Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

The night did not frighten him at all. As he drove into the rain, smiling and squinting through the blurred windshield, he felt in complete control of the vehicle. He felt as if he were starting a great adventure, a lively and interesting journey, at the end of which he would be rewarded for his courage and tenacity. Courageously, tenaciously, he tried to see the road, his foot on the accelerator, pushing the Dodge through the storm. He thought of how childishly naïve Altar’s concept of marriage was, wondered how fast the winds outside were, wondered if Maggie had left the house yet. And beneath all his idle thoughts, like a tingling undercurrent of anticipation, he had a sense of something about to happen. The windshield was dissolving before his eyes and he could barely see the road. He could feel the buffeting wind and water wrenching at each straining joint of the automobile, but he felt safely encased in a strong metal cocoon.

He supposed it was only the storm and the egotistical idea of puny man pitting himself against mighty nature; just that coupled with the feeling of aloneness as he pushed through the night, and yet he couldn’t shake the persistent feeling that he was on the verge of a magnificent realization. He drove hunched over the wheel, fully expecting a sudden illuminating light to burst into the automobile, exploding in incandescent brilliance around him, a roman candle of truth and revelation. He wondered about sudden truth, rejecting it as a stylized concept for the practitioners of Altar’s art. There was no such thing as sudden truth. Verity simply piled upon verity to form one day a shining edifice which only seemed to have materialized suddenly out of thin air. And yet, even rejecting it, he felt as if he were about to touch sudden truth, felt as if he would soon be able to see clearly through the raging storm, see through it into the core of life, and beyond that to death, and into eternity, and into the very soul itself.

He felt the way he’d felt in Puerto Rico, watching the funeral procession.

And suddenly he began to tremble.

His mind seemed crystal clear, brimming with thoughts, flooding with solutions. His mind grabbed for the scattered glittering pieces, clicking them into place until he thought he would burst with the sheer thrill of near-revelation. With luminous clarity, he could remember the first time he saw Maggie and everything that had followed afterward, the meeting of two strangers, the clasping of alien hands. With persistent logic, he wondered why they had reached for each other? What in him had not been satisfied? What in him and the thousands of others who broke the marriage contract caused the unrest? Was it the struggle for Altar’s prize, for success, for beauty in a world grown suddenly too complex for a simple animal?

Hadn’t his yielding to desire been a simple rebellion, a basic retrogression to something clearly understood in a world of incomprehensible things and ideas? Hadn’t the sex been a sure thing in a world of uncertainties? An accomplishment in a world of unrealized dreams and frustrated goals? Wasn’t that why he’d sought Maggie and found her?

He laughed aloud at the storm, feeling free all at once, hurtling free and unfettered into the raging teeth of the shrieking monster outside, routing the beast, pointing the nose of the car into the blackness and the rain and the howling winds as the windshield melted in pinpoint oozing blobs of red and green and yellow and white.

Then was there no such thing as love? Was love just another label? Was the whole world and everything in it a giant fabrication, a push-button front, a fakery for fakes? His mind veered from the thought because he was seeing now with penetrating logic, and he would not accept the pessimistic glibness of the idea, would not allow himself to fall into the facile trap of false acceptance, not when truth was piled in glittering heaps of golden coins at his feet. Not when he could pick up truth and let it spill through his fingers in cascades of dazzling revealed splendor. Of course there was love! Maybe romance was a fake, but love was as real as breathing, and what he knew with Maggie was love.

Again his mind backed away, refusing to accept any pat statement in the shining revelation of truth, asking the question: Or is it romance? and then rushing headlong with the question, allowing it to produce the next inescapable query: Isn’t this the same romance I knew with Eve? Hadn’t it been this way for us when we were still kids discovering each other? Yes! Yes! But I do love Maggie, I know I love Maggie; still the admission had to be made, and it followed unchecked: his love for Maggie was a thing sheltered and protected by the adolescent concept of romance. He had turned back to a juvenile belief, clutching for the glamour and the excitement — and he knew why. As the car hurtled through the night, he knew why. He’d grabbed for the glitter and the tinsel because the reality was too damned painful and too damned complex. But what had he found, and why was he still looking?

In the tunnel of wind and rain he wondered if you ever stopped looking, if you ever really discovered yourself in all the noise and all the confusion and all the speed, or did you keep looking for the rest of your life? And another truth rolled down upon him in overwhelming certainty, and he knew you didn’t find yourself by going back to seventeen. Maybe you looked until you were dead and buried, but there was no going back.

He realized now the fallacy of his reaction to the funeral procession in Vega Alta. He had been watching the drama of life and death that day. He had placed himself in the supported coffin and watched it going down the street, knowing it would be out of sight soon, knowing that his own life was moving forward unrealized, unfound, and that someday he would be buried. Soon, soon! And facing the utter finality of death, he had wanted to reach out for life, to hold it close in an embrace, stop the steady advance of life which was rushing him unfulfilled to the grave. He had wanted to turn back time, stop the insidious clocks, find himself before it was too late.

He had found Maggie Gault instead.

And the Signora had said it at a party in February, when he’d been too drunk to understand her. The Signora had said, “Margaret Gault isn’t the pot of gold.”

Now, as the lights of the bridge appeared blurringly in the distance, as the hurricane Felicia grasped at the car with undiminished fury, he thought, No, Maggie isn’t the pot of gold. I love her but she isn’t the pot of gold and maybe there isn’t any pot of gold at all. Maybe you never find it, or maybe you always keep looking for it, but one thing’s certain. You’ll never find it if you go back over ground you’ve already searched. I know for sure I’ll never find it this way. I love you, Maggie, he thought, but I know for sure.

That was the sparkling, shimmering moment of golden truth, and he nodded his head and thought, I’m going home to Eve.

The approach to the bridge was ahead. Through the blurred windshield, he could see the approach on his left and the curving ramp ascending in a high sweep above the storm. And straight ahead was the road which led back to Eve, the road to Manhattan’s cross streets. The white sign appeared suddenly in the storm, its black lettering swept relentlessly by the wind and rain: LAST EXIT BEFORE BRIDGE.

I’m going home to Eve, he thought.

And he pressed his foot to the accelerator with new determination, and he nodded again because truth had come to him at last.

“I’m going home to Eve!” he said aloud in the stillness of the car.

Last exit , the sign read. Pained, he saw the sign fall away on his right. Powerless to stop himself, he swung the car to the left, onto the ramp leading to the bridge and Maggie. The decision arrived at in pain, discarded now with pain, he drove onto the ramp decisionless, unable to stop, captured in the car as it mounted the wide, ascending curve of concrete. Last exit , the sign had read, but seeing the exit he had ignored it, had instead succumbed, powerless to something within him which was incapable of committing the final act of severance. He could not cut Maggie out of his life, could not leave a part of him bleeding and raw on the pavement. He knew then that truth could descend in lightning bolts, shower purging sparks upon him, and he would still be helpless to break whatever held him to her.