The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind

  It was true. I knew it was true, but I just kept telling myself I was smarter than he was. “Hey, Wyman,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  We put the tools away.

  Wyman had a car, a blue Mustang. He was sixteen, mobile, good-looking. I got friendly with him, not exactly because of those things, but more because he didn’t stop me. It was a strange sensation at first. We were friends, I realized. We began driving around a lot on weekend nights, looking—like most teenagers—for some ineffable great thing we assumed must be out there, some worthy thing to look for which remained unnamed but sought ceaselessly in the nighttime anyway. After a while it occurred to me we were looking for girls. Obviously. At that point I became self-conscious about it. We were looking for girls. It helped lend direction to the proceedings.

  We drove around Seattle eating hamburgers from Herfy’s. Wyman wrapped his in paper napkins and ate with exaggerated scrupulosity, occasionally stopping to wash up and collect himself. I wiped my hands on my overcoat while I waited, an all-purpose dress item, easy to care for. “You’ve got some hairs out of place,” I would tell Wyman, or something like that, when he came back from the gas station rest room. Then he would go for his pocket comb and, nervously, lean into the rearview mirror.

  “How is it now?”

  “You fucking narcissist.”

  “Does it look okay?”

  “They’re all going to want you to come on their faces.”

  “Don’t be gross, man.”

  “What’s so fucking gross about that? Huh? What’s gross about it, Wyman?”

  “Shut up, okay?” said Wyman. “Stop playing with yourself.”

  “Eat mine. What’s gross about it?”

  But Wyman just shook his head and started up his Mustang, which always idled steadily and perfectly. “Sick, man,” he said. “You are sick.”

  I gradually became content with merely driving aimlessly, so it was a surprise to me when, one night in March, we actually located two girls. The prospect of this occurring had long since dissipated; it had become little more than an excuse to drive around together, fending off loneliness by sitting on the same seat, watching familiar streets swim past, spending the time with someone basically undemanding—though neither of us would have admitted to all this. In any event here were these girls with their thumbs out, down by the canal near Fremont. It was impossible to know whether or not they were beautiful—whether they were the girls I had imagined finding. They stood in the rain with big purses over their shoulders, dark and wet-looking at eleven-thirty, nothing but shadowy possibility. But Wyman wasn’t slowing down.

  “Hey,” I said. “Pull over.”

  “Jesus,” said Wyman. “Girls.”

  We had to go around the block once. Wyman wasn’t ready and had to compose himself a little. “Girls,” he said again. “Those were girls.”

  “Pull over this time,” I reminded him.

  When we veered in the second time they let their thumbs down. Wyman watched them critically through the windshield and so did I—two budding connoisseurs. “They look like a couple of dogs,” Wyman whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  But then they were piling into the backseat suddenly, reeking of cigarettes and cold Seattle rain. “A Mustang,” said one of them. “Cool.”

  They were both dripping water from their hair and clothes—two soaked and pale girls in blue jeans.

  “You like cars?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dan here is Mr. Cars,” I said. “I’m serious. Mr. Cars.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No,” Wyman called back over his shoulder. “Not really. Not at all.”

  I glared at him. Why would he take no advantage from this? His neutrality, which I interpreted as a brand of fear, irked me, and I nudged him. Wyman rolled his eyes in reply.

  “You look sort of cold,” he said into the rearview mirror. “I’ll turn the heater on.”

  As we passed through the streetlights I looked them over under the guise of concern for their wet condition. The one who liked cars wore a red poplin jacket and soaked, bell-bottomed Navy jeans. Big-boned, freckled and colorless, she nevertheless had a kind of bovine attraction: somebody you might sink into, and from her white folds and pasty valleys never return. She sat there uncomfortably with her neck twisted to the left, wringing the water from her hair. I smiled at her, but my heart wasn’t in it. She smiled back dreamily and put her hand across her mouth. Her fingers, too, were plump and pale; they worked with nothing akin to grace and watching them I felt the faint beginnings of disgust.

  “I’m Joan,” she said to me. “My stepbrother had a Mustang but he sold it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What year?” I said.

  “A sixty-seven.”

  “This one’s a sixty-eight,” I said.

  “Sixty-nine,” said Wyman.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A sixty-nine.”

  The other one, though more aloof, appeared more quietly inviting. Her silence suggested certain slim possibilities; her wetness suggested the kind of bathtub sex I’d gathered was adult fare from television. I liked her small head and exaggerated, damp mascara; I liked the idea of dominating her smallness and getting some secret fierceness, some agreeable, energetic acquiescence, in reply. She had red hair, a turned-up nose, brown lips.

  “What’s your name?” I said to her.

  “Carla.”

  “Where do you go to school?”

  “Where do you go, Buster?”

  “Roosevelt,” I said apologetically, since Roosevelt was the school of snobs and rich kids.

  “It figures,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Roosevelt. It figures.”

  She looked out the window disdainfully, rubbing her hands together, blowing into them.

  “Is the heater on?” Joan called.

  “Yes it is,” answered Wyman.

  “I’m freezing,” said Joan. “Brrrr.”

  “I’ll turn up the fan,” said Wyman.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “How exactly does it figure?”

  “I’m sure,” said Carla. “You can tell.”

  She snapped open her bag, searched around with one hand and came up with a package of cigarettes. “Everything’s soaked,” she observed.

  “How can you tell?” I said. “What is it, anyway?”

  Carla rolled her eyes again. “It’s the way they talk,” she said crossly. “It’s the weird stuff that comes out of their mouths.”

  Joan laughed, covered her face, then slapped Carla’s shoulder with as much daintiness as she could muster.

  “Lay off,” she said. “They’re giving us a ride, okay?”

  “Wait a second,” I said again. “How do they talk? Explain this.”

  “Like you,” said Carla. “Got a light?”

  Wyman pushed in his lighter. “Hold on,” I said. “I talk like anybody talks.”

  “You talk like a Roosevelt guy.”

  “Oh, come on,” Joan said. “Lay off, Carla.”

  Wyman pulled his lighter out, a glowing orange coil, and held it back over his shoulder. Carla leaned in and lit her cigarette.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” answered Wyman.

  Somehow he was making more progress than I was by merely driving the car. The sensation of being so flagrantly rebuked was not so much familiar as it was inevitable, as though I had dreamed all this ahead of time. I decided to speak less, calm down, be courteous—as if I could change my character in the face of such distaste for it. I grew silent; we all did.

  “Where am I taking you?” Wyman said after a while. “Is there an address or some place you’d like to go?”

  “Home,” said Carla. “Go out a hundred twenty-fifth.”

  “Okay,” said Wyman. “Fine.”

  “Why don’t we stop off for a bottle of wine?” I suggested. “How would you two like to drink some wine, maybe?”

  But it wa
s as though they had expected this from the beginning. Neither seemed impressed by the suggestion. Carla showed nothing in her face at all, but Joan began to wag a forefinger at me. “Naughty,” she said. “Naughty, naughty.” Then she produced from her bag three bottles of Ripple, the wine of choice among teenagers of those years. One of them was three-quarters gone.

  “Automatic party,” she said to me.

  “Portable,” I said. “Portable party.”

  “Whatever,” Joan said. “I’m sure.”

  “Really,” said Carla, still looking out the window.

  It was the sort of conversation that seemed unavoidable that evening. These girls were strangers, slightly vulgar somehow, slightly cheap too, less fragrant than what I had always hoped for. I did not want to believe that the sort of girl I might end up with hitchhiked around from lonesome street corners carrying bottles of Ripple in her purse. I’d dropped a notch, on this rain-slicked evening, from the life my parents had held out to me. Wyman did not seem to feel this way. He seemed capable of carrying on with the business of driving and had fixed himself to the steering wheel with a sort of terminal rigidity. I could not count on him to aid me in easing the situation. Anything I said was an immediate blunder, a faux pas, which is a term no one in that car—except for me—could have possibly understood the meaning of. Still, I felt impelled to go on speaking somehow; this unfolding theater was my responsibility.

  “What do you say we stop?” I pushed on. “Pull over, have a swig maybe. So Dan here doesn’t have to drive.”

  “That’s okay,” answered Wyman.

  Carla began to insert directions into the forward motion of things—left here, right there, go straight ahead—but without the tenor of polite apology one would expect in her situation. She never even removed the cigarette from between her lips; its fiery tip bobbed and glowed in the darkness as she spoke from around its filter. We had passed into a neighborhood without streetlights or sidewalks, a north Seattle neighborhood of weedy carports and faded ramblers within earshot of the interstate freeway.

  “Right up here,” said Carla. “On the left. Right here.”

  It was a house like all the rest of them, a low, flimsy-looking box. A boat trailer sat in front of it rusting; puddles lay where the lawn should have been.

  “Is that your Barracuda?” asked Wyman.

  “It’s my brother’s,” she said. “He’s in love with it.”

  “Cool car,” I said. “Should we chug some of that wine now? I know I’m kind of thirsty.”

  Joan looked at Carla. “What do you think?” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” answered Carla. “I don’t care.”

  She yawned.

  “Shut off the motor,” I told Wyman.

  He shut the motor off dutifully. I noticed the rain against the roof now, a frail rattle and roll. The Ripple went around in a counterclockwise fashion, tasting like watered-down Kool-Aid. I swallowed an enormous draught before passing it on to Wyman, who tilted the bottle in the most perfunctory manner possible, as though he drank from it only out of courtesy.

  In the end we split that wine two ways. Carla merely wet her brown lips with it, but Joan drank with an eager greed, with desire, with misguided passion. It was as if she might find in those bottles of Ripple an answer to the most basic questions. I, too, drank as much as I could, shriveling in alcohol my self-disgust. As for Wyman, he remained uninterested in anything except keeping a courteous low profile. That wine went around at least nine or ten times without his swallowing more than a few tablespoons. It was as though he feared being poisoned.

  “Aren’t you worried about your parents?” he said finally, turning to look at Carla. “What if they see us out here?”

  “They’re asleep,” Carla answered. “The lights are out.”

  “What if they wake up?”

  “They won’t.”

  “She’s done this before,” Joan threw in. “A lot of times, right, Carla?”

  Carla didn’t answer. She merely sat there, idling in neutral.

  “Is everybody warm enough?” said Wyman.

  “I’m not,” Joan said. “But don’t start the motor, please.”

  And it was then that I felt her hand in my hair, fingers toying with the locks at my neck, raveling them up, tugging. “Nice hair,” she said to me. “I like it.”

  “You do?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I swiveled into the gaze she leveled me with, a gaze that meant sex in no uncertain terms, a gaze that meant nothing else’d turned out for her this night and that I was all that remained. It was that simple, but it stunned me anyway, and my thoughts swam beyond control now. She disgusted me, she was not what I wanted, and so, with the bottle of Ripple in my left hand, I climbed over into the backseat.

  “Automatic party,” I said.

  “Really,” said Joan, with her arm around my neck. “Right on. All right.”

  Wyman turned on the radio.

  “Hey,” said Joan. “You go up front, Carla. With that guy. Okay?”

  “That’s all right,” said Wyman, peering through the rearview mirror now. “I mean, unless you want to.”

  Carla looked out the window.

  I was fifteen—basically an unattractive boy with pimples, in an overcoat. It was my first kiss: a girl named Joan. Nineteen-seventy-two. I recall ineluctably the surprisingly bad smell of it. Her mouth tasted terrible, like seaweed, like half-digested wine. So this is it, I kept thinking. Her tongue asserted its way into my mouth and then lay there like a piece of slimy rope. And I felt nothing, no desire for her: I couldn’t feel her through the thickness of my overcoat, or breathe in the actuality of who she was. We touched only because we both hated ourselves; and so we were unable to feel each other. There was nothing either beautiful or easy about this. I began to feel I had ruined forever a moment that should have been fondly memorable. In adolescence it seems as if life might reveal itself only at the most poignant moments. But somehow these never arrive. Constantly consumed by small grievances of personality, we remain immune to their coming. We can’t fathom anything finally, not love, not joy, not the truth of some other. Not the stirring of the spirit by the touch of the body. Nothing.

  “I’m going,” Carla said in the face of this scene. She opened her door two inches and peered out. “Call me,” she said to Joan.

  “Wait a sec,” Joan said. “I’m coming.”

  She pushed me away from her, stared for a second into my eyes with some poor, misbegotten sense of her own grandeur in the moment—as if our brief meeting constituted high romantic tragedy—then bolted, dramatically, from the automobile.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Carla said to us.

  I looked at her. If I had kissed her mouth would things have been different? Perhaps the fragrance I had dreamed lived there, just behind that disdainful expression. Perhaps you could melt down that penumbra of disdain—that tiredness about all the boys she had ever met—and reveal behind it whatever feeling adults had that made sex their favorite subject.

  “You’re welcome,” answered Wyman. “Good night now.”

  When they were gone I tried to erase the taste of Joan from my mouth, but this was a noisy process. It seemed to me there was nothing to do with it, though; it wouldn’t leave me or fade away. “She tasted like shit,” I said to Wyman. “She was fucked. Fucking gross.”

  “Here,” he said. “Wash your mouth out with this.” And he held up a nearly full bottle of Ripple. “They forgot it,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  I rinsed with the Ripple: but nothing could eradicate what Joan had done to me. Nothing. Not even Ripple wine.

  Driving, Wyman lapsed into a rigid silence I was too self-absorbed to interpret. “You should have nailed that redhead,” I kept saying to him for some reason. “She wanted you to, you know. She did.”

  “No way.”

  “Are you kidding, Wyman? Obviously. Fucking obvious. She wanted it.”

  But he didn’t answer. He drove along w
ith one hand on the steering wheel, the other busily grooming his immaculate hair.

  “Maybe some Drano would get this smell out of my mouth,” I said. “Joan,” I said. “What a dog.”

  “German Shepherd,” said Wyman. “Spayed and neutered.”

  I laughed. So did Wyman. “The rain’s slowing down,” he said.

  “Let’s drink this Ripple.”

  “Let’s go somewhere decent.”

  “Let’s drink it at the Savoy. Up on the roof. We can climb the fire escape.”

  “Good idea,” said Wyman. “Great.”

  He liked it for the same reasons I did: we would count on the night air, the volume of the gray sky, the misty view of the city from the roof of the hotel—we would count on all of it to wipe things clean somehow and make us undefiled once more. How were we to know such a thing was impossible? What is ever put behind you?

  “Fucking stinks,” I said again, and rolled down my window. I turned my head and spit with the wind, but there was nothing satisfying about it.

  “More Ripple,” said Wyman. “Go on.”

  He was drinking himself now. He had a much finer genetic aptitude for it than I did. No doubt Wyman, wherever he is, drinks like a fish today. In any event at sixteen he could drink me under the table. And he liked to, generally speaking.

  “That redhead would have spread,” I said.

  “No way,” said Wyman.

  “Bullshit.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “She wanted it, Wyman.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “How would you know?” I asked. “Huh? How would you?”

  “You’re full of shit,” said Wyman.

  It was a truth about myself I already recognized. But it hurt, coming from Wyman.

  “Screw you,” I said. “You’re the one who’s full of shit, you know. Why didn’t you make a move on that girl? What’s the matter with you?”

  But he didn’t answer. He only sucked down more wine and passed me the bottle without taking his eyes off the road.

  “Drink up,” he said. “Let’s get drunk.”

  “I’m already drunk,” I said.

  “Get more drunk, then,” insisted Wyman. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  I took a drink of wine, but it was true, I was drunk already, and anything I drank now just made me feel worse than I already felt, more wine-sick, more unhinged.