“That’s the guy in Los Angeles?”
“It might clear my mind,” she said.
“All I know about him so far,” I said, “is that he’s got a hell of a lot of patience.”
“And that it’s running out.”
“That, too. What’s he do for a living?”
“He’s, well...” She seemed oddly hesitant, as though she didn’t want me to know, or was afraid I might laugh. “He’s a surgeon,” she said.
“Oh, yeah? That’s terrific.”
“A plastic surgeon.”
“Oh,” I said. A vision rose up in my mind: A phony, in a paisley ascot. Deep chahming baritone, overly manly handshake, a little too ruggedly handsome to be true.
The smile she gave me was rueful. “I know,” she said. “People always think it’s some sort of joke.”
So apparently the vision in my mind had showed on my face. “Not at all,” I said. “There are plastic surgeons and plastic surgeons. Some of them do wonderful humanitarian work, rebuilding people after terrible accidents and so on.”
“And some of them,” she said, “do unnecessary cosmetic surgery on idle rich people, making them pretty and charging them a lot of money.”
The irony in her voice led me to suspect the worst. I said, “That’s your guy, huh?”
“Barry is a cosmetic plastic surgeon,” she said, the same way a mother might announce her oldest boy is a hopeless alcoholic; and then she went on just the way the mother would, looking on the bright side: “But he’s very sweet, and very honest. He’s very very talented, he’s done amazing things with big noses and low foreheads and baggy eyes and—”
“Not while I’m eating.”
“The point is,” she said, “Barry is a truly wonderful, gentle human being, which is why I love him.”
There was a question I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know how. Also, I was afraid of the answer. Holding an onion ring, I sort of gestured vaguely toward her face, saying, “Did he, uhhh...?”
She didn’t get it. “Did he what?”
“You, um...”
“Oh! My face? No, he always says my face is one of the few times God did better work than he could.”
“A very fancy man with a compliment.” It was amazing how much I didn’t like Barry.
“Let me show you his picture,” she said, and opened the locket dangling on her chest. It turned out to be not exactly a locket after all, but a watch, with a photograph inside the lid. She leaned forward, extending the photo over the seatback, and dumped the onion rings and french fries in my lap. “Oh! I’m terribly sorry.”
“No problem.” There were fewer onion rings left than french fries, I noticed. I quick ate an onion ring, put everything else back in the barges and the barges back on top of the seat, then leaned forward to look at this paragon among men.
Well. It’s very annoying when your prejudices aren’t confirmed. The guy smiling in the picture — it was just his head, and a blurred section of what might have been bookcase behind him — looked to be my age (31) or a couple of years older, and seemed a very decent sort of chap indeed. She’d used the word ‘gentle’ and that was exactly what he looked like. Mild-mannered, easygoing, certainly trustworthy; a solid, likable, everyday nice guy. I’d known a whole lot of them in college. I’d even tried to be one myself for a while. “This guy shouldn’t be a plastic surgeon,” I said. “He should be a vet.”
She understood my meaning at once. “He’s very tender,” she agreed. “He’s very sympathetic to the humiliation people feel when they think they have a blemish.”
“Okay,” I said. I understood that at a level below consciousness I’d been in competition with Barry — an attractive woman creates male competition simply by existing — and now I saw that in any competition at any level Barry would have to come in first. He’d probably even spell better than me. Worst of all, if I ever met him, as I most likely would at the other end of this trip, I’d undoubtedly like him.
“You see what I mean,” she said, and turned the picture around to look at it herself. Smiling fondly at the picture, she said, “He’s such a wonderful guy. Why do I keep backing away from him?”
“He’s got a flaw somewhere.”
“He really doesn’t. He’s Mister Right.”
“Then take the plane.”
She sighed, shook her head, and closed the locket. Popping an onion ring into her mouth — when was she going to eat some of her french fries? — she said, “We met four years ago, in Houston. I was doing a shopping mall, and he—”
“A what?”
“A shopping mall. I’m a landscape architect.”
“Ah,” I said.
“You know what that is, don’t you?”
“You decide where the trees go.”
She gave me the condescending smile of the professional toward the layman. “Something like that. Anyway, I’m attached to a New York firm, but my work is all around the country.”
“What’s Barry doing in Los Angeles?”
“That’s where he lives.”
“And after you’re married?”
“I’ll switch to a West Coast firm.” Was there something slightly defiant about the way she said that?
I nodded. “You’re the one has to move, huh? Because you’re the woman? Whither thou goest, all that?”
“Not at all. Barry is the least sexist of men.”
I’d always thought I was. “Uh huh,” I said.
“It’s better for both our careers, that’s all,” she explained. “There’s at least as much work for a landscape architect on the West Coast as the East, and I’ve always traveled and worked all over the country anyway, so I can just as easily be based in Los Angeles as anywhere else. And that’s where most of Barry’s patients are, so it’s better for him. He says New Yorkers don’t care what they look like.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Are we out of onion rings?”
“There’s still french fries,” I suggested. “Or I could go get another order.”
“No, I suppose we ought to push on.” She sounded reluctant, though there really wasn’t much in this McDonald’s lot to hold us. Then she said, “How far do you want to drive at a time? How should we work that?”
“I’ll give you a ten-hour day,” I said, “same as I work in the city, which includes lunchtime. I started at ten this morning, so I’ll drive till eight tonight, and then we’ll stop.”
“A ten-hour day — isn’t that a lot?”
“It’s what I’m used to. Ready?”
“Just a second,” she said. “Let me just go get one more order of onion rings. For the road.” And she hopped out of the cab and loped away. I watched her go, then spent a minute cleaning up all the paper bags and cardboard barges from the seat beside me.
I liked her.
4
Six-thirty P.M. Pennsylvania mountains replaced by Ohio industrial parks. Interstate 80 abandoned for Interstate 76, to get a bit further south. The sun, descending dead ahead toward eye level, gradually becoming a nuisance. The passenger brooding in the back.
After lunch, I’d gassed up at the neighboring Exxon station, then climbed back up onto Route 80 and sailed on into the west. Ms. Scott, after sharing with me the additional order of onion rings, had returned to her previous seat, where she’d opened one of her suitcases and brought out from it a slender vinyl attaché case; the kind carried by State Department clerks, computer salesmen, and executive trainees. This, which she opened on her lap, had proved to contain such serious businesslike material as yellow-lined legal pads, ballpoint pens, graph paper, loose-leaf filler books, a cassette recorder, sharpened yellow pencils, and a slide rule.
(I have always envied people who know what a slide rule is for. It’s not even the question of how you use it, it’s more basic than that; I am convinced there have been moments in my life which would have been made easier if I had been equipped with a handy slide rule and the mastery of its operation, but I’m so ignorant I don’t even know which moments those were. Never have I said, “Oh, if only I had a slide rule!” though surely there have been times when it was the appropriate thing to say.)