Reverie at Red Light Leads to Heart-Stopping Encounter

They say when it’s this muggy, it can mess your mind. Maybe that was it, or maybe it was just the heat, or this virus I’ve been battling, but. . . .

I had stopped at a light on Pacific Coast Highway, mentally beaten up from a day at the office, when a woman in her early 20s pulled up next to me in a convertible. She tied up her hair in a red bandanna, and her forehead glistened ever so slightly with sweat. She took a swig from her water bottle, and it was at that instant that we exchanged glances. She mouthed “Hello,” and I nodded.

We played peekaboo at the light until she motioned for me to follow her, which I did for another three blocks until she pulled off PCH into a driveway. Her vanity plate read “VANESSA.” I parked in the adjoining space but kept the motor running. “Come on in,” she said. “You look like you could use some lemonade.”

I knew I should refuse and just back the car up and drive home.

“Maybe just a small glass,” I said, shutting off the engine.

I stayed four days, never leaving her house. Vanessa did all the shopping and cooking. When I said I’d be missed at work, she snickered. “Everybody’s replaceable,” she said.

“Are you a nymphomaniac?” I asked on the evening of the second day.

“I hate labels,” she said. “Why? Would it bother you if I were?”

On Day 3, I made the TV news. Colleagues shocked by my absence described me as a responsible worker who wrote “substantial, hard-hitting columns.” “He never defrauded the public with cheap columns,” one said, and I glowed with pride.

Sadly, TV used a bad photo--one of me holding up a six-pound trout that I’d caught on vacation long ago. “I can’t believe my parents gave them that one,” I said.

“Shut up, you big ape,” Vanessa said, mixing me another white Russian on the road to oblivion. “What have you got to complain about?”

I probably should get back, I told her.

“Let’s go someplace fun,” Vanessa said.

“OK, how about the Balboa Pier?”

“I was thinking more like the Riviera.”

“You are one crazy lady. I don’t even know where my passport is. I. . . .”

Fourteen hours later we were in Paris, checking into a $250-a-night hotel. “Hello, Rene,” Vanessa said to the concierge.

“ Bonsoir, Madame Vanessa. May I show you to your room?”

We dropped our bags inside the room. “I feel like boogieing,” Vanessa said. “How about it?”

“It’s 3 in the morning,” I whined.

Forty minutes later we were on the dance floor, dipping and twirling and laughing our heads off. “Tell me when you get tired!” I said above the din, but Vanessa just laughed.

We were dancing up a storm and the crowd had surged around us when the burly man with the high-pitched voice approached.

“Let’s dance, baby,” he said to Vanessa.

“Not a chance, pal,” I said.

“I was talking to the lady,” he said, pushing me aside.

“Talk’s cheap,” I said.

“The lady comes with me,” he retorted.

“Take a hike,” I countered, growing more confident with every exchange of cliches that I could come up with more than he.

I was correct--up to a point. Stumped for a comeback, he then remembered he had a derringer in his waistband for just such occasions. He pressed it to my side.

“The party’s over,” he said.

Thinking I saw his grip loosen on the pistol, I lunged at him, remembering too late my father’s long-ago advice never to lunge at a motorcycle cop or a burly person.

“It will be certain death,” he had told me.

Would that I had remembered. The man squeezed the tiny trigger, sending a tiny bullet into my rib cage.

I fell to the floor and heard someone call for an ambulance. For one hallucinatory moment, I thought I saw Vanessa leaving with the burly man.

But no, she was kneeling over me, patting my head with her bandanna--the same one she’d worn the first time I saw her on PCH. “Please stop shrieking,” she said softly. “It’s embarrassing.”

That quieted me. I lay wheezing on the Parisian dance floor as the lights of the nightclub spun wildly overhead. I searched out Vanessa’s eyes for one last look, having already resigned myself to the fact that following her home had been a serious, serious mistake.

Suddenly, I was vaguely aware of some clatter and then a cacophony of horns honking.

“What’s the matter--you dead, bud?” someone cried out.

I snapped to consciousness. The bank of lights changed above the highway on PCH, and traffic peeled away from the line. The woman in the car next to me waved and sped away, leaving me lost in my semi-daze and wondering if I could find my way home.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.