Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  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 hunge
r.

  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.

  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?”

&
nbsp; 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.