The Mural

by Michael Mallory

  And worrying about getting caught was tomorrow’s problem.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Even when seated in first class, Elley Gorman Hayden hated flying. Over the years she had learned effective techniques for hiding her fear, but every time the plane banked to one side or took a sudden lurch or bounce, her heart leapt up into her throat and her hands broke out in a sweat. This trip had been particularly bad, with almost non-stop turbulence from the point they had reached cruising altitude. The turbulence wasn’t that violent, but it was constant and unnerving. She turned to Blaise Micelli, her boss, and said: “I feel like a martini.”

  Blaise Micelli looked up from his Adweek. “Easy enough,” he said. “I’ll signal the flight attendant.”

  “No, Blaise, I being metaphoric. I don’t want a martini, I feel like one. I feel like I’ve been shaken for the last two-and-a-half hours.”

  “What a coincidence,” he said, grinning. “I feel like an olive on a long swizzle stick that’s pretty eager to get dunked in a martini.”

  Elley grimaced back at him. Normally when he made juvenile comments, accompanied by that Tom Cruise smirk, she would raise an eyebrow and cock one side of her mouth upwards, and threaten to spank him. Today she could not even muster that. “I just want to rest a bit,” she said, leaning the seat further back and closing her eyes, and absently fingering the tiny silver charms on the bracelet Jack had given her representing characters from The Wizard of Oz, which was her favorite film, one she completely identified with as a girl, stuck in a home life from which she desperately wanted to escape, complete with her own personal Wicked Witch in the form of her mother. It was time for her to stop lying to herself. Her sick feeling had started even before airplane began bouncing. It had come on in the limo on the way to the airport, a tiny burning ache in her chest that would not go away. At first she feared that she was starting to come down with something, but the longer she had the dull ache, the more she realized that it was like nothing she had ever felt. Maybe it was worry. Maybe she was actually worried about her marriage.

  She knew Jack had been fucking up at work lately. That was easy to gauge: his increasingly vehement rants against Marcus Broarty implied that he had been incurring his boss’s displeasure more frequently than usual. She had little reason to doubt that Broarty was a horse’s ass, but he nevertheless represented authority at Jack’s office, and respect for authority was not on her husband’s asset sheet. Jack’s saving grace had always been how he dealt with Robynn, but the sight of all those empties on the counter last night had sent sirens through her brain. If he was drinking that much around the child, then something was deeply wrong.

  And then that phone call from a woman with a sexy voice.

  Sure, it could have been taken at face value. Sure, the relationship between Jack and this woman could be completely innocent. Elvis could still be alive, too, and space aliens might have shot JFK.

  But Elley knew bullshit, knew it by sight, sound, touch, smell, and, yes, taste. She sold it to thousands of idiots on silver plates every day of her life. That was her job. And with that phone call her bullshit detector hit the red zone.

  She knew what was going on. The man who refused to do half the things she wanted him to do with her in bed had to go somewhere else to get what little gratification he needed. That explained everything else: the drinking, the argumentativeness, the trouble at the office. Explained it nicely, neatly, color-coded and with a slogan.

  Elley felt a dry, warm weight on her fingers. It was Blaise’s hand, casually sliding onto hers, so casually that anyone watching would simply have assumed they were a married couple. After all, they were both wearing wedding rings. “Please don’t,” she said, without opening her eyes. His hand slid back off.

  Actually feeling hurt by Jack’s infidelity threw conflict and confusion into her status quo existence. It was not as though she was guiltless. She and Blaise had been screwing around for a couple of years now, but in her mind, it was not an affair; certainly not a love affair. Blaise was conducting a love affair with himself, with which no woman could possibly compete. Her opening up for him was a business arrangement, nothing more. For a woman, sleeping with the boss was the modern equivalent of paying union dues: you did it to keep your job. And that was imperative since Jack was not making so much that she could jeopardize her employment. And now that he was clearly antagonizing his boss, she had to be particularly vigilant.

  Hell, she doubted Jack had any idea it was going on. He was too attuned to his own problems, real, imagined, or bottled.

  So then, why did she feel so shitty?

  Maybe because her impractical, sometimes impossible, increasingly toasted, but basically decent husband meant more to her than she had stopped to consider for a long, long time.

  Maybe because getting that phone call was like a sharp slap in the face.

  Maybe because she didn’t want to be a forty-year-old divorcee in a couple of years.

  “Fuck,” Elley uttered.

  “Later, later,” Blaise whispered.

  Elley opened her eyes and looked at him. Blaise Micelli was good looking enough. He was a well-preserved forty-nine, vigorous and wielding that kind of in-born sexiness that you either have or you don’t, no matter how your facial features are arranged. But looking at him, she could only think of him in the past tense.

  Somehow, she would work things out with Jack. Somehow, she had to.

  The plane suddenly bucked and Elley groaned. “Could you get me a headset, please?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Blaise signaled for the flight attendant and got the cheap headset. “I hope whatever you’re coming down with isn’t going to impact our business.” She was not sure which business he was referencing. As she plugged the headset into the plane’s music channel she said: “I’m sorry, Blaise, I’ll try to get it together for the meetings.” Slipping it on, she closed her eyes again.

  And damned if Jack’s smiling face wasn’t the first thing she saw out of the darkness.

  * * * * * * *

  “But how come Mommy’s not going to be there?” Robynn asked her father as they sped up the Pacific Coast Highway.

  “Punkin, like I said, Mommy went on a trip,” Jack replied. “We’ll see her when we get back home.”

  Robynn frowned. “I wish she were with us.”

  “I know you do.”

  They were three hours up the coast from L.A. and traffic was good, which was a rare treat. They were zipping past miles of crop fields, beans and strawberries, mostly, punctuated by an occasional vineyard. Aside from missing her mother, which was understandable, Robynn’s behavior in the car had been far, far better than Jack expected, given the black mood in which she had arisen that morning. She had remained calm while strapped into the car seat beside him in the pickup truck—something she did not always take so placidly—and she had spent most of the trip playing with a plush monkey that she had named “Mr. Booty,” because its white feet made it look like it was wearing boots.

  “Daddy, I have to go,” she said, as they zoomed past the green highway sign promising a town called Tarelton to be the next exit.

  Her timing was better than usual. Normally Robynn waited until they were just past a turn-off to declare her needs. “Okay, I’ll pull off in this next town and we’ll find a place, and maybe we can get a soda or some ice cream or something while we’re there,” Jack said.

  “Okay!”

  Robynn sang softly to Mr. Booty for the few miles it took to arrive in downtown Tarelton, which was three blocks long and looked like the Western street from a film studio back lot. Most of the buildings dated back to the late 1800s, though there had clearly been a concentrated effort in recent years to renovate, if not completely remodel, some of them. One old brick building that appeared to have been a fire house at one time looked freshly tuck-pointed. Jack had never thought of central California as a bastion of the Old West, but these days, old towns did whatever it took to bring in the tourists. Three men ambled ou
t of a feed store connected to a towering grain elevator on the main drag as Jack drove by, each one in jeans and a white lacquered straw cowboy hat. Jack pulled his truck into a space in front of an old brick building whose bottom floor housed a bar and grill. Next to it, in a small, recently remodeled store front, whose design contrasted with the Victorian-era buildings around it, was an ice cream shop, and when Robynn saw it, she dropped Mr. Booty on the floor and started to try and unbuckle herself from the car seat.

  “Whoa, whoa, punkin, hang on, you can’t do that yourself,” Jack said, reaching over and unfastening the buckle. “We’ll get there in plenty of time, wait for me.”

  “I want p’stacio nut.”

  “We’ll see if they have it.”

  The two of them were the only customers in the ice cream shop, which unlike practically every eatery in Los Angeles except the major junk food chains boasted of a public restroom. Jack got the key from the bored-looking teenaged girl behind the counter and opened the door, but Robynn went in on her own.

  She was getting so big.

  It turned out the place did not have pistachio nut, but it did have bubble gum, which appealed to Robynn even more. Jack ordered a bottle of water for himself and the two retired to one of the small, wobbly tables in the shop. While Robynn was happily licking her cone, Jack pulled out his cell phone and called Dani to tell her that he was coming up, but got her inbox. “Hey, it’s Jack,” he said into the phone. “Don’t be shocked, but I’m on my way back up to San Simeon. The second set of pictures at Wood City didn’t turn out either, so I’m going to take another set. I may need to get a new camera, though. I have my daughter with me. I’m going to be staying at the same place. You’ve got my cell number if you need it. Bye.”

  “Who were you calling?” Robynn asked.

  “Oh, just a friend,” Jack said. Putting the phone back into his shirt pocket, he started staring silently at a poster that had been taped up on the wall of the place, showing a triple-decker Neapolitan ice cream cone, with a scoop of vanilla on the bottom of the stack, strawberry in the middle, chocolate on top. The colors were somewhat off, so that the strawberry was more flesh tone than pink and the chocolate was a dark almond. It did not take much imagination to get a skin tone out of it as well, a bronzed, beach-tan skin tone. Jack kept looking at the join between the flesh and the bronze, the way they almost melted into each other, and he began to see two bodies: his and Dani’s. Jack was the pink layer and she was the bronze, rubbing wetly up against him, glistening with the sweat of passion. It was the most sensual thing Jack Hayden had ever seen in print, far more erotic than any girlie magazine.

  He continued to stare, transfixed, for who knew how long? Everything around him seemed to disappear except for the flesh colored images. Finally he shook his head and broke his gaze away from the poster. His lip was perspiring and he was hard. He took a drink of his water. Sneaking a look back at the poster, he now saw only a triple-decker ice cream cone. Jesus, did simply hearing Dani’s recorded voice on a cell phone greeting really have that big of an effect? Even if it had, what exactly he would be able to do about it now that he had his five-year-old in tow? You just sit there and watch Elmo, punkin, while Daddy and Dani go into the bathroom and get all bare nakedy and rub up against each other and make funny noises until they scream. Oh, and don’t say anything to Mommy, okay?

  “What the hell am I doing?” he asked the poster. He knew he should call Dani back right now and tell her that he had committed a terrible lapse in judgment having rushed up here with Robin in tow. Shit, maybe Elley was right all those times she’d rail about how he was nothing more than a fifteen-year-old in the body of an adult. He turned back toward Robynn to tell her that it was time to go. But no words came out of his mouth, only a gasp.

  Robynn was not there.

  His daughter was gone.

  “Robynn?” he called out inside the ice cream shop, but he could clearly see that she was not there.

  Leaping up from the table so forcefully that he nearly knocked it over, he demanded of the girl behind the counter where his daughter had gone.

  “I dunno,” the girl shrugged.

  “Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”

  “Nope, key’s right here.”

  “Well didn’t you see her leave?” Jack demanded.

  “It’s your kid, not mine.”

  Jack had a sudden impulse to slap her, but he held it in check. Then he saw the girl look behind him through the window. “Hey, isn’t that her out there on the sidewalk?”

  Jack turned around and saw Robynn standing near a concrete-and-board bench on the street, her half-eaten scoop dripping down her fingers, chatting amiably with an old woman, who was seated on the bench. “Jesus,” Jack exhaled. He ran out of the door of the shop. “Robynn!” he shouted, and the girl turned to look at him.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  He knelt down and grabbed her arms tightly.

  “Ow!” she cried, nearly dropping her cone.

  “Why did you leave like that?” he demanded. “You know better than to go off on your own!”

  She looked frightened now. “Sorry, Daddy, but this lady needed help.”

  Jack looked up into the face of the woman seated on the bus bench. She was old and had snowy hair, a lined face, and clear hazel eyes that right now looked a bit confused.

  “I didn’t mean to do anything bad,” Robynn was saying, now near tears.

  “Okay, punkin, it’s okay,” Jack said, loosening his grip and managing to turn it into a hug. “I just got scared because you weren’t there and I couldn’t find you at first. We’re in a strange town so if you got lost, I wouldn’t know where to look.”

  “I hope I haven’t caused any trouble,” the old woman said.

  “No, no, it’s just that we try to teach her not to wander off, you know.”

  “You and your wife?” the woman asked absently.

  There was a pause before Jack answered, “Yes, and usually she’s pretty good about it.”

  “Oh, well, you know how kids are,” the woman went on, seeming to clear. “Nobody really looked after me like that when I was young. Today it’s different, of course.” She looked at Robynn and smiled. “I think she’s the one I’m supposed to meet.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  The woman looked at Jack. “I was told to meet a girl here. Why here, I don’t know, but there she is.”

  Jack was now convinced he was dealing with some poor, senile woman who had wandered off from home, or perhaps from a care facility, and had gotten hopelessly lost. Robynn, in her innate sweetness, probably saw the woman walking around in circles with a puzzled look on her face through the window of the ice cream shop, and slipped out to see if she could help her when Jack was not looking.

  When he was looking at pictures of ice cream and turning them into sexual fantasies.

  “No harm done,” Jack said to the old woman. “My name’s Jack Hayden, by the way, and this is Robynn.”

  The woman looked at Robynn and smiled. “Oh, like the bird?”

  “Actually, it’s with a y and two n’s,” Jack said. “My wife’s idea. Look, is there some way I can help you?”

  “I don’t know, actually. My name is Althea Kinchloe. I guess you could say I’m visiting here too. I’m really from Vancouver.”

  “Canada?” Jack asked, amazed he had managed to get so far away from home.

  “No, Washington State, just across the line from Oregon. I grew up in California, though. Does my name mean anything to you?”

  “Uh, no, not really. Were you famous?”

  “Oh, heavens no, I just thought that, well, Howard is the one who told me to come down here, and I thought maybe that Howard spoke to you, too.”

  “I’m sorry, but I haven’t spoken with anyone named Howard. Is he your son?”

  “Howard? Oh, no, he and I were talking about getting married, but that was a long time ago.”

  “You’ve kept up with him, though.”

/>   “No, no, I can’t say as I have, but he contacted me a couple of days ago. I think it was a couple of days ago. I’m a little tired from the bus ride. It was in the middle of the night, so I don’t know which day to count it as.”

  Howard must be her husband, then, Jack thought. In the poor woman’s addled mind, he must have been relegated to a suitor. “You know, if you have Howard’s number we can call him,” he suggested, taking out his cell phone and showing it to her.

  “Oh, no,” Althea replied with a knowing smile. “Howard’s dead. That’s why I was so surprised to see him.”

  “Yeeesss...I imagine that would be something of a surprise.”

  There was an awkward silence, filled only by the sounds of cars driving slowly by on the street and the crunching of Robynn’s wafer cone. Then Althea said: “I know what you’re thinking, young man, that I’m some old biddy who’s not right in the head.”

  Jack had to smile at her candor.

  “I think you’re nice,” said Robynn.

  “Thank you, honey. I think you’re nice, too. If you like, you can call me Noni. That’s what my own grandchildren call me.”

  “Look, Mrs. Kinchloe, I just want to make sure you’re okay, because you seem far from home.”

  “Yes, quite a ways. I took the bus because I don’t drive anymore. Maybe Howard didn’t know that. I just threw a few things for the trip in this bag”—she patted an old cloth tote—“and headed out. I had to change buses in Paso Robles. Anyway, this is where Howard told me to come, and since he had never tried to talk to me before, I figured it must have been important.”

  “How did Howard contact you?”