“You’re not going to do the film?”
“It was a bad idea. It seems like an intriguing world, but it’s not. It’s just like ours, except worse.”
“I wouldn’t give up on it. It’s quite an opportunity.”
“No, there’s something kinky about that whole bunch. Come in the kitchen and help me make the salad. I have two chickens on the grill and some lemonade and soft drinks on ice.”
She walked ahead of me into the kitchen. Her hair was thick and brown and clean, and tiny strands hung like particles of light on her cheeks. I had a hard time separating her from Clementine Carter standing on a desert road that dipped into eternity.
She turned and smiled but didn’t speak. Her eyes were mysterious and had a radiance that seemed to have no source.
“Do you know you have a habit of staring?” she said.
“I think you were born for the screen,” I said.
“Not me.”
“You don’t have to work with Desmond. Louisiana is full of movie people. The state subsidizes movies up to twenty-five percent.”
“Let’s slice some apples.”
I rolled my sleeves and went to work next to her. I could not help glancing at her profile. There was not a line on her face or throat. I know this may seem foolish to some, but I could not associate the image of her toking on a joint with the woman standing beside me. In fact, I hated the thought.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” she said. “I’m sorry for taking the hit off that joint. My feelings are the same as yours. Fashionable vice is usually the mark of a self-important dilettante. Besides, I’m a cop.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” I said.
She put her knife down and looked through the window at the smoke from the barbecue pit breaking apart in the wind. A cottontail rabbit was couched among the camellia bushes, brown and fat, ears folded back, eyes bright. “Want to go outside?” she said.
“This is fine,” I replied.
She dried her hands on a dish towel and hung it over the handle on the oven. “I was married when I was sixteen. My husband was killed one year later in a stock car race. Entertaining people who carry Styrofoam spit cups.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know about the loss of your wives,” she said. “I don’t know how you lived through all that.”
I didn’t answer. She stood in the silence until my eyes found hers. “I don’t care about age differences,” she said.
“The woman pays the price, Bailey. Men skate. The scarlet letter didn’t die out with the Puritans.”
She looked up into my face. She touched my cheek. “You won’t give in, will you?” she said.
“Give in to what?”
“Principle, vanity, whatever you call it. You and your friend Clete pretend to be rebels, but you’re traditionalists. You know what a traditionalist is, don’t you? Someone who lets dead people control his life.”
She turned on the cold water in the sink and put her hands and wrists under the faucet, her back rigid. I rested my hand on her shoulder. She turned off the water and looked at me. I thought I heard a sound like train-crossing bells clanging in my head.
I placed my arms lightly around her back and spread my fingers between her shoulder blades and touched her hair with my cheek. I was afraid to pull her against me. “I love your name.”
“That’s all you can say?” she asked.
How could one not? I thought. But I couldn’t say the words.
I went out the door and down the steps to the shale drive. She walked out on the gallery and lifted one hand by way of saying goodbye. There was a hurt in her face that made me want to paint my brains on a ceiling.
• • •