Brian Garfield: Necessity

Her hair is naturally sandy and usually shoulder length but she’s worn it waved and blond for years; now she means to cut it short and let it hang straight and revert to color. At the moment the roots are showing and she’s going to have to help the naturalization process along at first with a good beauty shop coloring job to cover up the yellow past. Meanwhile the damnable wig.

But changing the hair back to normal won’t in itself effect much reduction in the possibility of chance recognition. Some other aspect of her appearance will have to change. Lose weight? No; any thinner and she’d look anorexic. Gain weight, then? No; she’s too vain: she needs to go on liking herself.

For a day on the highway she entertained the idea of plastic surgery but discarded it because she wouldn’t have time for the bruises to heal, and in any case it was a foolish idea and her life just now has quite enough melodrama in it without that.

Happily there’s no town anywhere in the world where disguises can be obtained more readily than in Hollywood.

A few blocks from Vine Street, beginning to wilt in the heat, she finds a parking space two blocks from her destination. Hollywood Boulevard has gone to seed and she must thread a pedestrian traffic of hookers and dangerous-looking adolescents and ordinary people going about their ordinary business.

In the theatrical costume supply shop she tries on a pair of eyeglasses with plain clear lenses. She knows the lingo because some of the girls at the modeling agency in New York were always trying to make it as actresses. “I’ve got a callback for a workshop play-just a walk-on as a tough, no-nonsense secretary.”

The clerk, a tanned blond young man with the pretty face and resentful pout of an actor between jobs, knows exactly what she requires; he simpers helpfully and goes to a drawer.

The frames have uptilted corners and give her the severe look of a self-important office worker. She is very pleased by how markedly they change her appearance.

“And I think a dark red wig, don’t you? Something I can do up in a tight bun at the back.”

He says, “I’ve got just the thing, dear.”

Studying the map, she sits in a booth over cottage cheese and a diet cola. The glass shakes in her hand but all the same there is a singular fascination in having the freedom to choose not only where to live but who to be.

She tries to recall what she learned about the area during her brief trips years ago. Not much comes to mind; but she’s heard enough casual talk in her lifetime to recognize some of the place names on the map.

She knows, for example, that Malibu and Santa Monica are on the sea, that Bel Air and Brentwood are where the movie stars and million-dollar executives live, that the extravagant shops of Rodeo Drive are in the middle of Beverly Hills, that East Los Angeles is the barrio and that Marina Del Rey is where the boat people go-the sort of boat people who own 36-foot cabin cruisers and make an annual half-day voyage to Catalina Island and spend the rest of the year parked at the dock sitting on deck attired in tee shirts and shorts, swilling beer and watching ball games on color television.

Through sunglasses her eyes explore the map. Not downtown Los Angeles: too slummy. Not Orange County: too stifled. Not West Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Santa Monica: not much likelihood someone from the past might be in town long enough to recognize her, but no matter how long the odds it is a risk to be avoided.

But there. Just over the Hollywood Hills to the north-the San Fernando Valley.

A hundred suburbs vainly in search of a city, indistinguishable but for their howler names: Burbank, Studio City, Highway Highlands, Calabasas, Universal City-even, for God’s sake, Tarzana.

There is the promise of anonymity in the very nickname: the Valley.

She drives toward it: north on the freeway through Sepulveda Pass, over a crest and down a long hill from which she can see across miles of gridded streets and low buildings. It is like the view from an airplane, the smog so thin she can see layers of tan purple mountain ranges beyond.

Quite beautiful, really.

Turning off the freeway she keeps her attention on the rear-view mirror. Maybe it’s silly; it’s implausible; but she still hasn’t been able to shake the conviction that they are back there and gaining on her.

At first she’ll have to stay in a motel. You can’t rent anything else without identification.

She finds one on Ventura Boulevard between an Arco station and an Italian restaurant. The motel has flyspecked stucco and there’s no swimming pool but it hasn’t yet reached the next stage of decline, when it will begin renting rooms with closed-circuit adult TV by the hour.

All the same, the old woman at the desk gives her a sharp look of disapproval and a veiled lecture couched in threadbare euphemisms about neighbors, trouble and police.

She assures the old woman that she’s not a hooker. Just a divorcee from Chicago seeking a place to start over. Looking for a job and an apartment.

She can’t tell whether the old woman buys it. The woman’s face is an immutable prunelike mask of skepticism. But it won’t do to embroider the story any more: she doesn’t want the old woman to pay attention to her.

The room is a bit shabby and vaguely Spanish in flavor except for the framed print above the bed, which depicts a French village in Impressionist fashion-maybe it’s Barbizon-and she has a moment’s amusement from the realization that she feels as incongruous as that thing looks.

It is now time to proceed with methodical care. She sits on the bed with a telephone directory in her lap and begins to make notes.

It no longer surprises her how much information you can get from bureaucrats simply by asking for it. After two hours at a pay phone she knows the easiest order in which to obtain identification.

She applies for a Social Security card, using the birth certificate from Tucson, and when the clerk seems puzzled that she’s never had a Social Security number she explains that she has spent her adult life nursing her invalid mother, who recently died.

“I’ve been taking extension courses at UCLA but I’ve never had a regular job, you see, so I never applied before, but the people at the employment agency told me I should come and fill out an application.…”

The clerk stamps the forms, uninterested in hearing any more.

On her way out she slips another application blank into her handbag.

The card for which she’s just signed will be mailed in about ten days to the street address of her motel. In the meantime there’s a great deal to do.

On the Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday she removes the red wig in a restaurant ladies’ room and drives down to Orange County to have her hair done in a place where they’ll never see her again and never remember her. “So hot this summer,” she says. “I’ll be cooler if it’s cut short, don’t you think?”

The hairdresser is an inquisitive man, sixtyish and overweight, gay and garrulous: Haven’t seen you before, my dear; such lovely cheekbones; do you live around here?

She has to think. Now who am I going to be today?

She becomes the wife of an aeronautical engineer who’s been unemployed for nearly a year and finally just landed an aerospace job here in Santa Ana so they’ve just moved down from Tacoma. Two kids and they are fighting the bureaucracy of school transfers this close to opening day.…

It is the sort of thing she’s done for idle amusement in the past when she found herself on an airliner seated next to a stranger she knew she’d never see again.

From childhood on she’s taken pleasure in harmless lies: they exercise the imagination. Now it is a talent she is going to have to cultivate permanently. That’s an aspect of this thing that frightens her especially: the chance that she’ll slip and misremember her own lies.