On Borrowed Time (2 page)

The only conversation that would take place was the ordering of food and the occasional “Please pass the sports section” and “Are you done with the News of the Week in Review?” We both viewed
New York Times
reading as a serious matter, and one that was not compatible with chitchat.

Unfortunately, on that day I hadn’t even finished Maureen Dowd’s column when I heard Jen’s name called out. I looked up to see Sandy Thomas and her husband, Adam. Sandy had been Jen’s best friend since she got to the city two years ago, and they were co-owners of a small art gallery in Soho. It’s another of the things that Jen and I did not have in common; she was a terrific painter and a true connoisseur, while my favorite “art” was Garfunkel.

I knew Jen wanted us to be alone almost as much as I did, but she invited them to sit down, and they jumped at the offer. I wasn’t pleased, but it wasn’t that I didn’t like them. Adam was a decent enough guy, although he mostly talked about how much money he had, and I liked Sandy quite a bit. It was more that this time with Jen and the
Times
was sacred, and only came along once a week.

But my charm soon asserted itself, as it was wont to do, and it was a quite pleasant couple of hours. Jen and Sandy had a discourse on artists, books, and music, while Adam and I grunted about sports. Of course, I had to call an early halt to the session, so that I would get home in time to see the game.

I have to admit I didn’t think about Jen’s parents during the Redskin-Giants game. Basically what I thought about were the Redskins and the Giants. It was a typical game, played on a cold December afternoon where the teams played ball control and fought over small pieces of real estate like it was Hamburger Hill. The outcome was in doubt until the final play of the game, but the Giants won, which meant they were going to the playoffs, and therefore all was right with the world.

In the morning, I dressed, packed, and went down for a newspaper. Jen dressed quickly, as always, but packing to her was something akin to what pyramid-building was to the ancient Egyptians. It was an agonizing, arduous process, with seemingly thousands of difficult decisions every step of the way. The end result was always the same; she packed virtually everything she owned.

When I returned there were four suitcases near the door, waiting for Richard the pack mule to take them downstairs.

“I assume you want me to take these to the car?” I asked.

She nodded. “Please. I’ll get the ones in the bedroom.”

“There are more?” I asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. I reached down to pick up the first one, which was either nailed to the floor or weighed a thousand pounds. “What’s in here, your rock collection?”

“Tell me about it,” she said, and laughed, and within twenty minutes I managed to get all her stuff, plus my one bag, loaded into the car. It was a relatively warm day, in the high forties, and Jen suggested that I open the top on my convertible. I declined, since I preferred not to listen to the sound of my teeth chattering all the way upstate. We did open the windows, though, and it felt good as we got farther and farther out into the country.

We stopped for lunch along the way, and then drove through Jen’s hometown on the way to her parents’ house. She lived there until she was eighteen, and she took pride in pointing out every landmark there was to point out. The town had clearly overdosed on quaint, but my big-city, cynical eye recognized it as a great place to have come from, even though I was quite pleased that I hadn’t.

We actually stopped at a place called the General Store, and it was exactly as one would expect. I could picture Ben Cartwright coming in from the Ponderosa to shop there, or more likely Hoss, since there was an entire corner of the room devoted to a display of licorice.

It was almost four o’clock when we got to Jen’s parents’ house. They hugged Jen intensely, greeted me warmly, and told me to call them Janice and Ben, which I assumed were their names. All in all, it felt like a good start.

Their house was a Colonial, probably literally, though Janice informed me that it was “only” a hundred and fifty years old. In the city, when we talk about a prewar home, we’re referring to World War II. In this town they meant the Revolutionary War. But it was a cool house, with a great fireplace and wood-burning stove in the large combination living room and den. I was starved, and the scent from dinner, as we entered the house, was so extraordinarily great it made me want to eat the air.

Jen and Janice went off to the kitchen, leaving Ben and me sitting on the two chairs near the fireplace. My sense was that he relished this first chance to get to know the man who might marry his little girl. If the roles were reversed and Jen were my daughter, I would be torturing him on a rack to learn the truth about him.

“She’s quite a girl,” he said.

I nodded. “Sure is.”

“What am I talking about?” he asked himself. “She’s a young lady.”

I nodded again. “Sure is.” I thought I was doing pretty well.

“Always had a mind of her own,” he said.

A third nod from me, with a small chuckle thrown in for effect. “Still does.”

The conversation went on pretty much that way for the next ten minutes. He mouthed a series of platitudes about his daughter, and I vigorously agreed. They all happened to be true, but I probably would have agreed with him if he said Jen was secretary general of the UN. When I arrived, I had checked my integrity at the door; my goal was to be liked.

Dinner was soon served, and though I’m sure I must have had food as good as that sometime in my life, I was at a loss to remember when. Janice made a meat loaf fit for the gods, should the gods happen to eat meat loaf. When surrounded by the mashed potatoes and gravy, it was so delicious that I simply could not stop eating it. If she could liquefy it, I would have taken it intravenously while I slept.

“Would you like some more, Richard?” asked Janice, for the fifteenth time. I had responded to the first fourteen either with yes or, if my mouth was too full to speak, an eager, drooling nod.

“I can’t,” I said, “unless you have a crane to carry me away from the table.”

Janice thought for a moment. “I don’t think we do, but Ben has a wheelbarrow in the garage.”

I nodded and handed her my plate. “That’ll work.”

When it was time to go to sleep, I was amazed to discover that Jen and I were sharing a bedroom. I hadn’t wanted to bring it up, and just assumed that her parents wouldn’t be comfortable with it. Jen, bless her heart, had cleared it with her mother ahead of time. We didn’t have sex, but the fact that I was able to hold her through the night was a substantial consolation.

And a wonderful memory.

If I had any reservations about going there, I couldn’t remember why, as the next few days were totally pleasant. Nothing extraordinary, just eating and talking and looking at the four million pictures they had of Jen at various phases of her life. Unfortunately, it seemed like half of those pictures included one Jack Winston, Jen’s high school sweetheart, who Ben informed me was by then a cop in town. As a teenager, Jack was muscular and good-looking, if you happen to like that type. I don’t, but since I was the one sleeping with Jen, I could deal with a few pictures of Jack, who hopefully by that time was bald and fat.

The point was, I was quite comfortable with Janice and Ben, and Jen reported that they liked me as well. Mission accomplished. Victory was mine.

On Christmas Eve, after Janice and Ben had gone to sleep, Jen took me outside and gave me my favorite present. She led me out to a gazebo at the rear of the property, and we made love. Afterward, she started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“When I was a girl, maybe ten or eleven years old, my friends and I used to come back here and talk about the type of man we were going to marry. We used to describe our Mr. Wonderful down to the last detail.”

“And you described me?”

“No.” She smiled. “That’s why I’m laughing.”

“You do realize you’ll never get me with that attitude?”

She looked at me and smiled her knowing smile. “Are you kidding? I’ve got you neatly wrapped with a bow.”

I was going to hold off until New Year’s, but that seemed like the perfect time. I reached into my pocket and took out the little box that had been burning a hole in it for two weeks. “Then you might as well have this.”

She looked at the box and then at me, disbelieving. She opened the box, saw the ring, and started to cry. Then she hugged me, so hard that I thought I was going to break.

“I love you, Richard.”

“So you’re saying yes?”

She shrugged. “Might as well. I don’t see Mr. Wonderful coming along anytime soon.”

She dragged me back to the house, then woke up Janice and Ben to tell them the news. Much to my relief they seemed pleased, and things were all warm and cuddly, except for the part where Ben threatened to dismember me if I ever hurt his little girl.

Christmas morning dawned with the sun shining and temperatures expected to reach into the mid-fifties, unheard-of for December. Jen wanted me to take a ride with her, so after polishing off seven or eight of Janice’s waffles, I rolled my fat, overstuffed self out to the car.

I was feeling so good that I agreed to Jen’s request to open the convertible top. Our first stop was to see a high school friend of hers, Nancy Brunell, who had just gotten back into town to spend the holidays with her parents. They spent a half hour gushing over the ring and our engagement, then an equal amount of time rehashing what sounded like boring high school times, though they laughed hysterically at each recollection. Nancy even took out their yearbook, and they discussed the fate of virtually every one of their classmates since high school. Jen sensed that I was about to doze off, so she announced that we were off to see Kendrick Falls.

“Uh-oh,” Nancy said to me. “You’d better watch yourself.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Whenever Jen took a boy to Kendrick Falls, they didn’t come back the same.”

Jen laughed and, once we were back in the car, explained that Kendrick was a waterfall that served as the local make-out place in high school.

“Did you go there with Jack Winston?” I asked.

She nodded. “I believe that I did. Pretty much every night.”

“He’s probably bald and fat by now.”

“Could be.”

“You repelled his advances, right?”

She nodded again. “Almost every one.” Then she sniffed the air. “I love the smell of jealousy in the morning,” she said. “It smells like victory.”

Before long we were out on a country road, heading for the falls. In a few minutes, what had been a beautiful day seemed to be turning somewhat cloudy, and the wind started to pick up. Somebody obviously reminded Mother Nature that it was December.

“You want me to stop and put the top up?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said. “It feels good. And the falls is just another couple of miles up the road.”

Within a few moments, even Jen seemed to be regretting her decision. The wind picked up in intensity, and with ominous black clouds seemingly everywhere, I had to turn on my lights.

Jen’s look was one of surprise and a little concern. “It looks like just before a summer thunderstorm,” she shouted, so as to be heard above the wind.

I was yelling by then as well. “I’m going to pull over!”

“Be careful!”

With amazing speed, it had gotten totally dark out, pitch-black, and it seemed as if the lights were not working. I quickly pulled the switch in and out, then I was gripped by panic when I realized that they were working, but that somehow this was a darkness they could not pierce.

I quickly looked toward Jen, but I couldn’t make her out in the blackness. “I can’t see!” I screamed.

“Richard!” she yelled, the fear in her voice reflecting my own. We had driven into a nightmare.

I tried to slow down and pull over, but I really had no idea where the sides of the road were. The one thing I did know was that I had to stop that car. Suddenly the wheels on the right side started to give out, and I realized that I had moved too far over and that we were careening off the road.

“Richard! No!” Jen yelled again, but in the wind it sounded more muted, almost as if she were calling me from a distance.

We started to pitch to the right, and the ground seemed to disappear under us. The car was out of my control, but I would not have known where to take it anyway, as the darkness was complete.

It was as if an unseen hand had picked us up and rolled us over. I reached out to grab Jen, to protect her, but I came up with air. The car started to roll; it was probably just once or twice but it felt like a hundred times, as if it would never stop. Jen was no longer screaming; I couldn’t tell if I was or not.

The car finally stopped moving, and had fortunately landed right side up. “Jen? Are you okay?”

She didn’t answer, which sent a new shock of panic through me like a needle. “Jen? Answer me, please!”

Suddenly, as if someone were drawing a curtain, the clouds started to disperse. I have never seen anything like it, before or since, but within no more than five seconds the wind had abated, light had been restored, and the sun started to come through.

Jen was not in the car.

There was not a trace of her, and I instantly cursed my decision to leave the top open. Jen was no doubt thrown from the car, and might be somewhere out on the road, possibly in danger from oncoming traffic.

I scrambled out of the car and headed back toward the road. I felt fuzzy, light-headed, but I don’t remember my head hitting anything. In any event, I figured I was okay, since I was running, but I didn’t stop to check. I had to find Jen; she simply had to be all right.

It was only ten or so yards to the road, and drivers who saw my car slowed down and stopped to inquire about my condition. I didn’t see Jen anywhere, which I took as semi-good news, since she must have landed in the softer shrubbery along the side of the road.

A man stopped his car and rushed over to me. “Are you okay?”

“My girlfriend … she was thrown from the car. Help me find her. Please.”