Good Car

The baby's father greeted me at the door holding a set of tongs and wearing a blue gingham apron lightly flecked with blood. He was a tall Englishman in his mid-forties and he kept his large head shaved perfectly clean. I'd met him once before and decided he was a nice guy, but I didn't like the shaved head. Somehow his solicitous manner made the bare scalp appear nude, rather than bald, and I could hardly look at him without feeling embarrassed. Just now it was dappled in beaded sweat. He shook my hand with expert pressure and looked into my eyes, saying nothing because his mouth was full. I hoped the blood and the tongs were unrelated to the placenta that I was there to help eat, but it was plain that he’d been cooking the thing at that very moment. He took the wine I'd brought and looked at the label, nodding and chewing. I'd chosen red wine, arbitrarily. Finally he ushered me inside with the tongs, and when he'd swallowed his food said politely that the party was just through that door and it was so lovely to have me. I now saw that we were standing in the kitchen. It was a large, old house, and I’d been nervous and somehow entered through the wrong door.

There were a lot of people there. Most of them were dressed up. I was not dressed up. I hadn't known it was that kind of party, something that happened to me more than it probably should have. Next time, I thought, I will wear my suit and dress down from there.

I looked around for someone I knew. The party seemed to be made entirely of couples, and the fact that I’d come alone now made me feel perverted. In the corner of the living room was a cherrywood bassinet with the new baby in it. Sitting in an armchair beside the bassinet, and rocking it gently, was a small old man with heavy glasses and a white bandage on the side of his neck. He looked like someone I could sit next to and disappear with, so I found a beer and sat down in the other armchair, a small table between us. We watched the party together and didn't speak. People kept stopping by to admire the baby, a little girl who was sleeping despite the noise.

It was the baby's mother who'd invited me, but I could sense without looking that she was nowhere nearby. She was unmistakable, a trial lawyer, six feet tall with a mind like a threshing machine. Her presence would be announced by a change in the atmosphere. She was my ex-wife, technically, though it had been thirteen years and the marriage had lasted only six weeks and she no longer thought of me in that way. I was just someone she used to know and whom she now liked to worry about. She was a remarkable woman, everyone agreed, and she deserved a remarkable life, but after we'd married it became clear I would be unable to provide such a life, or to keep up with her as she provided it for herself. But still she called me once or twice a year, always when she was driving somewhere. She seemed to believe that because she cared for me but no longer loved me, I must have felt the same about her.

After maybe a dozen people had filed past, gazing at the baby and saying about the same things one after another, I introduced myself to the old man. He asked how I knew the parents of this little creature here, and I told him the truth. He looked at me, and at what I was wearing, a T-shirt and jeans, and nodded as if he'd understood something I hadn't said. Then he told me he'd personally rather be enjoying the evening at home, but he'd come in place of his wife, Alice, who had suggested the idea of a placenta-eating party and also provided the recipe, but had passed away seventeen days ago.

This struck me dumb. The news was too severe, too eternal. I'd known him for thirty seconds and already his wife had died. Soon, the implication seemed to be, he himself would die. I stared at him. The bandage on his neck showed a pink trace of the bleeding below. His hair was only combed in the front. Finally I told him I was sorry to hear it. And I was, I was deeply sorry for him. Moments ago he was a stranger, and now I had joined him at the rim of a terrible void in his life. I could feel the gravitational truth of it. He said he still hadn't fully absorbed the fact that she was gone and half expected to see her there somewhere, because that was exactly the kind of thing she'd pull. She'd cooked their oldest son's placenta and served it in a casserole to the Eugene Symphony Orchestra in the summer of 1970. He hadn’t liked the idea then, and he still didn't like it.

Then he asked me what kind of car I drove and did I know anything about cars? This question, earnest and direct, calmed my nervous heart. Thank God for machines! It was the perfect topic of conversation. I wanted to envelop his little body in a grateful embrace. Well, I said, I had a few cars, old ones, but today I was driving a restored '65 Ford F-100 pickup and yes, I did know a thing or two. He said his Buick had broken down on the way there and rather than deal with the car and be late for his wife's final party he just left it on the shoulder of the highway and walked the last half mile. It had taken quite a while because one of his feet was bothering him and his damn shoes were brand new and no good for walking, but he'd made it more or less on time. He lifted one foot up and together we looked at the uncomfortable shoe, a brown wingtip which this morning had been shiny but was now scuffed and dirty. I asked him to give me some more detail about the car. He said it was a crimson '96 Riviera he'd purchased new in Bismarck, North Dakota, and that he'd had only the normal troubles with it before today. Then he described the breakdown, which involved a rattling sound, a hacking sound, black billowing exhaust, and a mushy gas pedal. I asked several follow-up questions and puzzled over the numerous details he provided, savoring the problem and feeling very far away. I had a theory about what was wrong—a broken valve—but didn't want to say it out loud, so great was my pleasure in considering the possibilities. Then the baby woke up and began to scream.

This silenced the rest of the room. Before anyone else could act, an alert, frizzy-haired woman in a striped pantsuit hurried over and lifted the baby and cooed and whispered and sniffed her diaper and bounced her on a hip. I remembered when I saw the baby's size that she was already five or six months old, which meant the placenta must have been tucked away in the freezer all this time, with other foods. Before the baby could calm down another woman said something in the first woman's ear, and quickly, as if she’d done something wrong, the frizzy-haired woman put the child back. After that nobody else came to help. Instead people resumed their conversations and began to slowly create some distance between themselves and the screaming. The old man and I exchanged a look, seeming to agree that we couldn’t just walk away, but also that the shrieking baby was not our business. I expected my ex-wife to appear momentarily, but she didn’t. Neither did her husband. To me, and clearly to others, the baby required some attention. The days of letting a child cry it out were over, I thought. But my ex-wife and her husband were remarkably competent people, and it was their home and their child. Probably we were judging the situation on old or insufficient information. The man continued rocking the bassinet, nudging it with one finger, but otherwise, right or wrong, we let the miserable baby be.

Speaking louder now, I told him he'd definitely need a tow, but that I could do that for him, today, and I could also take a look at the car in my personal shop, before he brought it to a mechanic. Then I told him I had an extra Bonneville he could drive in the meantime and that actually I would fix his car for free, and that anytime he needed help with his car or with his house or with anything at all, he should call me and I would come right over. I gave him my card, which he studied front and back as if he'd never seen such an object. He read my full name out loud and thanked me and patted my knee and put the card in his breast pocket and then patted that. I got the feeling we were about to become pals. Maybe we'd see each other once a month, and I'd bring a little lunch and help out with this and that, and he’d tell stories and we'd talk about nostalgic things, and I knew that one day I would go to his funeral, wearing my suit, and probably cry.

Now the husband emerged from the kitchen carrying a steaming ceramic dish, announced over the yelling baby that the main course was served, and the party quieted to a murmur and followed him into another room and onto the back deck, where there were apparently even more people and a potluck already in progress, leaving the three of us—me, the old man, and the baby—alone in the corner. When the room was clear, the crying stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I looked over and saw that the old man had put his hand through the bars of the bassinet and the end of his pinky finger in the baby's mouth. The baby suckled, one of her little fists gripping his hand and the other pulling at his starched sleeve, her eyes wide and calmed. The man was perfectly comfortable with this intimacy. I could imagine he'd done the same thing for his own children, and I thought again of his wife, Alice. I asked why an orchestra? He said she'd played the cello until her hands quit working. That's how they met. He played the oboe. Still played. Their son, whose placenta had been served, had rebelled from their vision of his future and was now the foreman of a strip-mining operation in Montana, though he'd shown a genius-level aptitude for music as a child, something his wife attributed not to natural talent or to genetics but to the orchestra's eating of his placenta.

The group on the deck exploded in hysterical laughter. It went on and on, died down, and then went on and on again. It was the cathartic, cleansing sort of laughter that can only come after a long period of dread. The kind that flees from your throat like a flock of scared birds. I was jealous of their laughing and yet felt grateful to be where I was. After they all calmed down I could hear the voice of my ex-wife as she delivered some remarks, thanking everyone, and I knew that when she was done talking, she would soon come in to retrieve the baby and ask what the two of us were waiting for, and I would have to decide if I wanted to cannibalize her and her baby's flesh—is there another way to put it?—and make the two of them part of me forever. As I was waiting for this moment of cosmic decision andcontemplating an escape out the front door, the man turned to me and said he'd once had a Ford, and it was a good car. He'd driven Buicks for most of his life, and they were also good cars, though now he was thinking it was time for a change.