The Last Lovely City (23 page)

Three businessmen in overcoats, with lavish attaché cases, having spoken to the pilot, inform Lila that it may be several
days before the San Francisco airport opens. And that the reason for not going on to L.A., or even to Reno or Salt Lake City, has to do with flight regulations—since theirs was a Canadian carrier, they had to return to Canada.

In an automatic way she looks across to the man in the trench coat, at the same time wondering why: Why has she more or less chosen him to lead her? She very much doubts that it is because he is almost handsome, and she hopes that it is not simply that he is a man. He looks decisive, she more or less concludes, and then is shaken by a powerful memory of Julian, who is neither handsome nor decisive, and whom she has loved for all those years.

The trench-coated man seems indeed to have a definite group of his own, of which he is in charge. Lila reads this from the posture of the four people whom she now approaches, leaving the didactic businessmen. But before Lila can ask anything, the loudspeaker comes on, and a voice says that they are all to be housed in the Toronto Hilton, which is very near, and that the airline will do everything possible to get them to their destination tomorrow. A van will pick them up downstairs to take them to the hotel. Names will be called, vouchers given.

Lila has barely joined her chosen group when she hears her name called; they must be doing it by rows, she decides. She is instructed to go through a hall and down some stairs, go outside, and meet the Hilton van there.

And after a couple of wrong turns Lila indeed finds herself outside in the semidark, next to a dimly lit, low-ceilinged traffic tunnel, where a van soon does arrive. But it is for the Ramada Inn, not the Hilton.

And that is the last vehicle of any nature to show up for the next ten or twelve minutes, during which time no people show up, either. No one.

Several taxis are parked some yards down from where Lila has been standing, pacing, in her boots, by her carry-on bag.
Drivers are lounging on the seats inside. Should she take a cab to the Hilton? On the other hand, maybe by now everything has been changed, and no one is going to the Hilton after all.

It is very cold, standing there in the dark tunnel, and seemingly darker and dingier all the time. Across the black, wide car lanes are some glassed-in offices, closed and black, reflecting nothing. Behind Lila is the last room through which she came. It is still lit, and empty.

Something clearly is wrong; things cannot be going as planned. Or, she is in the wrong place. Then, dimly, at the end of the tunnel, she sees a van moving toward her. It will not be a Hilton van, she thinks, and she is right:
HOLIDAY INN
, its sign reads. It passes her slowly, an empty van, its driver barely looking out.

Lila is later to think of this period of time as the worst of the earthquake for her—a time in which she feels most utterly alone, quite possibly abandoned. It is so bad that she has forgotten about the earthquake itself almost entirely; she is too immediately frightened and uncomfortable to think of distant disaster.

After perhaps another five minutes, during which everything gets worse—the cold and the darkness, Lila’s anxiety and her growing hunger—she hears voices from the room behind her. Turning, she sees what she thinks of as her group: the trench-coated man and his charges, followed by the other passengers, all coming out to where Lila stands, shifting her feet in boots that no longer seem to fit.

As though they were old friends, Lila hurries toward him. “Where’ve you been? What happened?”

“Bureaucratic foul-up,” he tells her. “Some stuff about whether or not the airline would spring for the hotel. Who cares? And some confusion about whose flights originated in Toronto.” With a semismile he adds, “You were really lucky to get out first.”

“Was I? I don’t know.”

“Anyway. Look, there’s our van. Toronto Hilton.”

In the candlelit kitchen of Julian’s house, Julian and Karen are drinking vodka and orange juice, Karen’s idea being that they have to use up the orange juice before it goes to waste in the powerless refrigerator. “Besides, the C makes it good for you.” She laughs, and Julian hears a sad echo of her old flirtatiousness as she adds, “But why am I telling a doctor anything like that?”

He sighs. “Yes, I am a doctor.”

This is not a room designed for such romantic illumination. The shadows on the giant steel refrigerator are severe, menacing, and the flickering candlelight on the black-tiled floor looks evil—they could be in jail. Julian feels nothing of the vodka, and Karen’s face, across the round, white, high-gloss table, shows mostly fatigue. She looks vague, distracted.

In a sober, conversational voice she remarks, “Funny to think back to old times in this kitchen. With Lila and old Garrett.” Garrett: Lila’s former husband, a mean and somber lawyer.

“This kitchen?” asks Julian. “I don’t remember …”

“Sure you do. We were all drinking champagne, and later I broke a glass.”

“I think it’s Lila’s kitchen we were in.” The whole scene has indeed come back to Julian, a flash, immobilized: the other kitchen, so unlike this one, all soft wood, some copper bowls, blue pillows on a bench. Prim, pale Garrett—and Lila, her gray hair bright, brushed upward. Lila laughing and talking, he (Julian) talking, each of them, as always, excited by the other’s sheer proximity. “It was somebody’s birthday,” he tells Karen, knowing perfectly well that it was Lila’s. “You had on a green dress.”

“Well, you sure do have a great memory for details.”

“I have to, it’s my job.” And you always broke glasses, he does not say.

“You mean, my green dress is what you might call a professional memory? Holy shit, Julian, holy shit, you’re, you’re …” She begins to cough, unable to tell Julian what he is. He gets up and moves to pat her back, but Karen gestures him away.

“Don’t, I’m okay, don’t hit me!” She laughs a little hysterically, as Julian, too late, realizes that she is getting drunk. Is drunk. “You know what the earthquake was like for me?” She is looking blearily across at him, tears pooled in those great, dark-blue eyes.
“Fun
. The most fun in the world. I loved it.”

“Good, Karen, I’m glad.” It no longer matters what he says, Julian knows, as long as it is fairly neutral. “I thought it was more like turbulence in an airplane,” he mutters, more or less to himself.

At which Karen giggles. “I like turbulence,” she tells him. “Remember? I think it’s a kick.” And then, quite suddenly, she bursts into tears. “Julian, I’ve never loved anyone but you,” she sobs, reaching out to him. Blindly.

Descending from the van at the Toronto Hilton, Lila and her new friends see that the lobby inside is very crowded. Everyone is gathered around a single small television screen, and in a room beyond there is a coffee shop, apparently open. “Hundreds killed,” the announcer is saying. “Devastation.”

“The restaurant’s out of food,” someone says.

There is a line at the reception desk, but it seems to move quickly; within minutes Lila is being assigned a room. “I wonder about phoning,” she says to the man in the trench coat, Mark. They have all introduced themselves.

Lila’s room, at the top of the Toronto Hilton, is actually a small suite, to which she pays no attention as she heads for the phone. Without considering consequences (Karen could easily
answer), she dials the familiar Mill Valley number. Dialing directly, not bothering with credit cards or operators, she gets at first a busy signal and then an operator saying that she is sorry, all the circuits are busy. Lila dials again, gets more operators who are sorry, more busy signals. She goes into the bathroom to wash up, comes back and dials the number again, and again. She orders a sandwich from room service, and continues to try to phone.

A couple of hours later, in Mill Valley, Julian awakes with a sudden jolt: he is in his kitchen, still, and every brilliant light in the room is on, as is the television. Bottles and sticky glasses on the table. Gradually he remembers carrying Karen into the guest room. She is light enough in his arms, but a total dead weight; his back feels strained. And then he came back into this room. Surely not, he hopes, for another drink?

The TV screen shows a very large, white apartment building that has buckled and is rent with cracks and gaps. A background of black night sky, and a cordon of police. Cars, flashing lights. Dazed people standing around in clumps. Julian gets up to turn it off when, at that moment, the phone rings. In his confusion, he stumbles, just catches it on the third ring.

“Lila? My darling, my Lila, wherever …? We’re here, I mean I’m here, no damage, really. Well, I imagine I do sound odd, but no, of course I’m not drunk. Karen was just on the point of leaving—actually packed, then the damn thing hit. I guess she’ll go tomorrow; by now I suppose I mean today. And you? You’ll be back today! For sure?”

Smiling, still breathing hard with the effort of so much futile dialing before at last getting through, Lila offers a silent prayer to all those on her curious private list: she prays that she can fly
out of Toronto tomorrow, or whatever day this now is—and that Karen can fly, finally, out of San Francisco.

She sleeps fitfully and wakes early, knowing that she is awake for good. She thinks of telephoning Julian again, but does not. She showers and dresses as hurriedly as possible, and goes down to the hotel lobby.

There people are sitting around, or milling about, aimlessly. The TV seems still to be showing the news from the night before; Lila glimpses the same bridge shots, fire shots, the broken apartment house. All around her in the lobby the faces are pale, clothes a little disheveled, as hers must be. From a small, plump woman who is sitting near the front desk she hears, “They say we’re getting out today, but I don’t believe it.”

Lila, too, has trouble believing that they will escape. As she looks around at the tired clusters of people—no one, she observes again, is going it alone—she imagines that they will be there for months, that they are in fact refugees from some much larger disaster.

In the coffee shop, she finds Mark, and another man, and joins them. Mark got through to his wife, in Saratoga, who said that their chimney had fallen off, and that everything in the house that could break was broken. “But she’s okay,” says Mark, with a grin. “And the kids. You should have seen the waves in the swimming pool, she told me. You wouldn’t believe it. Tidal.”

From the lobby then, at first indistinctly, they hear an announcement: “… vans will begin to leave this hotel at nine-forty-five. Repeat: the San Francisco airport is clear.”

Lila’s seat on the morning plane is not nearly as good as the one the day before. Pushing her way down the aisle with her carry-on, she takes note of this fact, though today it seems extremely unimportant. And she does have a window seat.

Everyone on the plane is in a festive mood. People smile a
lot, though many faces show considerable fatigue, the ravages of a long and anxious night. But an almost manic mood prevails: the airport is clear, we’re going home, the city has more or less survived. To all of which Lila adds to herself, and Karen is going back East, probably.

Everyone is seated, buckled in. The pilot’s voice is telling the flight attendants to prepare for departure. The engines start their roar; they roar and roar. And nothing happens.

This goes on for some time—ten minutes, fifteen—until the engines are turned off, and they are simply sitting there on the runway, in the October Canadian sunlight. But the atmosphere on the plane is less impatient than might be imagined; it is felt that at least they are on their way. There may even be a certain (unacknowledged, unconscious) relief at the delay: San Francisco and whatever lies ahead do not have to be faced quite so soon.

The pilot announces a small mechanical glitch, which will be taken care of right away. And, perhaps twenty minutes later, the engines start again. And they are off, almost: the plane starts down the runway, gathering speed, and then, quite suddenly, it slows, and stops.

Jesus Christ. Now really. What now? We’ll never. What in hell is going on? These sentiments echo around the cabin, where patience has worn audibly thin, until, apparently starting at the front row, where a smiling stewardess is standing, the rumor spreads: a dog has somehow got loose on the field; it will be a minute more. They have already been cleared for takeoff.

And then, with a motion that seems to be decisive, the plane moves forward, again. Glancing from her window, quite suddenly Lila sees—indeed!—a dog, running in the opposite direction, running back to Toronto. A large, lean, yellowish dog, whose gallop is purposeful, determined. He will get back to his place, but in the meantime he enjoys the run, the freedom of the forbidden field. His long nose swings up and down, his tail
streams backward, a pennant, as Lila—watching from her window, headed at last back to San Francisco (probably)—begins in a quiet, controlled, and private way to laugh. “It was just so funny,” she will say to Julian, later. “The final thing, that dog. And he looked so proud! As though instead of getting in our way he had come to our rescue.”