John Haskell - American Purgatorio

I was watching the shadows lengthen across the asphalt, waiting until someone came and took possession, and when someone did finally come, it wasn’t a single person. A man and two women came out of a family restaurant named Michael’s or Anthony’s and got in the car. The man drove, and I followed him as he drove, getting back on the Circle Road or New Circle Road. I continued following the car around this Circle until they pulled into the parking lot of one of the many motels, this one a two-story model with a wagon wheel as part of the signage. I watched my old maroon car pull up beside another, larger car, a more luxurious car, a Mercedes or Lexus or BMW. This, I thought, made sense. Although it wasn’t silver like the luxury car I remembered from New Jersey, it wasn’t exactly black either. It was a kind of dark, dark gray, and I realized that my memory of the car at the gas pump might be faulty. And not just the car.

I was watching the people inside the car, and when they got out of the car, by this time, I’d picked out one of the people, a woman. The man and the other woman seemed somehow aligned, and the one woman seemed slightly removed, and it was this woman, the removed woman, who, whether consciously or not, I took as the primary focus of my watching. It was her I watched as she walked up the stairs — as all three of them walked up the outdoor stairs — and entered a room on the second floor.

I walked to the check-in office, past the ice machine and illuminated vacancy part of the no vacancy sign, and at the reception desk I got a room for the night. It was from this room, with its queen-sized bed and lamp and television on a table, that I looked out through the curtains to the parking lot. I was on the ground floor, not exactly below, but somewhere below, the people I now seemed to be stalking.

This was the first time I’d had a bed to myself since leaving New York, and I wanted to lie down. I needed in fact to lie down and sleep, to stretch out and relax, but I couldn’t afford to relax. When they say that the joy of a motel room is also its heartbreak, they mean that since every room is basically the same, the experience of any individual room depends on the mind of the inhabitant. If there’s an inclination in the lodger for comfort, then there’s comfort, and if the room is not quite right, if something is wrong or missing — for me, something was missing — the room is a reminder, more than a reminder; it’s a sharp stick digging into the heartache that’s already there. Which was why I couldn’t fall asleep. I was worried about losing the fragile thread connecting me to my old life. I saw the car, my old maroon car, as a thread or string, connected to a kite, and I was holding on, but the kite had a mind of its own.

In the morning, when I looked out to the parking lot, I saw that one of the two cars — it was a Mercedes — was gone. I threw on my shoes and walked out to the car that was still there, the station wagon. Standing under a cloudless sky, I examined it for signs of familiarity and remembered experience, and the funny thing was, I couldn’t find any. There were no familiar dents or scratches. When I looked inside, there was no distinguishing crack or tear or cigarette burn to mark it as anything other than an old car, like any other old car.

The doors were locked, and walking around the car I was trying to smell some smell that might be emanating from inside. Anne had given the car a nickname, Chaucer, which came from Chaser, which came from the fact that the car was a Mercury Tracer. I was looking at the car, thinking of two possibilities. Either it was a different car — and if it was a different car then that was the end of it — or else it wasn’t a different car, and these people had either bought it or stolen it, and possibly stolen Anne.

Looking through the shatterproof glass I half hoped that Anne might be hidden under the blankets in the back, that I could call in through the glass, softly, but loud enough, so that if she was tied down under the blankets she would hear me.

“Anne,” I called out. “Anne.”

And that’s when the girl, the one I’d been watching, walked up to me. Standing slightly behind me, she said to me, in a loud whisper, “Are you interested in the car?”

As I turned, I could feel the adrenaline rushing into my bloodstream. I noticed she was wearing a blue beret.

“Who’s Anne?” she says.

“I was looking at your car.”

“To buy?” she says.

“Where did you get it?”

“It’s not mine,” she tells me. “But if you want to talk to the owner…” and she begins looking in her bag for a pen.

I touch my nonexistent breast pockets to indicate my lack of writing implement, and then she says, “Follow me.” She starts walking and I follow her, back to the motel building and up the stairs to the door of her room. Where she stops. She unlocks the door and stands, wondering, I suppose, whether to let me in. I squint in through the slightly opened door, looking for clues.

“Do you like your room?” I say.

“The room?” she says, and she steps aside so that I can see inside. And I do. The room seems normal enough, and as I’m peering in she asks me if I’m looking for something.

“No,” I say. “No. Just looking.”

She says her name is Linda.

“That’s pretty,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says.

“I mean it means pretty. In Spanish.”

“Oh…”

“Leenda. Is how you would say it.”

At that, or just after that, she invites me in. Her gestures are direct and forthright and I follow her into her room, an exact replica of my own room except with more clothes hanging on the chairs. As she roots around for a pen and paper I’m watching her, and I notice a lightness in her movements, and in those movements I detect a kind of contentment or happiness. She seems to be at ease. And it’s exactly this ease or contentment that I find inappropriate, or inappropriate vis-à-vis my own world of dis-ease and dis-contentment. In this other person’s — I wouldn’t call it happiness, but her apparent happiness — in the lackadaisical quality of her trust, the seed of my envy is planted. Why does she have the ease and happiness? Why is it hers and not mine? And it doesn’t make sense, but as I stand in the carpeted room, this is the question that’s bugging me. I’m feeling it. Her abundance is creating a lack of abundance in me, a paucity to which I react, not with generosity or understanding, or even healthy competition, but with wormy invidiousness.

My response to her seeming confidence is like Claggart’s response to the goodness and beauty of Billy Budd. It’s a kind of envy in which the goodness and grace of this other person has to be canceled out.

“Take off your hat,” she tells me.

“I’m not wearing a hat,” I say.

“Figuratively, I mean. Relax.”

So I try to seem relaxed. And that works for a while, and we talk for a while, about things, like the color of the car, and the profusion of bugs on the windshield, and all the time I’m talking to her I’m gauging her, waiting for her to trip, figuratively, so I can know whether she’s had a party to play in Anne’s disappearance. I already think she’s had some part in it, but I want proof to make it all clear. Then she’ll be bad and I’ll be good and I’ll feel better. But something about the room, or about her and her apparent honesty, is making me feel worse, and so, once she gives me the piece of paper with the telephone number, I fold it, put it in my back pocket, and then I tell her I have to go.

Later that day, through the curtains of my room, I watch the girl walk across the parking lot, but instead of getting into one of the cars, she walks past the cars, to the edge of the parking lot where it meets the circular drive. I leave my room and follow her, staying far enough behind her to avoid obviousness, but trailing her as she walks along the sidewalk. The sidewalk at this section of road is mostly a trail of hard-packed earth, through weeds sometimes and little puddles of water, and I note, at one point, her footprints.