There was a town in the short story. I should have mentioned that earlier. There was a town in the short story. Or there were towns, many of them. In the story, a man leaves his wife. He drives down the Maine coast. He reaches a town. He calls another woman from a pay phone. He tells her that he’s left his wife to be with her. She tells him she won’t leave her husband. He hangs up. He gets back in his car. Not his car. His truck. He keeps driving. There is a second town. The pattern repeats itself. In each town, there is a different woman. Each woman, despite the promises it is implied she has made, refuses to leave her husband. He drives down the Eastern Seaboard. He drives across the South. He drives up through the Plains states and west through the Rockies. In each town he is rejected. He does not stop to sleep or to eat or to take a shit, or if he does, the jeans-wearing author will not speak of it. At last he lands in a town in California. The town whose name I now, drinking, dozing, remembered. He makes a call, finds that the number has been disconnected. The story ends there, but I always imagined him staying. How can he leave? He has run out of road.
The reader senses that the man’s promiscuity, his faithlessness, is to blame for his being repeatedly rejected. But this sense is overridden, and deliberately, by the anger the reader also feels toward the women he has called. He has driven so far. He’s been driving for days. Can one of these women not offer him a meal, a bed, the comforts of her flesh, if only for one night? I read once that violence onscreen, even if it is designed to appall, argues, inevitably, for itself. That the viewer is always inherently intrigued and therefore aroused by it. That the visual fact of violence is titillating, even if the intent is to disgust. And so one feels not disgust but pity for the lone driver. The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.
Did I imagine myself as the lone driver, making a life for myself in a town full of strangers? Yes I did. Pay attention to enough men and you will begin to think of yourself as one. You will think of this as an improvement over fantasizing about being mistreated by one and you will, probably, be right. I mean, also the bourbon helped. So I put a down payment on a house and my son and I moved out of the apartment in Fresno and into the house I had bought and then, sometime after, I quit drinking, a process that involved dropping my son off at my parents’ house and checking myself into a rehab facility my parents had paid for and my parents also, for a time, paying the mortgage on the house I had bought, so that when I left rehab, though I refused to attend meetings of any kind, found the idea of sharing, of a higher power, of making amends, repulsive, I nevertheless remained sober because I had discovered it was the only way I could prevent my parents from helping me financially in any way. By prevent I mean avoid the necessity of. Pride kept me sober. Also anger, also stubbornness. Worth mentioning, too, that getting sober also helped me realize the mistake I had made, looking at a dusty, deserted, racially segregated, economically deprived town and seeing quaint, and here, too, it was pride and anger and stubbornness that kept me from admitting I’d been very drunk and very wrong, pride and anger and stubbornness that kept me from selling the house. Also, realistically, no one would have bought it. With the minuscule down payment that I had scraped together, no surprise that the place was a dump.
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When I reached the home I am still now, without my parents’ help, paying off, only one light was on. I had made improvements to the house since purchasing it, since sobering up, but this is not the kind of narrative in which I now detail those improvements and extol the redemptive power of physical labor, though I do in fact believe in said redemptive power, as I believe in the redemptive power of almost anything that is unpleasant and/or difficult. Anyway. Just, the house was nicer. That’s the important part.
It was nine o’clock and my son had been, if the sitter had followed my instructions, which she always does, asleep for an hour. The sitter is my age, a fact about which I feel some guilt. Or, she is the age I still usually imagine myself to be. In fact she is roughly a decade younger. She dropped out of college to care for her parents, who contracted, within the span of several months, two different but equally rare cancers. When chemo and radiation failed, when it became clear that surgery would do more harm than good, she came home and set them up in twin hospital beds in the living room of her childhood home and cared for them. Sometimes she tells me stories about the last few months of their lives, stories I enjoy not because they are affecting but because they are gruesome. Not affecting, well, not affecting for me.
When I entered my house, the sitter was on the couch, looking at her phone.
“Hey,” I said.
“Oh.” She turned. “Hey, you’re back. How’s your mom?”
“Fine. How were things here?”
She shrugged. “Fine. Had a little trouble getting him to bed. He wanted a second story, and then a third.” She rolled her eyes, smiled. “Nothing unusual.”
“Well,” I said. “Thank you.” I paused. “I know he really likes you,” I said. Though she had been my sitter at this point already for many months, and though she had told me about rubbing lotion into the cracked skin of her father’s feet, cutting his hard and yellowed toenails, holding her mother over the toilet and wiping her ass, running a sponge under her arms and between her legs, I still felt, still feel, in her presence, a profound awkwardness. As if she might at any moment decide—not to quit but to humiliate me. I don’t keep a journal but I sometimes felt, sometimes feel, in her presence, as if I do, and have forgotten, and that she’s read it, and is about to post its contents on her blog. This is my standard reaction to the fact of a slowly growing—as opposed to an immediate and overwhelming—intimacy. My therapist—I don’t work the steps, but I lost the argument with myself on therapy—says understanding the problem is the first step to fixing it and I agree, only I’m not sure whether I care to take any further action. And yes I know no one keeps blogs anymore.
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The babysitter and I talked for a while, first about my mother and then about hers, about her mother’s depression, untreated, and it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that in addition to the anxiety I experience when threatened with intimacy per se, in the babysitter’s case the fear that her past seemed likely to be my future—my parents are aging; I am an only child; there is no money for nursing homes—might also be a contributing factor. My therapist would have wanted me to share this fear, would have urged me to in this way make myself vulnerable, might even have suggested that I ask the babysitter about the fears she herself had experienced when she’d learned of her parents’ diagnoses, when she’d understood that the next months, the next years of her life would have to be devoted to caring for them. But I was not then, am not now, so evolved. I asked my babysitter how much I owed her and I wrote her a check and I said, as she shouldered her backpack and moved toward the door, “See you Monday.”