Independence Day (32 page)

“It’s not easy for first-timers either,” I say impatiently. Phyllis seems to be angling for something. Though what? I once had a client—the wife of a church history professor and a mother of three, one of whom was autistic and got left in the car in a restraining harness—who asked me if I had any interest in getting naked with her on the polished floor of a ranch-style home in Belle Mead, a house her husband liked but she wanted a second look at because she felt the floor plan lacked “flow.” An instance of pure transference. Though no one in the realty business isn’t clued in to the sexual dimension: hours spent alone in close quarters (front seats of cars, provocatively empty houses); the not-quite-false aura of vulnerability and surrenderment; the possibility of a future in the same grid pattern, of unexpected, tingly sightings at the end of the lettuce rack, squirmy, almost-missed eye contact across a hot summer parking lot or through a plate-glass window with a spouse present. There have been instances in these three years and a half when I haven’t been a model citizen. Except you can lose your license for that kind of stunt and become a bad joke in the community, neither of which I care to risk as much as I might once have.

Still, for some reason, I find myself imagining fleshy Phyllis not in a pink petunia print but a skimpy slip over her bare underneath, holding a tumbler of warm Scotch while she talks, and peeking out the blinds at the grainy-lit Sleepy Hollow parking lot as the innkeeper’s eighteen-year-old half-Polynesian son, Mombo, shirtless and muscles bulging, hauls a garbage bag around to the dumpster outside their bathroom in which sluggo Joe is grouchily tending to more of nature’s unthrilling needs behind closed doors. This is the second time today I’ve thought of Phyllis “in this way,” her health situation notwithstanding. My question, however, is: why?

“So you live alone?” Phyllis says.

“What’s that?”

“Because Joe had at one time thought you might be gay, that’s all.”

“Nope. A frayed knot, as my son says.” Though I’m baffled. In two hours I have been suspected of being a priest, a shithead and now, a homo. I’m apparently not getting my message across. I hear another round-bell go
ding
, as Joe turns up the TV from Mexico.

“Well,” Phyllis says, whispering, “I just wished for a second I was going wherever you were going, Frank. That might be nice.”

“You wouldn’t have a good time with me, Phyllis. I can promise that.”

“Oh. It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy talk.” Too bad she can’t get on the bus with the Canadians. “You’re a good listener, Frank. I’m sure it’s a plus in your profession.”

“Sometimes. But not always.”

“You’re just modest.”

“Good luck to you two,” I say.

“Well, we’ll see you, Frank. You be good. Thanks.”

Clunk.

T
he truckers who’ve been glowering at me have wandered off. And both sets of Canadians now emerge from their comfort stations, hands damp, noses blown, faces splashed, hair wet-combed, shirttails for the moment tucked, yaw-hawing about whatever nasty secrets were shared around inside. They march off into Roy’s, their skinny, uniformed bus driver standing just outside the glass doors, having a smoke and some P&Q in the hot night. He cuts his eyes my way, sees me down the phone bank watching him, shakes his head as if we both knew all about it, tosses his smoke and walks out of view.

Without as much as one guarded thought left from dinner, I punch in Sally’s number, feeling that I’ve made a bad decision where she’s concerned, should’ve stayed and wooed my way out of the woods like a man who knows how to get messages across. (This of course may turn out to be a worse decision—tired, half drunk, fretful, not in control of my speech. Though sometimes it’s better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.)

But Sally, from her message, must be in a similar frame of mind, and what I’d like to do is turn around and beat it back to her house, scramble into bed with her and have us go slap to sleep like old marrieds, then tomorrow haul her along, and begin instilling proper wanting practices into my life, and fun to boot, and quit being the man holding out. Forty psychics able to find Jimmy Hoffa in a landfill, or to tell you what street your missing twin Norbert’s living on in Great Falls, couldn’t tell me what’s a “better deal” than Sally Caldwell. (Of course, one of the Existence Period’s bedrock paradoxes is that just when you think you’re emerging, you may actually be wading further in.)

“Uffda, ya goddamn knucklehead,” one of the Canadians yorks out as I listen intently to Sally’s phone ring and ring and ring.

Though I’m quick to the next decision: leave a message saying I
would’ve
zoomed back but didn’t know where she was, yet I stand prepared to charter a Piper Comanche, zoom her up to Springfield, where Paul and I’ll pick her up in time for lunch. Zoom, zoom.

But instead of her sweet voice and diversionary, security-conscious message—“Hi! We’re not here, but your call is important to us”—I get rings and more rings. I actually picture the phone vibrating all to hell on its table beside her big teester bed, which in my tableau is lovingly turned down but empty. I pound in the number again and try to visualize Sally dashing out of the shower or just coming in from a pensive midnight walk on Mantoloking beach, taking the front steps two at a time, forgetting her limp, hoping it’s me. And it is. Only, ring, ring, ring, ring.

An overcooked, nearly nauseating hot dog smell floats across the lobby from Nathan’s. “And your mind’s a sewer too,” one of the Canuck women sounds off at one of the men standing in line.

“So and what’s yers, eh? An operating room? I’m not married t’ya, okay?”

“Yet,” another man guffaws.

Defeated, I’m nonetheless ready to go, and take off striding right out through the lobby. Gaunt boys from Moonachie and Nutley are straying in toward the Mortal Kombat and Drug War machines, angling for the big kills. New weary-eyed travelers wander through the front doors, seeking relief of some stripe, ignoring the Vince trophy case—too much on a late night. I should, right here and now, buy something to bring Clarissa, but there’s nothing for sale but football crap and postcards showing the NJTpk in all four seasonal moods (I’ll have to find something tomorrow), and I pass out of the air-conditioning right by the Eureka driver, leaning one leg up on his idling juggernaut, surrounded now by white gulls standing motionless in the dark.

U
p again onto the streaming, light-choked turnpike, my dash-board digital indicating 12:40. It’s tomorrow already, July 2, and my personal aspirations are now trained on sleep, since the rest of tomorrow will be a testing day if everything goes in all details perfectly, which it won’t; so that, I’m determined—late departure and all—to put my woolly head down
someplace
in the Constitution State, as a small token of progress and encouragement to my journey.

But the turnpike thwarts me. Along with construction slowdowns, entrance ramps merging, MEN WORKING, left-lane break-downs and a hot mechanical foreboding that the entire seaboard might simply explode, there’s now even more furious, grinding-mad-in-the-dark traffic and general vehicular desperation, as if to be caught in New Jersey after tonight will mean sure death.

At Exit 18E&W, where the turnpike ends, cars are stacked before, beyond, around and out of sight toward the George Washington Bridge. Automated signs over the lanes counsel way-worn travelers to EXPECT LONG DELAYS, TAKE ALTERNATE ROUTE. More responsible advice would be: LOOK AT YOUR HOLE CARD. HEAD FOR HOME. I envision miles and miles of backup on the Cross Bronx (myself dangled squeamishly above the teeming hellish urban no-man’s-land below), followed by multiple-injury accidents on the Hutch, more long toll-booth tie-ups on the thruway, a blear monotony of NO VACANCYS clear to Old Saybrook and beyond, culminating in me sleeping on the back seat in some mosquito-plagued rest area and (worst case) being trussed and maimed, robbed and murdered, by anguished teens—who might right now be following me from the Vince—my body left for crows’ food, silent on a peak in Darien.

So, as ill advised, I take an alternate route.

Though there is no truly alternate route, only
another
route, a longer, barely chartable, indefensible fool’s route of sailing west to get east: up to 80, where untold cars are all flooding eastward, then west to Hackensack, up 17 past Paramus, onto the Garden State north (again!), though eerily enough there’s little traffic; through River Edge and Oradell and Westwood, and two tolls to the New York line, then east to Nyack and the Tappan Zee, down over Tarrytown (once home to Karl Bemish) to where the East opens up just as the North must have once for old Henry Hudson himself.

What on a good summer night should take thirty minutes—the G.W. to Greenwich and straight into a pricey little inn with a moon-shot water view—takes me an hour and fifteen, and I am
still
south of Katonah, my eyes jinking and smarting, phantoms leaping from ditches and barrow pits, the threat of spontaneous dozing forcing me to grip the wheel like a Le Mans driver having a heart attack. Several times I consider just giving in, pulling off, falling over sideways from fatigue, surrendering to whatever the night stalkers lurking on the outskirts of Pleasantville and Valhalla have dreamed up for me—my car down on its rims, my trunk jimmied, luggage and realty signs strewn around, my wallet lifted by shadowy figures in Air Jordans.

But I’m too close. And instead of staying on big, safe, reliable 287 up to big, safe, reliable 684 and pushing the extra twenty miles to Danbury (a virtual Motel City, with maybe an all-night liquor outlet), I turn north on the Sawmill (its homespun name alone makes me sleepy) and head toward Katonah, checking my AAA atlas for the quickest route into CT.

Then, almost unnoticeable, a tiny wooden sign—CONNECTICUT—with a small hand-painted arrow seeming to point right out of the 1930s. And I make for it, down NY 35, my headlights vacuuming its narrow, winding, stone-walled, woods-to-the-verge alleyways toward Ridgefield, which I calculate (distances that look long on the map are actually short) to be twelve miles. And in ten minutes flat I’m there, the sleeping village rising into pretty, bucolic view, meaning that I’ve somehow crossed the state line without knowing it.

Ridgefield, as I drive cautiously up and through, my eyes peeled for cops and motels, is a hamlet that even in the pallor of its barium-sulfur streetlights would remind anyone but a lifelong Ridgefielder of Haddam, New Jersey—only richer. A narrow, English high street emerges from the woodsy south end, leads through a hickory-shaded, lush-lawned, deep-pocketed mansion district of mixed architectural character, each mansion with big-time security in place, winds through a quaint, shingled, basically Tudor CBD of attached shops (rich realtors, a classic-car showroom, a Japanese deli, a fly-tiers shop, a wine & liquor, a Food For Thought Books). A walled war-memorial green lies just at village center, flanked by big Protestant churches and two more mansions converted to lawyers’ offices. The Lions meet Wednesday, the Kiwanis Thursday. Other, shorter streets bend away to delve and meander through more modest but still richly tree-lined neighborhoods, with lanes named Baldy, Pudding, Toddy Hill, Scarlet Oak and Jasper. Plainly, anyone living below the Cross Bronx would move here if he or she could pay the freight.

But if you’re driving through at 2:19, “town” slips by before you know it, and you’re too quick through it and out onto Route 7, having passed no place to stop and ask or caught no glimpse of a friendly motel sign—only a pair of darkened inns (Le Chateau and Le Perigord), where a fellow could tuck into a lobster thermidor across from his secretary, or a veal scarpatti and a baked Alaska with his son from some nearby prep school. But don’t expect a room. Ridgefield’s a town that invites no one to linger, where the services contemplate residents only, but which makes it in my book a piss-poor place to live.

Exhausted and disappointed, I make a reluctant left at the light onto 7, resigned to sag into Danbury, fifteen miles farther on and by now full to the brim with darkened cars nosed into darkened motel lots. I have done this all wrong. A forceful stand at Sally’s or at the very least tarrying in Tarrytown would’ve saved me.

Yet ahead in the gloom where 7 crosses the Ridgefield line and disappears back into the hinterland of scrub-brush Connecticut, I see the quavery red neon glimmer I’ve given up hoping for. MOTEL. And under it, in smaller, fuzzier letters, the life-restoring VACANCY. I aim at it like a missile.

But when I wheel into the little half-moon lot (it’s the Sea Breeze, though no sea’s near enough to offer breezes), there’s a commotion in progress. Motel guests are out of their rooms in bathrobes, slippers and tee-shirts. The state police are abundantly present—more blue flashers turning—while a big white-and-orange ambulance van, its strobes popping and its back door open, appears ready to receive a passenger. The whole lot has the backlit, half-speed unreality of a movie set (not what I’d hoped for) and I’m tempted just to drive on, though again that would mean conking out on the car seat and hoping no one kills me.

All the police activity is going on at one end of the lot, in front of the last unit in line; so I park near the other end, beyond the office, where lights are on and a customer counter is visible through the window. If I can be assigned a room away from the action, I may still get one-third night’s measure of sleep.

Inside the office the air-conditioning’s cranked up high, and a powerful cooking smell from a rear apartment beyond a red drapery makes the air dense and stinging. The clerk is a slender, dull-looking subcontinental whose eyes flicker up at me from a desk behind the counter. He’s talking on the phone at a blazing speed and in a language I recognize as not my own. Without pausing, he fingers a little registration card off a stack he has, slides it up onto the glass countertop, where a pen’s attached to a little chain. Several hand-lettered and unequivocal instructions have been pressed under the glass, relating to one’s use of one’s room: no pets, no calls charged, no cooking, no hourly rates, no extra guests, no operation of a business (none of these is currently in my plans).