“Now there was this one kid they auditioned from the school marching band, played the tuba, but he knew how to play the bass and he was by far the most accomplished musician of the bunch. You give him the notes, he can play them-almost never makes a mistake. Mike said this guy was the best-trained technician he’d ever heard.”
He goes on: “But they turned him down. They went for another kid instead. Because this guy, the earnest zealot with all the training, he stood there like a lump and just played the notes. He didn’t have the music in his bones. He heard it-but he didn’t feel it. How’d they put it? They said he just didn’t have soul.”
“I had a feeling there’d be a moral to this story.”
“Honey sweet, you may be the world’s greatest pole-vaulter for all I know but you ain’t got the soul of an airplane driver. You study long and hard, you’ll memorize enough to get you a license, but every time you go up in the air you’re going to be scared of the aircraft. You’re never going to have a feel for it.”
“Why are you so anxious to do yourself out of a paying customer?”
He smiles briefly: he can be surprisingly gentle. “Baby love, you’re not going to make a good pilot. And if you can’t do it well, why do it at all? Take up water skiing or horseback riding or amateur theatricals.”
She doesn’t reply. She watches him. Charlie sips coffee and makes a face. “We having dinner tonight?”
“That depends.”
He gives her a straight look. He has an airman’s blue grey eyes and when he isn’t being sardonic they seem morose. The random thought crosses her mind that if you were filming The Charlie Reid Story you could cast Robert Mitchum in the title role. Charlie doesn’t carry his eyes at half mast and he doesn’t really look like the actor but he’s got a similar resonance and he presents to the world a rough facade that hides a good ear and an ironic intelligence.
Charlie says, “I wish I could tell when you’re really mad. Everything’s an act with you.”
“When I’m really mad you’ll know it.” She perches a hip against the desk; there’s only one chair in the tiny room and he’s sitting on it. She glances at the ten-year-old snapshot of Michael above his head. The kid’s big-jawed face has the same effect as Charlie’s: a little shifty and a littly ugly but somehow you know that against your better judgment you’re going to like him.
“Does he still play in a band?”
“They’ve got a little group. Sorority dances and such. Just casual stuff. They have fun.”
“What instrument does he play?”
“Saxophone.”
“Is he good?”
“Put it this way. He’s enthusiastic.”
She pictures the kid-tall now and hulking like his dad. Honking into a saxophone, trying to sound lyrical. Probably has girls hanging all over him.
She says, “What did you do in the Air Force?”
“Flew fighters.”
“Vietnam?”
“I did a couple tours. You want us to talk about my war crimes now?”
“Did you commit any?”
“I made a deal with myself not to wear sackcloth and ashes the rest of my life. You get tired of examining the philosophy of what constitutes being a Good German and what constitutes being a normal human critter. You get tired of trying to define what’s a crime in those kinds of circumstances. It’s about as useful as counting angels on the head of a pin.”
Then he adds: “I never was much on moral introspection. I don’t feel warped about it. I don’t think it turned me into a hero or a maniac. I went there, flew airplanes, did what I was told most of the time. Tried to keep my self-respect, stayed alive, came home.”
“You retired as a light colonel.”
He gives her a quick look and she realizes her mistake. No one must ever know she’s an Air Force brat. She’s not supposed to know the jargon.
She’s relieved when he lets it pass. He says, “I was a major. Deputy squadron CO. They wanted to promote me to a desk. Said I was getting too old to keep flying. So then I took my retirement-I was thirty-eight. Maybe that is too old to fly jets. I like piston planes better anyway. They’re for fun, you know?”
She points to the old map on the wall. “Were you a mercenary?”
“I flew in Africa a few times. You like asking questions, don’t you.”
“I’m curious about you.”
He says, “I’m kind of curious too. I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“I own part of a bookstore.” She’s pleased to be able to say it with such ingenuousness.
“You sure in hell don’t look it.” He’s drinking coffee; his eyes over the rim of the cup are examining her body frankly. When he puts the cup down his eyes droop with amusement and his mouth opens and he actually begins to laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“Thinking about the first time you walked in here. Soaked to the skin.”
She stands up. She remembers his lewd leer at the time. To cover her abrupt self-consciousness she says, “Why didn’t you get an airline job?”
“I’m not rated for multiengine jets.”
“You could learn.”
“I doubt I’d like it much.”
“You were born too late. You should have been a barnstormer.”
“Sleeping out under the wing of my Jenny. You think I never dreamt of that?”
Then he says: “Let me recommend Chez Charlie Reid. One and a half stars in the Michelin guide. It’s a dump but the cook does a pretty good patio barbecue. You like rib steak?”
24
It is about half an hour’s drive from the airfield to Doyle and Marian’s bookshop in Burbank. She has made a discovery about the Valley: wherever you start from, you’re half an hour from your destination.
That half hour conveniently is the running time of one side of a standard audio tape cassette. The car has a built-in player. (Apparently every car in California has one.) For camouflage she has tuned all the buttons of the car radio to innocuous mood music stations but the player overrides the radio as soon as you insert a tape.
Now she carries in her handbag several cassettes-baroque music mainly, and Mozart-and she knows it’s cheating but she can’t bear the thought of giving up good music for the rest of her life. She’s made a pact to listen to it only when she’s alone.
In the East a car was transportation. Here it is a cocoon: Californians spend half their lives in their cars; they drive everywhere with windows rolled up and air conditioners blasting even in mild weather-you see them jammed up on the freeways alone in their cars, sealed in, shouting soundlessly, gesticulating to the beat of the programs they’ve turned up to top volume. When you glimpse them it’s always startling: they’re like mime characters in an absurdist fragment of silent film, the plot of which hasn’t been revealed to you.
At the interchange she’s looking in the mirror while she negotiates the exit ramp from the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura Freeway. Two cars behind her take the same turns.
When she merges into the eastbound traffic she uses side mirror and indicator to ease over into the far right lane. The two cars are still back there: a rust red one and a boxy black sedan. They seem to hover in the mirror.
The traffic is clotted here, moving fitfully, backed up behind the exit for Van Nuys Boulevard, and it is only out in the far left lane that things move smoothly.
She watches the two cars go by in the fast lane. One of them has four teenage Valley Girls in it; the black sedan is driven by an old man with a scowl. He’s gesticulating with one hand and talking to himself. It looks like a violent argument.
That’s all right then.
She moves back into the faster lanes, listening to the Magic Flute overture, thinking wryly of a stale joke: help-the paranoids are after me.
Sometimes it seems so silly. Is it all only a melodramatic fantasy?
Maybe-maybe.
But suppose you choose to behave on the basis of that hypothesis-and suppose the hypothesis is incorrect.