“Joe, relax,” Amy says, putting her hand on my leg. “It’s just a minor traffic violation.”
But Amy doesn’t know that I killed four people. I am sweating and I’ve heard about things like this. A guy gets pulled over for a minor infraction and somehow, through the sadistic magic of computers and system, the guy is pinned for all kinds of other shit. I could shoot myself.
Amy turns the radio back on. Five songs play and twenty minutes tick by and Officer Thomas Jenks is still in his automobile, holding my personal information. If he’s issuing me a simple ticket for failing to signal, if that’s all there is to this, then why is he on the phone? Why does he keep pushing buttons on the computer? Does my freedom end at the beginning of the season when my iPhone shows sun and the sky above is swollen with rain? Because I do know a cop in this state. His name is Officer Nico and he thinks my name is Spencer. What if he saw my picture in the computer? What if he recognized me and called Jenks and said, I know that guy. And what if—
“Joe,” Amy says, and I almost forgot she was here. “You look like you’re having a panic attack. It’s not bad. It’s not even a speeding ticket.”
“I know,” I say. “I just hate cops.”
She strokes my leg. “I know.”
She reaches into the cooler and takes out a peach. A peach. Of course it kills me that we are moving backward. She is eating a peach and I am obsessing about Peach Salinger and my mug of piss.
That mug.
I try to believe that it’s gone. I picture a maid swiping it, disgusted, scouring it clean, dousing it with bleach. I picture a golden retriever—people with summer homes, they love their great big dogs—and he’s sniffing around, pawing at the mug, and he knocks it over and his master calls and he runs and my urine seeps into the floorboards and I am safe. I picture a Salinger child playing hide-and-seek. The mug gets knocked over. I’m safe. I see a Salinger cousin, cunty, texting, absentmindedly throwing shoes into the closet, losing her shit when a full mug soaks her precious Manolos, her Tory Burch sandals. She trashes the shoes. I am safe.
I hear the door slam. Jenks is on foot. He might ask me to step out of the car. He might lie to me. He might try to trick me. He might ask Amy to step out of the car. He wears cologne, poor guy, and he hands me my license and the rental registration.
“Sorry about the holdup,” he says. “You know, they give us these computers and half the time they’re jammed up.”
“Technology,” I sigh. Free. Free! “It’s the end of us all, right?”
“All the more reason I’d like you to use that blinker,” he quips.
I smile. “I’m truly sorry, Officer.”
Jenks asks us if we live right in the city and I tell him it’s quieter in Brooklyn and everything is going to be okay. I am blessed. I smell Jenks’s hopeful body spray. I see his small life, it’s all in his eyes, unlived, dreams he didn’t chase, dreams he won’t chase, not because he’s a pussy, because he simply doesn’t see his dreams in detail, the kind of details that drive a person to pack their shit, to move. He became a cop because of the simplicity of the uniform; you don’t have to think about what to wear every day.
“You have fun,” he says. “Be safe.”
I pull back onto the road and I’m relieved that my day, my life, doesn’t end here. I have one hand on the wheel and I maneuver the other under Amy’s cutoffs. I see our turn up ahead, the one that leads to Little Compton. I don’t want the police anywhere in my future and I accept that I fucked up, that I left one loose end, and I will never, ever do that again.
This time, when I turn, I use my fucking blinker.
3
WE stop at Del’s Lemonade and sit at a picnic table, toasting with lemon slushie cups. Amy shrugs. “It’s fine,” she says. “But honestly, this isn’t that good, you know?”
I love her contrarian way. “People think everything is better when they’re on vacation.”
“Yelp Nation,” she says. “Miserable people want to call it a one-star slushie and insecure people want everyone to be jealous of them and be all, ‘best slushie everrrr.’”
Sometimes I wish she could have met Beck. “Wow,” I say. “You just described my ex to a T.”
She smacks her lips. “Which one?”
It’s vacation, so I let loose. I tell her a little about Beck even though you’re not supposed to talk about your old girlfriend with the new one.
“So she was an Ivy League chick?” she asks. “Was she snobby?”
“Sometimes,” I say. “But mostly she was sad.”
“You know, most of the people who go to those schools, they are psycho because they spend their whole childhoods trying to get into those schools. They can’t live in the moment.”
I will fuck her on this table right here, right now. “You are so right,” I say. “Did you ever date anyone like that?”
She shakes her head. “You can show me yours, but I don’t want to show you mine.”
She is the only woman left who knows the value of mystery. She tosses her slushie into a trash bin and we lie back on the table, watching the branches above us sway.
“Talk,” she says. “Tell me.”
I start at the beginning, in the shop, Beck without her bra—Amy says that’s attention seeking—and Beck buying her Paula Fox—Amy says that was to impress me—and this is where Amy is so beautiful and unusual. She doesn’t interrupt me to tell her own story or slip into a jealous rant. She listens to me and she is a sponge. It’s cathartic for me to describe Beck’s viciousness, and this is why you need to get in a car and go sometimes. I don’t think we could have had this conversation in New York. I feel so aware with Amy, and she just gets it when I tell her about Beck Tweeting from Bemelmans Bar, the way she had to look up solipsistic in the dictionary. When I tell her that Beck referred to Little Compton as LC, she kicks the air. She gets it. All of it. I am known. She turns her head.
“You guys came here together?” Her voice is higher, suspicious.
“No,” I say. And technically I’m not lying. I followed Beck here. There’s a difference.
I tell her about the way Beck cheated on me with her shrink.
“How terrible,” Amy says. “How did you find out?”
I held her prisoner and broke into her apartment and found the evidence on a MacBook Air. “I just had a feeling,” I lie, because it’s also sort of true. “So I asked her and she told me and then that was it. We broke up.”
She strokes my leg. I tell her to Google Nicholas Angevine and she does and she scans the headlines and she looks at me, horrified. “He killed her?”
“Yep,” I say. And it’s impressive. I framed him for the murder so effectively that I don’t even exist in the Wikipedia page about the crime. “He murdered her and he buried her near his family’s second home upstate.”
She shudders. “Do you miss her?”
“No,” I say. “I feel sorry for her, of course. But it wasn’t good between us, you know? And when you came along, I mean, it sounds sick, but that was like, well, then I really didn’t miss her anymore.”
She bumps her knee into mine. “That’s sweet.” She promises me she won’t cheat on me with a shrink. She is wary of physicians and psychiatrists, “people who thrive on other people’s pain.”