Driver's Education (18 page)

I pedaled furiously. I stayed one hundred yards from the car, and I swerved around the few pools of light that did stream down to the street. When traffic approached in the opposite direction, I took to the sidewalk and dodged the oncoming beams. Twice I clipped the edge of a mailbox with my inside elbow, leaving bits of skin behind.

He took Beekman Avenue to North Broadway, and there, at one of the seven stoplights, he turned south. I thought for a brief instant that he'd spotted me; when the light turned green, he waited for a few seconds too long, the car choking as it idled in neutral. But then, a Ford that had pulled up behind him honked, and my father—and I—continued.

We followed North Broadway until it became South Broadway, below Benedict. The bike's pedals were moving so quickly, so furiously at this point that they seemed to take my legs with them, tying them and untying them into knots as they circled, requiring no effort from me, though still my knees and calves and thighs burned white. I threw on the brakes once—when the car lumbered onto the Tappan Zee Bridge—and I remember very vividly the bitter smell of rubber and the taste of salt just below my nose.

I stalked him still. Over the Hudson, which in the night looked like nothing but a ragged slash in the earth, and then into South Nyack. A mile north, directly across the river from the house where my mother died, he pulled into a lit parking lot on Remsen Street, a few yards from
where it intersected with Piermont. I maneuvered my bike into the row that ran parallel to the one in which he'd parked, and I ducked behind the high hood of a Chevrolet. Crouched on my haunches, I had a direct view of the interior of my father's car through the rear windshield.

He held the newspaper clippings he'd collected—the articles from cities in other states—up to the light. I remember that. The night was still oppressively hot, and sweat stung the corners of my eyes. I swatted absently at the bugs that circled above my head. I couldn't read the papers' actual copy, but I recognized the print when the light hit it. When it created shadows where he'd circle something in thick ink. He studied each one for the better part of a minute before folding it and setting it on the shotgun seat. When he finally stepped out of the car, he kept his hat on.

I hid behind one of the Chevy's rear wheels as he passed me. Though, looking back, I hardly think that was necessary: he walked with so much resolve, so much blind purpose, that I doubt he would've noticed me had I slammed my fist across his jaw. John Wayne in
The Longest Day
. I waited until the clack of his oxfords against the pavement grew faint; I crawled toward the front of the Chevy and spotted him as he slipped behind a red and blue sign, into a restaurant and bar called the Sandpiper.

For the next twenty minutes, I wrestled with myself; I sat on the ground and held my knees, my ass fixed to the pavement. I refused to believe that such a simple explanation had existed for the past six-odd years; that this all came down to an antitwist, an anticlimax, to a
bar
. Some winged insect landed on the tip of my nose and I considered: what of the longer absences? The stretches that didn't last for a night, but rather for days, a week, the better part of a month? The long periods after which he'd saunter through the door with last Saturday's
Cleveland Plain Dealer
tucked beneath his arm? I stowed my bike behind a rusted dumpster and followed his tracks across the lot.

The Sandpiper's interior was large but intentionally suffocating; I recall it reminding me very much of the one country club I'd been to with my parents and two friends of theirs, back when my mother was still alive. The dining room's ceiling was high and painted burgundy, but
a low-hanging series of lamps darkened with stained-glass shades created a second, much more oppressive roof under which families ate at broad square tables. All the room's fixtures—the door handles, the table legs, the frames of chairs—had been painted a brassy gold that reflected green, red, blue. I found an empty booth with a high quilted back from where I could sit, undetected, and view the bar, which was mahogany and horseshoe shaped, and in front of which my father stood. His back toward me.

For the better part of twenty minutes, he was alone and I was alone, save the bartender who served him a scotch, and the waitress who served me a Coke. But then, as my father ordered a second, a third drink, the Sandpiper's door would occasionally swing open, and there would be the intrusion of noise from the outside—passing cars, the popping of exhaust—and a scattering of men, and some women, would ease their way past the tables and to the bar. They were businessmen, mostly, the types I imagined my father cavorting with when he worked in the city. Wool pants and starched white shirts, sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Suit jackets hung on the hooks beneath the bar. Hair slicked back in wet waves that lifted from their foreheads. They sat, or stood, on either side of my father, and they greeted him with light slaps on the back, shallow jabs to his shoulder, and the only thing I can remember thinking is wanting to quietly take the hat from his head. To comb his hair with my fingers. To fix the fraying collar of his shirt.

I slouched in the booth. “You want another Coke?” the waitress asked me.

“How much are they?”

“A dollar.”

“I've only got a dollar on me.”

She poured me a glass of water. She walked away briskly, muttering something that I couldn't quite make out because a man at the bar was saying, “McPhee, tell us that story again. The one about Detroit.”

He winked at a man standing on the other side of my father, who added, “Was it Detroit? Or was it Pittsburgh? It was Pittsburgh, wasn't it, McPhee?”

There was a blond woman standing next to him who had her hair coiled on top of her head—she laughed and slid a hand over the man's shoulder.

“It was Pittsburgh!” my father said.

“Pittsburgh!” the man said. “How could we forget!”

My father motioned to the bartender for more scotch—Paul Newman in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof;
the man who first approached him signaled for everyone else to come closer.

I drank thirteen glasses of water as my father spoke—I remember that very clearly. I'd become very hot and found it impossible to cool down. I listened first with fascination, and then with concern, and then with humiliation, dread, as he retold an unpracticed, unpolished story about a man he wished he were who visited Pittsburgh to save another man's life. He blundered dates and details, and when the crowd interrupted him—
We thought you said it was in sixty-three, McPhee, but now you're saying it was this year?
Or,
One hundred or two hundred bridges, man, get it straight!
—he'd correct himself incorrectly. My cheeks burned as he created a world that didn't exist, a world in which he didn't exist, a world from which he'd robbed relevant pieces in order to construct irrelevant shapes.

The woman with the blond hair balanced on her head said, “Tell us, McPhee, how would a person go about making a house out of old record covers?”

My father reached for a stack of napkins and, with them, tried to engineer walls, a door, a roof. The napkins slid from the bar and floated like so many leaves to the wood floor. When he tried to save the last one from falling, he knocked over his scotch. The sound of the crowd jeering masked the slap and snap of glass breaking, but I placed my dollar on the table and left anyway.

•  •  •

I waited three hours for my father, the liar, to emerge from the Sandpiper. I pulled my bike from behind the dumpster where I'd left it, and I leaned against the trunk of his battered car, squinting as the broad light from the streetlamp pressed against my eyes. I kicked at rocks until there
were no more rocks; I counted stars until there were no more to count; I picked at my cuticles until each of my fingers bled.

When he did push through the restaurant's door—it was nearing midnight and the rest of the crowd had long since left—I stood up perfectly straight. I waited while he dropped his hat, tripped as he endeavored to pick it up, dropped it again, finally placed it, cockeyed, on his head. I waited longer when the bartender chased him down, halfway across the parking lot, to inform him that he hadn't paid his tab, not for that night or the four previous nights. And then again longer, much longer, while he shoveled through his pockets for loose bills, quarters, dimes, nickels.

When he got a good look at me, when he smiled and raised both hands and shouted,
Colin!
I mounted my bike and I left.

•  •  •

He didn't return home that night. I assume he slept in his car, but he didn't return home. I stayed up until dawn—not waiting up for him, but burning the pages of the script that I'd written. I removed the crisp sheets from the desk drawer where, over the past six years, I'd left them for him, and I carried them down to the kitchen sink.

At first I burned each page individually, theatrically, starting at the beginning. The boy slipping through the screen. The boy as a cowboy. The boy as a Viking. The father as a hero. I held a match till the flame singed my finger, and then I touched it to the sheet, engulfing one of its corners. I'd keep the page in the air till the rising heat burned my forearm, and then I'd drop it in the sink, where its ash would mix with the paper burned before it. Looking back—Bee Duffell in François Truffaut's 1966 adaptation of
Fahrenheit 451
.

But this became too time-consuming. Once the boy had grown up I placed the remaining sheets into the sink in hundred-page chunks and torched them, intermittently pausing to run the faucet and scoop wet soot into the trash.

Finn

I meet Nancy Davenport like this:

After Randal has subdued the cat and she's been seduced by a blissfully drunk sleep, we buy these two Hawaiian shirts (patterns of coconuts and hula dancers, oversized, rayon, the type worn by men who watch golf on television) at a department store in downtown Columbus. We outfit ourselves with other things we consider to be very medical supply sales represenative-y, like khaki shorts with no belts and white tennis sneakers with no socks, though neither of us can remember a time we've actually
met
a medical supply sales representative. We change silently in the hotel room, stepping over the cat, who lays supine on the carpet. In the welcome bag on the nightstand, we find two identification badges—Mr. Perez and Mr. Carlisle's—and we pin them to each other's shirts.

“Maybe you shouldn't be Mr. Perez,” Randal says.

“I could be Perez.”

“You're much more of a Carlisle. With that hair.”

We switch.

Before we leave, I press a finger against a bare patch on Mrs. Dalloway's throat, checking her furtive pulse.

“She's still with us,” I say.

Randal rolls her onto her side. “In case she pukes.”

The convention hall where the luau takes place is hollow and smells
like a sports club. We sit at a round table and I film us as we drink free mai tais and eat sweet pulled pork with sugar glazed pineapple rings.

“Turn that thing off,” Randal says. “People are staring.”

Only one person sits alongside us—a man in a mossy shirt with bright yellow pineapples and white umbrellas on it. He says nothing while he shakes the ice in his glass and pulls the strings of meat apart with his fork before eating them. The tablecloth is blue and plastic, and features a beach party scene, so many cartoon women in bikinis, their legs stretching on for miles.

“I'm going to get more of this pork,” Randal says.

“You're the worst Jew I know.”

He looks at me for a moment, and then at his empty plate. He walks toward the long lines of buffet tables in a smaller adjoining room. I watch him as he goes, dodging two inflatable palm trees the size of skyscrapers that climb up the room's high sterile walls. He knocks on the fin of a foam surfboard propped up against one of the trees' trunks and then tries to restabilize it after realizing he's knocked it cockeyed. He gives up on it after about ten seconds and lets it fall to the ground.

Most of the conference attendees have drifted toward the center of the space, where they dance awkwardly and apprehensively to the musings of this ukulele band that performs on a stage that's covered in sand and made to look very
Gidget Goes Hawaiian
. The dancing rayon bellies, tattooed with mangoes and papayas and coconuts, crash into one another.

So I can get a better shot I move to a tiki bar that's been erected between a photo station with a blue screen that says “aloha” above it and a small, empty karaoke stage. I sit there, ordering mai tais from a man sporting a grass skirt over black wool pants, and I wait for Randal to find me. It's ten o'clock or at least somewhere around then and the people dancing are becoming more at ease with their collective awkwardness: instead of cringing and apologizing when they step on each other's feet, they laugh. They take it as an opportunity to touch each other, to make a million points of contact before they retreat in huddled pairs to empty tables and the room's darker corners.

“This thing was outside last year. They had citronella torches to keep the bugs away,” a woman says. She's been standing next to me the whole time I've been at the tiki bar, though until this moment I've yet to notice her. She's older than me, I think, though then again, perhaps not: she could either be twenty-eight or twenty-three or thirty-four. Pale skin that hasn't recently seen the sun, with permanent freckles and a few dark moles. Blond hair, clipped along the shoulders in a straight, geometric plane.

“Was it?”

“It was. But it turned out Bob Thurston, from Hill-Rom, was, like, severely allergic to citronella,” she says. She's wearing a dress that is black, and knee length, and has two birds of paradise blooming on the tits, which incidentally don't entirely fill the dress, and so the flowers fall in half bloom until she adjusts the thin straps on her shoulders, which she's doing now. “He got too close to one of the torches and he went into anaphylactic shock—just like
that
. It was ugly: poor Bob shaking on the ground, gasping for air, with none of us able to do a thing about it.”