Джоан Силбер - Improvement

They were having this discussion while eating their blackberries with sugar on the porch. It was true that even Leah, the most sensible of women, had done stupid things in her relative youth. She’d fallen asleep drunk and set her bed on fire with a lit cigarette. She’d hitched to Montreal alone in the middle of the night and talked her way out of dirty situations.

“He paid a bigger price than I ever did,” Leah said. “That kid.”

Leah was right, of course, that what Teddy was complaining about was only money . “I bet he was in a rush to get to some girl,” Teddy said. He didn’t want to imagine too much, actually.

“Or some guy,” Leah said. “It’s a bigger world now, you know.”

I hope he’s getting laid in heaven , Teddy almost said. He believed it was petty to picture heaven as a place, but who could help doing it? He’d heard that Muslims had a heaven of endless pleasure and beautiful sex with perfect mates. Teddy did not usually pray for dead people (what good was that?), but he would’ve sent that crazy, dead driver something good if he could have. Because he was young, especially. Young forever.

Leah got up and went back out to the garden, where she began sweeping leaves off the path. She took impeccable care of the house. It was a fifties house, boxy and small, and she’d had it before she met him, but it had been both of theirs for a long time now. Teddy had just replaced a lot of shingles on the roof in the spring; if rain came in again they were in trouble. He loved this house; he loved coming home to it.

When Teddy went to pick up the truck, he got his friend Jackson to drive him down. Jackson was in on the Sally story. He said, “Everybody has a fling now and then.”

They did? Jackson had not, and he said Teddy had all the luck. Jackson didn’t know Sally was actually older than Leah. But for Teddy the past made all the fooling around with Sally a young episode; it just worked that way.

The trip took more than five hours, with breaks for food and coffee, and Jackson was a good friend to do it. He wouldn’t even let Teddy pay for gas. And he didn’t pull out of the repair shop until it was totally clear that the truck was ready. He wasn’t going to strand Teddy in the middle of fucking Maryland. When he waved goodbye out the window, he yelled, “Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful,” as if it were 1952.

Teddy contemplated this advice as he pulled into Sally’s driveway. He would’ve looked better in Jackson’s Subaru, but the truck (with its bolted and soldered patches, its expensively restored brake lines) was his truck. He could see the shape of Sally moving behind the big bay window. He was tired from the drive, and it did occur to him, not for the first time, that he was sort of a failure in life, to someone like Sally. It was true that on the way to getting ahead he’d had a tendency to fall on his face. But he was rich in many things—love and happiness, the most important things—if he wasn’t fucking them up at the moment.

Sally gave him that look when she opened the door; she looked tickled and hungry and amused at herself. “Hey, pardner,” she said, an old joke of theirs. Teddy acted as he did every time—he gave her a long hug and a thorough kiss—but he was not exactly with her. He was a man out to lunch somewhere.

She might have picked up on this. She led him back to the kitchen and took a pitcher of iced tea out of the fridge. “How can you look so tuckered out from someone else driving?” she said.

Teddy went on about how happy he was to have his rig back; he’d secretly been afraid they’d find something else that would cost too much to fix.

Sally, who had her own life, said, “I had a week at work I wouldn’t wish on a dog.”

“A dog wouldn’t be so great with a computer,” Teddy said. “He’d eat the keyboard.”

Sally said her boss was making her organize this year’s staff retreat, oh, God. A retreat, now that Teddy asked, was when employees had to go off to a hotel in the country to discuss their vision. She made a puking gesture, finger down gullet, that April would’ve used.

“I guess truckers don’t have these,” Teddy said. “We’re more informal about discussing our visions.”

“You have them?”

“We do, and I’m not at liberty to reveal them.”

Your basic trucker-philosopher lived in solitude and had too much time to think, too many theories. Teddy was very aware that he was lucky to be married. He liked the alternation of days on the road without a soul to talk to and then time at home with his family all over him. The on-off routine suited someone like him. The season when he’d first met Leah, he’d been alone too long; he was clenched and shy.

And now look. Sally had decided this was enough talk, and she’d gotten up from the table to lead him to the bedroom upstairs. The bed was always tightly made—could bounce a dime off the blanket—and on the dresser was a vase of flowers, waiting for him. Waiting for her, really (what did he care about roses?); she wanted some Valentine sweetness in this.

Teddy could see already that he didn’t exactly want to be here. But it would be a cruel moment to turn back—he had no interest in being mean to Sally—and maybe he wanted to be here enough to stay. Apparently he did. It wasn’t the best sex they’d ever had, but he did his part, the spirit of the thing took over, they managed fine.

Afterward, when they were lying in the nice cool air-conditioned room, the sweat drying off them, Sally said, “It’s no fucking different than it ever was. I still have to wait for you to show up in the truck. Wait all over again.”

He hadn’t seen this coming. How aggravated her voice was.

“I think it’s better if we don’t do this anymore,” she said. “I’ve kind of had it. Okay?”

“You sure?” he said.

“Sure enough.”

It came to him as bad news, even if it was all for the best. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, if you’re sure.” She was still very pretty. He put his hand on her hip; he wasn’t getting up right this instant even though he was going soon. “All right then,” he said. He didn’t even like her entirely, not the way she was now and maybe not even then, but he wanted a minute for remembering that it had been a great thing to be young with her.

They both fell asleep—like a peaceful couple—before he got up and showered and got himself ready to leave. Outside the windows there was a fading sky with a white moon already showing. He was hungry too, but dinner with Sally was a distinctly poor idea. He wasn’t ever going to see her again, was he?

“You be careful when you’re driving,” she said at the door. “Don’t get into any more accidents.”

“Wasn’t my fault.”

“That’s what they all say,” she said, with a mild chuckle.

“I’ll be careful,” he said, as if he were answering Jackson.

He was really very hungry and he wasn’t going to take the truck wandering around Sally’s town or onto the clogged streets of Washington. He headed back onto I-95, where there was a rest stop if you went south. Darkness had fallen, and the rest area had a neon glow, the brightness of a roadside settlement of snack bars and gas stations. What a joy and relief it was to sit down in a Formica booth and tank up on a double cheeseburger, fries, apple pie a la mode. He ate as if he’d been running hard all day.

He’d planned to stay over at Sally’s, and now he could drive through the night to get home to Leah. But by the time he finished the pie he was thinking a takeoff at dawn made more sense; his semi was a sleeper, with a mattress tucked in the back of the cab, and he could settle for the night right here. Which was what Leah thought he was doing, in fact.