And her restlessness would ripple, double, a flavor of something cold. She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers. She would sigh a little for the passage of time, the endless corridor of it, how its walls washed by you on either side — darkly, fast, and ever, ever.
“WHAT DO YOU DO, you stay overnight on the road somewhere?” he said, standing next to her car in the cold. It was Friday morning and spitting snow. He had come over and helped her load up the car.
“I drive until dark, then I check into a motel room and read until I fall asleep. Then I get up at six and drive some more.”
“So, like, what are you bringing with you to read?” he asked. He seemed unhappy.
She had a Vogue magazine and The Portable Jung. “Something by Jung,” she said.
“Jung?” he asked. His face went blank.
“Yeah,” she sighed, not wanting to explain. “A book he wrote called The Portable Jung.” She added, “He’s a psychologist.”
Pinky looked her deeply in the eyes. “I know,” he said. “You do?” She was a little surprised.
“Yeah. You should read his autobiography. It has a very interesting title.”
She smiled. “Who are you? His autobiography? Really?”
“Yeah,” said Pinky slowly. “It’s called Jung at Heart.” She laughed loud, to please him. Then she looked at his face, to fix him like this in her mind. He was wearing a black shirt, a black sweater, black pants. He was smiling. “You look like Zorro today,” she said, strangely moved. The spidery veins at his temples seemed like things under water, tentacular and drowned. She kissed him, long and at the rim of his ear, feeling in the rolls and spaces of her brain a winding, winding line. She got into the car. Though she hadn’t even started up the engine, her departure had already happened, without her, ahead of her, so that what she now felt was the taunt of being left behind, of having to repeat, to imitate, of having to do it again, and now, and again.
“All this wandering that you do,” he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. “How will anyone ever get close to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves.
And she thought about this all across Indiana, beneath the Easter hat of sunset that lit the motel roof in Sandusky, through the dawn of Pennsylvania, into which she soared like a birth — like someone practicing to be born. There were things she’d forget: a nightgown stuck on a hook behind the bathroom door, earrings on the motel nightstand. And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.
She would park the car right off Delancey Street; there would be a spot across the street from the hotel with the Pepsi sign and HOTEL in lights beneath. All night, sirens would keen, and traffic would whoosh and grind its way down Houston, down Canal, toward the Holland Tunnel — a bent sign to which aimed straight at her window. She would get up in the morning and go for sundries; at the corner bodega the clerk would mispress the numbers on the register, and the toothpaste would ring up at $2,000. “Two thousand dollars!” the clerk would howl, standing back and looking at Odette. “Get a real toothpaste!” From a long distance, and at night, a man would phone to say, doubtfully, “I should come visit on Valentine’s,” history of all kinds, incongruous and mangling itself, eating its own lips.
If she had spurned gifts from fate or God or some earnest substitute, she would never feel it in that way. She felt like someone of whom she was fond, an old and future friend of herself, still unspent and up ahead somewhere, like a light that moves.
Starving Again
DENNIS’S EX-WIFE had fallen in love with a man she said was like out of a book. Dennis forgot to ask what book. He was depressed and barely dating. “I should have said to her, ‘Yeah, and what book?’ ” Dennis was always kicking himself on the phone, not an easy thing, the tricky ouch of it. His friend Mave tended to doodle a lot when talking to him, slinky items with features, or a solitary game of tick-tack-toe. Sometimes she even interrupted him to ask what time it was. Her clock was in the other room.
“But you know,” Dennis was saying, “I’ve got my own means of revenge: If she wants to go out with other men, I’m going to sit here and just let her.”
“That’s an incredibly powerful form of revenge,” said Mave. She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth. When she was on the phone she often had to improvise Dennis’s face from a window: the pug nose of the lock, the paned eyes, the lip jut of the sill. Or else she drew another slinky item with features. People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.
They met for dinner at some sort of macrobiotic place, because Dennis had recently become obsessed. Before his wife left him, his idea of eating healthy had been to go to McDonald’s and order the Filet-o-Fish, but now he had whole books about miso. And about tempeh. Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way. Men were like that, Mave had noticed. They liked to look in the mirror. For women, mirrors were a chore: Women looked, frowned, got out equipment, and went to work. But for men mirrors were sex: Men locked gazes with their own reflections, undressed themselves with their eyes, and stared for a shockingly long time. Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn’t possibly be a bad thing.
This month Dennis was reading books written supposedly for women, titles like Get Real, Smarting Cookie, Get Real and Why I Hate Myself. “Those books are trouble,” said Mave. “Too many well-adjusted people will endanger the arts in this country. To say nothing of the professions.” She studied Dennis’s flipped-over tie, the soft, torn eye of its clipped label. “You choose to be healthy, and you leave too many good people behind.”
But Dennis said he identified, that the books were amazing, and he reached into the book bag he now carried with him everywhere and read passages aloud. “Here,” he said to Mave, who had brought her own whiskey to the place and was pouring it into a water glass from which she had drunk all the water and left only the ice. She had had to argue with the waitress to get ice. “Oh, no — here,” Dennis said. He had found another passage from Why I Hate Myself and started to read it, loud and with expression, when suddenly he broke into a disconsolate weep, deep and from the belly. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”