She drops the sodden newspaper into it. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” He secretes the wastebasket under the desk. Then he stands up. He is big.
Six-two, she thinks; probably six-four if he’d stand up straight. He towers. The shoulders belong on a water buffalo.
“You’re ten minutes late,” he says. “Not that it matters. Nothing out there flying right now except a few skateboards and umbrellas.”
“I don’t want to fly today. I want to learn to fly.”
“I know. Usually I take ’em up the first day. See how they like the feel of it. Half the people that go up with me never come back for lesson number two.” He has a bellicose grin that surprises her because it engages her.
She thinks: I don’t wonder they don’t come back. One look at him and most sane individuals would think twice about going up in an airplane with him.
He says: “Some people just don’t take to flying upside down, that kind of thing. How’s your stomach?”
She is brushing herself off—ineffectually. Her feet are soaked and around them grows a puddle at which the man stares with a widening one-sided grin. All his expressions have a sardonic tilt.
Wet to the skin and miserable, she replies with tart defiance: “My stomach’s all right. You might offer me a towel.”
“Bathroom’s in the hangar next door. But you have to go outdoors to get there.”
“I don’t suppose you have an umbrella.”
“Never use ’em.” His leer is a bit lewd. She wonders what it is about her that amuses him so. She doesn’t feel a bit funny.
He is putting on a hat—a baseball sort of cap. He says, “Well shit,” and clumps past her to the door. “Wait here.” He goes out into the rain.
She feels she’s achieved a petty victory. She glances through the jumbled papers on his desk and has a quick look at the documents that are thumbtacked to the wall under the crayon-on-cardboard sign. Beside an old map of Angola—what’s that doing here?—she spots his private pilot’s license, dated 1951, and his commercial licenses—single-engine and pilot-instructor, both dated 1974—and a certificate from the State of California permitting Charles W. Reid to operate a bonded school for the training of private pilots in single-engine dual control aircraft. There is the inevitable Playboy calendar nude. Off to one side she sees an Air Force certificate: he retired in 1972 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, which probably means he’d been serving as a major—not a very high rank after twenty years’ service. Most of the documents are dirty and have gone ragged around the edges; none is framed.
Thumbtacked on the side wall above the desk, where he’ll see it when he is sitting down, is a color snapshot of a nine- or ten-year-old boy with masses of brown hair and a big jaw like Reid’s.
Wind slams the door open and he lunges into the room with a wadded towel in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other. He kicks the door shut behind him. All his motions are big and rangy: he moves like a large predator with total confidence in his own physical authority. He sets the coffee on the desk and proffers the towel. “Here you go.”
“Thank you.” She makes her voice softer than before. “It was stupid for both of us to have to get wet. I’m sorry—I didn’t think.”
“I’ve been wetter than this and survived it, I guess.”
She scrubs her hair with the towel. “Is that your son?” She indicates the snapshot.
“Got to be. Looks like me, doesn’t he. That was taken nearly ten years ago, when he made that sign. He’s a sophomore at Stanford. Studying East European languages. Damn fool kid wants to go into the diplomatic corps. I can’t talk to him any more.”
But you’re fond of him, she thinks. That’s good. You’ll know what it means to worry about your child.
She says, “When he gets a couple of years older he’ll realize you’re not as stupid as he thinks you are.” She wraps the dank towel around her neck; there’s no point trying to fix clothes or make-up—everything is ruined.
She reaches for the coffee, pries the lid off and tastes it. “This stuff’s terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you drink it?”
“I get it from the machine next door,” he says. “It’s better than the stuff I make.”
“Then I hope I never have to taste yours. About these flying lessons now—I thought maybe you could give me some books to study, and don’t you people use those phony airplanes inside a hangar where you simulate actual flying for the students?”
“Link Trainers? That kind of thing? I’m not that rich. Maybe you aren’t either. They use those to train professional pilots. If you intend to take up commercial flying for a living, maybe you ought to go apply to Pan Am or United Airlines.”
“I just want to learn how to fly a small plane.”
“What for?”
It takes her aback. She didn’t anticipate that one; she hasn’t prepared an answer to it.
When she hesitates, Charlie Reid says, “A few women take it up because they’re lying out in the back yard by the swimming pool with nothing to do in the afternoon and they see a bunch of light planes buzzing around and it looks like a lot of fun. Glamour and freedom and something to do in the afternoons. And then there are the ones—the divorcees—that figure maybe it’s a way to meet a man. You one of those?”
“No.”
“Well then.” He waits.
She says, “I’ve been up in small planes. As a passenger. I like it. I like the feeling. I can’t explain it any better than that.”
“Well, it’s your money,” he says. “You don’t get the sample ride today but I can start you in on basic principles and paperwork.”
“Good. Let’s get the red tape out of the way and then maybe you can give me some homework. I’ll be away for a week or so. When I get back I’d like to start taking lessons three or four days a week.”
“That’s kind of pushing it.”
“I’m in a hurry,” she replies.
12 On Thursday she leaves at dawn and drives to Las Vegas.
There are several mail-forwarding services in town. On Fremont Street she picks one at random and signs up for six months, paying cash in advance. The man at the counter does not ask for identification.
In the coffee shop of one of the downtown casinos she orders iced tea. It is a drink she’s never liked very much but it seems to be the thing to do in the Sunbelt and it fits in with her intentions to change her habits.
She is squirting lemon into the glass when a man stops beside her table. “Hi there. What’s your name?”
Her breath catches. It is a moment before she can look up. She tries to make it steely. “I’m sorry. You’ve got the wrong table.”
“I just thought maybe you’d let me buy you a drink or something.” He is losing his pale hair on top and he wears flesh-colored glasses. Probably about her age. Slender, almost reedy. Type-casting him, she thinks of electronics—he looks as if he programs computers. An apologetic half smile shapes his mouth as if engraved there.
She says: “Thank you. No.”
“You’re very attractive, you know, and if you’re by yourself—”
“I want to be by myself.”
“I just thought—”
She says, “They have legal prostitution here. If you’re horny—look, just pick up a newspaper over there and read the ads and find something you like and make a phone call.”
The man says, “It just doesn’t work for me if I have to pay for it.” He turns his palms up in a gesture of abandonment. “But then I suppose we all end up paying for it one way or another.” He wanders off. She ventures a guess that the ink probably hasn’t dried on his divorce.
She feels compassion for the bewildered fool. There was a time when she’d have been happy to invite him to sit down and have a cup of coffee and tell her the story of his life. She’s always liked people; she’s always curious about them.
She wonders why her rebuff seemed to take him so utterly
by surprise. Perhaps everybody assumes that an attractive woman who’s alone must have a transparent reason to come to a place like this.
She doesn’t want to take any others by surprise; it might make them remember her. When the next man arrives at her table and says, “Hi. You alone?”—it isn’t more than five minutes later—she gives him a grim look and says, “I’m waiting for my husband. He’s a police officer.”
“Lucky for him. Too bad for me.” The man goes away, good-natured, taking it in stride, searching with bright eyes for his next opportunity.
That one too, she thinks. Nice guy. For all you know all he wants is a friendly smile and a few minutes’ conversation.
Dear God. I’ve always been such a nice person. I’ve always loved stray puppies—I’ve always been kind to my friends and generous to my enemies and trusting to strangers.
Is it possible to wake up one morning and make a snap decision that’s going to change the rest of your life—and truly become a different person: someone you’d have hated?
There’s got to be room for humanity. You can’t just let yourself shrivel up into a suspicious crone.
And yet.…
You’ve got to think about Ellen. For her sake you can’t trust anyone at all.
Let the poor sons of bitches find other girls to talk to. Right now you just can’t afford the exposure.
Alone at the coffee shop table she fills in the Social Security application—the second one: Dorothy Holder’s. Yesterday she stopped in an instant-printing shop and had Dorothy’s birth certificate photocopied. She encloses the copy with the application and lists her mailing address as that of the mail-forwarding service.
She tries to make Dorothy’s signature different from Jennifer’s: bigger, rounder, heavier. She’s practiced signing Jennifer C. Hartman night after night in a crabbed hand that is not at all like her usual flowing script.
She drops the application into a mail slot and a quarter into the one-armed bandit. It doesn’t pay off and she goes back to her motel. It is six o’clock: a bit early for dinner and she isn’t hungry anyway. She lies down on the bed, just to relax for a few minutes; maybe she’ll go in the swimming pool in a little while to cool off, and then tackle some of the home study program Charlie Reid gave her—instruments, controls, regulations.…
When she awakens it is past midnight and she sits up feeling sour and hung over. Exhaustion, she thinks. It isn’t the hard work of it all; it’s the strain—the tension of knowing she needs to make only one misstep and it all will be useless and they’ll come down on her like a falling safe.
Desperately tired, she can’t get back to sleep.
It occurs to her at some point in the endless drag of the night that never before has she known how dreadful it is to be truly alone. It’s all a blank slate now: no past, no friends—not even the prospect of friends. Nobody at all.
Ellen, she thinks.
But Ellen can’t help her fend off the terror; not now.
She opens Charlie Reid’s spiral-bound primer and tries to memorize the rules of flying.
13 In the morning she sells the car for $800 cash on a small used-car lot two blocks from her motel. The dealer, a man with a sunburned bald head and an expression of wry bemusement, must be accustomed to buying cars for cash: he’s probably seen a hundred examples of the hopefuls who arrive in Las Vegas in their $20,000 Cadillacs and depart a few days later in $100,000 buses. Those big-spending high rollers must have their mundane $100 counterparts and this is precisely the impression she wants to leave: she wants to differ in no way from the multitude.
According to the radio on the bald man’s desk the official temperature is 108° Fahrenheit—and it isn’t even eleven o’clock yet. The dealer sees her expression and says, “Wait till August, you want real heat.”
When she signs the bill of sale she has to show identification; that is why she’s saved the old driver’s license. He glances at it, comparing signatures, but he’ll forget her name as soon as she leaves the shack and he files the papers away.
She is curious whether he feels much pain in his red burned scalp but she doesn’t ask; she takes the cash and walks away, squinting behind her sunglasses.
Back in the air-conditioned motel she plucks the blouse away from her fried skin and makes a little ceremony out of burning the old driver’s license and flushing the ashes away.
Nothing left of the old life now except a ring of keys.
At the cheap blond desk she begins to make a list on motel stationery: a list of all the things she knows about herself. It isn’t the first time she’s done it. The ostensible purpose is to check off the items she’s changed and to see what remains to be done. The actual purpose is to keep from going insane.
At one of those political dinner parties last year a guest was the private detective whose specialty is skip-tracing. “Raymond Q. Seale,” his business card announces, and if you ask him what the Q stands for he replies, “Questing,” with an irritating smugness: a self-important little man slicked up in a tight suit. Phony smile and the sleazy artful manner of a cynic who insists that the world lives at his own gutter level. But she listened to him with interest; the pressures on her had kept increasing and by then she’d already begun to fantasize ways of escape.
She recalls how annoyingly self-confident Seale was—but knowledgeable. “Your teen-agers run away from home. Twelve-year-olds sometimes. Or even younger. Half of them pregnant. They’re the hardest ones to find—no fingerprints on file, no credit records, no paper trail to identify them by.
“Grownups run out on their bills, mostly. Sometimes they just get tired of their husbands or wives—sometimes the guy just doesn’t want to have to pay alimony.”
She pictures him now—a mean man, amused by the misfortunes he’s describing. “We work for the bank to find the guy and repossess the car, or the parents ask us to find the runaway, or the woman pays us to go after the husband and bring him back so she can hit up the poor guy for alimony, whatever.”
She remembers hearing the investigator say: “Most people got no idea how hard it is to lose yourself.” He was playing to his audience with the cunning of a seedy nightclub comic. “If we’ve got a client who’s got a pile of money and plenty of time and he wants to find you bad enough, we can find you. We can find anybody, see?
“I mean, it’s impossible for most people to disappear and stay disappeared. It’d take brains and a lot of hard work. They’ve got to change their whole lives. If they used to play tennis, they’ve got to take up bowling. If they used to go to ball games, they’ve got to start going to the opera. A guy that used to live in conservative business suits, he’s got to start wearing loud sports jackets and leisure suits and Levi’s. If they’re stamp collectors, they’ve got to quit it—and remember not to subscribe to any stamp-collecting magazines. If they drove a small car they should buy a big car, or a pickup truck or maybe a motorsiccle.
“And they can’t ever make contact with any of their friends or relatives. That’s what trips most of them up. Sooner or later they get the urge to drop a postcard to Momma or make a long-distance call to Uncle Fatface. That’s when we get ’em.
“See, it’s not enough just to change your name and move to Florida. You’ve got to change everything. Every detail. You make a list of everything you know about yourself and you change every single thing on the list. You try and change the way you walk, the accent, everything. You’ve got to become a new person—a whole new type of person in a different social class. That’s the only way to hide from guys like me. See, most people just aren’t willing to make those kinds of changes.”
That was when she thought: I am.
14 Going home from Las Vegas—home: she’s realizing that never before has she truly understood the complexity or ambiguity of the word—she spends three days on various buses and trains; she isn’t in a sightseeing mood but she wants to be sure her trail can’t be picked up and followed from the car she’s just sold and so she endures a rounda
bout tour of Lake Tahoe, Sacramento, Napa and San Francisco. At every stop she converts thousand-dollar bills into postal money orders and bank cashier’s checks.
Finally she returns by air coach to Burbank in the Valley.
On the plane she studies her list. It seems important to keep the mind pragmatically focused on details; otherwise she has the feeling she may fly apart.
For this flight she has paid cash and assumed yet another new false name. By now she feels able to do this with a certain distracted aplomb. Not like the first time, when she nearly gagged with alarm—filling out a motel registration slip in Pennsylvania, scribbling a name she’d made up on the spot, concocting an address, paying cash in advance for the room, hardly daring to look the room clerk in the eye.
The clerk didn’t even lift an eyebrow and that was when she began to realize that nobody has any reason to care. Nobody suspects you if you just behave naturally. The world is indifferent to the way you spell your name. As long as you pay the bill nobody gives a damn whether you’re traveling under a nom de guerre.
She’s thinking: Nobody even notices. Then why’s my heart still pounding so?
15 During her absence the first Social Security card—Jennifer Hartman’s—has arrived in the mail. She looks at it in a kind of wonder. It gives her the oddest feeling: as if she is giving birth to a new person, one piece of paper at a time.
She takes a cab to the Motor Vehicle office and stands in queues all morning and part of the afternoon filling out a driver’s license application and taking the written test; she stands in front of a machine that takes her picture—short fair hair and glasses; and now they want to take an ink impression of her thumbprint.
“Do I have to?”
“Why? You got something against it?” The man has greasy black hair and suspicious little eyes.
She says, “We’re all just numbers in somebody’s computer, aren’t we. I don’t want to be fingerprinted and weighed and whatever else they do in prisons. I just want a driver’s license.”
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