The car lumped up and then down and Bennett kept going.
“Bennett —” she said.
Because something in the motion of the car going over the carpet, the lifting and descending of the wheels, the unexpected resistance, the carpet being more solid than she’d expected — this troubled her, she felt a tickling in her lower gut.
“Shouldn’t we —”
“No,” Bennett replied simply. He was hunched like a bear, both hands on the steering wheel.
He should though. He should stop, he should just check. She looked over at him, his gaze was straight ahead. Maybe she should insist, but how? Her voice would be strong and shrill in the dark car — her voice would be loud. Already they were moving away, they were scrolling forward through time, and the distance and the minutes made her doubt herself, so she listened to the scratchy groove of Steely Dan and she handed Bennett his smoke and she sipped the Bordeaux. Any Major Dude Will Tell You. Further and further on, the road rolled them casually homeward. If she’d checked her watch she’d have known only five minutes had passed. Her emotions were like a tide turning slowly and gently out on the reef, her agitation ebbing as the stronger conviction rolled neatly in: it was only a piece of carpet, of course it was, if there was any chance, any chance at all, that it wasn’t, Bennett would have stopped, he was 38, he knew things, he knew how to navigate the Metro in Paris, the autobahn in Germany.
“Did I tell you about the time I got drunk with Truman Capote?” Bennett began. He and Capote had been the only ones in first class on a flight from London to Helsinki. Capote, wearing a large coat and long red scarf, had taken a shine to Bennett, slim and young in tight jeans and a tee-shirt — “Oh, I was pretty back then” — on his way to visit an Oxford classmate who happened to be Finnish royalty. They’d had a layover in Berlin and the stewardesses all disappeared. “Let’s go and get a drink,” Capote commanded, even though they were both already quite drunk. He and Bennett trotted down the metal stairs and onto the tarmac, no one seemed to notice them. They saw a bar on the other side of a chainlink fence, lit up “like Jesus in the manger,” Capote said. When they climbed the fence, Truman’s scarf got caught and he was almost strangled. He was hung there like a fat fly in a web and Bennett had just managed to set him free when airport security arrived. But because they were first class passengers, no one said anything, just ushered them back on the plane and a crew of fresh stewardesses brought them champagne.
Back at the boathouse, Bennett fell asleep cocooning Rosie’s body, his semi hard-on pressing leisurely against her lower back. They had not yet used the word love, but surely she did love him. He filled up the lonely places of her life, the empty Sunday mornings, the yearning Saturday nights; he filled the hollows of her childhood and made her grown-up. Every day she was with him was one more away from her grandmother and the Sunday-brown house in Lowell. He was her direction into the world. His un-shaven chin grazed her shoulder. Again, she felt the car jolt over the carpet, the single headlight rise and dip then flatten out again. Yet, it was nothing more than the flickering of an old film, and though she wondered briefly about the package on the back seat, she fell asleep.
Bennett woke her with sleepy sex in the morning. He had this amazing technique which always made her come moments before he did. He liked to watch her roil under him and then pound into her. The light from the sea glittered on the ceiling above them and she could hear the water gently lapping. He rolled over and lit his first cigarette of the day and the smell of the tobacco layered with salt and seaweed. On this particular morning, there was also the scent of cut grass, as the gardener was again mowing the vast lawn, the burr of the machine entering her consciousness from the obscure shed near the greenhouses where such implements were kept and perhaps where the gardener even lived. She had never seen the gardener close up, she had never seen the owners of the main house — Bennett told her they were away in Lake Comma, Italy. Every day, people came and went from their house, delivering, cleaning, repairing. “Tradesmen.”
“We have to go into town,” he said, even though it was barely seven and he seldom used the imperative. She flung her arm over him, made a sulky face, “Want to stay in bed all day.”
He rose up and away from her in one move so that she was tossed aside like a small boat in his wake. “Get up,” he said and she was a child.
They drove down from Sasco Hill to the scrubbier end of Fairfield, where buildings were squat and square and telephone and electricity wires crisscrossed the streets. Edges were hard and sharp or prickly with antennae, and the road tar was already softening and off-gassing. The air was gooey with heat, it felt not like air but cake batter. Carly Simon took the place of conversation, a relief to Rosie, because when Bennett entered these moods he did not want her bright, inane chatter, he did not want her voice at all. Her voice seemed to hurt him. She was glad of the practice she had of silence, the years and years of not bothering Gran. The Carly Simon cassette was a live recording Bennett had made on Martha’s Vineyard a few years ago, and it was gritty and uneven, people could be heard coughing and chatting. Carly and James — James Taylor — had an impromptu gig one night at a bar on the island and Bennett had been there. He used to sail with James.
Bennett pulled into Jiffy’s Wash n’ Wax, which had just opened for the day. A thin dark-skinned man — Jiffy himself? — was checking the three giant vacuums that squatted together along the far edge of the lot. Bennett drove past these, lined himself up for the wash on the designated track. The car didn’t seem dirty. And yet Rosie sensed urgency, Bennett tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, and not in time to the music.
When Jiffy came to the window, Bennett slapped a twenty in his palm, “Hey, man, the super wash, please. And if you can really get under it, I’d appreciate it.”
The tracks pulled the BMW into the flailing octopus arms at the entrance. The rubbery strips slapped and flapped against the car, over the windows and roof and Rosie felt a moment’s intense panic of claustrophobia. She might be entering a horror movie or an episode of The Twilight Zone and something terrible and quick was waiting for her in the dark. A dead, run-over zombie-man perhaps. Jets of water now shot at the car, and soap blubbed over the windscreen. She stayed still and silent, Carly could not be heard, only roaring, whooshing. Bennett lit up a cigarette and the smoke, trapped inside, pricked her eyes. She gripped the seat.
Why are we here, she wanted to ask him.
She knew the answer but then she didn’t, didn’t know anything, the drop was precipitous, a ride at the fair without any safety harness. What might there be under the car? If it hadn’t been a carpet. What needed to be washed off? Because if she was going to ask questions, she must be prepared for the answers. About what might have become lodged in the wheels or various joints and axle-whatevers underneath.
However. However like a foothold, a handhold, a hand up and out, so she gripped fast to the however: many things, other than carpets, might find themselves in the middle of the road at night. A deer, hit by a previous car. A duffle bag someone had accidentally left on top of their car as they’d driven off. Cushions, part of a sofa, a small mattress. Plenty of things were soft, yet not squishy, things with an internal integrity. How accurately her memory retained the sensation.