Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

Ch. 11

149 11 EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD DRIVE cross-country at least once, just to see all the amazing places you wouldn’t want to live. You’ll be able to rule out most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, because you won’t care for most of the people, while out west, the clincher will be the decided absence of them. There are sights to see. Passing through Ohio’s Amish country, the billboards touting Amish restaurants and Amish-made furniture made me marvel that in America even a culture that shuns materialism has been effectively turned into a brand name. You’ll learn the skylines of Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolis are as hard to distinguish as the cows you’ve passed, and ramshackle farmhouses will scarecrow any fancies you have of moving to the country. As we passed through Columbus, Taylor suggested we should stop and visit its historical society. “It’s home to my favorite work of American art: a prehistoric Hopewell culture twelve-inch mica open hand.” “What’s the Hopewell culture?” Junior asked. “The Mound builders,” I said. I knew the answer so it must have 149 150 been something I learned from Taylor. It made me wistful that if we broke up that would never happen again. “It’s a national treasure,” Taylor claimed. “It’s this beautiful, almost modern-looking open palm, cut from a single sheet of mica, an emblematic symbol of our common humanity. Mica’s incredibly fragile, and it survived unbroken for fifteen hundred years. Very few people know about it, but it’s amazing.” I trusted his judgment. For a scientist, Taylor wasn’t all nuts and bolts, and had an artist’s imagination. It was the reason why he could invent a time machine. I know I sound like the worst sort of snob, but New Yorkers are egalitarian snobs—at cocktail parties we’re equally impressed by meeting what the Times has declared is “America’s best zither player” as we are meeting this year’s winner of the PEN-Beckett Award for a first novel where not much happens. In some ways New Yorkers are all Mad King Ludvigs who recognize other royal families—protocol requires Londoners and Parisians to be treated as equals—only we ludicrously maintain our sense of grandeur as we give must-be-obeyed Chinese take-out orders from tiny studio or one-bedroom palaces while sneering at commoners in Terre Haute hovelling in their four-bedroom, three-bath Tuscan Chateaus. Any sane New Yorker can have a great weekend in any part of the United States, but our minds inevitably turn to questions about what the hell people do there the other 362 days of the year. We took four-hour turns behind the wheel since it would take two long fourteen-hour days of driving to get to Midland. I was a nervous wreck about Cheney showing up again—this time with an army backing him up. At every stop, I mistook every plump, balding, gray-haired man wearing wire-rimmed glasses for the vice president. I’d never realized there are millions of these guys. We almost ran screaming out of a truck stop in Ohio when Taylor thought Cheney was getting a cherry slurpee. Then in the men’s room at a Burger King in Indiana, I almost had a heart attack when Cheney’s dead ringer used the urinal next to mine. 151 It was my first cross-country road trip, and I soon gathered that driving across America is like the worst aspects of aging; you forget more of the journey than you remember, and feel crankier, fatter, and more exhausted than you did when you started. For their first shifts, Junior and Taylor bickered about what music to listen to, each of them sharing similarly eclectic tastes but arguing for their different mix tapes. When Junior drove, he ran a program of complementary progression, each song offering a variation on a theme. Doleful but danceable love songs by the Eurythmics were followed by doleful but danceable love songs by the Smiths, which led to doleful but danceable love songs by the Pet Shop Boys. Taylor’s taste was different. He liked every song to whipsaw your emotions and loved hearing the romantic-depressive Psychedelic Furs tune “Love My Way,” followed by Nina Simone’s joyous-furious “Mississippi Goddam,” followed by Petula Clark’s...