E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

But she didn’t seem to be aware of how I felt, there was this distracted spirit of her, her head shook from side to side with bursts of voice, like sobs, as if someone was mourned.

Our lovemaking was like song or like speech. “Don’t you see,” I asked again and again, “don’t you understand?” And she shook her head from side to side in her distraction. I couldn’t overcome this. I became insistent, I felt my time running out, I felt I had to break into her recognition. It’s you, I wanted her to say, and she wouldn’t she wouldn’t say the words.

And then the tenderness was gone and I was pounding the breath from her, beating ugly grunts of sound from her, wanting her to form words but hearing savage stupid gusts of voiceless air coming from her.

In my moment of stunned paralytic grief I groan I go off bucking I think I hear her laugh.

For several days we made our life sleeping till mid-morning and getting on the road and driving again till the sun went down and we could find a bed. We drove through boarded-up towns, we ate blue-plate specials and we slept in rooming houses with linoleum on the floor and outhouses in back or in small motor-court cabins with the sound all night of the trucks rolling past. Night and morning we made love it was what we did our occupation our exercise. But always with great suspense in my mind. I never knew if it would happen again. I didn’t have the feeling anything was established in her. She fucked in a kind of lonely self-intensification. She slept without touching me, she slept with no need to touch or hold me, she went off to sleep and it was as if I weren’t there.

I would think about this lying in the dark while she slept. I was there for her, I was what she assumed, and I was willing to be that, to be the assumption she didn’t even know she was making. And then one day she’d discover that she loved me.

Once in a while, usually in the numb exhaustion of daybreak, I’d look into her face and see an aspect there of the acknowledgment I wanted in the gold-washed green eyes. There would be humor in them. The lips slightly swollen and open, the small warm puff of breath. She’d giggle to see neither of us was dead and she’d give me a cracklipped kiss a soft dry kiss with the hot pulp of her lip against mine.

She liked to be inside her appetites and her feelings. Whatever they were. One day in a rainstorm I skidded off the road. I was frantically spinning the wheel, I couldn’t see through the rain, it had turned white, opaque, but Clara was laughing and shrieking like a kid on a carnival ride. We thudded into a ditch. Water softened the canvas top and began to leak through and we sat at a tilt as if in a diving plane, in clouds. I thought we might drown. Then we felt the car rise, somehow the water floated us free, and when the storm passed over, we gently drifted a half mile or so in the flood like some stately barge down a stream. She loved it, she loved every second of it, her fingers gripping my arm, the nails digging into my skin.

Sometimes we went out at night walking some main street to a local movie. She liked to stop in a tavern and drink ten-cent beers, she liked the looks she got, the sexual alert that went off every time she walked into a bar or a diner. One time someone came over to the booth and started to talk to her as if I weren’t even there. It seemed to me unavoidable what I had to do. He was an amiable fellow with a foolish grin, but with the strength in him of belonging in this bar, of being known in this bar, this town, he looked down and saw my knife, the tip making an indentation in the blue shirt and the sprung gut. He was genuinely astonished, they don’t use knives in boondocks of the Midwest, he backed off with his palms up.

She had turned pale. “What’s the idea, do you know what you’re doing?” She spoke in a soft urgent whisper leaning toward me over the table.

“I do,” I said, “and if you don’t stand up and get your ass moving I’ll do the same to you.”

Outside I grabbed her arm. She was in a cold rage but I had the feeling, too, that I had done right, that I had shown her something she wanted to see.

“You know something?” she said as I hurried her along to our room. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

I thought they were the first words of love I’d heard from her.

In Dayton, Ohio, I saw in the rear-view mirror the unmistakable professional interest of a traffic cop as we drove away from his intersection.

“I have not been smart,” I said. “I suppose my mind has been on other things.”

I made a sharp turn into a side street and started looking for the poor part of town.

“What’s the matter?”

“A German convertible with bud vases and New York plates. You don’t often see that in these here parts.” She thought awhile. “Is this a hot car?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Soon enough we were going through the dingy sections where the bums were standing on the sidewalks and the garbage spilled into the streets. The Buckeye State Used Cars enterprise looked grim and satisfactorily seedy, I turned in there and commenced a negotiation. The man with his fat dirty fingernails showed me there was not even a book on such a car. I said that was because it was so expensive they didn’t figure anyone could afford it. He said maybe so, but how could he sell a car where you could not get the parts if they broke? I said nothing ever broke on a car like this. He said how could he take ownership on a car that had no papers? I said it was my family’s car and since when did you walk around with papers of your own family’s car? He said why did I want to sell my family’s car? I said I was running away to get married and needed cash. “How are you going to run if you don’t have no car anymore?” he said. “I’m going to buy a modest well-tuned vehicle from you,” I said, looking with bright honest earnestness into his face.

He walked around the car several times. He glanced at Clara in the front seat, I had told her to put on her fur jacket. “That is my fiancée,” I said to him softly, “of whom they don’t approve.” I could see him thinking: They wouldn’t go after their own kid.

Come with me

Combust with me

“Someday,” Clara said over the noise, “maybe you’ll be able to buy it back, or one like it.”

“What?”

“I said someday you could hope to get it back.”

“I’ve got my car,” I said, pounding the dashboard. “I’ve got papers for it. I’ve got a hundred fifty simoleons in my pocket. Is that bad? We can get to California if we’re careful.”

“California?”

“That’s where we’re going. Didn’t you know?”

“I wasn’t informed,” she said, holding on to the leather strap over the door. She peered ahead, frowning. I had taken in partial trade a 193 °Chevrolet station wagon with wood-panel sides that shook and rattled, and floorboards that jumped in the air every time we hit a bump. It had a high polish on its tan-and-brown body and admitted to fifty thousand miles.

“I didn’t know dead people were that unusual. I saw them all the time. I wandered around holding my bottle and seeing these dead hunkies lying on tables. I dragged my blanket around behind me. I wasn’t frightened. My father would smile at me.

“When I was older I began to understand things a little more. I thought, for instance, that anyone who was dead had to have a hole in them. I didn’t know people died without holes in them. Then I figured it out one day. Some old guy was being dressed who died of natural causes. He’d made it all the way. So I knew then about natural death.

“But it was just the business, you know, it was nothing special, we lived in an apartment right over the business I played after school outside in front of the stoop and there was my father driving up with his hearse, they’d back up into the garage and he and my brother took the body into the back. And that was the way things were on West Twenty-ninth Street.