Mariko's white BMW sped across the narrow highway as the sun rose. Matt was still recovering from his bruises from the day before and groggy from his second 5 a.m. wake-up in a row. The early morning drive into the high desert, the sticky sweet scent of the sage blooming on the side of the road – it was just like the morning before. How could things have gone so out of control so fast? He asked himself if this was normal life in the real world. Then he remembered his high school days, college finals and the bleak three years at the telecommunications plant.
High school in Auburn was unremarkable, except for getting suspended for insubordination after refusing to run an extra lap and pushing back when the gym teacher pushed him. So was community college, except there wasn't even a fight with the gym teacher to look back on. Just the basic courses, the French he'd always wanted to learn, plus the credits he needed in electronics for a job at Voxtel, one of the only games in town, the telecommunications equipment company where his dad worked.
Because he could read a schematic, he eventually set up test benches for the new equipment, did the quality control checks, compiled the printouts and filed them in a report to his department head. It was a living, he eventually decided, but not much of a life. Two years went by, punctuated only by an occasional date, mostly with girls that family friends thought would be good for him. Some were with women he met while he was taking the family Doberman, Alex, for a run in the park. None had anything to offer beyond a quiet life in town and another 30 years of setting up tests for telephone equipment.
One day a film crew came up from Hollywood, a couple of guys with a Japanese production company making a video for Voxtel stockholders. They were filming Matt while he ran a test. He got to talking with them, and they told him there were hundreds of jobs for electricians on film sets around Los Angeles. They even gave him the name of an employment agency that could set him up with assignments.
It was just the excuse he'd been looking for.
His dad was furious and wouldn't speak to him as he packed up to leave. His stepmother and her daughter, his half-sister, said goodbye, without much emotion invested. He rented a cheap apartment off Melrose, bounced from job to job on low-budget films and the occasional porn video, and met Mariko one night when he saw she was reading Rimbaud's A Season in Hell at the back of the Black Cat Café.
His dad was furious and wouldn't speak to him as he packed up to leave. His stepmother and her daughter, his half-sister, said goodbye, without much emotion invested. He rented a cheap apartment off Melrose, bounced from job to job on low-budget films and the occasional porn video, and met Mariko one night when he saw she was reading Rimbaud's A Season in Hell at the back of the Black Cat Café.
"Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un grand festin oú tous les vins coulaient et tous les femmes dansaient," he recited from his college French course. They had a couple of dinners together before things got more serious. For the first time since he was a kid, there were things about a woman that he didn't understand and he wanted to be with her until he did, and maybe even after that. Then, for the past month, he realized he wasn't spending any time in his apartment, just hanging out at her house while her dad was in Japan. Was this love? Whatever it was, he'd never been happier.
He watched her as she turned toward the dry lakebed where the space shuttle used to land, passing a series of Quonset huts on their left. She grew up in Beverly Hills, with her father shuttling back and forth across the Pacific. Her mother, too, until she'd had enough and just stayed in Tokyo one day. So with her father on business most of the time, Mariko had spent the last couple of years on her own, finishing high school, nightclubbing, knocking about, a couple of semesters of French at UCLA, but mostly shopping, going to the gym and wasting time. Until now.
She looked over to see Matt was dozing off again. He wasn't like the other guys she dated in high school or college – they were all striving for something. But in his escape from the grind of his test bench, he'd already found it. She knew what it was, too – the freedom from that grind. But she also knew that freedom is hard to find, but it is always harder to deal with afterward.
And that would be Matt's challenge. And she knew he'd struggle with it, that he'd be afraid any choice he'd make would find him feeling trapped again. And she knew once he'd found a path to follow, it might be one without her.
She knew all this without saying it. And she was confident he didn't understand as much about himself as she did. And she thought if she gave voice to her ideas he might get defensive.
She also knew this about Matt: He might look pretty tough, but his life had been pretty sheltered in a small-town way up until now. And the last few years of staying on her own had given her some insights and strengths for dealing with people and situations that she'd learned to use to her advantage.
Which she was about to do right now.
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