Ride Around Shining (3 page)

My chief memory from the old days was the incident with the serval. He was the last delivery of my shift one warm June night, and when I got to the door a little white girl answered. About a month before his orders had begun including fish curries, but it was the first I ever saw of Antonia.

“Can you drive us somewhere?” she asked in a frantic voice, childlike and irresistible. She had a terrifically stylish haircut that was trying to fall over her right eye. I wasn't sure about her face at first. It's always that way with the ones who end up really mattering. She was holding what looked like an unusually long kitten with enormous ears. It was twitching its nose sluggishly and goop was leaking from one of its eyes. They'd recently bought this exotic cat, a serval hybrid, and now it was sick and refusing to eat and the only vet they knew could treat it wasn't answering the phone. It was after ten, and they didn't know what to do.

Five minutes later, all three members of the household were in the back of my Corolla, which smelled like every restaurant I'd delivered from that night. The hood would have still been dented from one of the accidents, but they were too intent on the cat to notice.

In the old days I lived down the street from a twenty-four-hour animal hospital, and I drove them there, feeling that great importance of purpose that most any urgent night errand bestows. As we sped across streetlit pools of moist night, the kitten ate a little mango sticky rice off Antonia's finger and I remember feeling relieved and unnaturally triumphant.

The cat got well. I hardly saw them again before I moved away, but when I did the tips were embarrassing. I think it was that night of impromptu chauffeuring that allowed everything to come after. I became a very minor memory, of a man who might be good in a pinch, and who knew how to get somewhere.

Even so, I knew it wouldn't be easy to get the job. Just because Calyph conducted his hiring like young money living by whim didn't mean he wasn't looking for some expertise parallel to his own. I knew, too, that there were better ways of expressing my qualifications than those that were strictly true, and that I wanted the job badly enough to use them. Why I wanted it so much, I almost couldn't say. There was a draw to the simplicity and old-fashionedness of the vocation, to being a servant almost. I got to bathe in the reflected glow of their luxury while assuring myself I was not so shallow as to actually want such things. But really it was them. If it'd been a quarterback and his blond wife I'd never have done it. It had to be a black man, exactly like Calyph in his unpredictability and buried intelligence, and his aloof and difficult white wife, his Antonia. They were like some obscure royalty, so obscure they hardly knew they were anything special themselves. To be in their lives would be the promise of a new beginning in a more vital world. Anyhow, I guess I needed the money.

When Calyph saw me turn up again, there was just enough in his attitude that I could see he wanted me to lie. When I came into his study, he was sitting behind an immense oaken desk no one his age could hope to command. It must have felt like I'd come back to him from a long way away just to be the right man for the job, and he looked relieved somehow. We shook, he offered me a seat, and then he wandered the room, whistling and inspecting its books and prestigious-looking brass items like he'd just discovered this was part of his house. There was a globe sitting on a floor stand, and he spun it slowly as he talked.

“How's your driving record?” he asked eventually.

“Spotless,” I assured him.

Later he asked, with what seemed like particular interest, if I'd know how to carry myself with the dignity of one who served in a great house. “I don't want any of this humping around like a pizza boy,” he explained. “Nobody got more class than a good chauffeur.”

I assured him I knew this was true. Then I sat up a little in my chair and invented an explanation why.

“I came from money,” I said. “We squandered it, though. I was the last of the line.” The last bit was a little rich. It conjured a scene with a country house, a landscape garden—who knew what. I didn't even know what I meant, and I was afraid he would laugh and expose me. But, being nouveau himself, he nodded in perfect satisfaction.

“Y'all ever have a Bentley?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Cool, cool.”

“Yeah,” I said, faintly let down by his credulity.

It's not that I was ashamed of my past, exactly. My parents died young and I came up among aunts and uncles in an obsolete railroad town in Wisconsin; it was the most ordinary possible thing. When I got to college, to a school my teachers assured me was the Harvard of the Midwest, it was paid for with the life insurance money, and I found I was poorer than the people I wanted to know. Lacking even the explanation of being a scholarship kid, I just stopped talking about my hometown. My past became like one of those paper fortune-tellers, a device to be manipulated. By the time I came west and met Calyph I was pretty used to making it up anew.

The other lie was strictly necessary: of course I couldn't talk about the crashes. I knew I was sound, in spite of my priors. Really, no one is more cautious about stopping distance than the man who's seen the highway freeze fifty feet in front of him and burst into a red nova of brake lights. No driver is really defensive until his cabin has filled with the cry of his helpless brakes, which sound like the air is full of angry metal birds.

As the Justice tipped sunward
and came free of her base, I saw Calyph lift his hands and freeze, and felt my wonder chilled by a distant remorse. She had to fall, there was no way around that, and yet, having brought it off, and so neatly, I now wished myself on the other side of things. I wished I could be the one to rush forward and throw my body against the ice, to keep him safe from harm. The Justice fell with the dignity of something elemental, as if she were slipping unnoticed into some Arctic sea. She fell sword-first, and gathering his weight Calyph twisted awkwardly at the knees and sprang away as the man who'd hugged me looked over his damp shoulder, dumbfounded. She hit the ground, and I remained a moment longer to savor the crash, but instead of the million splendid shards I'd hoped for, she only cracked in two and fell into an unremarkable rubble. For the second time that hour, a cry went up among the crowd, and I saw Calyph clutch his knee, and lingered in spite of myself, to see what I had wrought. But as the men rushed to attend him, he shook it off and straightened again, joining the crowd in looking for someone to blame, and I turned quickly away amid the brief chaos and slipped into the house.

When Antonia finally came out
to the car, the taste of blackened bacon stuck like ash-smear to the roof of my mouth. Brushing flecks of char from the ragged hole in my shirt, I opened the door for her with my face turned away, but she didn't get in.

“Close that,” she said quietly. Then she got in the front seat.

When I had come around to the driver's side, she was still settling in, drawing the belt around her. She was a little one, with delicate-looking wrists and knees, and sometimes she seemed to be using a little of her concentration to keep her movements slow, so she wouldn't look like a child. Yet the effect made her seem strangely ageless, like she was younger and older than me at once.

I asked where she wanted to go and she named a clothing boutique in Southeast. When we'd pulled out onto the main road, I heard the pluck of her little lips pulling apart, and she said, “I'm sorry that happened.”

It took me a moment to realize she wasn't talking about the sculpture. She'd turned her head a little toward me, as minutely as if she were looking in the rearview. I could only see it because one of those dangling housewife earrings I didn't like her to wear trembled a little, to announce the movement, but I didn't pay her any mind.

“You bandaged it?” she asked. “Does it still hurt?”

“I'm fine.”

“Your poor shirt.” She must have felt she could be tender to my wardrobe where sympathy for my actual skin would only feel like pity.

“Before people came we'd been watching that show,” she explained in a slow voice, finishing on a down note like that was all I'd get. She most always spoke this way, when I could get her to speak at all—with a hesitance that implied the rest of the world spoke too carelessly.

“The people-hunting show?”

She only winced. She seemed truly pained, as though no answer were possible, but then Antonia was very good at saying nothing. So often in those early days our talk was like a stoics' game, where the object was to get the other to reveal more than you. There was a tension to the game that I enjoyed as a stand-in for other tensions, and she was a worthy competitor.

“You know the one where the good chef yells at people?” she said finally. “Sort of inspires him.”

I checked my blind spot, even though I knew there was no one, and turned down the air as the car shot along the leaf-darkened road.

I could see her shake her head at the edge of my eye, the earrings going off again. “He should know better than to speak to you that way, with other people around. On your day off.”

“It's not my day off if you need to get somewhere,” I said, giving the phrase the rich, earnest sound of a platitude. In my mind this had been the finishing volley, and I waited, swelling with humility, to be given the point. But Antonia only looked out the window and let the silence take us.

“Madame didn't enjoy the party?” I asked, after we'd driven awhile.

I stole a glance and saw her small mouth compress. Her lips had a loose look for one who spoke so rarely, like they'd be supple if you bit one. She was always twitching and pursing them, and making little moues.

“Madame,” she said, like a curse.

Her mouth seemed to have an active life of judgment all its own. At first I hadn't liked this, thinking that behind her reserve she was censuring everything by some merciless private code. At any moment I thought the barely parted lips would shrivel in disdain and I wouldn't know why. Eventually they did, but it was only rarely, and most always correctly, so that even when she looked the picture of a snotty little rich girl, I agreed with her, and approved.

“I'm sorry you had to come all the way down here so I could shop,” she said.

“It's not so very far,” I assured her.

“I know I said I wouldn't. It must be a pain, to be sent for like that.”

“It's a pleasure to be sent for like that,” I corrected her.

As we swept briefly onto I-5 past Ross Island, a semi tried to get into an accident with us. We wanted the next exit, and instead of braking for the truck I sped up while dodging left, got in front of him, then slid right across two lanes while falling beneath the speed of traffic to make the exit. I didn't think Antonia had noticed until we nosed toward MLK and she said, “You're a good little driver,” with a snap in her voice.

“Yes, Miss Daisy.”

“Is there anywhere you'd like to go after we're done?” she teased.

She made it sound like I'd want a soft-serve cone. But I felt the proximity of her small knees, imagined the backs of them damp from the heat of the day, pressed together now and drying in the cool of the car, and could think of no reply.

After her shopping
, she had me stop alongside Laurelhurst while she rolled a cigarette. It takes a special upbringing to need to be driven to a park in order to light up, but one of the first things I'd learned about Antonia was that she'd come from southern money, and that it made her both worldly and impossibly young. She'd met Calyph at Carolina. During the summer before her junior year, she took a tour of Europe with her mother, on a boat—they went up and down the Rhine and all the way around through the Strait of Gibraltar. Yet apart from her years in Chapel Hill and her travels, she'd led an exclusively suburban existence, going from daughter to housewife at twenty-two. One night I'd taken her to a dinner for the players' wives, and she'd asked me if a tag on a Pearl District warehouse meant there was a lot of gang activity around there. In the next block we'd passed a Chilean art gallery and a Scandinavian bar that advertised their digestifs and herbal liqueurs.

“That's where they go to talk truce,” I explained, and she muttered a little under her breath in a muted, rambunctious growl that seemed aimed largely at herself. After dinner she went back there and had a drink with Sergio Rodriguez's wife. “They wouldn't serve me a julep,” she reported in an awed voice.

“Have you got anything new for me to listen to?” she asked now, as we drove north. “That last just sounds like that electronica music.”

I gave her the bale eye for a second before I realized she was tweaking me. She'd learned about my music writing from Calyph and had started asking for copies of what I liked. She said she was buying them on vinyl if she liked them, too, and although I hadn't seen proof, I imagined I was contributing to a largely decorative library somewhere in some unseen room of their house. She'd have to put something on, occasionally—she'd hop on a treadmill to
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!
and then stand before the mirror, removing a sweat-laced bandanna and feeling, through the aching in her calves, that those screwdrivered guitars stood for something she'd once thought essential, some closeness to a young urban struggle she'd felt sensitive to before she'd moved here to be with Calyph and lost it again among the lawns.

I think she'd tried to like music for a while, probably in college, and then lapsed. All our college ideals, our moods and exultations, you couldn't take them seriously now. But the ideals of the past that make us curse aloud in shame just to remember them are the same ones that, another day, in different weather, somehow stand up and become serious again, become the vital parts of better people we could have been, lost along the road, and, I'm saying, she had asked me for music like it was important to her this way. It was like she thought it would free her from her sterile suburban distance and connect her again with some lost essence that coursed hidden from her through the streets of the real city. Sometimes she'd give me vague directions to drive around an unexplored quadrant, and look out the window like she was hoping we'd bump into everything she missed. But she was too proud to tell me what she was looking for, to feel the ridicule of saying “Take me to the
real
city,” and I was glad of it, because I was looking for that same place myself, and wouldn't have known where to go.