Rush Hour

It burned brightest, that one. Miami Avenue to Copans on 95 is brutal at five, the city’s regular bowel movement, cars emptying out like digested remains, worse for the wear, dented and scratched and spilled on. I cut into the HOV lane, thinking I could just slip out of rush hour, like stepping out of time. Two hundred yards later, I was completely stopped. You can’t shirk fate. You just can’t.

But I was next to her. She of the lime green Prius, with dents on the door like pockmarks. She, with the cute button nose, merry blue eyes, brown hair streaked with blond and red, like brush strokes, and the olive skin glowing like she’d just left South Beach. Maybe she had. I glanced over, and so did she. Of course we played coy. It was a game, after all. After a few more stolen glances, I offered her a timid smile, my lips parted slightly so that if she squinted, she’d be able to see the whites of my teeth, and the little sliver of air between the two front ones, a gap I’d tried to close on numerous occasions with food, bits of apple, celery, banana, spinach, though nothing had ever stuck. She smiled back, all teeth, perfectly aligned, and lifted her sunglasses to wink at me. I’d never met a woman like her.

We dated over the course of the next mile. As the asphalt glittered, and the sun bounced off the hoods of cars, and tourists, unused to this kind of backup, angrily slapped the sides of their cars, only to burn their hands with a metallic whap, we exchanged our stories, our goals, our ambitions, our past loves. We held hands by tapping side view mirrors. She kissed me, leaving a smudgy red imprint on the inside of her window. We took our shirts off. She unhooked her bra and held it up with one finger, then tossed it in the backseat. I blasted U2, because she’d mentioned they were her favorite band. We wrote long, elaborate love notes to each other, filled with pet names, i’s and j’s dotted with hearts, smiley faces and winking faces and sometimes sad faces, all the affectations that normally seemed so insincere but now seemed genuine. It was a clumsy kind of love, but it was ours, all ours, and it was exhilarating.

Car exhaust rose in waves around us, blurring the expressway into a surreal portrait of itself, and I imagined we were exactly that, a painting on a wall, being examined by a man, a fat man, his toupee uneven, his tuxedo wrinkled, the smell of cheap champagne on his breath, an imposter of a connoisseur, himself a surreal portrait of himself. I couldn’t waste any more time. I asked her to marry me. She pretended to consider it, tapping her finger against her lower lip, squinting in concentration, one of her locks falling softly across her forehead. Yes, she said. Of course. She’d known all along I was the one.

Even though my car’s a gas-guzzler? I asked, worried that might be a deal breaker. Even if you were driving a Hummer, she said.

I was out of breath, I was hyperventilating, I was so happy. We kissed to the sound of honking horns, and then we danced, a slow, sensual dance, steering the noses of our cars over the dashes, towards each other then away, then towards again, and I blasted U2’s Beautiful Day and thought it would never end—our love, an impenetrable bubble floating over a sea of cars that heaved and hoed and inched forward and screeched.

A half mile later the honeymoon ended and we settled into our domestic phase. Starting and stopping, starting and stopping, taking the foot off the brake, tapping the accelerator, tapping the brake. It was monotony. We barely had time to look at each other. I saw dusk falling like a blanket, and turned on my headlights. A thousand red brake lights surrounded me, drops of blood in the soft darkness, and I thought of death. She let herself go, of course. Didn’t bother with her hair anymore, and wiped her lipstick off with tissue, which she stashed in the cup holder. She told me it was so refreshing not to wear makeup. Now that we were married, she said, she didn’t need to impress anyone. I cringed, and tried to pass it off as a smile.

The squabbling didn’t start too much later, maybe a quarter mile. I saw that she wasn’t paying much attention to the car in front of her, inching closer and closer, and told her to keep her eyes on the road. She twisted my words, claiming I just didn’t want to see her anymore, and accusing me of an affair. It’s true I noticed the woman in the black convertible two lanes over, and admired the way she kept the top down, but I’d not once acted on my impulse. I was beginning to regret my decision. She was not the woman I thought she was—she was needy, she was hysterical, she was unhappy, she was demanding, she was old and tired and fat and the way she smiled made me want to puke.

The HOV lane began to loosen and pick up speed, and I pulled away from her, breathing a sigh of relief, tossing my U2 CD out the window, where it shattered against the median. I glanced in the rearview and nearly choked—she had cut into the lane too, and was following close behind me, so close I could feel her nudge my bumper, and could see the red of my taillights in her eyes. I was afraid of being swallowed up.

She followed me for miles, a grim determination in the way she clutched the wheel, hunched over, her hands on 10 and 2, the way it says in the manual. The highway lights clicked on, one after the other, like dominoes falling into place. I’d neglected to fill up before I left work, and now the needle was flirting dangerously with E, fluctuating, fluttering around the line, conscious of any acceleration, deceleration, braking, turning. I think she knew, too, because her lips creased into a maniacal smile, and she looked like a ghost, her face lit up by each highway light, her hair wild and frizzy. It made me shudder.

I slowed down, there was nothing could be done, and watched nervously as she pulled up next to me. I told her I was sorry, the whole thing, the way I treated her, that it damn near broke my heart. She said I could shove my apology up my ass. I said Listen, it’s not like this is what I wanted. We just grew apart, I said. There’s no shame in it.

There were lines scrawled across her forehead, crows’ feet around her eyes. Her hair was thinning. You stole the best of me, she said. You stole the best of me and you spit it out and now I’m useless, a husk of a person, all dried up.
I told her she was being a little overdramatic, and she called me a deadbeat scumbag. Her only solace, she said, was that we didn’t have kids.

I looked at her, her face contorted in anger, and felt only sympathy. Only sympathy. She was the first woman I had loved, and, for all I knew, the only. The highway stretched itself for us like infinity, a cliché, I thought, but for a reason. We had some good times, didn’t we? I said to her. She didn’t respond, staring forward, and I could feel her tears. We lived a lifetime on this road, I continued.

Her face softened. I started sweet talking out my ass, forcing lies through my teeth, like bad breath, spewing all shades of bullshit, telling her I still loved her, needed her, wanted to grow old with her. I felt bad doing it—that’s something I’d never been comfortable with, though I’d done it with all the other women in the past, try to send them off floating, and a little bit confused—but it was working. I told her I’d never forget her.

Suddenly, red and blue lights lit up the night, and the mournful wail of a police siren shattered the silence. I was startled, and looked around in a panic. It took me a few seconds to register that the car was tailing me, that I was still in the HOV lane illegally. She stayed with me as long as she could, then, with a smile I still can’t explain, that I see in dreams and in nightmares, that I doodle at work by the hundreds without realizing, that’s got me aching, wondering whether she was just a phantom, someone I conjured up, pulled away. She pulled away, turned off her headlights, and, as far as I know, she didn’t look back.