My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (17 page)

I pulled out a twenty to pay for our subs and the condoms Mike Kozura had given me a few hours before flapped from my pocket and tumbled to the floor. “Oh, it’s like that?” Sarah said, laughing, as I hurried to retrieve them. “Hot to trot? I thought you wanted to drive straight through the night, but I guess we should get a motel.”

“That might be necessary,” I said brightly, playing along, glad that the girl behind the counter had been distracted by the ding of the bread oven and hadn’t noticed, while fully aware of how appallingly thin my loyalty to Sarah had become.

Me and Sarah went next door and grabbed a pint of Dewar’s and two thirty-two-ounce bottles of Sol. Whatever treachery she’d sensed in me at dinner in Old Tucson had been forgiven, and now, with her clothes and toiletries stuffed in a pink backpack in the trunk of the Ford, the gas tank topped off, and some decent liquor clanking inside the black plastic bag in her arms, she seemed a bit giddy and loosened, ready for a romantic vacation. Back in the car, I started the engine up, flipped on the radio, and found Sarah’s hand squeezing my leg like a strange little crab. I looked up at her and saw her face coming closer to mine, and then we were kissing for the first time. Her lips were soft, and her tongue poked wetly into my mouth. It felt like kissing a total stranger, and there was something gross about it that at the same time turned me on. I cheated my eyes open and saw how full of feeling she was, and I remembered how important a kiss this was supposed to be—our first kiss, after two months of falling in love over the phone. I closed my eyes again, reached around her and pulled her into me, continuing the kiss, willing myself to love her as I’d loved her just hours earlier, on the flight out. But all I could think about were the odd mechanics of the kiss, her tongue flopping in my mouth like a minnow, the taste of cinnamon gum. On the radio, a guy from the BBC News was talking about the recent surprising advances in China’s space program and whether or not this was a valid cause for concern. “Wait, hold on,” I said, drifting back from the kiss and bumping up the volume, “I want to hear this for a second.” I looked down and added, as though to further explain, “My friend’s dad is writing a book on quasars”—a random lie which wouldn’t have made any sense even if it had been true. We sat there for thirty more seconds, both listening carefully to the end of the report, and then I leaned in and kissed her for another five or ten seconds, to sort of wrap things up after the interruption.

Sarah smiled. “To be continued?”

“Count on it,” I said, coasting forward across the lot.

Inside Subway, the Mexican girl who’d dressed our subs was wiping down the counter with a blue sponge and singing to herself, draped in a kind of brave and naked mournfulness. My heart felt bent in half. I loved that girl more in that moment than I’d loved any girl ever.

*

We zoomed eastward on I-10 through the wasteland towns of Benson, Johnson, and Dragoon, Arizona. The road snaked up into low mountain forests, and then, once we’d pulled free of Willcox, dropped straight down to the desert floor. I cradled my beer in my lap, taking long sips and watching the mile markers tick down as we neared the New Mexico border. In the hot darkness, talking to Sarah, it was like we were on the phone again, and her tiny voice and sweet laugh summoned up an ounce of the excitement and swooning tenderness I’d felt for her over the past couple of months. But despite these dim-wattage currents—and as much as I genuinely liked her—it was as though a switch had been thrown the second she’d greeted me at baggage claim, and no matter how mightily I fought with the controls, I couldn’t crank the switch back on.

I tried to fathom how my longing for her could so swiftly evaporate. It wasn’t that her looks turned me off—true, she was no model or movie star, but she had a pleasant face and a likable smile. And her personality was essentially the same as it had been on the phone, if maybe a bit mopier and less confident. The frenzied, infatuated state I’d been in since the night of our first conversation was simply gone, and in its hangover wake I felt a sense of growing, anxious dread, which my beer eased a little but not enough.

Sarah had begun to explain an aspect of literary theory that she was studying, and I said “Yeah?” and “Really?” at the right times and asked follow-up questions with persuasive tones of engagement, though in truth I couldn’t really give less of a fuck and was so caught up in the mystery of our troubling disconnection, I barely heard a word of what she was saying. Then she asked a question that broke through and got my full attention: “Davy, do you think we’ll get married? Like, eventually?”

I paused, and then a strange, ambiguous croaking sound came out of me, like a bullfrog tuning its pipes.

She took hold of my arm with both hands and went on. “I mean, of course this probably sounds crazy, but here’s the thing. You know how sick my grandma’s been getting. I’ve always had such a special connection to her, and I know how much it would mean to her to see me get married.” She shrugged apologetically. “I figure, you know, if me and you are gonna get married anyway, maybe we should do it in six months, while she’s still alive, instead of in three years. Like next spring, after my graduation. It would make her
so
happy, and her being that happy, that’d make me so happy, too.” When I responded with silence, she retreated a step or two. “If you think it’s too soon, or too crazy, I totally understand. I don’t want to put any pressure on you, I just … I don’t know, part of me’s like, what the hell, why not? Like, we might as well, you know?” I stared ahead at the ghostly silver twinkle of passing reflectors on the side of the road. “I really hope you can meet her soon,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, me too,” I said finally. I felt drugged, and a little buzzed from the beer, which was weird because I usually never felt any buzz from beer alone. “Maybe we can visit her at the end of the trip, when we get back to Tucson.”

“That’d be awesome!” she said happily, popping her seat belt off and launching herself close to kiss me on the ear. “I was afraid you’d think I was insane or something.”

I waved my hand and sagged away. By saying nothing, I knew I was only encouraging her mislaid faith in me, but how could I be honest and let her down so completely? Our trip had only just begun, and there was still a chance, perhaps, that the spark would return. It even occurred to me that maybe all of Sarah’s marriage talk was her own way of pushing past any disenchantment she might’ve been feeling herself. The uneasiness boiling in my stomach was now a rising panic, but my body’s response to panic was always to induce a sense of severe drowsiness and disorientation.

Sarah sat back, refastened her seat belt, clutched my hand in hers, and closed her eyes for a nap; she’d gotten up early that morning to give her mom a ride to work. “You need anything before I hit the hay?” she asked.

“No, I’m good. Actually, pass me the Dewar’s, please.”

“You sure you should be drinking and driving?”

“I’m not gonna get wasted, I just need to touch it to my lips for a second and wake the fuck up.”

She cracked the bottle open and handed it to me for a couple of sips, then took a sip herself and slid it away under the seat. She leaned her seat back. “I love you,” she said, beginning to drift off.

I squeezed her hand.

Dreamily, she said, “This is maybe—no, definitely—the happiest day of my life. It almost seems too good to be true.” And then she was asleep.

*

We passed an exit for San Simon, which put us about fifteen miles from New Mexico and just over an hour from Deming and the Desert Sky Café. As Sarah dozed, and I edged the Ford from eighty to eighty-five and then up to ninety miles an hour, I puzzled over how I might possibly escape this whole sad mess of my own design. Sarah wasn’t crazy for bringing up marriage and saying “I love you”—I’d been the one to instigate that kind of talk over the phone, and had painted a beautiful, appealing fantasy that both of us had utterly bought into. But the fact that I’d believed as fully as Sarah in the shimmering vision of what was to come didn’t let me off the hook. In the end, I was as much of a charlatan as any hustler peddling swampland to naïve retirees, and when things came crashing down, as they were bound to very soon, Sarah was going to feel suckered and swindled, damaged and scraped clean.

The moon rose low in the sky, casting gray light over the flat, cracked rock sea that stretched from both sides of the highway as far as I could see to the horizon. Out here, in the country’s emptiest corner, sometimes ten minutes went by without seeing another car heading in either direction. The overall effect was of driving on the moon itself.

I glanced over at Sarah. An eerie green glow from the dashboard dials spilled across her face. Her chin was tucked to her shoulder, turned slightly toward me, her mouth slack. She breathed slowly and easily, one hand on her knee, the other slipped down between her legs, pressed against the zipper of her jeans. A part of me wondered if maybe I could just suck it up and spend eight days with her, try to have a good time, see how things went. Who was to say how I’d feel once we had a little more time together? The strangeness of being on such an intimate journey with someone who felt so foreign might subside. But I knew I wasn’t attracted to her, and our whole chemistry seemed off. The idea of having to fake it for another week filled me with a discomfort so deep it edged into terror. Then again, ending the trip early—and having to find a way to explain it to Sarah—felt too horrible to really contemplate. I banged once, hard, on the steering wheel, marveling at the trap I’d set for myself, and filled with painful exasperation. With no clear path at hand, all I could do was to simply keep driving.

Another few miles down the road, a small maroon sign flashed off the shoulder:
Now Leaving Arizona, Come Back Soon!
Two hundred yards farther down, a wide billboard loomed from the median dirt:
Welcome to NEW MEXICO, The Land of Enchantment
. We whooshed past, and I felt the border sweep over us like an invisible membrane as we entered my magic land. I thought of Shade, and longed desperately for her to be in the passenger seat of my car instead of this impostor.

I needed a cover story, it seemed to me, a way to end our trip that didn’t feel personal. And the truth was, it wasn’t personal, not exactly. It wasn’t her fault that I’d built her up as some kind of idealized soulmate. What I craved and had been chasing, again and again, for the past eleven years, I began to realize, was the exquisite misery I’d felt when I’d first seen Shade on the screen. That wrenching longing was its own perfect drug, and as long as a girl kept me at arm’s length and maintained a distance, some veil of mystery—as Maggie and Bonnie and all of the others had, even when we’d come together—then my excruciating and exhilarating ache could be preserved. But when a girl threw open the gates and let me in, as Sarah had, no matter how charming, smart, and pretty they might be, the intensity would drain from me and I wouldn’t be able to gas it out of there quickly enough and start my search for the next girl to call Shade.

Past tiny Steins, New Mexico, I began to see signs for motels and truck stops in Lordsburg and Deming. I knew I couldn’t go as far as Deming, not with Sarah. But I didn’t want to pull off the highway and turn around until I had a plan in place. Slowly, I pieced together what I would tell her. It hurt my heart to think about how she might respond—with anger, with grief, with shock? Sarah’s face, dipped in moonlight, was so placid, her sleep so peaceful, I couldn’t help but think of my mom’s grandfather on the train to New York and his waiting bride. I hated myself for what I was about to do.

I resolved to get off I-10 at Lordsburg, but at the first exit I faltered at the last second and stayed headed east, and a mile later, at the next exit, I was boxed out by an enormous tractor trailer hauling a single ninety-foot windmill turbine blade that looked like a dragonfly wing made of metal. I braked hard but couldn’t get over in time, and the pint of Dewar’s shot out from beneath Sarah’s seat and wedged itself against her left foot. There was no third exit, just an amber dusting of streetlights from Lordsburg’s central square disappearing in the rearview mirror, and magnificent, sad, sacred Deming puffing heat from twenty miles ahead. I thought of my last visit to the Desert Sky Café, my promise to myself to return only with Shade. How many times since then had I dreamed of what that moment would be like? It was agonizing to be so close and yet so far away.

I wasn’t even sure if there’d be another exit before Deming. I dropped my speed to sixty-five and started looking for a gravel turnaround with access to the westbound lanes. The Dewar’s bottle at Sarah’s feet made a sloshing sound as we coasted over breaks in the road, and I slipped off my seat belt and stretched my right hand toward it. If I was going to turn the car around and wake Sarah up and lay some bad news on her, I needed some scotch in me first.

I got my fingers around the bottle and plopped back into my seat, but just as I began to unscrew the cap, a dead horselike beast, big as a Clydesdale, flashed suddenly into sight thirty feet in front of us, stretched on its side across both lanes. “Holy shit!” I cried, pounding the brakes and yanking the wheel hard to the left. We rocketed onto the left shoulder and into the hard dirt beyond, then fishtailed wildly and shot back onto the road. The bottle of Dewar’s had jumped from my hands and landed down by the pedals.

As I reached again for the bottle, Sarah bolted upright and shouted, “Watch out!” Ahead of us, in the same lane, was a car’s entire steel fender and grille, massive as a canoe. I swerved hard to the right, almost lost control again, and finally came to a stop in the middle of the road. “Oh my God, what just happened?” Sarah said, frightened and full of alarm. “Are you okay? Wait, are you drunk?”

Adrenaline firing through me, I eased the Ford up a long, curving incline, past an old Chevy Cavalier parked on the shoulder with its hazards blinking and its windshield and front end completely demolished. I pulled in behind the rig with the gigantic turbine blade, which had stopped on the same shoulder a hundred yards in front of the Chevy. “I think someone hit a fucking unicorn!” I shouted. “Come on, let’s make sure they’re okay.”