smiling, “it’s almost lunch time. Eat with me. I
want to hear about what you’re writing.”
And he was gone. I hadn’t said yes or no, but he was gone.
“Hey!” whispered another voice behind me. Buz. The agency clown when he was sober. Wine put him into some kind of trance, though, and he just sat and stared and looked retarded—which he wasn’t, quite. He just didn’t give a damn about anything, including himself. He drank up his pay and walked around in rags. Also, he never bathed. “Hey, you two gonna get together and write some books?” he asked, leering.
“Get out of here,” I said, breathing as shallowly as possible.
“You gonna write some poor- nography together!” He went away laughing.
Later, at one of the round rusting metal tables in the corner of the warehouse that served as the lunch area, I found out more about my new writer friend. Kevin Franklin, his name was, and he’d not only gotten his book published, but he’d made a big paperback sale. He could live on the money while he wrote his next book. He could give up shitwork, hope- fully forever …
“Why aren’t you eating?” he asked when he stopped for breath. The warehouse was in a newly built industrial section of Compton, far enough from coffee shops and hot dog stands to discourage most of us from going out to eat. Some people brought their lunches. Others
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bought them from the catering truck. I had done neither. All I was hav- ing was a cup of the free dishwater coffee available to all the warehouse workers.
“I’m on a diet,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment, then got up, motioned me up. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“To the truck if it’s still there.”
“Wait a minute, you don’t have to …” “Listen, I’ve been on that kind of diet.”
“I’m all right,” I lied, embarrassed. “I don’t want anything.”
He left me sitting there, went to the truck, and came back with a ham- burger, milk, a small wedge of apple pie.
“Eat,” he said. “I’m still not rich enough to waste money, so eat.”
To my own surprise, I ate. I hadn’t intended to. I was caffeine jittery and surly and perfectly capable of wasting his money. After all, I’d told him not to spend it. But I ate.
Buz sidled by. “Hey,” he said, low-voiced. “Porn!” He moved on. “What?” said Kevin.
“Nothing,” I said. “He’s crazy.” Then, “Thanks for the lunch.” “Sure. Now tell me, what is it you write?”
“Short stories, so far. But I’m working on a novel.” “Naturally. Have any of your stories sold?”
“Some. To little magazines no one ever heard of. The kind that pay in copies of the magazine.”
He shook his head. “You’re going to starve.”
“No. After a while, I’ll convince myself that my aunt and uncle were right.”
“About what? That you should have been an accountant?”
I surprised myself again by laughing aloud. The food was reviving me. “They didn’t think of accounting,” I said. “But they would have approved of it. It’s what they would call sensible. They wanted me to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher like my mother. At the very best, a teacher.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “I was supposed to be an engineer, myself.” “That’s better, at least.”
“Not to me.”
“Well anyway, now you have proof that you were right.”
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He shrugged and didn’t tell me what he would later—that his parents,
like mine, were dead. They had died years before in an auto accident still hoping that he might come to his senses and become an engineer.
“My aunt and uncle said I could write in my spare time if I wanted to,” I told him. “Meanwhile, for the real future, I was to take something sen- sible in school if I expected them to support me. I went from the nursing program into a secretarial major, and from there to elementary education. All in two years. It was pretty bad. So was I.”
“What did you do?” he asked. “Flunk out?”
I choked on a piece of pie crust. “Of course not! I always got good grades. They just didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t manufacture enough interest in the subjects to keep me going. Finally, I got a job, moved away from home, and quit school. I still take extension classes at UCLA, though, when I can afford them. Writing classes.”
“Is this the job you got?”
“No, I worked for a while at an aerospace company. I was just a clerk- typist, but I talked my way into their publicity office. I was doing articles for their company newspaper and press releases to send out. They were glad to have me do it once I showed them I could. They had a writer for the price of a clerk-typist.”
“Sounds like something you could have stayed with and moved up.” “I meant to. Ordinary clerical work, I couldn’t stand, but that was
good. Then about a year ago, they laid off the whole department.” He laughed, but it sounded like sympathetic laughter.
Buz, coming back from the coffee machine, muttered, “Chocolate and vanilla porn!”
I closed my eyes in exasperation. He always did that. Started a “joke” that wasn’t funny to begin with, then beat it to death. “God, I wish he’d get drunk and shut up!”
“Does getting drunk shut him up?” asked Kevin. I nodded. “Nothing else will do it.”
“No matter. I heard what he said this time.”
The bell rang ending the lunch half- hour, and he grinned. He had a grin that completely destroyed the effect of his eyes. Then he got up and left.
But he came back. He came back all week at breaks, at lunch. My daily draw back at the agency gave me money enough to buy my own lunches—and pay my landlady a few dollars—but I still looked forward
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to seeing him, talking to him. He had written and published three nov- els, he told me, and outside members of his family, he’d never met anyone who’d read one of them. They’d brought so little money that he’d gone on taking mindless jobs like this one at the warehouse, and he’d gone on writing—unreasonably, against the advice of saner people. He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on try- ing. And now, finally …
“I’m even crazier than you,” he said. “After all I’m older than you. Old enough to recognize failure and stop dreaming, so I’m told.”
He was a prematurely gray thirty-four. He had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two.
“You look older,” he said tactlessly. “So do you,” I muttered.
He laughed. “I’m sorry. But at least it looks good on you.”
I wasn’t sure what “it” was that looked good on me, but I was glad he liked it. His likes and dislikes were becoming important to me. One of the women from the agency told me with typical slave-market candor that he and I were “the weirdest-looking couple” she had ever seen.
I told her, not too gently, that she hadn’t seen much, and that it was none of her business anyway. But from then on, I thought of Kevin and I as a couple. It was pleasant thinking.
My time at the warehouse and his job there ended on the same day. Buz’s matchmaking had given us a week together.
“Listen,” said Kevin on the last day, “you like plays?”
“Plays? Sure. I wrote a couple while I was in high school. One-acters. Pretty bad.”
“I did something like that myself.” He took something from his pocket and held it out to me. Tickets. Two tickets to a hit play that had just come to Los Angeles. I think my eyes glittered.
“I don’t want you to get away from me just because we won’t be co- workers any more,” he said. “Tomorrow evening?”
“Tomorrow evening,” I agreed.
It was a good evening. I brought him home with me when it was over, and the night was even better. Sometime during the early hours of the next morning when we lay together, tired and content in my bed, I real- ized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought—and much less than I would know when he went away.
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2
I decided not to go to the library with Kevin to look for forgeable free papers. I was worried about what might happen if Rufus called me from the car while it was moving. Would I arrive in his time still moving, but without the car to protect me? Or would I arrive safe and still, but have trouble when I returned home—because this time the home I returned to might be the middle of a busy street?
I didn’t want to find out. So while Kevin got ready to go to the library, I sat on the bed, fully dressed, stuffing a comb, a brush, and a bar of soap into my canvas bag. I was afraid I might be trapped in Rufus’s time for a longer period if
