The Decent Proposal (27 page)

He became determined to follow them.

But how was he going to acquire a car? Renting one was impossible; he hadn't had a driver's license or credit card for twenty-two years. (He'd consulted a calendar recently, more baffled than shocked by the hemorrhaging of time.) For days he wasted his energy on wishful thinking. If Elizabeth had an anonymous benefactor, why couldn't he? Someone who dropped a pair of keys in his lap and pointed to a shiny, waxed car waiting on the curb just for him. (This did not happen.) He knew a few people who lived out of their cars, and even though most of these vehicles were ancient RVs or oversize vans—dubiously mobile shanties that hadn't gone east of Lincoln in years—he asked each of these homeless car owners if he could borrow their car for a day. They all told him some version of “fuck off.” And then suddenly it was Tuesday morning, and he and Elizabeth were sitting at the kitchen counter eating omelets (his new specialty). She reminded him about the premiere that night and the trip the next day. She said she'd be getting home late and waking up early, so he might as well take her spare key to let himself in and out.

She placed it gently in the palm of his hand: the same hand
he'd used only a few months earlier to break into the house he more or less lived in now.

“Orpheus, I'm so proud of you,” she said, before making a hasty exit, leaving him staring in her wake. He hadn't even been able to say his usual “thank you.”

How could he possibly
not
follow her? He had to restrain himself from running out to her in the driveway and proclaiming his intention never to let her out of his sight from this moment on, not even for work. There was
no way
she was going to the desert without him.

But how?

He left his rolling suitcase in the house that morning. Walking without it felt strange, like he was missing both a load
and
a limb, his step lighter but also less steady. He headed toward the Boardwalk, sidestepping a young family whose paraphernalia cascaded from their car onto the sidewalk: T-shirts, caps, sunglasses, bottles of water, sunscreen, a half-empty box of donuts, the trappings of a stroller. The harried father glanced up at him from a pile of toys, shrugging his shoulders apologetically. In the last few weeks, Orpheus had bought some more outfits, and he now regularly availed himself of Elizabeth's washer and dryer. He'd taken to wearing a baseball cap to keep out of the sun, and to hide the worst of his ravaged face from view. Pleased to have been mistaken for a regular functioning human being, he saluted the man, “huh,” without breaking his stride.

It was busy on the Boardwalk for a Tuesday in October. Orpheus watched a performer jump in his bare feet from a chair onto a pile of broken glass. (He managed, as always, not to cut himself.) A Jimi Hendrix look-alike on roller skates nearly crashed into him while playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A bald, red-faced woman in a sundress banged her fists on an upright piano, failing to make much noise since the instrument was missing most of its keys. Orpheus yearned suddenly to be
back inside Elizabeth's house and away from the madness of the world. He turned to walk back, and saw the tourist family from a few minutes earlier taking in the Boardwalk for the first time—overwhelmed, mesmerized. Something dropped from the father's back pocket, traveling the short distance to a nest of palm husks lying on the ground. The husks, which had been blown off the tops of the surrounding palm trees by coastal winds, must have broken the object's fall. The father didn't hear a thing, and was already running after his young son, who was eagerly inspecting the glass walker's pile of broken bottles. Orpheus walked over—all it took was a few steps—and reached down among the hairy brown husks, plucking out the object easily. A large plastic holder said “Enterprise Rental.” It was as he had suspected, but hadn't dared to hope: they were the keys to the car a few short blocks away, a
fully functioning
car guaranteed to be empty and unattended for hours to come.

Orpheus pocketed the keys, striding off at a brisk-but-not-too-brisk pace.

It was only when he was inside the car that Orpheus realized how odd these supposed keys were. They weren't keys at all. Where was the slender, notched, metallic protrusion to be inserted into a matching hole? This was nothing other than a black rectangular cube.
The hell?
His eyes darted around the dashboard for the ignition. How the fuck was the car supposed to start without a
key
? What had happened to cars in the last two decades? Was he so out of touch he couldn't even start a
car
anymore?

He heard a police siren, his heart rate spiking, hands sweating as he surveyed the dash more urgently. The siren couldn't be for him. Could it? No; he'd be long gone by the time anyone knew.
If
he could figure out how to start the damn thing.

He saw a
START
button, which looked promising. He pressed
it: nothing. He punched it with his fist: still nothing. What was happening? What was he doing? The old, proud Orpheus would never have stooped so low. No, for that man, the means always justified the end, which was how he'd ended up marrying a woman he didn't love and betraying his family for another woman who wasn't worth his spit.
Fuck it.
For once, the end would have to justify the means.

He took a deep breath and pressed the
START
button again: nothing.

He tried again: still nothing.

He began pressing the button over and over, without hope, pressing harder each time, until he was practically punching it with an index finger he was in grave danger of breaking.

Orpheus kicked at the floor in anger, letting loose a furious, animal yell.

Later, he realized his foot must have hit the brake pad just as he was pressing down the button. The headlights and all the interior controls flickered to life, and a little screen in the middle of the dashboard showed him the view from the back of the car. This thing had
cameras
too? It didn't sound like the engine was running, however, and without hoping for much, he put the car in drive and stepped on the gas.

To his amazement, it moved.

Over the course of the previous week, Orpheus had asked Elizabeth a series of nonchalantly phrased, cunningly disconnected questions to confirm the logistics of the desert trip. (So much for not prying, but at least he did it artfully.) This was how he knew she would be picking up the boy at 7 a.m. from his apartment in Silver Lake. One day, he asked her to show him how her phone worked. (He didn't have to pretend to be mystified by this device.) Since the Internet meant very little to him, he focused his wonderment on the fact that it was both a phone and a Rolodex.

“So everyone you know, all their numbers and addresses are right there? Stored
in
the phone?”

“It'd be more impressive if I knew more people, but yes, that's right,” said Elizabeth.

“So if you wanted to look up, say, Richard, huh—”

She gave him the tiniest flicker of side-eye.

“—say if you forgot his address. What would you do?”

Elizabeth clicked on her contacts, pulling up Richard's card. “Here, look.” She handed him the phone.

“
Outstanding
,” he crowed, committing the address to memory.

He wished he had a Thomas Guide to help him find his way to Silver Lake, but he was surprised how much he remembered once he was back on the streets as a driver instead of a vagrant. Too vast from the pedestrian point of view, L.A. came alive inside a moving vehicle. As he turned onto Washington—his namesake—Orpheus felt himself become a part of the hatched pattern of boulevards and avenues stretching eastward. Not even twenty-two years of deprivation and neglect could induce him, as a native Angeleno, to forget that after Lincoln came Sepulveda, and then La Cienega, followed by La Brea, Crenshaw, and Western. They were all still here, exactly as he'd left them (except for what looked to be an elevated rail—
the hell?
—just west of La Cienega). He'd forgotten how many billboards there were in L.A., adorning the space where the streets met the sky. Many of them were digital now and changed every ten seconds or so, reminding him of futuristic cityscapes in movies like
Blade Runner
.

“The future is now,” he whispered, gazing out his window. “Huh.”

Orpheus made a left onto Vermont, heading north: Venice, Pico, Olympic, Wilshire, all the numbered streets in between. It was like visiting old friends. If anything, the city looked better
than he remembered it, though maybe that was because
he
looked so much worse.

He went east again on Beverly Boulevard, knowing it would turn into Silver Lake Boulevard eventually. From there he got a little lost; the grid went wavy, like straight layers of sedimentary rock turned groovily metamorphic, the parallel lines melting into curves, the perpendicular intersections swirling into spirals. It wasn't until close to sunset that he found a suitably inconspicuous spot on Richard's block from which to keep watch.

His plan was to stay up all night. He spent the first two hours reading the manual he found covered in crumbs in the glove compartment, learning about hybrid energy and (most important) how to turn the damn car on and off. Close to 3 a.m. he saw Richard stumble into his building. Somewhere around 4 a.m. he fell asleep, despite his best intentions, succumbing to the inevitable crash that followed the adrenaline rush of his day.

Orpheus had no idea why he woke up two hours later, but he suspected it was the noise of Elizabeth's ignition turning over (at least
her
car still operated the old-fashioned way), because almost immediately he saw the familiar Honda Accord begin to move. He was still wiping sleep from his eyes when he started the Prius like a pro and took off behind her. If he had woken up even thirty seconds later, he would have waited another hour before realizing they were gone. He would have missed them entirely.

It was still dark when he followed Elizabeth onto the 101 and the 10. Orpheus had thought that driving—especially on the highway at night—would bring back the memory of his calamity like never before, but he was so intent on negotiating the delicate balance between not letting Elizabeth's car get too far away and not getting too close to it that the eastern sky went from black to navy to cerulean to bright Dodger blue before
he realized the night was over. It was only when the sun's rays began poking him in the eye that he recognized the beginning of a new day.

Orpheus pulled down his visor. A photo fluttered to his lap. It was a studio portrait of the tourist family: father, mother, son, and even their baby daughter in matching khakis and Christmas sweaters. He squirmed, casting it off him as if it were an insect he couldn't bear to touch. He looked around him. In the light of this supposedly glorious new day all he could see was the flat suburban sprawl of the Inland Empire extending endlessly on either side of him. Orpheus released a long sigh. He was tired, so tired. Every bone ached; every joint creaked.

There would be no ghostly visions of his lost family, no painful yet revelatory resurrection of the past, no real demarcation between that past and however many days were yet to come. He had no idea what he'd say to Elizabeth if she saw him following her, no way of justifying his actions. What the hell was he doing out here? He'd already ruined one family's vacation; what more could he accomplish?

He had no answer, but he continued following the spotless Honda Accord, maintaining a carefully calibrated distance several car lengths behind.

BY THE TIME
Richard woke up, Elizabeth had moved on from the 15 to CA 127, also known as “Death Valley Road.” They were getting close. His head popped up in the rearview mirror.

“How long was I out?”

She looked away from the road for a split second to glance at him. He was rubbing his eyes with his fists, and even though he had only a half inch or so of hair, somehow it was still sticking up in the back of his head. It was a rare moment in which he had no idea how adorable he looked, which enhanced his adorableness by about a thousand.

“A little over three hours,” she said, training her eyes on the road again.

“Yikes, really?” he yawned. The sleep hadn't been refreshing, but it had helped. He at least didn't feel like vomiting anymore. He climbed into the front seat, his denim backside brushing against her shoulder. “Sorry,” he muttered.

She caught a whiff of his unique scent: Right Guard deodorant, Head & Shoulders shampoo, and the tiniest tang underneath it—an earthy, animal something that refused to be contained by artificial fragrances.

“You still okay to drive?” he asked. “Not too tired?”

“I'm good.”

“D'you have any water?” He yawned again.

Elizabeth cocked her head in the direction of the basket. Richard opened it and saw a veritable cornucopia of edibles: the aforementioned PB&Js, which looked slightly less revolting now; two baggies stuffed with baby carrots, celery sticks, cherry tomatoes, and cucumber slices; two Balance Bars (mocha chip and yogurt honey peanut); two apples; two pears; a netted bag of clementines; and two individual-sized bottles of water. He grabbed one, draining it in three long gulps.

“Wow, you really went all out, huh?” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I like to be prepared. Could you actually hand me one of those sandwiches?”

They were already in the desert. Growing up in Massachusetts, Richard had pictured bumpy sand dunes as far as the eye could see, like in
Star Wars
, whenever he imagined “the desert.” But on his way through the American Southwest seven years earlier, and on countless road trips to Las Vegas since, the real thing consistently failed to live up to the fantasy. For one, there was no sand. It was all brown, crumbly dirt and dusty, low-lying plants. This desert scrub spread out in all directions over gently
rolling hills. Every time he saw it, he couldn't help feeling a little disappointed.