He picked up his suitcase, but she held her position, blocking the door to the bedroom. He turned and walked through the bathroom door into the hall. He moved along the hall and down the stairs quickly, hoping to deny her the time to deliver some angry comment, or at least to be far enough away not to hear it distinctly.
Ted Forrest got to the foot of the staircase, across the foyer, and out the door. He shut it behind him quietly so she would not be certain which way he had gone, then walked down the gravel path to the garage. He put his small suitcase in the trunk of the BMW and left the trunk open.
He went through the door to the back room of the garage. When the building had been the stable, that side had been the front of the building, where the carriages and tack had been kept, and the horses had been led around to be hitched. Now it was the workshop, where the gardeners stored their mowers and blowers, the pool man put spare filters and chemicals, and the caretakers stored tools and supplies. Along the back wall there were three workbenches, and above them was a shelf with a row of paint cans in shades matching each room in the house for touch-ups. Forrest took two unopened halfgallon cans of mineral spirits, placed a strip of duct tape over the cap of each to prevent subtle leakage, and set them in his trunk in a plastic leaf bag. Then he took a battery-charged electric drill and a set of bits and put those in, too.
He started his engine, pulled down the long driveway, and out onto the road. He turned off his cell phone and put it into his pocket. He didn’t want to receive calls and create a record of which repeater towers had relayed the signals to him. After a moment he took the phone out again. It would be wise to make one call before he left the area. He dialed the number with his thumb. “Hi. I’m afraid I had to go out of town unexpectedly. I won’t be anyplace where I can be reached by phone, so don’t call. I’ll get in touch the second I get back. Erase this. ‘Bye.”
He turned off the phone again and put it into the glove compartment, so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it on the daylong drive. Maybe he would buy Kylie a present while he was gone. It would have to be small enough to be paid for plausibly by her paycheck from Marlene’s. Of course, the present would depend upon whether she followed his instructions about the message he had just left. He had the four-digit code she used to replay her messages, and he sometimes used it to listen to them. Usually what he heard was vapid voices of fourteen-and fifteen-year-old girls asking whether she was going to this or that, and what she was going to wear. In the past sometimes she had saved a message of his so she could replay it and listen to his voice on her cell phone after she had gone to bed. Later tonight he would check to be sure she had erased his message.
He drove to the Golden State Freeway, pulled onto the southbound entrance ramp, and accelerated into the stream of traffic. He drove steadily for two hours before he stopped outside Bakersfield at a large complex where rows of trucks sat idling at the back of the lot, went into the restaurant and ate steak and eggs, then pulled into the gas station and refilled his tank. Down the road in the suburbs, he stopped at a Rite Aid drugstore and bought a box of wooden kitchen matches and two cans of charcoal starter.
The drive from Bakersfield seemed longer than he had anticipated, because from here on the traffic grew gradually thicker and slower. There were long-haul trucks in the right lane, then recreational vehicles as big as buses beside them, and then the left lanes full of SUVs and pickup trucks fighting for inches, passing each other for illusory advantages or for spite. It was dangerous and tiring, and Ted Forrest didn’t want to get into an accident or be pulled over by a highway-patrol officer, so he tolerated a spot in the middle lanes.
He came down Tejon Pass out of the hills into Castaic and the Santa Clarita Valley, places that had barely existed twenty years ago, but now were so choked with houses and strip malls and chain restaurants that they were beginning to seem dirty and worn out and unbearable. Then he was past the Cascade, the long, open sluice at the end of the aqueduct that in the 1900s had turned the San Fernando Valley into a garden and the backers and their friends into millionaires. A few minutes later, Forrest was in the northern part of the valley, fighting the real traffic toward the city of Los Angeles.
He was getting closer to his destination a few feet at a time, and the impatience and frustration invited him to think about why he was working so hard to get to a place where he didn’t want to be. He had made a small mistake in Los Angeles eight years ago, and now, in order to fix things, he had to come back to complete a missing step. But the underlying problem was the nature of women. He struggled to obtain them, only to find that what he got had changed into something he had never wanted.
The human species had evolved so that the females matured earlier than the males. They seemed to grow and ripen steadily until they reached near perfection at about the age of fourteen. They were not exactly at their physical zenith at that moment, but they were on the verge of it, still getting better every day, and still not showing any deterioration of any kind. Their skin was luminous, their hair thick and shiny, the whites of their eyes really white. Their waists seemed impossibly thin, and their breasts and buttocks were round and firm.
When they got older, all of that began to change. Having a physical relationship with a woman over thirty was a compromise. It was like eating fruit that was just a bit too soft. It might not be bad enough to throw away just yet, but it was past its peak, and a man tended to catch himself letting it lie untouched in the bowl and reaching for newer fruit. Their skin lost some of its elasticity and began to crease around the eyes and mouth. Their hair turned dull. They put on weight. If they stopped eating and did hard, punishing exercise each day, they began to look like skinny men. If they chose surgery and injections, they became nightmare creatures, with smooth, fishlike faces that had bloated mouths and wide, staring eyes.
They started out sweet-tempered and curious and pliable at thirteen, but within a decade they became spoiled and wised up, cynical and stupid simultaneously. A woman who had been told she was beautiful from the time she was fourteen became a monster of overconfidence and self-congratulation by the time she was twentyfour. She was psychotically suspicious of others and lenient with herself. She allowed herself to dignify whatever selfish nonsense she felt as though it were a philosophy, but she turned what he felt into a crime.
He had kept his feelings from causing trouble until the annual harvest festival in Mendota nine years ago. It was the first day of the festival, when they introduced the Harvest Queen and her court. The Harvest Queen was a pug-nosed girl with vacant eyes and a smile that had grown stale because it had been on her face sunrise to sunset since she was three and learned she would be rewarded for it. The one to look at was one of the princesses named Allison Straight.
She had dark brown hair with reddish highlights and huge green eyes. Her petite, curved body was the sort that drew the eyes away from the tall, greyhound-thin princesses around her, and her mouth had full Cupid’s-bow lips. Even in her princess gown, what she evoked was not cold, empty elegance, but fecundity. A stranger to the small towns of the Central Valley might have marveled that she was not the one who had been chosen Harvest Queen. She had the magnetic quality that some actresses had: a singularity that served to remind the eye that beautiful women didn’t all look like sisters. The best looked as though they had arrived from an undiscovered country on the other side of the earth.
Allison Straight wasn’t queen because she didn’t come from a well-established local family, didn’t have a father who owned the Chevrolet agency or served on the town council. Ted Forrest had been born in the vegetable country. He had seen so many of these contests that he always looked at the whole court with little interest in which child of the local merchants had been chosen queen.
He had stood around for a time being important while the notables had found their way to him. These events were organized and operated by boosters’ groups, and these people always wanted to ensure that Ted Forrest continued to sponsor their civic improvements. On this occasion, the one who took charge of him was a woman named Gail Hargrove. She was the former president of the chamber of commerce, a four-time councilwoman, and before that, a member of the board of education. She was a tall blond woman with a helmet of stiff hair and a lot of makeup who was as sexless as a civic-renovation project.
She conducted him to a big table where the local wines were being sampled in tiny plastic cups, and got him a real glass of the special cabernet that had reached its peak this year. She took him to see bins of exotic strains of white asparagus, broccoli rabe, radicchio, Japanese eggplant. She took him to see the architects’ model of the new municipal-refurbishment plans, and compared them to the concept drawings that had been done in elementary- school classes under the title “City of the Future.”Just when Gail Hargrove began to run out of other sights to show him, a bright flash distracted them. She took him toward the flashes, where she showed him the Harvest Queen and her court, who were on display across the room. They were on fake Louis XV armchairs from Zinsser’s Furniture, posing for group portraits.
Allison Straight caught his attention instantly. He felt the same sort of certainty he had felt when he had seen Caroline at about the same age twenty years earlier. She was simply the most attractive human being he had seen in years, a natural miracle.
