DRIVER
497
desired, but did not know, one another, kept us both good-humored.
Then, gradually, at the woman's insistance, our passion overflowed
into rooming-houses and hotels, although with luck I was still able to
confine it to the car, reserving our shared bed for sleep. Mornings,
we drove on; the woman would not mind, not at first, waiting in
the car while I transacted my business. Thinking it over, I shall not
emphasize my profession by concealing
it.
I was a salesman, of count–
less
different things, encyclopedias, garden supplies, trusses, religious
texts, all or none of these. I would reach into the back seat for my
case. The car door shutting behind me threw a switch. Two minutes
or two hours later I would be back, whatever had passed between
me and 'the lady of the house' forgotten now unless translated into
clues: money in my wallet, a thumbnail blackened by a slammed
door, more than once liquor on my breath and lipstick on my ear.
The patience of the woman in the car came to be tried. We would
drive on doggedly, a capsule of discord, she questioning, pleading;
myself silent, not guilty, amazed by the recurrence, from one to the
next, of the same demands, the same voice first injured then sarcastic
before its final sickening fall into a nastiness without nuance or
remedy.
I would want only to be rid of her.
I soon learned to avoid these climaxes. At the first sign of
strain-when the woman, say, was no longer content to do her nails
in the car, but sat making lists of food to buy or friends to surprise
with postcards-I would persuade her that I meant to stop several
days in a certain town.
On
being shown to our hotel room, I would
make impetuous love to her before going down to 'see about the
car' (in which I would happen to have left my things) and driving
off into the night alone. Those were hours of resolution, of pride in
my lonely calling. The renounced woman roared in the motor and
wailed in the fleeing dark.
Somewhere I have read that driving is a substitute for sexual
intercourse. I am as good an authority as the next man on both
subjects, and can affirm without hesitation that for thrills, enter–
tainment, and hygiene the woman
is
no match for the automobile.
There
is
furthermore the efficient, even temper of the latter, and
the fact that you may obtain a younger and more beautiful one as
often as you like.
