Just Another Dame Traveling Through Los Angeles

So we were spilled out into Union Station and the connecting train was not yet there and I headed into the main lobby to get my bearings. It was a beautiful summer night in Los Angeles, and I was in a Raymond Chandler state of mind as I looked around the grand old train station with its vaulted ceilings and wooden benches, the Spanish tiles and art deco motifs, and the old-fashioned schedule board with arrivals and departures lit up red and green. 

Outside the building, tall palm trees were etched against a pink sky, and the air was soft, but the streets would soon grow dark with something more than night, and I was just another dame traveling through L.A., waiting for the Coast Starlight. I wandered over to the counter to ask a ticket agent about the gate, and a fifty-something fellow in a cheap blue suit overheard my question and decided he and I had some kind of relationship because that was his train too. He stepped forward and leaned toward the agent.

“She’s with me.”

Like hell I am, I thought.

The guy had heavily bagged eyes and drooping jowls, and his face was covered in creases, and he was wearing white shoes with his blue suit, and I wouldn’t hold any of that against him, but his voice was as thick and slurred as sludge, and he was shoving himself a little too far into what I considered my personal space, telling me not to worry because he’s going there too, and why don’t we just duck into that little place and have a drink together. He was no Philip Marlowe, either. I jerked away from him as a startled fawn might, had he startled a fawn and it jerked away from him.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not. I just feel it that way. I’ll play it alone.”

I glanced up at the face of the big round clock. The hands said it was getting towards eight o’clock. A frat-boy turned businessman in a short-sleeved shirt was speaking sharply into his cell phone. He was the kind who was perennially annoyed, the kind who liked his coffee black, strong, and made this year, the kind who had a son of a bitch for a boss and thought at least the trains should run on time. Two putty-faced women carrying shopping bags from Chico’s were circling in search of a rest room, a fit-looking young man with a suntan and a ponytail entered via bicycle, and a long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blonde sat at ease in one of the chairs.

It was a waiting game.

The blue suit emerged, fortified, from the bar, and there I was, looking like a lot of class, I guess, from thirty feet away, and he made a beeline to me and bared his teeth like we were old acquaintances. He was no stranger to rejection, I was sure of that, but it hadn’t made him shy.

When I was a girl, I would have felt sorry for him; I would have tried to elude him without hurting his feelings, and my pity, misinterpreted, would have fueled more passionate pursuit.

With maturity, however, there comes the ability to be clear and unequivocal. And I was. And he left.

I took a swig of water, then sat down and opened my book with hands that were not too steady. I thought lots of things. It got later.