The sweat trickled down his forehead, needled him in the eye. His arms weren’t free to rub so he squinted, shook his head. He deduced that he looked crazy. The students walked around him, giving him space.
He liked to cut through this campus, wondering if the art school girls mistook him for a hip young professor. Academia was one of the few professions where forty-two seemed relatively young, he thought. In television, even public television, it was ancient. Why did this suddenly come as a revelation to him? Why had he never prepared for this moment? It occurred to James that he might be in shock.
He put the box of books down on a bench and sat next to it, breathing heavily. A mother—squat, rigid with anger—walked by quickly, dragging a toddler by the wrist. Both of them were silent, the mother staring straight ahead and the boy blank, inert. They had just exited a fight and were moving fast through its plume. The boy wore a backpack with the tail of a lion poking out of the bottom.
James walked in the opposite direction from the pair, carrying his box through the fish gutter chaos of Chinatown. The crowds thickened and thinned as he passed McDonald’s and the hospital. A new organic chocolate store had opened up where a Chinese grocer had been.
James’s arms were aching by the time he reached the bottom of the street. He passed the two-in-one semidetached houses, his neighbors joined at the hips, with shared yards and little fences between.
He knew that Ana would be home soon, and he was pleased to see a parking space right in front of their lawn. Ana had taken the car to work so she could grocery shop after, and she would need a place to park.
The neighborhood was permit-only and in the throes of what James had labeled, in his letters to the city, a “parking crisis.” He had considered pitching a piece to his producers on the absurd parking situation in the city (There was no logic to it! No system! No grand vision!), but couldn’t figure out the right angle. And it was too blatantly antienvironment for Sly. Who had sympathy for drivers these days?
But James loved the car, a leased black Jetta. He wished it were here right now. He would get Ana to pack one of her wondrous picnic lunches with the white cloth napkins, a glass bowl of green grapes, her chicken sandwiches. He would drive her anywhere she wanted to go, out of the gridlock, maybe to Niagara Falls to look for barrels, suicides, get a drink in a horrible restaurant with gigantic plastic menus and cream sauce on everything.
This was, he realized, a memory from their twenties.
Suddenly, a silver SUV pulled into the space directly in front of James’s house, a space James presently thought of as Ana’s. Now where would she park?
James hated the silver SUV. It was a bully. The cars on the other side of the street had garages and no reason to take up perfectly good parking spaces that were meant to be used by those on James’s side of the street, where there were no garages, just small gardens backing on to other small gardens. But this particular guy—a loud, brickish Portuguese construction owner whom James called Chuckles to his friends—used his garage as a woodworking shop and cannery, and paid for permit parking (James had done some sneaking around the lane to figure this out). He had a large van, too, which often had two-by-fours sticking out the back, taking up even more spaces. All of this infuriated James, who loved rules when they worked to his advantage but was otherwise an anarchist. Ana had pointed out that he might be a libertarian, but James bristled, picturing people in mountains with war-painted faces arming themselves against immigrants.
Chuckles got out of the car, pulled up his pants over his hips. He had a Bluetooth clipped to his ear and was gesticulating, but James couldn’t make out the words. When James got closer, and Chuckles disappeared into his house across the street, James saw that, of course, he had taken up nearly three parking spaces, parking smack in the gravitational center between two cars, leaving emptiness on either end much too big to be acceptable, much too small for anything but motorcycles. Now Ana would probably have to park a block over, which meant it would take her longer to get back and comfort him, and also the extra walk with groceries would be hard for her after a long day.
James staggered up onto to his porch and dropped the box of books. He unlocked the door to the smell of cut lilies and last night’s olive oil. He threw his jacket on the ground. In the kitchen, he found a black marker and, in the recycling bin, an old photocopied flyer for a maid service. On the back of the flyer, he wrote:
WE HAVE A PARKING CRISIS ON THIS STREET. PLEASE RESPECT YOUR NEIGHBORS AND PARK NOSE TO TAIL—YOU ARE TAKING UP SEVERAL SPACES.
James wrote fast, wetting the paper, letting the ink leak through onto the countertop.
He paused.
YOU HAVE A GARAGE—WHY DON’T YOU USE IT, YOU FAT FUCK
He looked at the paper. More? He added punctuation:
YOU FAT FUCK!
James stood beside the car, humming profanity under his breath. He placed the note under the windshield wiper and went inside, sat on the white club chair facing the window, and waited. Soon, surprising himself, he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up, darkness had come to the room. His cell phone beeped from somewhere. He had missed a call from Ana, who was on her way home. She had texted: Anything else from the store?
He looked out at the SUV, the flyer paper flapping in the breeze, and a deep pull of panic set in his stomach. No, no, no! In his stocking feet, he got up and ran to the door, down the stairs, looking both ways, wondering if the fat man would appear, or Ana, or—this was the worst image—both at the same time. Both of them, dots far away coming into focus, rolling in from two different directions: Ana’s puzzled face as the fat man pulls the paper off the car; Ana, looking up at James in the window as the fat man shows her his handwriting—
James grabbed the paper from the windshield and ran to the porch. But then he saw the box of books there, and remembered his day. He looked at the paper and tore off the bottom part, crumpling “YOU HAVE A GARAGE … YOU FAT FUCK!” and sticking that portion in his pocket. Then he walked back to the car, calmer now, and placed the rest of the note, the part he told himself was neighborly, on the windshield.
Then he went into the house and waited for his wife.
The firing didn’t seem to gut him today, James noticed. There wasn’t the same pleasurable pain in reliving it, and he left his bench.
At a café, James drank his second Americano of the day. Bruce had suggested that he update Finn’s enrollment, “considering the circumstances.” James felt like he was applying to grad school, filling in the sheaf of forms: phone numbers and work schedules, dietary restrictions, religious practices. He signed in the space marked “Parent/Guardian.” He circled the latter. Below his and Ana’s numbers, he put his mother’s as the emergency contact.
“Is there any information that would help us get to know your child better?” James considered writing: “Mother in a coma; father in a drawer.” He didn’t, but smiled at the possibility, then accepted the sorrow on the other side of the smile.
The door of the café opened, and a red stroller appeared. It stuck in the door, then jiggled this way and that until, finally, a seated young man clicked shut his laptop, pulled out his earbuds, and loped over to pull it through. A flushed woman on the other end thanked him, and then immediately behind her, another red stroller stuck in the doorway. The young guy pulled that one through, too, and accepted the thanks. And then, finally, a third one appeared, this time green. The women laughed loudly. Chairs scraped, and tables banged. James relinquished an extra chair. The young man packed up his laptop and left. When finally this swell of bodies settled, the room’s tininess had lost its charm. James was now wedged too close to the espresso machine, which stopped and started with a go-cart revving in his ear. He attempted to finish his papers while the women talked. There was such panic in their voices, such urgency, as if they had just had duct tape stripped from their mouths. It seemed to James that there was nothing linear in this talking, no distinguishing one voice from the other, no call and response, just call.