You Think It, I'll Say It(2)
They laughed, and they started making steak for dinner, or sausage, although, because of the kind of people they were (insufferable people, Nell thinks now), it had to be grass-fed or free-range or organic. And not too frequent.
All of which is to say that many times since she learned of Henry’s affair she has wondered not only if she should have known but even if she is at fault for not cheating on him. Was there an unspoken pact that she failed to discern? And, either way, hadn’t she been warned? An admiring twenty-three-year-old graduate student was, presumably, just so satisfying! Plus, Bridget and Henry had become involved at a time when Nell and Henry could go months without sex. They still got along well enough, but if they had ever felt passion or excitement—and truly, in retrospect, she can’t remember if they did—they didn’t anymore. Actually, what she remembers from their courtship is dinners at a not very good Mexican restaurant near campus, during which she could tell that he was trying to seem smart to her in exactly the way that she was trying to seem smart to him. Maybe for them that was passion? Simultaneously, she is furious at him—she feels the standard humiliation and betrayal—and she also feels an unexpected sympathy, which she has been careful not to express to him or to her friends. Their deliberately childless life, their cat, Converse (named not for the shoe but for the political scientist), their free-range beef and nights and weekends of reading and grading and high-quality television series—it was fine and a little horrible. She gets it.
To the driver, she says, “I’m not a vegetarian.”
He turns off the van’s engine. Although she paid online, in advance, for the ride, an engraved plastic sign above the rearview mirror reads, TIPS NOT REQUIRED BUT APPRECIATED. As he climbs out of the front seat to retrieve her suitcase from the rear of the van, she sees that all she has in her wallet is twenties. If it weren’t for his political commentary, she would give him one—her general stance is that if she can pay three hundred dollars for a pair of shoes or $11.99 a pound for Thai broccoli salad from the co-op, she can overtip hourly wage workers—but now she hesitates. She’ll ask for ten back, she decides.
She joins the driver behind the van, just as a town car goes by. When she passes him a twenty, she observes him registering the denomination and possibly developing some parting fondness for her. Which means that she can’t bring herself to ask for ten back, so instead she says, “There’s no way Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
She wonders if he’ll say something like “Fuck you, lady,” but he gives no such gratification. He says, seeming concerned, “Hey, I didn’t mean offense.” From a pocket in his pants he takes a white business card with an orange stripe and the shuttle logo on the front. He adds, “I’m not driving Sunday, but, you need anything while you’re here, just call me.” Then he kneels, takes the ballpoint pen from behind his ear, and uses her black-wheeled suitcase, which is upright on the ground between them, as a desk. He writes LUKE in capital letters and a ten-digit number underneath. (Years ago, Henry had tied a checked red-and-white ribbon, from a Christmas gift his mother had sent them, to the suitcase’s handle.) The driver holds the business card up to her.
For what earthly reason would she call him? But the unsettling part is that, with him kneeling, it happens that his face is weirdly close to the zipper of her pants—he didn’t do this on purpose, she doesn’t think, but his face is maybe three inches away—so how could the idea of him performing oral sex on her not flit across her mind? In a clipped voice, she says, “Thanks for the ride.”
* * *
—
With CNN on in the background, Nell hangs her shirts and pants in the hotel room closet and carries her Dopp kit into the bathroom. The members of the governing board will meet in the lobby at six and take taxis to a restaurant a mile away. Nell is moving the things she won’t need at dinner out of her purse and setting them on top of the bureau—a water bottle, a manila folder containing the notes for a paper she’s in the revise-and-resubmit stage with—when she notices that her driver’s license isn’t in the front slot of her wallet, behind the clear plastic window. Did she not put it back after going through security in the Madison airport? She isn’t particularly worried until she has searched her entire purse twice, and then she is worried. She also doesn’t find the license in the pockets of her pants or her jacket, and it wouldn’t be in her suitcase. She pictures her license sitting by itself in one of those small, round gray containers at the end of the X-ray belt—the head shot from 2010, taken soon after she got reddish highlights, the numbers specifying her date of birth and height and weight and address. But she didn’t set it in any such container. She probably dropped it on the carpet while walking to her gate, or it fell out of her bag or her pocket on the plane.
Can you board a plane in the United States, in 2015, without an ID? If you’re a white woman, no doubt your chances are higher than anyone else’s. According to the Internet, she should arrive at the airport early and plan to show other forms of ID, some of which she has (a work badge, a gym ID, a business card) and some of which she doesn’t (a utility bill, a check, a marriage license). She calls the airline, which feels like a futile kind of due diligence. The next call she makes is to the van driver—thank goodness for the twenty-dollar tip—who answers the phone by saying, in a professional tone, “This is Luke.”