Necessity

36

The motel in La Jolla has become a welcome refuge. To reach the ocean she only needs to step out of her room and walk across the narrow street and climb down a steep worn little trail. There are bits and pieces of beach amid the massive dark eroded rocks.

At sunset she’s there barefoot in a tangerine sleeveless blouse and frayed shorts made of cut-off jeans, sitting on a folded blanket with her back against a rock, holding a drugstore steno pad against her upraised knees, checking off items in yet another of her lists of things to do, things to get right.

You could live in a place like this. A kid could grow up here. Mild sunshine all year round. Ocean, mountains, the San Diego Zoo.

Maybe you shouldn’t think that far ahead. Maybe you’d better not dare to hope.

There’s a bronzed teenage couple on a patch of sand beyond the next lump of stone; she had a glimpse of them when she arrived and once in a while she hears the energetic vocalizations of their love-making between strikes of the gentle surf.

It brings up the thought that she didn’t exactly have a celibate life in mind when she began all this but she supposes it could hardly be otherwise right now-it’s only that she never stopped to think about it. She recalls how she used to envy some of the other models at the agency their hedonistic capacity to luxuriate in extracurricular evenings with randy photographers or half-drunk ad agency men or conventioneering fabric and fashion buyers. An expensive dinner; drinks in a skyscraper lounge with a view of the park; a hundred dollars for the powder room and a few hours in a hotel. Strangers before, lovers during, strangers after.

That was long before Bert. She was young and not confident of who she was; it seemed best to be one of the gang, to look as they looked and behave as they behaved. She remembers one veteran’s acerbic counsel: “There’s forty or fifty of us for every job. Think about it. You go along or you go under.”

But she didn’t go along. After the first few print-ad jobs she went her own way and found it didn’t really make much difference. Maybe she lost a few shots here and there but mainly she still got the jobs, or got passed over for them-it depended mostly on what sort of face and body they were looking for. They’d make passes of course; that was part of the ritual; but most of them were grown up about it if you didn’t put out. That was up to you.

She has never been at ease with one-night stands. Sexuality has never seemed that casual. Nothing feels quite so vulnerably intimate as sharing her naked body with a man: it’s just not the sort of thing she can do comfortably with a stranger.

She’s thinking now of Charlie. His burly gentle power. No longer a stranger; a father, a flyer, a barbecue cook. A friend; and the sensual pull is strong-clearly he feels it as much as she does.

But she knows another thing as well: that in a few days she’ll be turning her back on him.

The thought stirs a restless unease. She should not have accepted his invitation. Dinner in San Francisco inevitably will lead to an invitation to his hotel room.

In the dusk she looks at herself in the mirror of her compact. The dark new coloring, the hairdo-is it enough? She’s been scanning the newspapers for two weeks now, looking for Graeme’s byline, expecting every day to see a blown-up telephoto picture of herself and a caption, Do You Know This Woman?

No one knows this woman, she thinks. Not even me.

But she knows someone else. Or at least she knows him this well: Charlie’s no more easy with one-nighters than she is.

Whatever we might do, it would mean something.

It wouldn’t be the kind of thing we could just forget.

I like you, Charlie. I really do. But I don’t know what the hell to do about it.