And let’s just say Jill does not keep a tidy office.
Pompeii. Oscar Madison’s closet. The Collyer brothers’ apartment. These are places less cluttered than the interior of Jill’s car, which on any given day is a panorama of paper scraps, business cards, stray pennies, Taco Bell bags, gum wrappers, AA batteries, uncapped Sharpies, melted lip balm and half-full Nalgene bottles.
Also strewn about are clothes — sweaters, scarves, socks, boots, the occasional bra — and jewelry — hoop earrings, bracelets, twisted chains of unprecious metal — all of which seemingly starts the morning on Jill’s person only to be shed during the course of her peripatetic workday.
Then there is the photo gear. Sweet Jesus, the photo gear. Monopods, tripods, light stands. Reflectors, diffusers, strobes. Tangled cords, orphaned lens caps, crinkled gels.
And everything covered in dog hair.
I sit in the driver’s seat and survey this mess. Then I look at the odometer: 129,571 miles. The keyless entry doesn’t work. Recently the transmission has been issuing a loud clunk between reverse and first gear. Hard turns at parking-lot speed have long generated vibrations in the front wheels — little seizures that we’ve grown accustomed to over the years but now, sitting alone in the garage, suddenly give me a pang of worry.
Can we really take this thing across the country?
Later in the day, driving this trusty yet disheveled steed home from lunch, Jill and I pass the corridor of car dealerships along Camelback Road. I see the big blue Honda sign and hang a hard right. The front wheels vibrate.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Let’s just look around,” I say. “This is purely exploratory.”
Of course, the last thing we need as jobless wayfarers is a new car payment. But maybe we could sell the CRV and my car and buy a used van or a bigger SUV. Something that better fits our crazy quest. It’s not like we haven’t talked about it.
As soon as our shoes touch the car-lot pavement, a salesman materializes from the rows of glinting sheet metal. He is 150 pounds of desperation wrapped in a baggy Men’s Wearhouse suit. This is before Cash for Clunkers. The lot is full of cars and devoid of shoppers. The hunger in the salesman’s eyes betrays a capacity for not just duplicity but raw evil. He reminds me of the roving flesh hunters in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. He makes me uncomfortable. I look at Jill; she is downright scared.
We circle a car. The salesman stalks us, three steps behind and gaining. The car is called the Element. We are clearly out of ours.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jill mutters to me. But I’m not leaving until the flesh hunter shows me how the front seats unfold. I’m curious as to whether they fold flat, merging with the rear seats to create a sleepable surface. Turns out they do.
In his desperation, the flesh hunter mistakes my mild intrigue for something more. He leaps straight from folding seats to financing, like a deluded rattlesnake striking at prey a mile away. I snap back to my senses. “We’re just looking today,” I tell him.
The flesh hunter follows us back to our CRV, proffering business cards and talking about trade-in values. I repeatedly click the “unlock” button on the key fob, to no avail. Jill opens the passenger-side door the old-fashioned way and reaches across to let me in. When I shut the door, the flesh hunter lingers outside it, a little too close, his eyes dead and his hand raised in a languid goodbye wave.
“We really need to get that key thing fixed,” Jill says. I make a mental note to look into that and a whole lot more.
—Scott