Free A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis Page B

his wife, “a writer is what you’re setting out to be, and a writer is what you’re going to end up, not a cab-driver. What do you know about driving a cab? The man I married a couple of months ago was going to be a college professor, in case you’ve forgotten. If I wanted to marry a cab-driver, I could have stayed in Flatbush. I could have done better than that if I’d stayed in Flatbush. I could have married Harry Ingleman. His father owns a whole
fleet
of cabs!”
    Lowell rose abruptly and went into the kitchen to make himself a drink, but the bottle was gone.
    â€œI threw it out,” said his wife. “You’ve been drinking too much. I had an uncle who drank too much, and I know all about it.”
    Curiously, although their life together was terrible and they hadn’t made love in more than a week, she was wearing all his favorite clothes and her cooking had never been better.
    â€œThere’s still time,” said Lowell on the last morning as he settled himself behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. “We can still change our minds.” The old car was dangerously laden; for some reason, although they had relatively few possessions, they had contrived to find a great many big heavy containers to put them in. Not ten minutes ago their landlady had confiscated their deposit on the grounds that she couldn’t find another tenant in the middle of the month, which Lowell knew to be a bald-faced lie even though he couldn’t prove it. Otherwise everything was fine. The University of California had been informed by mail that he would not be needing their nice scholarship after all, thanks very much. Lowell had said good-bye to his friends. Sentimentally, he vowed to say good-bye to one friend a day, but he soon ran out of friends and he ended up saying good-bye to some people twice because he kept running into them on campus. He said good-bye to his roommate four times. It was all kind of embarrassing, and after a while he got the idea that people were looking at him in a funny way. “How about it?” he asked his wife, whose face was hard as stone.
    â€œIt’s too late for that,” she said. “This isn’t the place. Drive on.”
    It was hard to believe that changing your life could be as easy as flipping a switch, but that was exactly what happened: Lowell turned the key in the ignition and drove away from everything he had ever known in his life. They went across the bay and over the hills and down into the valley and over the mountains, and the next day they crossed Nevada and after that they were no place Lowell had ever been or imagined he would go.
    â€œDo you realize that I’m the first member of my family to cross this thing in a hundred years?” said Lowell as they bridged the Mississippi at Saint Louis. His emotions were strange and sinking, but not precise enough to put a name to.
    â€œBig deal,” said his wife.
    They came to New York at night, hurtling through a hellish New Jersey landscape the likes of which Lowell had never dreamed existed, a chaos of roadways and exits, none of which made any sense, surrounded by smoke and flashes and dark hulking masses and pillars of real fire a thousand feet high, enveloped in a stench like dog’s breath and dead goldfish.
    â€œThere it is,” said his wife.
    â€œWhere? Where?” cried Lowell, bending over the wheel, uncertain of anything, his heart in his mouth and his mind in a fog. The geometry of the place was all wrong, and nothing made sense.
    â€œOver there,” said his wife.
    Out of the corner of his eye Lowell caught a fleeting glimpse of something huge and calm-looking in the distance, but his perspective was shattered by neon and oncoming lights, and at that moment a sign convinced him that it was really a truck, and he almost ran into a real truck that he hadn’t even noticed. He swung away from it in the nick of time, only to be