The Imaginary Burning Car by Jerry Williams

Since we are still huddled together in the toxic shadow of Valentine's Day, I suppose it's appropriate to write about breaking up.  Surely, thousands of VD survivors waited until after the holiday to move all their stuff out of apartments and disappear in U-Hauls; get caught cheating on purpose; send goodbye e-mails (or texts); or, hell, just break up face to face like people did before Nikola Tesla kindled the world's ruin with electricity.  Thus?  In honor of the colors red and gray, let me begin at the end of the middle.

Katarina stood six feet tall in heels, and she always wore heels (flats made her calves hurt).  She had dark brown hair and eyes.  Her broad features were finely sculpted; her skin was the color of cinnamon.  She looked like a statue standing outside the doorway to Desire.  I know that sounds mawkish, but she was Russian.  When we started seeing each other she had just turned thirty-six—exactly twice my age.  The relationship lasted about nine months and remained rocky, twitchy, and sticky pretty much the whole time given that she was married, had two kids, and worked as my direct supervisor at Bank One, where I answered credit card application phone calls for ten hours every Saturday.  Mid-1980s.  Dayton, Ohio.  Again.

At the time, I was ready for anything, mainly because I was lonely.  Most people don't want to know anything about loneliness.  Real discourse on the subject is more taboo than alluding to the specter of nuclear war: Ignore it, and it might go away.  Yet loneliness makes most of our decisions for us.  Bodies collide because of it.  Cable channels propagate because of it.  Pharmaceuticals slide down esophagi when we can't endure another day of it.  Alcohol.  X-Box oblivion.  Gambling.  A rusty knife hacks away at us from the inside, and we surrender to our most meager ambitions.  Anything to deaden the pain.  I'm probably speaking for myself here—because I want to feel better.  And that sole aspiration, in all its casts and configurations, has been, despite what I say or do, the story of my life.

Katarina was up front about everything: I should avoid calling her at home during the evening; no one must know, not even my closest friends; we would see each other on Thursdays at a pre-designated location; my performance at work must not suffer; she didn't want to catch any diseases, so I wouldn't be permitted to have a girlfriend.  It crossed my mind that she'd had affairs before, but I didn't care.  Or at least I thought I didn't care.  I marveled at my becoming as dark and disastrous as all the poets I admired.  And maybe Katarina felt shipwrecked in adulthood or her husband neglected her.  Maybe she wanted to simulate a courtship and recreate the onset of love, something she feared she might never again experience.  Whatever the reason, it was apparent that we'd risen (or sunk) to the same level of incautious need.

We started out meeting at a motel not far from my dormitory at the University of Dayton.  It was cheap, but it wasn't nasty.  The sheets and pillows smelled clean, and a small refrigerator kept our beer and vodka cold.  She paid for the booze, and I paid for the room.  My student loan money had to be good for something.  This became our custom, our ritual, though I couldn't always afford the motel.  Sometimes we went to my mother's government-subsidized apartment in Centerville, if she was sleeping at her boyfriend's, and barricaded ourselves in the extra bedroom.  Being seen as smart and handsome by this educated older woman made me feel like a prospect.  In exchange, I presumed that I injected a sense of yearning and machination into the flagging drama of her life.  Scandling with my boss sparked a tangle of hot crossed wires.  Not falling in love seemed petty.

For the record, I never once laid eyes on her husband, and she rarely spoke of him.  I can't even remember his name.  I do recall that he worked as an engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which doubtlessly made him, politically, a hawk.  As a result, I experienced less remorse.  Besides, Katarina had kept up with her wifely duties, although she insisted she couldn't come when they slept together.  Thankfully, reflections of the two of them in their marriage bed never flooded my mind when I sat down to study or write the occasional poem.  The husband was a given, a fact of life.  Every older woman seemed to have one.  In this way, I maintained a certain distance.  I can't say I felt like a victim any more than I can say I felt like an interloper.  These days, however, I could never imagine entering into such a deceitful situation.  Lying is a dissociative art.  The act debases one's sense of identity, which is already precarious enough.

By and by, the isolation inherent in an adulterous relationship took its toll on me, and I began to retreat.  I stopped abandoning my own routine whenever Katarina wanted to see me.  Visits to the motel dropped off.  I waited longer and longer to return her phone calls.  When we did get together, we usually had lunch at some monotonous restaurant, and she would gaze at me with this sad look in her eyes, as if I were dying of cancer or going off to war.  I started missing work and she let it slide.

The summer before my sophomore year, I decided to buy a car.  I hadn't really minded walking, taking the bus, or borrowing my mother's Pontiac Le Mans.  Then I realized that without a set of wheels I might as well be incarcerated.  Katarina seemed impressed by my sudden desire for ownership, and though I knew we weren't going to stay together much longer, I still wanted to please her.  But I didn't have a great deal of money to spend.  Maybe I could afford some rusted-out piece of junk.  Coincidentally, her father had driven down from Nebraska in a 1965 Dodge Dart he'd wanted to sell for the past several months.  On the telephone one Thursday afternoon, she told me the vehicle was in good shape, no serious body damage, and obviously it ran well if her father had driven all the way from Nebraska.

"How much does he want for it?" I said.

"Three-hundred dollars," she replied.

"What's the catch?"

"His dog has been sleeping in the back seat.  The upholstery isn't perfect."

"How bad can it be?" I said hopefully.

She assured me that her husband wouldn't get home from work until at least six o'clock, so I withdrew three-hundred dollars from my bank account and took bus D14 out to their place in Kettering, yet another suburb of Dayton.  But for the driver and a blind man I'd seen around town asking everyone if he could touch their face, I was the only person on the entire bus.  I sat in the very back seat, just like in grade school, and peered out the window at an absolutely unprepossessing city.  The bus dropped me off about a mile from my destination, and I walked down a brand new, tree-lined street.  I was sweating when I reached Katarina's driveway and saw her sitting on the front steps of the red brick, two-story house she'd described on the phone.

Her father stood near the Dodge Dart sedan, smoking an unfiltered cigarette and mumbling to himself in Russian.  Katarina jumped to her feet and headed me off before I could introduce myself.  She said something to him in Russian that I couldn't translate; he held out his gnarled hand, and I shook it.  I had heard that he'd served in the Red Army during World War II and that he still drank a quart of vodka every day and sometimes stepped out on his wife.  His ferocious green eyes told the whole story.  Unedited and unrepentant.

"Drive!" he barked, and Katarina wrenched the keys from her jeans pocket and tossed them to me.

"We'll just go around the block," she said.

When the two of us got into the car, leaving her father standing near the garage, I quickly acclimated to the various knobs and pedals so I wouldn't look like a neophyte in front of the Russians.  I started the engine and smiled at the antique rumble, inched out of the driveway, and coasted up the street toward the nearest stop sign.  It was really a nice old car.  Big steering wheel.  No blinking red gas tank and seat belt guy on the instrument panel.  In spraying Lysol everywhere and covering the back seat with a blanket, Katarina had done an excellent job of masking the dog smell.  By the time I made the first turn, I'd already decided to purchase the vehicle.

"When I was eighteen," she interjected, "I used to take this out on the weekends in Chicago."  She seemed so happy that I would consider buying her father's car.  I couldn't help getting swept up in the rejuvenating excitement, despite the truth about our age difference having accessed my heart.  I felt guilty—like the man who ditches his fiancé after she gets disfigured in an automobile accident. 

As we rounded the final corner, she told me to stop by the side of the road, and I complied, though I didn't kill the engine.  She pulled a black and white photograph out of her back pocket and handed it to me.  "That's a picture of me taken around the time you were born," she said.  I stared at the picture and struggled to hide my astonishment.  She looked excruciatingly beautiful.  She had on a striped tank top that accentuated her breasts, and she was wearing sunglasses.  Immediately, I yearned for the untarnished, unmarried Katarina, though I knew the woman in the photograph would never have been attracted to me, would never have loved me, under any circumstances.  Sensing my reaction, she yanked the evidence out of my hand with a comic flourish and slipped it back in her pocket.

"So what do you think?" she said.

"Of the picture?"

"No, the car," she said impatiently.

"Well, I guess I'll take it," I said, and she smiled broadly.  She might even have clapped her hands together.

The old man was loitering in the middle of the driveway, so I parked along the curb in front of the house.  After Katarina located the title in the glove compartment, we climbed out of the car.  Her father walked over and squinted at me until I reached for my wallet and ceremoniously passed him three large bills, which he handled a little too carefully with his tawny fingertips.  He nodded and then sidled up next to the sedan, whispered something in its ear, and shuffled silently back to the house.

"He's had that car since it was new," Katarina lamented.

Without a kiss goodbye, I drove away in my jet-black Dodge Dart, cruised up Far Hills, and took a right on Stewart.  The sky had faded to a very light, Midwestern gray, the color of an abraded fifty-cent piece.  As I drifted down a narrow side street toward campus, I brushed my hands over the steering wheel, thinking I should buy one of those leather racing grips you can find on sale at K-Mart.  The steering wheel's original plastic finish had begun to crack.  I remember considering these particulars when I noticed the smell.  At first, I assumed the musty blanket had reacted with the aerosol spray to generate an old unabridged dictionary bouquet.  But the smell kept getting worse and worse.  Defeated little Lysol soldiers lay dead and desecrated on the olfactory field of battle.  I cranked down the window a few turns, and then I cranked it down a few more.  I scrunched my nose and breathed through my mouth to fend off what had become a full-scale stench.  Unbearable.

When I finally arrived at the dormitory parking lot, I jumped out of the car and stood for a moment.  Then I walked around to the passenger's side door.  I grabbed the handle and flung the door open and the odor hit me even harder—like a backed-up Kentucky outhouse on the hottest day of summer.  I tore the blanket off the back seat, and what I saw I never want to see again.  The vinyl stitching had rotted away, and the metal innards, the coils, were strung with about ten-thousand yards of filthy dog hair.  Katarina had ventured to clean up a lot of the actual dog feces, but she couldn't reach all of it.  The animal had obviously been living in the vehicle, not just sleeping in the back during road trips.  I started to gag, so I shut the door and staggered to my room.

 Inwardly, I knew my relationship with Katarina dangled at the end of a rope made of dog hair.  I had to call and confront her about the sedan and ask for my money back.  We broke up right after she delivered an agonizing sermon on the irresponsibility of youth and fired me on behalf of Bank One.  As an impulsive juvenile, I believed that love should end with an exclamation point instead of an ellipsis, especially if I felt wounded or perplexed.  I wanted to leave a burning car in her driveway, but I refrained.  I simply exchanged the Dodge Dart for a check, signed by her husband, and moved on to the next transitory misadventure.  Still, a burning car.  That would have lasted forever.

Comments

[Tony Chaney]

Bravo, Jerry! I could easily and viscerally imagine every bit of it; I could even feel the Slavic bite of her homeland's desperate temperatures. As you know, we have a lot in common.

[saint nobody]

jeezus, jerry. are you on sabbatical or something? how can anyone write like this while they are teaching? i feel like a slacker. this is really gorgeous, wrenching, all that. i assume this will be in your memoir. it must be.

[Jerry]

why thank you, amy. i'm not on sabbatical or something. my clone is just cranking away while i watch the incredible mr. limpet.

[Jerry]

thanks so much, paintless. every comment means so much to me, given this is my first venture into the blogosphere.

[Evelyn Wangari]

Phukes! I could imagine every bit of it...

[uzmasurwat]

You would profit from reading Emerson's essays -- and taking "Self-Reliance" to heart.