wilted brown crepe
paper. This is why I don't care much for flowers. I like green things. Green is cool. Green is calming. Green hangs in there. V. S. Naipaul—whom I have read keeps an all-green garden—has been quoted as saying, “I feel if I wanted to see flowers, I could just take a bus ride and in front of every house there would be a series of shocking colours.” Yessir. I keep the peonies because my mom had bushes that bloomed deep red and purple beside the steps of our white clapboard milk house and the scent takes me back, but that fond dalliance is quickly swamped by an overwhelming evocation of frumpy church ladies and their mysterious supertanker bosoms.

I pick a bundle of greens and, after washing them up in the house, make a salad with olive oil, canned tuna, diced black olives, fresh ground pepper, and a dash of white wine vinegar infused with chive blossoms picked from beneath the front porch window. Halfway through the salad I am thinking I might have gotten into the weeds some, because the back of my throat starts burning and eventually becomes downright uncomfortable. I keep waiting for myself to swell up or retch like a dog, but nothing really happens and half an hour later the discomfort is fading although my uvula still tickles. Boy, you just never know where the day is headed.

 

Before leaving for Colorado, I get over to Mark's shop just once and don't get much done other than to stare at the truck and ponder the way the light plays off the ground sheet metal. There is still a lot of grinding to be done. Mark is excited because while I was gone he went looking for a part in a local junkyard and stumbled on an International with a cab that looked just like mine. The ornamental lettering said
L-180
but the spec plate inside the cab said
L-112
. International and their sixty-six configurations of the L-Line—sometimes I think they themselves got confused. He said it was pretty shot but the fenders and grille looked decent, and he thought we could rob some parts off it. From what I can tell from my old books, the L-112 cab is the same as my L-120 and the L-180 looks similar, too, so I tell him it'll probably work. He says he's going to give it another look, take some measurements, and let me know.

 

Colorado could have been trouble. In Colorado I put myself face-to-face with the past, not out of some sweet longing, but as a necessary step of knowing Anneliese and Amy. Anneliese lived in Colorado for two years. This is where she studied for her master's degree, this is where she met Amy's father, this is where Amy was born. Apart from my misgivings about meeting Amy's father, I knew our visits with Anneliese's college friends would be laced with reminders that I was being written into a preexisting story line. In this respect, old friends always have the upper hand on new lovers. Three months of pillow talk do not supplant the ratty sweatpants of history. This is an issue not of speed but mileage. You wonder if you'll hit it off, you wonder how you're stacking up, you wonder if this chair in the coffee shop has been occupied by a previous object of affection. It is my pet theory that men are much more childish about this than women, or certainly I am. In my past roles as lover I have behaved in ways that left me accused (often rightly, sometimes wrongly, but always at cost) of blockheadedness, contradiction, and worse, but with each new relationship it always seemed to be I—not the woman—who went through a stage of obsessing over the past. Running little films of scenes I had neither right nor reason to conjure, and yet like the proverbial sore tooth revisiting them again and again. As if I could jump in and intervene. Sometimes it was all I could do not to remonstrate my partner for doing things I had done fourfold. Grievance is a sullen little boat, blown in the creepy breeze of ridiculous sighs.

We root around in the past because the future is unavailable. It is harmless enough, I think, at this point in my life, to stare at old truck advertisements and wish to be somewhere I cannot. To triangulate between the Hopper painting, the International ad, and the current state of my heart. We sort the past in an attempt to sort the present and anticipate the future. I am paying to put new paint on an old truck in part so that I may use it in the present, but I am also trying on some level to pick the lock on Hopper's quiet blue room. I buy copies of
Freezer Fancies
or
Prelude to Home Freezing
so I can gaze at Irma Harding for the fun of imagining all she was meant to project, but I am also catching a little
frisson off the pages of a cookbook that speaks to me from the kitchen of some fifty-odd years ago. Other people will pay $186.08 for a box of Irma Harding tin foil, $179.05 for an Irma Harding timer, and $87.55 for a flyer advertising Irma Harding freezer packaging supplies. I recently purchased an advertisement torn from a 1951 edition of the
Saturday Evening Post
. It features a picture of an L-model International pickup and text declaring, “What you pay isn't half as important as what you get.” The hope is that by inhabiting moments that are unavailable—because they are in the past or never existed at all—you will be arming yourself to recognize the real thing in real time. That you might recognize the moments you long for when they are happening.

The downside, of course, is that you can auger in. I say this as one who tends to wallow. In preparing for the Colorado trip, Anneliese and I have been quite naturally led to revisit our separate histories, comparing tote boards of regret. Anneliese is matter-of-fact in these matters, whereas I adopt the demeanor of a consumptive poet, heaving my chest weakly, construing all manner of mournful torment in what cannot be undone. When she has had enough, Anneliese speaks to me at a level I can understand, which is roughly Dr. Seuss:
We are what we are because of what was
. That is to say,
What you pay isn't half as important as what you get
. She is, of course, clearly stating the obvious, which by now I assume she realizes will be a regular requirement of hanging out with me.

Sometimes it is the future that calls out the past. In talking about what might be going on in Amy's little heart and head during the visit, I told Anneliese how I have come to love the little girl and tears sprang to her eyes with an immediacy that left me spooked. I thought about my young friend Adam waiting for me to take him fishing again, and the litany of my disappointed lovers, and I got sick with myself at the idea that I might be the alcoholic who says he has put the bottle down for good.

It was a relief then, that Colorado went just fine. I was able to assign faces to stories. I was able to meet several people who were at Anneliese's side in the difficult months surrounding Amy's birth. Amy's father, Dan, turns out to be a humorous and articulate fellow and although there was
potential for an episode of reality television, the six of us spent the bulk of the week under the same roof and we never once pelted each other with empty beer cans. On the third morning or so, I found myself alone at the breakfast table with Dan's wife, Marie, and we had our own little heart-to-heart based on the parallel elements of our respective roles. I remember leaving the table thinking, We can do this. It took time and hard work for Anneliese and Dan to reach this point—there were gaps, and both can claim their scars—but the result is that for six days, we all gathered at the same supper table, drawn together by a child who currently responds only when addressed as the great racing horse Seabiscuit. For the purpose of balancing all the happy talk, I should say that during a visit to the Denver Firefighters Museum, Amy went off on a fit the length and breadth of which deceived several eager museum patrons into thinking they had arrived late to a live reenactment of a historical five-alarm clanger.

 

I return from Colorado to find all the tomatoes in the backyard dead or shrunken. I stand there staring at them and think I should write a gardening book and call it,
I Know Why the Caged Tomato Sags
. The first year I planted tomatoes back here they went like gangbusters. Every year after, it seems half of them die. They roar up and get to a point where they look full and green, and then they develop this habit where by noon they wilt. If I jab holes in the ground and pour water to them, they come back, but it's short-lived. Someone told me it's a root ball problem, and someone else told me it's the black walnuts on the property line. I know black walnuts will kill tomatoes. But I had that one good year, and so I keep planting some back here. It seems like the cherry tomatoes survive better than the larger breeds.

The good news is, the tomatoes I planted in the new bed between the house and garage are steroidal in their abundance. My mom stopped by while I was gone and picked the ripe ones and left them on my porch. The plants are so huge they have tipped over and upended the wire cages. Must be the pig manure. I drive in stakes and tether the tomatoes to the stakes to hold them upright. With my usual penchant for overkill, I
planted cucumbers and beets in the new bed as well, and the cucumber vines are swarming the beets. I just don't get the concept.