From the driver’s side, Graham, gray hair in a buzz cut, looked at his wife, Greene. She wrestled with her rubbery hair band, struggling to arrange her long gray hair into a ponytail. “Really?” she mumbled to herself. On I-15, headed past coppery St. George, a Mormon town of red sedimentary rock carved into buttes, mesas, and narrow canyons, they had spent the last three days at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City.
Graham said, “Problem?”
Greene finished with her hair, saying, “Let me play the fool,” which was a line Gratiano said in The Merchant of Venice. They had seen a performance the previous night.
“Let old wrinkles come,” he said, the line Gratiano said next.
She punched his arm, saying, “Ham!” using his nickname. “I’m not old.”
“We’re both old.”
“You are! You keep hunching your back.”
“Whatever you say,” Ham mumbled. He thought of the true first sign of their aging. Two years earlier, Greene had been driving her Volvo on her way to give her English final. As she had explained to Ham later, the last question of her test had been on her mind, “What is the meaning of it all in the end?” “It” was to mean the novel they had just read, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. She then realized “it” could be mistaken for “life,” and maybe she should explain “it” to her class before she handed out the test. As professors, they both had emphasized “theme” as something you felt at the core, a meaning that only reading the whole text brought sense. Then her world had spun. An Amazon truck had hit the front of her Volvo broadside right near her front bumper, which caused her car to spin counterclockwise. She’d run a red light and had come to a stop at Jiffy Lube.
After a frantic phone call to Ham, he had said, “Maybe seventy-one is time for you to stop driving.”
“And lose my autonomy?”
“There’s Uber.”
“I hate driving anyway,” she’d said.
After he arrived, she’d sent him with her test to her classroom while she dealt with the police. Now as retired professors, they headed toward the Nevada border.
Ham enjoyed their ride though the Virgin River Gorge, a ribbon of freeway running through a mini-Grand Canyon. It must have taken hundreds of thousands of years for the narrow river to cut through all this red, gray, and purple rock. He’d read that dinosaur tracks had been found around here.
His wife turned to him. “You know, that play last night was so powerful, it’s easy to miss secondary themes.”
“Such as?”
“Family lines. Connection is everything.”
“Connection is everything?” he said in a doubtful tone.
“Look at Portia and her late father, the king—or you, Ham, and the Grahams. You’re named after three of them, after all.”
“The Southern Grahams. I’m connected to them like a bee is connected to Alpha Centuri.”
“No, we’re like rivers. We flow a course that’s set in front of us.”
He’d have to ponder that one. After all, a river had made this gorge.
“Jonathan would have loved these rocks,” Greene said. Their late friend Jonathan, a geologist, had called them the “spy couple,” their names together connecting them to the British author of literary spy thrillers. Funny she should bring him up.
Soon they reached the top, a flat desert area with a band of green on either side of the river. The one thing he loved about long drives was his mind could wander through the past. He’d never thought much about being “old” or doing the right thing for the family name. Hell, when he and Greene had married at twenty, they celebrated by dropping doses of LSD on their honeymoon in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The spruce ridges, the shroud of fog, the many waterfalls, all fed a paradise for the imagination. Who’d expected they would staple more than fifty years together? They had been like a train repeatedly stopping and starting, but then they reached their destination: California, many dogs, five different houses, two kids, four grandkids, many classes taught, lots of wine, and love.
Ham knew Greene couldn’t relieve him at the wheel. “How about we stop for coffee in Vegas? I could use some caffeine,” he said.
“Sure.”
Once they hit Vegas, they slipped through the flat, sandy city via the freeway, seeing giant casinos such as the black pyramid of the Luxor, an echo of a once-grand Egyptian empire. Gwen Stefani was advertised at Planet Hollywood. Ham realized he should exit before he ran out of exits. As rain started, and lightning struck, he spotted a coffee shop off the freeway.
They sat at a table, and it started to rain hard, a cascade. They had their coffee and would wait it out.
“Odd rain,” said Ham. He ripped open a pack of sugar to add to his coffee when Greene grabbed it from him. She gave him laser eyes, and he knew she was right. He had diabetes. Use Splenda.
“Speaking of odd,” she said, “wasn’t the tension between the Christians and Jews in The Merchant of Venice palpable, but odd for a love story?”
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?” said Ham, quoting Shakespeare. “Nothing odd about it.”
“I don’t mean odd then,” she said. “How about powerful?”
They each watched the rain a bit and watched the cars come to park with windshield wipers slapping time. The rain started slowing.
“A love story?” said Ham. “It’s a tragedy of greed and racism. Where did you get love?”
“Jessica and Lorenzo?” she said.
“She’s wary of him,” he said, serving it back to her. “Love gets belittled in the play—nothing to call a romance. Look at Bassanio. He says he loves Portia, but he loves her money. Shylock loves his daughter but his ducats more. You can’t ignore all that.”
“I don’t ignore it as much as you’re ignoring choosing our grandchild’s name.”
“It’s not ours to choose! Why the hell do you get involved? Now you have your daughter-in-law mad at you.”
“Harper works for a boy or girl.”
“And named after your great grandfather, a Confederate general. She was outraged.”
“But you say family names are tangential.”
“It doesn’t matter what I say. The general had fought for the Union first, then joined the Confederacy. That flip alone is enough to rile anyone up these days.”
“It’s important to keep the name in the family.”
At the sound of a bump, they looked outside. A Honda had hit the front of a Mercedes in the parking lot. Done with their coffee, Graham and Greene stood, and by the time they exited, a couple had burst out of the Honda, about to yell at each other. In the doorway, Graham shouted at them, “We saw the whole thing!” Greene stood next to him.
“Both bumpers look fine,” the man shouted back to him, and then “Fine,” to the woman in front of him. “Ha!” the man barked to the air.
The woman’s face changed from anger to surprise. She kissed the man, and he kissed her back, then leaned against his own car, confused. Graham was just as confused.
“Bravo,” yelled Greene toward the couple. “A love story!”