Play It as It Lays

24

“YOU DRIVE," the man had said. "We'll pick up my car after."

He was wearing white duck pants and a white sport shirt and he had a moon f ace and a eunuch's soft body. The hand resting on his knee was pale and freckled and boneless and ever since he got in the car he had been humming I Get a Kick Out of You.

'You familiar with this area, Maria?"

The question seemed obscurely freighted. "No," Maria said finally.

"Nice homes here. Nice for kids." The voice was bland, ingratiating, the voice on the telephone. "Let me ask you one question, all right?"

Maria nodded, and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

"Get pretty good mileage on this? Or no?"

"Pretty good," she heard herself saying after only the slightest pause. "Not too bad."

"You may have noticed, I drive a Cadillac. Eldorado. Eats gas but I like it, like the feel of it."

Maria said nothing. That, then, had actually been the question.

She had not misunderstood.

"If I decided to get rid of the Cad," he said, "I might pick myself up a little Camaro. Maybe that sounds like a step down, a Cad to a Camaro, but I've got my eye on this par tic ular Camaro, exact model of the pace car in the Indianapolis 500."

"You think you'll buy a Camaro," Maria said in the neutral tone of a therapist.

"Get the right price, I just might. I got a friend, he can write me a sweet deal if it's on the floor much longer. They almost had a buyer last week but lucky for me — here, Maria, right here, pull into this driveway."

Maria turned off the ignition and looked at the man in the white duck pants with an intense and grateful interest. In the past few minutes he had significantly altered her perception of reality: she saw now that she was not a woman on her way to have an abortion.

She was a woman parking a Corvette outside a tract house while a man in white pants talked about buying a Camaro. There was no more to it than that. "Lucky for you what?"

"Lucky for me, the guy's credit didn't hold up."