William pulled the car into the road again.
I thought about this, and it seemed to me that as soon as I got into Mrs. Nash’s car that day, such happiness had overtaken me. “Oh Pillie,” I said quietly.
But William said no more.
* * *
And then William began to close down. I watched this happen. His face—it is odd—it is almost like his face remains but everything behind it retreats. You can see him going away, is what I mean. And his face got like that as we drove.
I said at one point, mostly to make conversation, “Ours is a very American story.” William said, “Why,” and I said, “Because our fathers were fighting on opposite sides of the war and your mother came from poverty and so did I, and look at us, we’re both living in New York and we’ve both been successful.”
And William said, without looking at me—he said this immediately—“Well, that’s called the American dream. Think of all the American dreams that weren’t lived. Think of that veteran with his car of trash we saw the first morning we were here.”
I looked out my side window. Then I realized that the man standing in front of his house on Dixie Road looking at us with such fury was old enough that he could have been a veteran of the Vietnam War, maybe that was his story. I have told you before how I barely knew about the Vietnam War; we were so isolated as I grew up, and I was just young enough to not know anyone who was in it. But when I went to college and met William this changed, and I said, now, “You were so lucky about Vietnam, William. To get such a good draft number. Think how different your life might have been.”
“I’ve thought about that my entire life,” William said. And then he said no more.
* * *
—
It came to me then that I had possibly taken something from William by being the one to go in and see Lois Bubar. That had I just waited a few moments and thought it through, and had him come with me, she might have been just as pleasant to him as she was to me. This thought bothered me as I watched William driving with his face closed down. I thought how the first thing he had said was: “Does she want to see me?”
And I had had to tell him no. And his face, that slight bafflement that crosses it sometimes. I thought: Here is one more woman—in his mind—who has rejected him. And I thought once more of the nursery school teacher who had never picked him up again after having made him feel so special. And then I thought that maybe he had been sent to the nursery school because his mother had told his father about the baby and their marriage had trouble in it, and maybe Catherine had not been really capable of caring for him at that time. This made some sense to me.
* * *
—
So I said to him, “William, I’m sorry I just ran out of the car and was the one who got to see her. I should have had you come with me, I just ran right out—”
He glanced over at me and said, “Oh Lucy, who cares. Seriously. Who cares that I didn’t see her. I was scared and you were trying to help.” After another minute he added, “I wouldn’t worry about that. Sheesh.”
But his face remained the same.
* * *
We pulled into the airport parking lot, such a huge and empty parking lot. It took us a few turns to figure out where to drop the car off, even in all that emptiness, and we got out our suitcases and headed inside the airport. It was even—to my mind—stranger than it had been the night we flew in. It was small. But it was foreign, this is what I thought as we went into it. There was no place in it to get anything to eat. It was midafternoon.
As we walked through the airport—we had not yet gone through security—William said, “You know, Lucy, I need to just go walk for a bit.” And I looked at him and said, “Okay, do you want company?” And he shook his head. “Leave your suitcase with me,” I said.
But I was hungry and there was no place in the airport to get food, so I went—with both our suitcases—back over the little bridge to the airport hotel and I walked through the double doors and saw right away that their restaurant was closed. Open at 5:00, a sign said. I gave a huge sigh and turned around to head back, and I thought to myself: When does anybody in this state eat? And just as I thought that I saw the fattest man I have ever seen. He was coming through the double doors that I had just come through, and he had pushed one of them open but this was not enough space for him to get through. He did not seem old; he may have been thirty, I do not know. But his pants went out on the sides of him like a ship almost, and his face was buried into itself. I let go of one of the suitcases and I pulled the other door open for him and he smiled in a way that seemed to me to be ashamed, and I said, “There you go,” and he said “Thanks” with a kind of shy smile and he went up to the front desk in the lobby.