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Show Motherlunge a novel 67 It was still dark outside; General's shitpile by the fence was frosted over. Pavia said, "No time to stop for coffee," before I had a chance to ask. We got in Pavia's car and in a few minutes the heater was blasting against my pants leg as we sped down the elevated highway over deserted, movie-set neighborhoods. I looked out the window at the liquor billboards and rows of three-family houses and lack of available street parking, wondering, as I always do on drives through unfamiliar areas, what other people could possibly be doing, living there. What kind of jobs did they have? Where did they eat? Do they think about the people in cars flashing past their homes fast as time and as glamorous in the abstract, and feel disappointed with themselves? I rested my head on the window glass, blindly reading along my jawline with my fingertips, checking for untweezed chin hairs. "So how's this going to work, again?" I asked Pavia, who drove holding a candy cane between gloved fingers, licking it into a sharp white point. "With the Reeds, I mean?" "I'm not sure," Pavia said. With her hair pulled back and dark lipstick on, she looked like a woman from a car ad, pan-European, ancestrally indifferent to public opinion. Speeding in the left-hand lane, we drew up behind a big blue Buick in which two elderly and hair-blurred heads bobbled above the seatbacks like loose Q-tips. Pavia pressed one black driving glove patiently and rhythmically on the horn. "This is going to be a play-it-by-ear kind of thing." She shifted in her seat as if to untuck her lungs from her thickening middle, "I'm going for-I'm thinking this can be a win-win." |