Everybody Loves Somebody

by Joanna Scott

“I’m talking about a flat tire.”

  “You got a flat tire?”

  Bob, who isn’t the bristling type, feels like bristling. Instead, he admits that the spare is flat as well, and he finishes with a sigh to express humility, which seems to please the mechanic, who wipes his hands on the dirty rag he’s holding and says, “Let me take a look.”

  “You, T Rex!” a man yells from the office next to the garage.

  “You, Cyril!” T Rex yells back.

  “Willa’s on the phone.”

  “Tell Willa I’m busy.”

  “You tell her.”

  T Rex gives his round belly a pat. “My Willa’s on the phone,” he explains. Bob signals him to answer the call and follows T Rex into the office.

  “Cyril, we got a foreigner here,” T Rex says, picking up the phone and repeating, “Willa, I got a foreigner here. What? French. What?” He covers the mouthpiece of the phone for a moment and asks Bob, “Willa wants to know, are you real French or Canadian French. She just wants to know.”

  “I’m not French.”

  “You’re not French?”

  “I’m from Larchmont.”

  “Willa, he’s from Larchmont. What? England, I guess. No, I made a mistake. What? Now? Right now? Can’t it wait? What? Why?”

  While T Rex is talking to Willa, the second man, a younger man with an ample blond beard, leans across his desk to offer his hand to Bob. “Name’s Cyril,” he says.

  “Bob.”

  “Hiya, Bob.”

  “I’ve got a flat.”

  “We’ll help you out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I got to go bring Willa some eggs,” T Rex says, handing the phone back to Cyril. “She’s baking a cake.”

  “My wife’s baking a cake, too,” Bob announces abruptly.

  “That so?” Cyril says with interest that is obviously feigned.

  “I’ll be back,” T Rex promises.

  “Sure thing, go on,” Cyril urges. When T Rex has gone, Cyril explains, “He had to go buy eggs for Willa.”

  “Oh,” Bob says, as though he only now understands.

  “You got time to wait?”

  “Well”

  “’Cause you’re gonna be waiting.”

  “Fine.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “Thanks.”

  They sit in the office in silence for a few minutes while Cyril pages through a magazine. Bob eyes the phone, wondering if he should call Trudy and tell her he’ll be late.

  “Ever eat muskrat?” Cyril suddenly asks.

  “No.”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “Really?”

  Cyril reaches into the deep drawer on the lower side of his desk and pulls out a bottle and two plastic cups. He fills one with two shots’ worth and gives it to Bob, then fills a cup for himself. “Bottoms up,” he offers. Bob takes his first gulp out of courtesy and his second because he’s pleasantly surprised at the quality of the triple malt.

  “Thank you, sir,” he says, feeling less in a hurry.

  Cyril waves away the gratitude. “Ever eat moths?” he asks, refilling the cups.

  “Moths?”

  “Moths. Mayflies. Grubs. The fact is, you can’t starve if there are bugs around. Though I have to admit, I’m not partial to ants. Bottoms up.”

  “Cheers.”

  “Did I hear you say you’re French?”

  “I’m from Larchmont.”

  “Mmm.” Cyril flips the pages of the magazine, then looks up at Bob with renewed interest. “I hear in France they pay more for frog meat than for prime beef. That true?”

  Bob pushes his empty cup toward Cyril, who generously refills it.

  “I don’t really know.”

  While Cyril browses through his magazine, Bob sips the whiskey and gazes contentedly at the tear streaks of dirt on the window.

  “You ever find yourself lost and hungry in the woods, you can try salamanders,” Cyril says.

  “Good idea,” Bob replies.

  By the time T Rex returns from bringing eggs to his Willa, Bob is feeling warm inside and happier than ever. While Cyril pages backward and forward through his magazine, Bob wanders out to watch T Rex work on his car.

  “You musta run over a bottle full of nails,” T Rex says without looking up.

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t know why you never patched the spare. I can patch the spare for you. Too bad you didn’t stop sooner. You did a job on it, mister. But don’t you worry. I can patch the spare.”

  “Well, thanks, thanks a lot.”

  “Won’t take me no time at all.”

  Bob watches in a pleasant daze as T Rex unbolts the spare. After a few minutes he wanders back into the office. Cyril is nowhere in sight, so Bob sits at his desk, fills a cup with another swallow of whiskey, and picks up the phone, meaning to dial home. But when he sees Cyril plugging the gas nozzle into a car, he decides he’d better ask for permission to use the phone.

  “Hey, Cyril,” he calls.

  “Hey, Bob, you doing okay?”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  Bob decides to put off calling Trudy and wanders outside again to watch T Rex, who, with unexpected alacrity, has already started to patch the spare. Bob considers the remarkable skills divvied up among the population: Everyone’s an expert in something, as his own dad used to say.

  “You mechanics,” Bob says. “You’re amazing. I’m very grateful.”

  T Rex declares matter-of-factly, “Wait till you get the bill.” He slaps the tire and lifts it off the mount. Bob follows him back to his MG, making feeble gestures to help as T Rex loosens the bolts of the damaged tire. “That’s all right,” T Rex says, waving him away. As he watches T Rex work, Bob feels deeply, but without embarrassment, the irrelevance of his own skills.

  “Willa is baking a cake,” T Rex announces, grunting each word as he jerks loose a bolt.

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “You told me.”

  “That’s all right. I bet you’re wondering why my Willa is baking a cake. I’ll tell you why. She’s baking a cake to celebrate her ex’s birthday.”

  “That so?”

  “The thing is, her ex is dead. Been dead for twelve years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.”

  Bob watches in thoughtful silence as T Rex lifts off the flat. Soon the patched spare is in place, the jack has been disassembled, and Bob is in the office, writing Cyril a check.

  “I mean it, you guys are great. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “Take care, fella.” Cyril’s expression suggests that he’s eager for Bob to leave. The ringing phone helps to hurry things along. Cyril picks up the receiver before the end of the first ring. “Hey, T Rex, Willa’s on the phone. Yeah, he’s coming. What? Sure, if you want me there. When? That’s impossible!” He waves impatiently to Bob, and Bob backs out of the office, bumping into T Rex on the way.

  “Hey, thanks, thanks again.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Though the MG goes through its usual opening sputters, Bob isn’t worried. If the car stalls and refuses to start again, then there’s a good man named T Rex who will take the time to fix it. Bob’s sense of relief swells as he thinks about the luck of finding this garage, where whatever might go wrong can be fixed.

  Soon enough the laboring motor settles into a steady purr, and Bob is speeding along the road again, enjoying the power of the modern B series engine as though it were his personal accomplishment. He’s proud to be the owner of a snappy red car that handles curves so efficiently. Yet as the minutes pass he becomes aware of his growing discomfort. His throat stings with dryness, and the warmth from Cyril’s whiskey has already cooled inside him. The miles ahead are beginning to seem as endless as time seems short, with the dusk darkening rapidly into night. He wants to be home. He misses his family and feels a foggy awareness of r
egret for not calling Trudy to warn her that he’ll be late.

  He’s wearing glasses, but still his eyes are tearing from the wind, and the double line in the middle of the road blurs into a single cord of yellow. Everything is beginning to blur, including the recent past. How much whiskey did he drink back at the gas station? Intoxication is a hypothesis that he can disprove with careful calculations. But how can he be careful when he’s seeing one line where there are supposed to be two?

  It helps, he discovers, to picture sobriety as a bright white seashell visible through a few feet of murky water while he’s swimming—it’s right there in the sand, but for some reason he can’t find it when he dives. Isn’t this always the case? Then he will try again, or at least he will enjoy imagining the sensation of swimming underwater. That’s all right, as T Rex would say. He’s heading home. Hit the road, Jack. He sings the few lyrics he remembers from a song, then fiddles with the knob of the radio. Unable to find music, he settles on what he thinks at first is a sportscaster’s appraisal of a game, the voice almost shouting, as though competing with the wind.

  “...Result is bound to be apocalyptic terror attended by plagues, conflagrations, seven-headed beasts, and the flaming horsemen of hell. It’s the same hysterical old Pollyannas and their liver-lillied calamity howlers who called Eisenhower a baboon and Wilson a Casanova and will tell the average American to hold even our Holy Savior in contempt. But you all out there making up the majority of our great country know how to think. You, my fellow average Americans, know how to use your brains. You are the equals of Jefferson and Hamilton and can be certain of the virtue of...”

  The radio is replaced by static as the road dips between two steep slopes, the crackling sound reminding Bob of the leaves blowing across the parking lot back at the tavern. How many beers did he drink at the tavern? He can’t remember. For the moment he can’t remember much of anything.

  “...The wide popular supp...” The voice fades in and out of static. “...Including the United Na...as idiotic an assump...I believe...that justifies America...government being an instru...what you can to pro...the apparition of...arouses no” As the MG reaches the summit of the hill, the voice emerges from the static with a new clarity: “The gutters awash in blood.”

  An interlude of harp music follows the final pronouncement. Perplexed by the broadcast, Bob turns off the radio. It’s a strange world, he muses, where you can drive along a blurry country road and listen to a stranger spout opinions that make no sense. He is surprised to find himself imagining a face to go with the voice—a pasty, wide face of a man who has made all the wrong choices and has nothing better to do than whine into a microphone about anything and everything.

  In an attempt to sharpen his focus, Bob lets his thoughts travel ahead of him along the winding country route. He considers how darkness is like seawater—murky and vast, penetrated rather than illuminated by artificial lights. Fear belongs to the night; violence belongs to the day. And then, at the end of the meeting, Bob will hand you the pen. Please sign on the dotted line. A quarter of a million dollars later, he can sit back and relax. But he can’t relax, not until he has figured out how to get from here to home without any more delay.

  Is he imagining it, or is the patched spare out of alignment, causing the right front wing to veer to the side? Or else the road is tilting. He’s in a bowl made of mountains, the dark ridges spinning counterclockwise beneath the sky. Everything seems to be moving in the wrong direction—except Bob. He’s driving from Oneonta to Larchmont. He’d be home by now, but he had to stop to have a flat repaired. Trudy will understand. All he has to do is tell Trudy the truth.

  Usually, the truth is what he says is the truth. Not this time. He’s not sure what to believe. That he will burn for all eternity in hell? Nonsense. Oh, Willa, bake me a cake. A song beginning with the dream of a song. Everything makes sense, except in songs.

  He tries to remember the joke his client told him earlier—something about the Russians and their missiles. If, then. Which will end first, the world or human consciousness? So what. If, in fact, Bob drank too much over the course of the day, with every passing mile the alcohol’s effect is diffusing. Soon Bob will be home, and home is where he will be sober.

  It strikes him as a fortunate coincidence that Route 28 merges eventually onto the familiar highway. He doesn’t even have to wonder if he’s lost. Another car politely yields as he enters the right lane, and the whole world seems to click back into place. Bob is beginning to feel like Bob again. After humming at least one verse of all the songs that come to mind, he reaches his exit.

  He can’t wait to be home. But as he drives through the center of town, he begins to wonder if Trudy will guess that he’s been drinking. He’s more than two hours late. He should have called. Of course he’ll apologize for being late, but once he explains about the deer, the flat tire, and Cyril’s garage, she’ll realize that it couldn’t have been helped. Will she let him take her in his arms? Oh, Trudy, give your husband a kiss, show him that you love him. But she won’t love him, not if she assumes he’s intoxicated. Her attitude will need no more expression than what her body will convey as she pushes him away.

  Although he’s only a couple of miles from home, he decides to stop for a cup of hot black coffee at HoJo’s. The hostess greets him by name and leads him to a booth by the window. He moves with slow, deliberate steps to keep himself steady. While he’s waiting for his coffee, he uses the restaurant’s pay phone to call home.

  “Trudy,” he says, half covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

  “Bob, is that you? I’ve been so worried!”

  “Some...ting, thing, something unexpected...”

  “What’s happened?”

  It takes an effort to speak precisely. “I had a blowout on the road. I’m here...where am I? They’re fixing the tire, here at the garage.”

  “I can hardly hear you.”

  “A bad connection. Listen, I be—will be home in an hour. They’re fixing the flat.”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Bob.”

  Back at his booth, sipping his coffee, he imagines the scene he has managed to avoid. If he’d gone home too soon, his wife would have smelled the whiskey on his breath and responded with the cold resistance that he has envisioned countless times, though never actually witnessed. In the six years of their marriage he hasn’t given her any reason to doubt him. But if she did doubt him, if she thought him less than worthy simply because he’d had more than a few drinks, wouldn’t he have tried to turn to his child for affection, his darling little baby, perfect in every way? What young father doesn’t live to hear the sound of his child’s laughter when he tosses her into the air and catches her, tosses her again and again like a beanbag? Up the stairs he would have pounded, every stride heavy with the vivid awareness that he was a man who others assumed had made it. Heading directly into the baby’s room, he would have fumbled with the wall switch, and when the light flicked on, he would have found that Trudy had managed to arrive before him and already planted herself in front of the crib, as placid and powerful as the doe who’d made sure that her fawns crossed safely from one side to the other of Route 28.

  Women always think men are blind to their own faults. The truth is, Bob knows the dangers of liquor and is able to remain in control. But it’s not easy when business and related situations demand the courteous acceptance of whatever’s offered—mimosas and beer and whiskey. Because he’s a courteous man, Bob is at HoJo’s drinking coffee instead of trying to prove to Trudy that he can put one foot in front of the other.

  It occurs to him that flabbergasted is a good word, a word that can fill the mind like helium in a balloon. Though the scene will never be enacted, he still can’t believe that if he were home by now, his wife wouldn’t let him hold the baby. But he has to believe it. Confronted with what she’d interpret as the evidence of his intemperance, his wife would refuse to let him reassure her. He ca
n predict the outcome of their argument, if they’d gone ahead and argued. But isn’t it always better to avoid a conflict than to persist in stubborn self-righteousness? He won’t make the same mistakes other men make. It’s really very simple: he’ll stay at HoJo’s drinking black coffee, then he’ll go home.

  OR ELSE

  PART I

  In the Automat

  Nora Owen had never arrived alone in the city before, and now she found herself swept toward the exit by the pack of morning commuters, most of them businessmen who proceeded in a vaguely furtive manner, as though they were secretly and independently trailing someone who was trailing someone else, the crowds separating into currents up the escalators and across the main concourse beneath the vaulted ceiling and its pinpoint constellations, carrying Nora this way and that and finally to the end of a taxi line. But she didn’t want a taxi, and once she realized what the others were waiting for she headed in the opposite direction, downtown on Vanderbilt, no, uptown and over to Fifth, yes, this was correct. Firmly en route, she swung her arms, fingers balled into loose fists. The ridges below her cheeks swelled when she tightened her jaw. Every few steps her lower lip disappeared beneath her upper teeth and then reappeared as she exhaled in a long, determined sigh.

  She paused to study a window display. A fan blew sparkling ribbons around a mannequin draped from head to toe in mink. Inside the store, a clerk moved slowly, like a fish along the bottom of a clear lake. Nora watched the clerk adjust a blouse on a hanger. She watched the mannequin. She watched the shadowy reflection of herself watching and with a start noticed the image of a man looming behind her—a ghost, or a trick of perception, and when she turned he shouldn’t really have been there. But he was there—a black man in a speckled wool coat holding in his outstretched hand a worn red leather wallet identical to the one she’d been carrying in her back pocket.

  “Does this belong to you?”

  He had stolen her wallet. Next he’d hit her, knock her to the ground, and race away, taking with him the seventy-eight dollars she’d managed to save over the past year. She knew that such things happened routinely in the city. Except...what did he say?