She pressed the clutch, shifted into first, then accelerated out of the dealership’s lot. A slight shudder, a grumble from the convertible’s engine, but it was her smoothest start yet. When she’d made it through second, third, and was safely driving down Jefferson in fourth, she glanced beside her at Denis.
“Like a pro,” he said, without meeting her eyes.
It was true, what Denis had said the first time she’d test-driven the car. The MGB was temperamental. Marin wished she could believe she’d run back to the dealership every day that week because she wanted to learn the car’s quirks. Surely, things would be easier at night, when guilt caught her, left her awake with the scent of her husband’s pillowcase, wondering if she should call him in Japan, find his voice in the mess of time zones.
But it wouldn’t matter, after today. Cliff was due home that evening, which meant this was Marin’s final drive with Denis.
Somehow, it had seemed permissible—if not ideal—to spend forty-five minutes per day driving around with a man while her husband was in a different country. A harmless episode in her otherwise unblemished record of fidelity. But to see Denis when Cliff was home, minding the same weather report, felt like a different story.
As they passed the car wash, Marin downshifted and changed lanes to avoid a sudsy pothole. The car took the maneuver in stride. While she nudged it smoothly up to speed, she and Denis stayed quiet and still, like parents who’d finally soothed an infant.
The top, as always, was down. In front of the Chrysler plant, they waved the fumes away from their faces. Then Denis patted the dash and said, “By God, I think you’ve tamed it.”
The finality of his tone frightened her. She refused to match it—not yet. For now, she would simply drive. She would drive with Denis, their hair full of wind.
The convertible was a tiny, impractical creature, built in 1974, with googly headlights, a meep-meep horn, and seatbelts that clipped at the waist. The car put Marin at eye level with everyone else’s tires. Driving it gave her the sense of privacy and adventure she’d had as a kid, dawdling amid adult legs.
Marin didn’t particularly care about cars. A week earlier, though, when she was running down Jefferson, the sight of the MGB, posed among the Camaros and Corvettes at Uncle Chucky’s Classic Cars, had stopped her.
It was the first time she’d run toward Detroit from her house in the suburbs, two miles from the city limit. In general, running was new to her. She’d only started six months earlier, when she and Cliff had moved to Michigan, aware that if she must pass so many hours alone, it was best to spend some in motion. Most days, she ran deeper into her neighborhood, tromping along spotless sidewalks, until the houses gave way to the lake. She would return home feeling better. Not good, exactly, but at least as though she’d jostled herself back to the world.
Since Cliff had left for his two-week trip to Japan, though, her usual route no longer did the trick. Perhaps she’d grown too familiar with the shutters, the weather vanes, the same dogs sniffing the same roots. Or perhaps she’d underestimated this particular pall of aloneness—Cliff not sequestered at his office downtown, but languages and climates away. It was time, she’d decided, to run in a new direction. To see how far she could go.
It was the car’s color that caught her attention. A muted, sun-bleached yellow. Marin had never seen an MGB, but she had seen, somewhere long ago, this exact color.
She was circling the car, trying to place it, when Denis—a salesman—emerged from the dealership.
“I’m not really looking,” she said, still breathless. “I mean, I am looking at this car. But not for a car, in general.”
“Okay, sure,” Denis said. “I follow you.”
“It reminds me of something. I can’t remember what.”
“The Queen used to drive one,” Denis offered.
“Interesting,” Marin said. “But I’m not thinking of the Queen.”
She trailed her fingertips across the hood. Denis tilted on his heels and recited the specs.
After a moment, Marin gasped.
“Sorry,” she said. “I remember.”
“Well?” Denis asked.
“A bath toy, from when I was little. A yellow whale—exactly this color. It had eyelashes! And it squirted water from its head.”
With the memory settled, Marin became more aware of Denis—a real person, standing there. She must sound unhinged.
To her relief, though, Denis said, “Wow. That’s a quality bath toy.”
Marin nodded. She thanked him, apologized, turned to run home.
“Hey,” Denis called. “Want to drive it?”
She faced him again.
“It’s a beautiful day, for a convertible.” He pointed at the cloudless sky. “Plus, it’ll make my boss think I’m doing something.”
It really was a beautiful day. Late May, more warm than cold, summer still ahead, untouched. The dealership’s plate-glass windows and oblong sign—Uncle Chucky’s Classic Cars in cursive—shimmered in the brightness.
“Is your boss Uncle Chucky?” Marin asked, and Denis laughed.
“Oddly, there is no one here by that name.”
“I might be too sweaty,” Marin said, inspecting her tank top.
“This car’s forty-four. That’s a hundred, in people years. A little sweat won’t hurt it.”
Marin leaned over, examined the interior. “I haven’t driven a stick since high school.”
Denis shrugged. “It’s temperamental. Wouldn’t matter if you drove one every day.”
She guessed he was a little older than her. Maybe 32 or 33, like Cliff. But there was a boyishness to the way he wore his dress clothes, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, tie too loose around his neck. He had dark, curly hair. Though he was standing still, Marin saw in him the promise of motion, as if he were waiting his turn on a high dive.
He was so different from her husband. Cliff, armored in Italian suits, as handsome and solemn as a knight. She loved that about Cliff—how he was, so clearly, a grown man. How he had, unlike her, marched unflinchingly into adulthood.
But something about Denis, his tie winging over his shoulder in the wind, made Marin say, “All right. Let’s take the yellow whale for a drive.”
Now, in the convertible with Denis, Marin slowed for a red light. She waited for him to speak. She missed the ease of their usual conversations, but also saw his silence as proof they were on the same page—that he understood this drive would be their last.
When she stopped, she caught a whiff of his shampoo, his laundry soap, and something human that made her wonder how his house smelled, where he set his keys, what he saw from his bedroom window.
“So,” Marin said. “Did that guy from Birmingham buy the Stingray?”
“Not yet,” Denis said. “But he emailed me in the middle of the night. A bunch of questions I’d already answered.”
“That’s a good sign, right?”
He watched a fuel truck park at a gas station. After a long moment, he said, “Right.”
Though Marin was happy for Denis about the sale, she felt a twirl of anxiety. Over the course of their drives, she’d learned he’d nearly saved enough to move to California, where he hoped to open a record store with a friend. She knew this was their last outing. And yet, the thought of Denis’s leaving brought a tightness to her chest.
Only five hours with Denis, and she’d learned so much about him. That he was born near Detroit and graduated from Wayne State. That he’d worked as a mattress salesman, a valet, an assistant to a home inspector. That he played piano, drank gin, and tended a difficult plant called a calathea, because the prior tenant left it behind, and Denis couldn’t let it perish. That he subbed for a wedding band. That he was, in his words, “romantically unattached at present.” That he’d dreamed that week of searching for a pen in tall grass, but didn’t fret over the meaning the way she would’ve. That he shaved every other day, and something hung beneath his shirt on a thin, silver chain, and he wore his belt on its second-to-last hole.
All this, and she didn’t know his last name, or—thank God—phone number.
To Marin’s credit, she’d told Denis about Cliff. How they’d been together five years, and how Cliff was the VP of a company that made systems for autonomous vehicles. She told him, too, that he was in Japan, negotiating a deal, and when he was due home.
At first, Marin’s openness with Denis about her marriage had comforted her. She regretted the times she’d allowed men to believe she was single, concealed her ring with a grapefruit or a novel, banishing poor Cliff so she could feel, momentarily, a stranger’s desire.
She wasn’t sure anymore, though, if her candor with Denis was a good sign. It concerned her—how from the moment she’d met him, rambled about her bath toy, she had unfolded herself, a plant opening to the sun.
They passed a liquor store, its sign rife with birds’ nests. Denis asked, “What happened with the ID? When your roommate came back, I mean.”
The day before, Marin had recounted the saga of her college roommate’s fake ID. With the fake, she’d told him, the roommate would procure beer and perfumy vodka, parade her bounty into parties with the arrogance of a demigod. When she wasn’t using it, she kept it in a pencil case, along with condoms and rolling papers and linty pills no one ever took.
One weekend, when the roommate was away, Marin decided to try it. The ID had belonged to the roommate’s older cousin, who had brown hair and eyes that could’ve been any color. Marin figured she looked as much like the photo as her roommate did.
She’d told Denis about the whiff of graphite when she opened the pencil case. How she memorized the cousin’s details, even practiced her close-lipped smile. And she told him how, at a liquor store that wasn’t the roommate’s usual, she brought a pinkish wine to the counter. The clerk examined the ID, examined Marin, then said she wouldn’t sell her the wine, and would, in fact, have to keep the ID, until Marin returned with a second form, for corroboration.
Never had Marin told anyone the rest of the story—not even Cliff, during that fledgling phase of their relationship, when they presented their pasts to each other in cocktail bars, the cocoon of her duvet. She’d left the entire ID incident out, partly because she’d banished it from her awareness, rehashing it only when the searchlight of her conscience found it against her will, and partly because she feared it would reveal some failing of hers Cliff hadn’t detected.
But today, her ponytail awhirl and Denis lounged against the car door, Marin confessed the worst part: When her roommate discovered the ID missing, Marin feigned cluelessness, barely looking up from her Milton homework.
“She didn’t question me,” Marin said. “That made it worse, for some reason. I’m still so mortified. I can’t even think about Milton without cringing.”
“Me neither,” Denis said. “What a slog.”
Marin smiled. “I actually liked Paradise Lost.”
After a moment, Denis asked, “Why do you think you did it? Took the ID.”
The question startled her. But there was no judgment in Denis’s tone, only genuine curiosity, and Marin thought, for the first time in years, of standing outside the liquor store, watching from the cigarette-butted curb as her roommate chatted with the checkout girl. Her roommate had looked lustrous with power.
“She could walk into that store and know nothing was off-limits, if she had enough cash. She didn’t need to rely on anyone else,” Marin said. “I guess I wanted to feel that.”
“That was the dream,” Denis said. “Not having everything, but knowing you could.”
Though Marin still regretted the episode, she was pleasantly surprised to find her shame diminished. She was so amazed by this new lightness that she almost missed the Belle Isle Bridge.
They always turned around at the bridge. Now, as Marin looped into the median, she was struck by the fact that they’d never planned any of it. Marin ran to the dealership, and the car was there and Denis was there, and they drove to the bridge and back, all without discussion, as if spurred by some shared migratory impulse.
Sometimes, she caught Denis tapping chords and melodies atop his thighs. She would ask what song he was playing, and if she didn’t know it, she’d look it up at home—listen to what he heard in his head. Today, though, as Marin waited for the light, he only stared at the Detroit River, glistening between the high-rises.
They had never touched, except for the first day, when they’d shaken hands after their drive. It seemed to Marin like a terrible waste, to have held his hand without context. She wanted to run her fingers along his neck, into his mussed hair.
Instead, she said, “Cliff gets home tonight.”
“Yeah,” Denis said. “I remember.”
The light changed, and Marin set about taking them back where they’d started.
“He got the deal done, by the way,” she said.
She’d seen Cliff’s text when she’d woken that morning. She congratulated him, and he hadn’t responded. That stupid time difference.
“Hey, good for him.” Denis watched her closely. “The trip was worth it, then?”
That Denis had phrased this as a question, not a statement, made Marin reflexively defensive of Cliff—their marriage.
“He’s taking me to the Bronze Door tonight, to celebrate,” she said.
“The Bronze Door,” Denis said. “Is that a euphemism?”
She laughed. “No. A restaurant, on Kercheval.”
Denis asked if it had a bronze door.
“It does,” Marin said. “Faux finish.”
“Ah, what a letdown.” He leaned against the headrest. “Solid bronze or bust. That’s what I say.”
They drove the rest of the way in silence. It wasn’t until Marin pulled into Uncle Chucky’s, parked the car and cut the engine, that Denis said, “Pretty sure I know the answer. But do you think you’ll come back tomorrow?”
“No,” Marin said, looking at her knees. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” he said. “That makes sense.”