Necessity

4

She breaks the 500-mile trip to Los Angeles with what promises to be a sleeplessly hot night in a nondescript motel on the California border.

She eats in a diner and fends off the awkward advance of a middle-aged drunk who seems not so much offensive as simply lonely; he drives away in a car with Indiana plates, after which she goes for a short walk while there is still a dusky light on the desert.

Rather to her surprise the Colorado River turns out to be a muddy trickle at the bottom of a wide dry weedy riverbed spanned by bridges that seem ludicrously too huge for the tiny flow underneath. For a moment she suspects her own elaborate scheme must be equally disproportionate-but then she thinks: there’s no such thing as too careful.

She’s reasoning with herself:

“If you don’t do this right they will find you and kill you.”

Startled by the sound of her own voice she looks all around to see if anyone has overheard her. This is just terrific. Turning into one of those crazy bag ladies who crawl the city streets like slugs, incessantly talking to themselves in loud voices.

Try to relax. Gentle down.

Oh God. Oh dear God.

On the way back to the motel she catches her reflection in a shop’s glass door. The dark wig still has the capacity to startle her. It’s the third wig she has employed. First there was the long straight brown one-it gave her the appearance of the sort of graduate student who’s deep into health foods and Zen-and then in Pennsylvania just before buying the blue car she changed to a frizzy Afro-style dark red wig and wore it as far as Denver. She remembers leaving it in a trash bin in a roadside rest area.

In the room she considers switching the television on but she doesn’t really want that sort of company; she sits in the plastic armchair listening to the walls shudder when the big trucks rumble past. They set up a rhythm in her mind: a music to which she fixes images of a dancing couple in tights and ballet slippers gliding across a long diagonal of light. For a moment she is caught up in her visualization of the formal pas de deux-the sensuous nobility of its gesturings-and then she remembers that she must no longer admit to an interest in dance.

The trucks rattle on.

She thinks of Ellen and weeps again.

Later in a half-waking dream she pictures big faceless men coming in the door, hauling her to her feet, manhandling her outside into a car-all this without ever speaking, for she visualizes them as sinister menacing hulks who prefer wordlessly to rend her nerves and provoke her broken babblings, the sort of damaging confidences that she might blurt out merely to fill the dreadful silence.…

Can the scheme work? Is there any chance at all? How many things can go wrong? How many things has she failed to take into account?

And what of Ellen?

Ellen, poor thing. So betrayed …

It is past midnight before she gets into bed; another hour and a half, drifting between innocence and evil, before she finds sleep.

In the morning it is easier: daylight pushes the panic back. She is relieved to get on the road.