“How do you know she’s not lying about that?” Jake asked. “She lies all the time.”
“I do not know that she’s not lying,” Greg said, “but it wouldn’t really make sense for her to do so. She knows that I’ll demand a DNA test after the baby is born. She didn’t care about that at all. I may not be the best at reading people, but I could tell she was one hundred percent confident that that test would come back showing me as the father. And the only way she could be that confident would be if she were telling the truth.”
Jake had to admit that this made sense. “Fuck me,” he said. “So, I’m assuming that her getting an abortion is out of the question.”
“Yes, it is out of the question,” he said.
“What happens next then? Is she going to tell people who the father of her baby is?”
“She is going to tell everyone who the father of the baby is,” Greg said miserably. “That too has been part of her plan all along. She wants this child to grow up with the entire world knowing that its father is Greg Oldfellow. That way, people will just expect that he or she will be a great actor. That is why she invited me to lunch; so she could give me a little warning about what was about to happen and let me inform ‘those who should probably know’ before the entertainment press did.”
“Christ,” Jake said, taking a gulp of his own scotch. “She is truly one of the evilest people to ever walk the earth. Fucking Hitler and Stalin would bow down to her.”
“You think?” Greg asked, shaking his head again. “You tried to warn me about her, Jake. I’ll always remember that. I didn’t take your advice, but you tried.”
“I did,” Jake agreed. “But even I didn’t know she could be that cold, that conniving.”
“Yeah,” he said miserably.
“So ... I guess you’re going to have to tell Celia about this?” Jake asked carefully.
“I guess I am,” he said.
“When?”
“As soon as possible,” Greg said. “The Oscar nominations are being announced the second week in February. She plans to go public a week before. She’s hoping that the story of our so-called romance during the project will help boost our chances.”
“Very practical of her.”
“Yeah, very practical indeed.” He sighed. “I need to tell Celia in person. This is not the sort of thing you confess to on the phone.”
Jake nodded. “They’re still in the south. I can have Pauline email over a copy of their exact schedule.”
“Okay,” he said. “Once I see that, I’ll start planning my demise.”
Chapter 23: The Show Must Go On
El Paso, Texas
January 28, 1996
Jake Kingsley and Greg Oldfellow sat at one of the tables in the Plaza Hotel’s rooftop bar on the seventeenth floor of the historic, 1930’s era building. A large picture window looked out over downtown El Paso, the site of tomorrow night’s Celia Valdez concert. The musician and the actor had flown in from Los Angeles on a commercial flight (first class, naturally) just an hour before, their plane touching down at El Paso International at 11:35 AM local time. Celia and her band had not checked in yet. Their late morning flight from San Antonio, where they had performed the night before, was still in the air currently. Jake’s plan was to hang out with the tour for a week or so, flying on the plane with them from city to city and staying in his wife’s hotel suites. Greg’s plans were still pretty far up in the air. He was here to tell his wife that he had cheated on her with Mindy Snow and gotten her pregnant (allegedly) and that Mindy was about to go public with this information, humiliating them both. It seemed unlikely that he would be hanging out for the same amount of time as Jake.
Jake was drinking a bloody Mary and munching from a plate of so-called ‘breakfast tacos’, which were reputedly a Tex-Mex specialty of the house. They were corn tortillas filled with a mixture of scrambled eggs, chorizo, cheese, and spicy salsa and they were quite delicious. Greg was sipping from a glass of Perrier. He had ordered no food, nor had he eaten or drank anything on the flight. He had no appetite to speak of and, though he desperately needed a drink, he felt that he should remain sober for the coming conversation with Celia. There would undoubtedly be time for getting plowed later.
“You sure you don’t want one of these?” Jake asked, pointing to his plate. “They’re pretty good.”
He shook his head. “My stomach is quite knotted up at the moment. I don’t think I would be able to hold it down.”
Jake nodded sympathetically. He could only image what the man was going through. Jake had had some painful conversations with romantic partners in his life—the breakup with Michelle Borrows (now Rourke), the confrontation with Rachel Madison after pictures of him cheating on her had been shown to her, and the wretchedly painful ‘we need to talk’ from Helen Brody came immediately to mind—but to have to confess to your unprepared and unsuspecting wife that you had cheated on her with an evil bitch and knocked said bitch up and that the story was about to be spread far and wide in the popular press ... that was an entirely different level, an entirely different plane of existence.
Greg’s cellular phone—a top-of-the-line Nokia flip phone—began to chime out its irritating ring from inside Greg’s sport coat. He reached into the pocket and pulled it out, flipping it open. “This is Greg,” he said into it. He listened for a moment. “Hey, C,” he said, his voice monotone. “Yeah ... we’re here now. Just sitting in the bar ... Yes ... Yes, we did. Right. Okay, we’ll see you then.” He flipped the phone shut again and put it back in his pocket.
“They’re here?” Jake asked.
Greg nodded slowly, the miserable expression on his face becoming a little more miserable. “They just landed at the airport. The limo is waiting for them. They should be here to check-in in about twenty minutes or so.”
Jake nodded solemnly, figuring that Greg was now feeling like he was standing in his cell overlooking the gallows on the morning of his execution and had just been told that the hangman had clocked in for duty. “Are you sure you shouldn’t have given her at least a hint that something serious was in the works?” he asked. “Just so she could get a little bit braced for this?”
“I’m sure,” Greg said. “If I’d hinted I had some bad news to share she would have pestered me until I spilled it.”
“Yeah ... I suppose,” Jake allowed. He took another bite of his taco, another swig of his bloody Mary. “Uh ... I hate to bring this up, but ... you know ... I would just like to remind you of ... you know ... the bro code.”
Greg nodded. “The bro code,” he said. “I understand. I will mention nothing to Celia or anyone else that you knew about Mindy and me before I told you about it in Oceano the other day.”
“I appreciate it,” Jake said, feeling relieved. He had no idea how Celia might react if she found out that Jake had known about Greg’s affair with Mindy for two months and had told her nothing about it, but it would likely not be an understanding kind of reaction. Women, in Jake’s experience anyway, did not appreciate the gravity of the bro code or sympathize with its rules.
The minutes ticked quickly by. Jake finished his bloody Mary and his breakfast tacos. The waitress removed the dishes and Jake ordered a second drink. Greg continued to sit morosely and mostly silently, sipping from his sparkling water every now and then and frequently looking at the time on his Rolex. Finally, thirty-two minutes after Greg received the phone call, Laura and Celia appeared in the bar’s doorway.
Jake’s libido cranked up a bit just seeing his wife standing there. She was dressed in a pair of faded blue jeans and a pullover T-shirt with a cartoon chicken on it, her hair down, her eyes tired-looking. She was beautiful and, despite the pending doom atmosphere currently pushing down on the reunion, he could not wait to go to her suite with her and take her in his arms and get naked with her.