Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Um. No una cosa importante. Aqui dinero suficiente y la coloco en manos de usted.”

The woman shakes her head and reaches to close the door on her visitor. “No entiendo.”

Yolanda: “¡Puse el dinero a usted para el azul del coche!”

“OK. ¿Usted quiere pagarme y tomar mi car ahora? Right now?”

“Sí. Um, yo quiero pagarme y tomar el car. Coche.”

The woman shakes her head at the dual idiocy of this Anglo lady’s Spanish and her willingness to purchase the car sight unseen.

“Trescientos. Three hundred dollars.”

“Esto es dinero requerida.”

“¿Huh?”

“La suma requerida está aquí.”

“OK. OK.” The woman can’t help laughing now. She has the cash in her hands and holds it close to the bosom of her tired housedress, gathering it in as she laughs.

“Me deseo hago los papeles necesarios al gobierno. ¿Todo a la derecha?”

“No entiendo. No entiendo.” The woman laughs and laughs.

“Hago los papeles al gobierno. OK?”

She laughs: “Bueno, bueno. OK. No cuido.”

RAY FRALEY HAS AN IRA, which he pronounces like the male given name. Lest it be confused with the terrorist army, ha-ha. He has a certificate of deposit, and a mutual fund, and a savings passbook he wants to bring in to have the interest registered. He has term life insurance through his company and whole life through Irving Kreitzberg, CLU over in West Hollywood. He has a death, disability, and dismemberment policy, which pays incrementally greater amounts for the loss of a single finger, a hand, an entire arm, and so on, and does he really want to think about this now? He has Blue Cross, which provides for a semiprivate hospital room. He has a house that last belonged to Ted Bessell. From That Girl. Or was it Dick Sargent? Dick York? It was a colorless male lead. He sees the face and hears the laugh track smothering the unfunny lines. Bob Crane? Bob Cummings, ring a bell? Bob Montgomery? That would be Elizabeth’s dad. She starred with Dick York — or was it Sargent? — in that show. But whoever it was who’d walked the halls of his house, burned meat in the barbecue pit, and pissed in the toilets, he just can’t remember at this particular moment. Anyway, these are the assets he has counted on being able to marshal against the onslaught of the world. They had looked formidable, solid, marking him as a propertied man, a man of means, of a certain impermeability. And now?

Bob Cummings had been Robert in the movies. Ray Fraley had watched his movies at the Fox, in Detroit, when he was a boy. Not a pot to piss in then. If he’d had a way then to articulate his desires, they would have come out: IRA, life insurance, mortgage, etc. It is these financial instruments that give form to his dreams. His dreams wrap themselves in their legal names.

Impermeabile means raincoat in Italian. Ducking into Renascente on a rainy February day, “Vorrei un impermeabile.” Feeling like Gregory Peck, picturing himself in the future, telling the anecdote of this needful Roman purchase, the rain angling out of a slate sky onto the very history of Western civilization.

But it wasn’t Robert Cummings stalking those drafty halls he now owned. Bob Cummings hadn’t sat on his patio or poured an old-fashioned at his wet bar. Who?

And what else? He has a very exciting oral-genital relationship with a married middle-aged secretary in his office named Maureen. He has a teenage daughter with a canopy bed. An ex-wife whose wedding he will attend because they are “good friends.” When he pictures her mentally, he sees a figure sitting propped up in bed, wearing sunglasses, a hundred-millimeter filter cigarette burning in an ashtray at her bedside right next to her sweating tumbler. That aggrieved noontide voice.

This car purrs just like a kitten.

1466 East Fifty-fourth Street

This is the talk of the neighborhood. Over the fence while you hanging the wash and whatnot: Y’all hear what’s up at Sheila’s? What they coming in all bold like that unless they wanting people to know. Because they don’t know how dull it can get around here. They are the number one topic, mmmmm-hmm. They gonna kill the cops. They gonna start a revolution. Revolution? What we need a revolution for? Just open a supermarket around here we don’t be going to Sam’s for every damn thing. Ha-ha-ha.

Meanwhile …

At 1220 hours Metro Squad Castle-Bravo Six on routine patrol did observe two unattended vehicles at location rear of One Four Five One East Fifty-third Street matching APB descriptions on vehicles sought in Eight Three Three West Eighty-fourth Street incident. Per bulletin, dispatch informed but no further action taken.

EN ROUTE TO GRIFFITH PARK, the suitably remote location where they plan to release Ray Fraley with a stern warning and switch to the Corvair, Yolanda, following in the new car, misses the exit. Tania, who drives the Lincoln, watches helplessly in the rearview as the little blue car continues on the freeway, heading toward beautiful downtown Burbank. That was stupid. Teko curses.

Once in the vast park, is she a little surprised to find herself on Crystal Springs Road? She’d graduated from Crystal Springs School for Girls, where she’d met and commenced the seduction of Eric Stump.

She sees it now as an act of bourgeois self-annihilation. I mean, wanting to be a housewife at age sixteen?

But anyway, Crystal Springs, the reservoir itself, had been a long streak of glittering mercury in the sun that slanted over the coastal ranges, another of the Bay Area’s limitless ornamentations, fenced off from the public and viewed mainly from the viaducts she drove her MG across.

Teko leans close. He whispers, “We have to waste this guy. Yolanda’s not showing up.”

Tania’s eyes fill with tears.

“We’ll leave his body in the bushes. Nobody’ll find it for days. Now, you knock it the fuck off. The last thing I need is any of your rich bitch bullshit. Just shut up and do as you’re ordered.”

“We could wait a little longer. Please. Just a little while longer.”

They wait. The radio reports again on the useless raid on Eighty-fourth Street. The garbage-strewn house has been found to be unoccupied. Teko sneers. Tania reaches out to change the station, slaps away Teko’s hand when he moves to restrain her. It is an unpremeditated, unprecedented act, and they stare at each other in silent hiatus before Tania turns the knob, seeking music.

In the back, Ray Fraley hears the famous voice singing the grinding dirge: “ If I ever get out of here, thought of giving it all away. ” He says to himself, Oh Yes God Please.

Whispering again: “Fucking have to off him. It’s him or us.”

“Just wait. She’ll come.”

“You do what I tell you, or I swear it’ll be both of you rotting in the bushes.”

Tania has basically made up her mind that she isn’t going to allow Ray Fraley to be killed just because Yolanda can’t read road signs, or follow big white cars, or whatever her problem is. She works to convince herself that this mutinous plan is worth it on the basis of what seems like the distant memory of Ray Fraley’s not-so-bad smile as he leaned out of his car window to talk to two apparent hitchhikers in the early morning. The bright, mildly lecherous smile of a man taking time out of his busy day.

“We wait five more minutes.”

“I’m not fucking bargaining with you, Tania.”

“Five minutes, then you can kill him.”

“The fuck? Quiet the hell down, will you?”

“Just not yet. Don’t kill him yet. OK?”

“Just, like, shh! Shhhhh! Come on.”

Tania finds it easier to talk to Teko like this when she’s alone with him. Together he and Yolanda just wear her down. But separately they’re both little nothings. In the old days she wouldn’t have given either of them the time of day. She is amazed at how easily that old sense of class privilege resurfaces. On the other hand, she’s a little proud of how well she’s adapted; this is the very first time in her life she has had to associate, for a sustained period, with people she hasn’t chosen.