“While I was buttoning up my shirt, she asked me if I wanted her to try again. I told her that it was okay, it had been great anyway. Her face scrunched up and she told me she could just add it to the list of things she’d failed at recently. I started getting dressed a little faster. I didn’t love where this was going. She said she was leaving New York because it had spit her out and left her with nothing to show for her years there. She was heading home and she knew she’d never leave Chicago again. A few hours earlier, she’d told everyone at the party that going home was the thing she was most looking forward to on earth. Now she’s crying and I can’t find one of my shoes, and so I hand her the tissue box on the floor near the headboard. She doesn’t take it. Just lies there, with the covers up to her waist and tears in her eyes, her tits slipping off the tabletop of her chest, just kinda pooled up there in her armpits. Man, they look like a pain in the ass to deal with. Just, the whole scene…I felt terrible.”
“But you leave anyway.”
“I leave and tell her I’m sure I’ll see her again before she gets out of town.”
“But you don’t.”
“I don’t.”
“Poor Kelly.”
“Your Number Two, then,” Will said. “Please.”
“You’re not just framing it all this way for my benefit?” Whitney said. “The bloody nose. The tears. The boredom through and through.”
“I guess you’ll never know.”
“But it’s useful for me to know before I head into this one. Just to help me calibrate my telling.” She sipped from a nearly full glass and considered the volume of liquid. “We’ll never finish the second bottle.”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “We have half that chalkboard left.”
They took a break and teased each other about their eating and their drinking. A breather before diving into Whitney’s second, and each of their thirds. The server brought the new dishes at an accelerated pace. Spiny urchin shells stuffed with whipped uni. Razor clams. A pair of ruby-red langoustines. A bowl of fried potatoes. They were getting fatter. Their teeth were turning pink. The overhead fan had stopped for some reason and they were starting to sweat through their clothes.
He’d never felt the sensation of her belonging to him more than he did just then. And that same feeling of possession was overwhelming her in the moment, as well. Whatever they’d devised for themselves, it had worked, it was working. He wanted to break the new record she’d set. She wanted to make sure he never had an up-close look at another woman’s pubic hair again.
“Go on, then,” Will said. “Number Two.”
“He was old.”
“Forty.”
“Fifty-five.”
“C’mon.”
“One of the things they wanted me to do while I was out there was make a last-ditch play to get this novelist to let us option his first book. It’s not my favorite thing, but John read it in college and it changed him or whatever, and he’d failed to get this guy to go with us before.”
“A novelist.”
“It’s a boring story,” she said. “But he’s lived in the Palisades for twenty-five years. Has two grown kids with a first wife. Published those first couple books, wasted some time with screenplays that were never made. But John saw a series in his debut. The guy’s nice, nice-looking, still has his hair.…But this house. I’d never seen anything like it. Exposed beams and ceilings and glass walls, and just lush like I didn’t know it could be in L.A.”
“A novelist,” Will said again, and Whitney rolled her eyes.
“The book’s not even good. I did it as a favor to John. I drank the guy’s coffee. I made an appeal. I knew he had no intention of working with us. I could’ve left, but I wanted to tour the house. These warm rooms where the light splashed in. Bookshelves on every wall. His kids were handsome and didn’t look like the sort who were doing blow in Hollywood clubs at fourteen—but what do I know? The ex-wife was an actress. I said she looked familiar even though she didn’t, and he said she was on some network shows in the nineties. He was tan, nineties-handsome himself. I don’t know, there wasn’t anything in particular about it, except I was running out of time out there, and I’ve always been curious what it’d be like to be with someone that age. He didn’t want to do the show, and I could care less, but I thought I’d make his day. It was simple as that. I didn’t want to leave yet. I really wanted to get another look around. I really wanted to see the upstairs.”
“So you fucked the house.”
She laughed. She looked uncomfortably full. “I guess that’s right.”
“You asked for an extended tour.”
“I just went upstairs and he followed me and I guess I sat on the edge of the bed and he sat on the edge of the bed and nobody said anything, and then it just happened. No booze. Conventional as can be. I imagine with guys like that, they either get divorced and bang hookers, or they just kinda pack their dicks away and try to be a halfway-decent little-league coach for a while. I got the distinct impression that he was the latter.”
“The un-Adrien-Green.”
“It was perfectly pleasant.”
“That’s kinda gross, though. That’s fucking old.”
Whitney shrugged. “It was warm upstairs. He knew enough about what he was doing. He’d lived over there most of his life, you know? He’d been married and he’d probably dated plenty of beautiful women. The sort who are just…around. He was probably more confused than anything. Halfway through, he needed to catch his breath and I sorta did the work on top.”
“But you got there anyway. Nice and primed from a record-breaking effort.”
“You couldn’t even call it the full thing that I’m used to, though.”
“Un-Adrien to the
