She moved slightly in the seat, and turned to him. “Well, we can’t go back.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“So,” she said, “I guess there won’t be any Lamaze with Lois.” She laughed again. “Sounds like a television program.”
“Lily, we can’t just drop it like that.”
She said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, no. I mean, what will we do about it?”
“We’ll forget about it, I hope. We’ll tell it at dinner. Jesus, Tyler.”
“I just said we can’t do that. That would hurt feelings. There’s going to be hurt feelings already because my mother recommended that lady to us. And we went in there and laughed at them.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, you come on.”
She stared at him for a moment in disbelief. Then she laughed again, shaking her head. “This is ridiculous. And I’m too hot and tired to talk about it anymore.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, so we drop the subject. Is that right?”
She looked out the windshield at the oncoming road. He was speeding again. “Slow down, will you, please?”
“I’m only going five miles over the limit,” he said. “You told me to step on it.”
“Please slow down,” she told him. “I don’t care what I said.”
They went perilously close to the guardrail going around a bend in the road, and she put her hands to her face. He slowed a little, then began to pick up speed again. She said, “You can let me out anywhere along here.”
There was no answer to this, only more speed. They were going close to eighty miles an hour now.
“Will you please slow the fuck down,” she said.
To her surprise, he did so, a little too suddenly, pumping the brakes, and she realized that a police car had veered in behind him with lights pulsing.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, pulling over.
6
THEY SAT IN SILENCE for a few seconds while the police car slowed and stopped behind them and the patrolman got out, then reached back into his car for his ticket pad and paper. The patrolman wore a flat-brimmed hat with the black strap shiny and perfectly arranged across the bottom of his face. He approached cautiously.
“This is partly your fault,” Tyler said.
“Oh,” she answered. “That’s right. I was the one speeding. When will you grow your handlebar mustache? What the fuck is this, Tyler?”
“As a matter of fact, I think I actually liked the way that mustache looked.”
“You probably liked Tommy Johnson, too.”
“He voted for Dukakis.”
“Oh, God,” Lily said, laughing. “That qualifies him. I see, now.”
The patrolman had written down the license-plate number, and now came to stand at the driver’s-side window. He was a stooped, older man with a perfectly fitting starched shirt and wiry, dark-brown arms. He leaned in and looked at Lily out of gray eyes set back into leathery pouches of brown skin. Then he looked at Tyler and asked if there was an emergency.
“No,” Tyler said.
“Driver’s license and registration, please.”
Tyler was already reaching past Lily to open the glove compartment. It wouldn’t budge.
“New car,” Lily said to the patrolman.
Tyler got it open at last, retrieved the registration, and handed it, with his license, to the patrolman, who held it open and copied information from it into the ticket pad. “You have any idea how fast you were going?” he said to Tyler.
“No, sir.”
“I clocked you at more than seventy-five miles an hour.”
Tyler said nothing.
“You got a pregnant lady in the car. She your wife?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Tyler said. “That’s my business.”
“We’re married,” said Lily. “For now.”
The policeman’s face broke into a little grin on one side of his mouth, which he wiped away with a rough motion of the back of the hand that held the pencil.
“Just write the ticket,” Tyler said. “There’s no detective work required.”
“I think you might benefit from a little advice, there, fella. Ain’t no necessity for you to break bad with me. Not here, not under these circumstances. You can’t win under these circumstances. Under these circumstances, no matter what you say, I win and you lose, see, because you broke the law and I clocked you.”
Tyler said nothing.
“You owe me an apology.”
“Okay,” Tyler said.
“And you owe her an apology, too.”
“This is not in your power,” Tyler told him. “Give me the ticket.”
“Well, you ought to take your family into consideration a little.” The cop looked past Tyler to Lily. “You like going that fast?”
“No,” Lily said. “I don’t.”
Again, he looked at Tyler. “I’m gonna cite you for speeding and for reckless driving.”
“Okay, look, Officer, if you do that, I’ll lose my job.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you hit the gas, son.”
Tyler sat back against the seat, and then gripped the wheel. It took a long time for the citations to be written out. The officer walked back to his car to do it. Lily and Tyler sat very still in the quiet. She could see the rage working in her husband’s face and neck, the pulsing there.
The officer walked slowly back to the window and handed him the license and registration, and then the ticket, and said, “Nice and slow, now. Right?”
Tyler simply held the wheel and stared out.
“I said, ‘Right?’”
“Right.”
“Court date’s written in that box on the upper left.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s better.” The cop leaned down and looked at Lily. “Good day, ma’am.”
Tyler waited until the police car had pulled around them and was out of sight down the road. Then he started out, and nearly pulled in front of an oncoming truck. The truck driver blared his horn and came roaring by, and Lily screamed. After the truck had blown past, Tyler sat with his head drooping, still gripping the wheel. Finally he looked back, and with great care pulled out. They went just below the speed limit. Lily watched the side of his face, and tried to summon anything to say to him, a path back through the last few minutes. She couldn’t even find something neutral to speak of.
He spoke first: “That was just terrific.”
“Oh, Tyler—you’re not really going to tell me that was my fault, too?”
He looked fiercely at her. “We’d still be at the Lamaze class.”
“You’re funny,” she said. “Really. Hilarious.”
“I guess you’ll see how funny I am.”
“What is that, a threat? Jesus, listen to you.”
He said nothing. He was picking up speed again.
She said, “Sixty in a forty-five—you want to try for two in one day?”
He pulled the car over into the gravel by the side of the road, so that it fishtailed slightly, and the brakes made a terrible screeching sound. He got it stopped, turned in the seat, and fixed her with glittering, cold eyes. It was like the worst of her nightmares, the antipathy in his expression. He was getting hold of himself, and this was in a way more frightening than the rage he’d been in. “Look,” she said. “We’re both irritated and hot and miserable, and we just got a fucking speeding ticket. Let’s wait until we can be civil again.”
He faced front, gripping the wheel.
“We’ll calm down and see how silly the whole thing is.”
“We’ll tell it at dinner,” he said with a brittle, sardonic smile. He shook his head. “No. I can’t do it. I just can’t. I thought I could but I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” she said.
He didn’t answer, but sat there staring out.
“Tyler? What? What is this?”
Nothing.
She felt frighten
ed; something awful was coming. But then the fright gave way to anger. She opened the car door, got out, and began to walk. The surface here was uneven and she wavered and nearly stumbled.
After a minute, he inched the car forward. “Will you get in?” he said.
She kept walking, looking straight ahead.
“I wonder,” he said, “if you know what Buddy’s insurance people are gonna say when they see this ticket for speeding and reckless driving in a fucking demonstrator.”
She stopped, leaned against the guardrail, reached down and took off one shoe, then braced herself with her other hand and took off the other. She held them, walking along on the asphalt now, though it burned the bottoms of her feet, and made her have to move to the tall grass beside the road. The grass was too dry, here, and hurt almost as much as the asphalt. He kept inching the car along.
“We can do this all day,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“Okay,” he said, shouting at her. “I’ve got some news for you, sweetheart. A bright little piece of news.” He pulled ahead, then accelerated so that the tires squealed, and went on, into the distance and around the long bend to the east.
For what seemed a long while she walked down the road and no other cars came. She crossed to the other side and passed a series of grass lawns, then crossed again, heading around the long bend. She heard a car somewhere in the distance, but it was hard to tell if it was ahead or behind. She stopped. A green Cadillac approached from the east, driven by an elderly woman. It went by, and she watched it go on. A minute or so behind it was Tyler in the demo. He went by her without looking, then made a U-turn and came back, slowing to where he had been as she’d stopped.
“You wanna hear the news?” His voice was ugly. There was a frightening, violently derisive edge to it.
She couldn’t believe it, and she did not respond.
And now he shouted. A full, horrible scream: “The GODdamn baby isn’t mine!” And he pulled away again, tires squealing, rear end fishtailing. She watched him go, and kept walking, rote movement, paying no attention now to what the asphalt was doing to her feet, her nylons, which had torn and were coming to pieces. Her mind was a blank wall, and this was just happening; she was merely going on in it, whatever this was. The road went up a slow incline, into the shade of some live oaks, and she sat under one of them to cool off. She pulled the shards of her nylons from her feet and looked out at the road. Beyond it, bordered by a wide prospect of wild grass and mounds of coal, was a railroad. A train went by over there, a freight. The whistle sounded. The smells of creosote and tar were on the air. She watched the traffic, and waited for something to come to her, some way of deciding what she should do. It seemed to her that he had said the most outlandish and terrible thing he could think of, and that it was rather sickly absurd, so childish as to indicate a kind of pathology. It might even have made her laugh, except for the awful expression of pent-up anger in his face.
7
PRESENTLY, she got to her feet, and went along the road for another mile or so. She went past a yard where a family was having a picnic—babies on blankets and lying in mothers’ laps, children running and shouting in the shade, men standing together over a fire. She breathed in the smell of charring meat, walking by, and they all gazed at her—she realized she must look quite funny, a pregnant lady with stockings torn off at the ankles, striding along the road alone, with her shoes in her hand. She hadn’t even taken her purse with her.
A young man came over to the end of the yard as she reached it. “Is everything okay, ma’am?” he said.
She couldn’t bring herself to speak. She smiled and nodded and went on. She saw him watching her when she reached the end of the next yard. She wanted to stop there, but decided that if she did he would see it as an indication and follow her, wanting to help. So she kept going, until she was well out of reach of the picnic. And when Tyler came from the other way, slowing as he neared, and then going ahead and making another U-turn, she decided to face him.
He pulled up and stopped with a scary disarrangement of the dirt and gravel by the roadside. “You want to talk about it?” he said.
“I don’t know what there is to talk about,” she said. “I laughed at Mr. Johnson and I thought we were laughing—”
“That isn’t what I mean,” he said. “Will you get in?”
She did so. She realized, with a shock, that she was crying.
“Do you understand now?” he said.
“No.” Her purse was still on the front seat. She reached in it and brought out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes, her face.
“Did you hear what I said back there?” he demanded.
She nodded.
“And you don’t understand it?”
“No—I said no. I don’t understand it. Jesus Christ.”
He looked away, and then shook his head slightly. He seemed afflicted with a kind of sickening apprehension. There was no color at all in his face. “I was going to be a good guy and try to keep this from you. I love you and I was going to do it. I was doing it. But I saw that—I saw the—the sonogram. It did something to me, okay? I can’t help it.”
She stared.
“I mean, it’s partly my fault. I should’ve told you at first. I mean, I tried to. I—I lied, all right? To begin with. It amounts to a lie. I kept it from you. I blame myself for that.”
“Tyler, will you please tell me what you’re talking about?”
His eyes trailed down to her abdomen. “That isn’t my baby.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he uttered under his breath, looking away.
“Tyler, what the fuck is this about? You don’t want the baby?” She was crying, her nose running, she couldn’t get all the moisture off her face, and he was a blur on the other side of tears.
“Okay, look,” he said. “Listen. I’m only going to say this once.”
She sobbed.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Tyler, please—what in God’s name.”
“You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone. I’ll support you and all that and I’ll be a father to the kid, okay? As long as you don’t say anything.”
It crossed her mind again that this was pathology; he was having some sort of psychotic episode. She nodded in order to humor him.
“When I was seventeen, I got the mumps. Okay? I had a complication from it—orchitis. Do you know what that is?”
She shook her head.
“Well, it made me sterile. Okay?” He waited for this to sink in. “I can’t get a woman pregnant. There’s no way I could’ve made you that way.” He suddenly leaned close. “Do you get it now, Lily?” Very slowly he sat back and rested his hands on the wheel, looking out at the houses on that side of the road. Suddenly he broke into tears, sobbing, holding his face in his hands.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t find a way through everything that was coming at her in her mind. It was as if she stood in a violent wind, trying to open her eyes to it, trying to see everything that was veering toward her out of the dark. She took a breath, then stopped, and held it, and looked down at herself, her hands, her legs. When she raised her eyes to him again, she saw that he was still crying, though he’d let his hands down, sitting there with the tears running down his face, staring out the windshield.
“But—” she started. Nothing would come.
For a long time, neither of them said anything. Then he looked back, and carefully pulled out onto the road, going slow now. She heard him sniffle. “We can’t go home like this.”
She said, “Tyler—”
“Who was it, anyway?” he demanded abruptly.
She didn’t answer. She was looking at the countryside, the blue sky. She saw a jet at the edge of a long, trailing wisp of cloud, and the cloud looked like a white rope, slung from the horizon, something spun out of control, from massive forces beyond the sky.
“Come on, you can tell me. Or was there more than one?”
> “But—but there’s—there has to be—some mistake,” she told him. “Maybe the doctors are wrong.”
“Oh, it’s a virgin birth,” he said. “Goddamn.”
She didn’t respond to this.
“I’d like to know who it was.”
“There wasn’t anyone,” she said.
“Oh, come onnnn,” he said, drawing out the last word on a shout.
She looked at him. “I didn’t know you were coming to me, Tyler. I didn’t think I’d ever see you anymore.”
“Jeeee-sus Christ!” He had begun to speed up again.
“Well, it’s true,” she said, crying. “Please.”
“Just tell me who it was, for Christ’s sake.”
“Nothing happened. I didn’t—it didn’t finish. Tyler, it couldn’t be—there has to be some other explanation.”
“Look,” he said. “I want to know what his name was and I want to know when it happened and I want to know where it happened and why it happened and I want to know all of it right fucking now!”
She stared at him, sitting there with his eyes fixed on the road and his hands so tight on the wheel that his knuckles showed; his mouth was set in a narrow line of stipulation, anger, and expectation, his whole face one pinched, unhappy, priggish, crying mask, and something rose up inside her, a sudden rush of outraged resistance. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said in a trembling voice. “You can go to hell.”
He turned onto a narrow farm road, bordered on both sides by tall stalks of corn. He went for a mile or so, and then pulled off into a little grassy opening at the end of one field. There was a house off at the far end of the row, a run-down-looking clapboard place with a sagging porch and peeling paint along the window frames. She saw a truck parked in the yard and a small children’s swing. Tyler was wiping his face with the backs of his hands.
“What’re you going to do?” Lily asked him.
He said nothing. He turned the engine off and let his hands come to rest on the bottom of the steering wheel.
She sat with her arms folded over her heavy abdomen, waiting.
When he began to speak, it was with the measured tones of someone addressing a child. “I should’ve said something to you about the facts. It was wrong of me to keep it from you—”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 32