She opened the wallet bookwise to a photograph, and she revolved it 180 degrees and slid it across to him, still holding it down to keep it from springing shut, implying she would keep custody of it.
Rod—in better days—had long silky black hair with a wave at the end, and bangs cut straight across the forehead. It was a Prince Valiant style.
“He looks like Veronica Lake,” he said, insensitively. “His hair does.”
Unlike Veronica Lake, Rod had a small black goatee. He smiled broadly in the photo, as people did once in yearbook photos.
“Hm,” said Blythe. “Except not blonde.”
“Veronica Lake was brunette. Betty was the blonde.” He was trying to remind her of the cartoon characters in the Archie comic books.
“Veronica Lake was a movie star.”
“No, Veronica is Archie’s girlfriend. She and Betty. In the comics.” He had a general sense of losing traction, and he knew he shouldn’t be insisting, but the resemblance was perfect. At least in the hair department, Rod did look exactly like the svelte brunette in the comic book. Rod even had the girl’s heart-shaped face. Plus goatee.
“In the Archie comics, that was Veronica Lodge, not Lake. But you’re right. Rod did have hair exactly like that.”
“Veronica ‘Lake,’ Veronica ‘Lodge,’” he flipped a hand. All the stars were always interchangeable. At least to him.
So, for a funereal moment, they were both looking at the image of a man no longer alive. All that remained was his picture in a wallet. And his historical resemblance to a comic book character. And the record store he’d founded. And the pedal steel playing that appears on people’s CDs. Not a bad life. Blythe was folding her wallet and putting it away.
“Veronica in the comics was the bitchy one,” she clarified. “With the little tycoon father. Betty was the blonde one. She was the ‘nice’ one.”
A good-looking small platter arrived in the hands of a waiter. And a pair of ceramic mugs.
At that moment, a cell phone was chiming. It might have been coming from anywhere in the room, but it was, in fact, buried in Blythe’s purse. “Uh-oh,” she said, recognizing a ringtone, while she dug for it, “That’s Billie at the office.” She seemed puzzled as she examined her phone’s incoming-call window. “Billie should be at home. Tonight’s not her night.”
Whatever this was, it could ruin their dinner. And he found he was—like a teenager—furious at any threat to his selfish plans. Earlier tonight, he’d been contemplating dying of a heart attack. Now he was a jealous, angry boy. Philosophy is only for the dying. Objectivity, stoic dispassion, “wisdom,” all only for the dying.
Blythe said into the phone, “Well, when was the last time she was seen?”
Here was the nightmare that couldn’t possibly happen, the disaster that could be forfended by, alone, carefree reckless ignorance. He watched her, while trying to summon a communicative look, but she kept her eyes down on the plate that had just arrived before her, little wafers of raw fish flesh fanned out.
“I see,” she said at last, having done some listening. “He’s here with me. We’re at Avignon. All right.”
She folded her phone and looked at Mark.
She told him, “I guess Lotta was upset.”
“Was?”
If he were showing any anxiety, Blythe’s hands were rising, patting, tamping down. “It’s nothing awful, she’s fine, she’s great. We’d better go, though. Maybe we can get them to wrap this up. Take it with.” She touched the midpoint of the tablecloth between them with a little tickle on the fabric and explained. “Lotta seems to have left the group. She was in Bodie’s car.” She lifted a shoulder. “But she got out of Bodie’s car. She’s on Sunset Boulevard somewhere.”
Mark was getting out his credit card. “So it’s a romantic snafu,” he said. He pictured Bodie, planted deep in the car seat with his paralysis, yearning sidewise and trying to kiss Lotta, while Lotta squirmed and stiff-armed the poor fellow.
Blythe was pulling on her little jacket-thing. She cried, “Oh, too bad! And just when I wanted to ask you about physics and get an explanation why there’s no such thing as a ‘moment in time.’ As you say repeatedly on YouTube.”
FIRST, IN HER car, he did the obvious thing, he dialed Lotta’s cell phone, but he knew what would happen. He of course got the recording of her voice (Hi everybody, it’s Carlotta. Leave me a message)—but only after she’d let it ring six times—meaning she knew it was him but didn’t want to answer. Blythe as she drove listened to the failure of the call. And when he folded his phone she told him, “The area where she got out, all along there it’s safe. It’s all tourists and shoppers. One of my, actually, favorite restaurants is there.” She glanced to see if he was worried. “This happens often. Somebody goes off, and whenever it happens Billie has to come out—and she has to get you to come out—because legally now you’re responsible for the little Celebrity, not Fantasy Vacations Incorporated. Billie will be there. She’ll meet us at the Studio Lot, and then we’ll look for Lotta. And just keep calling till she does answer. She’s just riled up.”
The story, as Blythe had got it from Billie, was that Lotta was spied in the back seat of Bodie’s limousine, and that she wasn’t resisting but rather taking an active part. They’d been parked in a side street. The two kids who had looked in through the tinted glass and, quite by accident, caught them were Rachel and Josh, a girl from New York and a boy from San Diego, a pair of teenage Celebrities on the tour who themselves had been developing their own romance during the weekend.
These, all of them, were all good-hearted kids; nobody was invidious in the way Mark had feared spoiled children would be, and nobody would want to embarrass Lotta. They tended to take care of each other. The New York girl, Rachel, had ambitions as a singer-songwriter and strummed an acoustic guitar while simultaneously managing the curtain of her lustrous hair, keeping it away from the guitar fretboard; and Josh was a very serious classical pianist who preferred to be called by an Arabic name: he was either pretending to convert, or had genuinely converted, to Islam (at age sixteen, from Mormon parents, in the pretty little Southern California town of La Jolla). Everyone kept reverting to calling him Josh, because the Arabic name he’d chosen was completely unmemorable; also, it involved a throat-clearing sound in the middle that nobody could master. He had made a minor nuisance of himself, during the week, by requiring that all his food be halal, somewhat overscrupulously halal, and complaining that the girl Celebrities in the group, including Lotta, dressed too revealingly and danced too suggestively. (However, he and Rachel were the only two kids on the trip who were known to be, at night, tiptoeing in the corridors visiting each other’s rooms.)
For their tryst, Bodie and Lotta’s limousine had been parked on a street off Sunset Boulevard. After their friends discovered them embracing, Bodie and Lotta had rapped on the screen that occludes the driver in the front seat, and they told him to get going. Then, after a few blocks, Lotta asked him to stop so she could be let off, apparently in some emotional distress. The