The Red Car (17 page)

I was able to make it.

Something in my brain clicked. I knew this was a beautiful road, famous, but the choice turned out to be a bad one. Maybe the scenery was gorgeous but I couldn't turn my head to look, because I had to concentrate on the twists and turns of the road, all too aware of another car on my tail. It was a narrow highway.

“Fuck off,” I said.

I wanted to pull over to let the car pass me but I was too scared to pull over. I could not see the ocean, but I knew that it was there, at the bottom of the cliffs. I could imagine missing a turn, sailing off the road into the unknown like the black funeral car in
Harold and Maude
.

My knuckles hurt. I was sitting up way too straight. My back hurt. It had never hurt before. I did not want to have a bad back. Hans's back always, always hurt. A year ago, he had injured himself during a yoga class and I had not been sympathetic. I couldn't explain why. He wasn't easy to take care of when he was sick.

I did not know where was I driving but I wanted to be done driving. It was a beautiful day, but the glare of the sun shone
straight into my eyes, and I was blinking. Driving straight into the sun, I felt almost blind. I was driving blind on a twisty road in a red car with murderous impulses. The combination was bad. If this were a Haruki Murakami novel, at least I would be listening to the right music, a Beach Boys cassette or some old jazz, but I was too scared to take my hand off the wheel to turn on the radio.

I saw a sign for a motel and I felt another click in my brain. The River Inn. My parents had gone there together, a long time ago. I could not remember the last time my parents had been on vacation, but I knew that they had been there. My mother loved this place. She had told me about wooden benches in the river, which in places was more like a gentle stream. You could sit on these benches, read a book, drink a lemonade and dangle your feet in the water. I still had a picture of my mother that she sent me, years ago, her hair long, wearing a magenta T-shirt and a pair of shorts, sitting on one of these wooden benches in the river at the River Inn, her feet in the water. It was one of the rare pictures of my mother, who did not like to be photographed. It was one of the rare times that she was smiling.

I pulled into the driveway, the car crunching over a gravel path. The place did not look like much. It looked like a motel on the side of the road, nothing more. I went into the office, which was empty, and rang the bell. My hands were wet with sweat from gripping the steering wheel.

A young Asian woman appeared from the back, rubbing her eyes. She had the straightest, blackest hair. The whitest skin. I thought of Snow White. She was almost too beautiful for this world. She was holding an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. She was wearing a pale pink sweatshirt.

“Sorry,” she said. “I must have fallen asleep.”

“That's okay,” I said.

“Do you have a reservation?” she asked.

I shook my head, sure that she would send me away. I felt disappointed, suddenly wanting to stay in this place where my mother had been happy. I did not want to be sent away.

“Have some faith,” Judy said.

The beautiful Asian girl squinted at the computer screen.

“That's okay,” she said. “There are a couple of rooms open. How many nights?”

“One,” I said and then I paused. “Could I stay longer if I like it?”

“Oh, you will like it here,” she said.

Her straight hair formed a blanket in front of her face. I could not see her eyes. “Let's start with one night and you can extend if you want to. Does that sound okay?”

That sounded reasonable to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Cash or credit?”

Without thinking, I gave her my credit card. She pushed her hair behind her ears and I watched her begin to enter my information into the computer. And then it occurred to me, watching her, that Hans could find out where I was. He could call the credit card company, research my expenses. There was no reason for him to do that. That was what a husband would do when his wife went missing. Like the Julia Roberts movie that was always on cable, when she was still really young, where she cut off her hair and learned to swim, pretended to drown, swam to shore and went on to lead a new life in a small bucolic American town. All to escape her controlling, abusive husband.

But I was not missing. I was not even on the run. I had a plane ticket, a return date. Maybe I was on a break? Was that what it was? Hans and I had not discussed it. I had not explained to him, for instance, that I did not want to talk to him while I was gone. How could he be expected to understand that?

“Actually, could I pay cash?” I asked.

“Of course,” the beautiful receptionist said. “I will still need to take down the information from your card, though,” she said. “For a security deposit. Just in case. I will also need a form of ID. I should have asked for that straightaway. I am a little bit tired. I was up all night, reading this book. Have you read it?”

She held up her copy of
Tender Is the Night
.

“Sure, I read it,” I said. “A long time ago.”

“It's really good,” the receptionist said.

I opened my wallet and extracted a pile of twenties, the money Hans had considerately taken from the ATM after choking me. I instinctively reached for my neck, patted the soft skin and then my hair. I envied the hair of the receptionist. It felt good to have so much money in my wallet, but the room was more expensive than what I thought a motel on the side of the highway would cost. It would not last long. I could hear my mother the last time I was home, complaining about the rising price of produce in the supermarket. I wondered if the River Inn cost significantly less when she had come. If that was why she no longer took trips.

“Don't worry about money,” Judy said. “I told you that. Can you trust me?”

I did not know. Could I trust her? She had left me money. I just had to go and claim it. But I did not want to go back to San Francisco.

“Stay,” Judy said. “You are fine.”

“My mother stayed here once,” I told the beautiful receptionist. “She loved it. I was driving by and I saw the sign for this place and so I pulled over. Completely on impulse. I had absolutely no idea that I would come here.”

I regretted talking too much. I was nervous, I realized, checking into a motel where no one knew where I was. Where Hans did not know where I was. I didn't like to remember that fight. Hans's hands around my neck. I did not want to think about him. I didn't want to have to answer his emails, pretend that everything was all right.

“You'll see after you check in,” the beautiful receptionist said, handwriting me a receipt she'd made using a black quill pen, dipped in ink. Surely, a ballpoint pen would be quicker, a computer receipt. I looked at her pretty hair and wondered how she came to be working here. Maybe she was an actress, training for a role. “It's really spectacular here. Check into your room and come for brunch. You'll see the view.”

“Okay,” I said.

The receptionist squinted at the computer screen. I thought we were done, but the information was not going through.

“I didn't fill in a required field,” she said. “I need to enter the make of your car and your license plate.”

“I don't know it,” I said. “Let me go check.”

“Okay. I'll go with you,” the receptionist said. “I need some air.”

By now, I knew that I wanted this beautiful Asian receptionist to be my friend.

“Is this yours?” she asked, pointing at Judy's red car.

“It was a gift,” I said.

“It isn't what I would have expected you to be driving.”

The receptionist wrote my license plate number down on the back of her hand. It struck me as funny, like Lea from the apartment on Castro Street giving me her phone number. I looked down at the skin on my wrist. Her number was gone. It didn't matter. I knew where she lived. The beautiful receptionist walked me to my room. If she had been a man, I might have found this creepy. Instead, I was grateful. My room was in a flat, unremarkable one-story building on the other side of the two-lane highway.

“Come straight to the restaurant,” she said. “The kitchen is going to close soon.”

“Brunch,” I said.

“Coffee,” the receptionist said, kindly, as if I did not understand the word. “Eggs. Toast. Homemade granola. French toast.”

“Pancakes?” I asked her. I could not remember the last time I had eaten a pancake.

“Delicious pancakes,” she said. “With fresh fruit and organic maple syrup.”

I opened the door to my motel room. Again, it did not look like much. There was wood paneling on the walls, a framed photograph of sunflowers over the double bed. An armchair in the corner, a door that would open up to a bathroom.

“The restaurant is across the highway. There are outdoor tables that look out onto the river.”

“That's nice.”

“You have half an hour before the kitchen closes.”

I stepped inside my room. Maybe I liked it after all. The place was mine. I did not have to share it with anyone else. I was worried that my new receptionist friend would follow me into my room.

She left.

T
HE MENU HAD TOO MANY
choices. Six different kinds of toast. Omelets with goat cheese and varieties of mushrooms I had never heard of. I chose a table outside on the patio with a view of the river. It was beautiful. I ordered the pancakes because the Asian receptionist had told me she loved the pancakes. I asked for coffee.

There I was.

I did not understand how, geographically, there could be a river at Big Sur because I thought I was by the ocean. But the receptionist was right. I did love it there. It was like I had crossed the highway and been transported to another world. Blue sky. Tall grass. Wildflowers. Ducks. A mother duck with baby ducklings in the river, which was actually more like a bubbling brook. I could hear the pleasant tinkling of the water. I waited for my food, elbows on the table, my head on my hands, watching the water flow over the rocks. I looked out onto the wooden benches in the water, the benches my mother had loved, where she had let her picture be taken. My coffee came.

“Thank you,” I said.

I wasn't going to look at the waiter who took my order, but I felt a lingering presence. My pretty receptionist friend
set down a red mug on the table, a small pitcher of cream. I noticed another red ceramic mug, also filled with coffee, on the tray. The patio was empty. I tried to remember what day it was.

“Are you the waitress, too?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I saw you come in and I decided to bring your coffee.”

“I don't know your name,” I said, motioning for her to sit. She smiled. The other coffee was for her. She sat down and poured cream into her cup. I did the same.

“It's Yumiko,” she said.

“That is so pretty,” I said.

I worried if that was a racist thing to say. To compliment her Japanese name. Maybe in Japan it was an ordinary name.

“It means snow,” Yumiko said.

“I didn't know that,” I said.

“Why would you?” she said, smiling at me. She had pulled her pretty hair back into a ponytail. “You are not Japanese.”

I almost said that I liked sushi. I felt strangely nervous. Instead I mentioned a famous Japanese writer whose work that I loved. I was not sure why. Was it as if to say that I liked Japanese people? It was almost as bad as telling a black person that you had a black friend.

“That is my uncle,” Yumiko said nonchalantly, sipping her coffee.

“Who?”

“The writer you love.”

“You are kidding me,” I said.

“He is teaching this year at the writing program down
at Irvine,” she said. “I dropped out of college in Tokyo, my parents were worried about me, so he suggested I come down to California with him and study there, but I dropped out again.”

“And you came here?”

“I have been here for two months. I don't want to leave. I was about to run out of money but I asked for a job.”

The real waiter returned with my pancakes.

“Hey, Yumiko,” he said.

It was clear to me, right away, that the waiter was in love with her. It made sense. I was a little bit in love with her. Three round pancakes were served on a blue ceramic plate, a beautiful fruit salad in a hole carved in the center. Looking at these perfect pancakes, I realized that I wasn't in the mood for pancakes. I had ordered them because they were what Yumiko had recommended. They were not what I wanted.

“Would you want some?” I asked Yumiko.

She nodded.

“I'll bring another plate,” the waiter said.

“Could I also have some buttered toast?” I asked. “And two poached eggs.”

That was what I actually wanted for breakfast.

“What kind of bread?” the waiter asked.

There were six different kinds of bread. I asked for sourdough. “The sourdough bread is really good,” Yumiko said.

We sat in companionable silence, Yumiko eating the pancakes. We both looked out at the view. There was something about the light reflecting off the river. The waiter returned with my new breakfast, moving the plate of pancakes in front
of Yumiko. I wondered if this was something she did periodically. The waiter refilled our coffee.

“Can I join you guys?” he asked.

Yumiko shook her head.

I thought this was funny, after she joined me at my table. I was glad, though, that she sent him away.

“It's going to be time for me to leave here soon,” Yumiko told me. “I am starting to get restless, honestly. Everywhere I go, men fall in love with me. It is such a pain.”

I was almost going to say that I had no idea what that was like, men always falling in love with me, and then I remembered Jonathan Beene and Hans and the stream of emails that would be waiting for me. Perhaps men were always falling in love with me, too, but they weren't men that I wanted. The last man I wanted, Diego, he did not want me.