Skunk volunteers to chauffer. When they reach the old movie star’s house (she lives somewhere on the way to Miami, wherever rich people have country estates between Mississippi and Miami) they get a surprise: a third Dazzling Lady is still alive after all — a tart-tongued old alky who was Sally Silver’s sworn enemy in the olden days. Now she’s a sassy granny who wears mascara and tells it like it is!
A terrible car crash on the way to pick up the object of the tontine. It is Skunk’s fault. He has been writing about his mother on a napkin. She is offended and Skunk is banned from the car. So he leaves her. Or she leaves him. They part. She takes over. But she’s too old and blind to drive.
If Skunk hadn’t written on that napkin, he would have been driving, and his mother would be alive today, etc.
What about the napkin is so offensive?
What would this woman — whose model name was Sally Silver — find offensive?
Before we can know, she needs a history.
She needs to give up the life of an international model for Mr. Timberlake.
Why?
Mr. Timberlake does something gallant that attracts her attention. He takes up for her. He is presented as a contrast to her avaricious manager.
They run away to a neighboring county and are married by a justice of the peace. It is a purely romantic impulse.
What is the history of the woman whose actions we have described?
A farm girl from Kansas, whisked away by the jet set, having lost touch with her rustic roots, temporarily mad for the horses and cows, the barns and bales she sees through the windows of her limousine. Does she place all her affection for her past into the person of this courtly, even virginal man who does her a kindness?
Wouldn’t she come to regret it?
Hurt didn’t want to make either of them unsympathetic. They are devoted to one another, yet heroically unsuited.
She starts her own business from the home, designing and hand-sewing a line of science fiction — themed headbands.
She has a hot, sloppy affair with the town’s bachelor farmer, a gentle giant based on old Puffer over here, whatever his real name was. Hurt had never caught it.
One night, the night after Skunk has been banned from the car, they are driving through a mist, a silvery mist. And they come upon a hitchhiker, their old friend Olivia, standing weirdly beside a deserted country road in the silver mist, wearing the silver slacks that made her butt so famous, the silver jumpsuit, her beehive hair as it looked on her TV show, except now it has turned silver. Otherwise she looks strangely young. She is a beautiful old African-American woman with limpid eyes. Hurt was clearly seeing the woman who had played Uhura in the original Star Trek series. He couldn’t stop himself, she appeared out of the mist.
Of course, the silver pantsuit was his own invention. Well, he had stolen it from that other TV show. But if not for his magnificent, writerly brain making connections…
He was too fond of the word silver.
We hear about Olivia only from inconclusive e-mails and phone messages sent from the road. She never speaks, she never eats, she just rides with them, a harbinger of something. She is solid enough. The other women prod and pinch her. Skunk and Mr. Timberlake have a hard time piecing together this information. Isn’t Olivia dead? Didn’t she die? Everyone seems to vaguely recall hearing that Olivia had died at some point.
When they get to the hotel, it’s not there. It burned down in the 1980s. Maybe Olivia walks into the space where the hotel used to be and disappears.
It would be nice if the burned-out old hull of the hotel was still standing, but would that be realistic?
Skunk knew about the fire.
Here lies the heart of his culpability.
He knew the trip would end in blackened timbers, that the past had vanished and could not be reproduced or recaptured, no matter what that old gasbag Faulkner said. It was the prefab tragic ending of Skunk’s story, which he was writing for a national magazine. A human-interest piece that would elevate him from the world of pie catalogs forever. Skunk was, like Truman Capote as depicted in motion pictures, pushing reality, nudging it toward a desirable outcome for his article. Only his mother didn’t cotton to being used as human interest, especially without her knowledge, especially by her own son. And now to discover that he was willingly driving them forward into heartbreak!
Upon discovering the ruination and emptiness of life, the old women are destroyed. Their oldness comes out. Olivia — representing their glory or something — has melted and merged with the ashes and now they are just three tired, sick old women on the highway. Thus depleted of their essences thanks to Skunk’s machinations, and speeding along in the wee hours of the night because they wish to put as much distance as possible between them and the site of their mortal dreams, one of them falls asleep at the wheel — it has to be her, it has to be Skunk’s mother, and he must be haunted by the question of whether she fell asleep at the wheel or did it on purpose — and they drive under a rumbling log truck, and the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction are no more.
Part of Hurt knew that this all had to do with his pending divorce. How he got from there to matricide was not something he wanted to consider. If you thought about such things too much you couldn’t write.
MALE SECRETARY looked charming on the napkin. A pedestrian job for Mr. Timberlake, but one of deep attentiveness and servitude, like that sad butler in the book about the sad butler.
Mr. Timberlake is like the sad butler who could only cry on the inside!
In the book, people would always be trying to “help” him “reclaim” his “dignity” by saying “personal assistant” or “executive assistant,” and Mr. Timberlake would proudly insist on his respectable station as a male secretary of the highest order and would never let anyone get away with trying to gussy it up in newfangled lingo as if it were a secret shame.
Why was Mr. Timberlake Skunk’s father? Why wasn’t Skunk’s father more like Hurt’s father?
Hurt’s father was an agile and boisterous man, unlike Mr. Timberlake in every way.
And why was Skunk’s mother dead? What would Hurt’s mother make of that?
When was the last time Hurt had visited his parents?
What about Hurt’s brother, who lived so far away?
What about Hurt’s sister?
In your last novel you gave the characters your parents’ names. You think if you amass and collate a sufficient amount of superficial details — how stiff the legs of your father’s pants got after a week on the shrimp boat, how he picked the trash fish out of the nets, how after a while he would see the sun on the horizon and not know whether it was coming up or going down, about the swells so high nothing could be cooked on the stovetop — a true portrait will emerge.
What you end up with is just fiction.
Appendix: Hurt’s Napkin Stories
Wheelbarrow
Hired a young couple to push me around in my wheelbarrow. They’re not a couple, but I’d like to see them get together. I’d like to fix them up. Maybe they’ll bond over how much they hate pushing me around in my wheelbarrow.
Texaco Sign
Travelers say that all of Oklahoma is covered in a white fog. The only thing visible is a tall Texaco sign, and beneath it three enormous white plastic tiles with red letters that spell out EAT.
Maybe when you get there it’s a plate of chicken, or maybe the sign keeps receding and receding and you never find out what there is to eat.