Necessity (3 page)

But there. Just over the Hollywood Hills to the north—the San Fernando Valley.

A hundred suburbs vainly in search of a city, indistinguishable but for their howler names: Burbank, Studio City, Highway Highlands, Calabasas, Universal City—even, for God's sake, Tarzana.

There is the promise of anonymity in the very nickname: the Valley.

She drives toward it: north on the freeway through Sepulveda Pass, over a crest and down a long hill from which she can see across miles of gridded streets and low buildings. It is like the view from an airplane, the smog so thin she can see layers of tan purple mountain ranges beyond.

Quite beautiful, really.

Turning off the freeway she keeps her attention on the rear-view mirror. Maybe it's silly; it's implausible; but she still hasn't been able to shake the conviction that they are back there and gaining on her.

At first she'll have to stay in a motel. You can't rent anything else without identification.

She finds one on Ventura Boulevard between an Arco station and an Italian restaurant. The motel has flyspecked stucco and there's no swimming pool but it hasn't yet reached the next stage of decline, when it will begin renting rooms with closed-circuit adult TV by the hour.

All the same, the old woman at the desk gives her a sharp look of disapproval and a veiled lecture couched in threadbare euphemisms about neighbors, trouble and police.

She assures the old woman that she's not a hooker. Just a divorcee from Chicago seeking a place to start over. Looking for a job and an apartment.

She can't tell whether the old woman buys it. The woman's face is an immutable prunelike mask of skepticism. But it won't do to embroider the story any more: she doesn't want the old woman to pay attention to her.

The room is a bit shabby and vaguely Spanish in flavor except for the framed print above the bed, which depicts a French village in Impressionist fashion—maybe it's Barbizon—and she has a moment's amusement from the realization that she feels as incongruous as that thing looks.

It is now time to proceed with methodical care. She sits on the bed with a telephone directory in her lap and begins to make notes.

9
It no longer surprises her how much information you can get from bureaucrats simply by asking for it. After two hours at a pay phone she knows the easiest order in which to obtain identification.

She applies for a Social Security card, using the birth certificate from Tucson, and when the clerk seems puzzled that she's never had a Social Security number she explains that she has spent her adult life nursing her invalid mother, who recently died.

“I've been taking extension courses at UCLA but I've never had a regular job, you see, so I never applied before, but the people at the employment agency told me I should come and fill out an application.…”

The clerk stamps the forms, uninterested in hearing any more.

On her way out she slips another application blank into her handbag.

The card for which she's just signed will be mailed in about ten days to the street address of her motel. In the meantime there's a great deal to do.

On the Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday she removes the red wig in a restaurant ladies' room and drives down to Orange County to have her hair done in a place where they'll never see her again and never remember her. “So hot this summer,” she says. “I'll be cooler if it's cut short, don't you think?”

The hairdresser is an inquisitive man, sixtyish and overweight, gay and garrulous: Haven't seen you before, my dear; such lovely cheekbones; do you live around here?

She has to think. Now who am I going to be today?

She becomes the wife of an aeronautical engineer who's been unemployed for nearly a year and finally just landed an aerospace job here in Santa Ana so they've just moved down from Tacoma. Two kids and they are fighting the bureaucracy of school transfers this close to opening day.…

It is the sort of thing she's done for idle amusement in the past when she found herself on an airliner seated next to a stranger she knew she'd never see again.

From childhood on she's taken pleasure in harmless lies: they exercise the imagination. Now it is a talent she is going to have to cultivate permanently. That's an aspect of this thing that frightens her especially: the chance that she'll slip and misremember her own lies.

It means she needs to stay aloof—no efforts to make friends or steady companions. Not until she is comfortable in a new identity with a past so well rehearsed that it comes to mind as readily as if it were real.

The hairdresser sends her away in a wheeling cloud of advice about the most fabulous little places to shop and the most divine sushi restaurant.

10
She has destroyed her old credit cards but still keeps the old driver's license; she'll need it one more time.

The plan is based in part on the cautionary advice with which she was endowed inadvertently by that dreadful little investigator, what was his name? Something aquatic, like his sharkskin clothes …

Seale, that's it. Ray Seale.

From the outset she has implemented the plan with businesslike thoroughness and she's applied a ruthless concentration to the details—because she can't afford to make mistakes, and because for at least some of the time it keeps her mind off her fears for herself and for Ellen.

Much of the time she feels as though she is trying to walk underwater. There seems to be a haze over her vision: a translucence that separates her from reality. The things that she requires of herself are things that she accomplishes with prompt inventive adroitness but it is as if someone else were accomplishing them. Feeling dreamlike, trancelike, she knows she must keep moving briskly because, like a bicyclist, she'll fall down if she stops.

11
Wednesday morning there is rain but she drives to Van Nuys Airport anyway. The storm has brought road oil to the surface and she feels the car slide when she makes the turn into the parking lot, going too fast. A blast of wind strikes; the car shudders and she has a queasy sensation when the seat seems to pitch to one side under her.

There is the throat-tightening awareness that the car is out of control. She sees the metal chainlink fence skidding toward her in the rain; she remembers to lift her foot off the gas and waits in dread for the tires to find their grip.

Managing narrowly not to hit the fence, she rolls into a parking space and sits precariously still with the windshield wipers batting, wind rocking the car, afraid to breathe while she waits for the pulse to subside and reminds herself that none of this is going to be any good if she totals herself in a stupid careless accident.

If you can't remember to care about yourself, she thinks, care about Ellen.

She sucks in a deep lungful of air and waits a while, hoping the rain will quit or at least let up; she has no umbrella. It's a long way to walk and she doesn't see a parking area any closer than this one. Between gusts she recognizes the place down the field from his description on the phone: “I've got a little office in the hangar next door to the Beechcraft Agency. You can see it from the parking lot.”

She remembers his voice now: coarse, a whisky-cigarette baritone with a rough resonance of barrooms and card games; on the phone it made her think of lumps of rock rattling down a metal chute. She'd telephoned five flying schools and in each case she'd asked to talk to the instructor. She's picked this one because he answered his own phone and his intonation suggested he might not mind doing something a little out of the ordinary for a price.

He says his name is Charlie Reid.

The rain doesn't look as if it wants to depart. She makes a face and gets out of the car, fashions a tent over her head with the morning paper and runs toward the hangar, trying to dodge the puddles.

The open runway area presents no obstacles to the wind, which gropes for her in gusts, blasting rain into her face under the newspaper. By the time she reaches the door the newspaper is disintegrating and her hair is a sodden mat.

She hopes it is the right place. She goes in.

A man sits in a swivel chair at a cheap metal desk. Steam drifts from the Styrofoam cup in his hand; coffee makes a strong smell in the tiny office. The sign appended to the wall is in cardboard and appears to have been lettered with crayons by a meticulous child: “Reid Air Service and Flying School.” Nearby are Visa and Mastercard emblems.

He is huge and unkempt in work boots, dungarees and a faded mustard yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway back to his elbows. There are bags under his eyes; the lived-in face is creased and amused. It is evident he's been watching her through the window. He says in his rumbling voice, “You must want to fly awful bad.”

“I do.”

It elicits his skeptical grunt. He lifts a large metal wastebasket onto the desk.

She drops the sodden newspaper into it. “Thank you.”

“Don't mention it.” He secretes the wastebasket under the desk. Then he stands up. He is big.

Six-two, she thinks; probably six-four if he'd stand up straight. He towers. The shoulders belong on a water buffalo.

“You're ten minutes late,” he says. “Not that it matters. Nothing out there flying right now except a few skateboards and umbrellas.”

“I don't want to fly today. I want to
learn
to fly.”

“I know. Usually I take 'em up the first day. See how they like the feel of it. Half the people that go up with me never come back for lesson number two.” He has a bellicose grin that surprises her because it engages her.

She thinks: I don't wonder they don't come back. One look at him and most sane individuals would think twice about going up in an airplane with him.

He says: “Some people just don't take to flying upside down, that kind of thing. How's your stomach?”

She is brushing herself off—ineffectually. Her feet are soaked and around them grows a puddle at which the man stares with a widening one-sided grin. All his expressions have a sardonic tilt.

Wet to the skin and miserable, she replies with tart defiance: “My stomach's all right. You might offer me a towel.”

“Bathroom's in the hangar next door. But you have to go outdoors to get there.”

“I don't suppose you have an umbrella.”

“Never use 'em.” His leer is a bit lewd. She wonders what it is about her that amuses him so. She doesn't feel a bit funny.

He is putting on a hat—a baseball sort of cap. He says, “Well shit,” and clumps past her to the door. “Wait here.” He goes out into the rain.

She feels she's achieved a petty victory. She glances through the jumbled papers on his desk and has a quick look at the documents that are thumbtacked to the wall under the crayon-on-cardboard sign. Beside an old map of Angola—what's that doing here?—she spots his private pilot's license, dated 1951, and his commercial licenses—single-engine and pilot-instructor, both dated 1974—and a certificate from the State of California permitting Charles W. Reid to operate a bonded school for the training of private pilots in single-engine dual control aircraft. There is the inevitable
Playboy
calendar nude. Off to one side she sees an Air Force certificate: he retired in 1972 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, which probably means he'd been serving as a major—not a very high rank after twenty years' service. Most of the documents are dirty and have gone ragged around the edges; none is framed.

Thumbtacked on the side wall above the desk, where he'll see it when he is sitting down, is a color snapshot of a nine- or ten-year-old boy with masses of brown hair and a big jaw like Reid's.

Wind slams the door open and he lunges into the room with a wadded towel in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other. He kicks the door shut behind him. All his motions are big and rangy: he moves like a large predator with total confidence in his own physical authority. He sets the coffee on the desk and proffers the towel. “Here you go.”

“Thank you.” She makes her voice softer than before. “It was stupid for both of us to have to get wet. I'm sorry—I didn't think.”

“I've been wetter than this and survived it, I guess.”

She scrubs her hair with the towel. “Is that your son?” She indicates the snapshot.

“Got to be. Looks like me, doesn't he. That was taken nearly ten years ago, when he made that sign. He's a sophomore at Stanford. Studying East European languages. Damn fool kid wants to go into the diplomatic corps. I can't talk to him any more.”

But you're fond of him, she thinks. That's good. You'll know what it means to worry about your child.

She says, “When he gets a couple of years older he'll realize you're not as stupid as he thinks you are.” She wraps the dank towel around her neck; there's no point trying to fix clothes or make-up—everything is ruined.

She reaches for the coffee, pries the lid off and tastes it. “This stuff's terrible.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you drink it?”

“I get it from the machine next door,” he says. “It's better than the stuff I make.”

“Then I hope I never have to taste yours. About these flying lessons now—I thought maybe you could give me some books to study, and don't you people use those phony airplanes inside a hangar where you simulate actual flying for the students?”

“Link Trainers? That kind of thing? I'm not that rich. Maybe you aren't either. They use those to train professional pilots. If you intend to take up commercial flying for a living, maybe you ought to go apply to Pan Am or United Airlines.”

“I just want to learn how to fly a small plane.”

“What for?”

It takes her aback. She didn't anticipate that one; she hasn't prepared an answer to it.

When she hesitates, Charlie Reid says, “A few women take it up because they're lying out in the back yard by the swimming pool with nothing to do in the afternoon and they see a bunch of light planes buzzing around and it looks like a lot of fun. Glamour and freedom and something to do in the afternoons. And then there are the ones—the divorcees—that figure maybe it's a way to meet a man. You one of those?”