She moved her hand up his thigh only an inch or two. “That’s only four. Want something else to think about, so you’re not short?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She withdrew to her side of the car.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not annoyed. I’m trying to—” He stopped. “Look. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I do have a delayed reaction to the cop. I had no intention of doing that, no plan about doing it. He just came out of nowhere with his helpful Boy Scout face and gave me the choice of letting him run my license or killing him. Maybe he put me in a bad mood, but I don’t want to take it out on you. I’m just preoccupied, that’s all.”
She shrugged. “I was just trying to cheer you up. Let me find a better radio station.”
“Thanks. It’s almost the half-hour, and I want to be sure we pick it up if they’ve identified this car.”
Sylvie held the button down and let the radio find the next strong signal, then listened to a commercial about somebody’s “giant shopping mall of cars,” and then found a news report. There was no mention of their rental car, not even any mention that a cop had been killed. Here it was, hours later, and nobody seemed to have looked inside the parked cop car yet.
Sylvie was impressed with Paul’s timing. Killing the cop a minute earlier would have been foolish: There was still a chance he would go away. Killing him ten seconds later would have been too late.
She started to smile, but something stopped her lips, choked off the affection. Paul wasn’t behaving right with her. Earlier in the day she had provoked him a bit to explore the question, but she had not yet satisfied herself. She had accepted his explanation of his coldness and distance, but her acceptance had been only tentative. It was only talk, but here was that feeling again. Were his conciliatory words more real than her feeling? She loved him, had given herself to him all these years, and he was rejecting her, shutting her out.
She felt pained. She was over forty now. The first time she had noticed a change in the way she looked—a decline—had been when she was only twenty-five. Until then every change had been an improvement. But at twenty-five, there had been a slight change in the texture of her skin. There had not been any wrinkles yet, just a loss in the elasticity of the skin beside her eyes and on her forehead.
That had been a mild, tiny warning that things were happening. She had been married to Darren then, and she had not mentioned it to him. She had needed to think about it and see whether creams and lotions would restore her skin. She’d thought maybe it was because she was working out in the gym so much and taking hot showers afterward. The air in Los Angeles was so dry, and maybe her soap was too harsh.
Then she had blamed Cherie Will. Just before Sylvie had quit, there had been a series of movies that Cherie had decided to shoot outdoors. One, Sylvie remembered, had been about a picnic, and the other had been a thing about cowboys and cowgirls. Sylvie had gotten terribly sunburned, and sunburn was the worst thing for skin. Cherie had told everybody she was shooting so many movies way out on a ranch because the actors looked so much better in natural sunlight. The truth was that she had bought the ranch and was charging her own production company location-rental fees to help pay for it. All she had needed to dress the set was a checkered tablecloth for the picnic and two bales of hay for the cowboy stuff. Cherie had told her that her makeup would protect her face from sunburn.
That had been when Sylvie was twenty or twenty-one, and now she was over forty. How could she have gotten so old? She had always looked younger and prettier than her age, but now time was catching up to her. The dancing and the exercise had fought off the years for a long time, but now she was beginning to see a bit of extra fat on her bottom in spite of the work. Maybe even her tummy was beginning to soften.
She watched Paul without moving her head. He was resenting her. The resentment always was officially for being annoying or making a mistake or something, but it was really for letting herself go. Being a less-desirable woman was to be less respected, less wanted. For at least the past couple of weeks, he had been making the situation increasingly clear to her.
Sylvie could feel a suspicion slowly revealing itself to her. As she had been getting older and less desirable, Paul was becoming older and more desirable. He was still trim and hard. The extra years had given his skin a tan, sculpted look. The bulging muscles of his arms and legs had been giving way to a sinewy leanness. His thick dark hair had grayed a bit at the temples. He looked distinguished and seasoned. On her a gray hair was a blemish, a revelation that her youthful look was an imposture.
Paul had to be cheating on her. She tried to think of who and when. It could easily be that little dance instructor Mindy, the puppy dog. She had been flirting with Paul for at least a year, and lately she’d been overtly trying to get between them by using Paul as her partner, almost a second instructor. The woman could be any woman, or lots of women. There was no way to catch Paul after the fact, or know whether he had even started cheating yet. He was emotionally separating himself from her, and that was the big step.
How could Paul be so disloyal? She knew the answer to that, too. He would consider himself justified—all the work was done for him in advance. It wouldn’t matter that Sylvie had been completely faithful to him for fifteen years, and shared his difficulties and dangers—literally killed for him. He would believe that because of those two years in her life when she was very young and naïve, she had no rights. The fact that she had stopped doing films four years before she met him and already been a respectable married woman would be irrelevant. She simply had no right to be jealous.
Arguing with Paul’s justification was a meaningless activity. Justification was meaningless. What he wanted to do, he would do. Was doing. She was aging, and that was enough. When Paul had spent enough time searching and holding auditions for the next woman to assume her role, he would replace her.
Sylvie looked at Paul again, driving along the dark highway. He had such a strong, appealing profile. The slight upturn of his lips and the arched eyebrows gave him a special expression, the look of a perfect partner. The expression had always struck her as the look of a flamenco dancer, dangerous in a sexual way—jealous, aggressive, maybe just on the edge of violence.
Her breath caught in her chest and stayed there for a moment. She forced it out slowly through pursed lips and waited a moment before she took another, just as slowly, to calm herself. She looked at him again. Paul wasn’t some fat, soft-minded little business executive. Was he likely to file for divorce and then wait quietly for six months while Sylvie’s lawyers stripped the meat off his bones?
If Paul had made the decision that he was finished with Sylvie, then she would have a problem. “I love you, Paul.”
“What?
“I was just thinking about what a difference meeting you has made in my life. If it were all over now, I wouldn’t regret it.”
She studied him. He seemed genuinely puzzled, but not quite daring to be pleased, as though he were waiting anxiously for something unpleasant to follow. “What brought this on?”
“I don’t know. Just being here with you, I guess. I was just thinking that things in life—even ones that seem permanent—are temporary.”
He glanced at her with a look of amusement. “Are you trying to kiss me off?”
She laughed once, with no conviction. “Of course not. I just said I loved you. But since you brought up kissing people off, I guess it applies to that, too. If you did decide to leave me someday, I love you too much to make it hard for you.” She had been listening to her own voice to hear whether the lie sounded convincing, but she wasn’t sure how well she had done. He seemed merely confused.