Mystery Girl: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

be mournful perhaps, or mournful at feeling relief.
    “Well,” Gladys said, checking at her watch with a sigh. “We have to stop.”

9
    I DROVE TO THE MYSTERY GIRL’S place and parked beneath a tree. It was a Hollywood bungalow colony, set on a quiet block off of Sunset, the sort of phony beach cottages they built in the ’20s or ’30s as offices or sets, with peeling blue shutters and curving paths around the browning rosebushes. I got out, pretending to be looking for an address, which I suppose I really was doing, and found her cottage, number five, a quaint one-bedroom, flimsy yet chic, with cacti in little pots on the tile steps and an old-fashioned lamp beside the door. I loitered about until I noticed movement beyond the thin lacey curtains, then retreated to my car, which I rolled forward a few feet until I had a view of her door.
    I pulled out the canvas bag stuffed with some of the items Lonsky recommended I keep in my “kit” and which I’d grabbed when I stopped home to change from my suit into a less conspicuous T-shirt and jeans. I couldn’t complete his list—I didn’t own a camera, for instance, or any theatrical makeup, or a “selection” of fake mustaches—but I did have an old blond wig that Lala had worn when she’d dressed as a cheerleader one Halloween.
    For now, I just took out the notebook, in which I wrote the time of my arrival, and “Subject Observed at Home,” and grabbed the bag of nuts and raisins that I’d brought along in case the stakeout lasted all night, along with the water bottle, a designer model Lala used for yoga class. Fifteen minutes later my emergency supplies were gone. Half an hour after that I had to pee. I considered running to the gasstation on the corner, but didn’t want to risk losing the subject, so I put on NPR and listened to the news while I watched the traffic on Sunset slide by. Another half hour slowly passed. Unable to stand it any longer, I walked to the corner as casually fast as I could. They said they had no bathroom, though I’m not sure I believed them. I raced back to the car, hoping my subject was still there. I was now in acute distress and worried about permanent kidney damage. Precisely seventeen minutes later, I surrendered and relieved myself into my wife’s fancy water bottle. I was about to discard it, but remembering that it cost fifteen dollars, and the ridiculous fight that this fact had triggered, I resealed it and tucked it in my bag, planning to sterilize it with boiling water later. I chuckled ruefully, imagining the fury that would be unleashed if she ever found out. Then I felt sad, imagining the jolly laughter we would have shared a couple of years before, if I’d told her the same tale. What had happened? Why did she give a shit about a purple water bottle? Why wasn’t it fun being married to her anymore? Or to me?
    I reached into my bag and got my Proust (book one of Remembrance of Things Past, the three-part Moncrieff-Rafferty version, that silver-and-black paperback that’s everywhere, and which, like all true lovers, I’d learned to call by its secret pet name: In Search of Lost Time ). This was the one detail that Lonsky hadn’t gotten completely right: the inclusion of the Proust was not random. That volume, a fat block of thin paper, soft and heavy and yet somehow feathery, like pound cake, had been snoozing on the pillow beside me, in the spot where Lala used to dream. I’d always loved Proust, but now I read him both obsessively and haphazardly, the way other folks, I suppose, read the Bible, for comfort and wisdom in my time of pain. I had developed the irrational belief that almost any section, dipped up by chance, would answer my moment’s dilemma. Proust himself would only laugh: no one had less faith in God or man or woman, or in the prospect of those parties working things out. I opened the book and read
    He was jealous now of that other self whom she had loved.

10
    THE SUN WENT DOWN, though from