The Mural. Michael Mallory

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СКАЧАТЬ else to get what little gratification he needed. That explained everything else: the drinking, the argumentativeness, the trouble at the office. Explained it nicely, neatly, color-coded and with a slogan.

      Elley felt a dry, warm weight on her fingers. It was Blaise’s hand, casually sliding onto hers, so casually that anyone watching would simply have assumed they were a married couple. After all, they were both wearing wedding rings. “Please don’t,” she said, without opening her eyes. His hand slid back off.

      Actually feeling hurt by Jack’s infidelity threw conflict and confusion into her status quo existence. It was not as though she was guiltless. She and Blaise had been screwing around for a couple of years now, but in her mind, it was not an affair; certainly not a love affair. Blaise was conducting a love affair with himself, with which no woman could possibly compete. Her opening up for him was a business arrangement, nothing more. For a woman, sleeping with the boss was the modern equivalent of paying union dues: you did it to keep your job. And that was imperative since Jack was not making so much that she could jeopardize her employment. And now that he was clearly antagonizing his boss, she had to be particularly vigilant.

      Hell, she doubted Jack had any idea it was going on. He was too attuned to his own problems, real, imagined, or bottled.

      So then, why did she feel so shitty?

      Maybe because her impractical, sometimes impossible, increasingly toasted, but basically decent husband meant more to her than she had stopped to consider for a long, long time.

      Maybe because getting that phone call was like a sharp slap in the face.

      Maybe because she didn’t want to be a forty-year-old divorcee in a couple of years.

      “Fuck,” Elley uttered.

      “Later, later,” Blaise whispered.

      Elley opened her eyes and looked at him. Blaise Micelli was good looking enough. He was a well-preserved forty-nine, vigorous and wielding that kind of in-born sexiness that you either have or you don’t, no matter how your facial features are arranged. But looking at him, she could only think of him in the past tense.

      Somehow, she would work things out with Jack. Somehow, she had to.

      The plane suddenly bucked and Elley groaned. “Could you get me a headset, please?” she asked.

      “Sure.” Blaise signaled for the flight attendant and got the cheap headset. “I hope whatever you’re coming down with isn’t going to impact our business.” She was not sure which business he was referencing. As she plugged the headset into the plane’s music channel she said: “I’m sorry, Blaise, I’ll try to get it together for the meetings.” Slipping it on, she closed her eyes again.

      And damned if Jack’s smiling face wasn’t the first thing she saw out of the darkness.

      * * * * * * *

      “But how come Mommy’s not going to be there?” Robynn asked her father as they sped up the Pacific Coast Highway.

      “Punkin, like I said, Mommy went on a trip,” Jack replied. “We’ll see her when we get back home.”

      Robynn frowned. “I wish she were with us.”

      “I know you do.”

      They were three hours up the coast from L.A. and traffic was good, which was a rare treat. They were zipping past miles of crop fields, beans and strawberries, mostly, punctuated by an occasional vineyard. Aside from missing her mother, which was understandable, Robynn’s behavior in the car had been far, far better than Jack expected, given the black mood in which she had arisen that morning. She had remained calm while strapped into the car seat beside him in the pickup truck—something she did not always take so placidly—and she had spent most of the trip playing with a plush monkey that she had named “Mr. Booty,” because its white feet made it look like it was wearing boots.

      “Daddy, I have to go,” she said, as they zoomed past the green highway sign promising a town called Tarelton to be the next exit.

      Her timing was better than usual. Normally Robynn waited until they were just past a turn-off to declare her needs. “Okay, I’ll pull off in this next town and we’ll find a place, and maybe we can get a soda or some ice cream or something while we’re there,” Jack said.

      “Okay!”

      Robynn sang softly to Mr. Booty for the few miles it took to arrive in downtown Tarelton, which was three blocks long and looked like the Western street from a film studio back lot. Most of the buildings dated back to the late 1800s, though there had clearly been a concentrated effort in recent years to renovate, if not completely remodel, some of them. One old brick building that appeared to have been a fire house at one time looked freshly tuck-pointed. Jack had never thought of central California as a bastion of the Old West, but these days, old towns did whatever it took to bring in the tourists. Three men ambled out of a feed store connected to a towering grain elevator on the main drag as Jack drove by, each one in jeans and a white lacquered straw cowboy hat. Jack pulled his truck into a space in front of an old brick building whose bottom floor housed a bar and grill. Next to it, in a small, recently remodeled store front, whose design contrasted with the Victorian-era buildings around it, was an ice cream shop, and when Robynn saw it, she dropped Mr. Booty on the floor and started to try and unbuckle herself from the car seat.

      “Whoa, whoa, punkin, hang on, you can’t do that yourself,” Jack said, reaching over and unfastening the buckle. “We’ll get there in plenty of time, wait for me.”

      “I want p’stacio nut.”

      “We’ll see if they have it.”

      The two of them were the only customers in the ice cream shop, which unlike practically every eatery in Los Angeles except the major junk food chains boasted of a public restroom. Jack got the key from the bored-looking teenaged girl behind the counter and opened the door, but Robynn went in on her own.

      She was getting so big.

      It turned out the place did not have pistachio nut, but it did have bubble gum, which appealed to Robynn even more. Jack ordered a bottle of water for himself and the two retired to one of the small, wobbly tables in the shop. While Robynn was happily licking her cone, Jack pulled out his cell phone and called Dani to tell her that he was coming up, but got her inbox. “Hey, it’s Jack,” he said into the phone. “Don’t be shocked, but I’m on my way back up to San Simeon. The second set of pictures at Wood City didn’t turn out either, so I’m going to take another set. I may need to get a new camera, though. I have my daughter with me. I’m going to be staying at the same place. You’ve got my cell number if you need it. Bye.”

      “Who were you calling?” Robynn asked.

      “Oh, just a friend,” Jack said. Putting the phone back into his shirt pocket, he started staring silently at a poster that had been taped up on the wall of the place, showing a triple-decker Neapolitan ice cream cone, with a scoop of vanilla on the bottom of the stack, strawberry in the middle, chocolate on top. The colors were somewhat off, so that the strawberry was more flesh tone than pink and the chocolate was a dark almond. It did not take much imagination to get a skin tone out of it as well, a bronzed, beach-tan skin tone. Jack kept looking at the join between the flesh and the bronze, the way they almost melted into each other, and he began to see two bodies: his and Dani’s. Jack was the pink layer and she was the bronze, rubbing wetly up against him, glistening with the sweat of passion. СКАЧАТЬ