“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?”
“No.”
“Well then.” He waits.
She says, “I’ve been up in small planes. As a passenger. I like it. I like the feeling. I can’t explain it any better than that.”
“Well, it’s your money,” he says. “You don’t get the sample ride today but I can start you in on basic principles and paperwork.”
“Good. Let’s get the red tape out of the way and then maybe you can give me some homework. I’ll be away for a week or so. When I get back I’d like to start taking lessons three or four days a week.”
“That’s kind of pushing it.”
“I’m in a hurry,” she replies.
12
On Thursday she leaves at dawn and drives to Las Vegas.
There are several mail-forwarding services in town. On Fremont Street she picks one at random and signs up for six months, paying cash in advance. The man at the counter does not ask for identification.
In the coffee shop of one of the downtown casinos she orders iced tea. It is a drink she’s never liked very much but it seems to be the thing to do in the Sunbelt and it fits in with her intentions to change her habits.
She is squirting lemon into the glass when a man stops beside her table. “Hi there. What’s your name?”
Her breath catches. It is a moment before she can look up. She tries to make it steely. “I’m sorry. You’ve got the wrong table.”
“I just thought maybe you’d let me buy you a drink or something.” He is losing his pale hair on top and he wears flesh-colored glasses. Probably about her age. Slender, almost reedy. Type-casting him, she thinks of electronics-he looks as if he programs computers. An apologetic half smile shapes his mouth as if engraved there.
She says: “Thank you. No.”
“You’re very attractive, you know, and if you’re by yourself-”
“I want to be by myself.”
“I just thought-”
She says, “They have legal prostitution here. If you’re horny-look, just pick up a newspaper over there and read the ads and find something you like and make a phone call.”
The man says, “It just doesn’t work for me if I have to pay for it.” He turns his palms up in a gesture of abandonment. “But then I suppose we all end up paying for it one way or another.” He wanders off. She ventures a guess that the ink probably hasn’t dried on his divorce.
She feels compassion for the bewildered fool. There was a time when she’d have been happy to invite him to sit down and have a cup of coffee and tell her the story of his life. She’s always liked people; she’s always curious about them.
She wonders why her rebuff seemed to take him so utterly by surprise. Perhaps everybody assumes that an attractive woman who’s alone must have a transparent reason to come to a place like this.
She doesn’t want to take any others by surprise; it might make them remember her. When the next man arrives at her table and says, “Hi. You alone?”-it isn’t more than five minutes later-she gives him a grim look and says, “I’m waiting for my husband. He’s a police officer.”
“Lucky for him. Too bad for me.” The man goes away, good-natured, taking it in stride, searching with bright eyes for his next opportunity.
That one too, she thinks. Nice guy. For all you know all he wants is a friendly smile and a few minutes’ conversation.
Dear God. I’ve always been such a nice person. I’ve always loved stray puppies-I’ve always been kind to my friends and generous to my enemies and trusting to strangers.
Is it possible to wake up one morning and make a snap decision that’s going to change the rest of your life-and truly become a different person: someone you’d have hated?
There’s got to be room for humanity. You can’t just let yourself shrivel up into a suspicious crone.
And yet.…
You’ve got to think about Ellen. For her sake you can’t trust anyone at all.
Let the poor sons of bitches find other girls to talk to. Right now you just can’t afford the exposure.
Alone at the coffee shop table she fills in the Social Security application-the second one: Dorothy Holder’s. Yesterday she stopped in an instant-printing shop and had Dorothy’s birth certificate photocopied. She encloses the copy with the application and lists her mailing address as that of the mail-forwarding service.
She tries to make Dorothy’s signature different from Jennifer’s: bigger, rounder, heavier. She’s practiced signing Jennifer C. Hartman night after night in a crabbed hand that is not at all like her usual flowing script.
She drops the application into a mail slot and a quarter into the one-armed bandit. It doesn’t pay off and she goes back to her motel. It is six o’clock: a bit early for dinner and she isn’t hungry anyway. She lies down on the bed, just to relax for a few minutes; maybe she’ll go in the swimming pool in a little while to cool off, and then tackle some of the home study program Charlie Reid gave her-instruments, controls, regulations.…
When she awakens it is past midnight and she sits up feeling sour and hung over. Exhaustion, she thinks. It isn’t the hard work of it all; it’s the strain-the tension of knowing she needs to make only one misstep and it all will be useless and they’ll come down on her like a falling safe.
Desperately tired, she can’t get back to sleep.
It occurs to her at some point in the endless drag of the night that never before has she known how dreadful it is to be truly alone. It’s all a blank slate now: no past, no friends-not even the prospect of friends. Nobody at all.
Ellen, she thinks.
But Ellen can’t help her fend off the terror; not now.
She opens Charlie Reid’s spiral-bound primer and tries to memorize the rules of flying.
13
In the morning she sells the car for $800 cash on a small used-car lot two blocks from her motel. The dealer, a man with a sunburned bald head and an expression of wry bemusement, must be accustomed to buying cars for cash: he’s probably seen a hundred examples of the hopefuls who arrive in Las Vegas in their $20,00 °Cadillacs and depart a few days later in $100,000 buses. Those big-spending high rollers must have their mundane $100 counterparts and this is precisely the impression she wants to leave: she wants to differ in no way from the multitude.