Road Test

Pratt lucked into the road test when he was 24, the first and only time he'd been on the verge of becoming an official fiancé. He and Suzie were suspiciously compatible. The sex was good and so was the talk. They were into the same movies and music. They liked each other's friends. Her family wasn't insane. His family was, but liked Suzie so much that when they were around her they pretended to be bearable.

Pratt and Suzie moved in together, a real find on the top floor of a rent-controlled building on West End Avenue. It was the first time either of them had risked sharing bills and a bathroom. Things went remarkably smooth. Their friends and relatives remarked on it. It was a way of asking when Pratt and Suzie would tie the knot.

Pratt was wondering about that one day in the lobby of their buildings as he waited for the elevator. Did love and marriage necessarily go together like a horse and carriage? The carriage (marriage) did require the horse (love), but you could get around fine with just a horse. Though two people riding a horse couldn't get as far as one person on a horse or two people in a carriage. . . . The elevator arrived and Pratt got on. As the door was closing, the redhead from the fifth floor dashed aboard. She was in a playful mood. She lightly by unmistakably invited Pratt to stop in at her place and play. He declined.

Pratt was rattled. He'd never done--or rather never not done--something like this before. Did passing up the elevator offer mean he was more in love with Suzie than he'd been willing to admit? Or did it mean he was losing his balls?

Pratt bought an engagement ring and suggested to Suzie that they rent a car and drive up to Vermont for the weekend. They had vacationed together once before, a week at the beach on St. Barts; pure fun, except for one particularly painful lesson about sand. Pratt had high hopes for Vermont.

They left Manhattan on a cool, bright morning, driving a shiny five-liter Mustang, oh yeah. . . . Thirty-three minutes later Suzie had to stop to take a leak. Forty-two minutes later she had to stop again. Suzie could absolutely not make it through an hour of driving--except for the time she lasted 78 minutes, but only because by that point they were no longer speaking.

It rained for two days. Their room leaked. Suzie cried frequently and blew her nose a lot.

At supper Saturday they worked to regain their sense of humor and make peace. Pratt revved up his courage to pop the question. He looked deep into Suzie's eyes, reached for the champagne bottle and knocked over the ice bucket, sloshing an Arctic tide across the lap of the 60ish gent at the next table, who stiffened and groaned as though he'd been harpooned, inspiring his wife to cut loose with a shriek at what she assumed was her untimely widowhood.

Home Suzie would have been amused. Road Suzie locked herself in the bathroom and brushed her teeth for a couple of hours. The weekend remained damp in all the wrong places. The diamond ring never came out of Pratt's pocket. Within a month he was out of the apartment.

•

A year later Pratt became infatuated with Jane, who was extremely romantic. Jane was forever surprising Pratt with little gifts and social events, and sudden sex in semipublic places. To commemorate the six-month anniversary of their first simultaneous orgasm (Jane kept note of such things in her hand-bound Florentine diaries), she presented Pratt with tickets to Paris. Precisely six months to the second from their historic spasm duet, Pratt and Jane were in a 747 restroom recreating the event.

They checked into a chic hideaway in the Marais and made love in a large chair by an open window. Then Jane needed to do a little shopping. Some-how it consumed the day. Their second day in Paris was spent shopping. So was the third. On the fourth day Pratt lured Jane into the countryside by suggesting they rent a car and go shopping at wineries. But they stopped to ask for directions at a village that was having a crafts fair. Then there were the antique shops. They spent the night in a bed-and-breakfast run by the cousin of a milliner with whom Jane got along famously.

The next morning Pratt suggested a walk in the hills--and a romantic picnic by a stream. Jane accused him of being an Eagle Scout.

They drove back to the city. After they dropped off the car Pratt asked if they could go look at a painting or a cathedral, seeing as how this was his first time in Paris. Jane accused him of being a tourist but consented to an art auction.

They spent their final day shopping for the extra luggage Jane required.

On the flight home they didn't violate a single airline policy.

They left Kennedy in separate cabs.

•

And so it went.

During every takeoff and landing Connie dug her nails into Pratt's arm and muttered her litany: Flameout, wind shear, hydraulic failure, collision, mad bomber and all their variations. She was convinced that chanting every possible catastrophe was the only way to prevent them. Connie also had a strict rule against driving after dark in any foreign country, including California.

Mona got peevish on Kauai because there was no reason to dress up and the water was full of fish.

Bettina was shocked into sullen depression when Mexico failed to run according to the precisely planned daily schedule she had mapped out some 11 months earlier.

Kelly's idea of travel was to go someplace new for golf and tennis. Tennis and golf. And golf.

Linda complained about the food and the wine from one end of Italy to the other.

Ellen couldn't go away for a weekend without taking enough makeup, costume changes, electrical equipment and taped music to supply a Madonna tour.

Joan had spent all summer every summer of her life at the family cabin on a lake in Minnesota, and always would.

Olga informed Pratt, the night before they were scheduled to leave, that she had canceled their nonrefundable, impossible-to-get reservations for a Christmas week cross-country ski trip through Yellowstone. Advice from her astrologer.

•

Pratt was 39. All his friends from school had been married at least once, even the gays and lesbians. Hell, the lesbian couple had two baster babies and a Volvo. Pratt envied his friends' rich emotional lives, the profound joy they, their spouses and their kids took in one another. Pratt's friends envied his promiscuity. He was an efficiently oiled bachelor. He had flings with girls who were mainly interested in an education and a decent meal. He had on-going affairs/friendships with adult women, wary veterans who, like Pratt, kept their expectations in check and their options open.

Pratt loved to travel and did so whenever possible. Usually alone.

•

Pratt decided to take himself to England. Somehow he had been only once before, a business trip to London: three days and nights in a modern corporate office and a modern corporate office and a modern corporate hotel that could have been in any part of the world that had electricity and plumbing. This time it would be three weeks of no work and nobody else's itineraries, diets, taboos, bladders, obsessions, luggage or astrologers. If that meant three weeks of celibacy, fine. Often it didn't. Another advantage of traveling alone.

Pratt's seatmate on the flight over was the publisher of a Midwestern equestrian magazine, a gregarious man who was looking for investors to fund his surefire plan to enter and dominate the national market for glossy dressage gossip.

A couple of times zones later the publisher paused long enough for Pratt to excuse himself. As Pratt stood, the woman in the seat behind his glanced up from her book with what seemed to be a small sympathetic grin. It was. As Pratt walked past she wordlessly offered him a package of earplugs. Pratt took a couple and did a quick, silent took a couple and did a quick, silent salaam. The woman nodded and went back to her novel. Pratt continued down the aisle.

Pratt was staying at a small, mildly extravagant hotel in South Kensington that provided limousine service. There was another passenger sharing the limo: the woman who traveled with a ready supply of earplugs, generosity and tact.

They chatted pleasantly on the ride into town. Her name was Donna. She correctly identified him as a West Sider and he was right about her being an East Sider. They established that this was Pratt's first real visit to England and that Donna had been there often. She urged him to see some of the countryside as well as London. He assured (continued on page 102)Road Test(continued from page 86) her he was planning to. Neither of them suggested spending time together. Donna didn't even bother to find out Pratt's profession or if he was available.

That impressed him. Much about her impressed him, which is why he decided he wouldn't call until they were back in New York. He didn't want the first intimate thing he found out about her to be what kind of millstone she was to travel with. They checked into the hotel. Donna was on first-name terms with the manager.

•

Pratt went to the British Museum and was awed by the extent and quality of the collection and the scale of the looting involved in assembling it. He went to the National Portrait Gallery and studied the faces of the officially great Britons. He went to the Tower, where some of them had been executed. Went to Westminster Abbey, where a surprising number of them were packed into the floors, walls and gardens. He toured museums of new art and old weapons. He attended Parliament and a club football match, where the British gather to trade museum-quality insults. He went to the track and won some British money. He went to Berry Brothers and invested it in port. He went to the Royal Court Theatre and bumped into Donna in the lobby as the performance let out.

They had both enjoyed the production, a science fiction revival of The Way of the World. They went to a pub across the square for pints of bitter and an amiable disagreement about what the director was trying to say by setting an 18th century comedy of manners on Mars. Donna thought it was a droll comment on how remote the notion of manners had become. Pratt thought it was a droll comment on how Congreve's script was funny enough to survive a talented director with a daring sense of design.

Two young British couples at the next table invited themselves to join in the debate. The conversation soon devolved into a speculation about what the Hollywood version of The Way of the World would be. Pratt had Mirabell (Arnold Schwarzenegger) blowing his way into a high-tech torture chamber to rescue Millamant (Uma Thurman) from her evil scientist billionaire sadist spinster aunt (Robin Williams) when the pub bell rang and the lights went up.

As goodbyes were being exchanged the less sober of the young women gave Pratt an impulsive kiss on the cheek--then blushed and apologized to Donna for kissing "your husband." Donna assured her she wasn't the jealous type.

The young couples believed Donna. So did Pratt.

•

They walked back to their hotel. The night was idyllic--a crescent moon, leafy streets lined with Georgian row houses and lacking the stench, filth and well-armed crackheads of Manhattan's upscale neighborhoods. Pratt and Donna compared vacation scorecards. Both were having a good time. Both would be moving on in the morning. Pratt was driving to Wales to do some hiking. Donna recommended an inn near Snowdonia. She too was heading west, taking the train to Gloucestershire to visit friends. Pratt was tempted to offer her a ride. He gave in to the temptation. Donna thanked him but said she couldn't impose. They arrived at the hotel. Pratt assured her it wouldn't be an imposition, that it would be good to have company along in case he needed someone to change a tire or walk five miles carrying a gas can. Donna called him a shameless flatterer. They said goodnight and went to their rooms. Eventually Pratt got himself to sleep.

•

The next morning Pratt picked up his rental car and returned to the hotel to check out. Donna was in the lobby with her one piece of luggage. The concierge was on the phone trying to arrange alternate transportation for her; what London lacked in Glock-toting junkies it made up for in Semtextoting IRA members, who had detonated a political statement in the train station Donna had been planning to leave from.

•

Blue skies and fine country roads. An easy-flowing conversation. Neither volunteered much in the way of biographical detail. They discussed British history. Differences between Brits and Yanks and Aussies and Japanese in social situations. The distinctive psychoses of drivers in various countries. Pratt wasn't surprised to find that Donna had traveled extensively.

She took him to lunch at a tearoom in the Cotswolds. They didn't talk much. They were busy eavesdropping on two women at the next table who were dressed in unseasonably heavy tweeds and dissecting in detail the personalities, careers and living conditions of the shelties one of them bred.

The women finished lunch and left. Pratt grinned and was about to remark that now he felt he was really in England, but before he could speak Donna deadpanned that now he was truly in England.

When they got back to the car Pratt asked Donna if she was bored riding shotgun and would she like to drive. She thanked him but pointed out it would violate his rental agreement. He tossed her the keys and got in the passenger side. Donna said nothing but looked pleased.

She drove like a champ. As he had expected.

•

It was dusk when they arrived at her friends' house. It was a low, rambling 17th-18th-19th-20th century cottage that sprawled along a thickly wooded ridge, with the oldest rooms clustered at the center and the additions stretching out to the left and right. A cozy patchwork one story high and 350 years long.

Donna's friends, Dick and Chloe, invited Pratt to stay for dinner. Pratt demurred. The issue was decided when their five-year-old daughter requested that Pratt stay long enough to read her a chapter of her new book, and her four-year-old brother immediately counterattacked by tossing his stuffed pig to Pratt, initiating a game of catch. Pratt had no choice but to find a comfortable chair and do both at once. The battle for possession of the newcomer ended in a draw when the literary pig throw was suspended by the arrival of bedtime, at which point Chloe declared dinner to be irreversibly under construction and ordered Dick to begin pouring cocktails into Pratt.

Dinner was a warm, sociable glow. Charred chops and hefty rioja. Dick and Chloe didn't subject Pratt to the clumsy grilling a strange man would have gotten from a woman's friends in the States. The conversation did separate into man-man and woman-woman (continued on page 106)Road Test(continued from page 102) ghettos earlier and more thoroughly than it would have at a New York table. Donna and Chloe were old school chums with six months of minutiae to catch up on, which they turned to in earnest as soon as they were satisfied they could safely leave Pratt and Dick to bond over current political outlooks and past tastes in drugs and guitarists. But each time Pratt glanced up, Donna or Chloe was glancing at him.

He was in love. Not the rock-and-roll version he'd felt for Suzie. The real thing. Love.

Over coffee Pratt asked them to recommend a hotel, but they all knew it was a formality.

•

Then he and Donna were alone in the drawing room. Dick and Chloe had retired a few minutes earlier.

For the first time since they'd met, they were carefully polite. They agreed on how lovely dinner had been, Donna thanked Pratt for the drive out, Pratt thanked Donna for introducing him to her friends--anything to avoid acknowledging the great viscous glob of sensual tension that filled the space between them. Through it, Pratt could feel her breasts pressing against him from four feet away.

Pratt could also read the brief essay in the look on her face. She was hoping he wouldn't make her say out loud that this was the wrong time and place. He understood. He agreed. And even if he didn't, he wasn't going to do anything to disappoint this woman. After a small silence he quietly said goodnight. She gave him a light, grateful kiss on the cheek and went off to bed.

Pratt's room had been built in the 1780s, Donna's in the 1920s. The rooms shared a wall but were 140 years apart. Pratt tossed and turned for at least that long before he drifted off.

•

Pratt was up early. Not as early as Donna. She and Chloe had gone riding. Dick urged Pratt to stay until they returned. Stay as long as he cared to, in fact. Pratt thanked him but said he had to go. Pratt traded phone, fax and address data with Dick and hugs with the kids, then hit the road.

Donna would appreciate why he left: to give her time alone with her friends, and to spare them both any more nights on opposite sides of that fucking antique wall that had probably been built by some arrogant bastard using profits squeezed out of brutally exploited colonials, probably in New York--Now that was something to look forward to. New York and Donna and no wall. . . . . Pratt noticed that the terrain had become wilder and so had the spelling on the road signs. He realized he was in Wales and that he hadn't made a reservation at the inn Donna had recommended. He stopped in a town whose main drag wasn't as long as the string of consonants that made up its name. He phoned ahead and nailed down the last available room.

He arrived at sunset. The inn was situated at the head of a long narrow valley that was backlighted in bronze. A slender lake was performing molten Technicolor tricks along the valley floor. The steep hillsides were carpeted in lurid emerald greenery and dotted with gold-pink-purple impressionist sheep. Behind the inn rose a long-extinct volcano. All Donna had said was, Nice place, good hiking.

True and true. The innkeepers were a ruddy-cheeked old couple who welcomed Pratt effusively enough to qualify them as honorary Italians. Dinner was ambitious enough to have originated on the far side of the Channel as well. Afterward in the lounge the other guests went out of their way to include the lone foreigner in their conversation. Pratt did his best to repay them with the pleasant surprise of meeting an American who was unassuming and fluent in English. They were quite taken with him. He wished that Donna had seen it. He wondered what she was doing.

The next day Pratt hiked up the mountain and around the crater rim. A beauty.

Pratt liked hiking alone. The solitude, settings and endorphins put things in perspective. As he sat on an outcropping and watched the wind rippling the long wild grass on the slopes below, Pratt's perspective was that he longed to trade his solitude and endorphins for Donna. He wanted her to be here. He wanted them to travel everywhere and make love on volcanic rims and have kids who'd be best friends with Dick and Chloe's kids. He was in love. Not the close-enough-for-rock-and-roll version he'd felt for Suzie. The real thing. Love. This was not some endorphin-glow delusion. This had been there long before the hike, it had been going on . . . continuously since that little grin and the earplugs. Love. Christ. Thirty-nine fucking years old and he's first-time, full-tilt, chest-pang loony in love. He wondered how foolish it was to feel this way about someone he hadn't slept with. Maybe it wouldn't be so great. He doubted that. Donna was good at things. He looked forward to finding out. He would make it his life's work.

•

When Pratt came down off the mountain he found Donna in a meadow behind the inn, tossing a stick for the innkeepers' aged retriever. Pratt tried to find something amusingly adult to say. He settled for not running up to her, kissing her and flinging her to the ground. He walked up to her, kissed her and took her to his room. Their room.

•

Sex and hiking and sex and eating and sex and a castle and sex in Wales. A rainy weekend in Bath, museums during the day, pubs and dancing at night, urgent squirming in the car on a country lane with a downpour drumming on the sheet metal like the ghost of Keith Moon. Liquids, liquids. The surf licking the cliffs on the Cornwall coast. A night of serious drinking followed by serious rug burns when they couldn't make it all the way from the door to the bed. A long drive east to Cambridge to do the cornball tourist thing, punting on the Cam. Worth it. But the clock was running. Tomorrow would be one last day together in London. Morning after that Donna's plane would take her away.

They dawdled in the huge clawfoot tub in their Cambridge hotel. Finally Pratt got out, brought the phone over and got back in. He began to call the hotel in London, the one in South Kensington where they had stayed separately at the start of the trip. Donna stopped him; she wanted to stay someplace else. Pratt sensed the South Ken place had other memories attached and Donna didn't want to play mix and match. Pratt didn't ask. Donna hadn't talked about her love life and hadn't inquired about his. Pratt was OK with that. The past could wait. The future too. Pratt was living totally in the now, something he had experienced before only when clinging to a rock wall or when being bashed around (concluded on page 144)Road Test(continued from page 106) by a homicidal river. He was new to love and fascinated by it. It was as intense as life-threatening sports but even more satisfying.

He booked a room in Knightsbridge. Then he started to call the airline to see if he could get a seat on Donna's flight; his wasn't leaving for another two days. Donna insisted he hang up. He asked why she didn't want to fly home together. She said that she did, but in the long run they'd benefit from reminding themselves it was possible to survive not spending 24 hours a day together, reminding themselves they actually had some self-control. She said it in a wry, rueful, quietly wise tone, then began doing one of Pratt's favorite things.

When they were spent, Donna wept and clung to him and kissed all of his face, memorizing it with her lips.

•

They spent their last day wandering London, letting the streets decide where they would go. The only specific place Pratt and Donna wanted to be was with each other. For the first three hours the streets respected their wishes and took them no place in particular, but eventually delivered them to the British Museum. Pratt and Donna passed an hour in the correspondence files, snooping through letters written in earlier decades and centuries by lovers who had been separated--some by great events of state, some by the mundane business of everyday life. Pratt couldn't find any who had separated as an educational exercise in self-control.

Late that afternoon Pratt and Donna drifted into an antique shop and bought each other engravings from an 1844 actor's instructional manual that illustrated the Thirty-Six Classical Facial Expressions. Pratt gave Donna one of a woman tossing a profile, narrowing her eyes and flaring her nostrils, titled "Number 17, Mysterious." Donna gave Pratt one of a man with chin held high, a heroic gaze and one fist clenched to his breast, titled "Number 23, Undaunted."

They spent cocktail hour draining a wine bar Donna was fond of, then went back to their room and made desperate, kinetic, bed-damaging love.

They bribed their way into a riverside table at a brilliantly fashionable Mediterranean restaurant on Cheyne Walk. The food was extraordinary. Pratt didn't notice. Donna, radiating affection, told charming, self-deprecatory stories of her youth, the kind of revelations that she had never offered before. Pratt's brain recorded them for playback at a later date.

They lingered over cognacs. At one point Donna seemed to gather herself as if getting ready to say something important. All that came out was a sigh and a slightly wrinkled grin.

They walked in silence, arm in arm, back toward the hotel. Slowly, making it last.

They were approached by an Asian woman carrying a sleeping infant. She asked if they wanted to buy jewelry. Donna said no thanks and gave her some money. Pratt said yes and bought a ring. The woman blessed them and moved on.

Pratt took Donna's hand, held up the ring and asked her to marry him.

Tears glistening in her eyes, she told him she already was. Married.

Pratt glanced at her ringless left hand, which he was still holding. Donna explained that she and her husband didn't wear rings.

She answered the next question before Pratt could ask. Yes, it was a good marriage. One child, a daughter, 13. Yes, she'd be staying with her husband. Their one problem was that they traveled miserably together, got irritable and had nasty arguments. In order to keep the marriage together they always took separate vacations.

Pratt nodded to show he understood.

Donna wasn't certain he did. Her travels weren't about sex. She'd been unfaithful only once before, a one-night stand. Nothing like Pratt. Pratt was the romance of her life, the traveling companion she never dreamed that she would find.

Pratt whispered, "Yeah."

He concentrated hard and was finally able to let go of her hand.

Donna said she was sorry she'd been too gutless and selfish to tell him, up front, right away. She said she wouldn't blame him if he hated her.

Pratt looked away for a moment, then slowly looked back at her. Said nothing.

Donna met his gaze. She said if he wanted, she would meet him once a year, for two weeks, anywhere in the world. But only if she never, ever saw or heard from him at home.

That impressed him. They checked into the hotel. Donna was on first-name terms with the manager.

They spent cocktail hour draining a wine bar, then went to their room and made bed-damaging love.