Shatterday (11 page)

Arlo pursued, a cart before him like Quixote's lance and shield. A breakneck lurch that slowed and modified into his strolling pace as he neared her behind, as he neared behind her, as behind her…

Fearing she might turn at any moment, Arlo obfuscated: he wrenched camouflage from the shelves and flipped it into the cart, heedless of form or content to the act: a box of Tampax, a tin of litchi nuts, a jar of maraschino cherries, a pack of frozen prawns, dietetic grapefruit slices.

Now he swung alongside her, two vehicles steaming down the freeway aisles of life, destined to cross at a king's X of inevitability. Arlo perused prices, hefted weights, compared viscosities, his thoughts meanwhile cascading, plunging, avalanching down corridors of cunning. Tactics of encounter. This was no frippery, this statuesque color-coded commodity, fair traded and in highest demand by a legion of slavering consumers. No miniscule ploy for simpoleons—a fresh varient was required. How do I meet thee? Let me count the ways. Know your enemy. Loose hips sink kips. Wait, hark! See her now comparing bottled salad dressings, a bare minimal ten feet from you. What beauty, what form, what a goddam eternal verity, fade to black and ecstasy!

Now she moves on … having selected nothing. No clue, no hint, a major battle, this. Wait—there goes the vinegar into the cart, and now, joy of joys, the olive oil! An old-fashioned girl, no prepared dressings for her!

(I'm Pennsylvania Dutch Amish, Miss, and I, too, long for the simple delights of the pure life, wanna go to bed with—no, forget it, that wasn't right.)

Arlo's lust bayed at the fluorescent moon.

Now she's at pet foods. Dog or cat? Let it be a dog, dear Lord, let it be a dog. Parakeet seed? Well, Arlo would try anything once, no scene was too freaky, really: when you're in love,
anything
is correct.

Suddenly, she was looking at him. Not in his general direction, but directly at him. Staring, with an unfocused intensity, Arlo panicked. It wasn't supposed to work like this. Which way could he run? He was hemmed in by specials on one-calorie cola and potato chips. She was starting toward him.

"Excuse me, but don't I know you?"

Of all the phrases, words, sentences, polemics, diatribes, inducements, blandishments, lead-ins, rhetoric in Arlo's thesaurus of hustle, nowhere was there an answer to her ridiculously trite—disarming—question. Arlo clutched. His throat froze. He stared at her, a mastodon in ice, seven million centuries frozen solid, staring out of that giant popsicle at Amundsen and his party.

"Mmm. I'm sorry. I guess not."

She wheeled away, Arlo forgotten.

"Wait!"

"No, I was wrong. You look different up close. I'm not wearing my contacts."

Frantic was an industrious troll, deep inside Arlo's vitals, hauling out hanks of viscera and flinging them, underhand, like a dog scratching dirt, through a painful hole bored in the small of Arlo's back.

He followed her, hurriedly, aplomb blown. "Wait a second!" Baked bean pyramids and he collided, cans went clattering, he surged on heedless. "I want to take advantage of you. I mean, I was trying to uh, er, um, decide whether to ask your advice about something, except I'm a little shy about speaking to strangers. But now that you've broken the ice, I wonder if I could ask you how to tell a fresh cantaloupe …"

She stopped dead, whirled, hands flat in readiness for a kung fu chop. "You're about as shy as a mako shark, and you
don't
want my advice. Of all the things you might possibly want, my advice is not among them." She performed a stately
verónica
and tooled the cart away from him.

"You're evil!" he called after her. "You torment men for kicks!"

In the parking lot, his brains having turned to cottage cheese, Arlo screamed senselessly at the cosmos. And the gas gauge he had neglected getting repaired. The Healey refused to start. It hacked a tubercular gasp and the electric fuel pump chittered like ground squirrels. Gasless. Arlo was pounding his head against the Derrington steering wheel when she came out of the supermarket with her groceries.

The nearest open gas station was two miles away, the corner of Franklin and Vine. And the only other car on the lot was hers. Arlo lurched out of the Healey and pursued her. His head ached terribly.

"Hey!"

"One step closer, Sunny Jim, and I give you an
ipponseoinage
over my right hip you'll never forget." She dumped the bag of groceries into the rear seat of the Dart and turned back quickly as if Arlo were a Vietcong cutthroat. He put his hands atop his head.

"I do not prowoke!"

"Vanish, masher."

"I'm outta gas. Honest."

"Now you are plumbing depths of ludicrousness unknown to Western Man."

"All I want is you should drive me down to the gas station corner of Franklin and Vine. I'll sit in the back seat. I'll sit on my hands. You can tie me up. I'm outta gas, it's late, I gotta headache."

"I don't believe you. You stink."

"Look. You don't trust me all that distance, two miles in the car alone with you, I'll go inside, buy a $2.98 garden hose, and cut off a piece I can use to siphon off a coupla liters of gas. With your permission."

"I'm convinced, get in."

He didn't move. "It's a trick. You'll hit me."

"I believe you, I believe you. Anybody who would volunteer to take a mouthful of gas without being at gunpoint must be telling the truth. Get in."

He sat on his hands all the way there, and back.

Though he was deathly afraid of her, Arlo pressed his meager advantage. With the fumey can of gas burbling into his tank, he stopped her before she could drive away.

"Maybe, uh, you should follow me back to the gas station to fill it up. I might have damaged the manifold housing coupler or something, trying to start it. It might conk out."

"There is no such thing in that beast as a manifold housing coupler."

"See, I'm driving a lemon. I
need
you to follow me."

"How the hell did I inherit you?"

"In Korea, if you save someone's life, you become responsible for them forever. Nice custom, don't you think?"

She grimaced. "Franz Kafka is up there, writing my life."

Arlo looked out from under thick eyelashes. It was his Jackie-Cooper-As-The-Kid look. "I've come to depend on you. You're so self-possessed."

Half an hour later they were on common civility terms, sharing the best chili dogs in Los Angeles, at Boris's Stand, corner of La Brea and Melrose, all beef, plenty hot, lotsa onions, two bits, you couldn't do better.

And half an hour later—inexplicably—they were on the verge of what Arlo called "a warm, humid experience," having driven out to Los Angeles International Airport, to a road bisecting a landing approach, where the jets landed directly over their heads.

"Can you tell me what we are doing here at 2:48 A.M. in the morning?" she asked Arlo. He said nothing. She rolled down the window. "Can
any
body tell me what I'm doing here at this dumb hour with a very possibly axe murderer and rapist?" she screamed into the night.

There was no answer.

Helluva sense of whimsy
, Arlo mused, edging closer.

"Tell me about yourself," Arlo gambited.

"This theatrical pose I wear is merely a snare and a delusion. I am, in reality, Anastasia, true Czarina of all the Russias, and I'm wearing a plastic nose. My father was Lamont Cranston, and he met an untimely end via the worst case of Dutch Elm Blight ever diagnosed at Johns Hopkins. He contracted it from Lupe Velez during a mad, passionate night deep in the heart of Mt. Etna, where my father was conducting guided tours. I am engaged to a Doberman Pinscher."

Helluva sense of whimsy
, Arlo mused, edging closer.

"Stop edging closer," she suggested violently.

"Look!" Arlo said, "Here comes one."

The Boeing 707 came out of the night like Sinbad's roc, screaming shrilly, and Anastasia screamed shriller.

The great silvery bulk of it, totally obscuring the sky, sailed out of the blackness mere feet above them, all vastness and terror, like a flat stone two blocks long, skimmed over water, and shred their silences past them. The 707 touched down almost as soon as it passed over them, and an instant later was a half mile down the runway.

Anastasia had pulled closer to Arlo. She was now wrapped in his arms.

"Scary, isn't it?" Arlo smiled.

"I wet myself," she said. She did not seem delighted with Arlo.

He leaned across slightly and kissed her. "Easy," she said, inserting an elbow into the conversation. "And that's an order, not a description."

Progress!
thought Arlo. "We'd better be getting back."

He started the car and made a U-turn.

"That was a helluva whimsical thing you said, when the plane passed over," Arlo chuckled.

"Which?"

"About what you did when the plane—

"It was a statement of fact."

•

At Arlo's apartment, after she had hung things up to dry, he offered her an omelet. "I can make seven different varieties, all delicious."

She aimed a finger at him. "You're lucky I share an apartment with a light sleeper, because underwear or no underwear, I wouldn't have let you con me into coming up here."

"Spanish, Viennese, Ranch-style, Albanian—"

"You have an indomitable will. Nothing seems to get to you. Brick walls and your head have much in common."

"Corsican, Paraguayan—"

"Look: I'm very hungry, mostly because you had the bad taste to remind me, and I'd like nothing better than a good omelet; but when I say
nothing
better, I mean exactly that. You are still a casual pickup, even though for some nutty reason we have managed to travel along this far together and my bikini briefs are drying over your shower curtain. Does my message penetrate?"

Arlo grinned infectiously. "Like a call from the spirit world. My father taught me. He was a master chef in New York hotels most of his life, except for a couple of years when he was captaining the kitchen of a luxury liner. Spanish, Corsican, Tibetan, German-Bavarian—"

She sat down on the arm of an overstuffed Morris chair, courtesy of the landlord. She pulled his blue bathrobe closer around her. A flash of leg reminded him there was nothing between them but the robe. "You know, Arlo, I have to tell you, concisely, I think you are the bummest trip I have ever been on. Not only are you funny looking, but there is a perceptible animal cunning in your face, and very frankly, but
nothing
could get me to go to bed with you, so forget the whole idea right now, How the hell do you make an Albanian omelet?"

Any second now, she'll notice them
, Arlo gloated.

He moved in and kissed her. It was an act of humor on his part, an act of politeness on hers. "Now that we have that out of the way," he smiled, "one Albanian omelet coming up."

He vanished into the utility kitchen, tiny for the white stucco unit (furniture courtesy of landlord and Thrift Shops; what might have been termed Early Impecunity) but more than sufficient for his needs. He proceeded to make a Spanish omelet, which was, in actuality, the only kind he could make, and that the result of endless hours following the recipe in
Fanny Farmer's Boston Cookbook
. Escoffier bad no trepidation about living in the same universe with Arlo. But this he
had
learned (Arlo, not Escoffier): one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Arlo had broken dozens.

He threw in a palmful of paprika and brown sugar and oregano.

"You collect coins," she called from the other room.

Beachhead secured!
he rejoiced.

"My father did," he answered, without turning from the stove. He had no need to go in the other room to see what she was doing. He could picture it perfectly. The picture was always the same, because it always happened just this way. She was standing before the flat, glass-covered case about the size of an opened newspaper. It stood on its own black wrought iron pedestal, a Herman Miller design that had been bolted to the underside of the case. The little Tensor lamp was turned in such a way that the beam fell directly on the arrangement of coins lying on their black velvet pad in the case.

"They're very handsome," she called.

"Yes, they were Dad's pride and joy," he said, not turning from the stove.

"They must be valuable," she said.

He turned from the stove, smiling a secret smile. Then he turned back to the stove, and scraped the ruined omelet into the sink disposal, started over again with gritted teeth, and knew he shouldn't have turned from the stove.

When he brought out their plates, and set them on the coffee table, she was still leaning over the case, mesmerized, hands behind her back, not wanting to put fingerprints on the carefully polished glass. Arlo smiled his own Spanish omelet of a secret smile.

She looked at the omelet uneasily as he went back to get the quart of milk from the refrigerator. She was back at the coin case when he returned with it. "Your omelet'll get cold," and she came over to the sofa, sat down and addressed herself to the egg without realizing Arlo was looking at the exposed left thigh.

"You keep them out where anyone could steal them?"

Arlo shrugged and ate a bite of omelet. It was awful. She wasn't saying anything about hers, however. "I seldom have people over," he explained. And mused that while he had just lied outrageously, the usual modus operandi had not been like this evening's. Underwear. He'd have to examine the ramifications of that ploy, at his leisure.

"It took Dad over thirty years to find all those. Myself, I could never understand the kick he got out of it. They never meant much to me—until he died …"

He choked up. She paused with a forkful on her way to mouth. The appraisal she gave him was the crucial one: if he could pass the sincerity test, the rest was downhill.

"But when he died …?" she prompted him.

Arlo plunged on, "It was all he left me. All those years he worked so damned hard, and he had so little to show for it. Just those coins. He left them to me, and well, it may have seemed a dumb way to spend time, collecting coins, when I was younger and he was around. But when he was gone, they became very important. It was like keeping a little bit of him with me. He was a good guy—never really understood me, but I suppose that's typical with the parents of our generation."