“That’s right. You don’t want to press your luck.”
As they glided along now green-swarded boulevards columned by fifty-foot palms, Jules breathed somewhat hard for someone just riding in a taxi. Before the ?le aux Cygnes, the last time he had been an outlaw had been in Algeria, because when he was there, where he was there was no law. Something about being an outlaw was the same in music, and in dying. The words flying, falling, disappearing in light, and rising occurred to him completely absent framework or order.
They pulled onto the crescent drive of the hotel. Instead of allowing Jules to square with the taxi driver, get a receipt, and put back his wallet, the doorman opened the cab door and stood expectantly, as if used to greeting tycoons and heads of state who neither carried money nor took taxis. This put pressure on Jules, who gave the taxi driver an enormous tip. As Jules was struggling to exit, the taxi driver jumped out, ran around the front of the car, and pushed the doorman from the door. “Don’t touch my cab,” he ordered, “and don’t mess with a guy like him,” he said, nodding proudly at Jules, “unless you want a dead donkey on your bed.”
“What?” the doorman asked.
As Jules stood up, the taxi driver whispered, “My cell number’s on the back of the receipt. Let me know when it’s time to roll.”
As Jules walked toward the hotel’s acres of highly polished marble, carpets as soft as marshmallows, gardens echoing with chamber music and the sound of fountains, and people dressed beyond the nines, he passed a young woman walking alone the other way. A bright yellow silk print dress tightly embraced her from the waist up but flowed at the skirt. She had a mass of genuinely golden hair that was like a halo or an unruly crown, and she was beautiful in an intelligent, entrancing way. As she passed, she smiled at him and her eyes widened – as Jules, now in his seventy-fifth year, well understood – with interest as genuine as the sun color of her hair. To say that he was electrified would be an understatement. He was practically electrocuted. Once again, now in Los Angeles, it was as if his emotions had leapt from an extremely high diving board. That he might encounter her later gave rise in him to equal measures of hope, numbing pleasure, and terror.
He wondered what was happening as his face flushed so hard that he stopped in his tracks and people had to walk around him. A bellboy asked if he might take the bag, and was refused with a vacant shake of the head. Then Jules saw the bar. He hadn’t had anything to drink on the plane. He hardly drank at all, and he never went into bars. What’s more, he was always so buttoned up and responsible that he normally would have checked in and placed his clothing in the empty drawers and closets. He would have organized his papers, laid out toilet articles neatly along the side of the sink in their exact order of use, washed, and visited the fire stairs, counting the steps from his room so that he could escape in the dark, possibly crawling along under the smoke, dressed in wet towels, like an ancient Egyptian. But instead he went into the bar.
At first he thought he wanted a Martini, because he had been served one once and it was so clear as to be invisible, but after a sip of what seemed like dry-cleaning fluid he realized that he was really after the olive. Here he would have to have something else. For him, this hotel bar was as dark, elegant, and beckoning an adventure as if he were sneaking in at age twelve. The bartender came over.
“Bonjour. In the Caribbean,” Jules said, “I once had a drink with soda, rum, sugar, and lime. I’ve forgotten what it’s called in French. I never knew what it was called in English.”
“That’s a Planter’s Punch,” the bartender told him. “I can make you one.”
Five minutes after he started drinking it, not yet having checked-in to the hotel, fleeing Paris after having killed two people, and very recently proposing to a crazy kid he had just met that they rob banks together, Jules was floating with the same lightness that had always defined Los Angeles. He had wondered what people did in bars, how for half an hour, an hour, or more they could sit silently and immobile on seats from which it was surprising that they did not fall. And now he knew, because, for an hour or more, soaring like a condor on rum and sugar, he thought of the woman in the yellow silk dress – her hands, her hair, the magic of her face, the way she walked, the scent of her perfume, her eyes, her smile.
Although he couldn’t stop thinking of her, he understood that she had been just a brilliant, sudden, overwhelming flash, an imagined perfection that left its imprint upon the eyes even after it had vanished. And this, he realized, was the essence and object of Los Angeles itself, a work of the climate, terrain, vegetation, sea, and light. How wonderful that it could be found in the beauty of a woman apprehended in an instant as she smiled and passed by.
HE WENT TO BED early without dinner and the next morning was at the swimming pool at dawn. Never had he seen such a clean pool. He tried to find a leaf, a speck, perhaps a discarded peanut, but couldn’t. How did they do it? Was the water distilled? Stacks of rolled towels and tables with pitchers of lemon water flanked every entrance. Solid chaises with thick cushions lay unoccupied all around the pool. Nothing stirred, and the water was flat until he broke the surface and swam his accustomed kilometer, trying not to lose count of the laps.
After he went back upstairs, he shaved, dressed, straightened up the room, and made the bed. He always did that, and then tipped and thanked the maids, who wondered what he was up to. His room was plush. Two balconies overlooked the pool to the south and Los Angeles to the east. It seemed peaceful and green, although he knew there was more to it than that, and that he was holed up in a privileged enclave.