Truth in Advertising Page 0,47
Her breath smells of booze and soup.
“What’s your room number?” she says, a grin on her face.
It’s getting late.
• • •
I want to call Phoebe but it’s late. I start to text her but stop. She thinks I’m in Mexico. Why worry her?
I flip through the channels. MTV and VH1 and Portuguese news and all-Arabic dramas and kickboxing and a Latvian documentary about a dairy farmer with one arm and a Hallmark special about a mentally challenged boy lost in the woods who finds the true meaning of friendship with an animal and a program on the History Channel about Nazis that they seem to play a lot and a thing on the Discovery Channel about gigantic equipment and the history of gigantic equipment and old footage of steam shovels and newer footage of trucks the size of ocean liners and there are movies, lots of movies, all of which I’ve seen before but I watch them nonetheless. And there are commercials. Foot odor and erectile dysfunction and toilet paper and tampons and cars, lots of cars, almost all on a road with no other cars, going fast, far too fast it seems, on winding, rain-slicked roads, leaves flying, and there are ones for beer, with a young guy doing something to get a young girl’s attention but embarrassing himself in the process and his friends watching the entire time and laughing in the corner only the girl thinks it’s cute and sits with him anyway and a line at the end, intoned by a cool-dude voice-over who says something like, “Because life’s worth living” or “What it means to be a man” or “Here’s to good times,” jumbles of words that mean nothing, that merely sound like they mean something, words that were thought about by large groups of intelligent people for months at a time. Words that in some cases were written by me or my colleagues, there, on TV. If you only knew what went into it. The hours, the days, the weeks, the meetings, the stress, the deadlines, the money, the approvals, the casting, the flights, the hotels, the flare-ups, the drinking, the casual sex, the hope that it will mean something because at the time it certainly seemed to. It seemed to be important. And then you see it on TV. And it goes by so fast. A shot we spent half a day lighting is on the screen for eighteen frames—less than a second, a second being twenty-four frames, unless it’s video and then it’s thirty frames. The point is . . . what is the point? I look for It’s a Wonderful Life, but can’t find it anywhere.
• • •
I wake early and have no idea where I am. It’s still dark, 7 A.M. I take a long, hot shower, make coffee in my room. It tastes like coffee I made in my room. I have two hours before visiting hours begin and I have to fight the regret of coming here. I turn on my phone and see a text message from Phoebe. Merry Christmas, mister! Wear sunblock!
I walk through town, the deserted Main Street, the quaint shops with quaint names, The Grumpy Oyster, Clam Up, selling bric-a-brac like seashells and other crap you’ll find at a yard sale in a few years. Lots of things with the words CAPE COD written on them. The outline of the Cape itself is permanently ruined for me after Ian once described it as looking like an erect penis with extreme curvature.
I keep walking, hoping to find a coffee shop. Near a rotary, mercifully, I find a Dunkin’ Donuts that’s open. I stop for a coffee and a plain donut. The woman behind the counter has bad skin and speaks with a heavy Brazilian accent. I know one word in Portuguese. Thank you. “Obrigado,” I say. She looks up and smiles. “Merry Christmas,” she says.
The road cuts behind the little airport and comes out onto the other side of the Cape, Route 6A. Here the feeling is of a very different place than the strip malls and fast food dumps of Hyannis. It looks like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Small, neatly-kept wooden houses from the 1700s, stone walls worn smooth, slate roofs. I turn down a side road. You can smell the ocean, the salt air. There’d been a light wind but now it picks up, colder. The sun is up. The road opens up onto the water. I don’t know the