He drove past Molly Brannigan’s on State, but Laraine’s white Maxima was not visible anywhere. A car that looked like hers was parked outside the Firehouse on Old French Road, but the number on the license plate was wrong. He continued winding his way through town, following the worn path to Laraine’s favorite nightspots. The car responded as if on autopilot. He set his brain on low idle, tried not to envision anything unpleasant, tried not to imagine the inevitable.
On East Eighteenth Street, just a block from the little theater he and Laraine used to frequent during the first five years of their marriage, the only good years among the past eighteen, he parked facing west, as far from the nearest streetlamp as possible yet within sight of the white Maxima across the street in the Holiday Inn’s elevated lot. She could have parked less conspicuously, he told himself, could have hidden her vehicle from view, but she never did. He acknowledged this fact but chose not to ponder it. Pondering was best reserved for the daylight hours. Too much cerebration at night could lead to harder drugs.
He watched her car and tried not to think about her in the hotel bar, waiting for some man to buy her a drink. Or maybe no longer waiting. Either thought was not a healthy one. So he thought instead about the little studio theater nearby. He wondered if it was still operational. He and Laraine had attended a lot of plays there, had spent many pleasant hours in that small, dark room. Coyote Ugly had been the first one. He smiled when he remembered how shocked Laraine had been when, in the second act, the lead actress walked onstage completely naked.
How quickly things change, he thought.
Then asked himself, But what else did you see? We saw True West there. American Buffalo. Glengarry Glen Ross. The Skin of Our Teeth. Greater Tuna. Children of a Lesser God.
It was Laraine who had introduced him to live theater. Introduced him to poetry and literature too, the magic of words. Now he could quote Rilke or Marquez at the drop of a hat, but now the height of Laraine’s current cultural life consisted of pornographic reruns playing on an endless loop inside her own brain, dulling images of the same scene over and over again. He knew what movie she watched in her head because he often watched it too.
The scene always opened with a long shot of a red pickup truck racing toward them down a dark, rain-slick street, a two-thousand-pound torpedo with one of its headlights out. Laraine had spotted it before he did. He had been staring straight ahead, driving too slowly through the intersection, thinking not about the light turning from yellow to red but about the examination he would take the next day, his possible promotion. “Move!” Laraine had screamed. But he had looked to his right first, saw her hands on the dashboard as she stared out her side window, saw the single headlight bearing down on them, and only then mashed down on the accelerator.
He regained consciousness to the sound of people hammering on his windshield. The Taurus he was driving that night had been rammed across the sidewalk and tight against a clothing store. He remembered turning his head to the left and looking through his shattered window at a mannequin in a bikini looking down at him. It had been a red bikini, fire truck red. The mannequin had had red hair and her nails were painted red and her fiberglass skin was a very pale red too. In fact there had been red everywhere he looked that night. The wetness dripping from the side of his face and from his left eye was red. The drunken driver of the red pickup truck crushed against the Taurus was now lying facedown on the hood of his truck, halfway out his own windshield, and his head was drenched in red. Vehicles were converging on the scene from two different directions, and their flashing lights were red too; their sirens were red, and Laraine’s screams as she struggled against her seat belt were as red as her limp right arm, the side of her yellow summer dress splotched bikini red, siren red, as she wrestled with the seat belt and tried to turn to the rear seat, tried to climb into the back, reaching with her one good arm for Ryan in his car seat behind DeMarco. Until Laraine touched the boy, there was not a drop of red on him anywhere, yet he continued to sleep peacefully, his head canted too far to the side, his wisps of corn silk hair still as yellow as pale sunlight, still as alive as summer except for the wash of color DeMarco saw everywhere he looked each time he blinked another red tear from his eye.
Or maybe that’s only my pornographic movie, DeMarco told himself now. Maybe Laraine doesn’t even see it anymore. Maybe she’s managed to shut it all off.