The Scenic Route (11 page)

S
omeone's elbow rammed Mandy's pelvis. And not in a good way.

“Sorry about that,” Gordon called out to everyone from the driver's seat of the mustard yellow jalopy. “Hit a pothole.”

“Are you okay?” Tad asked.

Mandy didn't know how to answer that question. She was sharing the cargo compartment of a 1972 Volvo hatchback with two guys and four trumpet cases.

“We'll be there in less than an hour,” Gordon said.

“We'd be there in less time if you took I-94,” said Drew, who was snaked across Mandy and Tad and the likely possessor of the offending elbow.

“Taking the 96 is a mile shorter,” said Omar, the designated navigator, who occupied the front passenger seat. “I checked on the map.”

“But there's more traffic on the 96,” Drew said.

“We should have left sooner,” Tad said. “We're going to be late for the gig.” Tad rarely got nervous, but he sounded nervous.

“We're not going to be late,” Gordon said, exuding the confidence of a man with more than six inches of personal space.

“Is there a reason we're not using the backseat?” Mandy asked,
wondering why they hadn't unfolded it and worrying that the question made her sound prissy.

“The floorboards,” Gordon replied.

“They're bad?” she asked.

“They're missing,” Tad said.

That didn't exactly add to Mandy's sense of security. She was already concerned about the unsettling vibration of the low-riding vehicle, which seemed to be held together with duct tape. She wanted Tad's friends to like her, but she also wanted to make it to 2008. As she gazed straight ahead out the back window, it felt like she was lying only inches above the roadway, with the headlights of the cars behind them shining directly in her eyes.

“But Betty drives great, doesn't she?” Gordon enthused. The first half dozen times Gordon had referred to Betty, Mandy had mistakenly believed “Betty” was his girlfriend. “Listen to that baby purr.” To Mandy it sounded more like the coughing of a consumptive patient. But maybe that was a good thing for an engine.

This wasn't how she'd intended to spend New Year's. But at least she was with her boyfriend. Well, technically Tad wasn't her “boyfriend,” since he didn't like labeling things. But they had been seeing each other almost every weekend except when he was playing gigs or hanging with “the guys.” Since Gordon and Omar rarely dated and Drew's idea of a relationship was paying for dinner before sex, time with “the guys” was usually an estrogen-free zone.

So Mandy was surprised when Tad asked if she wanted to come along to the New Year's gig in St. Clair Shores. She had been grateful he wanted to spend the holiday with her. Or to be more accurate, she was grateful after she got over being resentful that the issue had been in doubt. But Tad had left out the part about cramming clown-style into a compact clunker. In fact, he had left out that they'd be spending the entire evening with the guys. But she didn't want to complain,
because Tad didn't like when she acted needy. Or obsessive. Or crazy. She was working hard at being the new Mandy. The cheerful and emotionally stable Mandy. It was a lot of effort. And more so when her body was folded like an origami crane.

“There's a lot of traffic,” Tad said, half under his breath.

“That's because we're on the 96,” Drew said.

“It's shorter!” Omar insisted.

“Have I ever missed a gig?” Gordon asked.

“Yes!” Drew responded.

“Let me rephrase that,” Gordon said. “Have I ever missed a gig in the last year?”

“If we had just left on time, we'd be fine,” Tad said. Mandy was feeling guilty for making them go out of their way to pick her up. She should have offered to go to Tad's place when she found out they were running late. She wondered if Tad was blaming her for the extra delay.

“The problem is we're hitting all the northwest suburbs during rush hour,” Drew said.

“Did you know the Detroit suburbs have more highway per capita than anywhere in the world?” asked Omar, who had a habit of spouting random factoids. When Mandy first met him, she thought he was autistic.

“Detroit has more highway than Los Angeles?” Gordon sounded skeptical.

“Per capita,” Omar corrected him. “Because the suburbs became like independent cities after the riots, and the car companies pushed zoning laws promoting single-family homes.”

“Why does everyone blame the car companies for everything wrong with Detroit?” Drew asked.

“Because they controlled the city,” Omar replied. “Why do you think Detroit has almost no public transit? They literally tore out streetcar lines.”

“Did the car companies tear out the streetcar lines?” Drew asked. “Did Henry Ford go out with a pickax and start digging up train tracks?”

It was odd to Mandy how much people in Ann Arbor talked about Detroit and how rarely anyone went there. Maybe in the New Year Tad could take her to the MGM casino that had just opened downtown. Maybe they could have a date that involved leaving his apartment and didn't include enough people for a basketball team. She reminded herself how happy she was that she and Tad were together. And they couldn't be closer together. She was developing a contusion from where his belt buckle was stabbing her thigh.

“Are you really defending the car companies?” Mandy asked Drew, trying to engage in the conversation and appear to be an easygoing girlfriend (who didn't need the label of “girlfriend”).

“Not defending them,” Drew said, “but not blaming them for doing what corporations do, which is make money, not make cities work.”

“But they're not making money,” Omar pointed out.

“Maybe we're the ones to blame,” Tad said, shifting his weight. She realized that though they were pressed against each other, he hadn't once intentionally touched her. There was no caressing. No stroking her skin or her ego. Maybe it was because of the guys being around. But that didn't make her very optimistic about the prospects for the evening.

“What are you talking about?” Drew said.

“I had to call the club to confirm stuff for tonight,” Tad said. “And when I recited the facility director's name into some automated directory, it hit me that not long ago that was someone's job. Someone looked up the number for the person you were calling and connected you. You don't see many telephone operator positions in job listings anymore. And think about the bank teller jobs that vanished once we started getting cash from ATMs. We just take for granted that we get cash from a machine. We take so much for granted. ATMs. Voice mail. E-mail. E-books. Maybe e-cars are next. We keep gobbling up
new technology without thinking about the people we're making obsolete. And what happens to all those people? Do they evolve? Or do they fly planes into buildings? Or do they do something even worse we haven't seen yet?”

Now Tad was depressing Mandy. If she wanted to be depressed, she would have stayed home and worked on her dissertation.

“That's a bogus argument from Socialist Economic Theory 101,” Drew said.

“No,” Tad said, “that's how things look to someone who's had to actually face the reality of the job market.”

“You mean all two weeks since you got your degree?”

“I'm just saying there's a lot of people out there who are no longer needed,” Tad said. “It's not just the car companies having trouble. They're just the canaries in the mine.”

Mandy was impressed by Tad's passion, but she couldn't help wondering why he wasn't as passionate when it came to his feelings for her. Unless he didn't have equivalent feelings for her.

“Those are some big-ass canaries,” Gordon said.

“The car companies suck,” Omar opined. “Michigan is fucked.”

“You don't think the same thing could happen to the rest of the country?” Tad asked.

“Right,” Drew said, “because you entered the work force, the whole country is gonna have a cataclysmic economic meltdown.”

Gordon slammed on the brake, sending Mandy's head slamming into the back of the front seat.

“What the fuck?” Drew said.

Mandy lifted her head and saw a sea of red lights when she turned toward the front of the car. At first she thought it was some kind of dizzy aftereffect, but she realized it was brake lights. And there was a long line of cars at a standstill. In the distance she could see flashing emergency lights.

“Must have been an accident,” Gordon said. “Probably someone was drunk.”

“It's too early to be drunk,” Omar said.

“It's never too early to be drunk,” Drew said.

Cars weren't moving. At all. And it looked like they hadn't in some time. There were silhouettes of people standing between the lanes of traffic.

“We are so screwed,” Tad said. Mandy felt herself being bodily rearranged as he scrambled up and over her. He lifted the latch on the hatchback and got out of the car.

“Tad?” Mandy called after him. “Where are you going?” He didn't say anything, just shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, pulling it tight around him. She followed after him, walking between the stopped cars. “The party's going to be going past midnight,” she said to his hunched back. “If you guys end up being late, you can play later.”

“They hired us for the cocktail hour,” he said without turning around. “They don't want a trumpet quartet playing on New Year's at midnight.”

It felt weird to be walking down the middle of an expressway. To be moving freely past hundreds of cars that were unable to do so. There was something exhilarating about it. Mandy felt a frisson of nervousness, wondering what would happen if those cars started rolling forward again. But there was safety in numbers, and there was a fairly large crowd up ahead. “Accidents happen, Tad,” she said, knowing firsthand how useless those words could sound, but hoping they would also be helpful. “There's nothing you can do.”

“That's exactly the problem!” He moaned. “There's, like, no jobs. And there's nothing I can do. The guy who hired us tonight has a connection with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and he was going to help me get an audition.”

That explained his agitation. “Maybe he still will,” she said gently, bracing for another eruption. Tad just sighed. “Or you'll get an audition someplace else.”

“There is no place else. Unless I leave Michigan.”

The thought of his leaving gave her a queasy feeling as they reached the periphery of the crash site. Halogen headlamps from the waiting vehicles spotlighted the area, like a movie set, but one where the starring actors had already departed.

There seemed to have been three cars involved in the crash, and none of them had fared too well. An SUV was accordioned against the concrete divider. The other two cars had somehow ended up head to head with their innards splayed across the lanes amid broken glass and blood. In the backseat of one of the cars were two crimson New Year's party hats.

No one in the gathered crowd was saying much of anything as grim-faced policemen kept them yards away from the debris. A teenage girl with ironed blond hair was sobbing softly, and a freckled boy in a leather jacket was rubbing her back. Mandy longed for Tad to put a comforting arm around her waist, but he wasn't even looking at her.

“If we had left Ann Arbor on time . . .” Tad let the thought hang in the air.

“But we didn't,” Mandy said.

“It could have been us.” Tad seemed genuinely disturbed by the notion.

They stood in the chilly air, watching and waiting like the others around them. Though it was unclear precisely what they were waiting for.

“It was nice of you to come tonight,” Tad said softly, still not looking at her.

“It was the only way I was going to see you,” she said, being much more honest than she intended. Tad was silent, and she wished she could take the words back.

“If you lived in my apartment, you'd see more of me,” he said, or seemed to have said. She found it difficult to believe she had heard him correctly. “Seems kind of dumb that we're both paying rent.”

She felt like the ground was tilting, like she was sliding downhill and unable to get any traction. Her feelings for Tad were like a mudslide. They came all at once and left her gasping for breath. “You want me to move in?” she managed to ask him.

“Only if it's what you want,” he said.

And then what?
she wondered, knowing she shouldn't. But what happened after he discovered she wasn't as easygoing as she'd been pretending. What happened after he discovered just how neurotic and damaged she was?

“
Is
it what you want?” he asked.

There were so many things she wanted. “Yes,” she said.

“I'm glad,” he said, slipping his hands around her hips. They kissed in the pulsing light of the emergency flares. “Don't worry.”

I
t was just a day like any other day. Austin kept repeating that to himself while he examined the watery eyes of Harvey Fishman.

“Better One or Two?” Austin asked, adjusting metal dials on the phoropter while Harvey leaned in against the machine, focusing on the eye chart on the far wall.

After a long pause, Harvey said, “Can I see One again?”

“Absolutely.” Austin flipped the lens. “Better One or Two?”

“One,” Harvey said hesitantly as he ran his hand through the thin gray strands covering his scalp.

“Good,” Austin responded.

“No, Two.”

“Also good,” Austin said with a smile. “Now, neither of these may be very good, but is it better A or B? That's A?” He switched back and forth between the optics. “Or B?”

“Can I see the previous one again?”

“A?”

“No, One.”

“You said Two was better.”

“I'm not sure,” Harvey answered, sounding anxious. “Can we start over?”

Naturally, the last patient on a holiday was going to be a difficult one. No, not a holiday. Just a workday like any other workday.

Austin pushed away the phoropter, deciding he had a better chance of coming up with an accurate prescription if he did the refraction exam manually. He pulled out a polished mahogany case from under his desk, wiping away an invisible film of dust before flipping open the brass clasps. It had been his gift to himself when he finished his ophthalmology residency and one of his prized possessions. Inside were 266 glistening lenses with metallic rims, meticulously placed in labeled slots on a black velvet base. He put on a pair of thin plastic gloves before removing a lens and holding it in front of Harvey's left eye. For the next half hour he slowly and painstakingly held up lens after lens, sometimes in combinations of two or even three, with Harvey vacillating every step of the way.

The tediousness of the task soothed Austin. It kept him from dwelling on less productive topics, like where he might have hoped to spend his New Year's Eve. Once Austin had confidence in the prescription, he proceeded to put drops in Harvey's eyes. It was while waiting for Harvey's pupils to dilate that Austin's mind began to churn, and he left the examination room to check his phone for messages. He had this crazy idea that Naomi might call. It was right up there with expecting a call from the state lottery board, but, like they say, hope is the thing with feathers, or in Austin's case, with rocket propellant.

He had one voice mail, but it wasn't from Naomi.

It was Len, calling from Cabo, to remind Austin to contact Inteflex after the holiday. Austin had offered to reach out to his former medical school program to see if there were any alumni looking for jobs. Len and Austin hadn't yet filled the junior partner position, and
Len was getting increasingly nervous, though Austin was the one bearing the brunt of the additional workload.

Austin was about to put the phone back in his pocket, when it buzzed. His first thought was that it could be Naomi. But it was Stu.

“Do you have plans tonight?”

“Yes,” Austin said. He was lying, as he had done many times over the course of the last week. Though it easily could have been true. A friend had invited him to a party at his home. But it was going to be married couples and their kids, and the party was going to end at eleven, which seemed to make it less of a New Year's party than an old year's party.

“I don't believe you,” Stu said.

The fact was that Austin didn't want to go out for New Year's just for the sake of going out. There was too much pressure to have a good time, and he was actually looking forward to picking up some Buddy's Pizza, staying in and catching up on episodes of
Lost
.

“How about joining Stuffi and me?” Stu asked.

“In California?”

“In Detroit, wise guy. We're staying at the new MGM Grand.”

“Thanks for the advance warning.”

“Don't be a girl about it.”

“You text me practically every time you blow your nose, but you don't mention you're coming into town on New Year's?” Austin was kind of relieved, because he would have felt too guilty to say no.

“Last-minute thing. Got a meeting with a venture capital guy here on Wednesday. So decided to spend the holiday in Detroit. You in?”

“I'll come see you tomorrow,” he said.

“Don't be lame. Come tonight.”

“I told you I have plans.”

“And I told you I don't believe you. Come on. It'll be fun.”

Right. Loads of fun. Being a third wheel with a newlywed couple on New Year's Eve. A bickering newlywed couple at that.

“I think you and your bride probably need some quality time together, just the two of you,” Austin said.

“If it's just the two of us, we may kill each other. I'm serious, dude. She started kickboxing, and she's a little scary when she gets mad.”

And that was supposed to entice Austin? “I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do tonight. And get here by nine. We're going on the midnight riverboat cruise.”

There was no way Austin was going on a river cruise. Being trapped at a floating New Year's party he couldn't leave was his idea of hell.

He returned to Harvey and continued with the eye pressure part of the exam, positioning Harvey's chin on the ledge of the tonometer.

“So, Doc, do you have plans for tonight?” Harvey asked.

Austin was tired of lying and no longer saw the point. “Not really,” he said. “Probably just going to stay in.”

“You and me both,” Harvey said. “New Year's, Shnoo Year's. Right?” Harvey was more excited than Austin about discovering their common bond.

“Try to stay still,” Austin said. “I'm measuring the pressure inside your eye.” He hoped that the tonometer's probe approaching Harvey's eye would silence him, but no such luck.

“People pay through the nose to go to some shmancy party with bad food and loud music. Who needs that? We got a better plan, right, Doc?”

Austin was growing uncomfortable with the idea of being simpatico with Harvey. He was a nice enough man, but he was also a sixtysomething man, with a thick paunch, mismatched clothing and Coke-bottle glasses. Austin didn't believe in judging a book by its cover, but Harvey's personality was no great shakes either.

“I got myself a nice piece of sirloin from the butcher,” Harvey informed Austin. “Not too fatty 'cause I gotta watch my cholesterol. But
I got some nonfat vanilla ice cream, which tastes just as good as the real stuff. Swear to God. Gonna make myself a root beer float, broil up that sirloin and watch a video on my thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV. There's not a party out there that can beat that. Am I right?”

Austin gazed at the downtown skyline as the riverboat drifted down the Detroit River. The party cruise wasn't as bad as he had anticipated. But he had anticipated it being pretty bad.

The faux Mississippi steamboat traveled back and forth along a two-mile stretch of the river, which seemed to Austin like the boating equivalent of paddling in place. The prime rib on the buffet was dry, but the lasagna was tasty. And the band was enthusiastic, though they sang with more volume than skill, straining to reach high notes and landing too often in the crevices between pitches.

Austin took a swig of his third Scotch and soda and looked down at his phone. Still hoping for a message from Naomi. But not expecting one. He could have been home contentedly watching episodes of
Lost
if Harvey hadn't shown up as the ghost of New Year's Future. Austin wished he could go back to pretending it wasn't New Year's. But it was. And he was alone. Alone with people. Which was somehow even worse. But he wasn't going to meet anyone new sitting in his living room. Though he wasn't entirely convinced he was going to meet anyone on the boat either.

Stu had failed to mention it was a swing dance party, and the people on board were pretty serious about their dancing. There were men in zoot suits and women in polka-dot dresses doing dips and flips. A guy in a white fedora did splits, and Austin's groin muscles hurt just watching. But it was hard not to, because the guy was dancing with a striking woman in a red dress with dark skin and long, darker, curly hair.

“You should ask her to dance,” Stu said, noticing that Austin was gawking.

“Right,” Austin said, looking away.

“Why not?” Stu said, tossing back a shot of Stoli.

“I can't swing dance,” Austin said. “I can barely regular dance.”

“That doesn't stop Stu,” Steffi said, finishing her drink as well.

“And she still dances with me.”

“She doesn't have a choice,” Austin said.

“Who says?” Steffi said.

“Are you looking to find some other guy to dance with?” Stu asked her.

“Who knows?” she teased. “The night is young.”

“See, Austin, this is why you don't want your wife dressing hot and sexy.”

“You think this dress makes me look hot?” Steffi was wearing an iridescent purple dress with a plunging neckline. Stu touched her thigh with his index finger and made a sizzling sound. “I'm glad you like it,” she said with a contented smile, “because this is the dress I bought in St. Barts.”

Stu's mood shifted the moment she mentioned St. Barts. “Are you trying to make a point?” he asked.

“Just stating a fact,” she said.

“I said you looked nice.”

“And to look nice I need to buy nice things,” she said. “Unless you want me walking around naked.”

“That would be a whole lot cheaper,” Stu responded. It was the first time Austin had witnessed them bickering in person, and it was a lot easier hearing about their spats via Stu's texts.

“You're disgusting,” Steffi said, getting up from the table.

“Hey, it was your idea to walk around naked,” Stu called out as she walked away.

“You should go after her,” Austin said.

“Do you know how much that dress cost?” Stu asked. “Take a guess.”

“A thousand dollars.”

“Five thousand dollars,” Stu said. “Who pays five thousand dollars for a dress? I could get a sixty-inch plasma TV for five thousand dollars.”

“I thought you were in the middle of a gold rush.”

“I am. I will be. Once the VC deal goes through, she can buy a ten-thousand-dollar dress.”

“Are you worried it's not going to go through?”

“No, I'm not worried,” Stu said. “But other people are worried about Google Maps, now that they added satellite view and street view.”

“That seems like a good worry.”

“Those are just pretty pictures. We're not living in the picture age. We're living in the information age. EZstreets is the only 3-D mapping service that includes fully integrated white-page listings for every residence and every commercial business.”

“What's to stop Google from also adding that?”

“Let them. Because Yahoo and MSN will have to follow suit, and it takes too much time and money to build it from scratch in-house. One of them will buy us up in a flash. That's what the VC guys are counting on, which is why I've got this meeting on Wednesday. These money guys in Detroit are hungry for the next big thing. They're hungry to put this city back on the map and want to get in on the deal. Come with me to the meeting.”

“What for?”

“I don't need you to build the Web site with me. I don't need you to give up years of your life. I just need you now while I'm in the home stretch.”

“You don't need me.”

“I'm a software guy. I go into these meetings, and I've got my
CFO and my VC people, and it becomes an alphabet soup. I need someone in the room I can trust. Take a year off and work with me. Take six months off.”

“Stu, I can barely even get a day off. We're still short one partner.”

“Listen to yourself. I'm begging you to let me hand you part of my company, and instead you're working your butt off for a guy who takes advantage of you. Where's your self-esteem? And where's your sense of adventure?”

Austin wondered if that was what Naomi would say if she were there. It would be so easy to take Stu up on his offer, but Austin instinctively distrusted anything that was too easy. He felt more comfortable going uphill than down. And that was a problem. It suddenly seemed like he was putting up unnecessary resistance to the natural path lying before him. He could feel a surge of momentum pushing him forward. Or was that just the rolling motion of the boat combined with the alcohol running through his bloodstream? He needed to figure out the answer. No, he needed a sign. He snuck a glance at his phone, willing a message from Naomi to appear.

“You keep looking at your phone,” Stu said. “You got a booty call lined up tonight?”

“Right.”

“Whatever happened with Naomi?” Stu asked.