turns to look at me.
I glare fixedly at her, screwing up my face with as much contempt as I can muster.
She opens the car door and steps outside. When she closes the door, I gun the engine and, in one swift move, throw the gearshift into reverse and back the car in a semi-circle as the gears whine in protest. I jam the floor shift into first and speed away down the dirt lane in a cloud of dust.
For a moment I’m Steve McQueen in the classic film
Bullitt
, racing my souped-up Mustang over the hilly streets of San Francisco, as I press my Mazda up curvy Mt. Helix Drive. Several times I almost run my car off the road, or so I construe it as such. At the top of the mountain I stomp on the brake pedal and with tires screeching the car jerks to a stop. I jump out and run up the steps of the nature theater to the summit, to the stone retaining wall near the towering white cross.
I spring to the top of the wall, where one can look down on a vast pulsating blaze of lights, quivering like diamonds in the dark. After thinly considering a plunge to my death on the rocks below, I scream obscenities at the moon to ease the torment that gnaws at my heart like a large, furry rat.
But the wind seems to say to me: “What is the use of suffering, when there is no remedy, no cure for love?” Before long I feel foolish, and I walk slowly, dejectedly back to the car. I’ve fought with Liz before, I tell myself, although not over anything this serious. Perhaps, in time, I will find a way to forgive her. I need her.
I drive leadenly down Mt. Helix Drive and turn my Mazda onto the dirt lane. Liz is walking determinably down the road with hands on hips, a cartoon of the stern wife. I stop the car, and she marches by. I shift into reverse and drive slowly alongside her, bringing the car to a stop again. She opens the door and sits down lightly.
Neither of us utter a word for several minutes. The silence feels oppressive. Finally, we arrive at her parents’ wide-berthed trailer in the Valley.
Liz climbs out of the car. She turns and gives me a sweet look of disappointment. “In eight short months you’ll be eighteen, an adult, Daniel Isaac Rosen.” Then she adds disdainfully, “But you’re still just a baby. Growing up is a virtue, and it costs a lot. I can’t help. You’ll have to do it yourself.”
Before I can reply (I don’t know what I would say) Liz shuts the car door and comes around to the driver’s side. I roll down the window and listen.
“When you start to believe in yourself, to feel something other than self-pity, come see me.” She runs up the front steps of her trailer and disappears.
I sit still for a moment, like a forgotten Buddha statue. I suppose, I am thinking, that Liz and I have been subtly slashing at each other for some time. Now she’s decamped a second time, and the possibility I might never see her again seems real.
As I drive along Main Street, towards my motel, Haydn’s “Piano Sonata in E Flat” plays on the car radio. The music is like a warm summer downpour on my brain. I feel lost without my secret sharer, Liz Santini.
I tilt the rearview mirror downward so I can see myself. My eyes are wily, and for a moment I get the sense that I’m gazing at a stranger who mimics me, taunts me with the knowledge of a preposterous joke. My muscles tense until my breathing grows shallow and my sorrow transforms itself into a frozen, cursed smile. The image somehow informs me that for years, beginning with the onset of puberty, I’ve turned my eyes inward, watching and scrutinizing every aspect of my behavior. I’ve generated a tormenting self-consciousness that paralyzes me, gives me a feeling of unreality, an all-pervasive sense of not quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in.
I lost my genuine self in early adolescence. The realization evokes in me a terrible sadness. But Liz is right, I cannot cry. I can’t shed a tear over her betrayal, or the congressman’s iniquities, or this
Dick Lochte, Christopher Darden