"We?" he asked her.
"I shouldn't be left alone," she told him. "If you slept with Emma and didn't do it, I guess you can sleep with me and not do it, too, Jack."
He put her small carry-on bag in the backseat of the Audi and drove her to Shutters. The sun had set, but a faded-pink glow served as a backlight to the Santa Monica Pier; the lights on the Ferris wheel were on. On the promenade below One Pico, people on Rollerblades swept past incessantly. Leslie drank a bottle of red wine with her salad; Jack had about a gallon of iced tea with his.
"I wonder what you're the literary executor of," Mrs. Oastler remarked. (Carlos had told him, while she'd gone off to register in the hotel, that Leslie was the best-looking date he'd seen Jack with in a long time.)
"Her novel, maybe," Jack said.
"In which case, what would you do with it, Jack?"
"Maybe Emma wanted me to decide if it was fit to publish or not," he replied.
"It doesn't exist, Jack. There is no third novel. It wasn't her novel that was growing too long--it was the period of time in which she'd written nothing," Leslie said.
"Emma told you that?" he asked, because it suddenly sounded true.
Mrs. Oastler shrugged. "Emma never told me anything, Jack. Did she talk to you?"
"Not about her third novel," he admitted.
"There is no third novel," Leslie repeated.
It turned out that Mrs. Oastler had called Alan Hergott. Alan said something vague to her: the proceedings were "of a literary nature"; in fact, Emma had specified that her mother be excluded from the process. Even the reading of the will was a private matter, Alan told Mrs. Oastler; only Bob Bookman and Jack were allowed to hear what Emma wanted done with her estate.
"But are you guessing, or do you know there's no third novel--not even a work-in-progress?" Jack asked Leslie.
"I'm only guessing," Mrs. Oastler admitted. "With Emma, I was always guessing."
"Me, too," he said.
Surprisingly, Mrs. Oastler held his hand. He looked at her pretty face--her bright, dark eyes, her thin-lipped mouth with that seductive smile, her perfectly straight little nose--and wondered how a creature of Emma's outsize dimensions could ever have come forth from such a lean, taut body.
What Mrs. Oastler said surprised him. "Emma's death was not your fault, Jack. You were the only person she cared about. She told me once that taking care of you was all that mattered to her."
"She never told me that," he admitted. It would have been a good time to cry, but he still couldn't. And if, in his mother's estimation, Leslie Oastler would eventually break down, now was apparently not her moment to fall apart, either.
"Let's get the check," Leslie said. "I can't wait to see what sleeping with you and not doing it is like."
Jack thought they should tell his mother where they were spending the night. Alice would be worried about Leslie--and about Jack, to a lesser degree. What if his mom called the house on Entrada and got only the answering machine? Alice would be calling him on his cell phone all night.
"I'll call her while you use the bathroom," Mrs. Oastler said.
He'd forgotten to bring a toothbrush. For a host of historical reasons, Jack was disinclined to use Leslie's toothbrush, but he took a dab of her toothpaste and smeared it on his teeth with his index finger.
"Please feel free to use my toothbrush, Jack," Mrs. Oastler said through the closed bathroom door. "In fact, if you have any expectations of kissing me, please do use it."
He had no expectations of kissing Leslie Oastler--that is, not until she brought it up. Against his better judgment, Jack used her toothbrush to brush his teeth.
When he exited the bathroom, Mrs. Oastler had already undressed. She was naked except for her black bikini-cut panties--a sinister match to the bikini cut of her C-section scar and Alice's signature Rose of Jericho. Leslie crossed her arms over her small, perfect breasts as she slipped past Jack, into the bathroom, with a modesty that was as unexpected as her kisses a few minutes later.
She was an intimidating kisser, excitable and feral--without once closing her bright, watchful eyes. But Jack had the feeling that everything about her was an experiment, that she was merely conducting a test.
When they'd kissed to the point of exhaustion--either they had to stop or they had to progress to a more serious level of foreplay--Mrs. Oastler calmly asked him: "You did this with Emma, didn't you? I mean you kissed."
"Yes, we kissed."
"Did you touch each other?"