Cars from a Marriage: A Novel - Softcover

One
1981—IVY
1974 FORD MUSTANG HATCHBACK,
MANUAL TRANSMISSION, FOUR-CYLINDER, BURGUNDY
I’ve always thought of cars as places to die. That’s what high school driver’s ed did to me. Sure, there was also the practical stuff: how close to follow, laws regarding school buses, what to do in a skid (the most terrifying, anti-intuitive lesson of all). But that’s not what stuck. What stuck were the flickering black-and-white filmstrips narrated by dead drivers, forever regretting that one second they took their eyes off the road. Driver’s ed ghost stories. They grabbed my throat like a garrote—sudden, violent, remorseless—convincing me that driving and death were not only interrelated but inevitable.
This was in the old days of Behind the Wheel, before lawyers were in charge, when the schools actually taught you to drive and put you in a car with your high school gym teacher. Mine, Mr. Kapsopoulos, or Mr. K for short, was an excitable Greek, taken to screaming at other drivers with a clenched fist: “Where’d you get your driver’s license? Cereal box?” He taught us that the horn was more important than the brakes and, if we were on the highway, forbade us from slowing down when another car was merging from the right. He insisted it was the merging car’s job to join the flow of traffic, but what, I wondered, if the driver in that car hadn’t been taught by Mr. K? What if he was expecting a little help? All that mind reading, the judging of speeds and velocity, the opportunities for misunderstanding: to me, a fiery crash was as likely an outcome as any. I put off getting my license until I was twenty-three—much to the hilarity of my family and everybody in my hometown, Charlottesville. My dad was the local Buick dealer.
Ellis, on the other hand, grew up in New Jersey without even a twinge of car fear. Maybe they didn’t subscribe to the Edgar Allan Poe school of driver’s ed in New Jersey. Ellis marked the days leading up to his seventeenth birthday like some automotive Advent calendar. To the steering wheel born, I guess. In my imagination, his Behind the Wheel teacher spoke like Jeeves and held out a platter with caviar whenever he stopped at a light. To Ellis, the car was an extension of the bicycle, which was an extension of the trike, just another step in his trajectory from the womb to adulthood. If to me the car was Thanatos, to Ellis it was Eros. A conveyance handy for driving a date to the movies, feeling her up, maybe even getting luckier. If to me a car was to be driven slowly and cautiously, or preferably not at all, to Ellis a car was a toy—the shinier and faster, the better.
Did I ever think of this as a deal-breaker, in those first days we were dating? Perhaps if there was a Sedgewick-Inglebert Driving Compatibility Inventory, Ellis and I might have showed up to a high school cafeteria at eight-thirty one Saturday morning with our sharpened number two pencils, answered questions about yielding and the proper method of signaling parallel parking, and been told that our attitude toward cars was so clearly incompatible that we’d be better off never seeing each other again.
But there is no Sedgewick-Inglebert test. Besides, when I met Ellis, we were both living in New York City, where cars are optional. And of course, love is blind, especially at the beginning, especially in matters like following distances and turn signals.
I should probably explain that the New York City I had moved to, the New York of my psyche the year I met Ellis, was more a stage set than it was a real place. It was the Manhattan of Woody Allen movies, Odd Couple reruns, Marilyn Monroe standing on the air vent, and Marlo Thomas as “That Girl” smiling perkily from behind the counter in her Midtown candy shop. Before I moved to Manhattan, I’d been there only once, on a weekend excursion of the high school art club. We’d descended the magnificent spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, seen The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and eaten what seemed like an extremely exotic meal at Benihana. That was it—the sum of my experience in Gotham. A decade later, I was as starry-eyed as a shortstop buttoning his pinstripe jersey in the Bronx for the first time. Boxy yellow taxis zoomed down Broadway as if for my personal amusement.
Like all adopted New Yorkers, I came for nothing less than complete transformation. For the past four years, I’d lived with Nick, a chef, in a cute little farmhouse nestled in the Blue Ridge, outside Charlottesville. I met Nick in my fourth year at UVa, when I’d decided to pick up a little money by waitressing in one of the new chic downtown restaurants. Those were the heady, early days of Charlottesville as a foodie place, and we all felt like we were part of something big and exciting. Nick had a noble Gallic nose and the chiseled angularity of someone who could cook with fresh butter and never gain weight. He knew his wines; he knew his cheeses; he knew how to pleasure a woman. I probably fell for his farmhouse hardest of all. It was only about twelve miles from the house where I’d grown up, where my parents still lived, yet it felt like it existed in an entirely separate universe, blessed by a stronger, brighter sun. I could see myself there forever, writing novels at the sturdy wooden kitchen table painted a playful 1950s shade of aqua.
But it was a fantasy—the whole thing with Nick—a fairy tale. I didn’t fit in either in the high-class restaurant scene or with the celebrated authors who dropped into Nick’s restaurant whenever their agents visited Charlottesville. I was too young to appreciate my youth and not smart enough to recognize my own intelligence. Everywhere I looked, I saw coeds who were more coltish, waitresses who were sexier, and brilliant older women professors who let their hair go white as if to telegraph their intellectual gravitas. I was just another former English major with a dozen unpublished short stories. And the butter that never showed up on Nick’s hips was beginning to show on mine.
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine the logic of my decision to move to New York. If I was a small fish in the pond that was Charlottesville, I’d be plankton in the mighty harbor of New York. But I was depressed by the same old parties with the same old snobs, with Nick’s flirtations with new waitresses. And Nick could be cruel, too, especially when it came to my cooking. I once spent a whole day making chicken marsala. He took two bites and put down his fork, then got some of his own leftovers out of the refrigerator and ate them cold. He didn’t say a thing. He didn’t need to.
My part-time jobs—at Nick’s restaurant, Williams Corner Bookstore, the Virginia Quarterly Review press—didn’t add up to a career. The few pages that rolled through my manual Royal typewriter didn’t add up to a novel. I had gotten to the point where I didn’t know what I hated more: the pretensions of the central Virginia country elite, with their horsey weekends and their old-fashioned croquet parties where everyone wore white, or the rednecks at the 7-Eleven. I was at a dead end. Bailey, my sister, had managed to transplant herself to L.A. I would try New York.
So I sold my car for seven hundred dollars (it broke my father’s heart to see me get so little for a car that had come off his lot) and, at Dad’s insistence, converted the money into traveler’s checks, carefully recording their serial numbers in my journal. My mother packed me deviled eggs to take on the Amtrak and reminded me to eat them in the first few hours, before they spoiled. When the train pulled out, I looked back and saw my parents grow smaller and smaller, until they were the size of wedding cake toppers. I felt a pinch of homesickness—and guilt, too, for leaving them without any daughters nearby. But they were healthy and had each other, and I was riding into my grand future.
It was late March. My first month or so, I stayed in the cramped den of a rent-controlled postwar apartment on the West Side, which belonged to a divorced voice teacher in her late fifties named Betty, the mother of my best friend from college, Tess. Betty would “adore” the company, Tess insisted.
But even though Betty occasionally made a pot of orange pekoe and invited me to sit in one of her stiff wingback chairs and talk about my day, I felt a sort of coolness, like she didn’t want me getting too comfortable. Literally. Betty kept her apartment at sixty-five degrees, and I wasn’t allowed in the living room during voice lessons. I had to wait for the short intervals between students to sprint to the dark galley kitchen, where I kept my own box of Lemon Zinger and a small supply of yogurt. Betty’s twelve-year-old cat, Simon, had tuna breath and a problem with flatulence, and he slept in the same room I did. He arched his back whenever I walked in, reminding me I was the interloper—a gesture that brought to mind some of the crustier matriarchs of the Virginia aristocracy.
I adapted. I wore a sweatshirt over my pajamas and brought Simon a succession of cheap squeaky toy mice to try to win his affection. I splurged on treats for Betty, too, regularly stopping at Zabar’s for chocolate croissants and nice-sized hunks of Gruyère. Although I’d shipped my old Royal typewriter to the apartment, the first time I typed a sentence, I realized that in such tight quarters, each keystroke sounded like a gunshot. A paragraph would have sounded like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. I didn’t dare use it unless Betty was out.
But who cared? I was in New York. The first weekend, I rode all the way to Coney Island, wandered the narrow cobblestone alleys near Wall Street, and took the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center. You could pick up the Sunday Times on Saturday night and make a cheap dinner out of a gigantic slice of Original Ray’...