So even in perfection there’s imperfection. But Katharine would come closer than most people; closer by light-years than Lynn and I had ever achieved. Driving out across the charred desert while they argued it out behind me, I finally myself grew calm about Katharine. I had become involved in her life the way you get involved in somebody else’s chess match, until you almost come to think of yourself as a participant; but now we were in the endgame, we were nearing mate, and my status as mere observer was forcing itself on my attention. I was fond of Katharine, and with calmness I could now approve the happy ending I visualized for her.
The desert also forced itself on my attention as I drove along. At Barry’s suggestion, we had prepared ourselves as though this were a serious major desert, and in fact that’s exactly what it was. On the seat beside me was a paper bag of supermarket fruit, while on the floor in skimpy shade were two gray-white plastic gallon jugs of water.
This desert, called Mojave, had been not so much tamed as beguiled by this baking desert-colored road running straight across the empty miles. Tumbled mountains ringed us, and the road slowly rose and fell, as though we were traveling across fossilized waves from some Paleolithic tempest. Police helicopters fluttered and flapped above us, watching for motorists who, unwary or unlucky, had broken down. The temperature out here was over a hundred, and the humidity so low that I drove with a peachpit in my mouth to encourage salivation. On this griddle it was easy for automobiles to boil over, to suffer mechanical malfunctions, to abandon hope and die. There were no towns, there was no water, there was only this tightrope wire suspended in the dusty void between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Between the vultures and the angels.
With police cars patrolling the road and police helicopters floating overhead, I couldn’t travel at my usual high speeds but kept myself firmly under sixty from the time we crossed the state line into California. It was more than two hours after we left Las Vegas before we reached the next settlement of man, a town called Barstow, a small bleached stucco outpost of diners and junkyards in the desert, where I took the exit and found a McDonald’s. Barry treated, and we ate on the move, needing the breeze of our motion to keep us from roasting in this hot-crock cab.
Now the road turned southerly, toward Victorville and San Bernardino and Pasadena, and the couple in the back seat ate their Big Macs and drank their Cokes and took a rest from their discussion. Traffic had been thin all across the Mojave, as though we had been part of an old camel caravan trail on the Sahara, but south of Barstow there were more cars and a returning sense that life was after all possible on this planet. More optimistically Barry and Katharine began to talk again:
“I know it sounds stupid,” she said, “but what I wrote there is true. I’m afraid of demanding too much from you, that my need for independence will itself be a heavy dependency on you, weighing you down.” (Close to what I had been thinking myself, across the desert. Would he understand the hint, would he see the danger?)
No. “Your independence is one of the things I most treasure about you,” he said, fatuously earnest. “That’s why I wouldn’t think of trying to change it, and why it couldn’t possibly hurt me in any way. You must have your own space, your own feelings, your own privacies and selfhood. I’ve always respected that, and of course I’ll go on respecting it after we’re married.”
Of course he would, but what he didn’t understand was that after the marriage the strain on him would be so much greater that it would weigh him down; precisely as Katharine had said. But she didn’t fully understand it either, and was only groping for what troubled her in the darkness of the future, so her answer was merely more words, reiterating without explaining.
And that was the way they went, all day long, four hours of it in the cab as we crossed the desert and descended into the spreading exurbia of Los Angeles. They repeated the same arguments in different words, combined old thoughts in new ways, circled around and around the black dense contra-terrine boulder of Katharine’s doubt. And we came at last to the top of a long descent down a naked mountain slope, ten miles of sweeping broad roadway leading from the barren plateau into — the nether world. The entrance to Los Angeles. Yellow-gray smog covered the valley in a thick cloud, like a dirty smokescreen. Cars far ahead disappeared gradually down into it, while in the northbound lanes other tiny cars, apparently unharmed, emerged from that unmoving yeast at the bottom of the bowl and scampered up the long slope toward sunlight.
We slid down and down, and as we neared the smog it seemed for a while very slightly to recede; but we overtook it, and plunged in, and from the back seat Katharine, surprised out of her argument, cried out, “My God! What’s happened? A forest fire?”
The sky down here on the valley floor was gray, the sun a dime-size white circle with a red rim, the air yellow-tinged. Greenery flanked the roadway, amazingly enough, and here at the bottom were houses, neighborhoods, children on skate-boards breathing and living.
They wonder if man can adapt to other planets. He already has.
Barry said, “It’s smog. This part gets the worst of it, the wind brings it all east to the mountains. We usually don’t have any smog at all in Westwood.”
Katharine laughed — for the first time today — and said, “Barry, I’m not going to decide yes or no on the basis of smog!”
48
The San Bernardino Freeway, westbound. We went through Ontario, Pomona, West Covina, El Monte, Rosemead, Alhambra. Barry was right, the smog did lessen the farther west we traveled, but it never entirely disappeared. By the time we reached the city line of Los Angeles proper, it was merely a metallic glitter in the air, a sharp taste in the back of the throat, a faint burning at the corners of the eyes.
The discussion in back had worn itself down to a smooth eroded artifact, a kind of separate third presence back there, slowly fading into a ghost; to haunt them? Barry broke a long silence to call, “Tom, take the Golden State Freeway south.”
“Right.”
“But then stay to the right; you’ll be taking the Santa Monica Freeway next.”
“Okay.”
In a quieter, almost pitying voice he said, “Katharine, we’re nearly there.”
“I know.” She sounded tired, prepared to say yes just to end it; game called because of weariness. The right answer, but for the wrong reason.
There was heavy traffic now, four lanes of it in each direction. I wanted so much to keep my eyes on the mirror, but I couldn’t. My attention was divided as we negotiated the Golden State and then the Santa Monica Freeways, the cab weaving and wobbling through all those purposeful Mercedes-Benzes and Volkswagens. Santa Monica Freeway; less than fifteen miles to go.