Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  The silence in the living room was about to be broken, and, I could tell, by Leila. She shifted her position on the couch ever so slightly, and ever so softly she sighed, exhaled, as a prelude to speaking.

  I knew that if I let her start speaking, some genie would be out of the bottle, some jig would be up, some other story, not the story I had in mind, would begin.

  And so I struck first.

  What a wonderful day it was, I told them, and how wonderful I felt. I hadn’t felt this wonderful in years. And how great it was to be going for a drive with the two of them again.

  Not since Spain, I told them, had we been for a nice drive together. A drive in a car. One of my favorite things in life, especially with two of my favorite people.

  I’d always wanted to see the Fallingwater House. It was one of my favorite works of Wright’s.

  I asked Billy if he knew how to get to the Fallingwater House, but before he could answer I suggested that we stop downstairs and talk to the concierge. Just to be on the safe side. They probably had road maps and things. And they probably knew of some quaint out-of-the-way country restaurant where we could have lunch.

  I was frankly surprised at the ease with which I managed to browbeat them into compliance, and herd them out of the suite and into the corridor.

  4

  It was a most memorable sky, dotted with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little white clouds. Identical in size and shape, they made the mauve sky seem like a field of chrysanthemums through which the sun shone down upon the earth.

  I don’t know if they looked or not, but as we walked across the hotel parking lot, I pointed up at the sky and, turning first to Leila and then to Billy, I said, “My God, would you look at that sky.”

  5

  The car that Billy borrowed from a friend at Harvard was an old Checker cab. I didn’t know much about cars, but I could tell that a lot of money had been spent on it. Repainted. Reupholstered. Reappointed.

  The only yellow car in the parking lot. Not the yellow of yellow taxicabs but some other shade of yellow, with bits of reflecting granules mixed into the paint so that the exterior sparkled and glimmered with a combination of gold dust and mother-of-pearl.

  Black leather interior.

  A nice big steering wheel, the kind that made you want to keep your hands on the wheel just for the pleasure of it.

  Maybe it was the alcohol I detected, or thought I did, on Billy’s breath that morning, or maybe I didn’t like the nervous way he twirled the car keys around his index finger as we walked across the parking lot, or maybe it was simply that I wanted to be the one in charge of the tempo of our drive, but whatever the reason, I asked Billy to let me drive. I said I had never driven a Checker and had always wondered what it was like to drive one.

  I would drive out. He would drive back.

  Instead of giving me the keys, he tossed them to me. It was one of those “guy” things that a boy his age might do. There was nothing hostile about it. It’s just that I didn’t expect it and therefore failed to catch them. The keys went right through my hands and fell on the pavement.

  I bent down to pick them up and on my way up, with the keys in my hand, I could see Billy and Leila’s commiseration directed toward me, as if I had been treated unfairly.

  Although it was only Billy who tossed me the keys, they both seemed to want to apologize.

  6

  Despite my wealth of associations with the city of Pittsburgh, I had been there only once before. I now felt a little at sea sitting behind the steering wheel of our Checker cab and looking for a way out of Pittsburgh.

  They didn’t have any more free maps to give away at the hotel desk, but a certain Ms. Caan, consulting a road atlas, wrote out the directions for me on a sheet of hotel stationery. The directions had seemed perfectly clear while I was reading them in the hotel lobby and, in theory, they were still perfectly clear. It’s just that the reality of the city took away some of the clarity.

  The streets I was on meandered like rivers, and the names of the streets changed for no apparent reason, like the streets in Paris. One block they were called one thing, the next block something else. I drove up streets steeper than anything I had seen in San Francisco, only to drive down them again in search of an intersecting street that had failed to materialize.

  Finally, either by accident or a process of elimination, I wound up heading west on (appropriately named) Western Avenue. I crossed the Ohio River over Wiend Bridge and there on the other side of the bridge was state highway 51 heading south.

  According to my directions as written down by Ms. Caan, all I had to do was stay on 51 until I got to Uniontown.

  I lit a cigarette and stepped on the gas.

  We quickly left Pittsburgh behind.

  Rolling along toward Uniontown, I even allowed myself to gaze at the scenery, because Ms. Caan had advised me that the route she picked for us was the scenic route.

  I did all I could to appreciate the scenery. The rolling hills. The open fields. The groves of autumnal trees.

  We crossed the Monongahela over Elizabeth Bridge (at the town of Elizabeth) and, with my foot gently pressing on the gas pedal to increase speed without alarming Leila, we sped on toward our next destination, Uniontown.

  7

  A Checker is a very roomy car. There’s a lot of headroom, legroom, elbowroom.

  Leila sat up front with me, but not next to me. This is not meant to sound like a criticism of any kind. She is simply taking advantage of the room the front seat offers to be comfortable. To stretch out.

  Her cheek is nestled in the palm of her right hand, which is pressed against the rolled-up car window. Her body is stretched out toward me. Her legs are bent, and the hillocks of her knees under her dress are provocative. I keep thinking I’m going to reach out and touch them, alight on them, but I don’t.

  I don’t know why I don’t.

  Perhaps it’s because I can’t tell for sure if my desire to touch them is a desire to touch them or a desire to demonstrate that I can if I want to.

  But I can’t tell if I want to.

  I keep waiting for the situation to clarify itself. For some irresistible impulse to be born and to impel my hand toward her knees.

  She seems too far away where she is. Her body so close and she so far away.

  Billy is in the backseat, which is so far back that he seems like somebody following us rather than traveling in the same car.

  I catch a glimpse of his face every now and then in the rearview mirror.

  8

  I speed up at times and then, when Leila starts to stiffen and show signs of alarm, I slow down again. I do this in order to control the atmosphere in the car and prevent a buildup of something.

  A buildup of what?

  I speed up until the focus becomes what I’m doing, and then I slow down again.

  For a while, for a few scenic miles, the atmosphere returns to status quo.

  And then the buildup starts again.

  I respond by putting more pressure on the gas pedal.

  There’s a happy ending awaiting them at the end of this day and I will do whatever it takes to keep them from spoiling it.

  9

  I keep up a steady flow of superficial chatter.

  It flows from me like cheap white wine from a bottle.

  I have instant access to millions of bits of information stored in my memory. Everything from grade school to grad school and beyond. Almost everything I ever read in the New York Times is there. The genocides. The musicals. The movies. The sports in the Sports section. The science in the Science section. The diets. The drive-by shootings. The emergence of fashion models as famous personalities. The evolution of basketball and the emergence of the point guard and the power forward as the cornerstones of the game.

  The episodes, the incidents, the encounters, the dialogues, the story conferences, the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners from the life I’ve lived.

  They’re all there.

&nbs
p; It has no meaning for me but it’s all there, and I draw upon it as I drive in order to entertain, divert, and engage.

  There’s no hierarchy of importance, no dictatorship of themes, no need to bridge diverse topics.

  I regale them, as I smoke and drive, with an ongoing narrative of my life and times.

  10

  Approximately fifteen miles after Uniontown, we turned onto state highway 381 at the little town of Farmington.

  From Farmington, according to Ms. Caan, it is another fifteen miles to the Fallingwater House of Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Trees, forests of trees, on both sides of the road. Sudden flocks of birds rising up from the fields.

  The road was a narrow two-lane blacktop, full of curves. Wonderful to drive on.

  The three of us, by this time, were all a little punch-drunk. We burst out laughing at the slightest provocation. When no provocation occurred, we desperately reprised past provocations at which we had laughed and laughed at them once again.

  I quoted Billy’s many childhood malapropisms. Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wolves. Robin Hood and his married men.

  The traffic along 381 thickened. Weekend drivers enjoying the scenery. Young couples. Old couples. Cars full of kids.

  I kept passing them and, in the faces of the people I passed, I saw ourselves through their eyes. We looked the very image of one of those happy families you sometimes encounter on the road.

  When we drove through a little town called Ohiopyle, the name of the town was enough to make us hysterical with laughter. Leila’s eyes disappeared completely from laughing so hard. Billy had tears in his.

  We were laughing ourselves silly when we crossed the Youghiogheny River.

  I passed some more cars as the road suddenly jogged eastward.

  And then, just as I went around a blind curve in the road, I had to slam on my brakes and come to a screeching stop to avoid hitting the car in front of me.

  In front of that car were other cars lined up bumper to bumper.

  I couldn’t tell how long the line was because the road vanished off to the right up ahead.

  11

  It’s just a slowdown of some kind, I think to myself. Some rubberneckers taking in the scenery, or a car with a broken fan belt that has to be pushed off the road.

  Soon, I’m sure, we’ll start moving again.

  I express this view to Leila and Billy and they concur.

  We’re all agreed. Any second now we’ll start moving again.

  I light a cigarette and think to myself that before I have finished smoking it we’ll be moving on.

  12

  Our punch-drunk, rollicking mood is on hold for the time being. It’s there, idling like the engine of the car, ready to be engaged again.

  13

  The smoke from my cigarette, while we were moving, was sucked out of the car through the windows, but now it accumulates inside the car. Leila fans it away from her face. I offer to put out the cigarette, but she says it’s all right.

  I put it out anyway.

  14

  The cars are bumper to bumper on my side of the road. However, there is a completely deserted lane on the other side. Not a single car going by.

  Nothing is moving. Nothing except those chrysanthemum clouds. I keep tapping lightly on the gas pedal to keep the engine from shuddering. This could easily develop into a nervous tic. I have to make sure not to allow that to happen.

  15

  Up ahead, a couple of drivers get out of their cars. Hitching up their pants. Tucking in their shirts. Ex-servicemen probably, they now look like perfect casting for washing-machine repairmen.

  Trying to figure out what’s holding up the traffic.

  They join forces and walk together down to where the road bends to the right.

  They stop. They survey the territory ahead. They shake their heads.

  They amble back to their cars, gesturing to the rest of us with broad operatic gestures that they haven’t a clue about what’s holding up the traffic.

  16

  I keep tapping the gas pedal. The mood, the atmosphere in our car is changing. Some other atmosphere is slowly asserting itself in our car, and I don’t know what to do about it.

  My only hope is that we start moving again.

  And soon.

  17

  The car in front of me is rapidly becoming a permanent fixture in my life.

  It’s a burgundy-colored Buick Riviera.

  The couple inside the car have a dog that has taken a shine to me.

  I try not to look at it, because I don’t like the looks of this dog, but it’s hard not to look at it when it keeps looking at me.

  It appears, disappears, reappears.

  There it is again.

  And the damn thing is looking right at me.

  It’s a small, skinny dog, black and white. It must be standing on its hind legs on the backseat. All I see of it are its head and front paws through the rear window.

  18

  I’m desperate for a cigarette, but out of consideration for Leila I refrain.

  I have the option, or course, of getting out of the car and smoking my cigarette outside, but I no longer feel comfortable about leaving the two of them alone in the car.

  19

  Once again I am beginning to detect the telltale signs of their agenda. They’re getting ready to confront me with something.

  I turn the radio on and off.

  As if by accident, I hit the car horn.

  I say something.

  I say something else.

  Anything to distract them.

  20

  I’m engaged in a valiant struggle against an unaccountable feeling of loneliness. It seems all wrong and unnatural. How can I be lonely when I’m sitting here with the only two people I love? If I have a family, this is it. If anyone loves me, it’s the two of them.

  All the evidence against loneliness is in my favor and yet I’m getting lonelier than ever.

  There’s that damn dog again.

  21

  Years ago, I rewrote an already rewritten screenplay (currently being rewritten yet again by a husband-and-wife team) that belonged to a then-new genre called a Mafia buddy movie.

  One scene in particular now comes back in vivid detail.

  Two Mafia guys are taking a third Mafia guy for a ride. They’re all buddies, but the third guy has to die.

  They’re driving to a designated spot where the killing is supposed to occur.

  They’re telling jokes and talking about various parts of women’s anatomies along the way, as they tend to do in these scenes, their doomed buddy not having a clue, of course, that he’s taking his last ride.

  They’re driving along, having a wonderful time.

  And then (this was my contribution) they have to stop suddenly at a railroad crossing.

  And merely by the virtue of the fact that they have to make this unplanned stop, the mood inside the car changes. The jokes they were telling, the banter, the laughter that had been in keeping with the motion of the car suddenly seems forced and inappropriate.

  Tony, that was the name of our fall guy, Tony Russo, starts to sense that something is wrong. His two buddies aren’t saying much, but he can feel the current of silent sentence fragments going back and forth between them (or so I wrote in my stage directions). And as they all wait for the train to pass, he realizes what the real agenda is.

  22

  I remember Tony now because I am beset by the feelings I had ascribed to him in my stage directions for that scene.

  The panic. The loneliness. His bewilderment at suddenly dreading the two guys he loved. His family.

  I feel the same way.

  Leila and Billy are going to hit me with something. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect that it will hurt.

  Despite the layers of flab that cover my body, it is tense and hard, in anticipation of a blow.

  If I grip the steering wheel any tighter, my fingers will break like pret
zels and fall into my lap.

  23

  I have never felt the slightest anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear war.

  What terrifies me about atomic bombs is not their destructive potential but rather this aspect of them, that once a chain reaction begins inside a bomb, it cannot be stopped.

  Anything irreversible is a source of terror.

  I feel that some chain reaction has begun in our car.

  I feel the currents of communication between Leila and Billy. Between the front seat where she sits (not quite beside me) and the backseat where Billy is sitting.

  Without looking at each other, without speaking to each other, they are communicating.

  The shuffling noise Billy makes as he rearranges his body.

  The little cough he coughs.

  The half-suppressed sigh Leila sighs.

  Billy is opening and shutting the ashtray cover on the ashtray in the backseat.

  Leila, having been slumped over in the front, now sits up.

  She is now gathering her thoughts before starting to speak.

  She is looking down at her hands, where the thumb of one hand is rubbing, worrying the fingers of the other.

  Any moment now, she will raise up her eyes and look at me.

  I brace myself.

  She lifts up her head, turns it slightly, and looks at me.

  The look I get from her is as soft as cashmere.

  There are, or seem to be, tears welling in her eyes.

  And then, in that catchin-the-throat voice of hers that I associate with the sound of her laughter and memories of happier times, she says, “Oh, Saul.”

  The sound of my own name, as said by her, jolts me like a heart attack.

  24

  “Oh, Saul,” was all she said.

  I was stricken by the beauty and tragedy of it.

  It is a rare thing, after all, to hear the true, unabridged sound of one’s own name. It happens, if it happens at all, once or maybe twice in a lifetime.

  In that “Oh, Saul” I heard a catalogue of all the names of all the men I had tried to be.

  The pain was almost unbearable.

  And yet I could tell that if I allowed her to continue, there would be more pain. She was just beginning.