Gridlock

     Like an ex’s name regrettably tattooed above your left butt cheek, mistakes have a way of following you around. First we fear landing on the wrong side of Santa’s Naughty/Nice list. Then there’s the threatened mark on the ubiquitous “permanent record” of adolescent academics, followed, for some, by an expungeable youth of crimes and misdemeanors. But it wasn’t until the moment he saw her in the rearview mirror, that Sam realized just how dogged a pursuer an error in judgment could be.

     No freakin’ way…

     “Can you see what the problem is?” Maggie didn’t look up from her phone. “Is there an accident?”

     Sam was so focused on the driver of the ragtop Mustang behind them he hadn’t noticed their glacial pace. His wife’s voice, accompanied by a strident blast from a neighboring vehicle, wrested his attention from the Ray-Banned brunette in the rearview.

     “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s just too much traffic and not enough road.”

     “Well, it is a Saturday afternoon in October in New England,” Maggie said. She hit “Send” and looked up at her husband of seven years. “With all the leaf-peepers out you can’t be surprised it’s like this. The parking lot at the mall was insane.”

     Spending the day in the shoreline town of Clinton, Connecticut, had been Sam’s idea; an opportunity for reconnection and, perhaps, atonement. Sitting on Route 81, going nowhere, he wondered if this was the second wrong turn he’d made in the last few weeks.

He tried to gauge Maggie’s mood. The two had hardly spoken on the trip from the city. Sam drove the rented SUV and Maggie took take care of some business that apparently couldn’t wait until Monday, which was actually fine with Sam since he wasn’t quite sure what, or how much, he wanted to say.

     “Are you sorry we came?” Maggie’s answer might, he thought, make his decision an easier one.

     “What?”

     “I said, are you sorry we came?”

     “Of course not, you know how much I like to shop the outlets,” she said. “Anyway, you’re the one who was supposed to be at another conference this weekend.”

     Sam had changed his plans when he saw Maggie’s calendar was clear, an unusual occurrence as of late. Given the circumstances, he took it as a sign and decided to be spontaneous—something Maggie had always urged him to be.

     And look where’s it’s gotten me.

     “Yeah, D.C.,” Sam said. “Malloy said he’d go in my place if I stood in for him in Jacksonville next month.”

     Malloy owed him. Big. Sam had covered for his counterpart’s personal and professional transgressions many times over the years, when expenses had to be verified and asses needed to be covered, in cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, so he’d called in his marker.

     Freakin’ Malloy.

     But Maggie was right. It was a beautiful weekend in southern Connecticut and this was the only road that led to U.S. 1 from the highway, so it made sense that between everyone trying to get to the shore roads, and everyone already on the shore roads, things would get a little crowded. Sam eased forward along the two-lane road and glanced--surreptitiously, he hoped--in the side mirror. The convertible was still there.

     “Hey,” he said. “What’d you end up buying, anyway?”

      “I was torn between two purses,” Maggie answered. “I liked them both but couldn’t decide which one I really wanted, and then this woman told me about this special sales promotion so I just got both of them.” She tilted her head, searching. “I think she said her name was Cindy.”

     The Range Rover lurched forward, then braked to a halt.

     “Sam, what the hell? What’s wrong? Are you carsick?”

     Before fate threw its sucker punch, the trip to Connecticut had begun smoothly enough. Sam and Maggie left Manhattan at seven a.m. and the changing palette of autumn’s foliage was the couple’s main topic of conversation for the first half hour past the Cross Bronx Expressway, followed by a companionable silence punctuated only by the beeping of Maggie’s phone each time she received a message—which was often.

     “Hey, honey?” Sam said. “Do you think you could send things to voicemail for a bit? You’re missing the sights.”

     Another message came in and Maggie shook her head.

     “They’ll be plenty to see when we get there. I’ll put it on vibrate so it won’t bother you.”

     “It’s not the sound,” he said. “We don’t get to spend much time together and I thought it might be nice to disconnect from everything for awhile.”

     “Well, some things can’t wait just because you finally decided to take a day off.”

     “But your calendar was empty. I checked.”

     “I have more than one calendar, Sam. You’d know that if you paid attention.”

     Not wanting to argue unless it was absolutely necessary, Sam listened to NPR and made do with Click and Clack for company. After two hours on the thruway and turnpike the couple’s first stop was Clinton Crossings, a high-end outlet mall off exit 63, where Sam successfully navigated into what looked to be the only available parking spot in Connecticut.

     “Where do you want to go first?” he said.

     “We’re here?”

     “Yep, time flies…”

     “The Coach store.” The phone vibrated in her hand. “And Ralph Lauren and Nine West, if there’s time. Oh, but first I need to get a housewarming gift for Bryan in Sur La Table.”

     That’s where Sam saw her, handling a turkey baster in the Small Kitchen Tools section of the high-end epicurean’s Eden.

     Oh, shit.

     He took cover behind a stack of boxed Halloween table settings. Standing amidst stoneware that boasted dancing skeletons and broom-wielding witches, Sam tried to calculate the odds of running into the woman with whom he’d had his one-and-only one-night stand, during a drunken hospitality suite encounter in September.

     Sam wasn’t even supposed to go to that Orlando conference, but freakin’ Malloy needed bailing out so had Sam stepped in, again, with a bucket.

     “Dude, you’re saving me. I have to make nice with the wife’s family this weekend. Besides, I’m really the one doing you the favor. I hear they have a kick-ass freebie suite and really hot booth babes. You’ll thank me later.”

     Through the haze of infidelity, Sam vaguely remembered that the leggy brunette’s name tag had read “Cindy – Connecticut,” but he was dead certain the woman now trying to decide which color spatula best went with her eyes, was the same woman with whom he had shared several shots of tequila and various bodily fluids. It had been his only post-marital indiscretion, and the impetus for his being in this off-price consumer’s paradise in the first place.

     Freakin’ Malloy.

     Luckily, Maggie had been too busy selecting a copper sauté pan that would probably never be more than a dust collector in her assistant’s newly-purchased townhouse to notice her husband’s evasive maneuver. By the time Sam collected himself enough to become discernible from the ceramic images of open-mouthed specters swirling around him, Maggie was swiping her credit card and Cindy-Connecticut was nowhere to be seen.

     They left Sur La Table and went to Ralph Lauren, where Sam donned a pair of overpriced wraparounds and a nylon bucket hat. Maggie’s inquisition as to Sam’s sudden interest in accessories was making him nervous.

     “Why are you buying a hat? You never wear hats. And you have three pair of sunglasses at home. Why didn’t you just bring one of those?”

      “I forgot, and I thought we’d buy some lobster rolls and take them to Hammonasset Beach. I figure between the sun and the sand these would come in handy.” Sam motioned with the items in his hands as his wife just looked at him.

     Maggie’s phone vibrated again and she went outside to take the call. Sam was left alone to tread water in a sea of long-sleeved Polo shirts and stylishly-tied pullover sweaters. Alone, that is, if you didn’t count the huge dilemma he was now facing.

Paying for his impromptu, yet trendy, disguise, Sam continued the internal debate that had been amplified by the culinary near-miss with his recent past. He looked out the storefront window, beyond the tasteful vignette of everything preppy, khaki, and cardigan-like, and saw his wife, deep into an animated phone conversation and oblivious to the tall brunette that had just sauntered by.

     As soon as the blood returned to his face and he was sure the tingling in his arm wasn’t a heart attack, Sam decided the beach would be as good a place as any should he decide to confess.

      “Why don’t we buy everything here and take it right to the beach?”

     Sam tried not to sound too anxious when he suggested this to Maggie, after joining her on the open-air promenade. The mall was hosting a Shoreline Oktoberfest, and the couple was standing in front of a sandwich board listing the many food stands hawking the best edibles the area had to offer. The fact that Cindy-Connecticut had disappeared in the other direction made the idea even more appetizing.

     “Well…”

     “C’mon, this way we don’t have to fight the crowds at the shore,” Sam said.

     And we can get as far away from here as soon as possible.

     Maggie slipped her phone in her pocket and nodded.

     “Okay,” she said. “You pick up the food and I’ll jump into Coach real quick. I feel like being bad, so get my lobster roll with melted butter. And don’t forget the onion rings.”

Maggie marched away and Sam couldn’t help but admire the view. He loved his wife. The only reason he cheated, he told himself, was because he had been drunk and lonely and Maggie had been so busy lately...

     Jeez, how cliché can you get?

     Freakin’ Malloy.

     A short while later, seafood and sides in hand, Sam made his way through the growing crowd and stood outside Coach waiting for Maggie to emerge. Looking through the plate glass window, past displays of accessories and bags in every size, shape, and color that somehow still managed to all look the same, he saw his wife.

     Maggie was holding a black purse in one hand and a red one in the other, speaking to someone Sam couldn’t quite see. He lifted the fat-stained paper bags to get his wife’s attention just as the person on the other end of Maggie’s conversation came in to view.

     It was Cindy-Connecticut. Sam felt the trope of his worlds colliding.

     Maybe I’m lucky and I’m just having a stroke.

     Maggie smiled and laughed with her ironic consultant, and Sam was sure the karmic guilt marked him like the grease seeping through the paper bags he held.

Hoping his wife had been too busy choosing between overpriced leather goods to notice his aborted attempt to get her attention Sam ran into the book store across the way and hid behind a cardboard cutout of Jane Austen.

     Several minutes passed, and he watched as the well-endowed harbinger of doom exited Coach and walked in the direction of the food stalls. From his covert observation post Sam then saw Maggie come out, shopping bags in hand, and scan the passing throngs for her husband. She took out her phone, dialed a number, and Sam’s phone rang.

     “Where the hell are you?” Maggie said. “I thought you were going to meet me in Coach?”

     “The coffee kicked in and I had to make a pit stop in the men’s room.” Sam stammered as if the words tripped over something on the way out of his mouth. “Don’t worry, I left the food at the stand and I’ll pick it up on the way to the car. Why don’t you just meet me there?”

     Maggie agreed, and as Sam hung up and waited for his wife to head towards the parking lot, he noticed the T-shirt on display to his left. In crimson Times New Roman on a black background, Cicero’s words spoke to Sam across the centuries: “Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.”

      Et tu, Cicero?

      “Anyway I really liked both of them and didn’t know which one to get but then that woman in the store, Cindy, told me it was buy one, get one fifty-percent off, so I decided I may as well just buy them both and maybe I’ll give one of them to my niece, Kelsey, for Christmas.”

     The jarring combination of a semi’s air horn and Maggie’s voice brought Sam out of his ruminations and back to the leathered confines of the SUV. Maggie had been explaining the thought process behind her purchase of the aforementioned Coach bags, both of which now rested in the backseat. He was glad of his decision to upgrade to this behemoth, not so much for its cargo capacity, but for the way its size greatly diminished the possibility of his being identified by anyone in the convertible behind it’s bulk.

     “Did she work there? This Cindy?” He tried not to sound overly interested.

     “No,” Maggie said. “It was just some random woman who saw I was having a hard time making up my mind. She lives around here and knew about the special deal, lucky for me.”

     “Yeah, lucky.”

     “How much farther to U.S 1?” Maggie asked the question and turned her attention back to her phone while Sam struggled to concentrate on their conversation.

     “We’re almost there,” he said. “And it’s a good thing, too. Those lobster rolls are starting to smell.”

     They had progressed along Route 81 and were now underneath the railroad tracks that ran between and parallel to U.S.1 and I-95. Amtrak’s Nor’easter rumbled overhead and Sam could now see the cause of their session in blacktop purgatory was just a single traffic light with a short attention span.

     “It shouldn’t be too much longer,” he said.

     With that, a red Saab sedan in the intersection ahead began spewing steam from under its hood and exasperated passengers from all four doors.

     “You were saying?” Maggie said. She watched as the overheated car’s former occupants attempted to move the vehicle to the side of the road. “We should have waited to buy lunch at the shore.”

     Sam hoped the smell of the deteriorating crustaceans would cover the odor of his monumental flop sweat. They reached the three-way intersection and Sam tried to determine which way the convertible was planning to go. With no turn signal blinking on the car behind him, and without enough asphalt to go around the artery-clogging Swedish sedan ahead, Sam sat at the crossroads, wrestling with his conscience.

     “Screw it,” he said.

     Sam wrenched the steering wheel right at the red light, taking the tires on the passenger’s side up and over the curb, barely missing an antique hitching post and circumventing more than one precarious situation.

     Maggie’s phone fell between the seat and the console.

     “What the hell?!”

     Sam felt giddy. And he almost wet himself with relief when he saw the convertible carrying Cindy-Connecticut had turned left and disappeared into the southern New England roadscape. His adrenaline levels ebbed towards normal and endorphins filled his bloodstream, as if he’d just completed a long run.

      “Are you okay?” Maggie had fished the phone out from under her seat and was eying Sam with an expression of abstract curiosity. “You look flushed.”

     “I’m fine. The traffic just stressed me out. Hey, why don’t we dump the lobster rolls, head back towards the city, and I’ll take you out for an early dinner. You can show off one of your new bags.”

     Maybe I won’t tell her now. I’ll just wait until we get back to the city and I can think straight. That makes more sense. Things are going good right now. Yeah, I’ll wait.

      “Sounds good to me,” Maggie said. “I wound up getting more than I needed at the outlets and the traffic’s only going to get worse later. This way I can get the rest of these e-mails taken care of on the way home. And I’ll see if we can get a reservation at Bennie’s.”

     “Perfect,” Sam said. He flipped on the turn signal and headed up the ramp to I-95. Merging into the southbound traffic flow was easy, the foliage as clear and crisp as a Yankee Magazine calendar, and the bloodflow had returned to his extremities. Life was good.

     “Hey, babe, see if you can get a booth. And use the red bag tonight. A hot purse for a hot date, right? I’m no, whaddyacallit, fashionista, but I like it better than the black one.”

     Maggie stopped scrolling through her contacts and looked up at her husband, then back at the shopping bags, before returning her gaze to Sam.

     “What’s wrong?” he said. “I thought you were going to call the restaurant?”

     “I will, but first, tell me something…how did you know what color bags I was looking at?” Maggie asked. “You didn’t make it to the store, and they were already wrapped up and in the back of the car when you got in. How did you know one of them was red and the other was black?”

     Sam’s mouth went dry, he found it difficult to speak, and his mind went blank, except for the memory of the orator’s prophetic words, scarlet letters printed on a cotton/acrylic blend.

      “Sam,” Maggie said. “What’s going on?”

     Freakin’ Cicero.