Necessity (15 page)

The car this time is a sand-colored Buick compact, five years old, a couple of dents and the paint chipped here and there. Drab transportation to go with the slightly frumpy style of the brunette woman she now portrays: thick sensible brown shoes, dull green plaid skirt, loose white blouse in need of ironing, pastel green scarf tied carelessly about the neck, hair drawn back from her temples with tortoise-shell combs. Nearly an academic look.

By the time she's driven two blocks she has brought herself back down from the momentary high.

Face the truth. If you didn't need him to fly the plane you'd have left him flat the same way you left Doyle and Marian; even as it is you'll never see him after Tuesday.

So let's don't for Christ's sake start looking
forward
to anything.

It can't be any other way. Ellen has to come first. Doyle and Marian—and Charlie too—they know you as Jennifer Hartman.

And so does Graeme.

That's the kicker. Graeme. Picture Graeme exchanging confidences with Ray Seale …

And by this time next week Charlie will know altogether too much about Jennifer Hartman and her daughter who's just turned fifteen months old and the summer place they come from in the Adirondacks. If somebody like Ray Seale gets the bright idea to start questioning licensed charter pilots …

It's the only way: after Wednesday, Jennifer Hartman must cease to exist.

36
The motel in La Jolla has become a welcome refuge. To reach the ocean she only needs to step out of her room and walk across the narrow street and climb down a steep worn little trail. There are bits and pieces of beach amid the massive dark eroded rocks.

At sunset she's there barefoot in a tangerine sleeveless blouse and frayed shorts made of cut-off jeans, sitting on a folded blanket with her back against a rock, holding a drugstore steno pad against her upraised knees, checking off items in yet another of her lists of things to do, things to get right.

You could live in a place like this. A kid could grow up here. Mild sunshine all year round. Ocean, mountains, the San Diego Zoo.

Maybe you shouldn't think that far ahead. Maybe you'd better not dare to hope.

There's a bronzed teenage couple on a patch of sand beyond the next lump of stone; she had a glimpse of them when she arrived and once in a while she hears the energetic vocalizations of their love-making between strikes of the gentle surf.

It brings up the thought that she didn't exactly have a celibate life in mind when she began all this but she supposes it could hardly be otherwise right now—it's only that she never stopped to think about it. She recalls how she used to envy some of the other models at the agency their hedonistic capacity to luxuriate in extracurricular evenings with randy photographers or half-drunk ad agency men or conventioneering fabric and fashion buyers. An expensive dinner; drinks in a skyscraper lounge with a view of the park; a hundred dollars for the powder room and a few hours in a hotel. Strangers before, lovers during, strangers after.

That was long before Bert. She was young and not confident of who she was; it seemed best to be one of the gang, to look as they looked and behave as they behaved. She remembers one veteran's acerbic counsel: “There's forty or fifty of us for every job. Think about it. You go along or you go under.”

But she didn't go along. After the first few print-ad jobs she went her own way and found it didn't really make much difference. Maybe she lost a few shots here and there but mainly she still got the jobs, or got passed over for them—it depended mostly on what sort of face and body they were looking for. They'd make passes of course; that was part of the ritual; but most of them were grown up about it if you didn't put out. That was up to you.

She has never been at ease with one-night stands. Sexuality has never seemed that casual. Nothing feels quite so vulnerably intimate as sharing her naked body with a man: it's just not the sort of thing she can do comfortably with a stranger.

She's thinking now of Charlie. His burly gentle power. No longer a stranger; a father, a flyer, a barbecue cook. A friend; and the sensual pull is strong—clearly he feels it as much as she does.

But she knows another thing as well: that in a few days she'll be turning her back on him.

The thought stirs a restless unease. She should not have accepted his invitation. Dinner in San Francisco inevitably will lead to an invitation to his hotel room.

In the dusk she looks at herself in the mirror of her compact. The dark new coloring, the hairdo—is it enough? She's been scanning the newspapers for two weeks now, looking for Graeme's byline, expecting every day to see a blown-up telephoto picture of herself and a caption,
Do You Know This Woman?

No one knows this woman, she thinks. Not even me.

But she knows someone else. Or at least she knows him this well: Charlie's no more easy with one-nighters than she is.

Whatever we might do, it would mean something.

It wouldn't be the kind of thing we could just forget.

I like you, Charlie. I really do. But I don't know what the hell to do about it.

37
In twilight the teenage lovers depart. The temperature drops quickly. She is startled when several people materialize from various nearby hidden pockets and climb the few yards to the road.

With the shore to herself she begins to feel chilled but it takes energy to move. This is such a lazy place. A sense of peace: something she hasn't felt in God knows how long.

Thinking reluctantly about stirring, she delays her ascent to watch ribbons of pink dwindle to grey, on the horizon.

She feels very tired. So many things to make sure of. What has she overlooked?

She holds the steno pad against her knee and moves the pencil down the margin.

The diamonds? Check them off the list. Transferred to a safety deposit box in Capistrano Beach. In the name of Dorothy Holder.

Previous car? Sold for cash in Calexico. If Graeme's curiosity leads him that far perhaps it will give him the notion she was on her way out of the country into Mexico.

Back-up identity? Initiated ten days ago. Took an early plane to Salt Lake City. Obtained a birth certificate for Carole A. Fry. Applied the same day for a Social Security card and a Utah license.

She knows the drill now; she knows what lies to tell; they sound natural on her tongue—an advancement in glibness that pleases her perversely. She knows she ought to feel ashamed of herself. But it's far down the list of concerns.

God help me now—how many times am I going to have to go through this? Is Ellen going to have to grow up in a new town every year—a new school and new friends every season and a new name to get used to?

Stop it. Got to assume there's room for hope. Must behave as if it's going to work this time.

Back to the list in the notebook: pay attention now. Hard to read in this bad light …

Jennifer's two apartments? Check; check. Both landlords notified of departure. One security deposit forfeited.

Bills? Current and paid. Nothing outstanding.

All this is important because it would be stupid to attract the attention of bill collectors or skip-tracers.

Doyle and Marian? That's taken care of, at least for a while. On the phone to them last week she contrived to sound breathless and a bit incoherent: babbling about going back to her ex-husband, a trial reconciliation, a long trip together to the Orient and the South Seas to see if they can't patch it up and get it working again—got to run now; got to catch the plane.… My investment in the bookstore? Let it ride, good friends, and keep me on the books and if you make any money put my share in an account. I'll be in touch when we get back—oh, it may be months, six months, eight, hell I don't know. Love you both. Must absolutely
run
…

A patchwork solution but it'll have to do for the moment; at least it'll keep them from calling out the Missing Persons squad.

And when they repeat the story to Graeme—as Marian inexorably will do—it won't give him leads to follow. What's he going to do, hunt all over Asia and the islands?

Must remember tonight or tomorrow to reserve a rental car in Plattsburgh. Have to do it in the name of Jennifer Hartman because it would be suicidal to leave traces of Dorothy Holder that close to the lion's den. Put it on Jennifer's Visa card and remember to send in a money order to cover it because you'll never receive the bill.

The car must be something with four-wheel drive.

Better do it tonight.

What else?

The hardest part has been making sure she wasn't followed during the three days in Los Angeles when she drove from bank to bank, clearing out Jennifer Hartman's accounts, taking the money in cash. Every last account emptied—even the retirement account, although the man gave her a look of stern disapproval and warned her of dire consequences from Internal Revenue.

Now the money is redistributed around this new city and its cluster of satellite towns. Jennifer Hartman's assets are gone: liquidated and untraceable.

It's so difficult to create a life—and so easy to destroy it. All it takes is a few signatures. Or a bullet.

A bullet …

She flashes on an image: Bert with his gun collection. Unlocking the chain, taking down a revolver, showing it to her, trying to explain its operation. His exasperation when she doesn't seem to want to understand it.

“What is this—Victorian times or something? It's not a feminine thing to do? What's this crap you're giving me? Come on. Your old man was in the military. What are you going into a swoon for?”

“I just don't like the damn things, Bert.”

“Fine. Sometimes you need things you don't like. Suppose some creep breaks in here, comes at you with a knife?”

“I'd probably shoot myself in the foot.”

“I'm talking about the baby now. I'm talking about protecting my kid.”

“Bert, the baby's not even due yet for nearly six months.”

“People in our position, the world's full of creeps looking to put the snatch on rich kids. They bury infant babies alive out in the woods someplace and they come after you for two million dollars ransom. You understand? Now pay attention. You get a good grip on the thing and you hold it in both hands—here, like this …”

So she let him teach her how to load it, how to aim it, how to shoot. At Fort Keene, five months pregnant, she was pressed into accompanying Bert and four of his friends on their venison safari. There was Jack Sertic, togged out in professional white-hunter khakis, and the helicopter pilot who was a crack shot, and two guests from Bert's growing show business coterie of chums. One of them was an actor who three years ago had been modeling in designer jeans commercials and subsequently had become the beefcake star of a hit TV action series; the other was a fat comedian from New York and Las Vegas who had the filthiest mouth she'd ever heard. She'd complained to Bert about it and Bert had agreed with her. “But he's a funny son of a bitch, you've got to admit.”

She did—with reluctance. All the same she found it hard to hide her amusement at the ludicrously grim seriousness with which these presumably grown men crept stealthily through the trees on their sponge-soled boots, stalking in grim slow silence like little boys playing Steal-the-Bacon, behaving remarkably like smirking renegade villains prowling toward their sinister ambush in some horrid silent movie melodrama.

She had a rifle. She knew how to use it. She saw a buck deer—bolt upright and staring right at her—and she just watched it until it wheeled and darted away, the signal spots of alarm showing white on its rump—and Bert came clambering out of the trees to gape in astonishment. “You had him. You let him go. For God's sake, why?”

She looked him in the eye. “I hate the taste of venison. Didn't I tell you?” And walked away.

“Jesus H. Christ.” He came after her: gripped her arm and turned her. “Hey,” he said in a different voice.

Then he dropped his rifle and pulled her into the circle of his embrace. “Hey,” he murmured. Then his gentle smile became a sybaritic leer.

It was one of the last times she can recall laughing with him.

An hour or so later she watched him fire a high-powered bullet that tossed a smallish buck right into the air and brought it down in a hideous somersault against the bole of a birch tree with force enough to shake the ground.

She saw the avid excitement in Bert's face—“Hey, hey guys, you see that? You see that?”—and she turned away.

As she walked off she heard the comedian say, “You sure that ain't somebody's cow? Fucker goes hunting, comes up to this dumb-ass farmer, fucker says I'm sorry I killed your cow, man, can I replace it? Dumb-ass farmer goes, I don't know, fucker, how much milk can you give?”

Male laughter.

She didn't laugh. She made the excuse of fatigue and made her way back to the cabin, leaning back in that ungainly way to balance her expanding abdomen.

She was changing into another person all the while. It was possible now to look back and see what must have been happening then. Even at the time there was a sense that day by day her life was becoming different but she attributed this to the baby that was growing inside her.

It's more than that, though. Perhaps it's a kind of growing up.

From a reasonably strait-laced upbringing she shifted as a young woman, without ever marking the transitions, to a life of self-centered trivialities and meaningless cosmetic surfaces.

Amazing how we fall into traps: how we begin to care—simply because other people, superficial people, purport to care—about so many things that don't matter. What's In—what's Out. Who's U—who's non-U. A Triumph? But my dear, that was
last
year's car. Wouldn't be caught dead with a man who drives anything but a Datsun 260Z.

And then she'd gone beyond that into Bert's world of hedonistic luxury with its power trips and billygoat morality—aspects of which she was only beginning to discover.