I didn’t leave my gift in her player right away, not wanting to be seen driving right there, brazenly next to her, when it came on. I started up time, accelerated, and moved a few cars ahead, then jogged back on foot to her car with the universe on pause and switched the tapes. Consequently I didn’t get to see her initial reaction. But I drove annoyingly slowly, forcing the buffer cars behind me to pass; very soon I had Adele in my rear-view mirror again. I put on sunglasses so that she wouldn’t be able to see when my eyes were flicking up to the mirror at her. I saw her doing something, leaning, examining: I guessed that she had ejected my tape and was checking for identifying marks. (It said only MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN on the label.) Then there was a long period where she — I’m fairly sure — listened to some or all of it. She passed me again, paying no attention to me; I Dropped for a second to verify that my tape was in her player and then let her proceed. We drove for quite a while together, over an hour, although I don’t think she noticed that I was keeping discreetly close to her. She fluffed her hair several times. I looked for signs of arousaclass="underline" weaving, sudden slowing. There were none. I hoped she would be so aroused that she would have to stop at a motel very soon.
To my surprise, she drove right past the turnoff for Route 91 and Northampton. She continued to drive west. Was she on her way to Chicago? That made sense. She was probably in graduate school there. (The University of Chicago sticker on her rear windshield was above the Smith sticker, arguing for Smith’s temporal priority.) I wasn’t sure that I wanted to drive all the way to Chicago with her, but presumably she would have to stop somewhere for the night. And even if she hated my tape, she was still driving, and driving allows for a great deal of idle thought, and idle thought is the perfect medium for the accelerated transmutation of remembered distastefulness. By the time she turned into a motel that evening, some image off my cassette might be soaring through her sensibility, robed in urgency and fire. And regardless of how she felt about my tape, she would almost certainly come in her motel room, since what else is there to do in motel rooms?
As I drove, I worked out an elaborate plan of how I would proceed if she did check into a motel. As soon as she entered the parking lot, I would stop time and pull in ahead of her and park in an out-of-the-way spot. I would restart time. She would park and go into the office for five minutes and then reappear and walk to a room, say room 23. As she was pointing her key at the doorknob, with a semi-blank set-mouthed face that no actress could duplicate because it was so wholly a product of the certainty of her unobseivedness, I would pause her, go back to the office and get the spare key for room 23 from the key drawer, and enter ahead of her. It wouldn’t be a bad room, a little on the brown side, but there would probably be no good place for me to hide to watch her undress. I would be deeply sleepy by this time. My yawns would be coming every thirty seconds. It would be about seven in the morning Strine-time, counting my lengthy on-the-road Foldout, but I would still be needing some moment of closeness with this total stranger, who had become my chosen traveling companion. I would notice that in her room there was a locked door that led to the adjacent room. This would suggest some possibilities to me.
Still fully fermational, I would leave her standing at the door with her key out and I would walk out and “buy” (in the usual informal manner) fourteen dirty magazines from a newsstand a quarter of a mile down the road. I like wandering around newsstands in the Fold and looking at people looking at magazines. Sometimes it’s just as you would expect: the thirteen-year-old kid with a fine little mustache looking at a shelf-ful of gory horror-film mags, etc. But often it isn’t so simple: it isn’t like the cartoon cliché about how people resemble their dogs. The man at the rack of computer magazines is someone you couldn’t have predicted would be there; likewise the woman looking at the sailing magazines and the man reading at the antiques rack. You can’t necessarily match people up with the periodicals they flip through. Perhaps this is because people who spend time in newsstands aren’t representative of the people who are deeply interested in a given hobby or subject — the real enthusiasts are out on sailboats or at antiques auctions, rather than reading about them; or more likely they are leafing through the magazines at home, where they can really study them, being subscribers. Some of the true hobbyists disdain the magazines because they have studied them for so long that the level of repetition in the how- to articles has begun to tire them. It might often be that the inhabitants of a newsstand are those who want a taste of what it would be like to have a certain interest without actually having it. But then again, some are probably true aficionados of their particular realm who are drawn to the newsstand precisely because here they can see their specialized sub-passion on display near all others: model rocketry right on an equal footing with Metropolitan Home; the science fiction magazines only a few feet from bodybuilding, or from those flimsy how-to-write-an-effective-query-letter writers’ magazines. Unlike a bookstore, a newsstand unifies its huge range of subject categories by its overriding sense of nowness. It is a Parthenon of the immediate present, a centrifuge of synchronicity. Each magazine is saying, This is what we think you want to know about our subspecialty right this second, in (you scan the covers) July July July July August July July July August August July. My Fold-powers are replenished by trips to newsstands; I find that the longer I spend in one, the more cleanly and responsively time stops for me the next time I trigger a Drop.
So I would go down the road from Adele’s motel and buy fourteen men’s magazines at a newsstand, and I would walk back and arrange them on one of the beds in her room, room 23, covering its objectionable pink and brown coverlet with a superior quilt of plush womanflesh. I would get a washcloth from the bathroom and drape it on the edge of the bed, as if to catch the scumsquibs that were imminent from my bloated factotum. I would make sure that I had stroked past the point of caring at the moment I adjusted my glasses. Immediately thereafter, I would hear Adele’s revitalized key in the lock.
When, on the threshold of her own motel room, she caught sight of me inside, looking up at her with surprise, she would say, “Oh, sorry!” and close the door. It would not be too difficult for me to act flustered and embarrassed. I would genuinely be flustered and embarrassed. “I’m terribly sorry — one moment!” I would call loudly. “Sorry, sorry!” I would hurry outside, doing up my belt. She would already be on her way back to the office. “It’s my mistake,” I would say. “I think I was given the wrong key.”
“No problem,” Adele would say crisply. “I’ll get a different room.” She wouldn’t want to meet my eye.
“What I mean is,” I would hastily explain, “I think I’m in your room. The man said room twenty-four, but then when I looked at the key he gave me it said twenty-three, so I just assumed that it was the room I was meant to have. Obviously I was very wrong. But if you hang on thirty seconds I’ll be totally out of your room.”
Adele would say, “That’s all right — you’re obviously already all settled in there.” She would make a little laugh.