This is one of my more complete stories. Not that I should admit that up front, and not that it doesn't need more revision. And now I've broken my rule of prefacing my fiction rather than letting the reader take it for what it is. And this is what it is:
At twenty-nine, Dan Rabinowitz divorced his wife and got a new car, a fast one, silver, leased. He didn’t get the car right away. He waited for the divorce to settle, for his parents to stop asking so many questions (he was living with them again), for all the papers to be signed. So many papers even though there was no money to be had. The furniture had been Cammy’s, the apartment had been rented and their bank account had never been more than a kiddy pool, shallow with very slight ripples. Did he ever love Cammy? He didn’t know, but he knew it didn’t matter now. Whether he had loved her when he married her or married her without ever loving her, he was a fool either way.
He kept the car brochure on his desk. After a few weeks, there were dents of fingerprints all over the glossy pages. He wanted the silver one. There were two pictures of it in the brochure, one he liked better and showed around the office more often. He liked talking to car salesmen. He made a point of phoning one almost every day. Today was Tony in Matawan’s turn. He didn’t know where he got some of the things he said, but he liked how they sounded. He said, “Whether it’s the schmo up in Denville or you, someone’s going to make commission off of me. You want it to be you? Give me something to work with.” He hung up the phone firmly. He was a negotiator now.
There was no one he trusted more than his lawyer. His lawyer had a Mercedes, kids from two different marriages and an office that used to be a dentist’s. It still smelled slightly antiseptic and there was a sliding glass window in the entryway. After a few visits, Dan got into the habit of sliding the window back, sticking his head into it and yoo-hooing into the reception area to make the secretaries laugh. After a few meetings with Cammy and her lawyer, Dan’s lawyer confirmed that Cammy was a primo, first class bitch. Dan showed his lawyer the car brochure, both pictures of the silver model and the close-up of the black leather interior and wood-paneled dashboard. “Go ahead,” his lawyer said. “As long as it’s leased.”
Once he got the car, Dan didn’t mind going to work. And so what if he was late sometimes? He did a good job and nobody could argue with that. He marveled at all the hang-ups he used to have. And if his clients were happy and the resumes were still coming in, what was wrong with leaving a little early? The day after he picked up the car, he felt like driving into work rather than taking the train so he did, just like that. And so what? Parking and tolls weren’t much more than taking the train and he didn’t have to sit next to those poor suits falling asleep behind their newspapers.
On his way home he kept the windows down and sunroof open, even in the Holland Tunnel. It was June, warm and dry. The weather was better than any he had remembered. He wondered how many summers had gone by with this kind of weather, how much good weather he had not appreciated in the years with Cammy. He thought about the summers when he was single, the bars he used to go to at the beach. Bar Anticipation. Rod’s. The Tiki Bar. He’d heard they added a volleyball court. He had enjoyed the weather back then, him and his friends and nothing to get home to.
Looking to the flashing taillights ahead, he realized there was nothing stopping him from heading there now. He called his mother and told her he’d be home late. He left messages for his two single friends, Steve and Stevie B. He left the same message for each one, using the practiced inflection from inside his head. “Tiki bar. Tonight. Get your ass down there if you know what’s good for you.” If they didn’t show up, he’d have one drink and go home. He turned off the Turnpike onto the Parkway South, window rolled down and hand out the window snaking through the wind.
Before he finished his first drink, he met Michele with one L. She hopped up to the bar on one sandaled foot to clean sand out of a blister on the other foot. A sandal dangled from her thumb. There was sand all over the floor of the bar, either put there for ambiance or spillage from the mini-volleyball court. Dan didn’t know. Michele’s hair was reddish-brown. If he took a fistful of it, he thought it would make a crunching sound.
“You wear a lot of hair gel,” he told her. She looked shocked then smiled with her chin into her neck, which, Dan knew, was not Michele’s most flattering look. Her skin was almost as dark as her hair. “Want to see my blister?” She threatened by wiggling her toe close to his knee. “Yeah I do,” he said, “but not right now.”
They danced. A volleyball game started and more sand piled up on the dance floor. Dan did the twist and the sand made a pleasant crunch under his thin soles. It felt right, pushing the sand around like that. Michele jogged her elbows and danced around in a circle. Her chin was getting shiny and the corners of her eyes drooped. Dan did the circle thing too and another move he remembered from the old days, where he bounced his pelvis back and forth. It still got him the same laughs.
They went for a ride in his car. Maybe they were supposed to be taking a walk on the beach? He seemed to remember they had talked about that before they left the bar. She had gotten into the habit of grabbing his hand and pulling him in one direction or another. Had he been talking about his car? She pulled him to it and then they were in it.
She was driving it. She made a little gurgle noise every time she stepped harder on the accelerator and the engine roared. He understood she was imitating the sound of the engine. He didn’t think it was cute but he laughed anyway. He put his hand on her thigh and told her to take it easy. He was sober enough to realize Michele with one L was liable to wreck his car, and he wasn’t about to let that happen.
Her house was dark. There were striped beach towels hanging on a sagging wooden railing. Had he asked how old Michele was? He didn’t remember. His shoes were off and the wooden planks on the porch were coated in a dust he imagined was turning the bottoms of his feet black. The screen in the door was torn and taped then torn again. She opened the door without a key. “Isn’t it dangerous to leave your door unlocked?” he asked. This sent her into quiet snorts of laughter. Michele with one L.
She led him through a maze of dark shapes, tugging him along with her hand. A pile on the floor moved and Dan could make out a hairy shoulder and the brim of a baseball cap. It smelled like the musty perspiration of a drunken sleep. She opened two beers and they picked them up and put them down on the kitchen table as they talked.
Michele’s room was more like a walk-in closet. The mattress filled all of the floor space. It may not have been a mattress. It was a soft lump of bedding, maybe a pile of blankets and it was making him sweat more than he would have liked. Michele tried opening the window but it was already open all the way. He put his hand on a pack of cigarettes and tossed it aside. He picked around the blankets and anything that was not a blanket –a bottle cap, an empty purse – he tossed aside.
Michele’s hair still looked crunchy in the morning. Even crunchier lit up in the morning light. She had taken off her make-up and Dan was relieved to see she wasn’t all that bad looking. Maybe even pretty. She was wearing a tank top and sweat shorts. The shorts had a number ten screened onto the corner in maroon and gold, a team’s colors he used to know. The Iowa Buckeyes? That didn’t seem right.
He used the bathroom. There were pink sparkly bottles of lotion spread across the top of the toilet tank and cheap silver rings on the sink ledge. The rings were the kind you bought on the boardwalk from stores that sold trays and trays of them, shell jewelry, necklaces beaded on fishing wire, hermit crabs. He thought it would be funny to plunk them into the toilet, so he did. Plunk, plunk. He watched them float to the bottom and settle into the porcelain neck of the tank. Just like that, he thought. Fuck yeah.
There were lots of beer bottles on the kitchen table, open and partially full. He hadn’t remembered opening all of those bottles. Perhaps he was not the only one led into the house last night, pulled behind a closed bedroom door.
When he got outside, there were a group of guys milling around his car. One was crouched under the rear tire inspecting the chassis. The rest were taking slow steps around to admire it. They had on baseball caps, basketball shorts. The biggest guy had his shirt off. He came as far as the curb and faced Dan. They were all younger that Dan by a few years.
“You like it?” Dan asked.
“Not bad, man.”
“Fast as shit. Sweetest thing I ever bought.” The kid behind the axle popped up and brushed dirt from his hands.
Dan opened the door, took a deep whiff. “Nothing like that new car smell.” They all nodded in appreciation, took slow steps away from the car as Dan got in. The one without a shirt came over to the window to check out the interior.
“All leather, wood dash too.”
“You don’t mess around.”
“Shit, no.”
Dan eased her out of the spot, careful not to step on the gas too hard. He let the engine rumble quietly, the sweetest sound the car made, a whisper that told you how fast she was wanted to go if you’d let her. He revved the engine a little, gave the kids something to smile about. He would have peeled out but he was over that.
When he hit the Asbury toll, he thought, “Those kids were all right.” He said it out loud pulling out of the tollbooth. And Michele, she was pretty all right too. He popped the piece of paper she had written her number on into his glove compartment for later.
He had to get the car cleaned first, on the way to work. He brushed sand from the passenger seat onto the floor mat where there was even more sand. He always did the vacuuming himself. That’s what you had to do to get it done right. He wasn’t about those full-service places. His favorite car washes were stalls with big hoses and vacuums that let you do everything yourself, take as much time as you needed. There was one of those places in Edison, but he was already going to be a half hour late. And he had to get some different clothes to wear, too. Or maybe not. So what if people noticed they were the same clothes, a little wrinkled. There were worse things you could do than wear the same clothes two days in a row.
He closed the sunroof, found a song he liked on the radio. The car coasted over a bump and absorbed it, gave him a little lift in his stomach before it floated him back onto the road. The leather on the steering wheel was as smooth as a bed sheet. The drink holders retracted slowly with a gentle buzz. The seat was programmed for him, so that it slid into the exact right place at the press of a button. With the windows rolled up and the radio on and the world lit up in the blue tint of the windshield, there was nothing else that mattered.
