Time's Arrow Read Online Free Page A

away quickly. We rode the bus back, and buses take forever and are full of drunks and screaming children. . . . Cars are the thing. Cars. Every day we went back to the garage; and every day that car of ours was in sorrier shape. Eight hundred dollars? And you could actually see them at it, the grease monkeys, with hammers and spanners, about their long chore of patient wreckage.
    Needless to say, by the time we went along to claim it (elsewhere: uptown), Tod's car was a regular bedpan. We weren't in top form either. The transaction included a most unwelcome preliminary. Hospital. That's right. A look-in at Casualty. We made our own way there (somehow Tod knows this town backward) and we didn't stay long, thank God. You do what you have to do: you take your shirt off and get prodded and tapped, but you keep your head down; you don't want to know about the stuff they do in there. It's not your place to speak out. It's none of your business. The paramedics eventually drove me uptown to the scene of the accident. There was my car, like a mad old hog caught in midspasm, its snout and tusks crushed and steaming. And I didn't feel too good myself as the police officer helped wedge me into its driving seat and tried to shut the warped front door. Thereafter I sat back and let Tod handle everything. There were all kinds of people staring in at us, and for a while Tod just stared stupidly back at them. But then he got on with it. He rammed his foot down on the brake and sent the car into a fizzing convulsion of rev and whinny. With a skillful lurch he gave the bent hydrant on the sidewalk a crunchy shouldercheck—and we were off, weaving at speed back up the street. Other cars screamed in to fill the sudden vacuum of our wake.
    Minutes later: the first installment of our love life. Which was quite a coincidence. We came home, Tod flooring the accelerator to bring about a violent halt. He didn't pause to admire the car (the car seemed like new: great!) but hurried inside, flinging off his coat with a hot gasp and making a lunge for the phone.
    I tried to concentrate. I think I got most of it. It went like this.
    "Goodbye, Tod."
    "Wait. Don't do anything."
    "Who cares? It's all shit anyway."
    "Irene," he said.
    "Yes I am. Tod, I'm just this terrible old lady now. How'd it happen?"
    "No you're not."
    "No I'm not. I'm going to kill myself."
    "No you're not."
    "I'm going to call the New York Times."
    "Irene," he said, with a new heat in his voice. And a new heat all over his body.
    "I know you changed your name. How about that! I know you ran."
    "You know nothing."
    "I'm going to tell on you."
    "Oh yes?"
    "You say it in the night. In your sleep."
    "Irene."
    "I know your secret."
    "What is it?"
    "I want you to know something."
    "Irene, you're drunk."
    "Piece of shit."
    "Yes?" said Tod boredly—and hung up on her. He put the phone down and listened to its ringing—its machine persistence. And then its silence. His feeling tone was blank, was clear. . . . Well, after that, I suppose, things can only improve. I wished Tod would go and dig out that black chest of his, so that I could get a proper look at this Irene.
    But he didn't, of course. Fine chance.
    —————
    Maybe love will be like driving.
    "Pop? Your driving days are over." So said the mechanic in his oily dungarees. So said the hospital orderly in his stark white smock. But they were wrong. On the contrary, our driving days have just begun. I think Tod must be hankering for the old house, over to Wellport, because that's where most of our trips end up. He's kept a key. We go in and move from room to room. It's all empty now. He measures things. It's done with love, this measuring. More recently we've started inspecting other properties in the Wellport area. But none of them is worth measuring, like our old place. Back down Route 6 he slowly rolls.
    We've started finding love letters, in the trash, letters from Irene. He looks them over with his head at an angle and stuffs