Necessity

6

Los Angeles. A place for getting lost.

Is that a mistake? Why not Oregon or Idaho or Wyoming-somewhere miles from the beaten track?

The allure of somewhere rural and unpopulated is a valley of temptation; but on cooler second thought it would be much too easy for them to track her along those untrod paths. Newcomers never escape notice in such places, where gossip travels with the speed of a prairie fire.

Besides, she spent half her childhood in an Iowa plains village and they may expect her to return to such a setting.

Better to be swallowed amid the crowds. Better to leave one pair of footprints among the millions. Better to go to ground in the urban tangle with a thousand exit routes and ten thousand places to hide.

Hasn’t she always made excuses not to go along on trips to the Coast? Hasn’t she made a point of her contempt for Southern California? Citing at every opportunity Dorothy Parker’s (or is it Fred Allen’s?) line-“It’s a great place to live. If you happen to be an orange.” And Woody Allen’s dictum: “Los Angeles is a place where the chief cultural attraction is that you can make a right turn on a red light.” And the jokes she’s overheard somewhere and adopted as her own:

“How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb? Eight. One to change the bulb and seven to share in the experience.”

And: “The difference between yogurt and Southern California? One of them has an active culture!”

A week ago she concluded that it will be safe for her in Los Angeles precisely because they all know how much she reviles and ridicules the place.

Besides, she needs the big city’s facilities. There is so much to do and she has so little time. She’s got a deadline and it looms alarmingly close. If she misses it-

Let’s not think about that.

The city, then: Los Angeles. No further debate. Can’t afford doubts.

Yet misgivings corrupt her. Will they know what she’s planning? Are they one step ahead of her?

Quit it. Stop jumping at shadows. Get a grip on yourself.

Anyhow-face it, Jennifer-Dorothy. You turn up in East Tumbleweed, Utah, and you’ll draw the stares of every drooling bumpkin in town.

She has examined this from every angle and she is persuaded it has been a cool decision, not swayed by vanity: it makes sense that if you’re an unusually striking woman looking for a place to hide then you’d better seek out a place where there are a great many beauties, some of whose faces-like your own-have appeared in the ad pages of mass-circulation magazines.