Manny nodded, pursing his huge lips. “You hate mayonnaise.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
Manny was driving so close to the bumper of a chrome tanker that I felt like I was going to vomit. So I said, “You’re driving so close to the bumper of that tanker that I think I’m going to vomit.”
“It’s sucking me in, Slow,” Manny said, gazing at the Fiat warped and inverted on the back of that glimmering tank. “Pull me out. Pull me out! Eject.”
“I’m serious.”
He squinted his dark eyes at me. “Talk to me, goose. You been in a car since?”
I shook my head. Because no, I had not. I had not been in a car since.
“Where is she?”
“Same place.”
Manny slowed while entering the next intersection, then turned left on Manning Drive. He dropped the Fiat into second and whirred up the steep hill. My house was two miles in the opposite direction. But I knew where we were going. At the top of the hill, past the construction that seemed perpetual on this end of campus, stood the maze of buildings and covered walkways and parking lots and tunnels (that I had once heard stretched underground for four solid blocks) that was collectively University Hospital.
3
IN THE SPRING
of my senior year, when I was ranked eighth in the country for collegiate singles, Manny threw a birthday party for himself on his pontoon. It was a wide, cream-colored platform atop two missile-shaped floats. A roof of corrugated metal painted in green and blue stripes covered half of it. We dropped anchor in Jordan Lake only a few dozen yards out of the shaded cove of the dock.
After an hour of Coors Light and Frito Lays, I maneuvered myself beside a tall, thin woman who wore a red vintage bathing suit with a small ruffle approximating a skirt around her narrow hips. A white swim cap blossomed in bright rubber flowers around her head. Goggles rested on her forehead. She appeared to have come from central casting for
bather, circa 1930
. Her skin was so fair it worried me to see it in direct sunlight. Together we turned our eyes to the sky.
Manny stood on the pontoon roof. He was naked, save for a wide straw hat. The thin metal sagged under his feet. He held both hands in the air, as if conjuring a spirit out of Jordan Lake. Voices rose from the platform below. Jump! Jump! He lifted the hat from his head and threw it spinning into the summer sky. A lit cigarette dangled from his giant lips as he leapt into the air. His long, thin frame arced gracelessly towards the water, legs and torso at a sloppy angle like he was going to fold in on himself. Against the bright blue of the sky, his penis dangled beneath him in a thin silhouette.
Water splashed us as he landed. The woman and I leaned over. All that was left on the surface was a cigarette atop the roiling entrance, joined one moment later by the slowly spinning hat.
A breeze blew across the lake, and the woman held herself against the chill. She said, “Adam!”
A young man with a shaved head held up a hand as if to simply acknowledge that the woman had spoken, then turned back to the water.
“You cold?” I said. It was what I had been building up to.
She didn’t answer. She just held herself tighter. Then, after a few moments, as if she had just noticed I was there, she said, “Oof. It’s cold.”
“You want my shirt?” I said and held up the sleeve of the flannel shirt tied around my waist. Again, she didn’t answer, just turned back to the water. Manny emerged and spit a high stream of water from his mouth.
“Adam!” she said, but this time he didn’t respond. Then she turned to me and said, “You drive?”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You give me a ride?”
I looked around. “Now?”
“Yeah. These people suck.”
I knew almost all of them. Most were on the team. But Manny always said, “If you’re excited, you’re invited.” So there were strangers. Like Adam. And like her.
“I guess,” I said. “I’m Slow, by the way.” She didn’t seem to hear me.
She said, “Can I see your teeth?”
“Excuse me?”
“Smile.”
I smiled.
“Yeah, see how they’re set back? You have very nice teeth. I love teeth like that.”
I ran my tongue across my teeth. I felt incapable of saying the correct thing. I looked around again. All eyes were on the other side of the boat, watching Manny.
“So we’re cool? You going to Chapel Hill?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright.” She turned and outstretched her arms, hands together, as if teaching a child how to dive. If a line had extended from her fingertips, it would have stretched to the horizon, cutting through the hot air wavering just above the expanse of cool water, passing over Greensboro, crossing the Appalachian Mountains, and shooting across the miles of airspace filled with insects, low-flying birds, and tennis balls tossed for serves. She then raised her arms above her head and held herself in a straight, upright line before she tipped forward and dove.
Kaz stepped away from an oxidized aluminum cooler and said, “Get her name?”
I shook my head, watching the water. It still held her.
If Manny or Kaz had their eyes on a girl, one of them was going to get her. I did not engage in competition. There was never a selection in my favor. But I was happy to assist. They were the ones who had told me to get her name. I had a doubles partner, a scholarship, and my serve. Tennis was my focus, my friends were part of the focus, and everything else was peripheral. At twenty-one, I was already going bald and was still a virgin. Tennis—the partner, the coach, and the game—these were the basics and the nourishment. They could have the girls. Danger in my life was provided by late comebacks, dangerous second serves, and the debauchery of Manny and Kaz. I had ceded them my own.
But when the rubber flowers blossomed through the surface, followed by that long, blinking white face, and she said, “Coming?” I dove.
Manny was midway up the small ladder that hung from the boat
into the water. He dangled by one hand, a foot propped on a step, and looked at us over his shoulder.
“Mutiny!” he shouted. “Theft!”
Kaz put his hands in the air in disbelief.
I rolled back underwater and, in that cool space below the wavering heat, smiled.
In the parking lot the girl stopped, barefoot and dripping on the gravel. She pointed and said, “That’s my favorite car.”
“The Dart?”
She nodded. “You ever seen one?”
“A Dart?”
“They’re my favorite.”
“That’s mine.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes!” I laughed.
I admired her long, reedlike body as she ran her finger in one slow motion along the crest of the hood and circled the machine. She was even more beautiful than the car. It was the only car I’d ever owned. It was not often admired. My mother bought it for me out of the back of the newspaper when I was fifteen years old. At the time, to me, it had looked exotic. Fast. It was, of course, neither. For fifteen years it was the most consistent space in my life. My family had sold the house I grew up in. The town had expanded to the point that areas were unrecognizable. My high school had been demolished. Streets that I used to ride my bike on were now four lanes wide with speed limits above 45. The Dart, though, it had always been there. It still even smelled the same.
We headed back towards Chapel Hill on Wade Avenue, nearing the State Fairgrounds and I-40, past nondescript one-story brick
buildings with no doors, no windows, their walls grown over with kudzu. I drove slowly and without speaking, glad for the wind roaring through the windows. It was very seldom that I rode with a girl in the Dart. The last had been Katie, who had asked me to teach her how to serve during her summer vacation. I had driven her to the tennis center in terrified silence, embarrassed by the sputtering, growling engine. Once on court, I was fine. I spoke, I helped her with her toss, with her follow-through, and, for a moment, I thought I might have a chance with this girl who had had me charmed since childhood. Back in the Dart, though, I became meek and mute and useless. I was determined that wouldn’t happen again today.
The girl said, “Have you seen the Monet show?”
I followed her gaze down a side road and shook my head, trying to act like I knew what she was talking about. “It’s good,” she said. “Except for the timed tickets.” I let the wind overtake us again and turned back to the road. In the center of the lane before us stood a small man with stringy black hair, a plaid shirt, and tight black jeans. He was waving his arms over his head. I braked hard, and the car began to skid. The trunk slid towards the shoulder. The man just stood there impatiently, as if he wanted me to come closer, faster. When the car finally ceased to move, we were only a few yards away from him. He jogged towards us and opened the passenger-side door.
“Thanks,” he said, panting. His voice was oddly high-pitched. He sat on the backseat. “Car broke down.”
“Oh. OK,” I said, stunned that this person was now in my car. He smelled like wood smoke and mud.
“What are you doing?” the girl said.
“Lady, you almost drove over me.”
A dusty green Mercedes appeared in the lane behind me and honked two sharp bursts. I touched the accelerator.
“Sorry,” I said, as we picked up speed.
“Going to High Point,” he said. In the rearview, I watched him run his hands through his hair, thin and tangled and greasy. Tattoos crawled across several narrow fingers.
“We’re only going to Chapel Hill.”
“I need to get to High Point.”
The girl put her hands in the air, as if holding a large invisible ball, and shook her head. She snorted in disgust.
“Hey, huffy,” he said. “Got a problem?”
I turned to the girl, and my gaze seemed to wake her. She said, “What?”
“I said, you got a problem with me?”
She turned around and looked at him. “I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
“You deaf?”
“Yes.”
They stared at each other.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m hard of hearing.”
“This your girlfriend?” the guy said.
“No.”
Two helicopters flew low overhead, their roar pulsing through the Dart.
He said, “I like her.”
I had never picked up a hitchhiker in my life. We drove past a strip mall filled with antique cars, their owners sitting on folding chairs by popped hoods. Several heads turned as we passed, a few reaching into the air to wave. It made me feel safe. I waved back. Having this man in the car was something Manny would have done, and if Manny did something, girls usually liked it, and so I was going to do this, and this girl was going to like it.
“What do you do?” The man said. He spoke in exaggerated volume.
The girl didn’t answer.
“What does she do?” the man said to me, still excessively loud.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“We just met.”
“Well then, see?” he said, almost screaming over the wind. “We aren’t so different, my dear.”
“I hear you, asshole,” she said. “I work at an art museum.”
“The one back there?” Even he knew more about art than I did.
The girl shook her head. “Chapel Hill.”
“Cultured. I like it. What about you? Let me guess. College?”
My face warmed.
“And you two been swimming?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I know. You know how? I read minds.”
“Clearly took a mind reader,” the girl said.
The man’s face, thin and deeply wrinkled in vertical creases along his cheeks, jiggled in the rearview mirror along with each fluctuation in the pavement. He met my eyes in the reflection.
“You play tennis,” he said.
“Wrong,” the girl said.
“Not you.”
For a second I thought perhaps the man recognized me.
The Daily Tar Heel
ran my photo two weeks earlier when I’d beaten Cov Deramus, the national number 2 from Virginia. I had been recognized then, but that was on campus.
“He just found some tennis balls rolling around back there,” I said.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. But you . . . I know about you too. You like to take pictures. Polaroid pictures.”
The girl turned her bare shoulder and leaned over the seat. Her spine stood out in sharp relief, fine hair on each disk glowing in the
sunlight through the passenger side. She stretched one long, thin arm to her small, yellow canvas tote bag and lifted it from the cushion beside the man. He laughed.
“Four for four. What do you shoot?”
“Don’t you know?” she said, pushing a large Polaroid camera deeper into her bag. He laughed again. “I take pictures of the truth.”
“Whoa. Arty,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something else. You’re both from Chapel Hill, but you don’t know each other? That’s weird if you ask me.”
“She didn’t grow up in Chapel Hill,” I said.
“Yeah I did.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Friends School.”
“It true you guys didn’t wear shoes to class?”
She nodded.
“And didn’t have grades?”
“Evaluations. Where’d you go?”
“Durham Academy.”
“So,” the man said. “You’re rich, but so are you.”
We passed a large blinking road sign that read NC STATE PRISON IN VICINITY. DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.
He pointed and said, “I just got out of there.”
I fingered the top of the gearshift and tried to keep my eyes on the road. The traffic was stopped in the lane ahead of us, and I slowly rolled to a stop. I couldn’t tell if the guy was joking.
“What is it?” the girl said, leaning her head out the open window.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She stepped out of the car.
“Hey,” I said, but she kept going. She had had no response to the man’s announcement that he was a recently released convict. I couldn’t tell if she hadn’t heard or just didn’t care.