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Jackie smiled, a little sadly, and said, “It is. It always is.”
“I know I’m not a Greek arms dealer,” I said. “But—”
She looked startled. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, no, it isn’t that.” She reached across the remnants of breakfast and took my hand. “I already have more money than I can spend,” she said. “And if this show runs long enough to go into syndication, that’s my F.U. money.”
“Your what?”
She smiled. “F.U. money. Enough money to say, “Fuck you” to anybody or anything I don’t like, and not have to worry about the consequences.” She squeezed my hand, and then put it down. “Anyway, that’s not the problem.”
“What is the problem?” I said.
She sighed again, very deeply, and turned away to face the water. I looked at her profile. It was a very good profile, even though she was spoiling it a little with another frown, thinking her deep and unhappy thoughts about … what? Surely not me?
“I was selfish,” she said at last. “And that got Kathy killed.”
“Jackie, that’s—”
“No, let me say this,” she said. Her frown deepened. “So many people are just totally focused only on themselves, what they want, that they don’t think about how it affects anybody else. Especially in my business.”
“Not just your business,” I said, thinking that it sounded like a good description of normal life.
“I’ve always hated that,” she said. “I try to …” She waved a hand at the water. “There’s this sense of … empowerment … that goes with being famous. And I’ve seen how it turns good people into … what …”
“Assholes?” I suggested, thinking of Robert.
“Uh-huh, okay,” she said, still looking out over the Bay. “I don’t want that.” She turned back to face me, looking very serious. “I don’t want to be that person.”
“I don’t think you are,” I said.
“I will be,” she said, “if I try to take you away from your family.”
I looked at Jackie, and her deep violet eyes, set in that perfect, smooth, lightly freckled face, and for the first time it hit me that we were talking about exactly that: Jackie taking me away from my family. Dexter leaving Rita and the kids to gallop away into a mojito-soaked sunset and a life of top-shelf bliss. Jackie and Dexter, world without end—or at the very least, world without an end for a few more weeks.
I wanted that; I’d had a tiny taste of Jackie’s world, and of Jackie, and I liked it. I liked everything about it: the swirl of the adoring crowd everywhere we went, the gratifying buzz of worship from everyone who saw us, the room service and limousines and phone interviews and the feeling of being so very important that every burp and hiccup of our life was significant—I liked it. I liked the feeling of being with Jackie, in her world—and in her bed. And I liked her. I wanted more of it, all of it.
And I thought about what that meant: to leave my familiar workaday grind of crawling through violent traffic twice every day in an aging, battered little car, and slogging through the tired jokes and mindless routines of my job, knee-deep in carnage and callousness. And for what? Just to bring home a far-too-meager paycheck, which vanished immediately into the continual, greedy vacuum of family life, with its mortgages and braces and new shoes and groceries. And the endless, weary grind of dealing with kids and their constant problems, always flung at you in the same self-involved, demanding whine; and the every-morning shattering clatter of finding socks and homework and the other shoe as they got ready for school, followed by more shouting and fighting and doors slamming—and then a virtually identical performance every night at bedtime; the diapers and arguments and new jeans and teacher conferences, and high-pitched fighting every earsplitting step of the way. And I thought about Rita, with her perpetually fractured sentences and eternal fussing about absolutely everything, and the lines settling into her face as she hurtled into an old age that shouldn’t have come for another ten years at least, and the sense that she always wanted something from me that I couldn’t give her, couldn’t even identify. Could I really leave all this behind for mere perfection?
I thought I could.
I looked at Jackie. She was still watching my face, and her eyes were half filled with moisture. “Jackie,” I said.
“I can’t, Dexter,” she said. “I just can’t.”
I stood up and went to sit beside her on the chaise longue. “I can,” I said, and I kissed her. For just a moment she held back, and then she kissed me, too.
And it turned out that things weren’t really all that different in daylight. Not even right there on the balcony …
TWENTY-SEVEN
OUR UNSCHEDULED SIESTA ON THE CHAISE LONGUE BLENDED right into a surprise nap, and then a startling wake-up, which led to a second shower, and that took a great deal longer than it should have and ended up in Jackie’s bed again. And the whole day passed in a lazy fog of stupid jokes and comfy dozing, and before I knew it, it was night.
And the next morning, Monday, came much too quickly and caught us both in a nearly comatose state, lost in a sleep so deep that we didn’t hear the house phone until the third time it rang. I staggered out of bed and grabbed it, to learn that the limo driver was waxing wroth and demanding our immediate materialization in his car or we would be late on set and the forces of darkness would overwhelm his Town Car.
I quickly brushed my teeth and hair, and Jackie repaired her hair and makeup, and a very few minutes later we were catching our breath in the backseat of the limo, on our way to work.
We said no more about the future, but it was very much on my mind. It seemed the height of irony to me that although I had never really wanted to be saddled with a woman—except as part of my disguise—now I was hooked up to two of them. It was a bizarre situation for me, nearly surreal. I would never have guessed that among my other faults I was a satyr, a lecher, Don Juan Dexter, sauntering through life with a priapic smirk, eager hordes of feminine pulchritude trailing along in my wake. What a rascal I was—and how stupidly happy it made me. It was like living some absurd teen fantasy: hop out of bed with my pet goddess and then away in the limo. Off to a hard day on the set, lunch with my agent, saunter through an interview or two, always pausing along the way to allow the throngs of adoring women to bask in the glow of my radiant mojo. Dionysian Dexter, the surprise god of love.
My effervescent mood—and an accompanying silence from Jackie—lasted all the way to the soundstage the production had hired for the first day’s shooting. It was a few blocks in from the river, on the north edge of the Little Havana area, and in spite of the very best efforts of our driver, we were ten minutes late.
