unspecified steaming goodness. Salty,
crunchy objects littered over wet
mounds of something achingly deli-
cious, with sauce, with sauce, with sauce.
Polenta with stinking Gorgonzola,
maybe, and a fork-tender bone of meat
from some brave animal. A shank, a
leg, a neck, cooked for four years in a
thick mixture of wines. With tall drinks
that fizz a little and quiet down one’s
noisy little brain, or perhaps even a
warm cloudy drink you pour directly
into your eyes. James seems to register
my reverie and insists again that we
keep driving. Have to have to have to.
He slaps the steering wheel. “That’s
why we bought chips!” he cries, trying
perhaps to sound like a real human
being who feels enthusiasm. It’s sort
of awkward. “We have chips,” he says
more quietly. “If we stop now we’re
goners.”
“It’s just that it’s already kind of late,
and I’m pretty hungry,” I tell him.
“What are you saying?”
“That it’s late and I’m hungry?”
“If you’re not prepared to ofer a
solution then maybe you should not
speak.”
Well, it’s an interesting rule, and I
do enjoy constraints around what can
and cannot be said. The deepest kind
of etiquette. But if you applied such
a standard to everyone, there’d be very
little speech. The world would un-
dergo a near-total vow of silence. Per-
haps that would be a desired outcome.
Perhaps a special island could be set
aside for the solution-profering peo-
ple, who would slowly drive one an-
other to murder.
“O.K., sure, I will restrict myself to
a solution-based language. Here’s a
solution: let’s go to a restaurant. That
would solve so many problems. The
problem of hunger, the problem of ex-
haustion, the problem of claustropho-
bia in this goddam coin, and the very
real threat of escalating discord be-
tween driver and passenger.”
“Go to a restaurant, and then what?
Eating will make us tired. Where will
we sleep? I hate being the only one
who thinks about these things.”
“Oh, is it not fair?” I say. And I will
admit that my voice dips into a pout
here.
“That’s right,” James says. “It’s not
fair. I didn’t want to put it that way.”
“Because it makes you sound like a
sad baby?”
“You’re the one who said it. You said
it. How does it make me sound like
anything?”
“Yes, let the record show that I
controlled your words and rendered
you helpless and unaccountable. I am
all-powerful.”
James is quiet for a while. The rain
is thundering down on us. The wip-
ers are going so fast across the wind-
shield it seems they might fly of the
car. When Exit 49 suddenly appears,
James veers cautiously down the ramp
and pulls the car over in the grass of
an intersection.
“The record won’t show anything,
Alice, because there is no record. It’s
just us. I’m worried about getting stuckout here. That’s all this day has been
about. I’m trying to get us somewhere
so that we can get a room and then we
can worry about everything else after
that. Could we maybe fight later, when
we get home?”
“Oh, I’d like that.”
“I mean, I don’t really feel well, and
the fighting is not helping.”
I look at him. So much of our rela-
tionship depends on him being alive.
Almost all of it.
“Darling,” I say. “Let’s just go sit and
eat and relax for a minute. We can still
drive after that. We just have to get out
of this rain for a minute. And, after
dinner, I’m driving. No arguments.”
We find the restaurant and get a
table near the fireplace, which turns
out to be just a storage nook for old••