Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

In the car, Martine got started on her favorite subject: Everett. How glad she was to be shed of him; how she couldn’t imagine now what she’d ever seen in him. I wanted to discuss my own troubles, but she was rattling on so, I couldn’t get a word in. She said Everett had given her every Willie Nelson tape that ever existed, given them as gifts, and now was demanding them back; and it was true she no longer listened to them, but still he shouldn’t expect them returned just because she had dumped him.

“Mm-hmm,” I said, and drove on.

I didn’t want to see Sophia tonight. I just didn’t; I wasn’t sure why. I thought of her wide, gentle face and her kind smile, the way her blue eyes seemed lit from within whenever she stood in sunshine, and I got this wormy, shriveled feeling. I couldn’t explain it.

“Here’s an example,” Martine was saying. Example of what? She’d lost me. “Say he’s walking down the street and a man jumps off a roof,” she said. Everett, she probably meant. “Know what he would say? He’d say, ‘Hey! Why is this happening to me? Hey, isn’t it amazing that someone should jump off a roof just as I’m passing by!’ That’s Everett for you. He thinks the world exists purely for his benefit. If he’s not there, then nothing else is, either.”

“Solipsistic,” I said. I remembered the word from philosophy class.

“Right,” she said, digging through her packet of pork rinds.

“Green light, now: figure it out,” I told the car ahead of me. “What do we do when a light turns green? Ah. Very good.”

Martine crumpled her packet and stuffed it in my ashtray. “So,” she said. “Did you decide yet?”

“Huh?”

“About the truck. Yes, or no?”

“What truck?” I asked.

“Everett’s truck; what else. It’s a pretty good piece of machinery, you have to admit.”

I didn’t have the remotest opinion of Everett’s truck, and I couldn’t imagine why she thought I would. I put our conversation on Rewind. Came up empty. “Well, um,” I said. “It’s always looked fine to me. But face it: I’m no Mr. Goodwrench.”

“You don’t think it’s a stupid idea, though.”

“What idea is that?” I asked her.

“You and me going in on it.”

“Going in on it?” I asked. “You mean, as in buying it? You and me? Buying a truck?”

“Jesus! Where have you been?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I must have missed something.”

We were on her block now, and I had been planning just to let her out in the street. Instead I pulled into a parking space. “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I told her. “Maybe it’s nothing to you that I’m a victim of rank injustice, but—”

“What was the point! What have I wasted my breath for?”

She could have chosen a better moment for this. On the other hand, she was just about the last friend I had left in the world, and so I turned to face her and said, “Martine, I sincerely apologize. Run it by me again.”

She sighed. “See, Everett bought that truck off a lady in Howard County—” she said.

“Howard County; yes.” I tried to look as knowing as possible.

“—and he was supposed to pay for it in thirty-six monthly installments. Only he kept falling behind and his mom had to do it for him. And now he wants to move to New York, he says, where a truck wouldn’t be any use to him; so he says to his mom, ‘You take the truck; I can’t keep up the payments.’ She says, ‘When did you ever, I’d like to know? And what would I do with a truck?’ And that’s why she phoned me and asked if I wanted to buy it.”

In the dusk, Martine was all black-and-white, like a photo. Black eyes slitted with purpose, black hair sticking out at drastic angles around her high white cheekbones.

“And you’re suggesting the two of us should go in on it together,” I said.

“Well, for sure I can’t swing it on my own. But I can manage the installments, just barely, if you’d give his mom what she’s already paid: twenty-four hundred dollars.”

“Twenty-four hundred!” I said. “Martine. My total assets come to exactly half of that. And I’m still in debt to my parents, don’t forget.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “but not if you sold off your car.”

“Pardon?”

“Your car’s worth thirty thousand, did you know that? I looked it up in a book.”

I started laughing. I said, “My car’s worth what?”

“They’ve got these books that give you the price of every used car ever made. So I went to the bookstore and, like, flipped through one, and there it was: a ‘63 Corvette Sting Ray coupe in excellent condition is worth thirty thousand dollars.”

I was stunned. But I did think to say, “We could hardly claim my car is in excellent condition.”

“Okay; so knock off a few thousand. You’d still be rolling in money. Haven’t you always told me your car was a collector’s item?”

“Theoretically, I suppose it is,” I said. “But it was pretty well worn out way back when my Pop-Pop bought it, and you may have noticed I haven’t exactly cosseted the poor thing.”

“Oh! You’re so negative!”

She bopped me on the kneecap with one of her fists. I said, “Hey, now.” I took hold of her fist and set it back in her lap. Then I laid an arm across her shoulders. “I’m not trying to be a spoilsport here—”

“Well, you are one,” she said, but a sort of grudging amusement had crept into her voice. She snuggled in closer under my arm and said, “Just listen a minute, okay? Let me tell you how I’ve got it figured.”

“Go ahead,” I said. It wasn’t as if I had any pressing engagements.

“You would sell your car and, first off, pay back your folks. Quit your nickel-and-diming and just pay them back; be done with it. Get that Chinese statue off of your conscience once and for all. Wouldn’t that feel good? Then take some more of the money and go in with me on the truck. It works out just about fifty-fifty — slightly in your favor, even — between what you’d give Everett’s mom and what I would pay monthly.”

“But meanwhile, I’d have no car,” I told her.

“You’ll have the truck then, idiot!”

“We’ll have the truck,” I reminded her. “And you’ll be wanting to take it one place when I want to take it another.”

“Don’t we just about always go out on the same jobs together? And aren’t you tired to death of trying to get your work done in a little, toy, baby-sized car that doesn’t even have a rear seat?”

As she spoke, she was tracing a rip that ran across the knee of my jeans. Her fingertips hit bare skin and started coaxing at it. She said, “You could keep it at your place, if you like. And besides: we’ve been sharing it all along, more or less, when you stop to think.”

“Well, shoot, with thirty thousand dollars, maybe I should just go on and buy each one of us a truck or two apiece,” I said.

I was talking down into the top of her head, into her hair. It smelled of sweat. This got me interested, for some reason. Maybe she could tell, because she turned her face up, and next thing I knew, we were kissing. She had this very thin, hard mouth. I was surprised at how stirring that was. I wrapped both arms around her (not easy with the steering wheel in front of me), and she pressed against me, and I felt the little points of her breasts poking into my chest.

Then she drew back, and so I did too. I was relieved to see we were coming to our senses. (Or at least, partly relieved.) But what she was doing was shutting off the ignition. She dropped my keys in the cup of my hand, and her little face closed in on me again.

“You want to?” she asked me.