Long Shot (31 page)

She let dozens go by for the simple reason they were younger. She didn't consider the men at all. The women her age were only one in ten, but she needed someone close to a mirror image—who would understand instinctively how a woman might get caught without resources. She had it narrowed down to a matronly type in nurse's whites, reading a magazine as she walked, and a woman with a Vuitton purse the size of a suitcase, stopped in front of a window. Then, out of nowhere, a girl appeared from around the corner and made a beeline to Vivien's phone. She stopped a couple of feet away, as if to wait till Vivien was done, and rummaged in a ratty bag.

“You want to make a call?” asked Vivien mildly.

“Huh?” the girl replied, still fishing among her things. “No, thanks. I'm waiting for the bus.”

Suddenly, Vivien noticed slatted benches and a bus-stop sign on the curb beside the booth—as if they'd just materialized. With every day that passed, it seemed, she filled in more of the city's details.

The girl straightened up, having scavenged the proper change, and smiled through a row of off-color teeth. Her red hair sprang from her head like a fright wig. Not a girl at all, of course, except she seemed so careless. Over thirty, Vivien thought—just how far, she couldn't say. As to the clothes, it looked as if the cat had dragged them in, but on her they weren't half bad. She gave off a certain blowsy cheer, like the star of a traveling show. She was someone who clearly sang for her supper.

“Excuse me,” Vivien said, “I don't have any money.”

They exchanged a neutral glance, perhaps half a moment long—enough so Vivien knew there was no connection made to who she was. Even so, she felt as if she had price tags all about her person, in amounts she couldn't begin to hide. Yet the girl held out her open palm without a second thought. Vivien had her choice of a quarter, a dime, and three dull nickels. She took up the dime with a little thrill of victory. She said a quick thanks and ducked inside.

Once she'd dialed the number, she turned to shut the door. They both smiled broadly a second time, but already, she thought, they'd begun the retreat to their private lives. As it rang in Greg's apartment, Vivien wondered if she would have moved to help as quickly as the redhead did. Probably not. Though she wrote her share of checks to worthy causes, she couldn't recall that she'd ever been asked for a dime. Perhaps she looked too tight.

“Sid Sheehan here,” came the voice from the other end.

“Hi,” she said. “It's Vivien.”

“Well, well, well—speak of the devil. You lookin' to buy an autograph?”

“Me? Oh, I don't think so, Sid. I'm not a
fan
of anyone. Is Greg home?”

“Yup. Doin' a full day's work for a change. Can Edna and me come over and see your house?”

“Of course,” she said. “Whenever you like.”

A scuffle ensued at his end of the phone. They fought for control at the Cherokee Nile, and while they did, she watched the bus come lumbering up the boulevard, bearing down on the corner where they stood. The motley woman was frantic, as she rooted through her purse to find another dime. The bus hissed to a stop. She sat on the edge of the bench and dumped the whole thing in her lap. The bus door opened with a sucking sound. A kid with a book bag darted down the stairs and sprinted off.

Though Vivien heard Greg say hello, she couldn't speak till she saw how things resolved themselves. For an agonized moment more, the bus doors stayed wide open. The redhead picked out pennies from the litter in her lap. This round could have been won as easily as lost—except it wasn't. The door shut tight as a vacuum seal, and the bus wheeled away into traffic. By the time the woman had gathered the coins to ride, she was doomed to wait a second time. With a slump of her shoulders, she stuffed the purse with her odds and ends. Vivien could not see her face.

“Vivien, are you all right?”

“I'm all right,” she assured him, as if there had been some accident that only a few survived.

“Don't pay any mind to Sid, okay? He says whatever comes into his head.”

“It doesn't matter,” Vivien replied.

Inside, she quivered with rage. She'd missed a dozen planes in her life, but there was always a clerk on hand to fix her up with another. She vowed somehow to reverse this thing. A person shouldn't miss connections just for doing something nice.

“We're screening Jasper's movie,” she said. “Up at the house, on Friday. You'll bring them with you—all right?”

“Okay. But don't blame me if he pockets the flatware. You talk to Carl?”

“Um—yes and no.”

“What does
that
mean? He try to deny it or something?”

She watched as the woman examined her nails, buffing them up on her rumpled trousers. Clearly, Greg was in fighting trim. She had no wish to interfere. Perhaps he could bring off the scene with Artie that had just evaporated in her hand. For herself, she felt a sudden longing for life on a smaller scale. She preferred to attend to matters that crossed her path—like the redhead there on the bench, who stared out now at the passing cars as if they were on TV. Vivien hoped the next bus wouldn't come till they had a chance to have a word alone.

“Mostly,” she said, “we just hinted around. I'm a lousy private eye. We better call the cops.”

“Bullshit,” he countered. “I haven't seen
my
man yet. Fact is, I can't find him. Where the hell did he go?”

“I can tell you where he'll be tonight,” she said. “The Cock Tail. Studio City. You'll have to look it up.”

“When will I see you?”

“When you're done, I guess. You know what?”

“What?”

“He was only at Walden Pond two years. I always thought it was longer.”

“Well,” said Greg, “at least he got a book out of it.”

“I always thought it was years and years,” she said, not sure why it made any difference now. “He was thirty when he went back home.”

“Thirty,” said Greg, “was older then.”

She couldn't help thinking, all the same, that if Thoreau could leave the pond, then who could stick to anything? The firmest resolve had a definite term. Perhaps she should count herself lucky to know it now, so she wouldn't get all tied up, making fruitless promises too many years ahead. She'd do better to double her bets on what was on the table now, since she had no way of knowing how much time she had. It seemed she would wake one morning and simply turn around.

“Your three minutes are up,” the recording said. “Signal when through.”

“Where are you, Viv?” he asked, as if public phones were a private joke. After all, she had a line in the car.

“I've gone for a walk,” she replied, with a certain cool belligerence.

She hadn't, like Greg, begun to think in aphorisms, quite—or not that took the form of
Life is thus and so
. Still, she was feeling Harry Truman sensible and Kansas plain. Everyone else but she had started out in the midwest—Jasper and Greg, Artie and Carl, even Harry Dawes. Not a coast among them, east or west. But she felt, just now, more wry and unencumbered, more bound up in the earth, than any of them had ever been.

“You know,” she said, “I probably have a thousand invitations, waiting up at Steepside.”

“You bragging?” he asked pugnaciously. “Because if you are, you ought to see the orders on my desk. Admit it, Viv—you don't miss real life at all.”

“Well, neither do you!”

All of a sudden, a whir of static blew up like a whirlwind, cutting them off. The call, of course, was terminated deep within the circuit. Nothing to do with them
per se
. And yet she wondered, hanging up, if they weren't being warned to watch it, all the same. Perhaps they had to be careful not to get overspecific. She walked out onto the sidewalk, trying to think what one did if everything didn't get put into words.

“I don't know how to thank you,” she said, breaking into the woman's reverie. “Here I've made you miss your ride.”

“Oh, I don't mind,” replied the redhead, placid as could be. “It gives me time to think.”

“But I wish I could pay you back.”

“A
dime?
” she exclaimed. She enjoyed herself immensely—though not, it seemed, at anyone's expense. She sidled left to make room on the bench.

“I mean, I wish there was something you needed—some-think that
I
had.”

She didn't press it any further, seeing as the woman needed things she had no business prying into. Cash was the tip of the iceberg, clearly. Even as she closed the gap and took a seat on the bench, Vivien kept a little distance. She flashed for a moment on the desert west, where she was born and raised. She wondered how it must have been when the women got to talking—come to a brute, relentless land where half the men were wildcatters, rustlers, and snake-oil dealers. All that open space, and not a tree-lined street in sight.

“It goes in ripples,” the woman said, like she'd thought it all out long since. “I do for you—you do for someone else.”

“I'll have to remember to carry an extra dime. In case somebody asks.”

“Whatever,” the other shrugged. “It doesn't have to be money.”

She seemed accustomed to start things out in the open. Vivien usually wore a mask, but she saw they had no room to put on airs. When the redhead turned and craned her neck, one eye peeled for the bus, Vivien felt the tug of time, giving them both fair warning. Now was all they had.

She must have wondered a little why Vivien bothered to wait, lacking as she did the wherewithal to ride the bus. But neither made any special claim, asking where the other meant to go. They were strangers quite deliberately. They meant to keep it that way—with nothing in common, particularly, but the crossroads where they met. That said, they were no less ready to speak their minds.

This, thought Vivien suddenly, was the place to talk philosophy: in passing.

“The only other thing a dime'll buy you is a parking place,” the woman observed. “You can't even get a candy bar.”

“Nothing's worth what you pay for it,” Vivien said with a sturdy nod. “Not anymore, at least.”

“There's always love,” the other said, as if Vivien had set her a riddle. “But that's a special case. Depends if you're in or out.”

She turned and cast a second glance at the oncoming traffic, rising slightly out of her seat to get a better view.

“I guess,” said Vivien, smiling now. “But once you're in, it's a little like playing craps. You can't get out till you're broke.”

“What they call inflation,” the redhead said, making no economic sense at all. No wonder she was poor.

“With me,” said Vivien, “once I'm in, I
don't
get out.”

Just then, the woman spotted her bus. She stood up straight and stepped to the curb. She turned and smiled at Vivien. There was no last thing to say, it seemed. “Goodbye” would be as superfluous as “hello” would have been to begin with. She opened her hand and looked at the coins, as if she might have lost one in the meantime.

Vivien leaned forward and said: “See, that's why I don't get
in
. I never learned how to leave.”

“There's always hope,” said the redhead dryly. The irony seemed to impart to the word all of its old pre-Christian hunger.

The bus came at them out of the current, riding toward the curb. The woman looked up expectantly. Her hand hung limp at her side, and the rag doll's purse sagged open. She held it so loose, she might have been taking bids for the picking of her pocket. Vivien, still on the bench, put her hands to the back of her neck. She flicked the catch on the thin gold chain. She lifted the diamond off her throat, where it hung in the folds of a Bendel's blouse. It had hardly caught the first shiver of light before she scooped it in her hand. She had no time, so she wasted none. She reached across and dropped it, chain and all, in the unzipped purse.

It demanded a conjurer's sleight-of-hand. The last sensation she had of it was the warmth of the stone against her palm. Nobody saw a thing. The whole queer moment went unnoticed, in the general commotion attending the bus's docking at the curb. The brakes shrieked murder. The doors flapped open. A line of urban types came filing out.

“It's like they say,” called the redhead over her shoulder, one hand gripped on the tubular bar in the doorway. “You might as well spend what you got. It's not going to do you a bit of good when you're pushing up daisies—right?”

With that she was gone. She leapt offstage like a harlequin. Vivien waved in a dreamy way, though the other couldn't see her now, as she made her way up the aisle. The bus let out a squeal. It veered off into the stream again. Vivien sat for a moment more of sun as she watched it go, her arms outstretched on the shoulder of the bench. The street breeze fanned her face, like a whiff of Paris.

She didn't appear to have any lingering worry as to who she might be taken for. She cast a glance at the crazy-quilt of shop signs, far across the boulevard. She read them one by one like a line of print, seeming to search out something quite specific. For the moment, she had the strangest sense that no one would ever know her on sight again—but that was her way of saying she didn't care. She was no longer modeling life for the camera, as she left her bench abruptly, running to cross at the crosswalk.

The diamond didn't surprise her, really. She'd felt the moment coming, ever since she got it back. It didn't set right anymore. As if ten days' hanging off a jut of rock in the mid-Atlantic—the round of its yellow light revolving with the sun—had sent it back to something like a natural state. Perhaps she would have done better to toss it off a pier. If she'd thought about it at all, she probably would have decided she had no right to shrug it off. After all, if you cashed it in, say at Sotheby's, you could keep the poor in oranges for weeks.