The Pacific Star Diner was a little wooden cafe on the rim of the slum business section. Mary Anne opened the screen door and entered. A taxi driver and two workmen in black leather jackets sat at the counter drinking coffee and reading the sporting green of the San Francisco Chronicle. In one of the booths was a solemn Negro couple.
"Can I order anything I want?" Eyes sparkling, she slid into an empty booth at the rear.
"Of course," Schilling said, reaching for the menu.
"I want what I said, still. Will they give it to me?"
"If they don't, we'll go somewhere else."
The counter man, a middle-aged Greek wearing a soiled white apron, approached and took their order.
"How long will it be?" Mary Anne asked Schilling as the Greek went back to get ham from the refrigerator. "It won't be long, will it?"
"Only a couple of minutes."
"I'm starving." She began to read the titles on the jukebox selector. "Look-these are all jump tunes. All 'Jazz at the Phil' stuff ... could I play one? Could I play this Roy Brown tune? 'Good Rockin' Tonight,' it's called. Would you mind?"
He found some change and pushed it across to her.
"Thanks," she said shyly, dropping a coin into the selector and rotating the dial. Presently the cafe boomed with the noise of an alto saxophone.
"I guess it's pretty terrible," Mary Anne said as the racket finally subsided. She made no move to pick up any more money from the little heap, and Schilling asked:
"Aren't you going to play any others?"
"They're no good."
"Don't say that. Those men are artists in their field. I don't want you to give up what you enjoy in favor of what I like."
"But what you like is better."
"Not necessarily."
"If it isn't better, then why do you like it?" Mary Anne reached eagerly for a paper napkin. "Here comes the food. I'm going to ask Harry to sit down and eat with us." She explained, "That's Harry carrying the food."
"How do you know his name is Harry?"
"I just know; all Greeks are named Harry." When the man had reached the table and his long arms were beginning to push out the platters of food, Mary Anne announced: "Harry, please sit down; we want you to join us."
The Greek grinned. "Sorry, Miss."
"Come on. Whatever you want; we'll pay for it."
"I'm on a diet," the Greek told her, wiping off the table with his damp rag. "I can't eat anything but orange juice."
"I don't believe he's really a Greek," Mary Anne said to Schilling as the counter man went off. "I'll bet his name isn't even Harry."
"Probably not," Schilling agreed, starting to eat. The food was good and he ate a great deal. Presently, across from him, the girl finished the last of her coffee, pushed away her plate, and said:
"I'm through."
She had already finished, and completely so. Lighting a cigarette, she sat smiling at him across the yellow-moist table. "Still hungry?" he asked. "Want more?"
"No. That's enough." Her attention wandered. "I wonder what it's like to run a little cafe ... you could get all you wanted to eat, any time of the day. You could live in the back ... do you suppose he lives in the back? Do you suppose he has a big family?"
"All Greeks have big families."
The girl's fingers drummed restlessly on the surface of the table. "Could we take a walk? But maybe you don't like to walk."
"I used to walk all the time, before I got the car. And I didn't find that it hurt me." He finished his food, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and got up. "So let's go take our walk."
He paid Harry, who lounged at the cash register, and then they strolled outside onto the dark street. Fewer people were visible and most of the stores had shut off their lights for the night. Hands in her pockets, purse under her arm, Mary Anne marched along. Schilling followed behind her, letting her choose her own direction. But she had no particular course in mind; at the end of the block she halted.
"We could go anywhere," she declared.
"That's so."
"How far do you suppose we could walk? Would we still be walking when the sun came up?"
"Well," Schilling said, "probably not." It was eleven-fifteen. "We'd have to walk for seven hours."
"Where would we be then?"
He calculated. "We might make it to Los Gatos, if we kept on the main highway."
"Have you ever been in Los Gatos?"
"Once. That was back in 1949, when I was still working for Allison and Hirsch. I had a vacation, and we were on our way to Santa Cruz."
Mary Anne asked: "Who is 'we'? "
"Max and myself."
Walking slowly across the street she said: "How close were you and Beth?"
"At one time we were very close."
"As close as you and I?"
"Not as close as you and I." He wanted to be honest with her, so he said: "We spent a night together at a cabin up along the Potomac, in a little old lock-keeper's cabin on the old canal. The next morning I brought her back to town."
"That was when Danny Coombs tried to kill you, wasn't it?"
"Yes," he admitted.
"You weren't telling me the truth before." But there was no rancor in her voice. "You said you hadn't been with her."
"Beth-wasn't his wife then." This time he couldn't tell her the truth, because he couldn't expect her to understand. The situation had to be experienced.
"Did you love her?"
"No, absolutely not. It was a mistake on my part-I always regretted it."
"But you love me."
"Yes," he said. And he meant it very much.
Satisfied, the girl strolled on. But after a time she seemed to fall back into worry. "Joseph," she said, "why did you go with her if you didn't love her? Is that right?"
"No, I suppose not. But with her it was a regular event ... I wasn't the first, nor the last." So he had to explain anyhow. "She was-well, available. Physical acts of that sort happen. Tensions build up. .. they have to be expiated in some fashion. No personal element is involved."
"Did you ever love anybody before me?"
"There was a woman named Irma Fleming who I loved a great deal." He was silent for a moment, thinking back to his wife, whom he hadn't seen in years. He and Irma had legally separated in-good God-1936. The year Alf Landon ran for president. "But," he said, "that was a long time ago." It certainly was.
"How long ago?" Mary Anne asked.
"I'd rather not say." There were a lot of things, related things, he would rather he didn't have to say.
"If I asked, would you tell me your age?"
"I'm fifty-eight years old, Mary."
"Oh." She nodded. "That's about what I thought."
They had reached the car wash at the edge of the main highway. Seeing it, Schilling recalled the first hour he had spent in Pacific Park: the Negro named Bill who had owned the car wash, and his assistant who had been somewhere getting a Coke. And the dark-haired high school girl.
"Did you go to this high school?" he asked.
"Sure. It's the only one around."
"When was that?" He could, easily, picture her as a high school girl; he could imagine her in sweater and skirt, carrying a few textbooks, roaming, as the dark-haired girl had roamed, from the high school to Foster's Freeze at three o'clock in the warm midsummer afternoon.
Fresh little breasts, he thought almost sadly. Like cakes of yeast. The lightly downy body, growing and budding ... and, from it, the smell of spring.
"That was a couple of years ago," Mary Anne said. "I hated school. All the dumb kids."
"You were a kid, too."
"But I wasn't dumb," she said, and he could well believe it.
Beyond the closed-up car wash was a small roadside ceramics shop. A few lights were still on; a woman in a long smock was carrying pottery into the building.
"Buy me something," Mary Anne said suddenly. "Buy me a cup or a flowerpot-something I can have."
Schilling approached the woman. "Is it too late?" he asked.
"No," the woman said, continuing. "You can have anything you see. But excuse me if I don't stop."
Together, he and Mary Anne walked among the bowls and vases and plates and jars and wall planters. "Do you see anything you want?" he asked. Most of it was the usual garish oddities sold to motorists.
"You pick it out," Mary Anne urged.
He looked and found a simple clay dish glazed a light speckled blue. Paying the woman, he carried it to Mary Anne; she stood waiting at the edge of the field.
"Thank you," she said shyly, accepting the dish. "It's nice."
"It isn't ornate, at least."
Carrying her dish, Mary Anne wandered on. Now they had left the stores behind; they were approaching a dark square of trees at the edge of town. "What's that?" Schilling asked.
"A park. People come and eat picnics here." The entrance was barred by a hanging chain, but she stepped over it and continued on toward the first table. "Nobody's supposed to be in here at night, but they never bother to check. We used to come here all the time ... us kids from school. We used to drive up here at night and park and leave the car and go on inside on foot."
Beyond the table was a stone barbecue pit, a trash can, and, after that, a drinking fountain. A tangle of trees and shrubs grew around the picnic area, a chaotic blur of night.
Sitting down on the bench beside the table, Mary Anne leaned back and waited for him to catch up. The dirt slope was an upgrade, and he found himself short of breath by the time he had reached her. "It's pleasant here," he said, lowering himself to the bench beside her. "But the other one has the duck."
"Oh, yes," she said. "That big drake. He's been there for years. But I can remember when he was a baby."
"You like him?"
"Sure, but he tried to bite me once. Anyhow, that park's for the pensioners." She looked around her. "In summer we used to sit here, when it was nice and hot, drinking beer and listening to a Zenith portable we carried around. I forget who it belonged to. It fell out of the car one day and got smashed."
Holding her blue dish on her lap, she carefully examined it.
"At night," she said, "you aren't able to tell what color it is."
"It's blue," Schilling said.
"Is it painted?"
"No," he explained, "it's a fire-baked glaze. It's put on with a brush and the whole affair is stuck in a kiln."
"You know almost everything there is."
"Well, I've seen pottery fired, if that's what you mean."
"Have you been all over the world?"
He laughed at the thought. "No, only to Europe. England, France, a year or so in Germany. Not even all of Europe."
"Can you speak German?"
"Fairly well."
"French?"
"Not so well."
"I took two years of Spanish in high school," Mary Anne said. "Now I can't remember any of it."
"You'd get it back if you ever needed it."
"I'd like to travel," she said. "I'd like to visit South America and Europe and the Orient. What do you suppose it's like in Japan? My roommate has a brother who was in Japan after the war. He sent her a lot of ashtrays and trick boxes and lovely silk curtains and a silver letter opener."
"Japan would be nice," Schilling said. "Let's go there, then."
"All right," he agreed, "we'll go there first."
For a period Mary Anne was silent. "Do you realize," she
said finally, "that if I dropped this dish it, would smash to smithereens?"
"It probably would."
"What then!"
"Then," Schilling said, "I'd get you another."
Abruptly, Mary Anne hopped down from the bench. "Let's walk. Will we get hit and killed if we walk along the highway?"
"It's possible."
She said: "I want to, anyhow."
It was eleven-forty-five. They walked two hours, neither of them saying much, concentrating instead on the cars that rushed past them every now and then, stepping off the highway, standing on the weedy ground, and then starting back again when each car was gone.
Shortly before two o'clock they neared an island of lights growing by the highway. Presently the lights resolved into a Shell station, a closed-up fruit stand, and a tavern. A pair of autos were parked in the lot outside the tavern. A GOLDEN GLOW neon sign gleamed in the window; the sound of voices and laughter drifted out into the night.
Walking across the lot, Mary Anne threw herself down on the steps of the tavern. "I can't go any farther," she said.
"No," Schilling agreed, halting beside her. "Neither can I."
He went inside and telephoned the Yellow Cab people. Fifteen minutes later a cab drove into the lot and slowed to a stop beside them. The driver threw open the door and said: "Hop in, folks."
As they rode back toward Pacific Park, Mary Anne lay watching the dark highway move past. "I'm tired," she said once, very softly.
"You must be," Schilling said.
"These weren't the proper shoes." She had lifted her feet up and tucked them under her. "How do you feel?"
"I'm fine," he said, which was true. "I don't even think I'll be stiff tomorrow," he added, which was probably not true.
"Maybe we could go hiking again sometime," Mary Anne said. "When we have the proper shoes and all the rest. There's a nice place over toward the mountains ... it's up high, and you can see for miles."
"That sounds wonderful." It really did, tired as he was. "If you want, we could drive part of the way, park the car, and walk on from there."
"Here you are, folks," the driver said cheerfully, drawing to a stop in front of Mary Anne's apartment building. "You want me to wait?" he asked, opening the door.
"Yes, wait," Schilling instructed him. He and the girl climbed the stairs; he held the door open for her and she glided on inside, under the arch of his arm.
In the lobby she halted. She still had tight hold of her blue dish. "Joseph," she said, "good night."
"Good night," he said. Leaning forward, he kissed her on the cheek. Smiling, she raised her face expectantly. "Take care of yourself." he said to her. That was all he could think of.
"I will," she promised and, turning, hurried up the stairs.
Schilling found his way back out onto the porch of the building. There was the cab, its parking lights on, waiting for him. He had descended the concrete steps and was starting to climb into it when he remembered his own car. The Dodge, moist and dark, was parked only a few yards up the street; it had completely slipped his mind.
"I'll walk," he said to the taxi driver. "How much do I owe you?"
The driver slammed the meter arm down and tore off the paper receipt. "Nine dollars and eighty-five cents," he said with benign pleasure.
Schilling paid him and then walked stiffly to his own car. The upholstery, as he got in, was cold and repellent. And the motor sputtered unevenly when he started it. He allowed it to warm for several minutes before he released the parking brake and drove out into the silent, empty street.