Roadwork (18 page)

“What’s the matter with you people?” the girl asked. “No ‘Star Trek.’ Are you heathens?”

“They run it at four o’clock on channel eight,” he said.

“Do you watch it?”

“Sometimes. My wife always watches Merv Griffin.”

“I didn’t see any beetles,” number two said. “If I’d seen any, I would have eaten them.” The audience laughed heartily.

“Why did she move out? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” She looked at him warily, as if the price of his confession might be tiresomely high.

“The same reason I got fired off my job,” he said, sitting down.

“Because you didn’t buy that plant?”

“No. Because I didn’t buy a new house.”

“I voted for number two,” Soupy Sales said, “because he looks like he’d eat a beetle if he saw one.” The audience laughed heartily.

“Didn’t ... wow. Oh, wow.” She looked at him over her drink without blinking. The expression in her eyes seemed to be a mixture of awe, admiration, and terror. “Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not working?”

“No.”

“What do you do all day?”

“I ride on the turnpike.”

“And watch TV at night?”

“And drink. Sometimes I make popcorn. I’m going to make popcorn later on tonight.”

“I don’t eat popcorn.”

“Then I’ll eat it.”

She punched the off button on the Space Command gadget (he sometimes thought of it as a “module” because today you were encouraged to think of everything that zapped on and off as a module) and the picture on the Zenith twinkled down to a bright dot and then winked out.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said. “You threw your wife and your job down the drain—”

“But not necessarily in that order.”

“Whatever. You threw them away over this road. Is that right?”

He looked at the blank TV uncomfortably. Even though he rarely followed what was happening on it very closely, it made him uncomfortable to have it off. “I don’t know if it is or not,” he said. “You can’t always understand something just because you did it.”

“Was it a protest?”

“I don’t
know.
If you’re protesting something, it’s because you think something else would be better. All those people protested the war because they thought peace would be better. People protest drug laws because they think other drug laws would be fairer or more fun or less harm or ... I don’t know. Why don’t you turn the TV on?”

“In a minute.” He noticed again how green her eyes were, intent, catlike. “Is it because you hate the road? The technological society it represents? The dehumanizing effect of—”

“No,” he said. It was so difficult to be honest, and he wondered why he was even bothering when a lie would end the discussion so much more quickly and neatly. She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people who thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer. “I’ve seen them building roads and buildings all my life. I never even thought about it, except it was a pain in the ass to use a detour or have to cross the street because the sidewalk was ripped up or the construction company was using a wrecking ball.”

“But when it hit home ... to your house and your job, you said no.”

“I said no all right.” But he wasn’t sure what he had said no to. Or had he said yes? Yes, finally yes to some destructive impulse that had been part of him all along, as much a built-in self-destruct mechanism as Charlie’s tumor? He found himself wishing Freddy would come around. Freddy could tell her what she wanted to hear. But Fred had been playing it cool.

“You’re either crazy or really remarkable,” she said.

“People are only remarkable in books,” he said. “Let’s have the TV.”

She turned it on. He let her pick the show.

 

“What are you drinking?”

It was quarter of nine. He was tipsy, but not as drunk as he would have been by now alone. He was making popcorn in the kitchen. He liked to watch it pop in the tempered glass popper, rising and rising like snow that had sprung up from the ground rather than come down from the sky.

“Southern Comfort and Seven-Up,” he said.

He chuckled, embarrassed.

“Can I try one?” She showed him her empty glass and grinned. It was the first completely unselfconscious expression she had shown him since he had picked her up. “You make a lousy screwdriver.”

“I know,” he said. “Comfort and Seven-Up is my private drink. In public I stick to scotch. Hate scotch.”

The popcorn was done, and he poured it into a large plastic bowl.

“Can I have one?”

“Sure.”

He mixed her a Comfort and Seven-Up, then poured a melted stick of butter over the popcorn.

“That’s going to put a lot of cholesterol in your bloodstream,” she said, leaning in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. She sipped her drink. “Hey, I like this.”

“Sure you do. Keep it a secret and you’ll always be one up.”

He salted the popcorn.

“That cholesterol clogs up your heart,” she said. “The passageways for the blood get smaller and smaller and then one day ...
graaag!”
She clutched dramatically at her bosom and spilled some of her drink on her sweater.

“I metabolize it all away,” he told her, and went through the doorway. He brushed her breast (primly bra-ed, by the feel) on the way by. It felt a way Mary’s breast hadn’t felt in years. It was maybe not such a good way to think.

She ate most of the popcorn.

She started to yawn during the eleven o’clock news, which was mostly about the energy crisis and the White House tapes.

“Go on upstairs,” he said. “Go to bed.”

She gave him a look.

He said, “We’re going to get along good if you stop looking like somebody goosed you every time the word ‘bed’ comes up. The primary purpose of the Great American Bed is sleeping, not intercoursing.”

That made her smile.

“You don’t even want to turn down the sheets?”

“You’re a big girl.”

She looked at him calmly. “You can come up with me if you want,” she said. “I decided that an hour ago.”

“No ... but you don’t have any idea how attractive the invitation is. I’ve only slept with three women in my entire life, and the first two were so long ago I can hardly remember them. Before I was married.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Not at all.”

“Listen, it wouldn’t be just because you gave me a ride or let me sleep over or anything like that. Or the money you offered.”

“It’s good of you to say that,” he said, and got up. “You better go up now.”

But she didn’t follow his suit. “You ought to know why you’re not doing it.”

“I should?”

“Yes. If you do things and can’t explain them—like you said—that might be okay because they still get done. But if you decide not to, you ought to know why.”

“All right,” he said. He nodded toward the dining room, where the money still lay in the silver dish. “It’s the money. You’re too young to be off whoring.”

“I won’t take it,” she said promptly.

“I know you won’t. That’s why
I
won’t. I want you to take it.”

“Because everybody isn’t as nice as you?”

“That’s right.” He looked at her challengingly.

She shook her head in an exasperated way and stood up. “All right. But you’re a bourgeois, you know that?”

“Yes.”

She came over and kissed him on the mouth. It was exciting. He could smell her, and the smell was nice. He was almost instantly hard.

“Go on,” he said.

“If you reconsider during the night—”

“I won’t.” He watched her go to the stairs, her feet bare. “Hey?”

She turned, her eyebrows raised.

“What’s your name?”

“Olivia, if it matters. Stupid, isn’t it? Like Olivia De Havilland.”

“No, it’s okay. I like it. Night, Olivia.”

“Night.”

She went up. He heard the light click on, the way he had always heard it when Mary went up before him. If he listened closely, he might be able to hear the quietly maddening sound of her sweater against her skin as she pulled it over her head, or the snap of the catch that held her jeans nipped in to her waist ...

Using the Space Command module, he turned on the TV.

His penis was still fully erect, uncomfortable. It bulged against the crotch of his pants, what Mary had sometimes called the rock of ages and sometimes the snake-that-turned-to-stone in their younger days, when bed was nothing but another playground sport. He pulled at the folds of his underwear and when it didn’t go down, he stood up. After a while the erection wilted and he sat down again.

When the news was over, a movie came on—John Agar in
Brain from Planet Arous.
He fell asleep sitting in front of the TV with the Space Command module still clasped loosely in one hand. A few minutes later there was a stirring beneath the fly of his pants as his erection returned, stealthily, like a murderer revisiting the scene of an ancient crime.

But he did go to her in the night.

The dream of Mr. Piazzi’s dog came to him, and this time he knew the boy approaching the dog was Charlie before the bitch struck. That made it worse and when Mr. Piazzi’s dog lunged, he struggled up from sleep like a man clawing his way out of a shallow, sandy grave.

He clawed at the air, not awake but not asleep either, and he lost his sense of balance on the couch, where he had finally curled up. He tottered miserably on the edge of balance for a moment, disoriented, terrified for his dead son who died over and over again in his dreams.

He fell onto the floor, banging his head and hurting his shoulder, and came awake enough to know he was in his own living room and that the dream was over. The reality was miserable, but not actively terrifying.

What was he doing? A sort of gestalt reality of what he had done to his life came to him, a hideous overview. He had ripped it right down the middle, like a cheap piece of cloth. Nothing was right anymore. He was hurting. He could taste stale Southern Comfort in the back of his throat, and he burped up some acid-tasting sour stuff and swallowed it back.

He began to shiver and seized his knees in a futile effort to stop it. In the night everything was strange. What was he doing, sitting on the floor of his living room and holding his knees and shaking like an old drunk in an alley? Or like a catatonic, a fucking psycho, that was more like it. Was that it? Was he a psycho? Nothing sort of funny and whimsical like a fruitcake or a dork or a rubber crutch but an out-and-out psycho? The thought dumped him into fresh terror. Had he gone to a hoodlum in an effort to get explosives? Was he really hiding two guns out in the garage, one of them big enough to kill an elephant? A little whining noise came out of his throat and he got up tentatively, his bones creaking like those of a very old man.

He went up the stairs without allowing himself to think, and stepped into his bedroom. “Olivia?” he whispered. This was preposterous, like an old-time Rudolph Valentino movie. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t even sound sleepy. “The clock was keeping me awake. That digital clock. It kept going
click.
I pulled the plug.”

“That’s all right,” he said. It was a ludicrous thing to say. “I had a bad dream.”

The sound of covers being thrown back. “Come on. Get in with me.”

“I—”

“Will
you shut up?”

He got in with her. She was naked. They made love. Then slept.

 

In the morning, the temperature was only 10 degrees. She asked him if he got a newspaper.

“We used to,” he said. “Kenny Upslinger delivered it. His family moved to Iowa.”

“Iowa, yet,” she said, and turned on the radio. A man was giving the weather. Clear and cold.

“Would you like a fried egg?”

“Two, if you’ve got them.”

“Sure. Listen, about last night—”

“Never mind last night. I came. That’s very rare for me. I enjoyed it.”

He felt a certain sneaking pride, maybe what she had wanted him to feel. He fried the eggs. Two for her, two for him. Toast and coffee. She drank three cups with cream and sugar.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked him when they had both finished.

“Take you out to the highway,” he said promptly.

She made an impatient gesture. “Not that. About your
life.”

He grinned. “That sounds serious.”

“Not for me,” she said. “For you.”

“I haven’t thought about it,” he said. “You know, before”—he accented the word
before
slightly to indicate all of his life and all of its parts he had sailed off the edge of the world—“before the ax fell, I think I must have felt the way some condemned man feels in the death house. Nothing seemed real. It seemed I was living in a glass dream that would go on and on. Now everything seems real. Last night ... that was very real.”