Necessity (8 page)

There was Richard and then there was Chris. Several years apart. The memories now are jumbled: moving in, mingling the furniture—later the break-ups, the bleak sad search for another lonely apartment. And the quest beginning over again: for passion or affection or just (settle for it) companionship.

All too suddenly you were pushing thirty and in the morning you'd look fearfully in the mirror expecting to find a new crease in the beautiful skin.

It began to occur to you that you couldn't go on living this aimless life. You didn't want to think about that but now and then you'd have a premonition: a vision of yourself at thirty-seven trying to get work posing for lingerie ads in cheap mail-order catalogs and accepting some tedious schlemiel's marriage proposal out of desperation, knowing it would be good—at best—for four or five years of domestic boredom and financial security and another few years of alimony: you even saw yourself thereafter, midfortyish and fifteen pounds overweight, working as office manager for a chiropractor and making reservations for ten days at a Club Med: over the hill and desperate.

In that context Bert looked like more than a good bargain. He looked like a heaven-sent dream.

Remembering marrying him—remembering
why
she married him—she feels soiled.

Then of course the other question: Why did Bert marry
me?

He professed nothing cornball; you couldn't expect Bert to deliver himself of pronouncements of loving devotion. The nearest he ever came was that remark about wanting you to be the mother of his children. There probably was quite a bit of truth in that. He had his head full of pop theories about genes and heredity. More than once he brought out her album of family photographs (she remembers, with a pang, leaving it behind) and showed it to their friends and boasted, as if they were his own ancestors, about her handsome grandparents and tall regal Great Aunt Irma who'd lived healthily into her 102nd year. He'd exult: “Look at that bone structure!”

But there was another factor as well, one crucially important to the role he envisioned for himself. He was climbing to new strata and he wanted a wife: visible, presentable, cultivated, respectable.

He wanted you because you decorated his life.

Did I ever love him?

Yes, she thinks; let's be honest; you did love him. You'd have done anything for him. You'd have given your life for him.

And now?

Now it has been cruelly reversed. Now that you're no longer prepared to give it, Bert will gladly take your life.

If he finds you.

21
She keeps opening accounts with the money she's brought west. The forty bearer bonds are each worth $10,000 but most of the rest is still in wrapped bundles of $1,000 bills, awkward to negotiate because they draw attention.

The best she can do is to change no more than one or two bills in any particular bank.

The bearer bonds are easy to convert—she visits the financial houses and sells the first half of the bonds one or two at a time and uses the proceeds to open small trading accounts: insignificant stock portfolios.

Her tongue keeps prodding the bonding on her front teeth. The gap between teeth is gone but her mouth feels like a stranger's.

Exchanging her cash for cashiers' checks and money orders—she thinks of it wryly as laundering the loot—she sets about investing the money: buying treasury bills and certificates of deposit; opening interest-bearing bank accounts; going into three money market funds, each through a different broker because it is important to keep it all in scattered places and in sums too small to provoke anyone's interest. She even opens an IRA on the chance she may survive long enough to need a retirement account.

The thought provokes a cringe of desperation: barely a month now to the deadline and so much to do.

She has left about half the money in the safety-deposit boxes; in a week or two she'll take it along on a quick trip to Nevada and open accounts there in the name of Dorothy Holder.

Converting the first half of the money has used up tankfuls of gasoline and when all the transactions have been completed she has two safety-deposit boxes filled with bankbooks and account statements; there is no more than $20,000 in any one place but the total is short of $500,000 by only the few thousand she's spent since the adventure began.

There is still half a million for the Nevada accounts—and she hasn't touched the diamonds.

Those are Ellen's.

22
“A little more aileron. Left foot,” Charlie Reid says. Then in exasperation: “Your
other
left, my beauty.”

“Sorry.”

She depresses the pedal. The plane has been sliding; now it banks and continues to turn.

She attempts to line up the nose with the mountain pass twenty miles away—she's learned by now that it is called the Grapevine—and the plane skitters disobediently. She still isn't comfortable with the unfamiliar feel of the controls.

Whoever said it's just like learning to drive a car is an imbecile.

Charlie is talking into the radio mike and she hears the tower grant clearance; at least she assumes that is what is being discussed. There's so much crackling noise in the headset earphones that she can make out barely one word in five. They all sound alike and they all seem to understand one another perfectly but to her it is as much of a foreign tongue as it was on the first day.

Charlie says something to her.

She peels one earphone away. “What?”

“We're cleared to land. Go ahead.”

She stretches her body up to lean to her left and peer down through the window. Where the hell's the Goddamned airport?

Everything looks alike. Cars and trucks are toys moving slowly along the monotonous grid of streets; the roofs, the yards, the trees, the bright blue swimming pools—thousands of them, all identical, and you never see anyone swimming in them.

She tells herself that's because the inhabitants are indoors struggling with their own strife-ripped dualities of darkness and light. Never mind the bright landscape from the air. Cowering inside the boulevard shops and tract houses are creatures of despair, seducing and beseeching and murdering one another. She's thinking: Count your blessings, Jennifer Hartman. You think you've got it bad? Look down there.

That's the sort of pep talk she's been inflicting on herself lately. It doesn't do a very good job of persuading her. It's hard to sympathize with strangers when you're only one or two jumps ahead of the men with guns.

Wouldn't it be funny, she thinks, if they weren't after me at all? What if they've given up and written me off?

Suppose nobody's looking for me?

After all, there's no evidence they're there.

Suppose it's all in my imagination.

All this effort …

But she knows them better than that.

By the time she finds the airport she is nearly above it. She's forced to go around in a wide circle and try again. Charlie is on the microphone apologizing, explaining things to the tower.

The runway moves from side to side within the frame of the windshield. It is coming up at her and the angle looks all wrong. She feels disoriented.

“Easy now,” he says. “Gentle down. You're all over the sky. Just point the plane like a rifle. Honey child, you ever done any shooting?”

“Yes.”

“Aim it then.”

“I wasn't very good at it.”

He says drily, “Bring the nose up now and cut your power back.”

She pulls the wheel toward her and is relieved when the angle of glide flattens out: it no longer has quite the feeling of going into the ground like a falling coconut. She reaches for the throttle.

“Slowly,” he admonishes. “We don't want to stall, do we, dear.”

The runway keeps wavering from one side to the other. The buzz of the engine throbs in her every bone; she can barely hear him when he says, “A little bit less throttle now. Put your nose down just a hair.”

She endeavors to earn his approval but the dreadful machine fails to cooperate.

“Baby doll, try to straighten out. You're flying like some kind of pendulum. I'm getting seasick. Bet you forgot what I told you, didn't you. Pretend the runway's a road and you're driving your car down a ramp to it.”

The plane tilts. She tries to right it. It tilts the other way.

Charlie says, “Easy. For God's sake.”

The ground is coming up fast again; she realizes it's too fast—the angle just isn't shallow enough—and then the airplane lurches into a trough that feels bottomless: her stomach pops right up into her throat and she hears his groan and then she feels the controls move under her hands and feet when he takes over.

Halfway down the runway the wheels touch and then he is slamming the throttle forward and the yoke comes back toward her and the acceleration presses her back in the seat. The plane bounces and roars. A quick red haze slides down over her eyes.

She feels it soar. Down out of her side window she sees the earth pirouette, spinning as it drops away.

He levels it off. “You want to try again now?”

Something comes up into her throat and she has to swallow.

He says, “In other words you don't want to do it again right now.”

“Give me a minute to catch my breath.”

“Darling, you can have all afternoon. You're paying by the hour.” Then he speaks sotto voce to himself but she hears him distinctly enough; she is meant to: “And I can't imagine a bigger waste of time and money.”

“I'm going to learn to fly this thing if it kills me.”

“No,” he says. “You mean if it kills
me
.”

She draws a long breath. “Okay Charlie. Let's do it again.”

“Shee-yit.”

23
On the fourth approach he keeps his hands off the yoke and she lands the airplane by herself. To be sure it is one tire at a time: there's a good deal of bouncing and pitching but she manages. She even remembers to steer with the pedals instead of the wheel.

She brings it to a stop at the edge of the pavement. “Do you want me to take it in?”

“Thanks just the same.”

He taps her hands. She lifts them off the controls. Charlie taxis toward the hangar and idles into the parking slot, fitting it neatly between an Aercoupe and a Bonanza and cutting the ignition. Then he sits tense and still with his eyes squeezed shut. His huge hands engulf the control yoke.

She says, “You don't have to make a comedy act out of it.”

He pushes the door open and swings his legs out onto the strut. He needs to climb out carefully because he's so big; he tends to bang his head and he's always getting caught in spaces another man might negotiate with a foot of room to spare.

Without waiting to help her he drops down off the step and walks away toward the hangar.

She smiles slightly, knowing him a bit now. She's confident he'll go for it. He's as good as most—and as inconsistent—but he's not all bluff. And he's got his mercenary side.

A good thing too because time's getting very short. It's August 8. Four weeks from today they'll have left Fort Keene and it will be too late.

If Charlie refuses there'll be very little time to get someone else.

She's going to have to put it to him today. No later than tonight.

She watches him go into the hangar. The heavy rolling gait is peculiar to him: as though he were a sailor on a wildly swiveling deck. He seems to hesitate before planting each foot, as if to make sure first that there's solid ground under it.

After a moment she follows him through the hangar. Two of the Beechcraft mechanics are working on a plane; they both wave to her and she smiles back. She stops at the coffee machine and plugs quarters into it and carries two cups of the wretched swill around the corner into Charlie's sanctum. She finds him in the chair with his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands.

She puts his coffee in front of him and tastes her own. “I wouldn't've thought it was possible to get used to this stuff.”

“I once thought it was possible to get used to anything,” he says.

“What changed your mind?”

“You did, my love.”

“Am I supposed to be flattered or is that another joke?”

He says: “Some people are born piano players and some people are born aviators.”

“And I am not one of the latter.”

“You don't have the instincts, my beauty. Listen. A few years ago my kid was in a rock band. High school combo. They played for club dances and things. A couple appearances on some local public-access cable TV channel.

“They were all eleventh graders except this one guy who played the Fender bass. He was a senior and he graduated and went back East to college, and Mike's senior year the kids had to find themselves another bass player.”

His voice rumbles around the room, throwing ominous echoes. She enjoys the sound of it but she knows how a man's deep voice can deceive by making him sound as if he's got answers for everything.

“They hunted around school,” he says, “talked to the music teacher, all that, and it ended up they auditioned about five kids for the job. In my garage. I heard them all. Couldn't tell much difference—all that junk sounds the same to me. Kids' music always sounds like crap to a parent. I grew up on the jitterbug—I hear that stuff now, it sounds like crap even to me. We just couldn't have been that naive.

“Now there was this one kid they auditioned from the school marching band, played the tuba, but he knew how to play the bass and he was by far the most accomplished musician of the bunch. You give him the notes, he can play them—almost never makes a mistake. Mike said this guy was the best-trained technician he'd ever heard.”

He goes on: “But they turned him down. They went for another kid instead. Because this guy, the earnest zealot with all the training, he stood there like a lump and just played the notes. He didn't have the music in his bones. He heard it—but he didn't
feel
it. How'd they put it? They said he just didn't have soul.”