...of left aghast

"Lauren?" said Martha.
Lauren turned in the hall and went back to the room, and didn't look at Jules or anything around her. She stood before the window and the lights of Columbus Street poured past her to the bay, and she finally took her wallet and put it in her purse and walked out of the room, leaving Jules on the bed. Martha was still in the hall. She asked if Lauren was all right. Lauren said nothing, and Martha looked back to the room. "Do you want me to watch the baby?" she said. Lauren didn't answer.
Forty minutes later Lauren was at the airport. She never remembered later how she got there. She bought a plane ticket. She assumed she was buying a ticket for Kansas. She sat in the lobby waiting for her flight, and as she heard him tell it all again, just as he had on the telephone, a voice cut in announcing her flight. She was in the airplane ten minutes later. And hour and ten minutes later she was in Los Angeles.
She walked out of the terminal, somehow under the impression she was in Kansas. In the taxi she vaguely peered out the window and looked at the tall grass. At Sunset and La Cienega she got out of the taxi and began walking west along the Strip. It was one in the morning. She didn't know the time. In her head, over and over, as in the airport, she heard the things he'd said to her on the telephone; she didn't hear the jangling guitars, or the comments men made as she passed. She wasn't thinking so much about what he had said as simply hearing it again and again; she wasn't mulling over the betrayal of it, or becoming enraged that he should stay for the birth of a child who was illegitimately his when he didn't care enough to be present for the birth of the child he had with his own wife. No. She walked the Strip at one in the morning as though the phone conversation had hurled her into her own time, when it was not one in the morning, or ten in the morning, or ten in the evening, or midnight. She was too brutalised by it to care much for the fine shadings of betrayal or bitterness or especially rage; rather she was somehow set on course toward the most foreign thing she could find, whatever that might be. Walking there on the Strip, with the shop windows passing her and the faces of strange men caught in the glow of their cigarettes, she was only vaguely aware of the danger, and not aggressively running from it or for it; she didn't care. She didn't care. She wanted only to walk away from whatever became too familiar to her too quickly; the moment she passed a shop window, it was as though she had stared into it forever. She wanted to walk away from the men and the stunning glow of cigarettes. The clubs emptied, bottles rolled across the sidewalks, the bars glistened of bourbon. Like a torch, the blonde glided along the Strip under the gaze of a hundred men.

[Days Between Stations, Erickson, S.]