Читать книгу Twentynine Palms - Daniel Pyne - Страница 8

Now, a woman, improbably beautiful, coiled naked in the low hills of a white down duvet, waits for Jack, hopes crashing. Her platinum hair is tangled, her face flushed from lovemaking just minutes ago, eyes liquid, thighs slick. She’s three weeks past forty.

A toilet flushes. Watching him come out from the bathroom and circle the bed, Hannah’s face is willfully empty of emotion, as if to suggest it doesn’t matter what Jack does now, which only underlines the utter desperation that overtakes her despite the Ativan she popped as soon as he uncoupled and rolled out of bed.

Golf tees spill, scatter across the red Spanish pavers from the pocket of his shorts. He gropes for them. “Shit.”

“Don’t worry about it. Rosaria will clean up in here later.” Hannah stretches out, her breasts, nearly perfect spheres, levitating, defying all Newton’s laws of gravity. “Unless you can’t afford to waste the tees. Do you need money?” Then she covers her mouth, as if coy. “Oops. Sorry. Oh, Hannah, you castrating little slut.”

He smiles mechanically, pulls the baggy shorts up his legs, in a hurry, buttons them, feeling once again the urgent need to get out. White polo shirt. High-tech huaraches.

“I didn’t mean it.” Her voice reaches for him, clutches at him. He’s got to walk out now. “Shit. I’m not good at this part. Listen, baby, what if we—” She stops, he’s looking back at her. “No,” she realizes. Tears well in her eyes. “No.”

Tears, from cold blue eyes.

He leans down and kisses her forehead lightly before he walks out.

Jack is thirty-five.

It’s the year of the Rat.

Later, in his apartment, Jack’s face, like the rest of him, is glazed with sweat from the midday L.A. heat.

His eyes are closed. Only one of them needs to be. He is blind if he opens the wrong one, but that seldom happens and he doesn’t think about it. A world of diminished perspective is, for Jack, status quo. Colors explode against the inside of his eyelid, blossom with the hum of an electric fan. Damp tendrils of his hair tremble in the machine-made breeze.

A phone is ringing.

Jack’s eyes open. He waits.

He’s pretty sure it’s Hannah.

Calculating: she would still be in bed. He smells her perfume, Vera Wang, mixed with the residue of their recent, workmanlike act of copulation. It’s a smell, he decides, that is more than a little unpleasant.

The phone rings, and rings, and rings.

An off-key beep, followed by a moment of silence, then a freakishly compressed voice surges through the cheap speaker of the answering machine.

“Jack?” Jack doesn’t move. “Hey, Jack, it’s Tory. Are you there, man? Jack?” Tory. Shit. “You left your cell phone here.”

Shit.

“Must’ve been, I don’t know, yesterday? And you didn’t fucking notice? I mean, hell, what kind of actor are you, Jack? I mean, yo, it’s kind of like that joke about the actor who comes home, his wife’s been raped by his agent, his kids sold into white slavery, his house burned to the ground, and the guy’s like, ‘My agent came to my house?’” Tory laughs, then lapses into silence. Expecting Jack to pick up, irritated that he doesn’t. A short, frustrated intake of breath: “Okay. Anyway. Your phone’s here. Call me. I’m home.”

Dial tone. Silence. Jack closes his eyes again. Cell phone. Fuck. Goddamn it. Shit.

He imagines the Hope Ranch house, sun through the French doors, Tory standing in the middle of the cavernous ballroom, holding Jack’s cheap Nokia like it’s some kind of radioactive waste, his eyes dead, pretty and mean in the way married money will spoil the flesh and rot the soul. When Tory’s short fuse is lit, the slender muscles of his neck will tighten and relax, tighten and relax.

Wondering about Jack’s fucking phone.

Jack could have left it. That’s possible. Not yesterday, but Tuesday, when he was last up there, helping Tory clean out the Montecito garage before the old house went on the market. But two days had passed. Tory is right. It’s inconceivable Jack wouldn’t know his phone was gone.

A dull, tingling, vacant rolling dread gathers in Jack’s chest, slow crawling, connected to nothing, borne of the boy’s unknown, the boy’s unknowable, and the immutable yearning for acceptance by that which can never give it. Tory was Jack’s event horizon, and, once inside his gravitational pull, falling into the black hole was a certainty. That they have remained friends is as baffling to Jack as the compressed planes of his halved vision. And what has happened with Hannah is so primal that Jack knows, has known from the beginning, it would, must, inevitably catalyze a spectacular meltdown.

Jack doesn’t, however, regret what he’s done.

His mind calculates. If he’d left the phone at Tory’s on Tuesday, not today after fucking Hannah (twice) at noon and then telling her the affair was over—if he’d really left the phone on Tuesday while cleaning the old house and discovered it missing when he got back to L.A. and didn’t know where it was or where he’d left it and wasn’t patient enough to retrace his steps since he was, say, waiting for a call from his agent—couldn’t Jack simply have replaced it? Visit a T-Mobile store, buy a new calling plan, get the free RAZR. After all, Jack had been talking about giving Verizon the shitcan for months because he kept losing the signal on Olympic between Roxbury and McCarthy Vista, a vortex of wireless cross-cancellation so frustrating that a few of Jack’s other actor friends had stopped driving the Olympic corridor altogether.

Jack has a new phone. Which is why he didn’t realize (or care) that the old one was at Tory’s. Which explains everything except why it was in the master bedroom. Well, Rosario could have found it and put it there, not knowing whose it was, which works, until Tory asks Rosario—

• or Jack could just talk to Hannah and she—

• no, talking to Hannah would—

• talking to Hannah wouldn’t—

• talking with Hannah, Jesus—

• but, nevertheless, the thing with the new phone is solid. Who the hell knows how it got upstairs into the bedroom (if that was, in fact, where Tory found it)? Jack will go out now and get a new one, go right to the store, now, and get a new one—

• or just go—

• go—

• gone.

And Tory? Tory, after racking the cordless house phone in its cradle, will cross his cavernous foyer and hurry up his wide stone staircase, past the broken remains of Jack’s Nokia along the baseboard of the upstairs hallway not far from the dent in the hand-trowelled plaster where it hit and exploded after Tory fastballed it from the bedroom, their grand white master bedroom, where everything is slightly in disarray, women’s clothes scattered, bed unmade, the single golf tee Jack missed and Tory will find, under the bed, behind the corner of the duvet.

He’ll walk to a carved set of double doors salvaged from some foreclosed Oaxacan hacienda, and open them, to stare inside at the Italian marble tile tomb his wife modestly calls their master bathroom. Faint pink tendrils swirl in the tepid water of the massive tub each time another drop plummets from the flat-mouthed Italian spigot.

And like a commuter looking at a traffic accident from a passing car, Tory’s expression will never change. He’ll pull the tub drain, use the fluffy white bath towels to wipe the basin, drop the same towels on the marble floor and mop up the motley pattern of overlapping, bloody-wet shoeprints the EMTs left in the course of their recent visit, using his foot to push the towels around.

On the antique dresser is the teak brush from Fiji that Tory’s mother gave him for his tenth birthday. Tory will brush his hair, worried that it seems thinner than yesterday, possibly irritated by the prospect of early male pattern baldness when Jack’s hair is, no question, healthier and thicker and in no danger of leaving. Tory will brush his hair serenaded by the vacant thrum of the tub draining.

Jack, however, will only know that Tory called.