The Last of the Wise Lovers

  "Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.

  "You look good," I couldn't resist, "too good to be meeting a girlfriend."

  She chose to hear the first part of the sentence only, and she smiled in satisfaction.

  "You see? You can be nice when you want to be."

  We went down to the garage. One of her suits - perhaps the one she'd wear the next morning - was hanging on the hook above the back window. She seemed so calm, so pleased with herself as she slid in behind the wheel that she seemed to be inviting trouble; and despite having cancelled her most risky appointment, I was still afraid of all the terrible things that could happen to her at this rendezvous. For a moment I thought of delaying her (I had a sudden urge to get a stomach ache, like I used to when I was a kid; I even felt my intestines contract), but I realized I didn't stand a chance.

  "When will you be back?" I asked, as if I didn't know that she wouldn't be back till morning.

  She started to get annoyed.

  "Late," she said with all the pleasantness she could muster, "very late, actually." She stroked my cheek. "Go to sleep when you get home. When you wake up in the morning, I'll be there."

  This meant I'd have an endless night of no-sleep, waiting to hear the familiar sound of her car in the garage.

  "I might stay in the city until late, too," I said, maybe to get her worried.

  "How will you get home?"

  "I'll sleep over at my friend's house."

  "Where does he live?"

  "Queens," I blurted out.

  She thought a moment, then said - to my surprise - "Maybe that's a good idea, instead of you riding around on buses late at night."

  The idea sounded good to me too, so good that the feeling of being the abandoned little boy began to be replaced by an overwhelming sensation of adventure. I had $80 in my pocket, my last week's wages from the library plus what I had made on the docks. How much could a hotel cost? By the time I sat down in the car I was tingling with anticipation. Mom backed out of the garage and used the remote-control to close the garage door. I leaned back, glancing at my reflection in the side view mirror. That's when I saw the car.

  At first I didn't think anything of it. I was busy watching the thin trail of white smoke leaving its exhaust pipe and wondering why the guy behind the wheel didn't turn off the engine and get out. Only a minute later did I realize I was looking at that car, the blue Chevrolet. I wasn't scared; maybe because something much stronger had mesmerized me: curiosity. This was the first chance I'd had to get a good glimpse of the guy who'd sat behind me in the Lincoln Tunnel, just barely grazed by me on the night of the break-in, followed me in Kennedy Airport, and frightened Debbie the other night (I couldn't be absolutely sure that hadn't been Dad, but I preferred to think it had been this guy). Most importantly, this was the guy who knew so much about us, while all I knew about him was that he was small, he was fast, and he had an annoying, wheezing cough. I adjusted the mirror so as to catch every detail. All I could make out were light hair and a round face.

  Mom drove slowly to the end of the street. The Chevrolet pulled out from behind the tree, rolled a little way after us, then stopped again, without getting too close.

  Mom signaled and started to turn into the next street.

  "Wait a second," I asked. "Wait a second."

  She braked. "What is it now?"

  "Don't turn around," I said as softly as I could, "but if you look in the mirror you'll see him."

  "See whom?"

  "That guy, the one from the Lincoln Tunnel."

  She didn't want to believe me, but she glanced in the mirror anyway. "I don't see a soul, just a blue car...”

  "That's him."

  "It's about time you stopped this nonsense!" she burst out. She sounded angry, but she looked scared to death. All of a sudden I realized something very important: She hadn't been denying reality, as I'd thought; she'd just been ignoring my anxiety, and she was angry with me for arousing it in her again.

  Once I realized that she was suspicious, that she wasn't completely detached or denying everything but that she was actually suspicious, I felt a sudden surge of respect for her. I opened the door and got out. She called after me, "What are you doing?"

  "I forgot something. I'll take the bus into the city later."

  "Ronny...” there was real worry in her voice. Again she peered in the mirror. "I don't want to leave you like this."

  Suddenly life seemed unpredictable, full of surprises. I'd worked so hard in the last few days to arouse her anxiety, but now that I'd finally succeeded, I discovered that her concern was worse than her calm.

  "There's nothing to worry about," I called, stealing a glance at the Chevrolet (the sun's glare on the windshield made it impossible for me to see the driver). "It's not the same car," I added confidently.

  She hesitated.

  I pointed to my watch. "You haven't got much time left."

  "Are you going back home?" she asked anxiously.

  "Where else would I be going?" I waved to her and started walking toward the house.

  After she had gone I stood stock still, in case the guy in the Chevrolet tried to follow her. Not that I had a clue how I'd stop him. Actually, I wasn't thinking of anything except the danger that Mom might be in, and the need to prevent it. A few raindrops landed on my face. The guy in the Chevrolet turned on his windshield wipers, then turned them off again. Hesitantly, a little sheepishly, I turned around. Mom's car was gone, but was she at a safe distance? There was still a chance she had stopped at the deli for a minute, or at the florist's or at her hairdresser's. The wipers again swept across the Chevrolet's windshield. What should I do next? My imagination - which everyone had always told me to get rid of - was working feverishly, vainly trying to generate an idea. All it could tell me to do was to start walking. And that's what I did. When I'd gone about half a mile, the Chevrolet moved away from the curb and started following me.

  I walked along the side of the road, next to the front lawns of the houses so that I could escape if things got serious. I wondered whether - and how much - I should fear him. If he really was one of Dad's cronies, I figured he wouldn't want to harm me, just follow me. But that was a hunch, and I couldn't trust it any more than I could have trusted any of my other hunches in the last few days. Suddenly I thought that this was exactly the type of "event" that I would want to tell you about. I stopped by a pay phone and dialed your answering service. In mid-dial I started wondering how I was going to explain the situation to the dry little man on the other end. I dialed again, this time directly to your house. The answering machine answered. When it had finished, I left a brief message. The Chevrolet waited patiently at a safe distance the whole time. I put the receiver down and started walking again. Again he began to follow me. I turned down a different street. He turned after me. I felt very powerful. He was like my prisoner, attached to me by an invisible cord. Immediately afterward I felt exactly the opposite: weak, stupid, afraid. The intoxication of adventure and power became the awful feeling that I'd gotten in over my head. The empty streets, the light rain, the loneliness - all of them turned the blue car and the man inside it into something foreign, unexpected, and threatening.

  I couldn't decide which way to go. There were two possibilities: one led to the deli, which was near the southern entrance to East Neck; the other led down the street where Debbie lived, near the northern entrance to East Neck. As I passed her house I could see her on the front lawn, raking leaves. From the way she held her head and stared off into space at some distant point above me I realized she was going to let me pass without a word. I'm no good at those kind of games; and besides, I needed all the help I could get. I walked up to her fence and said, "Hi."

  She answered with a sad, dry, "Hi."

  I stole a glance at the Chevrolet. He had positioned himself between two cars, as if to signal that there was nothing to worry about - he would wait until I was finished.

  "Can I come in?" I asked.


  She shrugged her shoulders, and when I opened the gate she started to walk around the side of the house. I walked briskly after her, and when I caught up to her I grabbed her hand. She didn't resist. I was very grateful. When we got to the corner of the house I turned around and looked at the car. When I turned back around her face was very close to mine. I kissed her. At first she was frozen, but then she thawed as if the other night and the torn letter on my bed had never been. That's what's so confusing about Debbie: she's so simple that sometimes she's absolutely wonderful and sometimes - like if I need a little understanding and compassion when things get complex - she's absolutely maddening. Anyway, just then - I loved her. It began to rain again, harder. We ran to take cover. Through the bay window of her house I could see her Dad sitting in front of the television drinking beer. Her mother was ironing. We ducked in under her back porch and sat on cartons full of empty bottles.

  "I'm glad you came," she said, pressing herself against me.

  I peered around the corner of the house. The Chevrolet was still there. The driver wasn't inside it. I glanced around the other side, to their back yard: an old dryer was lying abandoned in the flower bed, two cars were parked under the pine trees, and several white, wrought-iron chairs were strewn about; he could have been hiding behind any one of them.

  Debbie attributed my constant fidgeting to embarrassment.

  She said, "Look at me, Ronny," gently cradling my chin in her hand. "I've been thinking about you, about what there was between us. We have to open up more to each other...” Something flitted behind the dryer, and I froze. She sensed it. "Is something wrong?"

  `We've got to get away from here,' I thought, `to draw the blue Chevy and its driver away before he goes after Mom or tries to break into the house again.' The thing that had been hiding behind the dryer jumped up on a chair: a cat.

  "Maybe ...” I had an idea, "we should go on a picnic?"

  "In the rain?"

  "Why not?"

  She thought a moment, then said, "That could be nice. Do you have a car?"

  I pointed at her parents' cars, which were parked nearby (and for a moment I was afraid the guy would be hiding in one of them, only to pop up in the back seat as we were driving along the river).

  Debbie said, "They'll only let me take the pick-up."

  "Fine."

  "Where to?"

  I spread my arms open wide, "Wherever you like."

  Now she was really happy. "I know a wonderful place, a little inlet just north of Tarrytown. There's a small cafe there with a tiny dance floor...” Suddenly an engine turned over, and I jumped up and peered around the corner. The Chevrolet was no longer empty. The guy was sitting in it. Debbie hugged me warmly.

  "Your heart is beating so...”

  I suppose I shouldn't have told her why it was beating so; if I hadn't, we would have gone off to that little inlet or islet or whatever near Tarrytown, and maybe things would have turned out differently. But I was so tense, and her voice sounded so full of that feminine compassion that always stirs me, that I began.

  "D'you remember that night you thought you saw someone in our garden?" (Inside I thought: I wish I could be certain that she'd been imagining things, and that the guy she'd seen hadn't been my father.) "Well, that guy - the one you thought was my Dad - is right over there, sitting in that blue Chevrolet. I was going to go into the city with my Mom, but suddenly he showed up in back of us. I got out of the car to try and draw him away from Mom and it worked, in fact he followed me all the way here...” and then I saw her face.

  It was frozen in a mixture of astonishment, disgust, and fear. I think "horror" would be the right word.

  She said: "Why do you insist on telling those stories?"

  "It's still there...” I invited her to check.

  "Maybe there is a blue Chevrolet there, and maybe there really is some guy sitting in it, or maybe he's already gone into one of the houses, but I don't believe that he followed you all the way here. Things like that simply do not happen in the real world," she slapped her thigh in disgust. "I don't get this game you're playing, Ronny. I really was hoping that things could go back to being the way they were, before I went on vacation. When you came up to the fence just now, I decided to give us another chance - though only yesterday I'd made up my mind to forget that you even existed; I even talked to my mother about it - and that's after years of not telling her any of what was going on with me...”

  Have I mentioned that I really liked her mother? The fact that she'd talked to her actually made me hopeful.

  "And what did she say?"

  "She thinks you're ill with something called `mythomania'. She read about it in Readers' Digest. It means that fame is so important to you that you're not satisfied with who you are, so you add all sorts of false details, like for instance that your father is a secret agent, or that all sorts of strange cars and detectives are hiding in wait for you...” she peered around the corner anyway, "and now it's getting worse," she said in that low, intense voice people use when they've decided the person opposite them is hopeless and that they're essentially talking to themselves, "because you don't just tell these stories, you actually believe them, and then you get all worked up about any old Chevrolet parked on the street." She turned her back to me and gazed at the rain. "Your strangeness scares me. Every time I think I'm beginning to know you, I find out I've just scratched the surface...”

  "... Because every time I try to open up to you, you get bored or frightened, and treat me as if I'm some sort of freak."

  "D'you mean that time you wanted to make love by the river, with all the mosquitos, in the mud; or do you mean all those times you get philosophical - you can be such a bore; or do you mean now, with this cock and bull story about a Chevrolet following you?"

  "Please," I grasped her arm, "even if you don't believe what I'm saying...”

  "If I believe the story about the Chevrolet, then things look even worse, because then it means you didn't really want to go on a picnic with me, you just wanted to use me to get out of here in my parents' car...”

  "I didn't mean to use you. I was going to tell you on the way to the picnic. I was just trying to put it off. After all my previous attempts, I could guess how you'd react...” All of a sudden - I don't know why - I felt the tears well up in my eyes. "I wish I could come to you and say: Look, this is what's going on, help me; I wish I could talk to you like that - and not just to you, to everyone: to my Mom, to my Dad, to someone." I couldn't hold back the tears any longer. I held them in as much as I could, so as not to make too much noise.

  She looked at me as-if-sympathetically, the way people do when they feel like they ought to be sympathetic, but they really have no desire to help. I calmed down and tried to collect my thoughts. It was 4:30. I could assume that Mom was already on the way to her meeting, and all I had left to do was shake the guy in the Chevrolet.

  "All right," I said, swallowing the last of my tears, "no picnic. Let's just drive around for half an hour, take me up north and drop me off somewhere on the road. I'll manage on my own from there."

  She took a deep breath, and shook her head.

  "Not even as a favor to a friend?"

  She didn't answer.

  I ducked out from under the porch and walked slowly along the wall, keeping out of the rain, still hoping she would run after me or call out to me. I passed the bay window. Debbie's dad had dozed off, beer in hand, and her mom was sitting in the chair opposite him. She turned toward me. The look on her face made me realize that Debbie wouldn't be coming after me. How I longed for a mother like that, just then! A fat, unpretentious mother who would give me strength and good advice!

  The Chevrolet was waiting for me on the street. I say `waiting' because it had already left its spot between the two cars, as if the guy in the driver's seat had understood from the way I'd walked, hugging the wall of the house, that we were continuing on our way.

  He waited patiently until I'd reached the end of the stre
et, and only then began to drive. That's undoubtedly the technique they learn in detective school - if there is such a thing as detective school. He drove after me like that down the next street, and the street after that. And so on we went, him hanging back, then jumping ahead like a cat to close the distance between us, until we reached the sign that says "Welcome to East Neck".

  I stopped at the intersection with the highway, a little disappointed by the quiet and the emptiness. Despite the rain, I'd expected a little more activity on Palisades Parkway on a Sunday afternoon. The man in the car allowed himself to come a little closer. I could have run left, toward Washington Bridge, or right, all the way to the Canadian border. Neither option would have helped me much; within a few miles he would have realized I'd tricked him.

  I heard a familiar groan from the intersection below me: the bus to Manhattan. What was the chance he'd stop for me, far from the bus stop? As he neared me I began waving both arms wildly. He passed by me in a stinking cloud of exhaust and kept going. I kicked the ground, hard, in frustration; and then he stopped.

  I threw a last glance at the Chevrolet and then broke into a run. At that moment I must have weighed several tons, my feet heavy with water. When I reached the door of the bus the driver smiled.

  "Jesus, you look like something the cat dragged in!" There were only four other passengers, and all of them laughed. When I thanked him he asked, "You ride with me every day, doncha?"

  "Sure," I answered, and hurried down the aisle to the back seat. The Chevrolet was a small, blue dot vanishing in the distance.

  For a while I felt immensely relieved. I leaned my head back and dozed off until I was awakened with a start. The bus had stopped.

  We weren't in Manhattan yet; just on the George Washington Bridge. I looked outside at the sky, which was now the color of worn asphalt. In the lane next to us, near the toll booth, there was an old pick-up truck. A guy with purple hair was trying to pass a fistful of coins to the man in the booth. All the cars behind him started honking their horns. I looked at them. The first was a black limo. The second was the Chevrolet.