Outside San Francisco, a High Curve on the Highway

Laura doesn’t yell this morning, or cry either.  She seems to accept the fog and says, “I love you, Sylvester,” and Sylvester very much wishes that she hadn’t said that. 

She loves his food, too: these days, it seems, she’s sprawled on the couch with both hands in her mouth, so it has grown easier to accept her “dead-end” speech, her insistence that they “explore other avenues.”  And as much as it pains him, he finally concedes an argument. 

But now, just as he crosses the threshold towards sunny, southern California, towards the room of welcoming faces that will applaud his speech on “cooking with love” and “the versatility of miso,” she tells him that she loves him.  Her words hang in the air like confused ghosts.

He tries to move, but he moves towards a slow arc that resembles half moon bay, past a fleeting, broken image of La Casita, the Mexican dive bar where they first had sex in a public restroom, past the signs warning of a redwood forest up ahead.

And even on this windy, foggy day, the gorgeously straight redwoods vault for the sky.  He goes onward to the mountains, and then to the dewy seaspray of the ocean.  He doesn’t know where he wants to go next or if he’s going to be late for his speech, or if it matters.  Part of him wants to trick them all and take another road, even now, go north alone, go diving for abalone.  He wants to watch the kelp change colors and not think of oil slicks.  He wants to cook by a bonfire and maybe even eat hot dogs, the kind you get at a baseball game.  He wants so much.

But then the road opens wide, and Sylvester can’t help but accelerate, can’t help but plunge into the curve above the seabreak.  And all the while he’s buzzing as if in concert with the rising and swelling and crashing waves.  And Sylvester can’t help but think that Tuesday morning has turned out to be a fine, fine morning.  No, that Tuesday, the whole day, even the week—that this week has turned out to be a fine, fine week.

The road bends and descends, and he looks at the clock.  There is no doubt, anyway, that this moment of 9:43 was undoubtedly, indisputably, a fine, fine moment.

Maybe when he gets back, things will work out.  Maybe Laura could eat ice cream for daily happiness, and Sylvester could begin a collection of model train sets.  Her backside could grow into a pumpkin.  She could teach seals how to knit scarves; she could do all kinds of things. 

But Sylvester knows what he would do.  He would get fancy.  He would build miniature bridges and towns and roads; he would even have farmland with miniature plants pretending to grow.  He would wear a conductor’s hat.  But Sylvester knows what would happen in the end.  He would just watch the trains go in circles.

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