“I know you changed your name. How about that! I know you ran.”
“You know nothing.”
“I’m going to tell on you.”
“Oh yes?”
“You say it in the night. In your sleep.”
“Irene.”
“I know your secret.”
“What is it?”
“I want you to know something.”
“Irene, you’re drunk.”
“Piece of shit.”
“Yes?” said Tod boredly—and hung up on her. He put the phone down and listened to its ringing—its machine persistence. And then its silence. His feeling tone was blank, was clear. . . . Well, after that, I suppose, things can only improve. I wished Tod would go and dig out that black chest of his, so that I could get a proper look at this Irene.
But he didn’t, of course. Fine chance.
—————
Maybe love will be like driving.
“Pop? Your driving days are over.” So said the mechanic in his oily dungarees. So said the hospital orderly in his stark white smock. But they were wrong. On the contrary, our driving days have just begun. I think Tod must be hankering for the old house, over to Wellport, because that’s where most of our trips end up. He’s kept a key. We go in and move from room to room. It’s all empty now. He measures things. It’s done with love, this measuring. More recently we’ve started inspecting other properties in the Wellport area. But none of them is worth measuring, like our old place. Back down Route 6 he slowly rolls.
We’ve started finding love letters, in the trash, letters from Irene. He looks them over with his head at an angle and stuffs them in a drawer somewhere. Maybe love will be like driving. When people move—when they travel—they look where they’ve come from, not where they’re going. Is this what the human beings always do? Then love will be like driving, which doesn’t appear to make much immediate sense. For example, you have five reverse gears and only one for forward, which is marked R, for Reverse. When we drive, we don’t look where we’re going. We look where we came from. There are accidents, sure, and yet it all works out. The city streams and pours in this symphony of trust.
My career … I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to hear about it. One night I got out of bed and drove—very badly—to an office. I then had a party with all my new colleagues. At six o’clock I went to the room with my name on the desk, donned a white coat, and started work. What at? Doctoring!
As life speeds up like this I move among the urban people, in the urban setting, the city’s metal and mortar, its sharper interactions, with more grit and bite in the gears. The city— and there are bigger cities than this (like New York, where the weather, I learn, continues to be temperate)—the city does things to the people who live in it. Does most things, perhaps, to the people who shouldn’t be in the city. Not now. They are the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Irene shouldn’t be in the city. Tod’s at home here, in some ways. He has stopped driving out to Wellport but I bet he misses our time there, its vigorlessness so safe and morally neutral, when he wore the passive uniform of old age. The old aren’t cruel, are they. We don’t look to the old, to the stooped, for cruelty. Cruelty, which is bright-eyed, which is pink-tongued . . .
This is more than city. This is inner city. And despite his newfound professional status, Tod lives among the underclass. Under, inner—how do these conditions express themselves? Jesus, how do cities get here? One can just about imagine the monstrous labors of the eventual demolition (centuries away, long after my time), and the eventual creation of the pleasant land—the green, the promised. But I’m awfully glad I wasn’t around for the city’s arrival. It must have just lurched into life. It must have just lurched into life out of a great trodden stillness of dust and damp. My colleagues at work, they tend to reside, prudently and intelligibly enough, up on the Hill or in the eastern suburbs, toward the ocean. But perhaps Tod Friendly has need of the city, where he can always drift among others, where he is never considered singly.