496
JAMES MERRILL
others with Revelation. I drove well-too well, perhaps.
As
I rounded
curves with a graceful one-handed gesture, certain passengers would
look admiringly at me instead of at the road. I was young, husky, I
had a pleasant face; people told me their stories. Having little
to
say
myself, I became, depending on the occasion, grandson, son, big
brother, kid brother, and would do my best not to destroy the
illusion while striving to deflect attention back to the main points,
those Olympian secrets of Fuel and of the Wheel. Until one day,
inevitably, I added to these a role that by its nature and at my age
was less easily given up than the rest: the role of lover.
She sat beside me at a counter one early evening, blonde, full–
blown and looking heartbroken. She had to go to another town, not
far, but had missed the last bus and was I headed that way? Well,
she paid for my coffee and I drove her off. Soon she was chatting
and patting her hair. "I thought you'd be gone when I came back
with my grip. Sure are a nice boy to do
this.
Shouldn't call you a
boy, though. Bet you know more than I do!"
I can smile now at my innocence. She guided me past her town,
past the next. Night was falling, I wanted to stop. Even when I
understood and drove without protest, indeed with my heart thump–
ing, down the dark dirt road, her hand reaching across me to
turn
off the lights-even then I had a surprise in store for me. Opening
my door, I started out. "Where you off to?" said my friend coyly. I
stood frozen with stupefaction. It was going to happen in the
car!
I forced a casual reply and turned from her to the underbrush,
lifting my face to the stars, letting her imagine what she liked, while
I tried to make sense of my feelings.
I knew that love was made in cars. Mine, though,
my
car–
could I put it to these uses? And were the uses high or low?
As
for
love, I can use the word today, but a molten
gulf
separated its
earlier meanings (a girl to
be
kissed between drinks, an imitative
couple in the back seat) from
this
experience, wringing and intense,
that within an hour had left the dry track of a tear on either cheek
as I drove deeper and deeper into some dark Western state. The
woman nodded at my side. I did not know whether I had degraded
or fantastically enlarged the road ahead.
That first love rose and set, establishing a pattern others were
to follow. First came days, or weeks, during which the fact that we
