CROMWELL AND BRAD are going to take a drive around Pittsburgh. Cromwell likes Pittsburgh. “It’s a very interesting city,” he says. “Far more interesting than people think.”
He invites me to come along.
I can’t, I beg off. My son’s here.
We part in the lobby.
“See you at the movies tonight, Doc.”
“I’ll be there,” I tell him, and extend a hand to Brad. “Nice to’ve met you.”
He tells me that it was nice to’ve met me too.
They go one way and I go the other.
It’s Billy I spot first. I become aware of him in the corner of my eye before I actually see him. His height. His newly cropped hair. Something has made me turn my head.
Had I not seen him, I would not have seen Leila, but now I see them both. There against the far wall. Both of them standing. Billy in profile, leaning against the wall, Leila full out, leaning against the wall too. Between them is a small table with a house phone, white, on top of it.
The lobby is enormous and very busy at this time of day. People checking in, checking out. Scattered throughout the lobby are little islands of furniture, little living rooms almost, with sofas, chairs, end tables, lamps, and rugs of their own.
I move through the crowd toward one of those little living room areas in the lobby. I sit down in an easy chair, it even swivels like the one in my living room in New York, and, lighting a cigarette, I begin to observe Leila and Billy at my leisure.
Billy is talking. Leila is listening. Billy’s left hand is rubbing the top of his head as he talks.
Although there is something undeniably surreptitious about what I’m doing, my motives for doing it are innocent, pure family-man motives.
It’s not often (strange as it may seem) that we get a chance to observe freely those we love.
It feels like ages since I’ve seen them.
Being with them is not the same as looking at them, as I’m doing now. You can’t just look at people when you’re with them. They say something. You say something. Your presence alters their behavior and your own as well. You see very little of the people you love when you’re with them.
Or so it seems to me, sitting there, luxuriating in this opportunity to watch them, for once, to my heart’s content.
I love them so.
I love the way they’re talking to each other. I have no idea what they’re saying, but there’s a vitality and an urgency in their conversation that’s apparent even at a distance.
Billy keeps rubbing the top of his head.
Leila is talking now.
He wants to interrupt, but doesn’t.
Then she stops talking.
Both are silent for a while.
Then Billy says something. He seems to be asking her a question. She looks down at her shoes.
I either notice or imagine that I see a physical resemblance between them. The slightly swaybacked curve of their spines. With their heads bowed, as both their heads are now, they look like two graceful question marks.
Mother and son.
I sit there smoking, envisioning the happy ending to this day.
They stand in silence and then, without another word being spoken, Billy picks up the white phone. There is only one person he could be calling in the hotel. And that’s me.
I’m sorry to give up my comfortable observation post, but it’s time to go.
I head toward them.
Billy is leaning against the wall with the receiver to his ear and Leila is looking down at her shoes when I arrive.
“There you are,” I say.
I’ve spoken too loudly and the sudden sound of my voice, and my sudden appearance, startles Leila. She is literally shaken. Billy spins around.
“Dad, I was just …”
All three of us start speaking at the same time and all three of us seem to be saying the same thing.
Then we laugh. Or I do. Or they do. There’s laughter among us.
Explanations follow laughter. We all seem to have some explaining to do and we’re all eager to state our case. Leila, still a little shaken, is explaining how she woke up starved and saw me asleep on the couch and didn’t want to wake me but she just had to have something to eat. So she went down to have breakfast and who should she run into in the lobby but Billy, who …
Billy takes it from there and starts explaining how he too woke up starved, but as starved as he was, he just didn’t like the look of the hotel restaurant. Instead, he decided to take a drive around town to look for a less pretentious place to eat, but just as he was heading out of the hotel, he saw Leila stumbling out of the elevator and …
“I was not stumbling,” Leila protests.
We all laugh for some reason.
Then Billy and Leila take turns telling the rest of the story. How they drove around Pittsburgh looking for just the right place. How a lot of places were still closed. How cool and autumnal the air was. How they finally found this diner not far from the river. A real blue-collar kind of place, with a jukebox and a lot of trucks parked in the parking lot.
They shower me with details about the diner.
When my turn comes to explain, I tell them what I did with my time and with whom. I leave out the essentials of what occurred over my breakfast table. Instead, I repeat what Cromwell told me: how the word on the movie is that it is to die for. How we might have a big hit on our hands. How this day will mark the end of Leila’s anonymity.
They both seem overly attentive while I talk. I’m not saying much, babbling away, but they’re hanging on every word I say, nodding, responding.
We all seem overly excited about something.
It all seems slightly artificial, but it’s hard to tell. Perhaps it’s genuine.
I either detect or think that I detect the scent of alcohol on Billy’s breath. It’s hard to know for sure, because I myself have been drinking.
We seem to be standing too close together as we talk. Billy’s hands look enormous suddenly. They’re the same hands he always had, of course, but now, for some reason, they seem to be massive. Maybe he’s using them more. Big unruly hands, like the wings of a creature he can’t quite control.
He’s wearing a beat-up old fleece-lined athletic jacket and he keeps pulling up the zipper and then pulling it down and he doesn’t seem aware that he’s doing this.
I miss the distance I had while observing them without being with them.
I feel both crowded and, God knows why, lonely at the same time.
And I feel overwhelmed by the need to process, evaluate, and interpret the data I detect in their eyes, in the sound of their voices, the language of their bodies.
The way Leila keeps looking down at her shoes.
The way she looks up and then down again.
The way she seems ready to leave, to rush off somewhere, and the way she just manages to keep herself in place.
Billy looks as rebellious as he did last night (a skinhead, a Liverpool hooligan, an East European mafioso), but he no longer behaves according to his rebellious image. He seems confused, pathetic. As if he doesn’t have a clue how to behave around me, what pose to strike.
I see a multiplicity of Billys in his eyes and I feel besieged.
I’ve done my part. I went through a rather exhausting process of understanding him and his rebellious image last night. The least he can do is stick to it for a while.
I feel incapable, not unwilling but incapable, of any new understanding at the moment, and I resent being called upon to provide it.
At the moment, I lack the resources to handle any deviations from what I consider to be their current characters.
I feel out of breath. Mentally out of breath.
As if caught in a vortex, or held together by gravity, we remain standing there, too close to one another for comfort.
In desperation almost, I suggest we do something.
“It looks like such a nice day,” I shout, having not had a single glimpse myself of the kind of day it is. “Why don’t we do something?”
Billy stammers and then speaks.
“I was just … I mean, just before you showed up … that’s what I was calling you about. We were thinking of going for a drive to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House. It’s supposed to be not far from here and I’ve always …”
He starts explaining himself again, apologizing almost, telling me how he’s become interested in architecture at college and how Frank Lloyd Wright is one of his …
I can’t tell if I’m being invited to come along with them or not, but I assume that I am and I accept.
“That’s a great idea,” I tell him. “I’ve always wanted to see the Fallingwater House. Let me just shower, shave, and change my clothes and we’ll be out of here. Won’t take me more than fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops.”
I thought they would wait for me in the lobby while I got ready, but instead all three of us get on the elevator and ride up together. Billy keeps zipping and unzipping the zipper on his jacket until I’m almost ready to slap his hand.
Standing in the shower, I bend my head as if in prayer.
I enjoy the sensation of hot water falling on my shoulders and the sight of steam rising, enveloping me.
There is not time to take a long shower because Billy and Leila are waiting for me in the living room. I picture them standing there.
It’s puzzling. I’m taking a shower in private, but there’s no private person within me. There’s only the outer man taking a shower, playing some public persona.
I can’t tell if it’s just the mood I’m in or if it’s a new malady.
I dry off, using many towels. I put on clean clothes.
I had left them standing and now found them sitting.
I never thought of either of them as massive before, but they seem massive to me now, as massive and as immobile and as burdened with some oppressive meaning as the two marble figures of Michelangelo atop the tomb of Giuliano de Medici.
No more meaning, please, I felt like screaming. Enough! I’m not a young man anymore.
They were sitting on the same long couch, Leila at one end and Billy at the other. Directly opposite the couch was an easy chair.
The chair faced them and seemed exactly equidistant from both Billy and Leila.
I was meant to sit in that chair (there was even a clean ashtray on the end table in front of it) and serve as a receptacle for whatever was oppressing them.
Everything pointed in this direction. The look in their eyes. The silence in the room. The triangular seating arrangement.
Our agenda to go sightseeing had been changed while I was in the shower.
I neither knew nor cared to know the details of the new agenda because I was not in a position to do anything about it. I was, for the time being, a completely one-dimensional creature trying to do his superficial best for both of them. There was no inner man within me. No one was on duty inside to handle this emergency.
Tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow, I would be able to deal with it. But not now.
To bog down now, to sit in that chair and listen to them disgorge themselves of whatever was oppressing them, was beyond my psychological resources. And I couldn’t allow them to jeopardize the happy ending I had in store for them. I had to save them from themselves, to keep them from spoiling the glorious surprise that awaited them tonight.
The silence in the living room was about to be broken, and, I could tell, by Leila. She shifted her position on the couch ever so slightly, and ever so softly she sighed, exhaled, as a prelude to speaking.
I knew that if I let her start speaking, some genie would be out of the bottle, some jig would be up, some other story, not the story I had in mind, would begin.
And so I struck first.
What a wonderful day it was, I told them, and how wonderful I felt. I hadn’t felt this wonderful in years. And how great it was to be going for a drive with the two of them again.
Not since Spain, I told them, had we been for a nice drive together. A drive in a car. One of my favorite things in life, especially with two of my favorite people.
I’d always wanted to see the Fallingwater House. It was one of my favorite works of Wright’s.
I asked Billy if he knew how to get to the Fallingwater House, but before he could answer I suggested that we stop downstairs and talk to the concierge. Just to be on the safe side. They probably had road maps and things. And they probably knew of some quaint out-of-the-way country restaurant where we could have lunch.
I was frankly surprised at the ease with which I managed to browbeat them into compliance, and herd them out of the suite and into the corridor.
It was a most memorable sky, dotted with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little white clouds. Identical in size and shape, they made the mauve sky seem like a field of chrysanthemums through which the sun shone down upon the earth.
I don’t know if they looked or not, but as we walked across the hotel parking lot, I pointed up at the sky and, turning first to Leila and then to Billy, I said, “My God, would you look at that sky.”
The car that Billy borrowed from a friend at Harvard was an old Checker cab. I didn’t know much about cars, but I could tell that a lot of money had been spent on it. Repainted. Reupholstered. Reappointed.
The only yellow car in the parking lot. Not the yellow of yellow taxicabs but some other shade of yellow, with bits of reflecting granules mixed into the paint so that the exterior sparkled and glimmered with a combination of gold dust and mother-of-pearl.
Black leather interior.
A nice big steering wheel, the kind that made you want to keep your hands on the wheel just for the pleasure of it.
Maybe it was the alcohol I detected, or thought I did, on Billy’s breath that morning, or maybe I didn’t like the nervous way he twirled the car keys around his index finger as we walked across the parking lot, or maybe it was simply that I wanted to be the one in charge of the tempo of our drive, but whatever the reason, I asked Billy to let me drive. I said I had never driven a Checker and had always wondered what it was like to drive one.
I would drive out. He would drive back.
Instead of giving me the keys, he tossed them to me. It was one of those “guy” things that a boy his age might do. There was nothing hostile about it. It’s just that I didn’t expect it and therefore failed to catch them. The keys went right through my hands and fell on the pavement.
I bent down to pick them up and on my way up, with the keys in my hand, I could see Billy and Leila’s commiseration directed toward me, as if I had been treated unfairly.
Although it was only Billy who tossed me the keys, they both seemed to want to apologize.
Despite my wealth of associations with the city of Pittsburgh, I had been there only once before. I now felt a little at sea sitting behind the steering wheel of our Checker cab and looking for a way out of Pittsburgh.
They didn’t have any more free maps to give away at the hotel desk, but a certain Ms. Caan, consulting a road atlas, wrote out the directions for me on a sheet of hotel stationery. The directions had seemed perfectly clear while I was reading them in the hotel lobby and, in theory, they were still perfectly clear. It’s just that the reality of the city took away some of the clarity.
The streets I was on meandered like rivers, and the names of the streets changed for no apparent reason, like the streets in Paris. One block they were called one thing, the next block something else. I drove up streets steeper than anything I had seen in San Francisco, only to drive down them again in search of an intersecting street that had failed to materialize.
Finally, either by accident or a process of elimination, I wound up heading west on (appropriately named) Western Avenue. I crossed the Ohio River over Wiend Bridge and there on the other side of the bridge was state highway 51 heading south.
According to my directions as written down by Ms. Caan, all I had to do was stay on 51 until I got to Uniontown.
I lit a cigarette and stepped on the gas.
We quickly left Pittsburgh behind.
Rolling along toward Uniontown, I even allowed myself to gaze at the scenery, because Ms. Caan had advised me that the route she picked for us was the scenic route.
I did all I could to appreciate the scenery. The rolling hills. The open fields. The groves of autumnal trees.
We crossed the Monongahela over Elizabeth Bridge (at the town of Elizabeth) and, with my foot gently pressing on the gas pedal to increase speed without alarming Leila, we sped on toward our next destination, Uniontown.
A Checker is a very roomy car. There’s a lot of headroom, legroom, elbowroom.
Leila sat up front with me, but not next to me. This is not meant to sound like a criticism of any kind. She is simply taking advantage of the room the front seat offers to be comfortable. To stretch out.
Her cheek is nestled in the palm of her right hand, which is pressed against the rolled-up car window. Her body is stretched out toward me. Her legs are bent, and the hillocks of her knees under her dress are provocative. I keep thinking I’m going to reach out and touch them, alight on them, but I don’t.
I don’t know why I don’t.
Perhaps it’s because I can’t tell for sure if my desire to touch them is a desire to touch them or a desire to demonstrate that I can if I want to.
But I can’t tell if I want to.
I keep waiting for the situation to clarify itself. For some irresistible impulse to be born and to impel my hand toward her knees.
She seems too far away where she is. Her body so close and she so far away.
Billy is in the backseat, which is so far back that he seems like somebody following us rather than traveling in the same car.
I catch a glimpse of his face every now and then in the rearview mirror.
I speed up at times and then, when Leila starts to stiffen and show signs of alarm, I slow down again. I do this in order to control the atmosphere in the car and prevent a buildup of something.
A buildup of what?
I speed up until the focus becomes what I’m doing, and then I slow down again.
For a while, for a few scenic miles, the atmosphere returns to status quo.
And then the buildup starts again.
I respond by putting more pressure on the gas pedal.
There’s a happy ending awaiting them at the end of this day and I will do whatever it takes to keep them from spoiling it.
I keep up a steady flow of superficial chatter.
It flows from me like cheap white wine from a bottle.
I have instant access to millions of bits of information stored in my memory. Everything from grade school to grad school and beyond. Almost everything I ever read in the New York Times is there. The genocides. The musicals. The movies. The sports in the Sports section. The science in the Science section. The diets. The drive-by shootings. The emergence of fashion models as famous personalities. The evolution of basketball and the emergence of the point guard and the power forward as the cornerstones of the game.
The episodes, the incidents, the encounters, the dialogues, the story conferences, the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners from the life I’ve lived.
They’re all there.
It has no meaning for me but it’s all there, and I draw upon it as I drive in order to entertain, divert, and engage.
There’s no hierarchy of importance, no dictatorship of themes, no need to bridge diverse topics.
I regale them, as I smoke and drive, with an ongoing narrative of my life and times.
Approximately fifteen miles after Uniontown, we turned onto state highway 381 at the little town of Farmington.
From Farmington, according to Ms. Caan, it is another fifteen miles to the Fallingwater House of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Trees, forests of trees, on both sides of the road. Sudden flocks of birds rising up from the fields.
The road was a narrow two-lane blacktop, full of curves. Wonderful to drive on.
The three of us, by this time, were all a little punch-drunk. We burst out laughing at the slightest provocation. When no provocation occurred, we desperately reprised past provocations at which we had laughed and laughed at them once again.
I quoted Billy’s many childhood malapropisms. Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wolves. Robin Hood and his married men.
The traffic along 381 thickened. Weekend drivers enjoying the scenery. Young couples. Old couples. Cars full of kids.
I kept passing them and, in the faces of the people I passed, I saw ourselves through their eyes. We looked the very image of one of those happy families you sometimes encounter on the road.
When we drove through a little town called Ohiopyle, the name of the town was enough to make us hysterical with laughter. Leila’s eyes disappeared completely from laughing so hard. Billy had tears in his.
We were laughing ourselves silly when we crossed the Youghiogheny River.
I passed some more cars as the road suddenly jogged eastward.
And then, just as I went around a blind curve in the road, I had to slam on my brakes and come to a screeching stop to avoid hitting the car in front of me.
In front of that car were other cars lined up bumper to bumper.
I couldn’t tell how long the line was because the road vanished off to the right up ahead.
It’s just a slowdown of some kind, I think to myself. Some rubberneckers taking in the scenery, or a car with a broken fan belt that has to be pushed off the road.
Soon, I’m sure, we’ll start moving again.
I express this view to Leila and Billy and they concur.
We’re all agreed. Any second now we’ll start moving again.
I light a cigarette and think to myself that before I have finished smoking it we’ll be moving on.
Our punch-drunk, rollicking mood is on hold for the time being. It’s there, idling like the engine of the car, ready to be engaged again.
The smoke from my cigarette, while we were moving, was sucked out of the car through the windows, but now it accumulates inside the car. Leila fans it away from her face. I offer to put out the cigarette, but she says it’s all right.
I put it out anyway.
The cars are bumper to bumper on my side of the road. However, there is a completely deserted lane on the other side. Not a single car going by.
Nothing is moving. Nothing except those chrysanthemum clouds. I keep tapping lightly on the gas pedal to keep the engine from shuddering. This could easily develop into a nervous tic. I have to make sure not to allow that to happen.
Up ahead, a couple of drivers get out of their cars. Hitching up their pants. Tucking in their shirts. Ex-servicemen probably, they now look like perfect casting for washing-machine repairmen.
Trying to figure out what’s holding up the traffic.
They join forces and walk together down to where the road bends to the right.
They stop. They survey the territory ahead. They shake their heads.
They amble back to their cars, gesturing to the rest of us with broad operatic gestures that they haven’t a clue about what’s holding up the traffic.
I keep tapping the gas pedal. The mood, the atmosphere in our car is changing. Some other atmosphere is slowly asserting itself in our car, and I don’t know what to do about it.
My only hope is that we start moving again.
And soon.
The car in front of me is rapidly becoming a permanent fixture in my life.
It’s a burgundy-colored Buick Riviera.
The couple inside the car have a dog that has taken a shine to me.
I try not to look at it, because I don’t like the looks of this dog, but it’s hard not to look at it when it keeps looking at me.
It appears, disappears, reappears.
There it is again.
And the damn thing is looking right at me.
It’s a small, skinny dog, black and white. It must be standing on its hind legs on the backseat. All I see of it are its head and front paws through the rear window.
I’m desperate for a cigarette, but out of consideration for Leila I refrain.
I have the option, or course, of getting out of the car and smoking my cigarette outside, but I no longer feel comfortable about leaving the two of them alone in the car.
Once again I am beginning to detect the telltale signs of their agenda. They’re getting ready to confront me with something.
I turn the radio on and off.
As if by accident, I hit the car horn.
I say something.
I say something else.
Anything to distract them.
I’m engaged in a valiant struggle against an unaccountable feeling of loneliness. It seems all wrong and unnatural. How can I be lonely when I’m sitting here with the only two people I love? If I have a family, this is it. If anyone loves me, it’s the two of them.
All the evidence against loneliness is in my favor and yet I’m getting lonelier than ever.
There’s that damn dog again.
Years ago, I rewrote an already rewritten screenplay (currently being rewritten yet again by a husband-and-wife team) that belonged to a then-new genre called a Mafia buddy movie.
One scene in particular now comes back in vivid detail.
Two Mafia guys are taking a third Mafia guy for a ride. They’re all buddies, but the third guy has to die.
They’re driving to a designated spot where the killing is supposed to occur.
They’re telling jokes and talking about various parts of women’s anatomies along the way, as they tend to do in these scenes, their doomed buddy not having a clue, of course, that he’s taking his last ride.
They’re driving along, having a wonderful time.
And then (this was my contribution) they have to stop suddenly at a railroad crossing.
And merely by the virtue of the fact that they have to make this unplanned stop, the mood inside the car changes. The jokes they were telling, the banter, the laughter that had been in keeping with the motion of the car suddenly seems forced and inappropriate.
Tony, that was the name of our fall guy, Tony Russo, starts to sense that something is wrong. His two buddies aren’t saying much, but he can feel the current of silent sentence fragments going back and forth between them (or so I wrote in my stage directions). And as they all wait for the train to pass, he realizes what the real agenda is.
I remember Tony now because I am beset by the feelings I had ascribed to him in my stage directions for that scene.
The panic. The loneliness. His bewilderment at suddenly dreading the two guys he loved. His family.
I feel the same way.
Leila and Billy are going to hit me with something. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect that it will hurt.
Despite the layers of flab that cover my body, it is tense and hard, in anticipation of a blow.
If I grip the steering wheel any tighter, my fingers will break like pretzels and fall into my lap.
I have never felt the slightest anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear war.
What terrifies me about atomic bombs is not their destructive potential but rather this aspect of them, that once a chain reaction begins inside a bomb, it cannot be stopped.
Anything irreversible is a source of terror.
I feel that some chain reaction has begun in our car.
I feel the currents of communication between Leila and Billy. Between the front seat where she sits (not quite beside me) and the backseat where Billy is sitting.
Without looking at each other, without speaking to each other, they are communicating.
The shuffling noise Billy makes as he rearranges his body.
The little cough he coughs.
The half-suppressed sigh Leila sighs.
Billy is opening and shutting the ashtray cover on the ashtray in the backseat.
Leila, having been slumped over in the front, now sits up.
She is now gathering her thoughts before starting to speak.
She is looking down at her hands, where the thumb of one hand is rubbing, worrying the fingers of the other.
Any moment now, she will raise up her eyes and look at me.
I brace myself.
She lifts up her head, turns it slightly, and looks at me.
The look I get from her is as soft as cashmere.
There are, or seem to be, tears welling in her eyes.
And then, in that catch-in-the-throat voice of hers that I associate with the sound of her laughter and memories of happier times, she says, “Oh, Saul.”
The sound of my own name, as said by her, jolts me like a heart attack.
“Oh, Saul,” was all she said.
I was stricken by the beauty and tragedy of it.
It is a rare thing, after all, to hear the true, unabridged sound of one’s own name. It happens, if it happens at all, once or maybe twice in a lifetime.
In that “Oh, Saul” I heard a catalogue of all the names of all the men I had tried to be.
The pain was almost unbearable.
And yet I could tell that if I allowed her to continue, there would be more pain. She was just beginning.
I wish I could say that what followed was caused by something snapping inside of me and that therefore I did what I did as a result of being out of control.
Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Nothing snapped. There was nothing left to snap.
I began howling.
“Oh, Saul,” I howled.
My cry, or shriek, or howl aborted Leila’s speech. She winced and drew back from me. She flashed a frightened look of inquiry at Billy in the backseat and received from him, or not, some reply.
“Oh, Saul,” I howled.
My only thought (I could think and howl at the same time) was of escape.
Escape from the point we had reached.
From the pain I was feeling.
My hope was that once we were in motion again, it would once again provide a distraction from the pain. Distraction from everything. And so I set us in motion.
Bookended by cars, trapped in an endless sentence of cars, I made the decision to break out of there.
I put the car in gear and, stepping on the gas, slammed into the car in front of me, just as that little dog appeared in the rear window. Then I put the car in reverse and slammed into the car behind me.
I had to repeat the procedure several times before the drivers of the cars in question, despite a manly show of outrage, provided me enough room for my getaway.
Since I couldn’t go forward, I made a U-turn and, with the whole lane to myself, I set off in the direction from which I had come.
Back toward Pittsburgh.
As if the happy ending I had conceived for the three of us still awaited us there.
As if the consequences of things irreversible could be eluded by a deftly executed U-turn on a two-lane highway in southwestern Pennsylvania.
I was driving fast. My aim was to drive fast enough to cause a distraction from any story in the car requiring further development and exposition.
I could not stop howling my name and, once I started, I could not stop crying.
I was sobbing, keening, weeping, blubbering, out of frustration or grief at being unable to summon with the sound of my own voice the chordlike resonance my name had possessed when it was uttered by Leila.
“Oh, Saul!” I kept howling.
“Oh, Saul!” I kept crying.
But it was a hollow sound that I produced.
Like a single finger plinking away at a single piano key.
And no matter how I tried to discover some biographical intimacy with all those Sauls I had been or tried to be in my past, I couldn’t.
The public, Leila and Billy in this case, had (I suspected) a much deeper and a much more personal appreciation of what I was going through than I did.
It wasn’t that my connections to my past were severed or impaired in any way, but rather that those connections conveyed nothing.
My memory was still perfect. Even under the stressful circumstances in which I found myself (howling out my name, weeping, and driving at a pretty good clip), I could recall at will almost any episode from almost any period of my life.
It was a summer afternoon and I was maybe three or four at the time. A stout, tall woman came to visit my mother. She wore a long-sleeved polka-dot dress and because she was so tall and I was so tiny, she loomed above me like a magnificent tower of polka dots. She stopped in the kitchen when she saw me, smiled, and said, “There you are. You must be Mrs. Karoo’s little boy, Saul.”
The whole of that long summer, I walked around as if I had been knighted at a very early age. I was set for life. I was Mrs. Karoo’s little boy, Saul.
“Oh, Saul,” I howled, weeping like a fool, not because that memory from my childhood meant so much to me but because I couldn’t get it to mean anything.
“Oh, Saul,” I cried. “Oh, Mrs. Karoo’s little boy, Saul.”
Leila and Billy sat in silence, neither looking at me nor saying anything. By now they were like hostages who were either paralyzed into inaction from fear or had adopted inaction as the best way to keep from provoking me into even more extreme behavior.
The car held the road and I held on to the steering wheel of the car with both hands, howling.
The road seemed to have a current of its own that made us pick up speed without any action on my part.
Like some rolling river accelerating as it rolled along.
The only other car I ever drove that reminded me of this Checker cab was an old Packard Clipper I drove once with a friend in the summer of ’59.
I was smoking Pall Malls at the time.
The thought that there was such a thing as the summer of ’59 now struck me as one of the wonders of the world.
I was Billy’s age.
“Oh, Saul!” I howled.
But the sound of my name, as uttered by me, caused no resonance. It was like dropping a pebble into a pond with ripple-proof water.
Leila and Billy sat in silence, not looking at me or out the window or at each other.
They seemed arrested in some midhowl of their own.
I could tell that they thought I had lost my mind.
I didn’t blame them for thinking that, or take it personally.
I only wished that they were right.
Unfortunately, the human mind can’t be lost as easily as most people think.
So there we were, the three of us speeding down a highway we had traveled in the opposite direction not that long ago.
There was clear sailing ahead of us as far as the eye could see.
High above our heads, those sunlit chrysanthemum clouds rolled across the sky of southwestern Pennsylvania.