Shatterday

As a last resort, before bed and a Seconal, Arlo did not turn north up his street, but continued ahead to a usually arid desert, the Ralph’s on Hollywood past Western. And there, as if the big greengrocer in the sky, he who smiles favorably on all such hegiras, had finally come back into the office and noticed Arlo’s button lit on the board, and sent her to him—there she stood, limned by the fluorescents of dalliance, lush in the simplicity of her skintight yellow ochre capris, seen through a glass starkly, wrestling with a grocery cart in the immense front window of Ralph’s. Arlo had almost gone shooting past the supermart—it was possible to clock the entire action in the store with a fast pass-down in the parking lot —but now, keeping one eye on the trembling roundnesses produced by her attempted disentanglement of the cart from its insertion into the long line of insertions (oh, lord, insertions!), he did a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn and plowed to a stop, half on the concrete walk that edged the storefront.

Arlo sprinted into the store,’ twelve seconds tardy. She had wrenched the cart free from its paramour, next in the line, and she was wheeling it down the nearest aisle, a side-to-side hipslung movement that was all sinuousness and the music of silks on silks. Arlo was transported. Oh, thank you thank you, Great Greengrocer In The Sky!

Arlo pursued, a cart before him like Quixote’s lance and shield. A breakneck lurch that slowed and modified into his strolling pace as he neared her behind, as he neared behind her, as behind her…

Fearing she might turn at any moment, Arlo obfuscated: he wrenched camouflage from the shelves and flipped it into the cart, heedless of form or content to the act: a box of Tampax, a tin of litchi nuts, a jar of maraschino cherries, a pack of frozen prawns, dietetic grapefruit slices.

Now he swung alongside her, two vehicles steaming down the freeway aisles of life, destined to cross at a king’s X of inevitability. Arlo perused prices, hefted weights, compared viscosities, his thoughts meanwhile cascading, plunging, avalanching down corridors of cunning. Tactics of encounter. This was no frippery, this statuesque color-coded commodity, fair traded and in highest demand by a legion of slavering consumers. No miniscule ploy for simpoleons—a fresh varient was required. How do I meet thee? Let me count the ways. Know your enemy. Loose hips sink kips. Wait, hark! See her now comparing bottled salad dressings, a bare minimal ten feet from you. What beauty, what form, what a goddam eternal verity, fade to black and ecstasy!

Now she moves on… having selected nothing. No clue, no hint, a major battle, this. Wait—there goes the vinegar into the cart, and now, joy of joys, the olive oil! An old-fashioned girl, no prepared dressings for her!

(I’m Pennsylvania Dutch Amish, Miss, and I, too, long for the simple delights of the pure life, wanna go to bed with—no, forget it, that wasn’t right.)

Arlo’s lust bayed at the fluorescent moon.

Now she’s at pet foods. Dog or cat? Let it be a dog, dear Lord, let it be a dog. Parakeet seed? Well, Arlo would try anything once, no scene was too freaky, really: when you’re in love, anything is correct.

Suddenly, she was looking at him. Not in his general direction, but directly at him. Staring, with an unfocused intensity. Arlo panicked. It wasn’t supposed to work like this. Which way could he run? He was hemmed in by specials on one-calorie cola and potato chips. She was starting toward him.

“Excuse me, but don’t I know you?”

Of all the phrases, words, sentences, polemics, diatribes, inducements, blandishments, lead-ins, rhetoric in Arlo’s thesaurus of hustle, nowhere was there an answer to her ridiculously trite—disarming—question. Arlo clutched. His throat froze. He stared at her, a mastodon in ice, seven million centuries frozen solid, staring out of that giant popsicle at Amundsen and his party.

“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