Out the windshield it is a moonless night, and the stars are hard and distant, the businesses and homes cold blue-white lit, not at all kin to me or you but somehow, too, parental, disapproving, like the leakage of light and sound from the parlor into my dark bedroom long past bedtime. It is as if I am four years old, listening to the television running below, to their angry words over the dull drone of the set. I feel as if I were on the bare edge of consciousness, slipping over now and then, all of it unreal.
The road ahead of me is damp and weirdly lit with the oncoming headlights, seemingly shallow and cool, here and there reflected in pools left by the rain. It is as if there were two of everything, mirror images, the pools only holes worn through to the other side, a glimpse of another, life, gone better perhaps, the reflected side, but the essentials, speed and light, life, the same lines bright.
When my tires cross the white line, I am picking up speed and the rattle of loose gravel against the underside of my car is an irregular splatter. I am pointed right and one absent motion away but then my foot finds the brake, applies it, and I let the other cars swerve suddenly past me, trailing their hard light and honking horns. My car slides a moment on the gravel, then the wheels catch, slow me alongside the first concrete columns of the underpass. My car limps along the shoulder, edges to a stop, dies.
The weeping takes a long time, and I sit in the closed car with my forehead pressed to the wheel, feeling the speed of cars as they pass me on the way somewhere, rocking my car with the rush of air. I wonder what they must think, seeing only the silhouette of a bowed head in the dark, stilled and quiet as if in prayer, their crisp headlights burning holes in the night. In a little while the noise subsides, and I roll down my window to let in the night air, fermented with exhaust and the dust of a million tires on the road but headed home. At last I am alone.
The night air is cool, and the rain is spent down to a scattering of sprinkles now and then on my windshield, the last shreds of gray clouds moving away. Parked just ahead there is another car idle and dark, pulled to the side, probably stalled, but I catch the glimpse of undulation in the back seat that makes me look twice, the curve of a shoulder, then a head thrown back, hair flowing, a second head joins the first and my headlights catch the curve, the spare color of flesh entangled in dark hair, dark night, the light, a show of desire, of grace.
They have parked their car by the side of the highway, some can’t-wait couple, unable to resist desire. He nuzzles the arch of her neck, her arms draped across his shoulders draw him into her before they dip below the edge of the seat again. Silence and the wind come in my window. The same wind that tosses her hair, that blows along the curves of their bodies, buffets me, seems to pull against me, against my heart.
My headlights shine into their back window like twin suns, benign and cool, in their personal sky.
He comes up again into the light, and I can catch a flash of shoulder, of face, a pantomime of greed and joy. He moves, all heat in the circle of bright from my headlights, and when they come to climax I strain to hear them, but all that comes to my ears is the fury of the wind and speed, of the cars passing, of distant thunder.
The wind comes in my window cool and dark. A sharpness to it reminds me autumn is coming, is almost here. After autumn there is winter, cold and white, and at the thought of this things seem to spread out around me, in a conjunction of highways, of choices, of hopes. I think perhaps I will spend this winter in the South. I can imagine a life, a new life, with new faces and names, bounded only by the limits of my heart.
Alabama, I have heard, is verdant and warm.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977 by Joan Fay Cuccio
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1250-8
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The Geometry of Love Page 17