But when we reached the front doors, she didn’t appear to have noticed anything. A short middle-aged man held the door for her, and her face lifted as if no one had ever thought to be so kind to her before. “Thank you!” she said, her puffy Texas vowels back again. I realized that this too was an act—an old act, one I should have recognized a long time ago. Beauty was untrustworthy, so she added naïveté, a country accent. Like Marilyn Monroe, with the breathy little-girl voice. I remembered her back at Letourneau’s: I think people think I’m dumb.
Had I seen any part of her real personality? Or had she just shown me whatever she thought I wanted to see?
Wasn’t that what I’d hired her to do?
Some parts had to be real, I thought. It was impossible to be disingenuous every second. When she’d dripped across my bathroom floor on purpose—that had been the real Mary, maybe. And when we’d lain on the carpet in my father’s old house, listening to the Laura Nyro record. I hadn’t been alone then.
Inside, the restaurant was designed to look like an Old World courtyard, with murals of people leaning from painted balconies, their arms full of real ivy, which snaked down the walls along decades-old cracks. Wicker fans hung motionless from the ceiling, a holdover from when the restaurant hadn’t had air-conditioning, and each table had a miniature chain-pull lamp and a built-in ashtray, which could be emptied from below. No one was allowed to smoke in restaurants anymore, but the ashtrays suggested a sort of bitterness about this rule on the part of the management that was soothing to the many elderly smokers who were regulars there.
“We’re with Albert,” Mary said to the man at the host station, leaning familiarly on his podium. “I don’t know if he’s—Albert! Hi!”
Albert was at a table at the far end of the courtyard, underneath a painting of a red-cheeked woman leaning out of a window, clutching a bottle of wine in one hand and a dripping glass in the other. Next to the painting, he looked dour in his brown sport coat, napkin in lap and walker propped against the wall. He didn’t hear Mary call out for him, but his head turned as she approached, a bright bit of yellow against the fake Spanish tile. “Girls,” he said, rising from his seat. “Nice to see you again. Robin, I’m speechless.”
Mary seemed to blush. I watched curiously as I saw that she only performed the body language of it, or maybe it was just that her makeup was thick enough to hide any extra color in her face. “Thank you! Oh my gosh. No, don’t get up—we’re too fast for you, we’re already sitting down. How are you?”
He tilted his hand: comme ci, comme ça. “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Look.” He stuck out his leg; there was a cuff sewn into the bottom, a bit too high, so that his translucent leg hairs showed just above the tops of his socks. “How are you? No trouble with traffic?”
“No, no. It was fine.”
He squinted at me. “And your husband? Your son—what’s his name? Eli?”
“Yes, Eli,” I said. Mary twitched in my direction and I added, “They’re fine.”
A potbellied man in plain clothes came to our table. I thought he might be the owner; he wore an expression that suggested both that he was ready to murder the incompetents around him and that he hoped we had a pleasant evening. “Can I get you something to drink? A bottle of wine for the table?”
“What do you think?” Albert asked us. “We could have a bottle, couldn’t we? Is red all right with you?”
“That would be amazing,” Mary said, smiling between Albert and the owner.
“How about you, Robin?” Albert asked when he’d finished ordering. “Have you been around to see old friends this week?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mary said, clasping his hand. “I looked up a couple of people I used to know. It’s been pretty interesting seeing what’s changed and what hasn’t.”
I stared at her. Had she really been talking to people Robin had known? Was that where she was going when she left the house, in the car she’d hidden from me?
“You found some who hadn’t moved away, then? It seems like it’s a rite of passage now, to leave home as soon as possible. I don’t know too many parents whose children stayed in one place.” Albert patted my leg. “Except for Leslie, of course.”
“Do you ever think about moving away, Leslie?” Mary chimed in.
“No.” I glanced around for the owner.
“No? Not even as a thought?” Albert smoothed his napkin. “You know, I always thought maybe I’d move to Vermont. I knew a family with a cabin out there. They used to invite me up for grouse season. It’s an interesting sport, although I might not be limber enough anymore.”
“Yeah, Leslie,” Mary said. “You could move to Vermont and shoot grouse.”
I shook my head.
“What’s your dream location, then?” she asked. “Where would Leslie go, if she could go anywhere?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” I said. “Maybe I’d live in Santa Fe.”
She laughed. “That’s an hour away! That’s the dinkiest dream move I’ve ever heard of.”
A waitress appeared at her shoulder, holding the bottle of wine. She poured it for Albert first, then paused. Albert glanced at her, brow wrinkled, and then said, “Oh, I see. No, I’m sure it’s fine, no need for all that,” so the waitress moved on to Mary’s glass.
“And where would you live, Robin?” Albert asked, when we had all placed our orders and the waitress had gone away again. “Would you stay in Las Vegas?”
“She’d go to LA,” I said without meaning to.
Mary’s eyes fixed on me. “Yes,” she said to Albert. “I would. I love it there,” she added, sinking back into her cheerful attitude. “It’s always seventy-five degrees and everyone has a tan and a therapist. I’m going to buy a long scarf and drive around in a convertible, like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief.”
“A film buff! Do you like Hitchcock?”
“I hate Hitchcock. I love Grace Kelly,” Mary said.
Albert laughed. “Hate Hitchcock? How?”
“His movies are all so slow, and all the people in them are like little cutouts in a dollhouse.” She propped her chin on her hand.
“I think he’d say that’s what he wanted from his films,” Albert suggested. “He called actors cattle, you know.”
“I knew it!” Mary declared. “You can just tell from watching those movies that Hitchcock was a big old dick.”