He wanted suddenly to lean into her. Lean near those elbows and hands, the fingers clasped in something like prayer. He wouldn’t, and he told himself that the only reason he had the urge right now was because Katie had been doing the loco-motion （or whatever） with Michael Caine in a skirt the width of a belt. How pitiful was it that while his movie star fiancée was gallivanting around London nightclubs with the dashing young heartthrob from Zulu, he was reduced to flirting with a counter girl at a second-rate diner? Answer? Extremely.
“I like your coffee,” he told her.
“No one likes our coffee,” she said caustically. The she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Michael,” he lied. “Michael Caine.”
“Like the actor?”
“Exactly like the actor.”
“You’re kidding, right?” She stood up straight and backed off a bit.
“I’m not. My parents are William and Becky Caine of Stamford, Connecticut,” he insisted. He chose Stamford for a fictional childhood because one of his artists lived there, a fine art photographer, and he owed him money, too. An actress friend of Katie’s had bought three of the artist’s images, probably as a favor to Katie, and he still hadn’t paid the photographer his 60 percent of the sale.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“To have the name of a movie star?”
She nodded.
“It’s fine. It made him laugh when we met, because it’s actually not his real name. But it is mine.”
“You’ve met Michael Caine?” She sounded dubious. He liked her instincts.
“I have,” he said, and he knew he shouldn’t be carrying on this way. He understood why months ago he’d seduced the Russian painter （or, he occasionally tried to convince himself, why he’d allowed himself to be seduced by her）： Katie was living her glamorous life in Arizona, he’d had too much to drink, and the alcohol had fed the Machiavellian delusion that he could turn around his gallery’s fortunes if he could ink this Russian defector. Sign her. Represent her. Instead, later, he’d get that one painting. But this sort of extracurricular dalliance with a pretty girl at a diner was pointless; he would be kicking himself the moment he rolled off of her. Either he had to fess up right now that he was teasing her or thank her for a delicious breakfast and plan never to come back here again. He’d only discovered the unexpected satisfactions of lying in the last year, when he’d had to start lying first to potential buyers—usually inflating the résumé of the artists they were interested in or at least making their biography more dramatic—and then to his creditors.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Ashley.”
She practically purred the first syllable.
“You know what I do,” she continued. “What do you do?”
He put some milk from the tinny creamer into his coffee, stalling. He took a sip.
“I own a gallery,” he said, finally. It was taking what seemed to be Herculean strength to resist this temptation across from him, and so he reminded himself that absolutely no good could come from proceeding a single step further. He was engaged. He was engaged to a movie star. He was engaged to a woman with friends who were wealthy or influential or both: the sort of people who could afford the sort of sculptures and paintings that he wanted to sell in his gallery, and who were impressed that he had displayed a painting, albeit briefly, by the notorious Russian defector who was—even now, even still—the art world’s flavor of the month. Just because Katie was with the real Michael Caine was no reason why he should be pretending to be a fake one.
“Art gallery?”
“Yes,” he told her, and he was about to tell her his real name and that he was engaged, but before he could say another word she leaned into him once again.
“Need a model?” she asked, and that was it, his resolve was gone, as dry and empty as a birdbath in a drought. This girl obviously wasn’t the financial lifeline he desperately needed, but she was about to provide a different, less tangible sort of succor.
* * *
.?.?.
David couldn’t imagine how he could possibly be hungry, but he was. His stomach was growling.
He recalled how much he had enjoyed the breakfasts at the diner near his gallery until he fucked the waitress there and could never go back. The idea that she was a setup—a honey trap, to use the parlance his father would likely have used—and knew exactly who he was all along? He never saw that coming, but he guessed desperation made you an easy mark. God, who would have expected that the diner girl would be his downfall, and not Nina? He went to the waitress’s place later that day, as they planned, and the regret was every bit as awful as he had supposed it would be. But it paled before the photos that some bastard brought to his gallery two days later. He’d almost vomited when he saw them. Her little place was on the second floor of a four-story apartment, and she hadn’t closed the blinds. At the time, he’d thought only how he liked the afternoon sun on her skin.