Chapter 16
Brad was sitting on the couch in the spacious living room again, strumming his guitar. He was thinking about Robert and the way he strode into the living room a few weeks earlier as if he owned the place. Anne came downstairs wearing her white house coat. It was 10:30 in the morning and she was on her way to the shower on the other side of the living room. As she walked by him she asked, “Are you still game to teach me how to drive the Citroen?”
He was, in fact, waiting for her to come downstairs. He had promised the night before. “Sure,” he said, pretending not to be surprised that she asked.
She said, “I thought we could have a picnic at Stinson beach and somewhere along the way you could give me some lessons.”
“It sounds like fun.”
She said, “Bring your guitar along and we can sing some Country and Western songs together.”
“I’ll get the case.”
Anne had got an old Deux Chevaux from her ex husband as part of the divorce settlement but she was afraid to drive it. It was a vintage, 1958 Citroen with a stick shift and a semi circle roof. It was gray, mostly because the paint was gone, very noisy inside and the wind seemed to come in from a hundred unsecurable openings. At three and a half, her daughter Jo didn’t know the difference between the Deux Chevaux and a normal car and at 25 Anne and Brad didn’t care.
He had to admit that she was good looking. In case he had forgotten, heads turned to remind him as they drove along Sir Frances Drake boulevard through Kentfield towards San Anselmo on their way to Stinson Beach.
Jo sat on Brad’s lap all the way to Stinson Beach, steering much of the way along the hairpin turns of highway one accompanied by her mother’s shrieks or horror. He fell in love with Jo at first sight. He loved her three-year-old innocence and her sharp, three-year-old mind. He was convinced that she was a genius of the first order. She was also a beautiful child and he was charmed when she grabbed him and kissed him on the cheek, which she often did.
He was in the grip of one of the oldest forces in nature: The need of children for the love of adults. Like all children, Jo would try to hold onto him with any means that she had. She would stop at nothing to keep him there but when she no longer needed him she would discard him or, if she tolerated having him around at all, she would treat him like an old acquaintance to be mildly ashamed of on occasion and sometimes even to bite with the serpent’s tooth of ingratitude.
Marriage was not in the cards. Obviously, looks had nothing to do with it. She was certainly beautiful. Personality wasn’t a factor. She was charming and funny. But Anne wasn’t a free spirit and he knew that she would only pretend to a willingness to follow him on his dangerous paths. She would stand at the entrance to the labyrinth and try to seduce him to come back but she wouldn’t go with him, at least not without the string of Ariadne.
There was another thing that made the idea of marriage confusing to Brad. In a very odd way, Brad thought he had a spiritual calling. Although, at the same time, he thought that, in the 20th century, a true spiritual life had become all but impossible. He conceded that there were a few exceptions like Thomas Merton or Martin Luther King but he thought that Merton was a spiritual cripple compared to what the human race needed and that King was all-too-human. While Brad was certainly an atheist, he wanted to count among the Knights of Faith that Kierkegaard called for and he wanted to recapture the spirit of Meister Eckhardt and the spirit of the Zen masters of old. But he had seen the alcoholism and hedonism behind the mask of latter day saints like Alan Watts and Timothy Leary and had read the emotional and intellectual confusion in the works of the contemporary literary sages like Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer and Henry Miller and he was skeptical. He wanted ideal friendships of the kind discussed in the Nichomachean Ethics but he was all but convinced that they were impossible in a capitalistic world where people were economic atoms, expected to follow economic opportunities above everything else. He wanted a marriage of equals without regard to social status or background but he wasn’t certain that he was capable of sustaining such a marriage or that it was possible for anyone to sustain one. He was still tempted by adventure and temporary pleasures.
Anne had been obsessed with sex and pleasure for many years until she had become fatigued and ashamed of herself. Her obsession had ruined her marriage. The court had ruled that her husband was responsible for the divorce. He was an irascible man, unable to control his emotions and had beaten her several times. But it was her frequent love affairs, including occasional lapses with her brother, that were the real cause. While on the road, she had allowed herself many one night stands and short affairs with both sexes and long term relationships with all of her band members and her manager.
Her mother had a long history with men as well. She was divorced when Anne was five and her brother Walt was three. Her mother lived with a succession of men until she married the Judge when Anne was 16 and her brother 14. Happily, her mother had developed into a fine looking middle age woman and she made a quick and easy conquest of the Judge. The marriage gave her a late and unexpected respectability. The family was lifted from working class poverty into respectable upper middle class life in Tiberon. Neither of the children fit into Redwood High School, however. Anne was a cheer leader for a year but her popularity was short-lived and was based on several hapless sexual adventures with school athletes. Her brother Walt became a complete rebel. It was during the early sixties, before the counter culture revolution, so there was no marijuana or long hair at Redwood, but he refused virtually everything and almost flunked out of school. When the war protests started, in 1965 and 1966, he was 20 years old and found his vocation. He became a hippie and discovered marijuana and LSD and changed his name to Gandolf, one of his heroes from the Lord of the Rings.
Walt kept his distance from the commune and like a wolf in the forest, stared malevolently at Brad whenever he ventured into its edges. Without Brad’s knowledge, Anne was using him as a wedge to keep her brother away. Her method was simple: She pretended that she was having an affair with Brad.
One the way home from Stinson beach, Anne reminded Brad of the driving lessons.
Brad said, “The brakes are a little mushy.”
“Mushy?”
Brad said, “I didn’t say anything on the way out here, but I think they’re low on brake fluid. No big deal. You can always use the emergency brake, if they get any worse.”
“The emergency brake. What’s that?”
Brad had once driven his car around the city for an entire week without brakes, simply by using the emergency brake instead of the brake pedal. He hadn’t found it too difficult. “It’s a lever here by the door.” He demonstrated, pulling them to a smooth stop. “You can always stop this way if your brakes fail.”
Her eyes got big. “I can’t drive the car if the brakes are going to fail.”
He laughed. “They aren’t going to fail. I’m sorry for giving you the wrong impression. It’s Sunday or I’d stop in and get some brake fluid. They’re just low on brake fluid, that’s all. I’m talking about an emergency.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s easy.” He demonstrated again. “Anyway, you won’t need to use the emergency brake. But I have been pumping the brakes. You probably have a leak in the brake line.”
“It hasn’t been driven much in the last few months.”
He said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll give you your lesson later. Your test is in two weeks isn’t it?”
She reddened. “I forgot to tell you. I checked again last night. It’s turns out that it’s tomorrow. I read my calendar wrong.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it perfectly safe as long as you learn how to use the emergency brake first. That will be your first lesson.”
“You can do it mom,” Jo said, taking her cue from Brad.
Brad demonstrated again. “It’s pretty easy.” He stopped the car and they changed places. He made her pull on the emergency brake a couple of times. She didn’t seem to have a problem with it.
On the road, she manipulated the stick shift reasonably well and admitted that her ex husband had taught her to drive before the divorce. But she said he was a terrible teacher and he had always blown up at little things and they ended up having terrible fights every time he gave her a lesson.
Jo climbed into the front seat and sat on Brad’s lap. After stopping easily, four times, with the emergency brake Brad told her to use the regular brakes.
“They’re fine,” she said. “Maybe a little mushy, like you said.”
“You can pump the pedal if it goes too far down to the floor board. They’ll tighten up.”
She pumped the brakes and they tightened up. “Let’s go,” she said.
They drove quite a few miles on a road alongside the highway 101. He said, “Let’s go onto the freeway for awhile.”
“No. I’m afraid to go on the freeway.”
“What about your driving test.”
“It scares me.”
“We’ll stay in the slow lane. We can get off after about three turnoffs. Then we can drive the rest of the way to Kentfield on back roads. I know a way.”
They entered the freeway. Anne’s knuckles were white against the gray steering wheel.
Brad said, “Take it easy. Shift into third gear.” He was amazed that she could handle the stick shift so well. Her eyes were riveted to the road. They approached the exit ramp and he instructed her to turn off. As she got onto the off ramp he asked her to test the brakes.
“How are they?”
“I’m pumping.”
“Are they OK?”
“Yes.” They came to a stop.
“You’ve got to turn left and go over the overpass to get to the road that leads to Kentfield.”
She said, “The brakes are getting a little low. My foot almost went to the floorboard.” She turned left at the green light and headed over the overpass.
He said, “You’d better let me drive. Use the emergency brake for the next stop. As soon as you get to the red light, I’ll take over.”
They got to the middle of the overpass and started downhill towards a stop sign. There was a large white Thunderbird waiting at the stop light. They were coasting slowly towards the light when she said, “Brad, the brakes are gone.”
“Don’t worry, just pull up on the emergency brake.”
Her hands didn’t leave the steering wheel. They were traveling at about ten miles per hour and they were about twenty feet from the back end of the Thunderbird. He yelled, “The emergency brake!” Jo was on his lap and he couldn’t safely dive over her lap and grab it. He held Jo with one arm and put his other hand on the dashboard to cushion the blow. He yelled, one last time, “Pull on the emergency brake.”
Her hands didn’t leave the steering wheel while they smashed into the back end of the big white Thunderbird at about ten miles per hour. The head and shoulders in the passenger seat of Thunderbird made a classic whiplash which Brad saw, clearly, directly in front of him, from a distance of about ten feet. The Deux Chevaux bounced up into the air, twisted and came down about three feet behind the Thunderbird. Jo hadn’t moved from Brad’s arms and none of them had hit the windshield. There was no blood or broken bones and only a few scratches on the Deux Chevaux. The Thunderbirds bumper had a slight U-shaped indentation. There had been no way to warn the Thunderbird because the horn didn’t work.
Brad looked over at Anne. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. What’s going to happen?” Suddenly, Jo let out a piercing scream and wanted to sit on her mother’s lap.
“Do you have a temporary driver’s license?”
Anne moaned, “Yes. But I don’t have any insurance.”
“We’ll have to get out and talk to them and tell them the truth.”
She said, “You’d better let me take Jo. We’ll go out there and talk with them.”
Brad said, “OK. I can talk if you want me to.”
“No. I’ll handle it.”
Anne led Jo by the hand until they got to the man standing outside the driver’s side of the Thunderbird. He was helping a middle age woman out of the passenger seat. The woman’s shoulders were hunched up and when she moved her head to look at Anne, her entire body turned along with it.. The man got his jacket from the back seat and instructed her to lie on the road, on her back. He put the jacket over her and within a few minutes the police arrived. Brad sat patiently in the driver’s seat watching the scene unfold. He saw them talking and he saw a resigned look form on the man’s face after he learned that Anne didn’t have any insurance. After about five minutes, an ambulance arrived and took the woman away. There were a few more words with the policeman and then Anne and Jo returned to the Deux Chevaux and Brad drove them back to the commune using the emergency brake. Deriin found a leak in the master cylinder and offered to repair it for the cost of the parts.