“You asshole,” she snarled.
“You’re the asshole,” I said.
“I hate you.”
“Ditto,” I said. “Ditto and square it.”
—
The day had begun peaceably enough, a Saturday, the two of us curled up and sleeping late, the shades drawn and the air conditioner doing its job. If it weren’t for the dog we might have slept right on into the afternoon because we’d been up late the night before at a club called Gabe’s, where we’d danced, with the assistance of well rum and two little white pills Mallory’s friend Mona had given her, till our clothes were sweated through and the muscles of our calves — my calves anyway — felt as if they’d been surgically removed, hammered flat and sewed back in place. But the dog (Nome, a husky, one blue eye, one brown) kept laying the wedge of his head on my side of the bed and emitting a series of truncated violin noises because his bladder was bursting and it was high time for his morning run.
My eyes flashed open, and despite the dog’s needs and the first stirrings of a headache, I got up with a feeling that the world was a hospitable place. After using the toilet and splashing some water on my face, I found my shorts on the floor where I’d left them, unfurled the dog’s leash and took him out the door. The sun was high. The dog sniffed and evacuated. I led him down to the corner store, picked up a copy of the newspaper and two coffees to go, retraced my steps along the quiet sun-dappled street, mounted the stairs to the apartment and settled back into bed. Mallory was sitting up waiting for me, still in her nightgown but with her glasses on — boxy little black-framed things that might have been an example of the generic reading glasses you find in the drugstore but for the fact that they were ground to the optometrist’s specifications and she wore them as a kind of combative fashion statement. She stretched and smiled when I came through the door and murmured something that might have been “good morning,” though, as I say, the morning was all but gone. I handed her a coffee and the Life section of the newspaper. Time slowed. For the next hour there were no sounds but for the rustle of newsprint and the gentle soughing suck of hot liquid through a small plastic aperture. We might have dozed. It didn’t matter. It was summer. And we were on break.
The plan was to drive out to the farmhouse our friends Chris and Anneliese Wright were renting from the farmer himself and laze away the hours sipping wine and maybe playing croquet or taking a hike along the creek that cut a crimped line through the cornfields which rose in an otherwise unbroken mass as far as you could see. After that, we’d play it by ear. It was too much trouble to bother with making dinner — and too hot, up in the nineties and so humid the air was like a flak jacket — and if Chris and Anneliese didn’t have anything else in mind, I was thinking of persuading them to join us at the vegetarian place in town for the falafel plate, with shredded carrots, hummus, tabouleh and the like, and then maybe hit a movie or head back over to Gabe’s till the night melted away. Fine. Perfect. Exactly what you wanted from a midsummer’s day in the Midwest the week after the summer session had ended and you’d put away your books for the three-week respite before the fall semester started up.
We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense — jobs were a myth, a rumor — and we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory’s mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A’s and B’s in the courses we took and doled out A’s and B’s in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.
At any rate, we made some sandwiches, put the dog in the car and drove through the leafy streets of town until the trees gave way and the countryside opened up around us, two bottles of marked-down shoppers’ special Australian zinfandel in a bag on the floor in back. The radio was playing (bluegrass, a taste we’d acquired since moving out here in the heart of the country) and we had the windows rolled down to enjoy the breeze we were generating as the car humped through the cornfields and over a series of gently rolling hills that made us feel as if we were floating. Nome was in the back seat, hanging his head out the window and striping the fender with airborne slaver. All was well. But then we turned onto the unmarked blacktop road that led out to Chris and Anneliese’s and saw the car there, a silver Toyota, engine running, stopped in our lane and facing in the wrong direction.
As we got closer we saw a woman — girl — coming toward us down the center of the road, her face flushed and her eyes wet with what might have been the effects of overwrought emotion or maybe hay fever, which was endemic here, and we saw a man — boy — then too, perched on the hood of the car, shouting abuse at her retreating back. The term “lovers’ quarrel” came into my head at the very moment the girl lifted her face and Mallory yelled, “Stop!”
“It’s a lovers’ quarrel,” I said, ever so slightly depressing the accelerator.
“Stop!” Mallory repeated, more insistently this time. The guy was watching us, something like an angry smirk on his face. The girl — she was no more than a hundred feet away now — raised her hand as if to flag us down and I eased up on the gas, thinking that maybe they were in trouble after all, something wrong with the car, the engine overheating, the fuel gauge on empty. It was hot. Grasshoppers flung themselves at the windshield like yellow hail. All you could smell was tar.
The car slowed to a halt and the girl bent to my window, letting her face hover there a moment against the green tide of corn. “You need help?” I asked, and those were tears in her eyes, absolutely, tears that swelled against her lids and dried in translucent streaks radiating out from her cheekbones.
“He’s such a jerk,” she said, sucking in her breath. “He’s, he’s”—another breath—“I hate him.”
Mallory leaned over me so the girl could see her face. “Is he your—?”
“He’s a jerk,” the girl repeated. She was younger than us, late teens, early twenties. She wore her blond hair in braids and she was dressed in a black tank top, cut-off jeans and pink Crocs. She threw a look at the guy, who was still perched on the hood of the car, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand and began to cry again.
“That’s right,” he shouted. “Cry. Go ahead. And then you can run back to your mommy and daddy like the little retard you are!” He was blond too, more of a rusty blond, and he had the makings of a reddish beard creeping up into his sideburns. He was wearing a Banksy T-shirt, the one with the rat in sunglasses on it, and it clung to him as if it had been painted on. You could see that he spent time at the gym. A lot of time.
“Get in the car,” Mallory said. “You can come with us — it’ll be all right.”
I turned to Mallory, blocking her view of the girl. “It’s between them,” I said, and at the same time, I don’t know why, I hit the child lock so the door wouldn’t open. “It’s none of our business.”