Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  He presses the ZOOM OUT button and is somewhat startled to see the digital display of a portion of Westchester County. Look at that. I-95 is marked. A little blinking dot right on it. He is trembling, but here in the harsh, sudden bathroom light, he can’t help smiling either. Global positioning. Many cars come with it standard now. His friends have shown it to him excitedly on afternoon outings on their boats. Palm-size devices mounted alongside their sonar that simply and accurately position you in the universe. It must have been a short step, technically, to separating the two functions, to dividing them into twin packages: the tiny sensor that locates where you are, and the little screen and dials that explicitly display that information. Keep track of your kids. Of your cheating wife. The paranoiac’s home companion.

  Technology is the opposite of mystery. Technology is the end of mystery. Puts the lie to mystery. Makes everything explicit.

  He feels suddenly youthful. Like a fresh-faced boy, bent over a toy, jittery with excitement, excitement uncontainable.

  The thief has come for the safe-deposit contents. Peke can’t believe it. It is some dark connection between them, some perverse sympathy of mind, some synchronous, watch-like ticking and clicking in unison.

  The thief has come for it. It is Peke’s good fortune and ill fortune rolled into one.

  “Maybe we should get going,” he proposes, moving her shoulder gently back and forth fifteen minutes later. “Skip the museum. Try to make Pittsburgh.”

  “Why the rush?” But even in her mild protest, he can hear her acquiescence.

  He smiles. “Our American tour continues.” An upbeat explanation they both know is rich in the unsaid.

  They are finally setting off on their delayed cross-country trip.

  He has no plan, exactly. But he has purpose. He has motion.

  A country is waiting. And a vague, unshaped rendezvous.

  Stanley Peke drives with few possessions, no firm itinerary, no responsibilities. Severed from the conventions of his previous life. Unburdened of everything—except a leaden sense of mission. He would feel truly free at this moment, he thinks, except for that.

  He is aware of how he must appear to the cars that pass him, to the cars that he passes. Like the desirable result of America’s promise. The magazine version of its comfortably retired and healthy senior citizens. Clothes new, button-down shirt and slacks and cardigan in tasteful tones of brown and gray, creases crisp, thinned white hair cut and combed neatly. His wrinkled but still pretty white-haired bride next to him, in a pale-peach blouse and blue skirt with a bright, new scarf—her attire sensible but with flair. Respectable and appropriate, but smart and alive. They will never be sweatsuit seniors, he and Rose. Despite the convenience, the thoughtless ease, it just isn’t in them. Set in among the wrinkles, her blue eyes still sparkle. Twin jewels admired for a lifetime. Like a final fashion touch.

  They are setting out across America. Like twenty-two-year-olds, fresh from school or just sprung from some dispiriting job, free now, on an adventure, exploring their unknown homeland. Except that he is seventy-two and she is seventy. This trip—this venture across America—is a trip on which a twenty-two-year-old would feel possibility, boundlessness, a sense of new beginning. Peke feels it, too, but also feels a sense of ending. How can he feel both beginning and ending? Feel both so acutely, riding along together companionably, like he and Rose? It is no surprise to him. His life has been filled with such ironic extremes. With a double helping of experience. Twin lifetimes, collapsing into each other, each breathing down the other’s neck.

  On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he turns to her.

  “You wonder where we’re going.”

  She looks out the window, not saying anything. Yes, of course I’m wondering.

  He knows how she feels. He’s always known. Like she is one of his possessions. It is how he treats her—even in his wonderful, attentive, seamlessly caring way. An object. A possession. It’s a survivor mentality he can’t escape or surmount. A characteristic bluntness derived from the bluntness of his experiences. A possession, too, because he had no others. Arrived with no others. And she seems to accept it. To understand. She has taken it as part of the bargain, along with what she perceives as his strength, his confidence, his seriousness, his solicitousness. She has understood the bargain, and that was something vital and essential he saw in her from the beginning.

  She was always his possession. They both understood that. And now she is his last possession. His only possession.

  They cross America. An America he has always felt safe in. At home in. An America he has felt a similar possession of, ownership of. Wide bands of interstate, like asphalt carpet runners just rolled out in infinite multilane welcome. And the countless colors and models and variety of the automobiles that cross them, their radios emanating a hundred songs and opinions—American choice, American prowess, and personal freedom, on simple and prominent display. Taillight brigades slipping smoothly beneath the westering sky. Democratic America. Standing next to one another, lined up silently, obediently, and respectfully at rest-stop urinals.

  There are two pasts for Stanley Peke, in a continual, sinuous dance of veils with each other. The past that is primped and shaped for familial and marital consumption, and the past that remains—like a watch in a safe-deposit box—locked away, unavailable, even to him. He has never spoken very much with her—not even her—about certain details. That was clearly part of the bargain with him, too, like accepting the sense of being his possession. Part of their understanding from the beginning. Once, when he drove her around his first American neighborhood, it was with the hope it would satisfy her, subdue further curiosity, fulfill his husbandly duty. As for the time before his arrival here, he’s made only a passing reference here or there, with the understanding that anything further, any deeper revelation or exploration, will come from him at some more opportune time. Yet it never has. After fifty years, she is still waiting, he knows. Oh, she has a good sense of it, he’s sure—from her reading, from history, from his passing references, from his personality. But she is still waiting to hear it from him.

  “We are going to find our things,” he says.

  “But they don’t matter,” she responds, flatly, without pause.

  “But they do matter,” he says as flatly back. The familiar ping-pong of a half century of marriage.

  “Then you’ll have to tell me why.” All this while watching out the windows, not looking at each other. That, he has thought, is maybe the greatest freedom, the deepest genius, of automotive design. Intimacy, because you are not looking at each other. Perspective as you talk.

  But he doesn’t know what to say to her. He doesn’t know how to phrase any of it, how to even begin to unwrap it. Here is a chance to explain, but he doesn’t know how to tell her—yet he knows exactly why. Because it defies the shape, stretches the bounds, of the survivor’s story. And more than that, because it is unfinished. Because it continues—furtively, sickly, perversely—in his head, and in the bedroom’s blackness around him at night. No, he still can’t tell her. This kind of story, you can’t adequately tell until it is finished. So he is left alone with the story’s newly insistent fragments as the landscape slides by.

  On both sides of the highway, Pennsylvania’s steeply raked hills display broad swaths of forest. Surprisingly dense and unbroken and pristine, he thinks, for a main artery in the eastern United States. Only occasionally, a gas station plaza—its meaningless flags and pennants waving colorfully, vaguely carnivalesque—flies bright and fleeting by their windows, disappears evanescent, as the landscape melts into slanting green woods again.

  “I know you had nothing,” Rose says, and after a pause, “I know it has to do with that.”

  And unsaid: I can’t know any more than that, because in all these years of marriage, after three children and a life together, you have never told it to me fully. You mythologize yourself, you gain psychological advantage, by not telling it, and I know this about y
ou by now, and I think you are at least honest enough with yourself to know this, too, about yourself: that you are very much about psychological advantage, and that’s the main reason you don’t tell it. Not the pain of the past. No longer the pain of the past. The pain must be gone by now—must have healed somewhat by now.

  He knows she feels all this, feels it and senses it all in her slight resentments, accumulated into a small and still-manageable mound after fifty years. He wishes—he only wishes—that that were the truth about his past. It should have healed. That would be the natural human course, the standard human response.

  He is asking a lot now, he knows. Driving her into the unknown.

  The device on the dashboard blinks occasionally, silently. She regards it with some inseparable mix of mild abhorrence and prim, formal interest.

  “That’s a tracking device of some sort, isn’t it? From that ridiculous catalog. We’re following somebody, aren’t we?” she says. And, after only a slight pause, “Following it to our furniture.”

  She’s always been an intelligent woman.

  There is a long silence, which answers her definitively.

  A survivor, he has thought, has no identity. To others, yes. Ultraidentity. Sacred identity. Worthy of hallowed whispers and respect, respectfully pointed out at a benefit, a gala, a charity function, all in smooth black tie. Look how far he’s come. Imagine, from nothing to this. A survivor fills a chandeliered room—any room—with his brutal past. But to him, no, it doesn’t work the same way. To him, he has no past.

  So, to a survivor, other things must fill in for identity. Affiliations. Clubs and memberships. Responsibilities. Children. (Who are made too important—it is a hard burden for children to bear. He has observed the brutal toll on some survivors’ children, has eventually seen the subtle toll on his own, but it is a toll he seems unable to mitigate. Mitigation would be to change who he is or what has happened, and that can’t be done.)

  A survivor is caught in a world of surfaces. Like his daughter as an awkward preteen girl, he thinks, curled up with a fashion magazine. Minutely observing a luscious world, imagining herself vividly in it, but separated from it: a world that played across the page without her. The survivor knows nothing but glossy surface. Lives in glossy surface. Because nothing else in the present can ever be as real.

  He wants his possessions back. Because he wants back the part of his identity that his possessions helped to make.

  His possessions are part of his assimilation. An assimilation he hasn’t thought very deeply about, yet he senses now that it’s gone. In part because its important trappings are gone. And he’s tossed back. As if to begin again.

  Peke. From Pecoskowitz. Not everything is what it seems, after all. The big, white, sparkling moving van. The crisp uniforms.

  The American-sounding name. A bent-over, harmless old man.

  No, not everything is what it seems.

  Rose Peke is mesmerized by the occasional blink of the light on the device that Peke has set between the seats. It is as blindly mesmerizing as her husband in sum has proved to be. Just as steady, yet just as oblique. As obvious as it is mysterious. As charming as it is twinkling on its surface. Its hardwiring, its purpose, less ascertainable, less knowable. He is like that blink of light. Charming but formal. Modest but insistent. Simple but transfixing. And like him, it leaves little choice, it seems, but to follow.

  And she has followed him as blindly, as trustingly, as he is following the blinking light. Because he is like a beacon, a lighthouse, against the wild shoals of her emotions, her longings, her ambitions.

  Nowadays, of course, it’s unfashionable, incorrect, to follow a man like that. Back then, it was considered virtuous, and today it is considered weak. But even then, even in that world of half a century ago that largely accepted it, her sophisticated friends, her cultured parents, her colleagues at the architecture magazine were surprised. So independent a woman. With so independent a spirit. How could she?

  No one understood that it was a choice. Eyes wide open. Because her fierce independence, the independence that she prided herself on, seemed to be nothing, withered and pale, compared with his. In truth, she has found that she does not need a full accounting of his life. Of what has happened to him. It is obvious from his capacities. From his resolve. She has gone along with his life, partly in wonder, partly to observe, to see how far his independence can go. The facts, the tragedies of his life before, he has never offered, but she has never pressed for them. And oddly—ironically—it is nevertheless their secret. The secret that they share. The secret that, in fact, she doesn’t know anything about, when everyone of course assumes she does.

  The secret that is still a gulf of mystery, that they have tacitly agreed to leave intact. For her to look across the canyon at him with that terrifying gulf between them. And find him—in that unknowing, in that distance—continually attractive. Alluring as the distance—as the far side of the canyon across the gulf—always is.

  “It’s a long ride. Perhaps this is the time to tell you what happened to me,” he says. A little miracle of mind reading that ceases to seem miraculous—that indeed they have each started to expect—after fifty years of marriage.

  She smiles. “You must feel pretty guilty about dragging me along. Because you feel the need to offer something substantial in return.” Her eyes narrow slightly in thought, and then their edges turn up in mild amusement. “And as of right now, that’s the only gift you can give me. The only thing you still own, isn’t it?” She looks out. “But give it when you really want to. Not when you’re offering it because you’re in a corner.”

  She smirks. He sees her expression and smirks in return. In each of their expressions is some indivisible quotient of annoyance and affection. Both of them melt slightly into smiles—thin, conspiratorial—in recognizing it.

  Of course, there was always one other thing: something not evident or explicable to her cultured parents or sophisticated friends. Something that should have been obvious to them, in their sophistication, but perhaps was not. Something so obvious to her. How he looked at her. And how she could see in that look what she meant to him. How to this survivor of unspeakable events, she was everything. How there was nothing and no one else. How despite all their possessions, their friends, their children, their lives, there seemed for him to be nothing else but her. Even after all this time, he still regarded her that way sometimes. As if there were no other matter, no other protoplasm in the universe. Blinkered, bottomless, utter desire. Beyond words, beyond description. But now, of course, they were headed off to find those same possessions she was sure had no comparative meaning to him. Making her question what had so long seemed unquestionable. Making her challenge the one unchallengeable assumption of her married lifetime.

  The interstellar display of evening lights has flicked on. They drive on in silence until her question. “Will they stop somewhere?”

  “At this point, it’s just a he, I think,” Stanley tells her. “He’s not going to stay the night anywhere, I’ll bet,” he says. “He’ll drive all night, into the next day.”

  “Do you know where he’s going?”

  He shakes his head no. “Somewhere sparse. Somewhere they attract no attention. That’s my guess. He might stop for food and certainly gas, but that’s all. But we’ll stay the night somewhere. The signal should remain.”

  A concession she knows is mainly for her. She knows he could drive all night. He has the stamina. Even at seventy-two. He is a half step slower these days, but he is magically healthy, blessed with an almost animal vigor. In the rare menial task when he needs it—lifting luggage, shifting furniture—he still has much of his bull-like strength. He exudes a life force that makes some of their increasingly frail friends jealous, she sees. His energy can seem, well, inhuman. An apt description, if you strip inhuman of its negative connotation, that is.

  At the Four Seasons in Cleveland, the valet takes the Mercedes. There is a midwestern ease, a slow, informa
l pulse, to the bellmen and the desk staff that is at odds with the majesty and hauteur of the lobby as the Pekes check in. They have called ahead to some old friends, a retired oncologist from the Cleveland Clinic and his wife, whom they first met on a Caribbean vacation years before. Yes, we’re driving cross-country. Once before we croak. In their phone conversations to set up a dinner, the theft never comes up.

  They meet at La Fontanelle, Cleveland’s finest French restaurant.

  The Mercers smile broadly as they approach the Pekes, seem nearly giddy, as if with the unmediated glee of having won a contest and now striding up to collect the prize. All four of them are dressed with like smartness for the occasion, the men in crisp navy blazers and bright ties, the women in simple but sophisticated dresses, with print scarves and shawls. The Mercers have, Peke can sense, new spring in their step, new energy, on seeing their old Caribbean pals, and he feels some of this energy, too, though he knows it is only the Mercers’ energy momentarily reflected in him.

  “Hello, hello, hello”—an awkward but affectionate pas de quatre, an effervescent round of handshakes and hugs and arms across backs. Peke sees Rose’s joy of connection—a temporary break from the pressures of events, from her loneliness amid them. Full decorum is restored only as they are led to their table.

  The restaurant achieves its strived-for Europeanness—a Europeanness that, paradoxically, seems to become more pronounced, Peke sees, more strived for in certain settings, the farther into America they go. A regal, formal, forced elegance: crystal chandeliers suspended from high ceilings, a thick leather folio of wines to choose from, even the dining chairs correct in proportion, immediate in comfort, rife with civility. It is a Europe he never knew, of course. A Europe that was taken away from him when he was still a boy. A Europe that, he can see, exists in American dreams as it exists in his own. Does this in fact make him more of an American? Sharing this wistful fantasy of Europe? It is another misty irony in his double lifetime. One life collapsing into another.