Still, for some reason, I find myself imagining fleshy Phyllis not in a pink petunia print but a skimpy slip over her bare underneath, holding a tumbler of warm Scotch while she talks, and peeking out the blinds at the grainy-lit Sleepy Hollow parking lot as the innkeeper’s eighteen-year-old half-Polynesian son, Mombo, shirtless and muscles bulging, hauls a garbage bag around to the dumpster outside their bathroom in which sluggo Joe is grouchily tending to more of nature’s unthrilling needs behind closed doors. This is the second time today I’ve thought of Phyllis “in this way,” her health situation notwithstanding. My question, however, is: why?
“So you live alone?” Phyllis says.
“What’s that?”
“Because Joe had at one time thought you might be gay, that’s all.”
“Nope. A frayed knot, as my son says.” Though I’m baffled. In two hours I have been suspected of being a priest, a shithead and now, a homo. I’m apparently not getting my message across. I hear another round-bell go ding, as Joe turns up the TV from Mexico.
“Well,” Phyllis says, whispering, “I just wished for a second I was going wherever you were going, Frank. That might be nice.”
“You wouldn’t have a good time with me, Phyllis. I can promise that.”
“Oh. It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy talk.” Too bad she can’t get on the bus with the Canadians. “You’re a good listener, Frank. I’m sure it’s a plus in your profession.”
“Sometimes. But not always.”
“You’re just modest.”
“Good luck to you two,” I say.
“Well, we’ll see you, Frank. You be good. Thanks.”
Clunk.
The truckers who’ve been glowering at me have wandered off. And both sets of Canadians now emerge from their comfort stations, hands damp, noses blown, faces splashed, hair wet-combed, shirttails for the moment tucked, yaw-hawing about whatever nasty secrets were shared around inside. They march off into Roy’s, their skinny, uniformed bus driver standing just outside the glass doors, having a smoke and some P&Q in the hot night. He cuts his eyes my way, sees me down the phone bank watching him, shakes his head as if we both knew all about it, tosses his smoke and walks out of view.
Without as much as one guarded thought left from dinner, I punch in Sally’s number, feeling that I’ve made a bad decision where she’s concerned, should’ve stayed and wooed my way out of the woods like a man who knows how to get messages across. (This of course may turn out to be a worse decision — tired, half drunk, fretful, not in control of my speech. Though sometimes it’s better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.)
But Sally, from her message, must be in a similar frame of mind, and what I’d like to do is turn around and beat it back to her house, scramble into bed with her and have us go slap to sleep like old marrieds, then tomorrow haul her along, and begin instilling proper wanting practices into my life, and fun to boot, and quit being the man holding out. Forty psychics able to find Jimmy Hoffa in a landfill, or to tell you what street your missing twin Norbert’s living on in Great Falls, couldn’t tell me what’s a “better deal” than Sally Caldwell. (Of course, one of the Existence Period’s bedrock paradoxes is that just when you think you’re emerging, you may actually be wading further in.)
“Uffda, ya goddamn knucklehead,” one of the Canadians yorks out as I listen intently to Sally’s phone ring and ring and ring.
Though I’m quick to the next decision: leave a message saying I would’ve zoomed back but didn’t know where she was, yet I stand prepared to charter a Piper Comanche, zoom her up to Springfield, where Paul and I’ll pick her up in time for lunch. Zoom, zoom.
But instead of her sweet voice and diversionary, security-conscious message—“Hi! We’re not here, but your call is important to us”—I get rings and more rings. I actually picture the phone vibrating all to hell on its table beside her big teester bed, which in my tableau is lovingly turned down but empty. I pound in the number again and try to visualize Sally dashing out of the shower or just coming in from a pensive midnight walk on Mantoloking beach, taking the front steps two at a time, forgetting her limp, hoping it’s me. And it is. Only, ring, ring, ring, ring.
An overcooked, nearly nauseating hot dog smell floats across the lobby from Nathan’s. “And your mind’s a sewer too,” one of the Canuck women sounds off at one of the men standing in line.
“So and what’s yers, eh? An operating room? I’m not married t’ya, okay?”
“Yet,” another man guffaws.
Defeated, I’m nonetheless ready to go, and take off striding right out through the lobby. Gaunt boys from Moonachie and Nutley are straying in toward the Mortal Kombat and Drug War machines, angling for the big kills. New weary-eyed travelers wander through the front doors, seeking relief of some stripe, ignoring the Vince trophy case — too much on a late night. I should, right here and now, buy something to bring Clarissa, but there’s nothing for sale but football crap and postcards showing the NJTpk in all four seasonal moods (I’ll have to find something tomorrow), and I pass out of the air-conditioning right by the Eureka driver, leaning one leg up on his idling juggernaut, surrounded now by white gulls standing motionless in the dark.
Up again onto the streaming, light-choked turnpike, my dash-board digital indicating 12:40. It’s tomorrow already, July 2, and my personal aspirations are now trained on sleep, since the rest of tomorrow will be a testing day if everything goes in all details perfectly, which it won’t; so that, I’m determined — late departure and all — to put my woolly head down someplace in the Constitution State, as a small token of progress and encouragement to my journey.
But the turnpike thwarts me. Along with construction slowdowns, entrance ramps merging, MEN WORKING, left-lane break-downs and a hot mechanical foreboding that the entire seaboard might simply explode, there’s now even more furious, grinding-mad-in-the-dark traffic and general vehicular desperation, as if to be caught in New Jersey after tonight will mean sure death.
At Exit 18E&W, where the turnpike ends, cars are stacked before, beyond, around and out of sight toward the George Washington Bridge. Automated signs over the lanes counsel way-worn travelers to EXPECT LONG DELAYS, TAKE ALTERNATE ROUTE. More responsible advice would be: LOOK AT YOUR HOLE CARD. HEAD FOR HOME. I envision miles and miles of backup on the Cross Bronx (myself dangled squeamishly above the teeming hellish urban no-man’s-land below), followed by multiple-injury accidents on the Hutch, more long toll-booth tie-ups on the thruway, a blear monotony of NO VACANCYS clear to Old Saybrook and beyond, culminating in me sleeping on the back seat in some mosquito-plagued rest area and (worst case) being trussed and maimed, robbed and murdered, by anguished teens — who might right now be following me from the Vince — my body left for crows’ food, silent on a peak in Darien.