The reader senses that the man’s promiscuity, his faithlessness, is to blame for his being repeatedly rejected. But this sense is overridden, and deliberately, by the anger the reader also feels toward the women he has called. He has driven so far. He’s been driving for days. Can one of these women not offer him a meal, a bed, the comforts of her flesh, if only for one night? I read once that violence onscreen, even if it is designed to appall, argues, inevitably, for itself. That the viewer is always inherently intrigued and therefore aroused by it. That the visual fact of violence is titillating, even if the intent is to disgust. And so one feels not disgust but pity for the lone driver. The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.

When I bought the house I did so in part because I had a romantic notion about the turn my life might take in such a town, so small and dead-ended. I imagined myself working at a diner, a diner frequented by truckers. I imagined one of them, kindhearted, modifying his routes so he could see me more often. Never staying longer than the time it took to drink two cups of coffee and eat a grilled cheese, but nevertheless, an understanding growing between us. I imagined myself in a long dress, in a backyard, hanging my sheets out to dry on a clothesline. Shielding my eyes from the sun. Instead I pay a woman to care for my son while I work as a legal secretary. All my skirts hit just below the knee. To clean these clothes, I use a washing machine and a dryer, both located in the basement. In the short story I read, the protagonist has a son, a son whom he leaves, with his wife, on the Eastern Seaboard. The author, the jeans-wearer, had a number of children. They are scattered about the country with the women who bore them. And though yes, it is true that the author never got sober, perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn’t, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.