Trust Exercise(41)

“Lucky you! That must be the shortest Das Rheingold in history,” Martin brayed, as if by sheer volume he could transport them all out of the room.

“Tim was feeling unwell,” said Mr. Kingsley, while pointing at Sarah a look that spoke words as if straight to her mind. You of all people should have known better.

“We had a bit of a misunderstanding,” Martin blared on. This wasn’t obliviousness, Sarah saw, but a hostile rejection of circumstance. Apart from Martin’s voice the house was perfectly silent. Even the faint static from the untuned radio in the living room at some recent moment had ceased. “My lot came around looking for me,” Martin shouted, “then their pals turned up looking for them. Inseparable they’ve all become.”

“Sarah,” Mr. Kingsley repeated, “please go home.” As she rushed from the room Tim seized hold of her hand.

“Do you have a ride, sweetie?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said, or perhaps she nodded, or perhaps she said nothing; she wrenched her hand from his and ran down the hall out the door. Every car was gone from the curb. Every trace of the party was gone like a zipper drawn closed, leaving only her sharp breaths and the clicking of her boots as she ran down the street. She feared nothing more than Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes pulling up to display his disgusted but unsurprised gaze, but she must have longed for it, also, so vividly did the vision pursue her. No one, not Mr. Kingsley nor Martin and Liam nor Karen nor David nor anyone else whose body was, as it seemed bodies always should be, encased in a car appeared out of the darkness to enfold Sarah’s seemingly naked, certainly lost, unprecedentedly vulnerable body into the proper housing and accustomed rate of progress of a car. Sarah ran, as she had never previously run, down streets unaccommodating of pedestrian activity, streets without sidewalks and where the signs were far apart or entirely absent. Mr. Kingsley’s neighborhood was a sinuous maze and she was lost almost as soon as she’d gotten his house out of view. Soon she was too winded, and too self-conscious of the noise her boots made, to keep running but her walk was swift and frightened. In this city only the very poor and criminals who had made some sort of mistake while committing a crime ever walked. Sarah thought of her mother’s shabby little car, so intimately familiar, with longing and rage. She would do anything to obtain her own car. She would prostitute herself or rob or kill if it meant she could have her own car. Since starting all over with saving her bakery wages she hadn’t bought a single thing and if she could just get to twelve hundred dollars she was sure she’d have her pick of good cars; she read the Auto Trader every week with obsessive attention. She had long since ranked her dreams in order: Bug, MG, Alfa Romeo, in every case convertible. There were always beautiful little foreign convertibles for sale for around twelve hundred dollars in the Auto Trader “because those little cars are a big pain to keep running, they’re worthless,” said Sarah’s broken and cynical mother, who for all her superior experience of life knew nothing about how to live.

And then suddenly Sarah had returned to the wide, loud, brightly lit boulevard and could see the sign for Mama’s Big Boy glowing in the distance. It was a distance a car would travel in the blink of an eye but it took Sarah, walking quickly, what felt like ten minutes. She walked at the edges of the parking lots, not on the curbside bands of crabgrass, so as to look like someone walking to her car, not someone walking down the street, but even so, a few cars sounded their horns as they passed as if striping her with a paintbrush of noise. Were they warning or mocking? She didn’t know, but she tried to walk even more quickly, as fast as she could without seeming to run. In the entrance vestibule of Mama’s Big Boy she spilled her coin purse all over the floor trying to get her fingers around change for the phone. Her useless fingers, like so many hot dogs stuck onto her hands. Once she had finally managed to call David’s car phone she was afraid that the ringing would stop. David was certainly parked somewhere with English Lilly grinding away on his lap, the curtain of Lilly’s blond hair slapping them both in the face, Lilly’s left knee like an ungreased piston squeaking against the edge of David’s seat and with each squeak nearly knocking the phone from its cradle. At any moment David and Lilly’s labored fucking in the front of his car would inadvertently answer the phone and then Sarah would hear what she already saw and heard all too clearly—but instead she heard a default outgoing message that David had apparently never bothered to personalize. She hung up. It wasn’t even eleven. Mama’s Big Boy was approaching its busiest hours, when people who had already been somewhere and people who were still going somewhere converged. There wasn’t a single booth open so she sat at the counter, staring down at the enormous laminated sheets of the menu. “You again?” said her waiter of three hours before as he sailed past with pots of coffee aloft in both hands. Thankfully he wasn’t working the counter, he wouldn’t speak to her again, wouldn’t say, “Where are those boys with the accents?” She had only enough for an order of fries and a coffee and when they came their two contrasting tastes, dull-grease-potato and acrid, equally filled her mouth with the warning saliva that comes just before vomiting. She couldn’t sit on the stool at the counter for more than an hour, they had a rule against loitering, but she might not even make it that long. Some time later she went to the bathroom to rinse and stare at her unrecognizable face and when she returned the untouched fries and coffee were gone and someone new was on the stool, poring over the menu, and when she caught the counterman’s eye he waved a hand dismissively and turned away.