Richard Brautigan - The Abortion - An Historical Romance 1966

‘A little tired.’

‘Let’s take a nap,’ I said, putting her under the covers and joining her.

We slept for an hour or so and then I woke up. The Mother Ghost was brushing her teeth and I told her to get into the closet until we were gone. She got into the closet and closed the door after her.

‘Hey, baby,’ I said. Vida stirred in her sleep and then opened her eyes.

‘What time is it?’ she said.

‘About the middle of the afternoon,’ I said.

‘What time does our plane leave?’ she said.

‘6.25,’ I said. ‘Do you feel you can make it? If you don’t, we’ll spend the night here.’

‘No, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to San Francisco. I don’t like San Diego. I want to get out of here and leave all this behind.’

We got up and Vida washed her face and straightened herself up and felt a lot better, though she was still a little weak.

I told the hotel ghost mother good-bye in the closet and Vida joined me. ‘Good-bye, ghost,’ she said.

We went down the elevator to the waiting desk clerk whom I suspected of drinking on the job.

He was startled to see me standing there holding the KLM bag in my hand and returning the room key to him.

‘You’re not spending the night?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ve decided to stay with her sister.’

‘What about your snoring?’ he said.

‘I’m going to see a doctor about it,’ I said. ‘I can’t hide from this all my life. I can’t go on living like this forever. I’ve decided to face it like a man.’

Vida gave me a little nudge with her eyes to tell me that I was carrying it a little too far, so I retreated by saying, ‘You have a lovely hotel here and I’ll recommend it to all my friends when they visit San Diego. What do I owe you?’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Nothing. You’re Foster’s friend. But you didn’t even spend the night.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very friendly. Thank you and good-bye.’

‘Good-bye,’ the desk clerk said. ‘Come again when you can spend the night.’

‘We will,’ I said.

‘Good-bye,’ Vida said.

Suddenly he got a little desperate and paranoid. ‘There was nothing wrong with the room, was there?’ he said. ‘It was my mother’s room.’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It was perfect.’

‘A wonderful hotel,’ Vida said. ‘A beautiful room. A truly beautiful room.’

Vida seemed to have calmed him down because he said to us as we were going out the door, ‘Say hello to your sister for me.’

That gave us something to think about as we drove out to the San Diego airport sitting very close together in the back seat of a cab where the driver, American this time, did not take his eyes off Vida in the mirror.

When we first got into the cab, the driver said, ‘Where to?’

I thought it would be fairly simple just to say, ‘The International Airport, please.’

It wasn’t.

‘That’s the San Diego International Airport, isn’t it? That’s where you want to go, huh?’

‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that something was wrong.

‘I just wanted to be sure,’ he said. ‘Because I had a fare yesterday that wanted to go to the International Airport, but it was the Los Angeles International Airport he wanted to go to. That’s why I was checking.’

Oh, yeah .

‘Did you take him?’ I said. I didn’t have anything else to do and my relationship with the cab driver was obviously out of control.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘He was probably afraid of flying,’ I said.

The cab driver didn’t get the joke because he was watching Vida in the rear-view mirror and Vida was watching me after that one. The driver continued staring at Vida. He paid very little attention to his driving. It was obviously dangerous to ride in a cab with Vida.

I made a mental note of it for the future, not to have Vida’s beauty risk our lives.

Unfortunately, the cab driver was very unhappy with the tip I gave him. The fare was again one dollar and ten cents and remindful of the experience we’d had earlier in the day with that first cab driver, I raised the tip-ante to thirty cents.

He was startled by the thirty-cent tip and didn’t want to have anything else to do with us. Even Vida didn’t make any difference when he saw that thirty cents.

What is the tip to the San Diego airport?

Our plane didn’t leave for an hour. Vida was quite hungry, so we had something to eat in the cafe. It was about 5.30.

We had hamburgers. It was the first time I’d had a hamburger in years, but it turned out not to be very good. It was flat.

Vida said her hamburger was good, though.

‘You’ve forgotten how a hamburger is supposed to taste,’ Vida said. ‘Too many years in the monastery have destroyed your better judgement.’

There were two women sitting nearby. One of them had platinum hair and a mink coat. She was middle-aged and talking to a young, blandly pretty girl who was talking in turn about her wedding and the little caps that were being designed for the bridesmaids.

The girl was nice in the leg department but a little short in the titty line or was I spoiled? They departed their table without leaving a tip.

This made the waitress mad.

She was probably a close relative to the two cab drivers I’d met that day in San Diego.

She stared at the tipless table as if it were a sex criminal. Perhaps she was their mother.

I took a closer look at the San Diego airport. It was petite, uncomplicated with no Playboy stuff at all. The people were there to work, not to look pretty.

There was a sign that said something like: Animals arriving as baggage may be claimed in the airline air freight areas in the rear of bldg.

You can bet your life that you don’t see signs like that in the San Francisco International Airport.

A young man with crutches, accompanied by three old men, came along as we were going out to wait for our aeroplane. They all stared at Vida and the young man stared the hardest.

It was a long way from the beautiful PSA pre-flight lounge in San Francisco to just standing outside, beside a wire fence in San Diego, waiting to get on our aeroplane that was shark-like and making a high whistling steam sound, wanting very much to fly.

The evening was cold and grey coming down upon us with some palm trees, nearby, by the highway. The palm trees somehow made it seem colder than it actually was. They seemed out of place in the cold.

There was a military band playing beside one of the aeroplanes parked on the field, but it was too far away to see why they were playing. Maybe some big wig was coming or going. They sounded like my hamburger.

We got our old seats back over the wing and I was sitting again next to the window. Suddenly it was dark in twelve seconds. Vida was quiet, tired. There was a little light on the end of the wing. I became quite fond of it out there in the dark like a lighthouse burning twenty-three miles away and I made it my secret talisman for ever.

A young priest was sitting across the aisle from us. He was quite smitten by Vida for the short distance to Los Angeles.

At first he tried not to be obvious about it, but after a while he surrendered himself to it and one time he leaned across the aisle and was going to say something to Vida. He was actually going to say something to her, but then he changed his mind.

I will probably go on for a long time wondering what he would have said to my poor aborted darling who, though weak and tired from the ways of Tijuana, was the prettiest thing going in the sky above California, the rapidly moving sky to Los Angeles.