Still, it does not stop me from saying, probably too brightly, “Hey, I forgot something at the store! Do you want to go for a ride with me?”

In the car I try to cope with Charlie’s sadness with a certain negative capability, and, as far as is possible, I try not to let it poison my excitement.⁵⁶ It might not be the most opportune moment of all time, but, I tell myself, it still has to be right. Even the radio seems to encourage me; when I fire up the Reliant the radio is playing that annoying Rat Burglar song by the Hard Twenties—“Steal Me”—but when I change the channel the first thing I hear is that ubiquitous commercial for Covet perfume. It’s right at the end of the spot, when the woman from the billboards and TV, the one in the sexy red dress that echoes the contours of the bottle, says in that sultry backroom voice, “You know you want it. What will you do to get it?”⁵⁷

I think: you’re right, sultry-voiced vixen in the sexy back-less dress.

I do want it. And now I am going to take it. I am going to make Charlie mine.

Originally I had planned on pulling over on a leafy, Frost-like, Connecticutian country lane, but now I can’t help myself. I barely make it down Clinton and right onto Lafayette when I blurt it out.

“You hear that?” I say, my nerves making me emit a noise almost like a giggle.

“Hear what?” Charlie says, studying the ramified cracks of the windshield.

“That noise.”

“What noise?” she says, looking dead ahead.

“Sort of a crunching sound?”

Eyes front, soldierly, she cocks her head as if listening for something inaudible.

“Maybe it’s more of a grinding. Maybe the axioregulator bushings misaligning.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

If I weren’t so disoriented by Charlie’s uncharacteristic fearlessness at my car’s polyglot noisemaking—and her first-ever refusal to participate in one of our oldest rituals—I would laugh, for it’s clear I am not making it up. The noises of distress that the Reliant is making are so clear that they are discernible not only as vibrations in your inner ear but as vibrations journeying through the car seats and deep into the tissue of your body.

The car is literally humming with ailment.

“That,” I clarify.

“The radio?”

“No, the noise that is making the gauges rattle around,” I say as the engine gags brutally. “The noise that sounds like a flock of California condors getting sucked into a jet engine.”

“The what?”

The car shudders, groans, spits something metallic onto the asphalt below us.

“That,” I say again.

“I think it’s just warming up.”

“Warming up?” I say in a tone of voice that may fall somewhere on the anger spectrum. “Do you know what car you’re in?”⁵⁸

A lifetime of honing the wrong instincts impels me to step on the brakes and yank the car to the curb. Before I know what I’m doing I have popped the hood and extracted the ring box from the engine bay. Beads of perspiration rappel down my back, forming freshets. I can feel each one coursing down its route, splitting and rejoining, making me an idiotically grinning delta of sweat. I am also suffering from a momentary fugue of anti-déjà vu: nothing is identifiably like anything else. I walk this street all the time, I shop all these stores, yet suddenly I cannot name them. For reassurance I peer around the hood and look at Charlie. Through the cracked glass her features are split and Cubist-like, nearly frightening, her expression a glossary on anxiety and confusion.