A friend of Jonathan’s had given him the car when he returned to the United States. It was a dented, gray Toyota with primer silvering the extensive rust and doors that didn’t lock. After a year of traveling through China and New Zealand, Jonathan had returned to D.C. broke, and he found it an unexpected sign of adulthood that a friend his own age could afford this generosity. The doors that didn’t lock hardly seemed to matter–until he found Rufus living in his car. Actually, Rufus didn’t live in the car, he slept in it, but it seemed like the same thing. Jonathan’s apartment was a few blocks from the men’s shelter on Fourteenth street, and he guessed that Rufus got his meals there. He didn’t like to ask too many questions; somehow it seemed that the more he knew, the more responsible he was, that asking too many questions was like feeding a stray cat.
Jonathan found him in his car on a rainy night in October, a night when he was expected at his prospective in-laws for dinner. He opened the door of his car, then jumped back, startled by a substantial black man, in a paisley polyester shirt and a John Deere cap, sitting in the driver’s seat, reading the newspaper. The man slapped the pages together and stared for a moment at the young Chinese man staring in at him. The scent of cologne floated into the damp air. “Excuse me,” Jonathan said. “What’s going on here?” “Just getting out of the rain,” the man started to fold up his paper. His hands trembled as he aimed the newspaper’s folded end at the side pocket of his blue vinyl Pan Am bag. With the paper secure, he braced one hand against the steering wheel and pulled himself around. “It’s about dinner time anyway,” the man worked his jaw sideways as he guided his feet out of the car door. His square face sagged, as if the roundness of his cheeks had slipped down to his jowls.
Rain pelted the shoulders of Jonathan’s jacket and he felt a few cold drops slide down inside his collar. He waited silently, holding the door like a chauffeur. When the man got clear of the car, he turned and shuffled away. His wide, high hips were crooked, flattened underneath.
Jonathan got into his car, dropping down too hard. The man had moved the seat back. He checked the glove compartment: registration, insurance, nothing was missing. Before pulling out, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the man set his bag on the hood of a parked car; he bent over the bag and reached into it, fishing for something. Now he would be late, and Pamela’s parents would smile as they wordlessly telegraphed their disapproval. He had always felt uneasy around them. Although Pamela still denied it, her parents had been visibly surprised when they discovered he was Chinese. At their first meeting, Mrs. Wallace’s brittle gaiety couldn’t hide her discomfort; she touched the softly lined skin of her neck and exclaimed about everything he said as if it were startlingly new. Pam’s father offered him wine and inquired about his parents with a grave delicacy. Jonathan told them that his father, an American, was an attorney in San Francisco, and his mother, who lived in D.C., was an acupuncturist who treated drug addicts. They had heard of his mother; she was frequently written up in the newspapers. Jonathan tried to keep the conversation from lingering on her work; he found it hard to talk about his mother without making her sound eccentric. Pam’s father seemed reassured to know that Jonathan had graduated from a prestigious university in the northeast. Their genteel formality made Jonathan imagine himself boisterous, raising his glass and saying, “Well, what do you think the kids will look like?” Instead, they held their wine glasses by the stem and spoke slowly. Pamela sat next to him and basked in her parents’ approval when he mentioned his acceptance at SAIS, the School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. He imagined Pam’s mother murmuring, State Department, over lunch to her friends. Ever since that night he felt that any Wallace family occasion combined the polite evaluation of a job interview with the ominousness of a doctor’s appointment.
Since they’d become engaged, he felt even less at ease. He carefully avoided mentioning the neighborhood he lived in, one of the last renovated blocks east of Dupont Circle. Every day, Jonathan passed the men lined up outside the shelter. Some stood silently on the pavement, staring toward the head of the line; others smoked cigarettes and talked as any group of men might. One pale young man, with a fixed grin, often hopped around on the sidewalk, flapping his flannel-clad arms. Glimpsed for a moment, he might have been a man enjoying himself, telling a joke at a party, but the moment went on for too long, and the way he spun on the pavement made Jonathan think of a wobbling gyroscope. A slight man with wire frame spectacles often sat on the church steps reading a book in the late afternoon. He looked like a dutiful merchant, passing a quiet hour with a book. Another man costumed himself in various street trash, and Jonathan had recently seen him wearing a shaggy carpet toilet seat cover as a hat. He swept the pink mop off his greasy head, bowing to women in the street. “I salute you with my tiara,” he said. Jonathan assumed that the man he’d found in his car was simply disoriented; he’d discovered it unlocked and decided to wait out the rain. But the following week, when Jonathan opened his car door, he found the man sorting papers: odd-shaped scraps were neatly arranged along the dashboard, and four piles of bank statements and cancelled checks had been placed in neat stacks on the passenger seat. Jonathan peered in at him and the man moved to cover his papers as if the wind would blow them away.
“Look, you just can’t do this,” Jonathan said.
“Sorry,” he gathered up the piles and set them cross-wise on top of one another. A cigarette burned in the ashtray.
“And I don’t smoke, so I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t smoke in my car,” Jonathan heard the edge of superiority in his voice and felt embarrassed; he sounded like a snotty kid. He also realized that he’d made a tactical error: by setting the boundaries of what he could and could not do, it sounded as if he were giving the man permission to use his car.
The man placed two of the smaller piles in a black address book. The leather was soft and shiny. He snapped a thick rubberband around the book to secure it, then put the other papers into his bag.
“Don’t mean to hold you up, lost track of time,” he got out of the car and straightened up slowly.
Jonathan watched him silently, trying to look stern, but the man wasn’t looking at him so he didn’t notice.
He was on his way to pick up Pamela, and when he got into his car, the lingering smell of cigarettes and cologne made him guess the man was spending a lot of time in it. Of course the logical step would be to move the car, but parking in Washington, set by zone, restricted him from moving it very far. He imagined the man searching for the car and finding it several streets away. He’d be ashamed of trying, and failing, to elude someone who was old and without a place to stay.
He’d been avoiding telling Pamela. Jonathan knew she’d have a decisive plan that he, in turn, would probably resist. Pamela had pretty, delicate features, and a high, wispy voice, but he had learned, early on, that her decisiveness was deeply ingrained. They had met two years ago, while she was studying for the bar exam. On their second date she’d made it clear that passing the bar was her main priority. He remembered her tone, as if she was expecting resistance, and when he told her that he’d been saving money for several years to take an extended trip to New Zealand and the Far East, he saw her redden slightly, and fumble with a bracelet she was wearing. He was attracted to that softness beneath her imperious tone. Something about the delicacy of her gestures, the way she always seemed to be in motion made him think of moving water. He quickly discovered that the current running through her wasn’t an abundance of energy, but a reluctance to be still, as if she needed to be busy to account for herself. One night, after making dinner at his apartment, they went to bed, and in the interval between the first time they slept together and the time before he left, the balance of pursuit between them shifted. She seemed endlessly curious about him. In those first weeks, her questions about his growing up at the clinic, the years he’d spent in California with his father, made him feel as if the different parts of his past were beginning to coalesce. Usually he felt at the mercy of his environment. He was one person when he visited his mother at the clinic, and another when he was skiing with friends in Vermont. Pamela began to say how much she would miss him, and even though he liked to hear it, he was also glad that he would be away while she was preparing for the bar. She often woke up fretful, worrying about what she needed to study, as if his presence slowed her down. Her worrying, her need to accomplish things, was a trait that even her new vulnerability didn’t ease; and so he had left, knowing she would probably be working in Washington when he returned, and that whatever was going to be between them would become apparent then.
In his absence she passed the bar, got a job with a large firm downtown, and her letters, arriving on corporate letterhead in China or New Zealand, were mostly filled with the news that she was working sixty hours a week, she was tired, she missed him, she was making money and had no time to spend it. Jonathan held these letters in his hand and looked out to the line of the horizon and the sea, the houses thatched with grass, and felt a strange sense of wonder that in some months he would return to Washington and his life would resume a distinct and linear course.
He told her about the man living in his car on a Sunday morning as they lazed over doughnuts and the paper.
“Why doesn’t he sleep in the shelter?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, ask him. Then tell him he has to find somewhere else to sleep. If you don’t, he’ll be living in your car all winter,” she said.
All afternoon Jonathan rehearsed, to himself, different ways of asking the man not to stay in his car. He would be firm and logical, but kind. He would talk to him, explain. When he went to his car, the man wasn’t there. The following week the man was sleeping in the driver’s seat, one arm draped over his Pan Am bag. Jonathan opened the door and touched his shoulder cautiously.
“Hey, wake up, I have to go,” he said.
The man opened his eyes, then closed them for a moment and stretched. Jonathan felt annoyed by his leisurely waking.
“Look,” he said, “don’t you have anywhere else to sleep?”
“Would I be sleeping here if I did?”
“What about the shelter?” Jonathan asked.
“You ever spent the night in a shelter?”
Jonathan just looked at him.
“Don’t mind eating there, but it’s no place to sleep. Everybody’s got knives, they try to steal my bag P nobody gonna take my bag. Dirty too. Junkies. I like my whisky, but I don’t do no drugs.”
Jonathan didn’t know what to say. He stood in the street while the man shuffled near the gas pedal for his shoes, a pair of brown slip-ons with imitation horse-bits on top.
“You can’t keep sleeping in my car.”
“All right young man, I’ll find myself another spot.” Abruptly, he pulled himself out of the car. His shoes made a noise like slippers on the chilly pavement. When Jonathan slipped into the front seat, it was warm.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Rufus. Rufus Williams.”
Jonathan extended his hand through the window and they shook. Driving away, he hoped that Rufus would find somewhere else to sleep and that would be the end of it.
Two days later Jonathan found Rufus playing the radio in his car.
“You said you’d find somewhere else to stay.”
“I tried.” Rufus got out of the car and set his bag on the pavement. “I just haven’t located myself yet.”
“Well you have to find somewhere else. And you’re going to run down my battery playing the radio like that.”
They stood, facing each other. Jonathan imagined how Rufus must see him: a young Chinese man in his twenties, clean-shaven and well-fed. Jonathan reached into the car and snapped off the radio. Standing in the street, Rufus started to cry.
“You listen to me young man, I’m a veteran. I paid my way my whole life. I had the same apartment twenty-five years an’ I paid my rent regular, but they got us all out Tcause they makin’ it condos. I’m a veteran an’ they put me on the street.” He dug a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes. “I got all my things in storage, two color TV’s, big Lazy-Boy chair, but I got no place to put it.”
“Don’t you get a pension from the VA?”
“Hardly Tnough to live anywhere decent. Damn crackheads everywhere. I got cut visitin’ my girlfriend last month.”
His crying became a snuffling whine. Jonathan shifted his backpack, wishing he would finish.
“I know you got to use your car. I’m going down to the city to see about some Tenant Assistance Program. See where I am on the wait list. I used to have two cars, used to have a big old Caddy, wouldn’t want someone sleepin’ in that.” The next evening they had a party to attend in Arlington. Pam was in a good mood, fussing over the wrapping for a birthday present, teasing him. She wore a short red dress, not too fancy, but the kind of dress that inspired him to open doors for her, help her with her coat. When Jonathan opened his car door, he saw Rufus leaning forward in the front seat, reading a paperback by the light of a street lamp.
“Evening,” he greeted Jonathan. He marked his place carefully before putting the book in his bag and raising his bulk out of the car. Jonathan introduced them, and watched Rufus take Pam’s reluctant, slender hand in his large one.
“Pleased to meet you, young lady,” Rufus took off his cap.
“Are you living in this car?” Pamela’s no-nonsense tone made Jonathan wince.
“I wouldn’t call it living. I stay here when I can’t find nowhere else.”
“Well, a car’s no place to live in winter,” Pamela said.
“Can’t argue with you there.”
“You have to find somewhere more permanent to stay.” Pamela pushed her hair back from her face; her gesture had the air of a challenge.
“She always do your talking for you?” Rufus looked at Jonathan and then back to Pamela, “Listen young lady, this’s his car and we had this discussion, him and me. I don’t see how it’s any of your business. I don’t like sleepin’ in his car any more’n he likes it, but I’m tryin’ to get myself located and there ain’t much I can do. You got a ring on your finger? He ain’t your husband, you got no legal claim on this car. This discussion between him and me.”
Rufus shouldered his bag, gave Jonathan a steady look, and headed down the street toward the church.
Pamela got into the car and slammed the door, “I can’t believe him, getting self-righteous about sleeping in your car! It smells disgusting in here. You should fix the door and get a locksmith to make a key.”
Jonathan didn’t answer.
“Jonathan?”
“Look, obviously I’ve thought about that.”
“Well, do it.”
“Pamela, has it ever occurred to you to look at this a little differently? I don’t like having him in my car, but I have a bed to sleep in, and mostly I sleep with you — I have two beds at my disposal. How can I deny him my car on a cold night? I mean, of course it’s annoying, but it’s not like he prevents me from using the car.”
“God, I can’t believe you,” Pamela crackled the sheet of directions. They drove out of D.C. silently, then navigated Arlington’s turning suburban streets, looking for house numbers under yellow porch lights. Jonathan imagined Rufus going to his car and finding himself locked out. He would stand in the road with his blue Pan Am bag at his feet, yanking at the chrome door handle, impatient and bewildered.
At the party Pam told the story about Rufus several times. Her telling of it made Jonathan sound indecisive and ineffectual. She moved through the party in her red dress, her long legs picking her way around a few people sitting on the floor. Jonathan decided that he wouldn’t discuss Rufus with her anymore, but a few days later, when she asked about him, he didn’t feel like lying either.
“Just fix the lock and get a key made, will you? Pretty soon you’ll have a damn hotel in your car; it’s getting cold out there,” she said.
Jonathan was making dinner at her apartment and he wasn’t in the mood to argue. He stirred the tomato sauce and poured himself another glass of wine. He believed that it wasn’t good to get mad while preparing a meal: it would turn the sauce or spoil the food. It followed that arguing over dinner wasn’t good either.
“Will you take care of it before the end of the week?”
“I’ll do it when I feel like it,” he said.
“You don’t take charge of things, do you realize that? You let everything drift along until it bumps into some sort of conclusion.”
He swirled the wine in his glass and stared at her through the reddish tint. She was right, but he didn’t necessarily think this was a bad way to live. It was the weakness implied that bothered him.
