The bartender looked at us sternly. I held up one hand and nodded to reassure him.
And he said it would be okay if I wrote the text myself, she muttered, quieter for the moment. But that’s the whole point. On the Road is an artifact of a specific past, a time we can’t go back to. What are we supposed to do, create a new past?What is this, Year One? What is he, fucking Pol Pot or something?
I drove home because I was the less drunk of the two of us, but it was still a mistake; I was plenty shaky myself. By the time we turned down the Palladio driveway, I was down to about fifteen miles an hour. Elaine started reciting.
So in America when the sun goes down, she said, and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all those people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old …
Other lights were on, in other rooms, but we saw no one. Somewhere on the road home oblivion had kicked in: in the hallway, walking behind me, she put her hand through my legs and squeezed, giggling delightedly when I jumped. Drunkenness always tends to release something in her, for better or worse. I was impatient with it tonight; but then, as she turned off the light I had just turned on and started fumbling with my shirt buttons, a strange thing happened, strange at least for me: that angry impatience fused with my lust, redoubled it, and it wasn’t like my desire to push her away from me just gave way to a desire to fuck her: the two desires were suddenly one and the same.
I put my hands under her arms, lifted her to a standing position again, and spun her around. She took two steps toward the bed in the darkness, but I shoved her the rest of the way, until she fell across it.
Oooh, she said; a little too sarcastically, I thought.
That didn’t help. Before long, though, her growls were real, and I closed my eyes and banged into her as hard, as violently as I could. I wanted to hurt her, there’s no question about it. But she didn’t seem to get it. Then, with my chest against her back, I withdrew, shifted up a little, pushed forward again.
Whoa, she said, with a kind of nervous flutter.
I kept on.
Hey, she said. Hey! Stop! Finally she got her hands underneath her and did a kind of pushup, so that I lost my balance. I rolled all the way on to the floor, and sat there.
You were hurting me there, she said. Jesus, you must be drunker than I thought.
I’m sorry, I said.
We were both breathing hard. She had raised herself up on her elbows and I could feel her staring down at me as I sat on the floor.
That’s not like you. I mean, you could ask. Don’t bother, ’cause the answer’s no, but you could ask, you know what I mean?
I’m sorry, I repeated. I guess I just got too excited.
I just stared at the wall ahead of me. Finally I felt her drop herself back across the bed.
What the fuck is going on around here today? she said.
* * *
I WENT TO your house, you know. I flew to Newark. I put the ticket on my credit card and flew out there. What a mistake, to have warned you that I was coming: but I had no inkling of that yet. I was spending money we didn’t have anyway, so there seemed no sense in limiting myself; I rented a car at the airport, spread out one of those Triple A maps on the passenger seat beside me, and found Ulster.
Nothing much to see. It’s the nicest town around there, I suppose, but then the surrounding towns look practically like Appalachia. You’d never really prepared me for it, the bald hills, the scruffy pines, the houses with collapsing porches and front yards full of rusting iron chairs and deer antlers mounted over the garage door; but I suppose you didn’t feel the need of it, you didn’t think I’d ever see it, or that you’d ever see it again either. At what I supposed was the center of town I parked just short of the traffic light and went into the first open store I saw, a cluttered, shabby Rexall pharmacy with a few of the ceiling panels missing, a few of the fluorescent lights burned out.
Excuse me, I said to the back of a gray head, and a thin, white-haired lady, bird-featured, eyeglasses hung round her neck with a black shoelace, turned to face me with a kind of dull mistrust. I don’t imagine they got a lot of strangers coming through that town.
Do you have a phone booth in here?
The stare she was giving me was mostly because of my accent, I realized. She shook her head no, as if the word no might not be part of whatever language I was speaking.
A phone book, then? A local phone book? She gazed at me blankly. I just need to look up an address, for a family in town. I’ve lost it, and they’re expecting me.
She cleared her throat. What family?
The Howes.
She cocked her head. Unhurriedly, without ever smiling or making some other kind of sympathetic gesture toward me, she patted down the apron she wore over her flat front, then searched through the mess around the register, until at length she located a pencil and a notepad. She wrote down the address, along with directions to the house, tore the paper off, and handed it to me.
You can thank me by telling them they still owe me two hundred and fourteen dollars, she said. Where are you from, anyway?
But the bell over the door was already ringing behind me.
* * *
DID I DO something wrong? Back in Berkeley? I mean, I always had the sense, in the year or so that we were together, that I had to be careful, that Molly was poised for flight in some sense, that the balance was delicate in terms of holding her life and mine together. Still, it all seemed to be going well, until one day she left and never came back. What happened? Should I have insisted on going out to Ulster with her? Should I not have followed her out there; should I have been more patient, shown more trust in her? Should I not have left all those phone messages, or announced I was coming, just springing a surprise capture on her instead, as one does with an animal or a mental patient?
I wish the answers were clear. Actually, what I wish is that the answer were clearly yes. Because such a mistake, the mistake of a young man too much in love, would gnaw at me, there’s no denying it: still, it would be easier to carry through life than the suspicion of a much more vague, ingrained, broad-based, personal insufficiency. I couldn’t hold her, I couldn’t make myself indispensable to her, and that kind of personal failure isn’t located in any act, one that might at least in the realm of fantasy be taken back or amended. I fell short; and that’s much harder to accept.
* * *
THAT WHOLE EPISODE with Mal essentially rejecting Elaine’s Kerouac film as too derivative — I confess I thought of it at the time as a small fire to be put out, a matter of mollifying Elaine, trying to let her know I sympathized with her bewilderment at having been humiliated in front of the entire staff and at the same time to let her know that Mal’s decisions, hard to understand though they might be, were basically unappealable. Well, I underestimated its effect. No work of art has ever been rejected here before. It’s all I hear anyone around here talk about: when they talk at all, that is, when they don’t clam up because they see me coming.