‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It was perfect.’
‘A wonderful hotel,’ Vida said. ‘A beautiful room. A truly beautiful room.’
Vida seemed to have calmed him down because he said to us as we were going out the door, ‘Say hello to your sister for me.’
That gave us something to think about as we drove out to the San Diego airport sitting very close together in the back seat of a cab where the driver, American this time, did not take his eyes off Vida in the mirror.
When we first got into the cab, the driver said, ‘Where to?’
I thought it would be fairly simple just to say, ‘The International Airport, please.’
It wasn’t.
‘That’s the San Diego International Airport, isn’t it? That’s where you want to go, huh?’
‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that something was wrong.
‘I just wanted to be sure,’ he said. ‘Because I had a fare yesterday that wanted to go to the International Airport, but it was the Los Angeles International Airport he wanted to go to. That’s why I was checking.’
Oh, yeah.
‘Did you take him?’ I said. I didn’t have anything else to do and my relationship with the cab driver was obviously out of control.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘He was probably afraid of flying,’ I said.
The cab driver didn’t get the joke because he was watching Vida in the rear-view mirror and Vida was watching me after that one. The driver continued staring at Vida. He paid very little attention to his driving. It was obviously dangerous to ride in a cab with Vida.
I made a mental note of it for the future, not to have Vida’s beauty risk our lives.
The San Diego (Not Los Angeles) International Tipping Abyss
Unfortunately, the cab driver was very unhappy with the tip I gave him. The fare was again one dollar and ten cents and remindful of the experience we’d had earlier in the day with that first cab driver, I raised the tip-ante to thirty cents.
He was startled by the thirty-cent tip and didn’t want to have anything else to do with us. Even Vida didn’t make any difference when he saw that thirty cents.
What is the tip to the San Diego airport?
Our plane didn’t leave for an hour. Vida was quite hungry, so we had something to eat in the cafe. It was about 5.30.
We had hamburgers. It was the first time I’d had a hamburger in years, but it turned out not to be very good. It was flat.
Vida said her hamburger was good, though.
‘You’ve forgotten how a hamburger is supposed to taste,’ Vida said. ‘Too many years in the monastery have destroyed your better judgement.’
There were two women sitting nearby. One of them had platinum hair and a mink coat. She was middle-aged and talking to a young, blandly pretty girl who was talking in turn about her wedding and the little caps that were being designed for the bridesmaids.
The girl was nice in the leg department but a little short in the titty line or was I spoiled? They departed their table without leaving a tip.
This made the waitress mad.
She was probably a close relative to the two cab drivers I’d met that day in San Diego.
She stared at the tipless table as if it were a sex criminal. Perhaps she was their mother.
Farewell, San Diego
I took a closer look at the San Diego airport. It was petite, uncomplicated with no Playboy stuff at all. The people were there to work, not to look pretty.
There was a sign that said something like: Animals arriving as baggage may be claimed in the airline air freight areas in the rear of bldg.
You can bet your life that you don’t see signs like that in the San Francisco International Airport.
A young man with crutches, accompanied by three old men, came along as we were going out to wait for our aeroplane. They all stared at Vida and the young man stared the hardest.
It was a long way from the beautiful PSA pre-flight lounge in San Francisco to just standing outside, beside a wire fence in San Diego, waiting to get on our aeroplane that was shark-like and making a high whistling steam sound, wanting very much to fly.
The evening was cold and grey coming down upon us with some palm trees, nearby, by the highway. The palm trees somehow made it seem colder than it actually was. They seemed out of place in the cold.
There was a military band playing beside one of the aeroplanes parked on the field, but it was too far away to see why they were playing. Maybe some big wig was coming or going. They sounded like my hamburger.
My Secret Talisman For Ever
We got our old seats back over the wing and I was sitting again next to the window. Suddenly it was dark in twelve seconds. Vida was quiet, tired. There was a little light on the end of the wing. I became quite fond of it out there in the dark like a lighthouse burning twenty-three miles away and I made it my secret talisman for ever.
A young priest was sitting across the aisle from us. He was quite smitten by Vida for the short distance to Los Angeles.
At first he tried not to be obvious about it, but after a while he surrendered himself to it and one time he leaned across the aisle and was going to say something to Vida. He was actually going to say something to her, but then he changed his mind.
I will probably go on for a long time wondering what he would have said to my poor aborted darling who, though weak and tired from the ways of Tijuana, was the prettiest thing going in the sky above California, the rapidly moving sky to Los Angeles.
I went from the priest’s interest in Vida to wondering about Foster at the library, how he was handling the books that were coming in that day.
I hoped he was welcoming them the right way and making the authors feel comfortable and wanted as I made them feel.
‘Well, we’ll be home soon,’ Vida said to me after a long silence that was noisy with thought. The priest’s composure vibrated with tension when Vida spoke.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about that.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I could hear the noise in your mind. I think everything’s all right at the library. Foster’s doing a good job.’
‘You’re doing a good job yourself,’ I said.
Thank you,’ she said. ‘It will be good to get home. Back to the library and some sleep.’
I was very pleased that she considered the library her home. I looked out the window at my talisman. I loved it as much as the coffee stain flying down.
Perhaps and Eleven
Things are different at night. The houses and towns far below demand their beauty and get it in distant lights twinkling with incredible passion. Landing at Los Angeles was like landing inside a diamond ring
The priest didn’t want to get off the plane at Los Angeles, but he had to because that’s where he was going. Perhaps Vida reminded him of somebody. Perhaps his mother was very beautiful and he didn’t know how to handle it and that’s what drove him to the Cloth and now to see that beauty again in Vida was like swirling back through the mirrors of time.
Perhaps he was thinking about something completely different from what I have ever thought about in my life and his thoughts were of the highest nature and should have been made into a statue… perhaps. To quote Foster, ‘Too many perhapses in the world and not enough people.’
I was suddenly wondering about my library again and missed the actual departure of the priest to become part of Los Angeles, to add his share to its size and to take memories of Vida into whatever.