Outside, the siren of an emergency vehicle-police car, ambulance, fire engine-caterwauled down some nearby street. Sirens were a constant background noise in this neighborhood. Howard thought of the crash of the surf on the Malibu sand, the only noise he ever heard from the deck of the beach house, and briefly he wondered what he was doing in this place.
Well, it was a little late to be asking that question, wasn't it?
Already he had set in motion a chain of events that would free him from his marital obligations and his life in Malibu. At times he might regret the course he'd taken, but he could not undo what he had done.
There was no turning back.
"What?" Amanda asked.
He realized he had spoken the last thought aloud.
"Nothing," he said, buttoning his shirt.
"Okay, be secretive. It's irritating, but manly in a reserved, nineteenth-century sort of way."
She rolled onto her side, showing her back to him.
Tattooed above the left cheek of her buttocks was a red rose. Howard had been fascinated the first time he'd seen it. He had been with many women, but never one with a tattoo. It had seemed exotic and arousing.
Now he regarded it with indifference and the faintest touch of condescension. He wondered if he regarded Amanda herself the same way.
No, of course not. Where had that thought come from? He was serious about Amanda. She was exactly what he needed. She was young. She had energy, ambition, confidence. She talked fast and proposed a thousand ideas an hour. And she was-what was the word?-adventurous. Sexually adventurous, not to put too fine a point on it. She did things with enthusiasm, things Kris would have been reluctant or unwilling to do at all.
He remembered his first night with Amanda-how she had teased his pants down around his knees and taken him into her mouth, drawing him out to full extension with her tongue, and in that moment he had been twenty years old again, not a man in middle age with hair on his earlobes and a potbelly that left him winded when he climbed a flight of stairs.
Not that their whole relationship was about sex. Far from it. They had conversations. Take tonight, for instance.
He had talked with her for most of the evening over an anchovy pizza and a bottle of Merlot. Only afterward had they retreated into the bedroom for a different kind of intimacy. What he was doing with Amanda was no cheap fling. It was an affair of the heart. It had to be.
Yawning elaborately, Amanda slipped out of bed and brushed past him into the bathroom. She poured a glass of water and drank a long swallow before fussing with her hair. Unlike him, she had no problem with mirrors. He liked the trim economy of her body, her small breasts with their stiff nipples, her tight thighs and the tight space between them, a space he had grown to know well over the past six months.
He had met her during a visit to KPTI, months ago.
He had flirted, she'd responded. He was incapable of resisting temptation. Sometimes he told himself that Kris must have been familiar with his weakness, and if she had chosen to marry him anyway, she had known what was she getting into. As a rationalization it was not much good, but it was the best he could do.
The truth was that he had loved Kris once, but the feeling had ebbed.
He supposed she'd been right when she said that for him, a woman's novelty wore off and she became another discarded toy. But there were always more toys to be bought if a man had the money… and if his previous possessions didn't weigh him down.
"She suspects, you know," Amanda said from the bathroom.
Howard, who had been hunting for his shoes amid the tangled bedspread on the floor, looked up in bewilderment.
"What did you say?"
"She thinks you may be having an affair. She told me so."
The world seemed to freeze around him, or maybe it was simply that his breath froze in his chest.
"When?"
"Yesterday. It was True Confessions time, at least for her." Amanda smirked, then turned grave.
"I shouldn't find it funny. After all, she is my friend in some sense of the word."
She stood nude in the bathroom doorway, hips cocked, arms akimbo. Her collarbone stood out against the pallor of her skin. She was not as pretty as Kris, Howard thought irrelevantly. But she was young.
"Why didn't you tell me before now?" he asked.
An insouciant shrug.
"Slipped my mind."
"Well, what did she say, exactly?"
"She thinks you're fooling around. I promised her a heart-to-heart talk, but I didn't follow through. It would be like a cat playing with a mouse. There might be a certain sadistic pleasure in it, but it's not the sort of entertainment calculated to raise your self-esteem."
"No." His voice was flat.
"I guess not."
"I'm not saying she knows anything for sure. She has a hunch, that's all-feminine intuition or whatever.
Anyway, it's good, isn't it?"
Good. What a word for her to use.
"Is it?"
"It makes it easier for you to tell her about us." A frown pinched her face.
"You are going to tell her, aren't you, Howie?"
"At the appropriate time." He knew it sounded perfunctory, and that she would be angry.
She was.
"I sincerely hope you're not getting the proverbial cold feet. I've taken a serious risk, you know. Your wife has more clout with the station than I do. She's the bionic news babe the six-million-dollar girl. What I'm trying to say is, she could get me canned, and if I don't have anything to fall back on…"
He held up a placating hand.
"You'll have plenty to fall back on. And you won't be fired. It's not going to work out that way."
"So how is it going to work out?"
"For the best." Howard sighed, suddenly tired.
"By the way, you're not the only one who's taken a risk."
"No? What have you ever done, besides show up with a bulge in your trousers?"
"I've done more than you know. More than you need to know. Now where are my goddamned shoes?
I have to get-" Home, he almost said but caught himself.
"I have to get going."
The time was almost ten o'clock, and it would take him an hour to get to Malibu from here. Kris would arrive at the beach house around midnight, and he wanted to be there well before she arrived. It had been awkward the other night, when he had come home later than usual, and she had already been there.
She had asked him questions then-questions about his imaginary drive up the coast, and about how restless and agitated he seemed. Of course she suspected him. It was obvious now, though at the time he hadn't allowed himself to see it.
Well, it didn't matter. It was too late for her, no matter what she suspected. Things were moving quickly to a conclusion, and soon everything would be resolved once and for all.
He found the shoes in one of the dark corners the lamplight couldn't reach. When he bent to slip them on, involuntarily he grunted, an old-man noise. He hated making noises like that.
Amanda was his ticket to youth. Or if not Amanda, then some new companion, younger still and lacking any tattoos.
But not Kris. Kris was the past. Kris was a dead weight dragging him down.
He had to be rid of her. He would be.
Soon.
After Hickle left, Abby opened her bedroom closet.
The VCR and audio deck had been recording continually, but the TV was off, the audio console muted.
She turned on the monitor and speakers, then sat on the floor in a sloppy lotus position, resting her back against the bed, watching the monitor. She saw Hickle pace his living room before fixing a meal in the kitchen. She wondered if eating was a response to stress or if he simply hadn't had enough dinner.