He laughed aloud at the storm, feeling free all at once, hurtling free and unfettered into the raging teeth of the shrieking monster outside, routing the beast, pointing the nose of the car into the blackness and the rain and the howling winds as the windshield melted in pinpoint oozing blobs of red and green and yellow and white.
Then was there no such thing as love? Was love just another label? Was the whole world and everything in it a giant fabrication, a push-button front, a fakery for fakes? His mind veered from the thought because he was seeing now with penetrating logic, and he would not accept the pessimistic glibness of the idea, would not allow himself to fall into the facile trap of false acceptance, not when truth was piled in glittering heaps of golden coins at his feet. Not when he could pick up truth and let it spill through his fingers in cascades of dazzling revealed splendor. Of course there was love! Maybe romance was a fake, but love was as real as breathing, and what he knew with Maggie was love.
Again his mind backed away, refusing to accept any pat statement in the shining revelation of truth, asking the question: Or is it romance? and then rushing headlong with the question, allowing it to produce the next inescapable query: Isn’t this the same romance I knew with Eve? Hadn’t it been this way for us when we were still kids discovering each other? Yes! Yes! But I do love Maggie, I know I love Maggie; still the admission had to be made, and it followed unchecked: his love for Maggie was a thing sheltered and protected by the adolescent concept of romance. He had turned back to a juvenile belief, clutching for the glamour and the excitement — and he knew why. As the car hurtled through the night, he knew why. He’d grabbed for the glitter and the tinsel because the reality was too damned painful and too damned complex. But what had he found, and why was he still looking?
In the tunnel of wind and rain he wondered if you ever stopped looking, if you ever really discovered yourself in all the noise and all the confusion and all the speed, or did you keep looking for the rest of your life? And another truth rolled down upon him in overwhelming certainty, and he knew you didn’t find yourself by going back to seventeen. Maybe you looked until you were dead and buried, but there was no going back.
He realized now the fallacy of his reaction to the funeral procession in Vega Alta. He had been watching the drama of life and death that day. He had placed himself in the supported coffin and watched it going down the street, knowing it would be out of sight soon, knowing that his own life was moving forward unrealized, unfound, and that someday he would be buried. Soon, soon! And facing the utter finality of death, he had wanted to reach out for life, to hold it close in an embrace, stop the steady advance of life which was rushing him unfulfilled to the grave. He had wanted to turn back time, stop the insidious clocks, find himself before it was too late.
He had found Maggie Gault instead.
And the Signora had said it at a party in February, when he’d been too drunk to understand her. The Signora had said, “Margaret Gault isn’t the pot of gold.”
Now, as the lights of the bridge appeared blurringly in the distance, as the hurricane Felicia grasped at the car with undiminished fury, he thought, No, Maggie isn’t the pot of gold. I love her but she isn’t the pot of gold and maybe there isn’t any pot of gold at all. Maybe you never find it, or maybe you always keep looking for it, but one thing’s certain. You’ll never find it if you go back over ground you’ve already searched. I know for sure I’ll never find it this way. I love you, Maggie, he thought, but I know for sure.
That was the sparkling, shimmering moment of golden truth, and he nodded his head and thought, I’m going home to Eve.
The approach to the bridge was ahead. Through the blurred windshield, he could see the approach on his left and the curving ramp ascending in a high sweep above the storm. And straight ahead was the road which led back to Eve, the road to Manhattan’s cross streets. The white sign appeared suddenly in the storm, its black lettering swept relentlessly by the wind and rain: LAST EXIT BEFORE BRIDGE.
I’m going home to Eve, he thought.
And he pressed his foot to the accelerator with new determination, and he nodded again because truth had come to him at last.
“I’m going home to Eve!” he said aloud in the stillness of the car.
Last exit, the sign read. Pained, he saw the sign fall away on his right. Powerless to stop himself, he swung the car to the left, onto the ramp leading to the bridge and Maggie. The decision arrived at in pain, discarded now with pain, he drove onto the ramp decisionless, unable to stop, captured in the car as it mounted the wide, ascending curve of concrete. Last exit, the sign had read, but seeing the exit he had ignored it, had instead succumbed, powerless to something within him which was incapable of committing the final act of severance. He could not cut Maggie out of his life, could not leave a part of him bleeding and raw on the pavement. He knew then that truth could descend in lightning bolts, shower purging sparks upon him, and he would still be helpless to break whatever held him to her.
And, realizing this, he began crying.
The windshield, dissolved already in the incessant wash of the rain, became a muddy, shifting, protoplasmic mass as he blinked to keep back the blinding tears. He wept from the very roots of his being, the tears welling into his eyes and streaming down his face as he sped into the storm and onto the high span of the bridge. He could no longer see ahead of him. The road seemed to be one he’d traveled before and often, the repetitious, monotonous, ungratifying landscape of an alien land in which he was a familiar stranger. Decided but decisionless, committed but lacking real commitment, he wept bitterly. The rain cascaded against the roof; wind tore at the windows. Helplessly, he clung to the wheel, weeping. Blindly, he followed whatever crude instinct propelled him through the night, rushing to reach her side, rushing to Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.
Perhaps the car went into its skid only because it was suddenly sideswiped by a fresh fierce gust which blew in over the open water to the span of the bridge, causing the tires to relinquish for an instant their tenuous grip on the slick pavement. Perhaps he remembered for a split second his earlier decision and impulsively pushed his foot onto the brake pedal in an attempt to follow the demands of reason by executing a now-unreasonable, all-impossible turn. Or perhaps — perhaps the familiar road was suddenly recognized as a road without an end; perhaps, confronted with a bewildering despair he had never known before, he turned the car deliberately toward the edge of the bridge.
The car turned sharply and then entered a sideswinging skid, its speed undiminished. He remembered something about always turning into a skid, but if he knew how to correct the sudden slipping motion, he made no attempt to do so. And then the moment for action was gone, and he recognized with a small shock that he had lost all control of the automobile. The shock passed almost at once. He sat in nearly expectant resignation as the car swung sideward in what seemed to be an endlessly long arc, swinging, swinging, swinging, and then striking.
He felt the impact as the car hit the guard railing, heard the splintering sound of glass and the crunching tear of metal above the noise of the wind. Held low by the weight of the engine, the nose of the car clung to the dark pocket where concrete met steel. The rear end buckled and leaped into the air of its own momentum and then was captured by the wild rush of the wind at hurricane force, lifting, lifting the back wheels and then flipping the car over like a toy. His chest rammed hard against the steering wheel, and he felt sharp, unbearable pain as the car completed a somersault which sent it spinning over the steel railing. He clutched for the roof of the car, and then the seat, felt the automobile lurch clear of the steel rail, upright again for just an instant, and then hurtling free, unhampered, loose on the wild night air, dropping for the river below.