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Show 361 shop, and a clothing store, and had been told no six times and maybe once (one of the restaurants). That wasn't a bad ratio when you were out tracting. He stopped for lunch at a Denny's on Sepulveda and afterward found his way to the office and left another application. To reward himself he drove to the beach to digest his club sandwich and potato salad with the sound of breakers in his ears. He sat for an hour on an iron bench in a grassy enclosure on a bluff with the ocean at his back, next to a statue of St. Monica, while a bum in a soiled undershirt slept in the shade of a palm tree a few yards away. He watched the uniformed doorman pace back and forth chain-smoking under the canopy of the hotel across the street and tried to remember if you tipped doormen as you were going in or coming out. He had seen the last of Gloriana. She had not made the smallest gesture toward suggesting he stay another night at their house in case employers didn't fall out of the trees to give him a job that day. She hadn't asked him where he was going to stay that night either. He had stayed in the shower longer than he had intended, but she hadn't come into the bathroom to talk to him through the curtain while the room filled with steam, nor afterward while he was chastely wrapped in a towel standing in front of a cloudy mirror shaving-he would grow his beard back after he had a job, he decided-nor had she come downstairs to watch while he put on one of his missionary suits and thus transformed himself into something she had never seen, nor while he rolled up his sleeping bag and packed his toothbrush and deodorant back into his overnight case, and she hadn't gone with him when he carried everything out to his car. He had gone back to the house one last time to thank her and say goodbye and found her already curled up in a corner of the couch with books and papers spread out next to her and across the coffee table. She had looked up and said good luck and |
