Millennium (22 page)

Once again I thought of the watches, but I was distracted by someone in the back of the big room having a coughing fit. It was a woman, and she had her back to me. Somebody was holding her arm and leaning toward her as she doubled over, clearly concerned that she was going to choke to death. She was waving him away.

“I still don’t know what you’re driving at,” I told Mayer.

“I can’t be more plain without sounding like a fool,” he said, wryly. “I’m simply looking for the inexplicable. I usually find it.”

“You won’t here,” I said. “In a few days or weeks I’ll be able to tell you exactly what happened last night. No doubt about it. There’s…”

The woman in back had straightened up at last, and it was her. The one who wouldn’t give me any coffee in the hangar and then gave me entirely too much of it a few hours ago. She was on her way out of the room.

“There’s nothing inexplicable in my line of work, Mister Mayer. And that’s the end of the press conference, ladies and gentlemen.”

I stepped off the platform and hurried toward the back of the room.

She wasn’t in the hallway outside. I went down it a little ways, to where it made a right angle, and looked around that. There were some reporters straggling away, but she wasn’t among them. At the end of the corridor was the door to the public part of the terminal. No point in looking for her out there.

“What are you in such a hurry for?”

I glanced back at Tom. He looked about as tired as I felt. We stood there at the side of the hallway while the last of the reporters went by us, including Mayer, who gave me what might have been a wink.

“I saw her again. I thought she came this way.”

“Who? Oh, your mystery woman. You think a cup of coffee in the lap is a sufficient introduction?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to her.”

“Sure.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know how you hold up. I’m half dead, and you’re looking for a party.”

“It’s not like that. It’s just…” I realized I didn’t know just why I wanted to talk to her. But I did want to. I thought about calling up United and seeing if I could trace her down, decided to put it off until tomorrow.

“Is that all for today, boss man?” Tom asked.

I glanced at my watch. “Damn right. The night crew’s got their orders?”

“They do. Want to go get something to eat?”

“No, thanks. I’ll just head back to that motel room I heard a rumor about seven or eight days ago. See if I can make it to the bed.”

“Two to one you don’t sleep alone.”

There’s not much more depressing than to be alone in a crowd listening to Christmas carols.

I shuffled through the terminal, feeling about ninety years old. It was about 9:30. Just about time for three or four drinks in the motel bar and then to bed.

I didn’t put much stock in Tom’s odds. Even if he’d been right, I wasn’t sure I’d know what to do with my good fortune in my present state. The one thing about Tom that irritates me is his belief that I live some kind of wild bachelor life.

Hell, in Kensington, Maryland?

I’m not saying it hadn’t occurred to me to take an apartment in town. Washington is and always has been blessed with an abundance of lovely, young government workers. Plenty of them will go to bed with you for a couple drinks and a turn around the dance floor. Then they’ll get up in the morning, peck you on the cheek, and you never see them again. Quick and easy and fun, and no strings attached. I know what I’m talking about; I tried it a few times not long after the divorce.

The thing is, it was good, athletic fun at night, but it always left me feeling shitty. I wanted to know the girl, I wanted—to
use a devalued word—a relationship. I didn’t insist on marriage. I wasn’t
that
far behind the times. But I thought we should get to know each other.

My wife would have had a good laugh over that.

I patronized a certain massage parlor on Q Street. I didn’t do it more than once every two or three weeks; my sexual urges didn’t seem to be what they once were. What I liked was the no-nonsense atmosphere. It was quick and efficient, and though I felt bad when I left it wasn’t so bad as the one-night stands had been.

That was the wild and free bachelor life that happily married Tom Stanley seemed to delight in thinking about. And that’s what had happened to the carefree jet-jockey too young for Korea and out of the service by the time of Nam but who had so goddam much of the Right Stuff he could have written the goddam book. Somehow, he didn’t quite remember how, he’d ended up at a desk. For a good time he got drunk and went to bed with whores.

In that frame of mind I hardly noticed where I was going. Keeping my eyes on my feet, I stepped on a down escalator, and a pair of low-cut brown shoes stepped on with me. I looked up the nylons to the skirt, then quickly to her face.

“We do keep running into each other, don’t we?” she said, with a smile.

*    *    *

I was still staring at her when there was a jolt. I had one hand on the rubber rail; with the other I grabbed her arm. For one wild moment I thought
earthquake!
Then I looked around and realized the escalator had stopped.

“Maybe we’d better get acquainted,” she said. “We might be stuck here for hours.”

I laughed. “You’ve got the advantage on me,” I said. “You know my name, but I’ve never had time to ask you yours.”

“It’s Louise Ba—” She covered her mouth and coughed. There was a cigarette going in her other hand. “Louise Ball.” She looked at me with a tentative smile, like she wanted to know if that was okay with me, her being Louise Ball. Well, I don’t
meet a lot of Louises anymore, but it was better than Luci or Lori or any of the cutesy names moms were giving their girls these days.

I smiled back at her, and her full-blown smile emerged. You could have used it to light candles. I became aware I was still holding her elbow, so I let it go.

“No relation to the famous redhead?” I asked.

She looked blank for a moment and I thought I might have dated myself with a reference to ancient history, then she had it. It was only later that I thought it odd she’d miss a reference to
I Love Lucy.
With a name like hers, wise guys like me must have brought it up a hundred times.

“No relation. I hope I didn’t embarrass you. I’m always doing things like that.”

I thought we were still talking about Lucille Ball, then realized she was referring to the coffee she’d spilled on me. It seemed like a trifle compared with the privilege of sharing an escalator step with her.

“No problem.”

The people below us were moving, so we started down the unnaturally high steps.

I considered and rejected several things to say to her. I was attracted to her as I hadn’t been attracted to a woman in a long time. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to dance the night away with her, sweep her off her feet, laugh with her, cry with her, say bright, witty, gay things to her. Okay, I wouldn’t have minded going to bed with her, either. To do any of those things, I should start by enchanting her, fascinating her with my wit, deliver some of those fine lines movie stars toss off with such ease in screwball comedies.

“You live around here?” I asked. Brilliant conversation opener number 192. I’ve got a million of ’em.

“Uh-huh. In Menlo Park.”

“I don’t know the area. I’ve only been here a couple of times, and hardly ever left the airport.”
Will you show me the city?
But I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask her that. We had come to
rest in a quiet little eddy beside the rushing river of humanity. We almost had to shout to hear each other.

“It’s across San Francisco Bay. On the peninsula. I ride the underground to work.”

“You mean BART?”

Again there was that pause; she looked blank, like computer tapes were whirling around in her head, then,
bingo.

“Yes, of course, the Bay Area Rapid Transit.”

An embarrassing silence began to settle over us. I had the gloomy feeling she’d be away in a moment unless Cary Grant stepped to my rescue with a good line.

“So you probably don’t know the East Bay very well.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering if you knew a good restaurant. All I know are the ones around the airport.”

“I’ve been told there are some nice ones in Jack London Square.”

And she just stood there, smiling at me. I hesitated again—frankly, I’m always awkward with people I’ve just met, unless it’s in the line of business. But she clearly wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere, so what the hell?

“Would you like to have dinner with me, then?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

*    *    *

Her smile was better than amphetamines, and worse than heroin. I mean, here I’d been feeling like I’d been stepped on by an elephant, and then we were together, and just like that it was like I was twenty years old and just woke up from a good night’s sleep.

On the other hand, I felt it might be habit-forming, and it sure as hell did disorient me. We were already walking through the public parking lot in the drizzle—with me babbling away like a speed freak—before I recalled I had a car of my own, over at the Hertz lot. I told her about it, and she looked up at the sky. It was starting to rain harder.

“Why don’t we take mine, anyway?” she said. “I can drop you off here later.”

It sounded like a good idea, until I saw her car.

It was one hell of a car. I looked at it, then at her. She was smiling innocently at me, so I looked back at the car.

I’m not even sure what it
was
, but it was Italian, looked like it had been built about twenty or thirty years from now, was about eighteen inches high and thirty feet long, and seemed to be doing sixty just sitting there. I figured it had to cost eighty or ninety grand.

Okay. This is her boyfriend’s car. Or she has a lucrative side income. Maybe a rich uncle just died, or her parents had money. There was no way she could have paid for it on an airline ticket agent’s salary.

Frankly, I was getting a little dubious about her. Small things were adding up the wrong way. For instance, with this sitting in the garage she rode the “underground” to work?

And let’s be brutally frank. With a face and a body like that, she was eager to go out with a guy like me?

I began to fear she might be a disaster groupie. They exist, though they tend to be male. But when they’re female, they can be very weird. Suddenly I remembered that morning in the hangar, when she’d run away from me. She’d been looking very hard at those plastic bags full of debris. Was she getting some kind of kick out of it?

Back in the airport she had seemed like an impossible dream. So when I finally understood that she was trying to help me, that she actually
wanted
to go to dinner with me and was doing her best to get me to ask, I hadn’t questioned my good fortune. But what did she really want from me? I doubted it was my dashing good looks and suave conversation.

I shoehorned myself into the passenger seat and she backed out, the foreign fireball under the hood rumbling like a big cat. The car purred along to the parking lot gate and we got in line. She looked over at me.

“Was it very bad today?” she asked.

Right. Here we go. I get to trot out my gruesome stories for the lady.

“It was terrible.”

“Then let’s forget about it. Let’s ban all talk about crashes. Let’s don’t even talk about airplanes.”

So there was another theory out the window. I just couldn’t figure where she was coming from. As we neared the toll gate I studied her again in the blue glare of the parking lot lights. Something else had been bothering me.

It was her clothes. There was nothing wrong with them. She looked good in them. But they were old-fashioned. She was in her civilian clothes now, and I hadn’t seen anything quite like them for ten years. I don’t claim to be a fashion expert, but even I could see they didn’t go together. The skirt didn’t match the blouse. The hemline was too high on her skirt. Her blouse was thin enough for me to tell she
was
wearing a bra.

I was still puzzling over it when she paid the parking charge by dumping a fistful of coins into the attendant’s hand and letting him pick out what he needed. I remembered doing much the same thing at the Calcutta airport.

Then she eased the lean, hungry machine out onto the access road, and we took off without waiting for clearance from the tower. It was like being in one of those car commercials where they try to prove their machine is more suited for aviation than for mere highways. We made the freeway in one piece, and then she really opened it up. She cut in and out of holes I never even saw, like the other cars were stationary obstacles.

After the first surge of fear I stopped reaching for the brake that wasn’t there, sat back, and admired the performance.

Damn it, that lady could
drive.

*    *    *

She took me to Jack London Square. I’d heard about it but never seen it. It looked touristy, but then I’m not a gourmet.

She parked, and I pried my fingers loose from the sides of the seat and managed to sort of roll out, amazed to be able to breathe, thankful for my life. She looked at me like she couldn’t
figure out what was wrong. I felt very old all of a sudden. I decided she probably hadn’t been going all that fast, it was just me turning into a fossil. I’m sure I drove just as fast in my own hot-rod days, and as for some of the stunts we pulled in our Navy jets…

We went into a place called Antoine’s, which was crowded. Naturally, we didn’t have a reservation. The maitre d’ told me it would be about forty-five minutes. I reached for my wallet, thinking I might grease his palm a little, when a magic thing happened. He got a look at Louise.

I guess he couldn’t bear the thought of having her cool her heels in the lobby. I didn’t see her do anything; hypnosis, maybe. Whatever it was, there was suddenly an available table by the window overlooking the water.

There were a lot of little boats out there, bobbing at anchor and drenched with rain. It was beautiful. I ordered a double scotch on the rocks, and she said she’d have the same. That pleased me. I never did understand why people want drinks that taste like candy and have paper umbrellas in them.