All I Have in This World (14 page)

When, in the night, as the trains rumbled past across the street and the Fina sign shone brightly through the thin curtains of his room, and Marcus lay awake filled with terror at the agreement into which he had so blithely entered, he consoled himself with thoughts of how sweet a ride was that Buick. On his disastrous excursion to the border, he had discovered that Texas roads were bumpy with gravel and in the F-150 he had felt the roughness of the macadam in his groin. Lying naked in bed thinking of the Buick also activated sensors down south, bringing not discomfort but a curious and somewhat embarrassing stirring. He could see getting it up over a truck, but a twenty-year-old Buick?

Certainly it was the car itself and not the woman, who was clearly no more interested in him than he in her. Marcus did check her finger for a ring but only out of reflex. He had long ago developed this habit with any woman he came into contact with, in the way he might, as an armchair botanist, categorize a plant by phylum and species. Of course her ringlessness did not mean she was without partner, especially these days. The word
partner
reminded him of his sister and it crossed his mind that this Maria whatever her last name was (she'd never said, and he'd responded in kind by withholding his own) might prefer her own tribe. You could not tell by looking. Annie was in no way what they called butch. Once, he had jokingly asked her if she was a lipstick lesbian, a term he had heard while selling condos in Nags Head with coworkers given to endless and graphic appraisal of every woman they saw, and applied liberally to any woman they deemed “fuckable” who did not respond to their come-ons.

“Do you see any stick on my lips?” she'd said. It was during one of her rare trips back home. They were sitting on the porch watching shadows claim the sandy drive.

“I don't believe it's supposed to be a literal term,” he said.

“So, what, it's a metaphor?”

“Okay, sorry, Jesus, I didn't mean to offend you,” he said.

“There are as many kinds of gay women as there are straight women.”

“Got it,” said Marcus, although he did not, having previously assumed that either you liked men or you liked women or sometimes both equally or even disproportionately, though this notion of crossing the border at whim seemed to be roundly discredited by both provinces.

What did he care what this woman did, or with whom? The only thing that might keep him awake again in the night was if she turned out to have been married more than thrice. He'd never understood the types who, having failed a second time (which was not in the least unconscionable, no more than was the pursuit of getting it right that had landed Marcus in this hotel room), insisted on repeating their mistakes. Such blind faith in an institution that, statistically, was unstable to begin with, was surely a sign of what the pop psychologists called codependency. Marcus wasn't sure he even believed in such a thing, given that its opposite would be total equality if not harmony in such a notoriously volatile arena as relationships. At forty-seven he had not once—unless he counted the earliest days of him and Rebecca, which were blurry with the headlong delirium of finding something wondrous when you had nearly given up on it—encountered such cohesion. And he had been married himself, but only once and at such an early age and so briefly he never even saw fit to tell Rebecca about it.

Marcus did not know why he was even thinking about such things, though his rumination had quickly quelled the sheet tenting. Still, welcome or not, the tangent touched off the slowly seeping blackness, and to sandbag the tide he thought of the car and only the car, a hulk of steel and chrome and vinyl devoid of the messiness of unhinged humans. When the light of morning tinted his curtains, he rose and, still naked, made a list on a long legal pad of things that might rival in sweetness the experience of navigating that low-slung Electra.

1. Round water bed, curvy woman, rainy afternoon.

2. Slow-dancing to “I'm Your Puppet” by Bobby Purify.

3. Sectional sofa in a sunken-ranch house living room circa 1972.

4. I am talking velour tracksuit.

His list making was so successful in holding off the water that he flipped to another page and got to work on a schedule. The day before, over lunch and a couple of beers, Maria had seemed reluctant to decide how to divide their time with the car until the car was in hand. Which left the task to him, for the sharing of that sweet chariot called for good fencing if he and Maria were to succeed even briefly at co-ownership.

Being a product of the American public school system, Marcus was an ace at chart making. The making of charts as educational tools had its detractors, but Marcus had never been one of them, as it was one of the few things he had learned in school that served him well later in life. One thing he had discovered was that women love a crazy homemade chart. Chart-as-aphrodisiac was not mentioned in fourth grade, but this was of course to Marcus's mind the true value of education, the way it served not those purposes for which it was intended but far more interesting ones that were inadvertently stumbled upon.

He decided to make a couple of charts: one in which Her Lowness (for first among the chores that fell to them was the naming of the vehicle) switched hands every other day, and another chart in which the exchange was made mid-week. The first chart went quickly; the latter raised some questions. Most people—perhaps 99 percent of Americans—did not seem to drive on Sunday mornings. Oh, they motored to and from church if they were churchers, and afterward drove over to put on the feed bag at some sneeze-guarded buffet, but in general, wherever you went in this country, the streets of Sunday morning resembled a B movie about a biological disaster. Marcus had always loved a Sunday morning ride. He went to bed early Saturday nights in anticipation. Through the empty streets he cruised, the world his and only his. Often he would stop for coffee in some brightly lit chain gas station and find no one behind the counter. Then through a steel door came the rush of water through pipes, and a sluggish employee in a red smock would emerge irritably from the back of the store, and Marcus would skedaddle rather than let small talk violate the sanctity of his Sunday mornings. Surely Maria would not mind if he helped himself, on the schedule, to this time every week, given her lack of interest in the details of their partnership. Though it took him away from his charting and was no more desirable a thought than how many times she had tied the knot, Marcus contemplated again the mysterious nature of her desire to share the car with him. He'd outright asked her why she was doing it and had been deflected with what at the time seemed to stem from a desire for privacy but now struck him as ominous. For she did not appear at all interested in the car itself. Was it the act of buying the car with a stranger that she desired?

Unnameable dread so paralyzed him that his pen bore a widening ink stain on the chart, as if black water were spilling out of it, drawn not from a cartridge hidden inside the pen but from the hand that held it. Marcus looked down at the soiled chart and recognized in its former orderliness that it was not the leap of faith involved in the act he craved but the back-and-forth of it, the compromise and sacrifice that results when you rise out of yourself into the wider world.

Into the wider world he went as soon as the sun rose, seeking relief from the forces that had ruined his beautiful chart. He'd counted out a thousand in tens and twenties from his stash and headed down the street to the branch of the TransPecos, which he remembered from his encounter with the park ranger, for larger bills. The teller was pleasant enough when she waved him forward from the line, but once he stated his business, her demeanor shifted so noticeably that Marcus, still reeling from that blot of ink, asked if there was a problem.

“No, sir,” said the teller, glancing over his head at a desk where sat an overweight Hispanic man who was obviously her superior. “Why would there be a problem?”

“I don't know,” said Marcus, aware, too late, that his question only made things worse. Maybe the woman could tell that the money was not his to spend. The bills felt too rough or too polished to her touch, as if they had been printed up in the back of a tattoo parlor. Might as well be counterfeit, given that he was posing as a man who, by purchasing a car with a stranger, might somehow inch toward distant redemption.

It was only on the walk back to the hotel, his wallet so slim he did not feel it, that he realized the teller had suspected he was a drug dealer. Such operations were far more common in these parts, and involved, certainly, a steady conversion of small bills into big. That he felt better knowing that the woman took him for a criminal was not lost on Marcus, who returned to his room determined to create a chart suggesting in its spotlessness and clarity a conscience unsullied by second-guessing.

A
T HOME
M
ARIA'S MOTHER
asked about the car, as Maria had known she would. What kind is it? How many miles? What was he asking for it? What did you offer? Was it Bobby or Pete you dealt with? Did it drive good? Did you remember to turn on the A/C to see did it work? Does it burn oil?

Maria answered those questions she knew how to answer and made up answers for the ones she did not. Yes, it burns oil, she said, and when her mother said, Why did you buy a car that burns oil, Maria said, What else would it burn, which made her mother quit scrubbing the stove top and study her daughter's face to see if she was joking. When she saw that Maria was not, she explained that by burning oil she meant, does it burn too much oil and she went on to explain exactly why that was bad, and Maria asked how you could tell by looking at a car how much oil it burned and her mother said you couldn't you had to drive it then check the engine, Didn't you even drive it and Maria said, Of course I drove it and after I drove it we looked at the hood and her mother said, You done what? and Maria said, I mean up under it and her mother said, Who's WE? And Maria said How do you know so much about cars anyway and her mother said, Well I've been driving one after another of them for thirty years so I guess I had to learn and then her mother said something she had said before more than once, which was that she did not understand how Maria had got on all these years without a car and Maria explained again that not everyone needs a car, that cars in fact are not all that good, that the emissions they give off are terrible for the environment and her mother said again, Back when I was coming up they didn't have any such thing as an environment, and Maria held her breath and her mother said, Nor cholesterol either, and Maria laughed and her mother said, First one day all of a sudden they're saying don't mess with it, it will kill you, you got to go get it checked at the doctor's and then the next day lo and behold seemed like overnight they went and took the cholesterol out of everything, and Maria shook her head and her mother said, Fat, too, woke up one morning went to the store and everything I picked up and put in my cart said fat free on the label, I would have hated to have that job, wouldn't you, whoever stayed up all night getting the cholesterol and fat out of nearly everything on God's earth must've worked their tailbone off and Maria thought that her mother was not dumb at all so why did she like to pretend she was and her mother said, Well what did you do on a day when the buses won't running and Maria said I waited until they
were
running and Maria's mother said that seemed like it'd be a pain having to depend on some schedule, did they run pretty much all night and Maria said she didn't usually take a bus anywhere in the middle of the night and her mother said something Maria did not hear because she was lost in a reverie about her mother coming to visit her dozens of times over the past ten years in all the various places she'd lived. Maria and her mother on a bus, her mother placing the coins in the tray by the driver and learning to keep moving down the aisle instead of standing there holding everything up watching her money drop into the receptacle beneath the tray and learning also not to stare at the other people on the bus who had been riding buses for so long that their faces reflected the pavement over which the bus traveled, and her mother relaxing out of her self-consciousness into easy conversation with Maria on a crowded bus, unconcerned that others around them might hear her discussing the movie they'd just seen—Maria and her mother at a movie!—and then, when they neared Maria's apartment, Maria's mother looking up and seeing the florist on the corner of her block and saying, This is us, right? and reaching up to lightly yank the cord signaling the driver to stop and talking on through the ding of the bell and rising as the bus lumbered up to the curb and talking, still talking, but not about the movie, about the car again: Who's WE? she was saying, and Maria said, What? and her mother said, You said WE looked up under the hood, who is we, By WE do you mean you and Bobby Kepler or you and Pete Kepler because even though those boys were good friends with your daddy back in high school and I am not saying they are not honest, still they're out to make something off those cars and I just hope when you say We looked under the hood you realize that even though those boys are not crooks, far from it, they still might just be telling you what you want to hear and Maria said That's like when men tell you that any other man who is nice to you is just being nice to you because he wants to sleep with you and Maria's mother said, Well, and Maria said, Why can't some men just be decent people and Maria's mother said, Maria, I don't know about all that, I haven't said anything to you about any of that, all I am saying to you is you said WE LOOKED UNDER THE HOOD and all I was asking you this whole time is Who is WE and Maria said Okay.

“V
ERY CREATIVE,”
M
ARIA SAID
about the charts Marcus had slaved over, which depressed him, for
creative
was a threadbare term to his mind. They sat in a booth in the restaurant of his hotel, charts spread across the Formica. She had called his room when he had returned from the bank to tell him that the car was ready and asked if he'd like to come along to pick it up. Something told him it would be best to decline, since the car salesman already assumed they were together, and Marcus did not care to propagate any lies here in this town where he had hesitated and been rewarded with what seemed to him a brand-new identity, as if he was a ward of the federal witness protection program. “Come by afterward and I will pay you and we can talk business over lunch,” he'd said. She showed up wearing the same outfit—low-cut jeans and a tank top—though her black hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, which made more prominent and noticeable the fine bones of her face.