Necessity

24

It is about half an hour’s drive from the airfield to Doyle and Marian’s bookshop in Burbank. She has made a discovery about the Valley: wherever you start from, you’re half an hour from your destination.

That half hour conveniently is the running time of one side of a standard audio tape cassette. The car has a built-in player. (Apparently every car in California has one.) For camouflage she has tuned all the buttons of the car radio to innocuous mood music stations but the player overrides the radio as soon as you insert a tape.

Now she carries in her handbag several cassettes-baroque music mainly, and Mozart-and she knows it’s cheating but she can’t bear the thought of giving up good music for the rest of her life. She’s made a pact to listen to it only when she’s alone.

In the East a car was transportation. Here it is a cocoon: Californians spend half their lives in their cars; they drive everywhere with windows rolled up and air conditioners blasting even in mild weather-you see them jammed up on the freeways alone in their cars, sealed in, shouting soundlessly, gesticulating to the beat of the programs they’ve turned up to top volume. When you glimpse them it’s always startling: they’re like mime characters in an absurdist fragment of silent film, the plot of which hasn’t been revealed to you.

At the interchange she’s looking in the mirror while she negotiates the exit ramp from the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura Freeway. Two cars behind her take the same turns.

When she merges into the eastbound traffic she uses side mirror and indicator to ease over into the far right lane. The two cars are still back there: a rust red one and a boxy black sedan. They seem to hover in the mirror.

The traffic is clotted here, moving fitfully, backed up behind the exit for Van Nuys Boulevard, and it is only out in the far left lane that things move smoothly.

She watches the two cars go by in the fast lane. One of them has four teenage Valley Girls in it; the black sedan is driven by an old man with a scowl. He’s gesticulating with one hand and talking to himself. It looks like a violent argument.

That’s all right then.

She moves back into the faster lanes, listening to the Magic Flute overture, thinking wryly of a stale joke: help-the paranoids are after me.

Sometimes it seems so silly. Is it all only a melodramatic fantasy?

Maybe-maybe.

But suppose you choose to behave on the basis of that hypothesis-and suppose the hypothesis is incorrect.

It’ll be a little late to change your mind when they’ve dragged you back to him and he’s killed you.

She thinks about stopping at the apartment on Lankershim for the mail. Too hot. Do it later.

Poking along on the freeway she’s remembering her visit to Ray Seale last winter. That was the day when anxiety finally drove her beyond speculation into decision.

For the umptieth time she rehearses it in her mind: has she forgotten anything he told her? Done anything wrong?

She tries to review the details of the meeting.