She sat up, the sheet gathered in front of her. “I have to get into the shower. Turn around, please.”
“Is Jack Valentine involved in this? He’s been telling people you got him fired.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“I know that. But somebody should have taught Jack Valentine a lesson a long time ago.”
“I have to go into the bathroom. Look the other way.”
“You’re my girl, Linda Gail. Do you think you have to act shy? Why are you doing all this?”
“Hershel knows I’m cheating on him. I don’t know what’s going to happen, that’s why. You don’t know the kind of world we come from.”
“The way I see it, a cuckold invites his fate.”
She got up, the sheet wrapped around her, and started toward the bathroom.
“People break their vows for a reason,” Roy said. “None of this is your fault. It’s not mine and it’s not your husband’s. It just the way it is. Come back to bed.”
She stood in the center of the room, the sheet trailing off her body. The rug was tan and thick and soft under her bare feet, the glassware and bottles behind the bar sparkling. The curtains on the French doors were gauzy and rose-tinted and transparent, filtering the light but preserving the view for the occupants, who were located so high in the sky that their privacy could never be violated. “You want me to come back to bed?” she said. “That’s what’s on your mind? A more successful go-round?”
“I could make love to you five times a day, Linda Gail. It’s an honor to be with a woman like you.”
“I don’t think it’s an honor at all,” she replied. “I think we’re all cheap goods.”
She walked to the French doors that opened onto the balcony, seventeen stories above the swimming pool shaped like a four-leaf clover. Clutching the sheet to her chest with one hand, she depressed the brass lever on the door with the other.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I’m doing nothing at all.”
She stepped out on the balcony and let the sheet fall from her body. She raised her arms straight out from her sides and stood on her tiptoes, her head tilting back, her eyes closed. She could feel the wind in her hair, her nipples hardening, the pores of her skin opening in the warm air. Across the boulevard, the oil wells were clanking up and down, the rhythm not unlike the sounds created by copulation upon a noisy mattress spring. She stepped up on a footstool beneath the retaining wall, then on a table, as gracefully as a woman ascending a winding staircase, and with one push she was up on the wall, the evening star winking conspiratorially at her.
For just a moment she thought she heard multitudes of people crying out in alarm, yelling at her, reassuring her that she was loved. She leaned forward, the night air sweet with the smell of flowers and chlorine, the promise of eternal summer sealing her eyes, quieting her heart, anointing her brow.
That’s when she felt Roy grab her with both hands and pull her off the wall and carry her as he would a child back into the apartment.
“How do you like your girlie now, Roy?” she said. “Do you still like your little cutie-pie from Bogalusa, Louisiana? Tell me, Roy. Tell me.”
Chapter
21
OUR ATTORNEY AND Rosita and I met with the probation officer Miss Lemunyon in her office at city hall at eighty-thirty A.M. the day after she told us Rosita might be rearrested for bail violation. Then she said she had to confer with her supervisor and left us in her windowless office for almost a half hour. Our attorney, Tom Breemer, told us that, in reality, Rosita had not violated the terms of her bail by temporarily leaving the state. The charges against her were misdemeanors that could be kicked up to felonious status, depending on what the prosecutor wanted to do, but nonetheless misdemeanors. Technically, we were in the clear. Then Tom added, “Unfortunately, these guys can elevate the ‘resisting’ charge to a felony, and you can spend weeks or months in jail proving you’re right.”
“What are we supposed to do?” I said.
“You want my honest opinion?” Tom said. He wore a clip-on bow tie and a seersucker suit and looked like a high school civics teacher.
“Go ahead.”
“The arresting officer deserves a bullet in the mouth. Maybe that would have happened to him in your grandfather’s time. It’s not going to happen now. You provoked Dalton Wiseheart. This is the consequence. We plea out and hope that Wiseheart contracts bubonic plague. No, don’t argue about it, Weldon. Count your blessings.”
“I don’t buy that,” I said.
“You know why people say justice is blind? It’s because it’s blind,” he said.
The door opened and Miss Lemunyon came in and sat rigidly behind her desk. “You can go,” she said.