7

The damnable wig has served well to disguise her on the road but it doesn’t go with her coloring or with her grey blue eyes. It’s hot and it itches.

Her hair is naturally sandy and usually shoulder length but she’s worn it waved and blond for years; now she means to cut it short and let it hang straight and revert to color. At the moment the roots are showing and she’s going to have to help the naturalization process along at first with a good beauty shop coloring job to cover up the yellow past. Meanwhile the damnable wig.

But changing the hair back to normal won’t in itself effect much reduction in the possibility of chance recognition. Some other aspect of her appearance will have to change. Lose weight? No; any thinner and she’d look anorexic. Gain weight, then? No; she’s too vain: she needs to go on liking herself.

For a day on the highway she entertained the idea of plastic surgery but discarded it because she wouldn’t have time for the bruises to heal, and in any case it was a foolish idea and her life just now has quite enough melodrama in it without that.

Happily there’s no town anywhere in the world where disguises can be obtained more readily than in Hollywood.

A few blocks from Vine Street, beginning to wilt in the heat, she finds a parking space two blocks from her destination. Hollywood Boulevard has gone to seed and she must thread a pedestrian traffic of hookers and dangerous-looking adolescents and ordinary people going about their ordinary business.

In the theatrical costume supply shop she tries on a pair of eyeglasses with plain clear lenses. She knows the lingo because some of the girls at the modeling agency in New York were always trying to make it as actresses. “I’ve got a callback for a workshop play-just a walk-on as a tough, no-nonsense secretary.”

The clerk, a tanned blond young man with the pretty face and resentful pout of an actor between jobs, knows exactly what she requires; he simpers helpfully and goes to a drawer.

The frames have uptilted corners and give her the severe look of a self-important office worker. She is very pleased by how markedly they change her appearance.

“And I think a dark red wig, don’t you? Something I can do up in a tight bun at the back.”

He says, “I’ve got just the thing, dear.”

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