The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 10

  I have no idea where I am.

  I’m supposed to be in southeastern Kentucky, but I’ve been lost for a long time. Pulling over to ask someone where I am isn’t really an option, because this road is ridiculous—rising and falling, full of 110-degree hairpin turns, not a light anywhere, no exits or gas stations or human beings. All I have to go on are my friend’s directions, which were more impressionistic than precise, with phrases like “Then you just kind of go for a while,” and “eventually the road sort of splits . . .” and “. . . you’ll figure it out . . .”

  There is a road I think I’m supposed to take (“. . . eventually you’ll see a smaller road that kind of bends off . . .”), so I take it, slowing way down to make sure I don’t drive into what I imagine must be the craggy ditch that sandwiches this godforsaken, miserable road—a ditch filled with jagged rocks and feral beasts. There is a sign, the first sign in forever, and I back up a little to drink in whatever information it can offer. The red glow of my rear lights makes the road look like a cartoon version of hell, with fiery trees and scorched earth. The sign is small and square, and says, “America.” Which is the one thing I knew already. I get very angry at that sign and almost shout at it.

  I’m angry at her for living here. I think it’s fake. I think her motives for living here are fake. I think she’s trying to prove something about who she is, or isn’t, or where she came from, or something. Southeastern Kentucky? It all seems terribly calculated. I imagine that she likes the idea of people saying, “She’s in Kentucky! That’s so . . . different. How very brave. How interesting and unique.” I imagine it’s only a matter of time until she cashes in on this cache—until she trades in the cultural bonus points of living a rustic country life for a plum spot at a consulting firm or med school. I imagine a lot of things, because I haven’t seen her in ten years.

  My car is full of trash: sixty-four-ounce soda lids and cigarette packs and coffee cups with butts floating in them. There is no worse smell than coffee cups with cigarette butts floating in them. None. It smells like poison and sickness and death. I’d very much like to get where I’m going and just eviscerate this car—sandblast it, spray chemical air fresheners everywhere, make it new.

  She told me I’d find it eventually, so I keep driving.

  Twist, turn, twist. Slow down, speed up. Slalom right and uphill, then left and downhill, then left again, and again. Doesn’t that mean I’m going back where I came from? Hours of this. Then: the road relents, eases into a long straightaway that pours me out into a small town like the end of a waterslide ride. Ten minutes later I pull up outside what I hope is her house, but at some level I don’t care if it isn’t, as long as whoever lives here can let me empty my car, sit down for a minute. Stay somewhere, for some time.

  Whoever’s house it is, it’s nicer than I imagined. I am right now being confronted with what I recognize as prejudice in me. I pictured a house in southeastern Kentucky as a 2BR tin shack w/ exposed septic tank, run-down porch w/ spittoon, and moonshine-soaked grannies on rockin’ chairs. This is a perfectly nice little house house, one that could have been plunked down in Lisa’s and my old suburban northeastern town without anyone being the wiser. It looks like a thousand other houses I’ve seen in America in the last year.

  I get out and leave the headlights on. They shine on the front door. I stand motionless, running over what I will say to the hard-luck genetic case wiv’ no teef who probably lives here when he trains his shotgun on my forehead and tells me he don’t cotton to the gov’ment taxing his land.

  Instead, here she comes. It’s her house. She looks good.

  “You made it. You’re such a smart boy.”

  She hugs me. There is no better smell than an ex-girlfriend.

  What do I remember about Lisa Taymor? Pretty. Very photogenic, with thick hair and a widow’s peak. Oddly big hands emerging from tiny wrists. Openly contemptuous of most of her friends’ high school–era suburban behavior—the drinking and flirting and arena concertgoing—but a participant in much of it. She was the only person I knew in our class who had a healthy dose of irony, or skepticism, or awareness of our surroundings. It’s not even awareness. Maturity? What do you call it when someone just kind of understands everything better than everyone else? She was, to my mind, the highest-rated all-around girl in our high school, the thinking man’s prom date prize, the sweet-smiling, arched-eyebrow cheerleading know-it-all.

  And I remember, I know of, the rumors. The little pinpricks of gossip that trickled to me every year or so, through people who were never even friends with her, whose eyes lighted up with joy when relating their crumbs of scandal. The most popular story involved a sudden dive into bisexuality and corresponding shaved head (all that lovely thick hair, gone?). One had her eloping with a professor, male; one had her in a torrid affair with a grad student, female; one had her a painter in Seattle, another a women’s rights advocate in San Diego, an organic farmer in New Hampshire, a lobbyist in Florida, a law school student in Ann Arbor. She was always doing something, somewhere, with someone.

  What was clear was that no one knew anything about her.

  So when I decided to drive cross-country, I figured I’d go see her, to see for myself.

  This trip, and the year off from work that made it possible, was my twenty-sixth birthday present to myself. I hoped that wandering, without specific goals or destinations, which is very un-me, would help me, somehow. Now, as it comes to an end, I’m still unclear as to what I was really looking for, what this trip has been about. I think I may have missed something, somewhere.

  So maybe Lisa will help to clarify . . . something. Or maybe not. The point is, all I am hoping for is a nice time, a conversation between adults who used to be children together.

  Two hours later we’re sitting in a bar, and I’ve cheered up, feeling better with a drink in me and someone to talk to. I’m telling all sorts of stories about the places I’ve been, more than a little pleased with my newfound war chest of adventure stories: kayaking in the Colorado River, getting mugged in Louisiana, caught doing 105 in Minnesota, the hotel owner with an eye sewn shut in Oregon.

  Aside from Lisa, every person in this bar could kick my ass. I feel more conspicuous than usual of my demeanor, my education, my whole thing, which is: a child of relative ease; a milk-fed smart aleck whose biggest childhood stress was standardized testing; the product of tennis lessons and guitar lessons and summer camps. If one of these Kentucky natives came over and said, “Sorry, but I’ve sized you up, and based on the head start you got in life, I have no choice but to kick your ass, so as to level our respective playing fields,” I’d understand completely, and I’d take off my glasses and wait for my penance to begin.

  “By the way,” I said, “that is the worst road I have ever seen, anywhere, ever.”

  She laughed. Oh right—that’s what she laughs like.

  “I know. Welcome to hill country.”

  “Why is that road like that?”

  “There are different opinions. I think it’s like that to keep through-traffic to a minimum. The only reason to take that road is if you have to come here for some reason, so we don’t get many unwanted guests.”

  “Like me?”

  “No. You’re a wanted guest.”

  “I know. But I feel a little self-conscious. Or something.”

  I’m looking for reassurance. But I get:

  “That’s because you’re vain. You want another one?”

  She doesn’t wait for an answer.

  Here we are, getting drunk together. Getting drunk with someone you knew when you were too young to get drunk properly is a fantastic way to spend your time.

  She asks me questions and I answer them. I ask her questions and she dodges, artfully, each and every one.

  Me: “What did you do after you graduated?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Come on.”

  “Stuff. I don’t know. What does anyone do?”

  “I moved to New York
and got a job.”

  “I know. You’re important and grown-up.”

  “I’m neither. Did you travel?”

  “A little.”

  “Did you live anywhere for longer than a year?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Did you get a job? Apply to grad school? Get married on a dare? Fly around the world solo? Invent something? Break a glass duck over your boyfriend’s head? Wake up one day and realize you missed me?

  In the last ten years, every report of her whereabouts had brought her back to me briefly; a few times I’d imagined us reuniting, two war-torn souls finding that what we’d been looking for all these years was what we’d had before we started looking. That I had these thoughts when I was twenty, not even three years after we’d had almost had sex in her hot bedroom right before I left for school, was ridiculous, I realize. Still, the feeling was there.

  On another whiskey run, she’s talking to some of the largest humans I’ve ever seen, at the bar. I would not be more self-conscious if I were pinned to the back of a shadowbox. I imagine their comments: Who’s that guy? What’s he doing in our town? Why are you hanging out with a little turd like that? Now she laughs. Is she laughing at one of those comments? Are they hitting on her, and she’s playing along? How does she navigate these landscapes as easily as she does? Where do you go to school to learn that?

  The same Lynyrd Skynyrd song (“That Smell,” also the worst Lynyrd Skynyrd song) plays on the jukebox for the third time, reinforcing some of the prejudice that her cute house had begun to dispel.

  When she comes back I think about asking her what was so funny. But she smiles and puts her hand on my hand and tells me it’s good to see me, and I forget all about it.

  Okay. So it’s not entirely true that I’m free of romantic thoughts, here. I’m trying to be, because these thoughts are impractical. But I know how these things work, and I know that any two people who almost had sex ten years earlier are bound to feel certain things when they see each other again. And we really did have a lot in common back then, so why can’t we maybe still? And it’s not like I just got in my car and drove down here to see her—I’ve been driving all over the country. Why am I defending this? Who cares? I’ve thought about it. I’m thinking about moving her from the Someone I Almost Had Sex With column to the Someone I Did Have Sex With column. Big deal. We’re all adults here.

  We sit on her porch. Aside from my white Chevy rental car, there is nothing but hill and sky and darkness. I’m a little drunk. I’m drunk. We’re on a porch swing. I fully expect to have sex with Lisa Taymor in the next twenty minutes.

  So I ask her if she has a boyfriend. But I do it like this, smiling:

  “So, what’s the deal? Are you in love? Are you married? Are you heartbroken?”

  “I’m a lot of things, but none of those.”

  “There have been some pretty weird rumors about you.”

  “I know. Apparently I’m bisexual. Which came as a shock to me.”

  “No truth to it? At all?”

  “Come on.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.” (It comes out like this: “That doesnnnnswer the questtin.”)

  She takes a breath. The kind taken by teachers when eight-year-olds refuse to stop fidgeting. Then: “I’m not in love, I’m not married, I’m not most of the things I’m alleged to have been.”

  “So what are you?”

  “What a question.”

  “Well, okay. I’ll start small. What’s your job?”

  A moment passes.

  “I’m a United States congressman. Congress . . . person.” She takes a long sip of beer. A great move.

  “That’s cool.”

  There’s a bug zapper somewhere that is just going crazy.

  “You are not,” I say.

  “I am.”

  “What? Are you . . . ? You’re fucking with me.”

  “No I’m not. I’m a United States congressperson.”

  “How do I not know this? How does anybody not know this? I would have known.”

  “There’s a reason you don’t know. There’s a good reason.”

  She’s being very mysterious. There’s something I’m not getting. I want her to show me.

  “You’re telling me you’re a United—you’re a congressperson from Kentucky.”

  “Not from Kentucky.”

  I freeze, trying to recall my map.

  “West Virginia?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where the hell am I again? Virginia?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Where?”

  “America.”

  America, America, God shed his grace on thee. I am told that these words were written by a Wellesley professor named Katherine Lee Bates in 1911, or so. An educator and patriot, a lover of spacious skies and amber grain, purple mountains and plains and national fraternity. When you expect sex and get history, you start to get a headache. I feel it coming on. But: we’re on Katherine Lee Bates.

  “And.”

  “She used to live here.”

  “Kentucky.”

  “America. America, America. A state you’ve never heard of. Population 230, roughly two square miles spreading across the junction of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky. This is where I live. I’m a congressperson from America.”

  Hmmmm. Am I being made fun of? I’ve never heard of this. I don’t know. Anything. I have nothing at my disposal. I am going to play along.

  “Okay. Follow along, here. This is the fifty-second state. It was established right after the Civil War—some kind of secret gerrymandering by reconstructionists to balance Congress. But the catch was, it had to remain secret. It’s not official. It has two senators and one congressperson—me, now—who report to Washington but don’t live there, who vote on every bill but the votes are blended in as votes from other states. My votes on things get cast from a fake congressman from Michigan. And the two senators from Washington, D.C., are actually senators from . . . here.”

  “There are no real senators from Washington, D.C.”

  “Nope. They’re from America. We have our own license plates and post office and state police. Our state bird is the wild turkey. Our chief export is nothing at all.”

  She’s given this speech before.

  “What . . . what does the state look like? Is it square, like Utah, is it—”

  “It’s shaped exactly like America, the country.”

  “But . . . but America wasn’t always shaped this way.”

  “You are a very smart boy. Originally our western border was straight, as was part of the northern border and the extreme southwest corner. Then, as the country’s borders changed, our state borders changed right along with them.”

  This isn’t a headache anymore. My brain hurts. I just wanted to see my old girlfriend and flirt with her and maybe who knows, and now I’m being told that everything I’ve ever learned about my home and native land is wrong wrong wrong.

  There’s a pretty long silence. Then I tell her I need to sleep, and she seems to understand.

  There is no sex. There is, instead, a kiss on the forehead, almost motherly, as I lie down on her couch and immediately close my eyes.

  When I wake up there is the smell of breakfast and the lovely sight of a tall pretty girl from behind, standing storklike at the stove, left foot resting on right inside knee, jean shorts and tank top and ponytail and everything that’s great about America. America, America.

  The conversation is a little awkward, the kind of cold-light-of-day stiltedness that seems to follow late nights in bars, for me, a lot, but usually for different reasons. It is not lost on me that things might have been exactly this awkward, and this kind of awkward, if we had slept together, except we at least would have slept together.

  Or is it my imagination that things are awkward? Lisa seems fine. I’m awkward. There’s something new. I feel ill at ease, I don’t know what to do with my hands, I have a hard time looking her in the eyes. Why?
Because she didn’t want to sleep with me, or because my middle-school geography teachers lied to me without knowing it?

  “Good morning,” she says. And she means it.

  She takes me on a walking tour of America. It takes about two hours.

  Their town hall is right where D.C. would be. There is a man-made creek through the town—state—that duplicates the path of the Mississippi. A small white-water rapid in the northeast represents Niagara Falls. Where Vegas and Atlantic City would stand, there are freestanding slot machines that dispense gumballs. The ground is flat in the “Midwest,” raised and rockier in the West. There is a footpath running the length of what would be the Appalachian Trail. There is even a marker where the Four Corners would meet. It is not much smaller than the actual Four Corners marker, I point out.

  “I’ve heard that before. I’ve never been to the other one.” She sips a Sprite.

  “How is this here? How is this secret?”

  She shrugs her shoulders.

  “I don’t know. Not that many people come here, for obvious reasons. And those who do don’t seem to feel the need to talk about it when they leave. I came here by accident. I got lost. And I liked it, so I stayed.”

  She shrugs her shoulders again. There is nothing calculated about her speech, or her attitude. She seems at ease in a way I have never been.

  “Here,” she says, “this will blow your mind.”

  We’re standing on what would have been roughly Oklahoma. We stroll for about fifteen minutes, east-northeast. Ladies and gentlemen, if you look out the right side of this walk you can see Dallas–Fort Worth, and New Orleans. We’ll be passing through Memphis. On the left you can see the St. Louis Arch (represented here by a broken McDonald’s sign, I see—clever) and on the right is Atlanta. And now . . .

  “Look,” she says.

  I look. It’s us. It’s this, here. If this tiny state is a map, we’re standing on the point of the map where this town would be, and there’s a display case in this—what is this?—parking lot, that contains a detailed three-dimensional model of America. The third America within America. It’s about the size of an America you’d see in your standard atlas. And before I even bend down to get a closer look at this smaller America, I know, and am right, that there is, painted onto the model, at the border of West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky, a tiny outline of America.