A Meaningful Life (4 page)

“Great,” said Lowell, noticing with a sinking feeling that her last sentence had been spoken with her father's inflection and ended with her father's phrase. He'd never noticed a thing like that in her voice before. He began to listen for it, and shortly his fears were confirmed. It was there, all right, coming and going like the odor of burning tires in a rose garden. He listened so hard and heard so much that soon he made himself impotent and unable to think about anything else. He held Betty from Flatbush in his arms, and it scared him.

“It's okay,” she said cheerfully as they put their clothes back on, something they had never learned to do either gracefully or well, owing largely to the hump in the middle of the floor. “We've got a lot of time. Pretty soon we'll be married and have a bed.”

“How come you're chewing gum?” Lowell asked. “You never chewed gum before.”

“What are you talking about? I've always chewed gum. I've chewed gum ever since I was a little girl. What kind of a question is that? Boy, this marriage thing must really be getting on your nerves. Here, fasten this, will you?” She turned her back to him, and he hooked her bra. Try as he would, he couldn't remember ever having seen her chewing gum. Surely he would have smelled it when he kissed her.

“Did you always pop it like that?” he asked.

“Pop what like that? I don't know what you're talking about. You forgot to kiss my back.” He always gave her a gentle kiss between the shoulderblades after he hooked or unhooked her bra. It was very important to both of them, and he'd forgotten all about it. He gave her a halfhearted peck, but the whole thing was already spoiled.

“I mean your gum,” he said. “I wanted to know if you always popped it like that. I guess it's not important. Let's forget about it.”

“You bet your life I'll forget about it, buster,” she said, swiftly climbing into her blouse and throwing her skirt around her somehow. “I'm going back to the dorm. I think you'd better take a good long ride and calm down or something. You can call me in the morning.”

She slammed the door and strode off down the parking lot. Lowell would have followed her but he hadn't put his pants on yet. He knew he couldn't follow her in his Jockey shorts. The people in the other cars would see him and honk their horns. He imagined himself trying to run back to the car in a half-squat with his shirttail desperately pulled way down. Then he imagined himself actually overtaking her by some fluke and having an argument with her in his Jockey shorts. It was impossible in Jockey shorts; he couldn't argue with anybody. Along with pajamas, Jockey shorts were possibly the dumbest garment ever conceived by the mind of man.

It was far too late to pursue her by the time he got his pants on. Instead, he went back to his dormitory, stole his roommate's tent, and ran away to Nevada.

By the time he reached Sacramento, he began to feel foolish. By the time he reached the Sierra, he began to feel positively terrified. The last of his forward inertia ran out in Truckee. He pulled into a service station, filled the tank, and headed back toward school. It wouldn't work. The life of Thoreau, testing his mettle against a harsh, muscular climate, wresting a living from the barren desert soil—it was not for him. He couldn't do it, any more than a cow could fly, and that was that. In the only plausible vision that assembled itself before his mind's eye, he wasn't struggling titanically with the elements and roaring his defiance like Lear; he was sitting in the middle of an alkali flat waiting for his pocket money to run out or his tent to blow over, whichever happened first. The whole notion was absurd on the face of it. He wasn't cut out for that kind of life. He didn't even know the first thing about it, and he had enough sense to realize that the Nevada desert wasn't the place to find out. He hadn't really wanted to go to Nevada anyway. He really wanted to marry his girl and stay in town. He still didn't know what kind of a life he wanted to have, exactly, but one thing was clear: making an ass of himself on an alkali flat wasn't part of it. His immediate priorities were clear: first, to graduate and get his diploma; second, to get married. These were concrete desires, almost facts, almost within his grasp. Nevada was fantasy, and flight was out of the question. As for peace and solitude and the life of the mind, he would work something out once he was properly graduated and married. He never had to see his in-laws again, and after they were gone it would be as though he'd made them up in order to have something funny to talk about at parties. Anyway, if people had come looking for him in Nevada, they probably would have found him right off the bat, and there would have been a lot of embarrassing questions.

Feeling drained but clear in his goals, he climbed back over Donner Pass in the gray false dawn, meeting trucks coming down at dangerous speed with headlights on and loads swaying. Below, on the rocks, lay bodies of other trucks that hadn't made it, their cabs squashed, their tires burned, their vans half-buried under heaps of smashed granite. Bad cess on them, Lowell thought. Teach them a lesson. He was going back, and he felt like being smart with everybody.

At the summit the car behind him began to honk its horn. A little fuzzy from lack of sleep and too much thinking, Lowell glanced in the rear-view mirror and sluggishly began to pull over to let it pass. Then, in a swift double take, he looked in the mirror again, floored the accelerator, and shot back into the lane with only inches to spare as the car behind hooted madly and slammed on its brakes. It was his father's car. He'd recognized it all in a flash, and there could be no doubt about it whatever: a green 1954 Kaiser sedan, the paint dull and the chrome ring missing from the left-front headlight, Idaho plates, Ada County numbers. And behind the oddly shaped Kaiser windshield, were the blurred, perplexed faces of his father and mother. Lowell drove faster.

They were over the peak now. It was all downhill, and the Ford ought to be able to outrun the Kaiser in no time. Anybody could outrun his father, no matter what they were driving. As a small boy in the back seat of the car before the Kaiser (a gray Frazer with an enormous blunt snout and a buffalo medallion), Lowell would watch with dismay as cars and pickups whipped past them with meteoric speed, even prewar Hudsons with tiny old men at the wheel. “Faster, Daddy, faster,” Lowell would urge as a city bus crept abreast, then lumbered slowly ahead, its driver glaring at them. “You can't be too careful with a car,” his father would reply. “There are a lot of Canyon County drivers on the road.” Lowell was never able to see what Canyon County had to do with it. The important thing was that everybody passed them. A vehicle had only to make its appearance behind them—even a road grader—for Lowell's father to slow to a crawl to let it past, warily scanning its plates for the dread Canyon County insignia.

Lowell hit sixty on the curving downgrade, but his father hung in there as though their bumpers were magnetized. It was kind of terrifying and it could not end well, no matter what happened. His father honked again, two short toots and a long insistent bray, and his mother waved a handkerchief behind the windshield. Lowell hunched up his shoulders and scrunched down in the seat until his eyes were on a level with the top of the dashboard, but he couldn't see the road very well that way and presently he sat back up again. Just then his father made a desperate bid to pull up alongside. Lowell foiled this maneuver by pulling over into the middle of the road just as a huge cattle truck as wide as a house struggled into view around a curve mere feet away. Lowell ducked back into his own lane in the nick of time, nearly colliding with his father, who was audaciously attempting to draw abreast on the right. When Lowell was able to look in the rear-view mirror again, his father seemed to be talking to him through the windshield and his mother had covered her eyes with her handkerchief. Lowell took the next curve at seventy. It did him no good; his father never faltered. Lowell guessed he was really in for it now.

Far too late, large numbers of plausible explanations of his presence at the top of Donner Pass sprang into mind. For example, he could have pretended he was coming out to greet them, never mind that he was going the wrong way, he'd gotten tired of waiting; it was a little thin, but it would have done in a pinch. Or he could have said he was visiting a friend—that was always a good gambit; his parents had worried constantly that he didn't have enough kids to play with, and he was always able to get away with being sighted in strange places (such as the sewage plant or the drive-in theater) by pretending that he was on his way to, or on his way back from, a visit to a friend. His parents were usually so pleased by word of this fictitious destination that any forbidden places he might fall into on his journey were simply incidental, and they never did get wise. (Now that he thought about it, why were his parents so worried that he might not have any friends? Did they think something was the matter with him? Was there actually something the matter with him that they'd never told him about? Had anybody else noticed? In this there was much food for thought, all of it unprofitable, but now was not the time; Lowell's father was recklessly attempting to draw abreast in a truck-passing lane that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and Lowell had to swing busily this way and that all over the highway to keep him in his place, although what he was going to do with him there, God only knew.)

Many were the good excuses he might have made. For that matter, he could probably have gotten away with no excuse at all—his parents were mild people and not given to prying—but he was committed to his course of action now, and there was no stopping it, any more than Hitler could have called off the war. They'd caught him red-handed and guilty as sin, running away from his own wedding (actually, returning from running away from his own wedding, not that it made any difference), and they stayed right behind him like nemesis, his father and mother, tooting peremptorily on the horn every now and then, no longer trying to attract his attention, just letting him know that he wasn't getting away with anything. Lowell supposed there was always the chance that his father would run out of gas or have to go to the bathroom. Then Lowell could race back to the dorm and pretend it was actually some member of his club, a wild chap with a great sense of humor and a similar haircut. In his heart, however, Lowell knew that nothing could save him; his father, a methodical man, would have filled his tank and emptied his bladder before setting out that morning, and there was no help coming from that quarter.

Soon they were at Auburn, and the freeway began. Playing his last card, Lowell slowed down in hopes they would try to get ahead of him. If they passed him, he could dodge off at the next exit. His father, however, refused to take the bait. Lowell slowed down, his father slowed down. Lowell switched lanes and went even slower, his father followed suit. He watched them in the rear-view mirror but saw nothing that encouraged him; his father had stopped talking and his mother was smoking a cigarette, but neither of them looked very pleased. It was hard to say how they looked. Lowell stared at their faces for a long time, searching for some sign, some hint of the kind of explanation that would get him off the hook, something that would make them neither angry nor distressed in their mild way, but the prospect was not encouraging. Presently a big blue Lincoln blared past at four times his speed, its driver's fist shaking furiously, reminding Lowell that he was in the fast lane and barely moving. You could get killed that way, and although Lowell wanted things to stop, he really didn't want them to stop that much; he instantly resumed normal freeway speed. His father accelerated too, maintaining an interval so precise it was as though Lowell was actually driving the Kaiser too, by some kind of remote control.

They passed Sacramento, and Lowell still saw no way out. They climbed out of the valley and through the round, brown hills. Vacaville fell behind them, and traffic began to build up. They came to San Rafael and passed the pastel tank farms on the hills above the bay, and still Lowell's father followed him implacably. So it was that they crossed the bridge and traversed San Francisco, went down the peninsula on Bayshore, turned off at Palo Alto and crept sedately down University Avenue, beneath the magnolia trees like a duck train, and came, finally, to the parking lot of Toyon Hall. Lowell pulled into his usual spot and stopped the car. His father stopped directly behind him. Lowell sat and waited. His parents didn't move. His father's hands remained on the steering wheel, ready to resume the chase at the drop of a hat. Lowell wondered whether, if he were to get out and go into the dorm, his parents would follow him at a two-car interval, walking along behind, stopping when he stopped. He sat and waited. His parents waited too. Lowell watched them in the mirror. They watched him through the windshield. His mother lit another cigarette, waving the match back and forth like a tiny signal before putting it in the ashtray. Lowell got out of the car stiffly and walked back to them, hoping that something good would come out of his mouth when he opened it.

“Hi,” he found himself saying.

His father reached down and turned off the ignition. His mother snubbed out her cigarette.

“I...” said Lowell. I what? I'm sorry? I'll be darned? He opened and closed his mouth several times, but nothing resembling words came out.

“I'll bet you have some good explanation for this,” said his father. “I was just telling your mother, I said, I'll bet he has some good explanation.”

They waited for him to come up with it, but Lowell's mind had been unproductive for two hundred miles, and nothing occurred to it now. He wished he could buy time by taking them some good place to talk, but in a campus apparently designed on purpose to contain no place where you could lay a girl but in a parking lot, there also seemed to be no place where you could have a scene with your parents except in a parking lot. He wondered what would happen if he fainted. He already knew the answer to that: they would wait patiently until he woke up.