An Agent of Utopia Page 9

  We don’t get much traffic on my street, a residential loop in a quiet neighborhood, and so even we single guys who don’t have kids in the yard unconsciously register the sounds of each passing vehicle. But this was the fifth night in a row, and so I set down my sandwich and listened.

  Tom used to identify each passing car, just for practice.

  “Fairlane.”

  “Crown Victoria.”

  “Super Beetle.”

  This was back home, when we were as bored as two 17-year-olds could be.

  “Even I can tell a Super Beetle,” I said. I slugged my Mountain Dew and lowered the bottle to look with admiration at the neon-green foam.

  Tom frowned, picked up his feet, and rotated on the bench of the picnic table so that his back was to Highway 1.

  Without thinking, I said, “Mind, you’ll get splinters.” I heard my mother speaking, and winced.

  Now Tom looked straight ahead at the middle-school basketball court, where Cathy and her friends, but mostly Cathy (who barely knew us, but whose house was fourth on our daily route), were playing a pick-up game, laughing and sweating and raking their long hair back from their foreheads. As each car passed behind him, he continued the litany.

  “Jeep.”

  “Ford pickup.”

  “Charger.”

  I didn’t know enough to catch him in an error, of course, but I have no doubt that he was right on the money, every time. I never learned cars; I learned other things, that year and the next fifteen years, to my surprise and exhilaration and shame, but I never learned cars, and so I am ill-equipped to stand in my kitchen and identify a car driving slowly past at eleven o’clock at night.

  Not even when, about five minutes later, it gives me another chance, drives past again in the other direction, as if it had gotten as far as the next cul-de-sac, and turned around.

  It passes so slowly that I am sure it is about to turn into someone’s driveway, someone’s, mine, but it hasn’t, for five nights now it hasn’t. I couldn’t tell you if I had to precisely what make of car it is.

  I could guess, though.

  Maybe tonight, if, when, it passes by, I’ll go to the front door and pull back the narrow dusty curtain that never gets pulled back except for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and see for myself what make of car it is. See if I recognize it. But all I did last night, and the four nights before, was stand at my kitchen counter, fingertips black with old news, jaws Peter-Panned shut (for I am a creature of habit), stare unseeing at the piled-up sink, and trace in my head every long-gone stop on the map to the homes of the stars.

  Even when all we had were bicycles, Tom and I spent most of our time together riding around town. We rode from convenience store to convenience store, Slim Jims in our pockets and folded comic books stuffed into the waistbands of our jeans. We never rode side by side or single file but in loopy serpentine patterns, roughly parallel, that weaved among trees and parked cars and water sprinklers. We had earnest and serious conversations that lasted for hours and were entirely shouted from bike to bike, never less than ten feet. Our paths intersected with hair-raising frequency, but we never ran into each other. At suppertime, we never actually said goodbye, but veered off in different directions, continuing to holler at each other, one more joke that had to be told, one more snappy comeback to make, until the other voice had faded in the distance, and we realized we were riding alone and talking to ourselves. I remember nothing of what we said to each other all those long afternoons, but I remember the rush of the wind past my ears, and the shirttail of my red jersey snapping behind me like a hound, and the slab of sidewalk that a big tree root thrust up beneath me in the last block before home, so that I could steer around it at the last second and feel terribly skillful, or use it as a launching ramp and stand up on the pedals and hang there, suspended, invincible, until the pavement caught up with my tires again.

  Then we were sixteen and got our licenses. Tom’s bicycle went into the corner of his room, festooned with clothes that weren’t quite ready to wash yet; mine was hung on nails inside the garage, in a place of honor beside my older sister’s red wagon and my late Uncle Clyde’s homemade bamboo fishing poles. Tom had been studying Consumer Reports and Car & Driver and prowling dealerships for months, and with his father’s help, he bought a used ’78 Firebird, bright red exterior, black leather upholstery, cassette stereo, and a host of tire and engine features that Tom could rattle off like an auctioneer but that I never quite could remember afterward. Being a fan of old gangster movies, Tom called it his “getaway car.” Tom and his dad got a great deal, because the getaway car had a dent in the side and its headlights were slightly cockeyed. “Makes it unique,” Tom said. “We’ll get those fixed right up,” his dad said, and, of course, they never did. I inherited the car my father had driven on his mail route for years, a beige ’72 Volkswagen Beetle that was missing its front passenger seat. My father had removed it so that he’d have an open place to put his mail. Now, like so many of my family’s other theoretical belongings, the seat was “out there in the garage,” a phrase to which my father invariably would add, “somewhere.”

  We always took Tom’s car; Tom always drove.

  We went to a lot of movies in Columbia and sometimes went on real trips, following the church van to Lake Junaluska or to Six Flags and enjoying a freedom of movement unique in the Methodist Youth Fellowship. But mostly we rode around town, looking—and only looking—at girls. We found out where they lived, and drove past their houses every day, hoping they might be outside, hoping to get a glimpse of them, but paying tribute in any case to all they had added to what we fancied as our dried-up and wasted and miserable lives.

  “We need music,” Tom said. “Take the wheel, will you, Jack?”

  I reached across and steered while he turned and rummaged among the tapes in the back seat. I knew it was the closest I ever would come to driving Tom’s car.

  “In Hollywood,” I said, “people on street corners sell maps to the stars’ homes. Tourists buy the maps and drive around, hoping to see Clint Eastwood mowing his lawn, or something.” I had never been to Hollywood, but I had learned about these maps the night before on PM Magazine.

  “What do you want? You want Stones? You want Beatles? You want Aerosmith? What?”

  “Mostly they just see high walls,” I said, “and locked gates.” I was proud to have detected this irony alone.

  “We should go there,” Tom said. “Just take off driving one day and go.”

  “Intersection coming up.”

  “Red light?”

  “Green.”

  Tom continued to rummage. “Our map,” he said, “exists only in our heads.”

  “That’s where the girls exist, too,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” Tom said, turning back around and taking the wheel just in time to drive through the intersection. “They’re out there. Maybe not in this dink-ass town, but somewhere. They’re real. We’ll just never know them. That’s all.”

  I had nothing to add to that, but I fully agreed with him. I had concluded, way back at thirteen, that I was doomed to a monastic life, and I rather wished I were Catholic so that I could take full advantage of it. Monastic Methodists had nowhere to go; they just got gray and pudgy, and lived with their mothers. Tom pushed a tape into the deck; it snapped shut like a trap, and the speakers began to throb.

  Lisa lived in a huge Tudor house of gray stone across the street from the fifteenth fairway. To our knowledge she did not play golf, but she was a runner, and on a fortunate evening we could meet her three or four times on the slow easy curves of Country Club Drive. She had a long stride and a steady rhythm and never looked winded, though she did maintain a look of thoughtful concentration and always seemed focused on the patch of asphalt just a few feet ahead, as if it were pacing her. At intersections, she jogged in place, looking around at the world in surprise, and was likely to
smile and throw up a hand if we made so bold as to wave.

  Tom especially admired Lisa because she took such good care of her car, a plum-colored late-model Corvette that she washed and waxed in her driveway every Saturday afternoon, beginning about one o’clock. For hours, she catered to her car’s needs, stroking and rubbing it with hand towels and soft brushes, soaping and then rinsing, so that successive gentle tides foamed down the hood. Eventually, Lisa seemed to be lying face-to-face with herself across the gleaming purple hood, her palm pressed to the other Lisa’s palm, hands moving together in lazy circles like the halfhearted sparring of lovers in August.

  Crystal’s house was low and brick, with a patio that stretched its whole length. From March through October, for hours each day, Crystal lay on this patio, working on her tan—”laying out,” she would have called it. She must have tanned successive interior layers of her skin, because even in winter she was a dusky Amazonian bronze, a hue that matched her auburn hair, but made her white teeth a constant surprise. Frequent debates as we passed Crystal’s house: Which bikini was best, the white or the yellow? Which position was best, face up or face down? What about the bottles and jars that crowded the dainty wrought-iron table at her elbow? Did those hold mere store-bought lotions, or were they brimful of Crystal’s private skin-care recipes, gathered from donors willing and unwilling by the dark of the moon? Tom swore that once, when we drove past, he clearly saw amid the Coppertone jumble a half-stick of butter and a bottle of Wesson oil.

  Gabrielle lived out on the edge of town, technically within the city limits but really in the country, in a big old crossroads farmhouse with a deep porch mostly hidden by lattices of honeysuckle and wisteria. She lived with her grandparents, who couldn’t get around so good anymore, and so usually it was Gabrielle who climbed the tall ladder and raked out the gutters, cleared the pecan limbs off the roof of the porch, scraped the shutters, and then painted them. She had long black hair that stretched nearly to the ragged hem of her denim shorts. She didn’t tie her hair back when she worked, no matter how hot the day, and she was tall even without the ladder.

  Natalie lived in a three-story wooden house with cardboard in two windows and with thickets of metal roosters and lightning rods up top. At school, she wore ancient black ankle-length dresses in all weathers, walked with her head down, and spoke to no one, not even when called upon in class, so that the teachers finally gave up. Her hair was an impenetrable mop that covered her face almost entirely. But she always smiled a tiny secret smile, and her chin beneath was sharp and delicate, and when she scampered down the hall, hugging the lockers, her skirts whispered generations of old chants and endearments. Natalie never came outside at all.

  Cynthia’s was the first house on the tour. Only two blocks from Tom’s, it sat on the brink of a small and suspect pond, one that was about fifty feet across at its widest. No visible stream fed this pond or emptied it, and birds, swimmers, and fishes all shunned it. The pond was a failure as a pond, but a marginal success as an investment, an “extra” that made a half-dozen nondescript brick ranch houses cost a bit more than their landlocked neighbors. Cynthia’s house was distinguished by a big swing set that sat in the middle of the treeless yard. It was a swaybacked metal A-frame scavenged from the primary school. In all weathers, day and night, since her family moved to town when she was six, Cynthia could be found out there, swinging. The older she got, the higher she swung, the more reckless and joyful her sparkle and grin. When she was sixteen, tanned legs pumping in the afternoon sun, she regularly swung so high the chains went slack for a half-second at the top of the arc before she dropped.

  “Zero gee,” Tom said as we drove slowly past. Tom and I didn’t swing anymore, ourselves; it made us nauseated.

  Once a year Cynthia actually came out to the car to say hi. Each Christmas the people who lived on the pond, flush with their wise investment, expressed their communal pride with a brilliant lighting display. For weeks everyone in town drove slowly, dutifully, and repeatedly around the pond and over its single bridge to see the thousands of white firefly lights that the people of the pond draped along porches and bushes and balustrades, and stretched across wire frames to approximate Grinches and Magi. The reflection on the water was striking, undisturbed as it was by current or life. For hours each night, a single line of cars crept bumper-to-bumper across the bridge, past Santa-clad residents who handed out candy canes and filled a wicker basket with donations for the needy and for the electric company. Painted on a weatherbeaten sandwich board at the foot of the bridge was a bright red cursive dismissal: “Thank You / Merry Christmas / Speed Limit 25.”

  At least once a night, Tom and I drove through this display, hoping to catch Cynthia on Santa duty. At least once a year, we got lucky.

  “Hey there, little boys, want some candy?” She dropped a shimmering fistful into Tom’s lap. “No, listen, take them, Dad said when I gave them all out I could come inside. I’m freezing my ass off out here. Oh, hi, Jack. So, where you guys headed?”

  “Noplace,” we said together.

  She walked alongside Tom’s Firebird, tugging down her beard to scratch her cheek. “Damn thing must be made of fiberglass. Hey, check out the Thompsons’ house. Doesn’t that second reindeer look just like he’s humping Rudolf? I don’t know what they were thinking. No? Well, it’s clear as day from my room. Maybe I’ve just looked at it too long. When is Christmas, anyway? You guys don’t know what it’s like, all these goddamn lights, you can see them with your eyes closed. I’ve been sleeping over at Cheryl’s where it’s dark. Well, I reckon if I go past the end of the bridge, the trolls will get me. Yeah, right, big laugh there. See you later.” Then, ducking her head in again: “You, too, Jack.”

  With the smoothness of practice, Tom and I snicked our mirrors into place (his the driver’s side, mine the overhead) so that we could watch Cynthia’s freezing ass walk away. Her Santa pants were baggy and sexless, but we watched until the four-wheel drive behind us honked and flashed its deer lights. By the time we drove down to the traffic circle and made the loop and got back in line again, Cynthia’s place had been taken by her neighbor, Mr. Thompson.

  “Merry Christmas, Tom, Jack,” he said. “Y’all’s names came up at choir practice the other day. We’d love to have you young fellas join us in the handbells. It’s fun and you don’t have to sing and it’s a real ministry, too.” He apologized for having run out of candy canes, and instead gave us a couple of three-by-five comic books about Hell.

  Tina’s house always made us feel especially sophisticated, especially daring.

  “Can you imagine?” Tom asked. “Can you imagine, just for a moment, what our parents would do?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I can’t imagine.”

  “I think you should try. I think we both should try to envision this. That way we’ll be prepared for anything in life, anything at all.”

  I cranked down the windowpane until it balked. “I don’t even want to think about it,” I said. I pressed the pane outward until it was back on track, then I lowered it the rest of the way.

  “Oh, but you’ve been thinking about it, haven’t you? You’re the one that found out where she lived. You’re the one that kept wanting me to drive past her house.”

  “It’s the quickest route between Laura’s and Kathleen’s, that’s all,” I said. “But if it’s such a terrible hardship, then you can go around the world instead, for all I care. You’re the driver, I’m just sitting here.”

  He fidgeted, legs wide, left hand drumming the windowsill, fingertips of his right hand barely nudging the steering wheel. “Don’t get me wrong, I think she’s a babe. But this neighborhood, I don’t know, it makes me nervous. I feel like everybody we pass is looking at us.”

  “Do what you like. I’m just sitting here,” I said. I craned to see Tina’s house as we drove around the corner.

  Tina lived in what our parents and ou
r friends and every other white person we knew, when they were feeling especially liberal, broad-minded, and genteel, called the “colored” part of town. Tina’s yard was colored all right: bright yellows, reds, oranges, and purples, bursting from a dozen flowerbeds. As so often when she wasn’t at cheerleading practice, Tina knelt in the garden, a huge old beribboned hat—her grandmother’s, maybe?—shading her striking, angular face. Her shoulders tightened, loosened, tightened again as she pressed something into place. Without moving her hands, she looked up at us as we passed. She smiled widely, and her lips mouthed the word “Hey.”

  Once we were around the corner, Tom gunned the engine.

  “Uh-uh, no sir, hang it up,” Tom said. “Not in my family, not in this town. Thousands of miles away, maybe. That might work. Oh, but then they’d want photos, wouldn’t they? Damn. The other week, all my aunts were sitting around the kitchen table, complaining about their daughters-in-law. My son’s wife is snotty, my son’s wife is lazy, they aren’t good mothers, they aren’t treating our boys right, and so on and so on. Just giving ’em down the country, you know?”

  “Uh-huh. I hear you.”

  “And I finally spoke up and said, ‘Well, I know I’m never going to introduce y’all to any wife of mine, ’cause y’all sure won’t like her, either.”

  “What’d they say to that?”

  “They all laughed, and Aunt Leda said, ‘Tom, don’t you worry, ’cause you’re the only boy in the family that’s got any sense. We know we’ll like any girl you pick out.’ And then Aunt Emily added, ‘Long as she isn’t a black ’un!’ And they all nodded—I mean, they were serious!”