Long Shot (32 page)

Lucky for her, she wasn't thinking.

She strode along the boulevard as if she'd never run an errand on her own before. She passed a florist whose plants spilled out the door to the sidewalk. She took a deep breath of pure spring green. After that was a shop stocked to the gills with vitamins—manned by a spare and haunted clerk who exuded a Zen-like certainty. Pet shop, button shop—Vivien let it all go by, indifferent to the sum of goods. She was after one particular thing.

She'd spent the last ten years shopping on impulse, going from window to window till something struck her fancy. Today she gave up browsing. Turning into Whitworth's Sporting Goods, she felt as cocky as Abner Willis, out to trade horses in a lemon grove. She wasn't in any mood to take no for an answer.

“You must be Whitworth,” she said, sauntering up to the counter. “Am I right?”

He was a very medium man, was Whitworth. Medium build and medium income. Right away, she knew he'd worked this spot for twenty years. He looked as if he could afford a bit of a caper. For the present, however, all he did was nod.

“There's something I'm trying to solve,” she said, forth-rightly as she could. Behind him were shelves of shorts and jerseys, gaudy as orchids. Next to the counter, a heaping bin of basketballs. “I need hiking shoes,” she explained—holding out her hands in a gesture meant to indicate the size. It seemed she wanted shoes to fit a polar bear.

“Just where are you planning to hike, exactly?”

He sounded as if the jungle began in earnest in the alley behind his store. In a word, professional.

“Oh, up there,” she said. “In the hills.”

She pointed behind her in such a way that she looked to be thumbing a ride.

“What surface?”

“I don't know,” she replied. She tried to think what kind of surfaces there were. “You know—sidewalks. Roads.”

“You want a walking shoe,” he corrected, somewhat tartly. Now he had the picture.

“Whatever you say.” She was already three steps ahead, and making her plans as she went. “I'm not fussy,” she said.

“Well, you ought to be.”

He loped to the end of the counter, to where one wall was stacked with shoes in boxes. He must have been forty-five, but he was trim as a high school track coach. Used to dealing with runners, who liked to consider the niceties of heel support and lacing. Vivien saw she was doomed to disappoint him.

Though the issue here was money, he bore such a stack of boxes toward her that she felt she owed him a proper show of respect. She let him lay out half a dozen styles, heard the pitch about uppers and lowers, and generally murmured signs of fascination. In the end, she was inclined to a watertight model, where the leather was thick as a saddle. He patted the toe approvingly, as if pleased to see how quickly she learned.

“What size?”

“Wait,” she said. “We got a small problem.”

Since he was as familiar with the euphemism as she, he faced the cold hard fact of money. She didn't overburden him with reasons. She left her money home, she said. She had no credit with her. He shrugged and sagged his shoulders, as if to say they'd reached an impasse. Though he saw she was a woman of means, what was a man whose accounts were in black and white supposed to do? She saw what he meant, but she forged ahead. She lifted one foot up across her knee, teetering there like a stork as she unhooked the tiny strap that held her three-inch heel.

“I do have these,” she offered, holding one up like a freshly landed fish. She plunked it down so it faced the others—hardly a shoe at all, compared. “I know they aren't any use to
you
, but I thought if I left them here, you'd trust me to come and claim them.”

They looked down now at two sides of a bargain. The gray suede Right Bank shoe was flimsy as a slipper in a fairy tale. Surrounding it on three sides, the heavy leather Whitworth shoes were grouped like mongrels around a cat.

“Let me get this straight—you want to pawn these shoes for a pair of ours.”

“I'll pay you tomorrow,” she said brightly, in the dead-beat's classic play for time.

They appraised each other nakedly. She thought perhaps she ought to swear to be back by five
P.M.
, but she saw it wasn't her promptness that was being weighed in this decision. After all, she could have told him outright that they cost two-forty new—this in spite of their looking stitched together out of scraps. But it wasn't the money either. It came down to just one thing, she thought. Could he see she was in the middle of something? Did he know what it meant to be out of time?

“I have to go measure this distance,” she said, and she sounded so vague, it seemed there must be a gold mine at the end.

“Hell, you can do that in a car,” he argued. “You'd have your odometer right there with you.”

“I don't really care how far it is. I want to know how long it takes.”

To him, she thought, she was just another idle B.H. lady, filling up the time between expenses. Who could say? Perhaps she was only
playing
at being Thoreau. If you meant to do it for real, perhaps you had to take a double vow of poverty and strict anonymity. That's what she'd always thought, at least, till she found out that even Thoreau himself went through it like a phase. As if it had to do with intensity, rather than time.

“You'll need some socks,” he said.

“What?” she asked, not sure she'd heard him right.

“You don't want to get all blistered, do you?”

She shook her head dumbly. She held out her open palm for the balled-up pair of cotton socks he passed across the counter. She slipped the pewter suede off the other foot. She sat on a bench that connected up to a set of barbells at one end. As she worked her feet into the socks, Whitworth came around the counter. When he handed over the squat and rugged shoes, one at a time, she realized she was used to being kneeled to in a shoe store.

She threaded the laces, slipped the shoes on, and stood up like a fighter. Whitworth made a twirling motion with his finger. She tramped around in a little circle, so he could check the fit. He beamed like an impresario.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, in a bantering sort of way.

“No,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Nobody special,” Vivien answered, letting loose a careless laugh. She floated around in her Whitworth shoes, ready to walk to Seattle. “It's just—why are you letting me do it?”

He shrugged off the implication of largesse. “Putting it simply,” he said, “I'm a nut. If I had things my way, there wouldn't be cars out there at all.”

He gestured at the boulevard, as if they stood by a woodland stream that the traffic had turned to an open sewer. He was plain as a tinker in
Heidi
.

“I look like a convert, do I?”

“Lady,” he said, “you look like the sort who'd drive from here to that barrel. But you got a walker's build. You might get bit by the bug.”

She didn't know quite how she'd done it. Who would have thought she'd stumble across a philosopher, just when she needed a little creative input? Though he ran this store and kept it solvent, underneath he was pure and daft and two feet off the ground.

“You grew up here, did you?”

“Corner of Fountain and Citrus,” he said, not so much nodding as taking a bow.

“Stone Canyon,” Vivien volunteered, tapping herself on the breastbone.

“Pretty country up there.”

He little suspected how deep the canyon ran between their lives. But they shared a particular brand of paradise lost: Half the desert city was wilderness still when they were ten years old. No matter that the Willises were in the forefront of the subdividers. You couldn't pin L.A. down as anybody's fault. It was too many people and not enough time that had done the old world in. Still, she didn't risk it one step further and own up to what she was heir to. Willises might be his sore spot.

They walked to the door together, quiet and lost in thought. They seemed to want to get out in the open, carbon monoxide or not. It was the kind of day they'd grown up in, after all—the afternoon sun grown long and dusty in the hills above the boulevard.

“Good luck,” said Whitworth cheerfully, leaning in his doorway. He raised a cautionary finger one last time. “Remember—pedestrian's got the right of way.”

“Hey, Whitworth—thanks.”

“No matter what you do,” he said, “don't ask directions. You can't get
very
lost. Besides, you might turn up on the edge of a view that goes all the way to Hawaii.”

They gave each other a kind of salute, with the better part of a wink thrown in, and then she started off. She stuck to the heavy traffic of the boulevard, all the way through West Hollywood. She resisted the impulse to climb uphill to Sunset. For a while at least, she wanted to walk a purely city street, so she'd have it to leave behind.

Did she still believe it was just a bookish thing she had embarked on? If so, then she should have been hearing echoes of Thoreau in the clamorous street, sounding like the murmurs of a long-forgotten dream. Yet before she had clocked her first half mile, the checklist she'd been making up—as to whether L.A. was deep as Walden Pond—had slipped her mind entirely. Walking here in the midst of a thousand daily lives, she began to understand that, for all his talk of foxes, loons, and morning fog, Thoreau did not go walking with his mind on the woods around him. Probably the reverse. The woods were there to let his mind run free.

And where the freedom took her was back to Jasper Cokes. She was so surprised to see his face rise up at the edge of consciousness that she went two blocks repeating his name, as if to reacquaint herself. She put it down to the randomness of memory, assuming he would vanish now as quickly as he came. She tried to fix on the street's pop trail of unrelated matters—the car wash next to the pillared bank, the boutiques on the brink of receivership. She hoped the course of ordinary life would break upon her, the way it had in the Valley, the night she fled from Steepside.

Odd to think she could live eight years in Hollywood and not see there were no repeat performances.

So this was grief, she thought, as she batted back the tears and picked up speed. She gave it the coldest welcome she could summon. But once it had a grip, it took everything in its path—advancing now like a wall of fire, till there was no place to turn. She resisted the darker light of the past, even as it gleamed in the road ahead.
Why go into it now?
she thought. Far better the tale that had grown up around them over the years. At least she could close it like a book. She had a right to be left in peace—for having survived him, if nothing else.

There
were
things here and there, of course—things not even Carl and Artie knew. How, maybe once a year, she and Jasper would draw an evening out till they were all alone. Splitting a snifter of B & B, they would settle down to have it out, propped on the pillows in one or the other's bed. They reeled off all their recent items, couched in the innuendo of the gossip-monger's trade. The nonsense put out about them struck them so funny, they wept with laughter. Reveling in their comic-book personae, they laughed off, petal by petal, the artificial flower of public life.

Till the one who was meant to leave would contrive to stay on a moment longer. Something clicked. They climbed in under the covers, tittering like schoolgirls. Thus did they defy the ironies that crowded them. With the lights all out, they were safe as kids in a cubbyhole. Talked and talked till they fell asleep. But they knew when enough was enough, as well. Some time before dawn, like Cupid in flight, the one whose room was across the house got up and crept away. As if morning were much too much of a risk, and breakfast a curse of fate reserved for the disillusioned.

Strange, she thought, how even grief was a thing you got used to fast. She didn't double up with pain, the way she'd always supposed she would. The effect was more like fever. These were the stinging sort of tears. They ached and burned, but they didn't blur the vision. Rather, they seemed to enhance it, like the morning after rain. Nothing got in the way of the hard-edged outside world she walked through. She took it all in as never before.

When she reached the border of Beverly Hills, she crossed through a fountained park that made it seem the weather had changed—as if this part of town were climate-controlled to seventy-two degrees. There were trees of every sort, like an arboretum. Beds of roses and creeping vines. Flowers to cut by the basketful. The blooming shrubs were on fire with color. The rocks on the lawns looked to be imported, the moss applied by hand.

She hung a right at the next corner and felt an uphill slant to the land. She was having to do more work to keep the pace—a thing she didn't know she had, till she felt she must maintain it. The houses on this street, she thought, must go as high as five or six. The old tall palms trailed up the sidewalks into the distance. The vivid gardens were ripe with April growth. Though some front yards were sculpted so as to look like holes of miniature golf, the flowers were no less bright and perfect. One had to learn to cultivate a double focus—so as not to overlook a single blossom, even as one avoided all the overblown bouquet.

She saw it was going to be hours before she got home, if she meant to start as far back as the day she and Jasper met. She trotted along the grassy line between the sidewalk and the street, for all the world like an overdressed jogger. She scanned the front of each house she passed. She could have been looking out for a place she'd left behind—say, in another life. She appraised each property, plot for plot, just as she'd been taught to at her father's knee. Figures rolled in her head like dice. She squinted like a bookie, doing up odds on his greensheet.

“You know what L.A.
really
is?” Jasper used to ask, whenever the city was eaten up by fires and quakes and mudslides. “It's Atlantis—that's what it is. You wait. Someday, we're all gonna go to the bottom.”