This was 1999 and travel agencies were getting killed off by the internet and I was selling my vintage 1972 Pontiac LeMans because my wife, Corrine, fucked an FBI agent in it. She fucked the ugly one, not the old one or the square-jawed one. I maybe could’ve forgiven her if she’d had car sex with the square-jawed one, if she’d simply been tempted to touch something pretty to forget about the mess of our lives. I might’ve even gotten over her doing it with the old one if she would’ve said it was a misguided attempt to siphon some wisdom from him. Instead she screwed the ugly one, the one with the weird bald spot and the unrelenting smoker’s cough, a man whose footprints reappeared on my windshield every time I turned on the defroster, a man whose dickprint I couldn’t get off my sunroof no matter how hard I scrubbed.
Even before the car sex, I’d been thinking about getting rid of the LeMans. I’d bought it two years before with every intention of restoring it to its former glory, but I’d quickly found that restoring things to their former glory wasn’t a job for impatient people who chuck their socket sets at their garage walls when anything goes wrong. The car ran, but barely. There were still rust spots near the wheel wells and the muffler was held up by a clothes hanger. The engine mysteriously leaked oil whenever it got above 75 degrees. There was a nasty gash on the quarter panel from two weeks before when I’d clipped a bridge stanchion and spun off the road.
“I’m lucky to be alive,” I told the tow truck driver who’d pulled me out of the ditch.
“Do you mean in general, or right now?” he asked.
“I mean right now,” I told him.
The reason the FBI was watching us was because of Corrine’s dad. He’d bilked people out of $700,000 by booking them cruises that didn’t exist and vacation houses that were already booked. Before he vanished, he left Corrine a voicemail that made it seem like the three of us were in cahoots, that if the Feds watched us they’d catch him. Corrine’s dad hated me and it made total sense he’d fuck me over, but he’d doted on Corrine her entire life, sending her to private school, paying for riding lessons, buying her a convertible on her 16th birthday. She couldn’t believe he’d betrayed her and she’d gone on a month long bender. I’d somehow remained sober through all of it, waving her away whenever she held out a gin and tonic to me, weathering the temptation of a margarita being mixed a foot away.
Relapse was part of recovery. Everyone at my AA meetings kept telling me that over and over. Everyone at AA meetings had opinions about what I should do. Some of them thought I should be kind and understanding with Corrine, give her a chance to straighten things out. My sponsor, Harold, told me to get the hell out of the house or be pulled down with her. I didn’t know what to do, but I hated the idea that if I left Corrine would get to stay in our house getting day drunk and never changing out of her pajamas.
There were three FBI agents staking us out. They worked in shifts. The old one, Cooper, worked mornings. The good looking one was Aparacio. He worked 4pm-Midnight. The overnight guy, the guy who’d fucked Corrine and who made the LeMans reek of cherry lube, his name was Restin.
This morning when I spun open the blinds, Cooper was standing in our driveway, talking to Corrine. I pressed my ear against the window screen so I could hear what they were saying.
“I think about jetting out of here every morning when I get up, but then have a mimosa or two and all my momentum slides away,” Corrine said.
At this point, Corrine was sleeping in our bedroom and I was sleeping on the couch. After she’d had sex with Restin, I asked her to leave, but then she started to pack much too quickly and much too happily for my liking so I immediately reversed course, told her that given the circumstances maybe we shouldn’t make any rash decisions. I told her that maybe our love could blossom once more, that we’d gone through some rough times before, that maybe our love was shaped like a parabola or a boomerang or some other curvy object that spun back toward the person who’d thrown it and even though it seemed like she’d tossed our love so far away that it would probably never return, maybe if we were super patient with each other it would? Maybe if we stuck this out for a while our love would slowly come spinning back toward us and we could snatch it out of the air and hug it tight to our chests. I mean who really knew, right? Maybe in a few months everything would be wonderful or perhaps at least decent?
Cooper walked back to his car and Corrine came back inside and poured herself a glass of champagne. It was 9:42 in the morning. Before this bender, she’d been sober for almost two years. She’d gone to 90 meetings in 90 days after her DUI, really committed to the program. She was way more of an AA apostle than I was, always raising her hand to volunteer to be someone’s sponsor. She always went to Pearl’s Diner after the meeting to drink shitty coffee and chat instead of doing what I did, which was heading straight home and turning on the television.
I flopped down on a chair across the room. I had a job interview that afternoon and my one serviceable suit was lying over the arm of the couch. I watched as Corrine nipped the edge of the area rug with her foot and sloshed her drink onto the hardwood floor. Instead of cleaning it up, she went back into the kitchen to top herself off. And instead of telling her to clean it up, I got a rag and got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed.
A month before, both of us were working at Corrine’s dad’s travel agency, selling cruises, beach vacations, Disney getaways. Corrine had worked there since college and her dad had grudgingly hired me as an office manager after we’d gotten married. You know how everyone always crows on and on about nepotism being horrible and unfair? That ultimately who you know is better than what you know? This time nepotism screwed us. Besides losing our jobs, we had the pleasure of having the FBI bursting into our offices and pushing automatic weaponry into our chests before they took us downtown for questioning.
A day before the raid, thirty of our customers showed up at the same condo in Vail. At first we thought it was a computer snafu, but then the same thing happened again with a bunch of other vacation rentals later that day. Corrine’s dad wasn’t answering our calls and when I tried to refund everyone’s money I found out the company accounts were empty.
I’d always imagined an FBI investigation as a cloak and dagger affair, but so far it was the exact opposite, everything the agents did was relaxed, out in the open. They respectfully tailed me whenever I went to the post office or the hardware store. A couple of times they’d helped Corrine carry groceries into the house, helped her water the flower beds. One day, Cooper walked over to me. He was in his mid-fifties, in good shape with a well-earned tan.
“How much longer are you guys going to be here?” I asked.
“As long as it takes,” Cooper said.
The job interview I had was for a job I knew I would not get. How was I supposed to explain away the fact that my previous job was as an accountant who hadn’t noticed that his boss was bilking the company out of thousands of dollars? How should I explain that I’d probably been hired for that job because Corrine’s dad knew I was dumb enough not to catch any of his malfeasance? Should I tell the interviewer that Corrine’s dad knew he could use my stupidity to disappear into the ether without any consequence and also almost break up my marriage?
“We’re pawns,” I told Cooper. “We don’t know shit.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, “we’re here until someone tells us something different.”
While we talked, I was swinging around my AA keychain on my index finger. Cooper saw it and pulled a medallion from his pocket.
“Six months,” he said, “but I wish it was six years.”
I looked toward our house and saw Corrine had the drapes open. She was sitting on the couch, sipping from a highball. She’d moved to hard liquor earlier than usual today, before Noon. Not drinking hard liquor before Noon was one of the drinking rules that she’d initially instituted, but it was becoming less and less of a rule and more like some piece of guidance that was easily deviated from if she thought it seemed necessary.
“Maybe you can help me get Corrine to a meeting,” I told him.
“She’s got to do it on her own,” he said. “You know that.”
I went into the house and got my camera and took some pictures of the Lemans for the online ad. I showed some of the damage but not any of the bad spots. In the ad, I’d said the car was a “good starter” even though that was only partly true. I’d said that I’d changed the oil every 3000 miles even though I hadn’t.
I posted the car online, listed it for $4200. A guy called after an hour and said he was going to stop by around 6 that night, but he didn’t actually show up. That happened a lot over the next week, people saying they were super excited to see the car, saying they’d swing over in the next hour, but then never swinging by.
One morning, I was spraying ArmorAll on the tires of the LeMans and Cooper motioned me over. When I got a couple of feet away I could smell the liquor wafting from him.
“How’s that pretty wife of yours?” he slurred.
The blinds were open again. I could see Corrine standing in the living room in her robe. Cooper knew exactly how she was doing. I walked in front of him, blocking his view.
“You need me to call your sponsor?” I asked him.
“My sponsor is dying of liver cancer,” he said. “That’s why I’m drunk.”
Cooper leaned on the hood of the LeMans to steady himself.
“Maybe we should invite Corrine out here,” he said. “All of us could figure out something to celebrate and then celebrate it.”
Cooper’s shirt was rumpled and his hair was uncombed. I noticed there was a pillow and a blanket in the backseat of his car. Cooper went in the car and grabbed the journal he was always scribbling in. He looked me up and down and then wrote something in his journal. I could only imagine how incompetent this journal of his made me look. His summary of my life probably read something like this — Male, 33, sloppy dresser, unable to get a new job, fights the thirst every minute of every day, wife about to leave him. That was the abridged version, but with a little time and effort you could fill in the gaps and make me look round and whole and much, much worse.
“I live in one of those cookie cutter townhousees they built by the ravine,” Cooper said. “My wife talked me into it before she died. No more yard care, she told me. A walkable lifestyle. After all the crap I put her through over the years, I owed her that. Now I have to sit out in front of your place every day and look and see what I could have had. Your bungalow has more character in one damn shingle than my entire place does.”
I started to walk inside and close the blinds, dump all Corrine’s liquor down the sink, drag her to a meeting with me.
“Hold on,” Cooper said. He pulled out a picture from his wallet and handed it to me. It was a picture of a naked woman lying on a chaise lounge. The woman had floppy breasts and a bushy mound of pubes. She was smiling slightly for the camera, but you could tell that her body was rigid, a little nervous.
“It’s a photo of my wife right before she got sick,” Cooper said. “She had a bunch of these taken for my birthday.”
He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a flask and took a swallow. I tried to hand him back the photo, but he waved me off.
“You keep it,” he said. “Plenty more where that came from.”
The afternoon agent, Aparacio, was about 40. He liked to listen to light jazz at high volume. He’d grown up in New York, still had the accent. Sometimes Corrine brought him leftovers from our dinner.
At around 7pm that night, I went out and talked to him. He was eating some pork roast I’d made.
“Is everything okay with Cooper?” I asked.
Aparicio was slowly eating, closing his eyes, savoring each bite.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“When he got here this morning he was wasted,” I said.
Aparacio finished the food and handed his plate to me.
“You sure about that?” he said. “That’s a big accusation you’re making.”
“I know wasted,” I said.
“I suspect you would,” Aparacio told me.
While I stood there Aparacio fiddled with the presets on his radio. Before there had been a whiny trumpet, but it was now replaced by a whiny saxophone or clarinet, I couldn’t tell which.
“You know this guy?” he asked. “He does that circuitous breathing thing? He can exhale for like 12 minutes straight. It’s a world record.”
Lately I tried to eat any leftover food we had so Aparacio wouldn’t get any. In the last couple of weeks I’d gained about ten pounds,simply out of spite. Corrine was onto me and she began to take a larger portion and then brought the rest out to Aparacio.
“He breathes within his breath,” Aparacio told me. “It’s like a circle. Inside each breath he finds another breath.”
He turned up his radio louder, took another bite, closed his eyes, chewed.
“Get Cooper some help,” I told him before I walked inside.
“It’s probably something they teach them at the Academy,” Corrine said, looking at the picture of Cooper’s naked wife. “It’s probably how they get you to open up. Cooper’s probably not even in AA. And no way this picture is his wife.”
By now Corrine had already finished her first couple of glasses of champagne and I wasn’t in the mood to hear her drunken speculation on how the world worked, how little she trusted everyone’s motives, how everyone was looking out for themselves. I took a chamois and a bucket from under the kitchen sink and went outside to wash the LeMans.
Restin started his shift at midnight and I definitely wasn’t going to talk to him about Cooper. In the beginning he’d been the most friendly agent, but now that he’d fucked Corrine, he didn’t seem to have much to want to do with either of us. He just sat in his car, fogging up the windows, waiting for the sun to come up.
The next morning, I got up early and went jogging to clear my head. I ran down by the reservoir. After a couple of miles, I ducked under a bridge to piss. Halfway through, Cooper yelled out to me.
“I need you to take me to a meeting,” he said.
I pulled up my pants, wondering if he was really in AA. I could tell he was the type of person who would not stop asking for help no matter how many times I told him no, that he was one of those people who sucked you into his orbit whether you liked it or not, someone who made it hard and complicated to help and who also made any help you gave him hard and complicated too and that seemed authentic and something you couldn’t fake.
It looked like he hadn’t slept in days. This didn’t seem like a trick to me. Maybe if I got him to the meeting, he’d remember what he needed to do to get sober and find someone else to help him and then maybe he would leave me alone. There were cars on the highway above us, rushing to jobs where someone would yell at them if they were late, people taking their kids to school who if they were late would get yelled at, people who did not have government agents following them or having sex with their wives.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take you.”
When I got back from my run, Corrine told me someone had knocked on the door and asked about the LeMans.
“He said he was looking for a project. I told him to stop by around 8 tonight so you two could talk.”
It was 10am and Corrine had already finished a bottle of champagne. She turned on a TV show where two women gossiped and day drank and made gossiping and day drinking look fun. The two women were on the East Coast and it was Noon there and who knows if they were even drinking anything alcoholic because they never got really sloppy or fell down or got sleepy or insulted any of their sponsors. They never made lewd marks to their camera crew and they only occasionally took off their bras to get more comfortable and breathe easier.
“I’m taking Cooper to a meeting tonight, but I should be back by then,” I told Corrine.
“You are a total sucker,” she said. “He probably doesn’t drink at all.”
“Maybe,” I told her. “But what if he isn’t conning me? What if I drag him to that meeting and it saves his life? What if Cooper repays my good deed by doing a good deed for someone else? What if these acts of kindness happen over and over again because of this chance I took?”
“Good luck,” Corrine said.
When I went to pick up Cooper he wasn’t at his townhouse. I walked around to the back and stared into his patio window. Everything looked too clean. It didn’t look like this was an alcoholic’s place, the patio furniture was spotless, the lawn was immaculate, it looked like he’d recently pressure washed his siding. I drove back home and found that the LeMans was not in the driveway. Corrine wasn’t there either. I went inside and a few minutes later, I saw the LeMans pull up. Corrine and Cooper and another man got out of it. Instead of heading outside, I opened the window to listen to them. Cooper had showered, cleaned himself up. The man probably thought Cooper and Corrine were married. That’s what I would have thought. I couldn’t hear what they were saying so I moved in our backyard, closer to the driveway. I stood near the fence and listened to my afternoon FBI agent talk up my car. How the transmission had recently been flushed, how many compliments he got when you drove it around, how sad he was to let it go.
“Would you take $3400 for it?” the man asked.
“Lowest we could go is $4000,” Cooper said.
The man stood there, walking around the car, looking everything over again, wondering if he could trust what these two strangers were telling him.
“Highest I would go is $3800,” the man said.
“That works,” Cooper said, shaking the man’s hand.
Aparacio was on duty then, sitting in his car with the windows down. I could hear the light jazz wafting through the air. I watched the man count out $3800 in hundreds. He fanned the money out on the hood of the car and Corrine scooped it up. Corrine signed my name on the title and handed it to him and he got in the LeMans and drove away. Cooper put his arm around Corrine while I stood there in my backyard watching all of this. Corrine and I would split up a month later and the FBI would never find Corrine’s dad, but now Aparacio’s dumbass music was floating out of his car. I could not understand how anyone could listen to that shit. I could not figure out how the fuck it was possible for someone to take a breath inside another breath.
