Underworld (74 page)

Then the lights went out. Just like that. The spotlight, the bar lights, the exit signs—all out, A vague shape, Lenny's, could be seen moving sort of experimentally toward the large metal door that opened directly onto the street and the customers up front might have heard him muttering, “Return to seat, return to seat.”

A rustle in the audience, a few heads turning, several people standing uncertainly. Were they thinking maybe this is it, a bomb, an airburst? Didn't the electromagnetic pulse from a test shot in the Pacific send massive currents surging through power lines in Honolulu, only recently, blowing out lights and setting off burglar alarms all over the island?

The lights came on. The spotlight shone on an empty stage. The field-stone wall had never looked more naked and fake. And there was Lenny, standing about a yard and a half from the exit. He came walking slowly stageward, mimicking a person sneaking back into a room, relieved and abashed, and they waited for him to say something that would pay off the long tense moment and shake them with laughter and he reached the stage and lifted the dangling mike and put it to his face and it began to screech and crackle and then the lights went out again and the afterimage of Lenny's tallowy face stuck to every retina in the house, half a scared smirk across his mouth, and the baby started crying.

When the lights came back on, a twenty-second lifetime later, the stage was empty, the metal door was ajar, the show was evidently over.

There were weeks went by when we barely slept. We were together every hour of the day and night for three or four weeks, much of it,
most of it in her car, eating and sleeping there, having sex in her car, sleeping and waking up and looking around and it was still dark, or still light, depending, and finally we'd stop driving for one reason or another, logical or not, and life'd slow down enough so things could happen normally in rooms but only until it was time to go again and she'd rumble up in the 1950 Merc, chassis lowered and driveline slightly souped, and we were headed west again.

“Don't tell me your dreams,” I said.

“But you have to hear.”

“I don't want to hear.”

“Oh you bastard, you have to hear,” Amy said, “because everything that happens has to happen to both of us.”

“Don't you know people don't want to hear other people's dreams?”

“Oh you bastard, what other people? Who are these other people?”

“Watch the road.”

“Every smallest thought we said we'd share.”

“Watch the road. Drive the car,” I told her.

And once I dropped her off in Santa Fe, where she had family friends, and kept the car myself and didn't play the radio or read the newspaper and she caught up with me a week later in a miners' bar in Bisbee, Arizona and we played a flirty game of liar's poker and climbed the high tight streets and felt a thing so powerful, and knew the other felt it, that we thought our faces might ignite.

“It was a mountain dream. A high clear place near a lake.”

“Don't you know dreams are only interesting to the dreamer?”

“Think you're so worldly-wise. You're awful smart for a foreigner.”

“Drive the car.”

“Who only learned English when he left New York.”

Amy was tall and competent and looked good in jeans. She knew how to do things and make things and even her good looks were competent, a straightforward sort of ableness, open and clear-eyed, with a smatter of fading freckles and a dirty-minded smile.

And once we were in Yankton, South Dakota, early on that summer, and the movie theater was just letting out, the Dakota it was called, with a bright tile facade and Audie Murphy on the marquee, and the
young people of Yankton got in their cars and drove up and down the main drag and we drove with them, nearly falling asleep, and we went to drive-in movies and talked about life and we rode across prairies and talked about movies and we drove through car washes and read poetry aloud, one of us to the other, and soapy water slid down the windows.

Her car was black and hooded-looking and we thought we were phantoms of the road, djinns who could pee unseen in the country dust. She didn't want me to know her father had given her the car. A graduation gift. But this was a thing I knew because one of her brothers had told me and the other thing I knew was that she'd drop me cold when the trip was done.

“You know what's interesting about you? You say you want to share the smallest thought. But what's interesting about you,” I said, “is that you're going to forget everything we said and everything we did and every thought we shared the minute.”

“No.”

“The minute.”

“No.”

“The minute we say goodbye. Because you know what you are? A practical hardheaded more or less calculating individual who is planning ten years ahead and knows every passing minute for what it is.”

“What is it?”

“A thing you drain every drop of juice from so you can forget it in the morning.”

And once we stopped at some stables and she tried to teach me to ride but I got up there and got down again and would not get back up and she rode off with the Indian who led the expeditions, into the cool hills.

She said, “What's wrong with that?”

“I'm just talking.”

She said, “Draining every minute. What's wrong with that?”

“I'm talking.”

“And I haven't told you everything. So don't accuse,” she said.

“You've told me everything twice.”

“You are such a bastard.”

“Tell me things you haven't told me. Go ahead. Shock me,” I said. “You're not shocking me.”

She could make and fix things and she liked to talk about the Brookhiser family, the grandparents and pioneer women and gold-panners and all the far-flung offspring of the old rugged stock.

And once we stayed with her oldest brother, an architect, sleeping in separate rooms—she seemed to have brothers everywhere. This one lived near Yuma in a lopsided house he'd built himself, skewed for effect, out of railroad ties and stucco and stamped tin, and Amy was in an elevated state, looking sideways at the place.

We were partly out of our minds from driving and we talked at each other across half a major state, pretty much nonstop, and we had the chemistry of a whole long brutal marriage compressed into weeks, the twang in the air of a thing that stays unadjusted, and we also had the feeling it was wrong to sleep because we could be saying something awful and important.

And once we drove along a dirt road somewhere near Ruby, Arizona and saw four men on horseback driving a bull, a humped bull of amazing size, nearly unreal, and we stopped not only to watch and not only because we thought the animal might charge a moving car but out of a strange and pagan respect, an animal so awesome, a Brahma bull, and the cowboys waved and drove the bull down the red dirt road.

“I have these tantrums in my mind,” she said, “where you'd hate me if I told you these raging throwing things of sex and jealousy and spite and wishing the worst kind of pain and slow death on someone who is close.”

“Tell me.”

“I won't tell you. Not even you. Least of all you.”

“I want you to tell me.”

“I won't unless you make me,” she said

Amy had a danceaway manner at times. She had a ritual thing she did, a reflex, not coy but wary and foxy, pulling away from me the more she showed a need, dancing away, eyes bright, her shoulder rounding against my approach. She could be skittish even in the midst of the act, close to pretending we weren't doing this but something else entirely, I don't know, holding hands in a school corridor
maybe, and sometimes she turned me down flat, saying, No you can't, or, No I won't, even as we sprawled on the seat screwing.

I thought our faces might flare up and disappear the night in mid-June when we climbed the narrow stepped streets of Bisbee, Arizona, shocked by love, sort of self-erased, after a beer and a sandwich in a dark bar filled with copper miners and their heartworm dogs. I didn't know it was possible to feel a thing like this, and then to feel it together, our heads half blown away and our minds emptied out, lost to everything but love.

She said, “I know what you do. You stay awake and watch me when I sleep.”

“When do you sleep?”

“You want too much. You want to crawl inside me basically. You want to follow your cock right in. Did it ever occur to me?”

“Drive the car.”

“No but did it ever occur to me?”

“Don't look at me when you drive.”

“No but did it ever occur to me that I would know a man someday who tries to follow me into the bathroom?”

“Drive the car.”

She said, “You wanted to crowd into the gas station toilet with me. I just remembered. I almost forgot. Because you thought you might miss something.”

And once we were passing through Bakersfield, California and the car overheated and we stopped for water at a trailer camp and this was something I absolutely did not know about. All these rows of trailer homes with people cooking hot dogs in a hundred and seven heat. A woman in a bathing suit ironing clothes on an ironing board outside her trailer with small kids riding tricycles in their underwear. And this was a thing I did not know existed, absolutely, or could ever conceive, a thing I had completely missed, people living permanently in trailers, and Amy called me a foreigner from New York.

I was going to Palo Alto, a textbook editor, fledgling, with an outfit determined to change the nature of the classroom, make it open, fluid, casual and Californian, and she was heading up to Seattle or Portland, she wasn't sure which, or back across to Denver with a master's
in earth science and a number of professional connections she wasn't letting on to.

“I don't know what I'm doing here with you. I don't know anything about you. All this time and all this talk and I don't know anything about you, basically,” she said, “except for the fact that you know how to make me mad.”

“Good. It's good for you. Getting mad cleans the blood,” I told her. “According to my Irish mother.”

“You have a mother. This is encouraging.”

“Get mad. Be mad,” I told her.

I didn't want her looking at me while she drove but sometimes I looked at her and invited a look back.

“I want everything that happens to happen to both of us,” she said.

“So do I,” I said, and meant it, at the time, truly.

She felt the weight of the gaze and looked across at me on the empty road with a mountain of lavender tailings rising above the old sheds that marked a mineworks and it was a look so intimate and reaching, so deep in things we'd done that it became a crazy kind of dare, a form of drag-strip chicken—which one of us would break the lovers' gaze and look away first to see if the car had wandered into the eastbound lane, with a shiny-eye pickup approaching, half a second from dazzling death.

“Who's strange?” I said.

“You stay awake and watch me when I sleep. I know you do. I feel it in my sleep.”

“I'm strange or you're strange?”

“You followed me into a ladies' room.”

“No, wait wait wait wait. You can feel me watching you while you sleep and you think I'm strange? Who's strange?” I said.

And there were times when you detached yourself from the steepest breathing, even, and felt a kind of white shadow, a sliding away into a parallel person, someone made of mind-light who seemed to speak for you.

Or, “You can't make me do this,” she'd say, running her hand up the seam of my fly, and I'm trying to drive the car.

And once when I was alone for a day and a night, not playing the
radio or reading the newspaper and driving around aimlessly for hours, I finally stopped and parked and took a walk in a picnic grounds where there were white-barked trees and garbage cans for food scraps and a man who looked disturbed sitting on a bench, outside Fresno somewhere, but maybe he was only deep in thought, or worried about something, and I felt a sadness I could not exactly locate, a feeling that could have been mine or could have been theirs, the little families with food on paper plates, the unhappy man slouched on the bench, the place itself, the bench itself, the trash cans that didn't have lids.

I bought a postcard to send her after she went her way and I went mine, a card that showed a picnic table in the trees, and I slipped it in a book inside my bag until I had time to figure out what kind of message I would write.

The first man stood by the window of his stately suite at the Waldorf. He watched the yellow cabs sink into soulful dusk, that particular spendthrift light that falls dyingly on Park Avenue in the hour before people take leave of the office and become husbands and wives again, or whatever people become in whatever murmurous words when evenings grow swift and whispered.

The second man sat on the sofa, legs crossed, looking at Bureau reports.

Edgar said, “Of course you packed the masks.”

The second man nodded yes, a gesture that went unseen.

“Junior, the masks.”

“We have them, yes. I'm looking at a security memo that's a little, actually, rankling.”

“I don't want to hear it. File it somewhere. I feel too good.”

“Protest. Outside the Plaza tonight.”

“What is it the bastards are protesting? Pray tell,” Edgar said in a
tone he'd perfected through the years, a tight amusement etched in eleven kinds of irony.

“The war, it seems.”

“The war.”

“Yes, that,” the second man said.

They were staying at the Waldorf, which was J. Edgar Hoover's hotel of choice during his sojourns in New York, but the party was taking place, the ball, the fête, the social event of the season, the decade, the half century no doubt—the ball was in the ballroom at the Plaza.