Страница 45 из 79
“No. Is yours.”
“I don’t want that one,” she said. “I have these others.”
“One day you will want it.”
“I’ll tell you what—when I’m old, if I need to convince people that I was in the movies, I’ll come get it. Okay?” She squeezed the picture into his hand, then turned and padded back toward her room and disappeared inside. She closed and latched the door slowly and quietly behind her, like a parent sneaking from the room of a sleeping child.
Pasquale stared at the door. He had wished for this world of the glamorous Americans, and like a dream she had come to his hotel, but now the world was back where it belonged, and he wondered if it would have been better to never have glimpsed what lay behind the door.
Pasquale turned and scuffled up the hall, and down the stairs, past the night clerk and outside, to where Tomasso leaned against a wall, smoking. His cap was pulled down on his eyes. He showed Tomasso the photo of Dee and the other woman.
Tomasso looked at it, then shrugged one shoulder. “Bah,” he said. And the two men started back toward the marina.
12
The Tenth Pass
Recently
Los Angeles, California
Before sunrise, before Guatemalan gardeners, before sharks and Benzes and the gentrification of the American mind—Claire feels a hand on her hip.
“Don’t, Daryl,” she mutters.
“Who?”
She opens her eyes to a blond-wood desk, a flat-screen television, and the kind of painting they put in hotel rooms . . . because this is a hotel room.
She’s on her side, and the hand on her hip is coming from behind her. She looks down, sees that she’s still dressed; at least they didn’t have sex. She rolls over and stares into the big, dewy eyes of Shane Wheeler. She’s never awakened in a hotel room next to a man she just met, so she’s not quite sure what one says in this situation. “Hi,” she says.
“Daryl. Is that your boyfriend?”
“He was ten hours ago.”
“The strip-club guy?”
Good memory. “Yeah,” she says. At some point in their drunken sharing last night, she had explained how Daryl unapologetically watches online porn all day and goes to strip clubs at night and then laughs when she suggests this might be disrespectful to her. (Hopeless, she recalls describing her relationship.) Now, as she lies next to Shane, Claire feels a different sort of hopelessness. What’s the matter with her, going back to this guy’s room? And what to do with her hands now, which not long ago had been ru
She glances back over her shoulder at Shane again. His hair seems even more unruly than it did last night, his sideburns more late-Elvis than alt-hipster. His shirt is off and she can see, on his ski
And now, morning after, Claire sits up. “This wasn’t very professional of me.”
“Depends on your profession.”
She laughs. “If you paid for that I think you got ripped off.”
He puts his hand back on her hip. “There’s still time.”
She laughs, takes his hand from her hip and sets it on the bed. But she can’t say she isn’t tempted. The kissing and rolling around were nice enough; she assumes the sex would be good. With Daryl, the sex was the first thing between them, the selling point, the foundation for a whole relationship. But in the last few months, she’s felt as if the intimacy has seeped out of it and now there are two distinct phases to sex with Daryl: the first two minutes like an exam from an autistic gynecologist, the next ten a visit from the Roto-Rooter man. At the very least, she imagines, Shane would be . . . present.
Conflicted, confused, she stands, to think, or to buy time.
“Where are you going?”
Claire holds up her phone. “See if I still have a boyfriend.”
“I thought you were going to break up with him.”
“I haven’t decided.”
“I’ll decide for you.”
“I appreciate that, but I should probably take care of it.”
“And if the porn-zombie asks where you were all night?”
“Guess I’ll tell him.”
“Will he break up with you?”
She hears some bit of hopefulness in the question. “I don’t know,” she says. She pulls the chair out from the desk, sits, and begins thumbing through the calls and e-mails on her phone, to see when Daryl called last.
Shane sits up, too, now, swings his feet over the edge of the bed, and grabs his shirt off the floor. She glances up, can’t help but smile at his scrawny attractiveness. He’s an aging version of the boys she always fell for in college: in the vicinity of good-looking but a few blocks away. Physically, he’s the anti-Daryl (square-jawed Daryl with his five-hundred-push-ups-a-day chest)—Shane all narrow angles and jutting collarbones, just the hint of a roll in his gut. “When, exactly, did you take your shirt off?” she asks.
“I’m not sure. I guess I was hoping to start a trend.”
She goes back to her BlackBerry, opens Daryl’s “what up” text, and tries to figure out what to type back. Her thumbs hover over the keys. But nothing comes.