"Did you ever care about me?" she asks again. I don't say anything, look back at the menu. "What do you care about? What makes you happy?" "It's hard to feel sorry for someone who doesn't care." You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it." I felt sorry for you for a little while, but then I found it hard to. It was just beyond you." She takes another sip of her wine. Other people made an effort and you just. "I don't know if any other person I've been with has been really there, either. I look at her, waiting for her to go on, looking up at the billboard. Oh shit, this isn't going to make any sense." She stops. You were kind." She looks down and then goes on. "I thought about it and yeah, I did once. "Did you ever love me?" I ask her back, though by now I can't even care. That's all I wanted to know." She sips her wine. She draws in a breath and says, "Thank you. "Just tell me," she says, her voice rising. I remember the first time we made love, in the house in Palm Springs, her body tan and wet, lying against cool, white sheets. On the terrace the sun bursts into my eyes and for one blinding moment I see myself clearly. I'm studying a billboard and say that I didn't hear what she said. All it comes down to is the fact that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.”
Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire's car. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk.
She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.
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