Driver's Education (2 page)

I kept going back to that place on Chrystie to get free wine. Randal eventually got fired from that job, just like he got fired from the rest of them, because he had been too charitable, not just to me but to everyone, pouring glasses that were much too full. Because, really, that's just how he was.

He's still got the binoculars glued to his face and he bites at a piece of dead skin that dangles from his chapped lower lip. The clipper ship stalls. It whips its sails furiously in the wind: the white heads of a Hydra
out on the Hudson. He keeps watching it as my elbows sink deeper into the grass and as the freckles on my back multiply and as tiny globes of sweat orbit his curls, sitting on top of his head like tight dark clouds.

“All those ships. Think of all those goddamned sinking ships we just saw. These ones are going to end up doing the same thing.” He swats at the camcorder. “Get that thing out of my face, would you?”

I should say this: I'm still not totally sure why he's agreed to go with me—or, at least why he hasn't put up some sort of a fight. I told myself a half hour ago that it was because he views us as I view us: more or less this indestructible pair. A Han Solo/Chewbacca thing. A Batman and Robin. A Rick Blaine/Louis Renault. But there are, if I'm being honest, some other (more realistic?) theories I've also been tossing around.

Like, for example:

#1: Gainful Employment: The job he lost last night (he'd been a waiter at a place where waiters wear cowboy hats) was the last in an epic series of dabblings. He's been a bartender, a locksmith, a janitor at a school for the deaf. He's answered phones and opened doors and sorted mail. He's sold peaches on the corner of Fifty-seventh and First, has collected and traded and often forged the autographs of almost-famous people. And each time he's lost one of those gigs, you get the sense that the orbit he's been following has been jolted. You get the sense that whatever makes shit happen for Randal Baker has hit pause. Or:

#2: A Girl: She lived in Hoboken and they dated for a year until two months ago when, suddenly, they stopped.

I never met her, and I never will, because she's out of the picture now. I've never even been allowed to say her name—I can tell you that much. I know what it is, obviously, but I've never been allowed to say it. I'll start sometimes, for the fun of it. I'll get the first letter, and then first syllable to buzz on my lips, but he'll stop me, usually, by smacking me. He'll say,
Damn it, Finn, what'd I tell you?

So, the point being: I don't know all that much about her. He's told me stories, though they've never really been enough. I'll ask him—beg, really—to tell me more. He'll try. He'll have a few hesitant starts, but each time he'll stop. He'll sigh. He'll pull at some blades of grass.

I'll ask, “Can I see a picture?”

He'll tie the grass into knots and walk away.

And so. I'll be left with these countless iterations of her. These imagined variations. The Girl as Bardot-ian bombshell—all blond, all tits, voice composed of nothing but gravel and sex. The Girl as Holly Golightly-ish flirt—saying what she feels but never what she means. The Girl as Hayworth—strong-minded, disagreeable, always going to restaurants and ordering something that's not on the menu. The Girl as Phoebe Cates—always getting out of a pool. Just always getting out of a pool.

Basically, whatever it takes for a girl, for This Girl, to have insinuated herself into the vast mythology of Randal Baker. Or to have turned him into something of a romantic, which I think is just about the worst thing a girl can do to a boy.

Or maybe it's just me who is being the romantic. Maybe the real reason it's been so criminally easy to convince him to come along is that—

Theory #3: He's Just That Sort of Person. The type of guy who, if Karen and I saw him in casting footage for the Very Popular Reality Show, we'd define him by a-total-going-along-with-it-ness. A passive quality that has the potential to become suddenly and explosively active. Not a joiner and not a doer—but the person who allows both to exist.

•  •  •

“We'll leave on Tuesday,” I say. “After I talk to Karen.”

Randal has been looking over my shoulder, stealing glances at the map. “So, okay. Pittsburgh first, it looks like.”

“And then Columbus.”

“And then Chicago.”

“And then—”

“Oh, God, what is that? They all look the same. Is that
Nebraska
?”

I position the camera in my lap with its lens tilted upward, toward the boats and the river and the sky and the lower half of Randal's ear. I take the binoculars from him and I give him back the wine, and after he slugs from it long and thirstily he starts fumbling in the pockets of his khakis. He bites his upper lip and frowns till there's this crevice between
his eyes, until finally he claws out a bent cigarette and a BIC lighter with a fish on it.

“Can you say that again?”

He turns his back to me, to the wind, and when he hunches over to light the cigarette I lift the camcorder and zoom in; his spine looks like so many speed bumps.

“Say what?” He exhales and the smoke rushes south. “Say what aga—Finn, Christ. Come on.”

So instead I film south toward the Hudson's mouth and the upper bay; toward the boats coming, merging, coughing steam, growling; toward the Statue of Liberty and the northern tip of Staten Island; toward the graveyard, the infinite blueness tricked out in ash.

I leap up. My knees are stained and matted with weeds and they feel light, full of helium. I step from the grass to the pier's pavement, treading lightly as my feet grow warm, then hot against the concrete. I rest my arms against a green guardrail and watch as the light wanes, as its reflection on the Hudson dulls from gold to rust. Everything smells like salt and oil.

Randal follows me, cursing as he hopscotches barefoot across the concrete.

There's the fluid, liquid sigh of traffic behind us on the West Side Highway. I begin picking at a spot where the railing's green paint has chipped. I tear off a large sheet of acrylic from the iron bars, turning it on its side so it looks like a cutout of Florida.

Randal stubs his cigarette against the railing, kicking off the ash, which lands on his toes.

“All right,” he says. “Let's see it then.”

“See what?”

“The map.”

I use my fingernails to peel off another sheet—rectangular, almost perfectly so. I tell myself it's North Dakota, or South Dakota, or Wyoming, or any of those other states that have unmemorable, half-assed shapes. In front of us two kayakers paddle in figure eights.

When I lift the paper it smells ancient and important, like newsprint.
The edges are brittle, its creases sharp and yellow. There are lines drawn on it—mostly illegible scribbles in black and blue and red and grey. There are cities and towns circled, places my granddad has been; there are roads, and counties, and—in the case of Florida—an entire state crossed out. Artifacts from his unbounded memories.

And then, in the margins, there are new notes: instructions he's written expressly for me. Like:
In Chicago—Never look the Gangster in the eye.

I drop North Dakota to the grass and turn to look out at the water. The clipper ship has tacked so the wind is at its rear, pushing its sails out in wide grinning crescents.

•  •  •

We are walking east on Jane Street and the sun floods the thin alleys between low buildings and the reflection, all the reflections, glow white and angelic on the camera's LCD screen. The bricks of the walk-ups around us change from orange to red to brown. A woman with a stroller slows behind us, and we step aside to let her pass.

I lean against a low green wall and bite at the dulled tip of my thumb. I smell like sweat and wine and just-chopped grass.

I rub something from my eye with the bottom hem of my shirt.

He says: “So, you must've considered the possibility by now.”

“What possibility?” I can feel the uneven mortar play tic-tac-toe on my back and I wipe at my face again.

“The possibility that maybe he's . . . And that's why he wants to see the car. Just . . . I don't know. So he can drive it one more time before he—or something.”

“I see what you're saying—”

“It was just a thought.”

“But, ha, it's not the case.”

I think about the map. I think about all its lines, printed and scribbled. There are so many of them, the roads. So many ways in which they tie themselves into knots, entwine themselves like the legs of guilty lovers.

“But hypothetically, what if it is.”

“Then,” I say, “we'll be the ones who save him.”

Colin

“Dad,” I say.

“Colin?”

“You're killing me.”

He hacks. First, the dry exasperations of a
k
. But then, something else. Something that submerges and bubbles below the surface: a cough swimming in motor oil.

We sit in the kitchen of a house that I can no longer afford. Four broad windows reach out over the bay, where currents swell beneath the Golden Gate. The sun, flooding in from the east, turns the water to rusted silver. When his coughing subsides, I hand him a napkin so he can wipe his mouth. He folds it unevenly and struggles to slip it into the breast pocket of his blue oxford—the same shirt he wore yesterday, and the day before that. The shirt I wash each evening. The shirt I iron for him every morning after helping him from his bed, before combing his threadbare hair. The only shirt that—now—he'll agree to wear.

“I'd say it's the other way around,” he tells me.

I press my mug away from me and I begin spreading butter across two pieces of toast.

“What I'm saying,” I say, “is that when you ask me every morning when the last time I sold a script was—that's killing me.”

I slice away the bread's burnt crust and hand both pieces to him. He
watches them on the chipped plate in front of him, a look of anticipation and then defeat slipping across his face.
But it's toast, Dad. What do you expect it to do? Sing? Dance? Restore your expired youth?

He holds a finger, curved into an arthritic claw, against the side of his nose. “I ask you that every morning?” He sounds as if his cheeks are stuffed with marbles.

I open the
San Francisco Chronicle
and leaf through the pages until I find the crossword. When he arrived last year, he would beat me at these things; it'd take me two hours to get through one puzzle, whereas he'd finish it in thirty minutes or less.

“Show the doctors that,” he'd say. “And then ask them if I need to be living with my son. Ask them if I shouldn't be back at home in New York, where I belong.”

I'd tell him, “But, Dad. It's not your head; it's your heart.”

Now, though, I'm not sure. He still completes the puzzles—in fact, often faster than he did before. But now once he's growled
Done,
once he's thrust the torn newsprint beneath my nose so I can survey his handiwork, I'll notice mistakes. Missed clues. Answers that don't fit. Three letters shoved into one cramped box.

19 down. Three letters.
Washington bigwig, abbr.:
ASSHOLE

7 down. Five letters.
Grateful:
FOR WHAT

1 across. Four letters. _____
Boleyn:
LUCY

At first I would circle the flubs in black ink and hand the puzzle back to him. I'd say,
Molière wasn't a Confederate general, Dad.
He'd shake his head defiantly, toast crumbs tossed from the corners of his mouth.
And the clue calls for three letters, second letter E.
He still wouldn't listen, though. He'd hold the point of his pen against the table and lift a single eyebrow in my direction. He'd keep it raised until I'd say, finally,
Yeah, all right. I can see it. Molière at Appomattox. Why not!

Now I just let him have them.

He still has his finger pressed to the side of his nose, but now he's tapping it slowly. He knits his brows together as he looks at me from
across the table, his eyes grazing over the dirtied rims of empty cups, the stacks of my half-finished scripts.

I say, finally, “It was called
The Family Room
. It premiered in nineteen eighty-three. Yes, that's more than twenty years ago. Yes, it starred two very famous people who have since died. Yes, you remember correctly, it was nominated for four awards, but not the Oscar. And yes, you remember even
more
correctly: it won precisely none of them.”

He stops his nose tapping. “It's funny—”

“That you never saw that particular movie?”

He nods.

“Yes, I know. Ha, ha, a real hoot. Hilarious every morning!”

I ask him if he's finished with his toast. He looks down at the uneaten slices and the despair returns to his face: first in the folds where his neck meets his chin, then, climbing upward, to his sagging jowls, his stretched ears, his pocked crown.
You've disappointed me, toast
.

I take the plate and shovel the mess into the trash. I return to fix the collar of his shirt, ignoring him as he mutters to himself, to the table, to the piles of paper: “Nineteen eighty-three was a long time ago.”

•  •  •

The call came two Februaries ago in the early afternoon: 1:30 PST/4:30 EST. I had finished my lunch and was cleaning the windows when Finn phoned, repeating all his cries in threes.

“Oh Dad, oh Dad, oh Dad.”

“Something's happened, something's happened, something's happened.”

“If I hadn't missed the train—I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

I said, “Finn?”

“Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad, we're at the hospital.”

“Stop,” I'd instructed him. “Slow down. Explain to me—exactly—what's happened.”