The fuel reserve light had been on for fifteen minutes, so Caruthers pulled his 1967 Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible into a Texaco station just off the freeway, and surprised the attendant at the Full Service pumps by asking for only five dollars’ worth of regular.
“Check under the hood?”
“No,” he told the grease-covered man. “The oil is fine.”
He got back on the 101 and reached the place where buildings ended and those sprawling cypress trees seemed tiny on the hilltops. He took the Los Virgenes exit and eventually reached Malibu Canyon Road.
The sight of red rock all around him was awesome; the massive slabs sprawled underneath as he climbed the final straightaway through the mountains. Soon, like a flash, that two-mile canyon stretch would afford him his first glorious sight of the Pacific Ocean, only to yank it away like a bullfighter’s cape as the car rounded another curve. Caruthers thought how life did that: dangle fruit so you could smell its ripeness, then snatch it away.
No good lawyer would represent him, and prosecutors had even discussed charging him with treason. The Center for Earthquake Studies was finished, padlocked, under investigation. It had been a good idea, Caruthers thought. It had almost worked.
It’s not too difficult to lose control of a car if that’s what you’re after. Caruthers had read it in a book: At a fairly high speed, with an automatic transmission, simply shift into “Neutral” and then jam it into “Reverse.” The gears won’t catch, but they’ll almost certainly jam, and the car will change speed at a rate so unpredictable that you’re sure to do something strange to compensate. In Caruthers’s case, the car veered sharply to the right. To compensate he turned left, but too far left. At eighty miles per hour, this sent him easily through the guardrail, and the convertible went sailing through the air. If you were close by in Malibu Canyon early that morning, you’d have thought that his car would fly.
Caruthers’s last thought interested him: Life is a takeoff and a landing, with turbulence in between. Two seconds later, the car crashed — headlights first, and rolled once, end over end. Then, instead of exploding, the five dollars’ worth of regular began to burn very slowly.
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
GRACE GONGLEWSKI HAD NEVER HIRED A MOVING company before. All her college moves, along with the one across the country, had been of the lug-it-yourself variety: truck rental, hunting for empty boxes, and friends who could be lured by pizza and beer.
This time, however, she and Charlie decided to relax and splurge. She’d made goodbye calls to three people; the others — that slew of acquaintances she’d acquired during four years in L.A. — could simply dial the Arizona number on the recording Pac Bell said they’d keep on her old number for ninety days.
Charlie hated moving. He couldn’t stand the sight of movers bumping his delicate machines into the walls. Especially the lumino-oscilloscope, a one-of-a-kind device that measured minute thermal shifts in certain magna and strata. On moving days he always wished he were a blues singer, with nothing but the shirt on his back, able to walk into any bar, anywhere, and sing so well the owner would come out with a plate of steaming food, a glass of good red wine, and a key to the room upstairs. Charlie had moved many times, but this time things were different.
Their first fight had been about Charlie staying nearly every night at Grace’s apartment, and how he’d come, unconsciously, to resent it. Grace told him she was more than happy to stay at his place, but four days later they were both sick of the spartan, bachelor-y way Charlie had arranged his possessions. Finally, they decided to find a place together. This conclusion, along with certain others, was reached over a romantic meal at Cafe des Artistes, where Grace had ordered a second bottle of wine because — though you could never know what was going to happen — it was still possible to look across a table and think you were seeing the rest of your life. For a moment, while she smiled into Charlie’s eyes, a reddish light radiated behind his head and the rest of the room went dark.
On their last night in Los Angeles, they made love on the carpet of her bedroom. The apartment was empty, hollow, and their voices ricocheted strangely through the rooms. They might have stayed in the living room — after all, the bed had been taken away — but they’d come to the bedroom almost by rote, or by fate, and they laughed when they realized this.
They awoke simultaneously in each other’s arms; they showered together and, two distinct eloquences of economy, they finished their last-minute tasks with unprecedented swiftness.
“I’m selling the building.” Navaro told them as they came down his path for the last time. “Was on the phone all morning.”
“Wow,” Grace said.
“Thing is …” Navaro looked serious. “Lemme ask you a question.”
Charlie and Grace both leaned forward.
“I’m in a moral quarry.”
Grace smiled at Navaro’s mistake, and Charlie pinched her discreetly.
Navaro went on. “I think the guy thinks there’s four apartments in the building. But he never saw it. Y’know?”
“You mean he doesn’t know about the duplex?” Charlie asked.
Navaro shook his head. “But you liked it, din’t ya?”
Charlie smiled. “Sure I did.”
Then Navaro turned to Grace, gave her a hug, and told them what the doctor had said about his heart. “I’m gonna fucking start spending money like crazy!” he laughed, and Grace decided, contrary to prior judgment, that the man’s life hadn’t been lived in vain.
Eight hours later, Charlie and Grace pulled up to the house they’d rented, sight unseen, outside Tucson, Arizona, where nobody they knew had ever been.
Grace unpacked as the sun set across the desert, the fading pink light etching the ragged slopes of mountains in silhouette against the sky. She got up and stood in the back doorway, leaning against the jamb. Then she felt the heat of Charlie’s presence and turned. He smiled, his shoulders looser, his posture more relaxed than it had been in a long time.
“How you doing?” he asked, and brushed a lock of hair from her eyes.
“Just fine.”
The house was small and cozy, a ramshackle wooden cottage with an empty fenced-in front yard of desert scrub. There were no neighbors for miles, and the only signs of civilization were the telephone poles that ran alongside the little two-lane blacktop. It was a quiet place, Grace thought, isolated, where she could take off her clothes and run naked if she wanted. “Arizona? Are you sure?” her mother had asked. But Grace had never been this sure of anything before.
She took in the mountains, and drew a deep breath of desert air. Then she wrapped herself in Charlie’s arms.
All day long, Grace had been too excited to eat, but then Charlie suggested a nighttime picnic to inaugurate their move. Great, she thought, a picnic. Charlie took the odds and ends of food they’d brought from Los Angeles, threw them in a shopping bag, and grabbed a bottle of wine.