“Sure,” he said, “why not?”
He went to his car, started it up, and in it followed Pat’s cream-and-blue Dodge up Geary Street, past Van Ness, and then up the hill on the far side.
Ahead of him the taillights of the Dodge blinked red, massive coils like the turrets in a pinball machine. He could not see her; he followed the taillights of her car. Here and there, he thought. Wherever she went. Uphill and down. Like a child’s fantasy of faith. And so, he thought, they lived happily ever after, the two of them in their cottage on the side of the hill, the two of them in their candy-bar home where nobody could find them. The Dodge stopped—its brake lights blazed warningly—and he wondered where he was; he had lost track of the streets. The Dodge’s turn signal blinked, and the car turned left. He followed.
The Dodge was at the curb, and he almost went on past; he heard the sound of her horn at the instant he realized she had stopped. How few times, he thought, he had been here to this apartment. The location, the address were shut out of his mind, as if the place did not exist. Twisting his neck, he began to back the car against traffic. The Dodge was directly beside his car, and now he was pulling behind it, parking parallel to it. The red taillights dazzled him. A variety of lights, turn lights, brake lights, white backup lights; they made his head hurt. The gaudy bedroom-and-chrome cars, he thought. Carpets and record players. He shut off his headlights, rolled up his windows, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Pat stood shivering, her arms folded, as he locked his doors.
“It’s the fog,” she said, as they walked up the broad concrete steps of the apartment building. The door was bronze and glass, locked. They had to wait while she found her key. The hall inside was soundless. On each side of them the doors were shut. Everyone here, he thought, believed in the good solid things of life. To bed at eleven, up at six.
Trustingly, he went along after her, icing her find the right door. She seemed to know; her long dark hair bounced at the collar of her coat as she trotted over the carpet. Her heels made no sound. Like a long vault, he thought, a passage into the side of the mountain.
The door was open, and she was inside the apartment, switching on lights. As she reached to pull down the window shades, he said, “These big apartment houses—they’re clammy.”
“Oh no,” she said matter-of-factly.
“It would bother me, each person retiring to his sealed chamber.”
Still in her coat, she bent to light the heater. “You’re just full of morbid images.” Going to the closet, she took off her coat and hung it on a hanger. “You know, in some ways you’re rational and in other ways you’re erratic and nobody can tell what you’re going to do; you just stand there with a blank look, and nobody can reach you or get across to you, and then finally, when we’ve all exhausted ourselves talking and waving our hands in front of your face—” She closed the door to the hall; the door banged. “Then you suddenly come to life and start charging everything in sight.”
He went into the tiny clean-sparkling kitchen to see about drinks. In the refrigerator was a bowl of potato salad. When Pat came in, she found him eating the potato salad from the bowl with a soup-spoon he had pulled out of the sink.
“Oh god,” she said. Lines formed about her eyes and spread like minute cracks to her lips and chin. “You make me feel like crying.”
“Old times?” he said.
“No. I don’t know.” She blew her nose. “I hope for your sake you can survive this. I’ll do what I can to smooth it over, at the station. I think I can talk to Haynes better than you or Bob Posin.”
“You’re a great one to smooth,” he said.
She said, “All right, and you might consider this: you talk about going to another station. Do you think you’ll get away from Looney Luke? That stuff is on all the independents and on the network AM stations and on TV; I heard it the other night late, on TV, after the movie. So what good will it do? Are you going to quit when they give you Looney Luke commercials? And are you going to confine it to Looney Luke? Why just Looney Luke? What about the bread commercials and the beer commercials? Why be arbitrary? Don’t read any of them. Isn’t that so? Aren’t you being arbitrary? And you pretend I wanted you to do something like this, I’m somehow responsible.” She was yelling at him in a little high-pitched shrill whistle of a voice, her old domestic-argument voice. “Isn’t that right? Aren’t you trying to pretend it’s my fault? I put you up to this or something—God knows what. You know this wasn’t what I meant. I wanted you to do something rational, show Haynes it wouldn’t go on the dinner music program. You say you started to read it, and then you just gave up. Why did you give up? Why did you have toy that over the air? Why couldn’t you just—not have started it? You can’t say things like that over the air; you can’t say you won’t read it, you’re tired of reading it.”
“Take it easy,” he said.
“This finishes you,” she said. “God, I had such high hopes for you—and you’re winding up nowhere, nowhere at all. Just because you couldn’t go out and meet this rationally, and go to Haynes and discuss it before you went on the air; no, you had to wait until you had the script in your hands and you were alone in the station, and maybe then you felt safe, you could get away with it, and then you opened your mouth and fucked up the script so that god knows what sort of grief we’re in for, maybe a lawsuit, maybe a fine by the FCC. And what about your music? What about the five years you worked fixing it up with them so you could play classical music, whatever you liked; they even let you pick it out and call it your show, like ‘Club 17.’ Are you just going to junk that? Isn’t that what this is all about? Weren’t you trying to protect that in the first place? Isn’t that why you didn’t want to read the commercial? You didn’t want to offend the old ladies, and now you just throw away the whole program, much more than reading it would have. I don’t understand you. I can’t make any sense out of it.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Five years,” she said. “Wasted. Thrown away.”
As he figured it, he had put at least ten years into the hopper getting this far. First there were the four years at Cal, getting his BA in the music department under Elkus, the counterpoint and composing. Then the two postgraduate years, doing a little conducting, singing (a so-so baritone) in their own group, the Marin Choral Singers, writing a moribund cantata dealing with peace among nations and the like. Then his fine job at the NBC music library: the Big Move to San Francisco, away from the university. Eleven years, he decided. Lord, it was almost twelve. He had first gone on the air as a private record collector—a discophile, as the term had it—and his easy delivery, his lack of snobbishness and pedagoguery, had put his program over long after the notion of inviting collectors had withered. He had a natural radio personality; he talked spontaneously, directly, without the customary rhetoric of the classical music fancier. And most important of all, he liked all kinds of music—classical and pop and moldly-fig jazz and progressive Los Angeles jump.
He said, “No, I didn’t do it to get away from Luke.”
“What then?” she said.
“To get away from you. Or maybe to get closer to you. Probably both. It’s intolerable as it stands. Seeing you every day at the station. Do you realize, a couple of years ago you and I were married? Remember that?”
“I remember,” she said. “What a diabolical business.” She said, “Like—who was it?”
“Somebody. Somebody in a myth. Separated by the winds of Hell.”