They made it to the Bruckner Expressway in no time. And in a couple of hours, they were well out of the city and right in the middle of a beautiful autumn New England day. As Ted drove, Marty dived into Mariana’s food, grunting and making almost sexual pleasure noises at the taste, washing it all down with strong café con leche. Ted said, “Hand me a bologna sandwich.”
“What? Don’t be an idiot. Have some of this.”
“I said I’m fine with bologna, okay?”
Marty handed him a bologna sandwich that had all the grace and allure and taste of a brick. Ted took a bite and acted like it was good.
“Are you aware that your bologna has a first name? It’s O-S-C-A-R.”
“Shut up.” Ted tried to massage the bare bread and lunchmeat down his gullet; it was like swallowing a dry thumb.
“Second name is Mayer. M-A-Y-E-R. Your bologna’s a Jew.”
“Oh my God.”
“That wasn’t mine. That was J. Walter Thompson. They were good. There’s plenty to go around,” Marty said.
“Plenty what?”
“Plenty everything, grasshopper.”
He wagged his chin at Marty’s food. “How’s the plátanos?”
“Like eating the ass of an angel.”
“You are disgusting.”
“Life is disgusting, Ted. ‘Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.’ Who said that?”
“Yeats.”
“Yeats!”
“Another wild old wicked man.”
“Didn’t he fuck the daughter of the woman he loved who dumped him for some dick politician?”
“I suppose you could put it that way. Maud Gonne.”
“Who cares? Who cares if Yeats was into strange? Who cares if Whitman was a homo? Or Frost an asshole to his wife? Why do we know these things? I don’t want to know such things anymore. Did the W. B. in Yeats stand for Warner Brothers?”
“It did not.”
“Well, excuse me, I’m an autodidact, Ted. Unlike book-learned, sissy you.”
“I know, you always said that. I just thought it meant you knew a lot about cars.”
“Hahaha. How’s the bologna?”
“Fuck you.”
They drove farther north like that. In perfect loving antagonism. It occurred to Ted that maybe Marty was like all the red and gold leaves he saw burning on the trees. In nature, it seems, things reached their most vibrant and beautiful right at the point of death, flaming out with all they had—why not natural man? His father was red, green, yellow, and gold, like a beautiful bird falling from the sky. Paradoxical undressing again. Ted coughed, and Marty’s mood darkened. “You got a cold?” he asked.
“Just a scratch.”
“Wear a scarf.”
“It’s like eighty degrees.”
“Driving in the car makes a wind chill factor.”
“Of seventy. Brrrr.”
“Hey, let’s get off the highway.”
“Backroads? Blue roads?”
“We got time, why not?”
Ted aimed the Corolla for an exit.
“This is your world.”