Creation, as I said, is no trouble at all. Like with the car. One of the first things we do, after settling in—we show up at this little garage or car cemetery a few blocks south. I’d call this place a hole-in-the-wall operation. But there’s no wall to hack a hole in. The buildings around here are right down on their knees. That’s evidently the thing with the contemporary city. You might want to work in it. But no one is seriously expected to live in it. Content, meaning and content, are all stored uptown, in the notched pillars of the skyscrapers. Well, the car seemed okay. It seemed like any other car. But Tod looked at it with real feeling, with the dull heat of—I don’t know—thwarted love. The garage guy soon joined him, wiping an oily rag with his oily fingers. Next, Tod goes and gives him eight hundred bucks. The man counts the money and they argue for a while, Tod saying nine hundred, the man saying seven, then the man saying six while Tod holds out for a thou, and so on. Left alone with the car, Tod ran his fingers along the bodywork. Searching for what? Scar tissue. Trauma . . . Tod was blue that morning anyway, as I recall. In the afternoon he’d attended a funeral, or just accidentally witnessed one, hanging back, rather, in the mournerless churchyard, where the graves were flush with the earth. He crossed himself and slipped away quickly. We rode the bus back, and buses take forever and are full of drunks and screaming children. . . . Cars are the thing. Cars. Every day we went back to the garage; and every day that car of ours was in sorrier shape. Eight hundred dollars? And you could actually see them at it, the grease monkeys, with hammers and spanners, about their long chore of patient wreckage.
Needless to say, by the time we went along to claim it (elsewhere: uptown), Tod’s car was a regular bedpan. We weren’t in top form either. The transaction included a most unwelcome preliminary. Hospital. That’s right. A look-in at Casualty. We made our own way there (somehow Tod knows this town backward) and we didn’t stay long, thank God. You do what you have to do: you take your shirt off and get prodded and tapped, but you keep your head down; you don’t want to know about the stuff they do in there. It’s not your place to speak out. It’s none of your business. The paramedics eventually drove me uptown to the scene of the accident. There was my car, like a mad old hog caught in midspasm, its snout and tusks crushed and steaming. And I didn’t feel too good myself as the police officer helped wedge me into its driving seat and tried to shut the warped front door. Thereafter I sat back and let Tod handle everything. There were all kinds of people staring in at us, and for a while Tod just stared stupidly back at them. But then he got on with it. He rammed his foot down on the brake and sent the car into a fizzing convulsion of rev and whinny. With a skillful lurch he gave the bent hydrant on the sidewalk a crunchy shouldercheck—and we were off, weaving at speed back up the street. Other cars screamed in to fill the sudden vacuum of our wake.
Minutes later: the first installment of our love life. Which was quite a coincidence. We came home, Tod flooring the accelerator to bring about a violent halt. He didn’t pause to admire the car (the car seemed like new: great!) but hurried inside, flinging off his coat with a hot gasp and making a lunge for the phone.
I tried to concentrate. I think I got most of it. It went like this.
“Goodbye, Tod.”
“Wait. Don’t do anything.”
“Who cares? It’s all shit anyway.”
“Irene,” he said.
“Yes I am. Tod, I’m just this terrible old lady now. How’d it happen?”
“No you’re not.”
“No I’m not. I’m going to kill myself.”
“No you’re not.”
“I’m going to call the New York Times.”
“Irene,” he said, with a new heat in his voice. And a new heat all over his body.