C Hribal - The Company Car

“Honey, you want to fool around? I’m getting leg jitters, look.” We’re sitting on the tailgate, our legs doing lazy pendulum swings. I look down and she’s right. Her legs do this sometimes, a little dance of their own, and they can’t stop. It’s like she’s had too much coffee. “The only thing that distracts me enough to get it to stop,” she says, “is good sex.”

“So what happens when you get jittery legs on your bike trips?”

She shucks off her jacket, peels off her pullover. She shivers, and her breasts rise from the cups of her bra. She pushes me down into the Nomad’s bed. “What, you think I find a hunk and fuck his brains out? What do you think, Ace? I suffer. Alone. In a school gym, or in a tent, or in a B and B. Biking is like a chastity belt. You should watch people try to sit down. It’s comical. Except for the young marrieds who mistakenly think it’ll be romantic, everyone’s groin is on fire at the end of the day. And it’s not lust. A & D ointment is not an aphrodisiac. My labia are too sore for fucking, trust me.”

“But not now,” I say, running my hands from her hips to her breasts and back again.

“No, not now. Right now it feels very, very good.” She has her eyes closed.

“This isn’t going to be a pity fuck, is it?”

“You’re going to drive me away, Ace, you really are. You know that, don’t you?”

“You wouldn’t tell me if you had fucked somebody, though, would you?”

“No, if you must know, I probably wouldn’t. But I don’t see how that matters, seeing as how I haven’t.”

“I found the diaphragm, Dorie. And the nightie you pack in your saddlebag.”

She sits back. “Christ.”

“You want to tell me again you weren’t fucking anybody?”

“I didn’t use them, Em. Not once. Not ever.”

“You’re going to tell me you took them along, neatly sealed in a plastic ziplock by accident?”

“I just wanted to feel like a free agent again, Em. It doesn’t mean anything. Like your dad—he’s probably had the same condom in his wallet since Korea. I packed that stuff because I wanted to feel as though something were possible. I mean, I wasn’t interested in that, not really. But I took it along anyway. Just to feel as though there might be a ‘just in case.’ Now,” she says, undoing her bra and pulling her arms free, “we can either make use of this fine evening or we can call it a night. What do you want?”

In the moonlight and the cold, Dorie’s breasts are magnificent—pendulous, full, the nipples smilingly erect. Patty Duckwa’s breasts had nothing on Dorie Keillor’s, and I am calling to mind an idealized pair of breasts last seen a third of a century ago.

Dorie’s body has a geometry that invites contemplation. I contemplate it for some time, running my fingers over her upraised nipples, over the gooseflesh of her arms and legs and belly. Her body glistens. You can almost see a light steam rising from it into the cold night air. I’m not sure that an act of love in the back of a station wagon is necessarily the best thing for our marriage right at this moment, but I am ready to vote in favor of it, too.

But just as she mounts me and we grunt-groan the success of her landing, I say, “Was there?” and she says, “Was there what?” and I say, “With the diaphragm and the nightie—was there a ‘just in case’?” And she says, “Em, do you really want to know the answer to that?”

“Knowing is better than not knowing,” I say, and she says, “You think so, huh? What if I told you I slipped? I didn’t, but what if I told you that? That early on, when all this started, I made a stupid mistake, something I couldn’t undo, and that you could either forgive and forget about it or let it eat away at our marriage until there’s nothing left? What would you say to that, Em? Is that something you’d really want to know?” She searches my eyes hard right then, as though she’s looking for something in there she really needs to find. “Em,” she says, “you just need to have a little faith.” And then she rises up on me and drops down, then does it again, and soon, despite my doubts, we’re both in a place beyond speech, beyond language, where we both know everything and understand nothing.

Later we lay side by side, spent, heat rising out of our bodies. “That was lovely, Ace, but now I’m freezing.” She sits up, pulls on her sweatshirt and jacket. “Besides, we should get some sleep. Sun’s going to be up in a couple of hours.” We get up. “Will you look at that,” she says, stepping into her underwear. “That’s sort of amazing, isn’t it?”

The skinny black trees, the leaves, every brown blade of marsh grass is filigreed with hoarfrost. The bridge glistens, the trees seem blanketed in a fog of their own frost. Everything is both soft-focus and sharply delineated, white and gray and black, as though etched by both fog and razor blade. Dorie kisses me and gets the rest of her clothes on.

“It is amazing.”

Dorie opens her car door. “You coming?”

“In a minute.”

I watch her beautiful blond head duck inside the Nomad. She turns the ignition, starts the heater. I still have a few swallows of beer left. The sky is getting that grayish light to it that means morning isn’t far away. It was on a night—a morning—like this one a long time ago that Robert Aaron told me Audrey was pregnant. At the time he felt like he had his balls nailed to the wall. Yet he and Audrey have managed, and come this fall their oldest is herself getting married. I think about our parents earlier this evening, our mother ready to send our father’s croquet ball into the outer reaches of the stratosphere, but she gave him a break instead.

I’m not sure who gave who a break tonight. Whatever happened with Dorie while she was not in love with me, whatever she did or wanted to but didn’t do, I will have to let it go. Some things are best left private, Nomi always said, and Dorie, too, is operating under that credo.

What keeps people married? I wonder, my deflated but still happy penis providing, perhaps, the most elemental of answers. Still, there are other reasons. How had our parents managed, particularly once the “you know” cooled between them? It was a mystery to me. Most things are. I walk out to the end of that broken bridge, the concrete greasy with frost. A part of me wants to get back into the Nomad with Dorie and drive all night. Another part of me wants to drive off the bridge.

Could it be as maddeningly simple and complex as this: that love and anger will keep you beside each other, night after night, till the end of your days, provided you’re both willing to keep your mouths shut and to suffer your fate, which is to be alone in unaloneness? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair to either party, does it? But then, who said anything about life being fair to anybody?

The sky now is that yellowy gray of early morning. Back at the car I finish my beer and nestle it with a friendly clink against its brothers in the cooler. I hoist it into the wayback just as Dorie calls over the backseat, “C’mon, Em, your wife is cold and sleepy.” Reason enough, I suppose, to go back home.

Everyone is still alive.

There is more than a little relief in writing that sentence, though its truth, I know, is temporary. The closest we have come in our family—our mother falling down the stairs, our father’s heart attack, Wally Jr.’s accident that left him a cripple—has left us feeling like lightbulbs in a hailstorm. It is that last event, however—or the sequence of events that followed it—that sent our father around the bend.