“I just don’t get where the one thing ends and the other thing begins. How do you know what’s you and what’s not you?”
“Well, that’s where all the fun is, isn’t it?”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.” He grins. They pass a low brick public school, dense pines, a large boulder. “Is it frustrating for it always to be the same outcome? Every time, guilty?”
“You have to play it like it’s the first time. Like anything could happen.”
“But on some level, you must know. That must be hard to ignore.”
“Well, I don’t want to get stuck, if that’s what you mean.”
He nods. “I hear you. I wouldn’t want to get stuck in the sixteen nineties either. Hadn’t even invented the spinning jenny yet.” He says it like she is supposed to get it, like anyone else would.Who is Jenny? Why is she spinning?No, he has mistaken her, formed some false idea,watching her play at somebody else. As she begins to wonder whether this was a mistake, he says softly: “But you don’t strike me as the type of person who would want to leave in the wrong way.”
She considers his silhouette, his steady gaze, the light flickering against the far side of his face, and a soft wonder settles over her, that he has looked at her and seen some fundamental goodness. “No,” she says. “I’m not.” She drums her fingers on her bare leg. “Can we play some music?” She reaches for the radio button before he can answer. Low, brooding strings jump from the speakers.
“Put on what you like,” he says, so she scans to the Top 40. A minute passes before he asks, “Who is this?”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“It’s Annie Lennox,” she says. “Don’t you watch MTV?”
“I don’t have a TV.”
In the back seat of the car is a pile of clothing and a toppled stack of books. “Do you live in here?” she asks gently.
“No!” He laughs. “I’m just taking some things to dry-clean.”
“You can afford to get things dry-cleaned, but you can’t afford a TV?”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t afford it.” He is shaking his head, bemused. “We just never had one growing up. So I guess I never got in the habit. My dad hated it—television was everything wrong with America, he would say. It’s making us depraved. Ruining democracy. Like people would stop thinking for themselves. Betsy—my sister—she couldn’t stand it.” The house was quiet, he says, except for classical FM and their ill-tempered beagle. “At school, though, we had a color TV. We all watched Westerns. AndI Dream of Jeannie.”
“That was a good show.”
“We were all in love with her. But I never liked how everyone talked about the characters like they knew them, like they were more real than people in real life. I don’t know, I started to think maybe there was something to it, that maybe television does numb people.”
His soft shirtsleeves, his steady wrist. What type of man finds drycleaning more essential than television? Still, she always looks in at the shop on Canal Street, all those garments sheathed in plastic like a morgue. She thinks of her underwear drying on top of the radiator. Maybe one day she will take her things down there. After all, this is America. Never rule anything out.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Well,” he says. “There’s a place around here. It’s just the most peaceful spot. You can swim, can’t you? You seem like a swimmer.”
She starts to laugh, smacked with the whole situation. “Sure.”
“Good,” he says. “But I have to confess I’m lost.”
“Lost!”
“In fact, I’m turning around.”
“We could go somewhere else.”
“No,” he says definitively. “The problem is, once you’ve been to the most beautiful place on earth, it’s very difficult to settle for anything else. But I haven’t been since I was a kid. So, bear with me.”
It is impossible after that not to see his face layered with earlier, more vulnerable versions of itself. Impossible not to feel tenderly toward him as he tries to rechart a route through the landscape of his memory, at first tentatively and then with agitated force, like he’s trying to push an earring through a closed-up piercing. But eventually he finds the way, a dirt road slipping off through an embrace of elm trees. As the shade draws cool relief over their faces, she feels the romance in his stubbornness, his insistence on beauty.
Al has always been told he was clever, but never has he felt more pleased with himself as right now, having written them into this moment, created just the right mood, the sun hitting the treetops of this quiet, sublime world, the lick of water against the reservoir rim, the birds whooping and the humidity glistening. And even for all his planning, he couldn’t have invented her.
