Slowly, I drove down Route 571 past the West Windsor Post Office which had been my favorite haunt after Tess and I returned from The Trip. That was in October, and the Kamehameha tree, strangely transplanted into the loamy soil of New Jersey, was just beginning to shed its silver-green leaves. The tree was then less than ten feet tall, and we would sometimes mail letters to ourselves or to no one in particular just to pass the tree on the way to the Post Office.
Tess’s brother was a frequent visitor to our house at that time, and he would bring Betty, Biff, and Benji, each the child of a different marriage and each capable of eating the entire contents of our walk-in freezer. Tess seemed to love Biff, while I was partial to Betty. Nobody much liked Benji, and when he was eventually captured writing threatening letters to President Macron on University letterhead none of us was surprised. After that, Tess’s brother visited less often, but we continued to mail Benji’s threatening letters just so that we could pass the Kamehameha tree, which had grown to fifteen feet by the time of the trial.
I turned into the parking area of the Post Office, purposely defying the red and white “Exit Only” sign that stared at me in a way that seemed purposely accusatory. Defiantly I cried out: “I am exiting: I am exiting the highway!” The sign seemed not to respond. Instead, as I pulled up to the drive-in mail depository, I once again saw the Old Man. I had seen him before, of course. He sometimes stood by the side of the road, peering at me as I passed. I had seen him once at McCaffrey’s food market, and once, astonishingly, Tess and I had seen him on The Trip — though what he was doing there I could not say, and Tess and I dared not speak to him lest we break some exotic taboo.
After seeing the Old Man, The Trip had dissolved into bickering and mutual recriminations, leading to the catastrophe the memory of which I have repressed for so many years. Still, seeing the Old Man again seemed reassuring, the way stubbing your toe or walking into a door can remind you of the time when, as a child, your nose was broken by an errant baseball. It felt bad, but it was a good kind of bad.
Tess had always said that sooner or later the buggy-whip factory would reopen and I could demand a job as floor manager in charge of nacre-handled buggy whips. Tess was being overly sanguine, I thought, for the plant had closed down in 1898 and had in recent years been converted into a combination art school and bowling alley. It was only years later, long after the catastrophe, that I learnt that the manager of the factory never intended its reopening. If Tess had been there, she might even have given up on her favorite astrologer, for he had told her, with considerable conviction, that because I was a Capricorn, my floor-manager job was assured.
Dating has never been my forte, and so it was with much apprehension that I arrived at the home of a lady I had picked up prowling around the back of the art school. I say her “home”, though there are some captious types who might not see the parking lot of the West Windsor Post Office as a home —but I would chalk up their attitude to the kind of snobbishness I always found insufferable. Because Benji had finally been released from the federal pen, he and his girlfriend had agreed to accompany me on a double date.
Benji and Meg made an admirable if felonious couple. Seeing them together reminded me of nothing so much as the thirteenth-century triptych I had once found in a dumpster outside the ruins of the Princeton University Art Museum. “How lovely,” I had thought, “the flecks of gold and green pigments enshrouding the figures of Saint Vitus and Queen Margrethe.” Yet here they were, for real, making out in the backseat of my ’68 Nova!
My date proved to be a less sensitive soul than Tess. When we passed the Kamehameha tree, which had now grown to be almost twenty-five feet tall, she chose not even to comment on its overarching beauty. In fact, the only words she uttered, after I had upbraided her for her appalling lack of sensitivity, were: “Let me out of here!” I slammed on the brakes, causing what appeared to be a major pile-up of cars on the Princeton-Hightstown Road, threw open the door on her side, and said, smartly: “With pleasure!”
I was not going to be blown off by a woman whose legal residence was a USPS parking lot (though it is true that, by that time, my own home had been foreclosed on and I had taken up residence in the shelter).
The years went by and for a time I did not again see the Old Man. I had even thought, perhaps too optimistically, that he had abandoned me and given up on his quest to slowly drive me insane. But today, after all the years I had avoided Route 571 and most of Mercer County, there he was, as obsessive and malevolent as ever. I had just passed the Kamehameha tree, which was once again only ten feet tall, and perhaps I should have sensed that life had at last come full circle.
Slamming my foot on the brake and causing yet another pile-up on the Princeton-Hightstown Road, I ran over to the Old Man and said: “Who are you, you iconic figure, and what do you want of me?”
He stared at me, and then slowly, haltingly, revealed what it had taken him more than a lifetime to excogitate: “Even a blind squirrel can find his nuts once in a while.”
I was thunderstruck, and for a long time I pondered the wisdom that he had imparted. But when I turned back to him, he was gone, having been squished by a Yellow Freight eighteen-wheeler.
I looked up at the traffic light. Finally, it had turned green.
