carpet. His girlfriend's mouth hung open, one hand curled over her perfect teeth. She'd turned white. Maybe she was a good actress after all.
Caroline glanced up at me. 'Ready to go?'
I nodded. She released him. This time I followed her out to the parking lot. We paused between our cars. Xena was at my driver's-side window, snub tail wagging.
'You're a second-rate writer with a first-rate mouth,' Caroline said.
I looked for a snappy comeback I would've even taken on-the-nose but I had writer's block and my jaw hurt. I touched it gingerly.
Caroline sighed, annoyed by her concern. 'How do you feel?'
'Embarrassed.'
'I meant your jaw.'
'It's embarrassed, too.'
'I bet.' She crossed her arms. 'What important lessons did we learn here?'
'Don't play pool with a woman who calls her cue Charlie?'
'One: This girl can take care of herself. Two: Don't start a fight you can't finish.'
A few cars blew by, honking, until one veered off down a side street. Condensation wafted through the screen from the barroom kitchen.
'It wasn't your prerogative to get pissed off in there,' she said.
'You asked what I took away from the trial. I suppose I countenance spitefulness less well.'
'I know that game, too. I used to go around with my big bleeding heart, attuned to human frailties. The overweight girl, no rings, who nods a little too earnestly when people talk, eager to be useful. Little old lady at the bus stop, plastic bag shielding her purse in case it rains. Middle-aged immigrant working the counter at McDonald's. And then I realized I was riding the Projection Express and figured I needed to reserve some of that concern for myself.'
I thought about her self-berating carrying through her office door. No, it's not okay. I didn't double-schedule staff, and now he's gonna wind up in the hall because of me.
She seemed to read my mind. 'Not that I'm any good at it. But I did figure out one thing.'
'Which was?'
'You can't get through life, which is this shit this fragile enterprise without getting damaged. You just don't. Not if you're a feeling person. Not if you don't have your head buried in the sand. Everybody's fucked up. Some of us are just in on the joke. And when you don't want to see that in yourself, you see it in others.'
She climbed into her car and started to back out, then rolled down her window. 'That's what you don't understand in that pulp you churn out. Everyone's a good guy. Everyone's a bad guy. It just depends how hard you're willing to look.'
Chapter 22
I knocked again on the hemlock-wood door, then peered through one of the frosted glass panes. Though I'd picked up Preston out front many times, I'd never actually been inside his condo, a balconied two-room floating among the billboards of Sunset. It occurred to me that I'd always had an image of it Milanese furniture, stone bathtub, faint whiff of sage hand soap.
The door opened face width. For an instant even from this close I mistook Preston for someone else. His hair, usually flared so carefully over his forehead, lay limp against his head, and he was unshaven, his stubble sprinkled with gray. I could see the lapels of a bathrobe he hadn't left all day?
Mortification flickered across his features.
I tried for a joke to put him at ease. 'I didn't tell you I was picking you up for a black-tie at the Beattys'?'
His face was tense; for once he wasn't sure what to say. He cleared his throat, eased the door farther open. 'I've been editing. No time to get my face on.' He said it with a defensive edge, and it occurred to me that in the years I'd known him he'd never extended an invitation for me to drop by. He always seemed so comfortable marching into my house with his own key that I'd assumed the informality ran both ways.
'Bad time?' I asked. 'I could '
'Well, you might as well come in now.' He stepped back, and I followed him down a brief, dark hall into the main room. The furnishings were hardly threadbare, but I was shocked by their ordinariness. A standard couch. White-tile kitchen. An antique credenza with hairline cracks, a ding or two away from a garage sale.
Preston returned to the tiny table by the window, sat, and gestured to the other chair. The table, stacked with shuffled sections of the New York Times, wasn't really sized for more than one person. Preston set aside Arts and went back to the soggy bowl of cereal I assumed was his dinner. A bare leg poked out from the fold of his bathrobe.
The whole scene was so banal, so unfabulous, so decidedly unPreston. I'd never seen him unshaven. I'd never seen him not nattily attired. I'd never seen him eating food bought at a grocery store. It was a perfectly ordinary scene in a perfectly nice condo, but it was also somehow a breach in my view of him and how he kept himself, and this we both sensed. Nothing had happened nothing at all but the awkwardness was pervasive.
'So?' he asked. 'What's so urgent it couldn't wait for me to barge in on you?' He didn't lift his gaze from the bowl; his heart wasn't in the joke.
I pressed forward. 'You'll get a kick out of this. That kid Junior, right? So I found him at Hope House…'
But the surroundings continued to distract me. Sodden coffee filter on the counter. A lonesome glass in the sink, awaiting the dishwasher. Manuscript sheaves, bearing Preston's editor-red scrawl, had colonized most of the condo's flat surfaces. The thought of him in here alone, only these chunks of text keeping him company, seemed oddly dismal. Had I expected him to edit during cocktail parties?
Atop the crammed bookshelf by the TV, bookended between two heavy mugs, sat a row of my hardcovers. The closest thing to a display in sight. Preston always badgered me so much about my writing that I'd forgotten that maybe he liked it. The possibility that he valued me more than he let on oddly diminished my view of him. A trust-fund editor more articulate than I was, he'd taken a gamble on me five books ago, and I hadn't really updated my underlying view of him since. Though we'd become good friends, if not intimates, in my hidden thinking he'd always remained part of the unscalable edifice of New York publishing, and I felt a devotion to him for giving me that first hand up. I knew, of course, that I was an opportunity for him then and especially now. But perhaps I represented a more profound opportunity than I'd thought. Like the rest of us, Preston was busted in his own lovely way. But maybe he was also ordinary like the rest of us. Maybe he needed me as much as I needed him.
Preston had said something.
I refocused. 'Sorry?'
'I said, 'Yes, you found Junior…?' '
I forged back into the story Xena and the cop and the jail cell but I couldn't convey the maddening hilarity of it. Preston humored me with a faint smile and the occasional nod, but we were both distracted and aware that the surface exchange had become a charade.
When I was finished, I said lamely, 'You gotta meet this kid.' I riffled the edges of the nearest newspaper section until the noise grated. The air felt unvented, claustrophobic. I was eager to get out of there, impatient to start looking into the vehicle ID Junior had given me. Finally I said, 'I gotta get over to Lloyd's. Tell him about the Volvo. I just thought you'd get a kick out of the other stuff.'
'Sorry to disappoint.'
'You never disappoint, Preston.'
He summoned a smile before rising to see me out. 'No,' he said. 'Of course not.'
Chapter 23
