Answer the question, says Jude.
I smile at her. I despise couples who fight in public, I say. You know that. But in about two minutes I’m going to politely tell you to shut the fuck up.
I look at Molly and she smiles, as if to encourage me. Molly seems very relaxed and I wonder if she’s not drifting on a private little ocean of prescription tranquilizers. Now the waiter arrives with my gin and I decide he’s not such a bad guy. I have four inches of gin in what looks like an actual jelly jar, a big one. I take a drink and watch as he tries to open the champagne. He looks uneasy, our waiter. His upper lips is damp with sweat. He’s having a spot of trouble with that bottle. The four of us are staring holes through him and I imagine the vibes coming from this table are nasty. After what seems like forever he pops the cork and slithers away and I feel relieved for him.
I raise my jar.
To the truth, says Miller.
Which truth?
Come on. Tell us how it is to live with Jude.
I stare at him. It gets weird sometimes. One day she drags me into a public bathroom and hands me a gun. I ask her what the gun is for and she tells me to kill the man in the blue suit and meet her outside in five minutes. Then she asks if I want to get a latte.
Miller nods, sympathetic.
And for my birthday one year, she took me to Mexico City for the weekend. What a sick time that was. Our second day in the city, she turned to me on the street and gave me a mask. What is the mask for? I said. Didn’t I tell you? she said. We’re going to rob this bank. And then we’re inside the bank and everybody is freaking out and I don’t know what to do because I never robbed a bank before and I don’t speak Spanish. And then Jude shoots the little blind bank teller because she won’t stop screaming.
What the hell are you babbling about? says Jude.
Huh?
That was a bad dream you had, she says. You were sleeping right next to me. I remember the night you dreamed that.
Well. That is peculiar.
You and I never robbed a bank together, says Jude.
False memory. I got hit in the head a while back.
Interesting, says Miller. The artificial flashback. A feeble attempt by the subconscious to cover something more painful.
I wonder would anyone notice if I went ahead and bit off a chunk of my jelly jar and swallowed it whole. On the wall above us, Paul Newman is a wreck. He’s in worse shape than me, anyway. He’s crawling before the guards like a dog, begging them not to hit him anymore and I think, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
eighteen.
TWO HOURS LATER WE ARE FLYING ACROSS THE BRIDGE in a silver Mustang and I am glad it’s not a convertible because sometimes the elements are just too much to bear. Not quite midnight and there is very little traffic. Jude is leaning against me, her head on my shoulder. I don’t think she’s sleeping but I have this funny idea that she is happy, or possibly nervous. But surely she is not nervous because this is what she wants. Molly drives with the cold manic fury of a girl who grew up in a household full of boys. I am tempted to ask her about her childhood but I stop myself. I don’t want to talk to her in front of Jude. There is no music in the car, no conversation. Miller is silent in the passenger seat and I imagine he is contemplating the velvet.
Over the bridge and through the hills. We are going to Miller’s house.
By the by. The remainder of our dinner party passed without relevant incident. Or nearly so. I knocked over a bottle of champagne around the time Paul Newman was shot in the throat, but Jude managed to make the waiter feel so hot and guilty about it that he gave us another one on the house. None of us got particularly drunk and no one asked me any more difficult questions, and I refrained from demanding another jelly jar of gin. Jude kept trying to talk about the film, but Miller wasn’t having it. He wanted to wait until we got home.
Home.
I was informed over crème brûlée and coffee that Jude and I would be staying with them for the duration of the project. Our things had been transferred from the King James to Miller’s house while we were at dinner and for some reason I imagined a little team of munchkins, ferrying our stuff across the bay on the backs of winged monkeys. This image pleased me and I was about to share it with Jude, but when I turned around I saw something in her face that I didn’t like. Jude looked scared. Jude had obviously not known about this move.
The Mustang glides down the dark driveway. Miller holds the car door open for us and Molly darts ahead to unlock the house. She’s a little too happy, to my mind, and I wonder if it’s the champagne. Jude holds my hand as we go up the steps, then stops and whirls around to kiss me, a long kiss. Her tongue is sweet in my mouth and something is wrong. This is the sort of kiss that resembles love.
What’s the matter? I say.
Nothing.
Uh huh. Why are you being so affectionate?
She jerks her hand away and hisses at me to fuck off, then.
There you go, I say. Doesn’t that feel better?
I wonder if she is feeling guilty about something. Jeremy, perhaps. The meeting for cocktails with Miller that inexplicably lasted a day and a half. It’s always possible that she missed me while I was falsely incarcerated. But somehow I don’t think so.
Inside and the house is warm with soft, rosy light. Jude and I pass through a shadowy entryway that feels very small, as if I should duck my head. Then we come into a large open room, the living room. The furniture is elegant, minimal. Dark wood and leather and red velvet the color of freshly spilled blood. The floors are hardwood. Molly is curled barefoot at one end of the bloody sofa. Her shirt is loose and unbuttoned to the waist, revealing a nearly transparent camisole of white gauze. Molly is small and curvy and probably doesn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds but I notice her breasts are bigger and rounder than Jude’s, who glances at me with a cold little smile. I shrug in response, but I am not stupid. Jude is five foot five. She weighs one hundred twenty pounds and doesn’t have a shred of fat on her body. She has the muscles of a snake. I wrestle with her sometimes and I cannot hold her down. She is too slippery, too fast. Too strong. Her breasts are very small but I have always thought that large ones would only annoy her.
I wonder where Miller is. Jude sits down in a leather chair and slowly pulls off her boots, dropping them to the floor with one distinct crash, then another. I remain standing. There is another armchair, but it is way the hell across the room next to a bay window. I am reluctant to move it and the most logical place for me to sit would be at the other end of the sofa, next to Molly. But I am still conscious of the way I smell and I have a feeling she would promptly put her small white feet in my lap, and she has very nice feet. Jude watches me and I can tell she’s pleased by my confusion. She takes off her leather jacket and tosses it on the floor. The green dress has long tight sleeves and small green buttons all the way down the front and the dress fits her so snugly that I can see the muscles in her arms and stomach. Jude isn’t wearing a bra and her nipples are pretty much always hard.
Do you want to sit down? says Molly.
I have a headache, actually. I see things that aren’t there.
Molly frowns because this is not really an answer but it’s the best I can give her. I have a headache and I wish I’d not stopped at one glass of gin. If there’s one thing I understand, it’s my own fucked-up biochemistry. I wander over to the bar, where I find a set of beautiful highball glasses. They weigh about two pounds each and it would be easy as falling out of bed to kill somebody with one of them. I find ice and a bottle of Bombay and I feel better already. I wouldn’t mind so much if Molly put her feet in my lap. I have a thing for feet, sometimes. And maybe my sense of smell is out of sorts and this is all a lot of misguided body language but something tells me that Jude or Miller or both of them are setting me up to fall for Molly.