Free Abandon by Pico Iyer Page A

injunctions. “Sell your cleverness. Buy bewilderment.” By the time his watch had reached three-thirty, though, he realized he was taking in not a thing: all he could register was the car that wasn’t arriving. He saw a pay phone outside the store, and went across to dial his own number. When it answered, he heard, as he’d expected, his own voice, closely followed by her own. “Hi. I’m really sorry. I’ll be there soon. I was going to be on time, and then something came up.” Her voice almost cracked. “Please don’t give up on me. Please?”
    He put down the phone and took a long walk around the block. When he came back, though, there was still no sign of the oversized car made for family vacations. He went into Follow Your Heart and bought some dates—the treat, she’d said, her sister always brought back for her from trips to the Middle East.
    Back in the car, he picked up the book again, and turned the pages without reading them. Then at last, a few minutes after four, he heard a thump, and saw the car that he remembered bump into the lot. There was fresh mud on its fenders, and its left-hand indicator was winking for a right-hand turn. It lurched into the small space and then paused, as if searching for a space that would be big enough. Then she eased it into a spot and for a few long moments there was nothing.
    When she got out at last, he saw no one he could recognize. It was as if a pale facsimile of her had come up here, with all the spirit absent. “I’m so sorry,” she said, as soon as she caught sight of him. “I was hoping and hoping I wouldn’t screw this up.”
    “That’s all right. You’re here now. It’s still light.”
    “It is,” she said. “Thank you.” And a little color came back to her face. “Thank you for not giving up on me.” She took a deep breath. “Can we still go on that drive?”
    “If you’d like.”
    “I’d really like. That road we went on before?”
    She got into the car, and placed a blue overnight case at her feet. Then, as he began driving along the hills, she said, “Are you mad?” and jammed a tape into his system as if to drown out the answer. By the time he turned off the main road, and onto the narrow one that curls around the mountains—bare golden hills above them, and the city half lost in a haze below—Bing Crosby was singing about tropical sunsets and girls with flowers in their hair. Someone else, with an old voice that made him think of Fred Astaire, was hymning the Southern Seas, and the moon over Burma; there was a song about a cruise, a shipboard romance, the sadness as the port came into view.
    She looked out the window, alert, expectant as a visitor.
    “All these songs about traveling?” The traffic had thinned out now; Santa Barbara was a greyish blur in the distance.
    “When I was young, I always thought I’d travel.”
    “And in fact?”
    “In fact, I haven’t.” The trace of anger that lay just behind the eagerness.
    “Well, you can make up for it now,” he said brightly, and then realized that what he’d said could be taken in the wrong way.
    “I will,” she said. “I am.” The light slowly returning to her voice.
    The sky looked guiltless as they crossed the Pass, and each curve brought them some new outline of a house, barricaded behind gates and rebuking the ash-filled slopes all around. “Like phoenixes,” she said, and he thought that she was right: they were indeed like mythical creatures of a kind, living far above the city, in a place where they were sure nothing bad could happen to them.
    A man was jogging along the narrow, steep road, a dog bounding beside him, and the sea far below. Though it was a Saturday in summer, few other cars were to be seen, and, high above, the tumult of the town far away, it was easier to believe that you were in some previous California, before anyone had thought to call it Eden. The smell of wild anise, and the sky sharp over the lake to the north; an absolute emptiness