The Leisure Seeker: A Novel (23 page)

He feels his cheek. “Yep.” He bends down over me and gives me a kiss, half on the cheek, half on the lips. It’s as far as either of us can reach. I can smell Edge shaving gel and Old Spice aftershave.

“You smell good for a change, old man.” I take another look at him. He’s actually changed clothes, too. “What got into you? You’re all duded up.”

“Nothing,” he says, like the senility has been a ruse, a really
good practical joke he’s been playing on me for the past four years.

“Well, I approve.” I don’t know what brought this on, but every once in a while he gets a bug up his ass and actually does the things he’s supposed to do.

John sits on the chair next to me. He hands me his can of Milwaukee’s Best and I take a sip. It’s so cold that it makes my eyes water. It must have been in the back of the fridge. I look over at him, clean shaven for the first time in days, no Sasquatch beard, wearing a decent plaid shirt and a pair of kelly green double knits that, if not clean, at least haven’t been worn for the past four days straight. He looks like my husband again.

What’s going on with this place? John’s cleaned up, and I feel physically better than I have for the past two weeks. I don’t know if it’s because we’re so close to our destination or what, but I feel healthy. I know it’s an illusion, but for now, I’m enjoying it.

There isn’t much left in the fridge so I decide that we have to go out for food. I don’t know if I want to stop at a supermarket or a restaurant, but I’m actually feeling well enough to have a good meal and I want to take advantage of that. So we pack everything up again so we can drive. We leave our chairs and a few things sitting at our site.

There’s nothing promising nearby. John wants to go to
McDonald’s, but I nix it. Before we get too far, I just tell him to pull into a supermarket. We park in the handicapped space and luckily there’s a shopping cart that someone left right nearby. I latch on to it and we head on in.

Ralph’s Supermarket is big and bright and confusing. After roaming around, we finally find the beverage aisle. While John gets Pepsi, I lug a big jug of Carlo Rossi Dago Red into the cart and a six-pack of Hamm’s. John might like another beer, I figure. After we pick up Cheez-Its and Wheat Thins, I feel myself getting exhausted, so I wheel us to the butcher counter and pick up a couple of nice-looking steaks, Italian bread, and twice-baked potatoes from the hot deli. On the way to the checkout, I find a few staples. Then we hightail it out of there before I keel over.

“I’m pooped,” I say, once we get everything into the van, ourselves included. “Let’s go home.” Odd thing to say, considering that we’re driving it.

I’ll be damned, but as soon as we get back to the trailer park, I start to feel better again. I still feel like I could eat. So we cook up the steaks on the fry pan, warm the potatoes and bread, and pour ourselves a glass of wine. It’s a wonderful dinner. For once, I eat almost everything on my plate. I feel full and content.

Afterward, we decide to watch slides. We do it simpler and safer this time. I have John set up the projector (which amazingly still works) on a card table by the door. I tape the sheet on the side of the van and we project up close. The images are
about two feet by two feet. It’s like watching television, except the show is your life.

Since we didn’t go this time, we watch slides from a previous trip to the Grand Canyon, a long time ago. The first one is of me standing at the edge of the canyon. It’s sunset, what John used to call “magic time.” The whole canyon glows with a rich vermilion light. John was far away when he took this shot and since I’m dressed in orange you can really barely see me, but I know I’m there in the corner of the picture, ragged layers of stone blushing beneath me, a fiery silhouette dwarfed by that great yawn of the earth.

I remember perfectly the outfit that I’m wearing in the picture. It was really cute—slacks and a floral patterned blouse, both in a burnt sienna. Even John commented on it after he took the photo, how much I matched the interior of the canyon. “I’m one with nature,” I remember saying. John laughed, but the kids didn’t get it.

There’s a whole series of canyon sunset shots. I push the button a little quicker with each one and create my own twilight. The colors grow deeper and darker—crimson gold burns into blood red—the canyon engorged. After five or six slides, I decide that the sun is taking too damn long to set. I click forward until we get to a daytime shot. The canyon looks entirely different.

With the bright morning sun bending over the craggy
rim of the pit, you can see all the different colors now, the rainbow qualities of the stone, the play of shadow upon shadow, the illusion of bottomlessness that is not bottomlessness at all, but simply the Colorado River, doing its job, carving through eons of hard stone. I can see only a hint of the actual river in this shot and it makes me think that if this river can slice this deep into the earth over thousands of years, what’s to stop it from just plain cutting the world in half? Could that happen?

I think about all that unstoppable water. My entire life would account for about one-sixty-fourth of an inch of this canyon. That’s probably a generous estimate, I realize, but I find solace in this imaginary fact. Funny how sense of my complete and utter unimportance soothes me these days.

“That’s a beautiful shot, John.”

John yawns and says, “I’m going to go to bed.”

I don’t want to go in yet. It’s a lovely night and I’m happy to be here with John. I hold out my glass for him to fill. “Just one more, John.”

We watch one more half tray of slides, a trip we took to the Pacific Northwest. There are shots of us in a sweet little town called Victoria, just outside Vancouver in British Columbia. I loved that town. It was so clean and quaint and innocent. It doesn’t look at all like where I grew up in Detroit on Tillman Street, but it looks like how the world looked then. Not so dangerous, so burdened, so sad.

The final slide is a nice one of John and I standing in front
of a castle in Victoria, taken by our friends Dorothy and Al.

“That’s the last one,” I say, and before I can say anything else, John gets up and lifts the projector from the table.

“John,” I yell. “For God’s sake, let me turn it off.”

He pays no attention to me. I follow the image of us as it zigzags like a flashlight beam, projected on the trailer next door, then across the road, then on the trees, then finally into the sky, where it is released completely, a mist of light.

“Put it
down,
John!” I say.

Sheepishly, John looks at me, then sets the projector back on the table.

My alarm goes off at 4:30. In the dim oven light above our kitchenette, I wrestle myself to my feet and find my way to the bathroom. Before I go in, I put on water for instant coffee for John and me, though I’m actually fairly awake. These days, I tend to wake with a start, heart clamoring at my breastbone. Even still, I take a breath and almost manage a smile. The cloudy mind and sandy eyes gladden me this morning for it truly feels like old times being up this early in the Leisure Seeker.

After the bathroom, I open the door to the van and peek outside. It still looks like night out there, but the darkness has a sepia quality that tells me it won’t be long before first light. John coughs raggedly, then opens his eyes. He’s still in his clothes from last night.

“John, get up,” I say. “We’ve got to get going.”

He coughs again. “Why?”

“Because we don’t want to hit all the traffic going into Los Angeles, that’s why.”

He grunts and I think for a minute that he’s going to give me a hard time, but he gets up. My husband has spent his life trying to avoid things like waiting in lines and being stuck in traffic. This is right up his alley.

By now the kettle is boiling. I mix up a mug of coffee and hand it to him.

At 5:15, John is in the driver’s seat and I’m right next to him. As we leave the Foothill Boulevard Trailer Park, I tell myself that we will, with any luck, be back this evening. I hope we can get our same space.

San Dimas, Glendora, Azusa, Irwindale, Monrovia—all small, well-kept towns, one right after another. Foothill Boulevard keeps changing names and I have to keep looking in my guidebooks to make sure we’re going in the right direction. One interesting thing that we do see is a hotel in Monrovia that, according to one of my books, has got a design that’s part art deco and part Aztec and Mayan. I can honestly say I’ve never seen another building like it and I’m not sure I want to.

Just before Pasadena, the road changes to Colorado Boulevard and I’ll be damned if traffic doesn’t start picking up
the moment we get into town, even this early in the day. Pasadena looks pretty in this low light, but I’m too busy fretting about what’s ahead to enjoy the scenery. I try to relax and look around at the palm trees and the stores and the lovely old buildings. John is doing fine. He’s not saying much but he’s driving like a champ.

My guidebook leads us onto Arroyo Parkway, then the Pasadena Freeway, where we get off at Figueroa Street. We head west on Sunset Boulevard.

We are in the city of Los Angeles.

Despite what I said earlier about the dangers awaiting old people in big cities, I have to admit, I’m thrilled to be on Sunset Boulevard. Having heard of this street all my life, it’s fun to be finally seeing it. Traffic’s getting worse and there are lots of parts that look slummy, but this street feels exciting to me. I guess we’re getting more courageous as this trip goes on. That or more stupid. Either way, we’re here.

The sun is gleaming high and bright now. It’s going to be a lovely day, I can tell. I see a pretty young woman in a very short skirt and halter-top, standing in front of a discount store, staring at the van.

“John,” I say, “was that a hooker?”

Then I see another woman, this one older and tired looking, leaning against the window of an abandoned restaurant. I feel sorry for these women, about their choices, about what
they have to do just to live. The woman looks at us as we pass. I raise my hand. She looks the other way.

We’re supposed to shift onto Santa Monica Boulevard, but Sunset is so interesting I don’t want to get off. My map says that Sunset intersects with Santa Monica Boulevard a few miles up, so I decide that we can stay on a bit longer.

The signs keep changing languages—Spanish, Armenian, Japanese. We pass tiny shopping centers crammed with foreign restaurants. I see Hollywood dry cleaners and Hollywood pizza joints and Hollywood wig stores. We pass TV stations and radio stations and movie theaters and guitar stores and nicer restaurants. Meanwhile, traffic keeps getting worse, but I don’t mind it because there’s so much to look at.

At the corner of Sunset and Vine, I see a sign that makes my breath catch. “John, look! It’s Schwab’s drugstore. That’s where Lana Turner was discovered.”

John turns to me. “Boy, she was built like a brick shithouse.”

“She was sitting at the counter when some Hollywood big shot saw her and decided to put her in the movies.”

“Probably wanted to get into her pants,” says John.

I laugh. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I look for the drugstore, but don’t see it anywhere. I guess only the sign is there now. We pass an old Cinerama domed theater, then a place called Crossroads of the World.

We’re getting closer.

West Hollywood is very flashy. There are huge billboards up and down the street, most of them with pictures of women dressed a lot like the ones I saw walking the street. There are fancy hotels, expensive-looking restaurants, giant heroic statues of Kermit the Frog and Bullwinkle the Moose. I see nightclubs with names like “The Laugh Factory” and “The Body Shop,” but these sure don’t look like the factories or body shops we have in Detroit. I get the feeling that people in Hollywood like to make people think they’re actually doing work for a living. I see a lot of limousines that must be taking people off to do that alleged work.

By the time we turn back onto Santa Monica Boulevard, traffic is bumper to bumper, and the discomfort starts to come on strong. I crush a little blue pill between my teeth and wash it down with coffee dregs.

Frustrated, John sits back in his captain’s chair, breathes loudly through his nose. I watch him creep closer and closer to a convertible in front of us.

“Take it easy,” I say. “We’ve just got a bit more to go.” Out the window, I see a homey-looking little restaurant with green awnings called “Dan Tana’s.”

“That looks like a nice little place,” I say to John. “Like Bill Knapp’s.”

He breathes loudly again, says nothing, looks ahead at the traffic. I glance up at a billboard and see an enormous picture of two half-naked men embracing and frolicking in the surf, with these words under it:

GAY CRUISES FROM $899!

We’re in Hollywood, all right.

After a long boring stretch of malls, storefronts, and construction, we finally arrive in Santa Monica. It looks like a nice town, but we’re not here to see the sights. We’re here for one thing only—to get to the end of the road. As the street numbers get lower, I detect the clean salt smell of the ocean. Even mingled with the exhaust fumes, it clears my head and replaces my discomfort with a trill of excitement. Up ahead, a sign over the street reads:

OCEAN AVENUE

In front of us, there are palm trees and a park, and I can see straight through to the flickering luminous Pacific. Above it, the sky glows white and blue. It looks every bit as glorious as I thought it would.

“John. Look. There it is,” I say, pointing ahead of us.

“There what is?”

“The ocean, dummy.”

“I’ll be damned. We made it.”

I am amazed and pleased to hear that John has some understanding of what we’ve been doing. I thought he only knew
that it was his job to drive. I reach over and put my hand on his arm. “Yes, we did. We made it.”

“
Hot
damn,” he says, scratching his head.

“You got us here, John. You did a good job, darling.”

John looks at me with the widest smile I have seen on that face in years. It makes me wonder if I have been too tough on the old boy. I guess I don’t tell him that he does a good job very often these days.