Old habits being what they are, Matthew can’t help sizing the girl up in terms of date-ability—or, to be frank about it, what some of the guys on the lacrosse team used to call the ‘diddle matrix,’ a set of parameters by which they would rate a girl’s attractiveness. Budding financiers and entrepreneurs all, they never missed an opportunity to apply economic metrics to a situation, factoring in not only a girl’s appearance and, ahem, ‘performance reviews,’ but contextual factors like social standing and how much the conquest might add to the value of one’s brand.
Not that Matthew ever took much stock in the ‘matrix’—for all but a few of the most testosterone-addled of his peers, it was mostly a lark, a casual game, and he had never made a decision about who to date or not to date based on its conclusions. But there it remains, the tendency to do a summary work up based on whatever you can glean about a girl and then attach a number to it.
This girl isn’t pretty, exactly—definitely not what you would call hot, at least not by the standards he’s used to applying. Then again, it’s hard to tell for sure because most of the important parts are hidden beneath those overalls and a baggy, long-sleeved t-shirt. Her hair is nice in a sort of unkempt way, and although her face is a bit square and unremarkable (with just enough make-up to even things out), there’s a no-nonsense clarity to her affect that he finds appealing. He’s gonna go out on a limb with this one and give her a 13 out of 20. Nothing to write home about but definitely in the realm of eligibility.
“There’s no way that one’s getting in the double digits,” he can hear his old teammate Cody shouting. “NO. WAY!” Cody, an aggressive defender and heir apparent to an Upper-East-Side fortune, lacked Matthew’s appreciation of the ‘intangibles’ and would have been glad to base his appraisals of women on their measurements alone. “You just gotta look at the data,” Cody liked to say.
The girl’s eyes narrow slightly. Is she picking up on the crude calculations going on in Matthew’s head?
Get it together, man.
“Where’d you end up going?” he says.
“University of New Hampshire.”
“Oh, right… I heard you telling the rental car guy.”
She cocks her head. “You were eavesdropping?”
“Oh, no. I was just—”
“I’m kidding. There was no one else around, and I was talking at like an eleven. Of course you overheard.”
Matthew smiles.
“So… were you able to get a car?” the girl asks.
“Yeah.” He pulls out the key fob. “Altima. Used to drive one of these. They’re pretty nice.”
“You had your own Altima?” She squints at him. “How old are you.”
“How old do you think I am?”
She takes a bite of a chip and gives Matthew another look up and down, her eyes narrowing further. “Tell you what—if I get it right on the first try, you have to give me a ride.”
“A ride?”
“That’s right. All the way to New Hampshire.”
“How do you know I’m going in that direction?”
“Aren’t you?”
He hesitates.
“I can spot a Maine-iac from a mile away,” she says. “Let me guess, you’re from the coast. Falmouth? Cape Elizabeth?”
“Great Falls. It’s inland.”
“Nuts.”
“Hope you’re better with ages than hometowns.” Matthew takes out a pack of gum, pulls out a slice for himself and offers her one.
“No thanks—” she holds up the chips “—still working on these.” She eyes his still-wrapped burrito sitting on the table. “You normally chew gum before you eat?”
Matthew glances at the burrito, then the gum. Whoops. “I… was thinking I’d save the burrito for the drive.”
“Right,” she says. “So if I come within a month of your age, I get that ride?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “I’d say you’re… 23. Just barely. Your birthday was within the last couple of months. I’m thinking August.”
Matthew stops chewing. His whole body goes still and silent. “How did you…”
“I’m a certifiable genius—IQ off the charts. You seen the new BBC Sherlock Holmes series? They based the character on me, basically, but it didn’t test well so they put a penis on it and changed it to a more recognizable name.”
“And you still didn’t want to apply to Swarthmore?”
“IQ has no effect on interest rates. Sadly.” She scrunches up the empty bag of Sun Chips and tosses it in a waste bin. “It’s late, we should get going.” She starts off down the corridor, striding without hesitation in the direction of the parking garage. Matthew picks up his bag and his burrito and chases after.
“My name is Tess, by the way,” she calls over her shoulder.
Something is off. But he can’t put his finger on what it is.
It might be the sensation of driving a new car. It’s the same make and model as his old one, but a different year. The details are different—the shape of the clutch, the orientation of the steering wheel. It might also have something to do with the presence of the girl in the passenger seat. He’s never been in the business of picking up strangers. But something is definitely off, something physical… the way his butt feels on the seat.
They approach the toll plaza on the Whitestone Bridge, crossing from Queens into the Bronx. Matthew shifts his weight and reaches down to pull his wallet from his back pocket.
“Fuck!” he cries.
“What is it?”
“My wallet. I think I must have… unless it’s in my bag…” The car swerves as he jerks his head to glance in the back.
“Whoa,” says Tess.
“I’m gonna have to turn around.” He starts looking around frantically for a turn-off before the toll.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” says Tess.
“I need my fucking wallet!”
“Here…” She reaches into the front pocket of her overalls. A moment later Matthew’s wallet is sitting on the center consul. He looks between it and her and the road.
“What the hell?”
“Relax, I didn’t pickpocket you,” she says. “You left it on the counter at Taco Bell.”
They pull into the tollbooth, and Matthew pays, wondering if she’s going to offer to chip in for anything on this trip. He guns it a bit as they leave the toll plaza.
“So that’s how you knew when my birthday was?” he says after a beat.
“Bingo.”
“So you’re not a high-level genius.”
“I didn’t say that.”
He glances over and sees that she’s looking at him with an expression that is cautious and conciliatory, but also a bit flirtatious if his old intuitions don’t deceive him. What kind of game is she playing? He has half a mind to leave her on the side of the highway.
Let’s not lose it, buck-o, he tells himself. Don’t forget the strides you’ve taken over the past few months.
What would it say about his spiritual progress if he took her to task for playing a little prank? She did it because she needed help and didn’t know how to ask. The girl is obviously in some kind of a bind.
Weighing his options for what to say next, none of those options seeming particularly apt, he settles on, “Why would you do that?”
“Would you have given me a ride otherwise?”
“Yeah, sure,” he says, “of course.”
She leans over toward him as far as her seatbelt will allow. The warmth of her body radiates onto his skin. The scent of her hair—fruity and slightly pine-y—reaches his nostrils. “Look,” she says, “I’m really sorry. I never would have done something like that, but I need, like need, to get back to New Hampshire tonight. I don’t make it, like, a habit of borrowing guys’ wallets to extract information for a ride. I was just a bit desperate at the moment.”
He nods and swallows. “What were you doing in Brooklyn, anyway?”
She sinks back into the passenger seat, and her heat and scent f
ly away. She lets out a long sigh. “It’s my mom. She has these ‘episodes.’ She’s bipolar. A couple weeks ago she went on a pretty hard manic kick, called up her ex-boyfriend, dude who ditched her a year ago to spend his time full-time with his family in the Far Rockaways.” She shifts noisily in the seat. “Yeah. Sooooo…. Mom had seemed to have gotten the message that we were no longer a part of Mr. Family Man’s plan, but then—BOOM!—her serotonin receptors go haywire and off she goes, trucking it down to New York to prove to him that she’s the one he really wants to be with.”
“And you went after her?”
“Yeah, I know. Sigh…”
“Didn’t go so well, I take it?”
“You could say that. Mr. Family Man decided to be the good Samaritan and take her in for a couple of weeks… while his wifey and the kiddos are away visiting her parents.”
“Yikes.”
“I tried to explain to her, like, ‘Mom, dude’s clearly taking advantage of you—again. But she wouldn’t hear it.” She sighs and rolls her head back against the headrest. “I mean, there’s a lot more to it than that. I don’t want to diminish her experience or like dismiss her feelings or anything.”
“No, I didn’t get the sense that you were—”
“It’s just, like, I’m trying to be in college. I’m trying to have that experience. And I don’t want to say something fatuous like ‘I’ve earned this’ or some kind of entitled bullshit like that, but you know what? After the way I’ve nannied my freaking mom over the years, um, yeah, I kind of have earned it. Like I deserve a little break to let me be nineteen for a hot second.”
Matthew feels his brow furrowing, his cheeks flushing. “You’re only nineteen?”
“Yeah… why?”
“I didn’t think you could rent a car until you’re twenty-one.”
“You can, there’s just this extra stuff you have to do.”
“Is that what that was about,” he says, “with the guy at Enterprise?”
“No. Eye roll. What happened with him is that I decided to give him my fake ID instead of my actual ID.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because there might technically be some incidents associated with my actual ID that are frankly none of his business.”
Matthew feels the beginnings of a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “You tried to rent a car using a fake ID?”
Tess lifts her chin defiantly. “I was going to offer him sexual favors, but then you showed up. Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t done it before.” Beat. “The fake ID, I mean, not the sexual favors.”
They drive on in silence for a while, this all being, um yeah, kind of a lot for Matthew to take in, much less respond to. He’s tempted to tell her about the awakening he’s experienced, how his whole worldview has undergone a tectonic shift, how the night is no longer distinct from the day, given the luminous glow shining forth from the core of his being. He’s more than tempted, in fact—he burns to tell her with a yearning that borders on the religious. But goddamn it, he’s distracted by the thought—as silly as it may be—that she was ready to… do stuff with the rental-car dude.
And Matthew offers up a free ride based on a guessing game that she rigged?
“Dang, dude,” his old teammate Cody would have said, “your ass got rolled…”
Why the hell does Cody keep popping into his head? Why should he give a shit what a dumbass like Cody might say at a time like this? This trip is about confirming that he’s moved beyond all that base and frankly boring nonsense.
Focus on the road. Focus on what’s right in front of you. Look at the seams on the ball, just like your dad taught you. (Lacrosse balls don’t actually have seams, but… whatever.) Tune in. Focus. That’s where the answer lies.
And it is where the answer lies, drawing him back into the present moment, any sense of worry or drama fleeing, layers of mental detritus shucking off, exposing that bright core of bliss that’s still there, that’s always been there and always will be. And if it glows a bit less brightly now than it did before, when he was hitching around the Mediterranean, it’s just because he’s tired. He didn’t sleep much on the plane. Everything is still 100% copacetic.
The cars are crammed belly-to-back on the opposite side of the divider, hordes of New Yorkers heading back into the city after a weekend away in New England, but the way north is clear. A little over five hours, plus perhaps a twenty-minute detour into Portsmouth to drop off Tess, and he’ll be home. Just past three in the morning. Ready to have a chat with the ‘rents. To articulate fully and freely for the first time who he really is, the life he wants.
The darkness draping itself over the Eastern roadway, is the harbinger of his awakening. Tomorrow will be the first day of his life.
“We all cool then?” Tess says.
He looks over at her. “Totally,” he says, offering a smile. “We’re totally cool.”
“So,” says Tess after a tasteful pause, “where are you coming home from?”
“Umm… Europe.”
“Any particular country, or…”
“I was sort of here and there. Went all over.”
“Uh huh. Sounds nice.”
“You ever been?”
She laughs. “The farthest I’ve ever been from New Hampshire was the time I had mono—I was ten or eleven—and my mom got it in her head that what I really needed was a hot, dry environment. So she puts me in the car, and we take off for New Mexico. Only got as far as Missouri, though, before we ran out of money and my aunt had to come get us. I don’t really remember any of the trip because I was so sick that I was mostly just trying not to throw up the whole time—plus which I used to get car sick, so that just sort of compounded the situation.”
“So,” Matthew says carefully, “your mom gets these ideas a lot then?”
“Not all the time. And that’s kind of what makes it so tricky, because she’ll go for months or even years without an episode, and you think ‘Great! We’re out of the woods!’ Then you wake up one morning and the car’s gone from the driveway and you’ve got about sixteen totally bat-shit text messages from her, telling you she’s got it ‘totes figured out now,’ she’s ‘vibrating on a new frequency,’ the ‘universe is singing to her.’ And you say goodbye to whatever plans you may have had for the next day, week, month… So, yeah, it’s a challenge. But, no, it’s not all the time.” She pauses thoughtfully. “But that’s not what you asked me. You didn’t say all the time. You asked if it happens a lot. So I guess I’d have to say it depends on what you mean by a lot. What do you mean by a lot?”
“I don’t know…”
“Like, do you go to Europe a lot?”
“Not a lot,” he says. “This was probably my third time.”
“See that, to me, seems like a lot. With regard to international travel.”
“This was the first time I’d spent any significant amount of time, though.” He’s praying that she doesn’t get the wrong impression and think he’s some spoiled rich kid. “The other times it was just like a week or two. Family vacations.” Yeah, right, that oughta sort it out.
“How long were you there this time?”
“A few months,” he says. “I took off in June, right after graduation. I was supposed to be there until the spring, but I decided to come back early.”
“Why? Did something happen?”
“Sort of.”
“What?”
He squirms a bit in the seat. “It’s gonna sound weird.”
“I just explained how the extent of my traveling experience owes to my mother’s bipolar episodes, and you’re gonna go all hush on me now? Weak, bro.”
“I…”
What the fuck, he thinks, just tell her. Treat it like a rehearsal for telling your parents. You’re gonna have to cross this bridge soon enough.
“I sort of had, like, a spiritual awakening.”
He feels her leaning in closer, staring at him. “You ‘sort of’ had ‘like’ a spiritual awa
kening?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound too sure about it.”
His hands massage the steering wheel rhythmically, the way they would his lacrosse stick just before a face-off. He takes a deep breath. “I did. I had a spiritual awakening.” He exhales and takes another breath, giddy at having stated in unequivocal terms what he has experienced—what he is still experiencing.
“What does that mean, exactly—a ‘spiritual awakening?’” Okay, maybe not so unequivocal. “What, like you saw God or something?”
“Not exactly,” he explains, “unless by God you mean the true, unchanging being-ness at the heart of everything. So I guess you could, I mean you could put it like that if you want.”
“Uh huh.”
“I just don’t know if I would use that word.”
“That’s… very interesting.”
He can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic. “It’s hard to put into words,” he says, “maybe impossible. But something sort of shifted in me and I knew almost immediately that I would never be the same again.”
“How’d it happen? Like, what were the circumstances?”
He tells her about that night in Paris, erring on the side of discretion by leaving out what he and the woman had gotten up to in the kitchen, focusing on how the street looked as he gazed out from the window of her dining room.
“It was like I was seeing through new eyes.”
“Wow,” she says, nodding, sitting back in her seat. “That. Is. Something.”
“The thing is,” he goes on, revving up, approaching an evangelical zeal, wanting desperately to share his insight, to encourage her—encourage everyone—to seek what he’s found, “I think anyone could experience what I experienced. It’s just about letting go. Completely. Of whatever you’re holding onto. For me it was an ex-girlfriend. All the memories and the trauma of that were like this big cork plugging up the channel that the energy of the universe was trying to flow through. And when I popped that cork—whoosh! But it could be different things for different people. Anyway, I think what allowed me to discover that was getting out of my usual environment, putting myself in a new context, giving myself the space and the time to allow this kind of un-packaging to happen. Like, that’s what people do when they go on meditation retreats or pilgrimages or whatever. They seize the opportunity to get unstuck from the routines and the patterns that keep them tethered to all their stress and their issues and complexes and everything. That’s what you’ve got to do to get some perspective, you know? Like I was thinking about the whole tradition in Islam where anyone who can afford to is expected to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at some point in their lives. And I think that’s what that tradition is about. It’s not about showing respect. It’s about getting away from the pressure of daily life that binds you to your problems like a vice. Like, Muhammed had his awakening out in a cave. Jesus was out in the desert. The Buddha was out in the wilderness, sitting under a tree. They were all away from quote-unquote ‘real’ life, you know? I think that’s what you’ve gotta do. I think it’s something that everyone ought to do at some point.”
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