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problem.
    Leigh was spreading out a map on his lap. “Let’s see. You want the Belt Parkway.”
    “Leigh, if you’d tell me where we’re going?”
    “Montauk. Thought we’d run right out there. This time of the fall, it shouldn’t be mobbed.”
    “But somebody out there might remember us.” They’d rented a small house in August. “Was that … ‘67? ‘68?”
    “That was eons ago. We’ll put up in a motel. Don’t worry, baby, we wouldn’t look like the same people. I’ll check us in. No problem.”
    No problem but us, she thought, to get back in touch. Heading out on the island, she drove five miles under the speed limit with extreme caution, keeping strictly to the right, always signaling intentions, never tailgating, precautions second nature by now as she concentrated on drawing Leigh out. “How’re things at the station?”
    “We had a flap when it looked as if we might be sold to a conglomerate, but it fell through. I’m doing the interview show Friday nights and the morning news weekdays. I have to get up at six, which is a royal drag. I want the evening news, but as long as Roy hangs in there, I’m blocked. They think I’m too radical for the evening news. Red sky in the morning? I don’t know why I’m the right shade of red for 8 A .M. but too red for 6 P .M. The corporate mind at work is a wonder to behold.” His long legs cocked up on the dashboard, he lay back in the seat not bothering to watch the scenery. He wasn’t big on scenery, Leigh: he called trees future toilet paper of America, and mountains he found bumpy and wasteful. He could not understand why people lived all those outlandish places beyond the suburbs of New York City. The West was Jersey City and the Far West was the Poconos. The proof of his love for her was that for most of ‘74, before he had landed the job at WBAD, he had taken the train down to Philadelphia to spend half of every week with her, Stanley braving the alien jungle. He had to travel in his work, but always did so with a sense of undying shock: My God, all those people living in the Great American Desert! Once she had felt the same way, having grown up in Cleveland and then in Chicago. New York represented glorious civilization. Everyplace else was the second city, second best. People lived in New York City; they only settled for Charlevoix or Portland. She had had that nonsense knocked out of her.
    “Are you still enjoying the interview program.? Do they give you enough freedom to use it politically?”
    “I maintain a pretty free hand. They get flack, but they dig that if it’s the right kind. Once a month I do a special for Sunday night. Last month I did cuts in day care—how’s that for strokes with the women’s army, hey? And this month I’m focusing on unemployment among kids. Like what happens to all the kids who don’t go on to college and don’t find jobs? What the hell do they do all day, every day? What happens to them? Do they fall apart like their old man would? Do they start boozing? Shooting up? Do they join gangs? Do they take to a life of crime? Just sponge off the folks? Just hang around? … Lord, do they think I’m a weird old man!”
    She realized what struck her: how relaxed he was. He lay back on his spine with the words flowing out in his deep smooth voice with the honey and fog in it and he never watched. He did not keep track of the cars behind them, ahead of them; he did not watch every person in every car; he did not foresee possible confrontations; he did not experience that metal skullcap tightening on her when a cop car idled on the side of the highway, behind some shrubbery. “Are they willing to open up with you?”
    “Listen, everybody wants to be interviewed. Everybody wants to be a star even for five minutes anonymously. The point is to provoke them into saying something useful and then shut them up. They get pissed if you don’t want to record them for hours. Every punk has a philosophy of life.”
    The