“Mmm. I’m sorry. I guess not.”
She wheeled away, Arlo forgotten.
“Wait!”
“No, I was wrong. You look different up close. I’m not wearing my contacts.”
Frantic was an industrious troll, deep inside Arlo’s vitals, hauling out hanks of viscera and flinging them, underhand, like a dog scratching dirt, through a painful hole bored in the small of Arlo’s back.
He followed her, hurriedly, aplomb blown. “Wait a second!. ‘ Baked bean pyramids and he collided, cans went clattering, he surged on heedless. “I want to take advantage of you. I mean, I was trying to uh, er, um, decide whether to ask your advice about something, except I’m a little shy about speaking to strangers. But now that you’ve broken the ice, I wonder if I could ask you how to tell a fresh cantaloupe…”
She stopped dead, whirled, hands flat in readiness for a kung fu chop. “You’re about as shy as a mako shark, and you don’t want my advice. Of all the things you might possibly want, my advice is not among them.” She performed a stately veronica and tooled the cart away from him.
“You’re evil!” he cried after her. “You torment men for kicks!”
In the parking lot, his brains having turned to cottage cheese, Arlo screamed senselessly at the cosmos. And the gas gauge he had neglected getting repaired. The Healey refused to start. It hacked a tubercular gasp and the electric fuel pump chittered like ground squirrels. Gasless. Arlo was pounding his head against the Derrington steering wheel when she came out of the supermarket with her groceries.
The nearest open gas station was two miles away, the corner of Franklin and Vine. And the only other car on the lot was hers. Arlo lurched out of the Healey and pursued her. His head ached terribly.
“Hey!”
“One step closer, Sunny Jim, and I give you an ipponseoinage over my right hip you’ll never forget.” She dumped the bag of groceries into the rear seat of the Dart and turned back quickly as if Arlo were a Vietcong cutthroat. He put his hands atop his head.
“I do not prowoke!”
“Vanish, masher.”
“I’m outta gas. Honest.”
“Now you are plumbing depths of ludicrousness unknown to Western Man.”
“All I want is you should drive me down to the gas station corner of Franklin and Vine. I’ll sit in the back seat. I’ll sit on my hands. You can tie me up. I’m outta gas, it’s late, I gotta headache.”
“I don’t believe you. You stink.”
“Look. You don’t trust me all that distance, two miles in the car alone with you, I’ll go inside, buy a $2.98 garden hose, and cut off a piece I can use to siphon off a coupla liters of gas. With your permission.”
“I’m convinced, get in.”
He didn’t move. “It’s a trick. You’ll hit me.”
“I believe you. I believe you. Anybody who would volunteer to take a mouthful of gas without being at gunpoint must be telling the truth. Get in.”
He sat on his hands all the way there, and back.
Though he was deathly afraid of her, Arlo pressed his meager advantage. With the fumey can of gas burbling into his tank, he stopped her before she could drive away.
“Maybe, uh, you should follow me back to the gas station to fill it up. I might have damaged the manifold housing coupler or something, trying to start it. It might conk out.”
“There is no such thing in that beast as a manifold housing coupler.”
“See, I’m driving a lemon. I need you to follow me.”
“How the hell did I inherit you?”
“In Korea, if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for them forever. Nice custom, don’t you think?”
She grimaced. “Franz Kafka is up there, writing my life.”
Arlo looked out from under thick eyelashes. It was his Jackie-Cooper-As-The-Kid look. “I’ve come to depend on you. You’re so self-possessed.”
Half an hour later they were on common civility terms, sharing the best chili dogs in Los Angeles, at Boris’s Stand, corner of La Brea and Melrose, all beef, plenty hot, lotsa onions, two bits, you couldn’t do better.
And half an hour later—inexplicably—they were on the verge of what Arlo called “a warm, humid experience,” having driven out to Los Angeles International Airport, to a road bisecting a landing approach, where the jets landed directly over their heads.
“Can you tell me what we are doing here at 2:48 A. M. in the morning?” she asked Arlo. He said nothing. She rolled down the window. “Can any body tell me what I’m doing here at this dumb hour with a very possibly axe murderer and rapist?” she screamed into the night. There was no answer.
Helluva sense of whimsy, Arlo mused, edging closer.
“Tell me about yourself,” Arlo gambited.
“This theatrical pose I wear is merely a snare and a delusion. I am, in reality, Anastasia, true Czarina of all the Russias, and I’m wearing a plastic nose. My father was Lamont Cranston, and he met an untimely end via the worst case of Dutch Elm Blight ever diagnosed at Johns Hopkins. He contracted it from Lupe Velez during a mad, passionate night deep in the heart of Mt. Etna, where my father was conducting guided tours. I am engaged to a Doberman Pinscher.”
Helluva sense of whimsy, Arlo mused, edging closer.
“Stop edging closer,” she suggested violently.
“Look!” Arlo said, “Here comes one.”
The Boeing 707 came out of the night like Sinbad’s roc, screaming shrilly, and Anastasia screamed shriller.
The great silvery bulk of it, totally obscuring the sky, sailed out of the blackness mere feet above them, all vastness and terror, like a flat stone two blocks long, skimmed over water, and shred their silences past them. The 707 touched down almost as soon as it passed over them, and an instant later was a half mile down the runway.
Anastasia had pulled closer to Arlo. She was now wrapped in his arms.
“Scary, isn’t it?” Arlo smiled.
“I wet myself,” she said. She did not seem delighted with Arlo.
He leaned across slightly and kissed her. “Easy,” she said, inserting an elbow into the conversation. “ And that’s an order, not a description.”
Progress! thought Arlo. “We’d better be getting back.”
He started the car and made a U-turn.
“That was a helluva whimsical thing you said, when the plane passed over,” Arlo chuckled.
“Which?”
“About what you did when the plane—”
“It was a statement of fact.”
At Arlo’s apartment, after she had hung things up to dry, he offered her an omelet. “I can make seven different varieties, all delicious.”
She aimed a finger at him. “You’re lucky I share an apartment with a light sleeper, because underwear or no underwear, I wouldn’t have let you con me into coming up here.”
“Spanish, Viennese, Ranch-style, Albanian—”
“You have an indomitable will. Nothing seems to get to you. Brick walls and your head have much in common.”
“Corsican, Paraguayan—”
“Look: I’m very hungry, mostly because you had the bad taste to remind me, and I’d like nothing better than a good omelet; but when I say nothing better, I mean exactly that. You are still a casual pick-up, even though for some nutty reason we have managed to travel along this far together and my bikini briefs are drying over your shower curtain. Does my message penetrate?”
Arlo grinned infectiously. “Like a call from the spirit world. My father taught me. He was a master chef in New York hotels most of his life, except for a couple of years when he was captaining the kitchen of a luxury liner. Spanish, Corsican, Tibetan, German-Bavarian—”
She sat down on the arm of an overstuffed Morris chair, courtesy of the landlord. She pulled his blue bathrobe closer around her. A flash of leg reminded him there was nothing between them but the robe. “You know, Arlo, I have to tell you, concisely, I think you are the bummest trip I have ever been on. Not only are you funny looking, but there is a perceptible animal cunning in your face, and very frankly, but nothing could get me to go to bed with you, so forget the whole idea right now. How the hell do you make an Albanian omelet?”