Fidelity (23 page)

He drove to the Golden State Freeway, pulled onto the southbound entrance ramp, and accelerated into the stream of traffic. He drove steadily for two hours before he stopped outside Bakersfield at a large complex where rows of trucks sat idling at the back of the lot, went into the restaurant and ate steak and eggs, then pulled into the gas station and refilled his tank. Down the road in the suburbs, he stopped at a Rite Aid drugstore and bought a box of wooden kitchen matches and two cans of charcoal starter.

The drive from Bakersfield seemed longer than he had anticipated, because from here on the traffic grew gradually thicker and slower. There were long-haul trucks in the right lane, then recreational vehicles as big as buses beside them, and then the left lanes full of SUVs and pickup trucks fighting for inches, passing each other for illusory advantages or for spite. It was dangerous and tiring, and Ted Forrest didn’t want to get into an accident or be pulled over by a highway-patrol officer, so he tolerated a spot in the middle lanes.

He came down Tejon Pass out of the hills into Castaic and the Santa Clarita Valley, places that had barely existed twenty years ago, but now were so choked with houses and strip malls and chain restaurants that they were beginning to seem dirty and worn out and unbearable. Then he was past the Cascade, the long, open sluice at the end of the aqueduct that in the 1900s had turned the San Fernando Valley into a garden and the backers and their friends into millionaires. A few minutes later, Forrest was in the northern part of the valley, fighting the real traffic toward the city of Los Angeles.

He was getting closer to his destination a few feet at a time, and the impatience and frustration invited him to think about why he was working so hard to get to a place where he didn’t want to be. He had made a small mistake in Los Angeles eight years ago, and now, in order to fix things, he had to come back to complete a missing step. But the underlying problem was the nature of women. He struggled to obtain them, only to find that what he got had changed into something he had never wanted.

The human species had evolved so that the females matured earlier than the males. They seemed to grow and ripen steadily until they reached near perfection at about the age of fourteen. They were not exactly at their physical zenith at that moment, but they were on the verge of it, still getting better every day, and still not showing any deterioration of any kind. Their skin was luminous, their hair thick and shiny, the whites of their eyes really white. Their waists seemed impossibly thin, and their breasts and buttocks were round and firm.

When they got older, all of that began to change. Having a physical relationship with a woman over thirty was a compromise. It was like eating fruit that was just a bit too soft. It might not be bad enough to throw away just yet, but it was past its peak, and a man tended to catch himself letting it lie untouched in the bowl and reaching for newer fruit. Their skin lost some of its elasticity and began to crease around the eyes and mouth. Their hair turned dull. They put on weight. If they stopped eating and did hard, punishing exercise each day, they began to look like skinny men. If they chose surgery and injections, they became nightmare creatures, with smooth, fishlike faces that had bloated mouths and wide, staring eyes.

They started out sweet-tempered and curious and pliable at thirteen, but within a decade they became spoiled and wised up, cynical and stupid simultaneously. A woman who had been told she was beautiful from the time she was fourteen became a monster of overconfidence and self-congratulation by the time she was twentyfour. She was psychotically suspicious of others and lenient with herself. She allowed herself to dignify whatever selfish nonsense she felt as though it were a philosophy, but she turned what he felt into a crime.

He had kept his feelings from causing trouble until the annual harvest festival in Mendota nine years ago. It was the first day of the festival, when they introduced the Harvest Queen and her court. The Harvest Queen was a pug-nosed girl with vacant eyes and a smile that had grown stale because it had been on her face sunrise to sunset since she was three and learned she would be rewarded for it. The one to look at was one of the princesses named Allison Straight.

She had dark brown hair with reddish highlights and huge green eyes. Her petite, curved body was the sort that drew the eyes away from the tall, greyhound-thin princesses around her, and her mouth had full Cupid’s-bow lips. Even in her princess gown, what she evoked was not cold, empty elegance, but fecundity. A stranger to the small towns of the Central Valley might have marveled that she was not the one who had been chosen Harvest Queen. She had the magnetic quality that some actresses had: a singularity that served to remind the eye that beautiful women didn’t all look like sisters. The best looked as though they had arrived from an undiscovered country on the other side of the earth.

Allison Straight wasn’t queen because she didn’t come from a well-established local family, didn’t have a father who owned the Chevrolet agency or served on the town council. Ted Forrest had been born in the vegetable country. He had seen so many of these contests that he always looked at the whole court with little interest in which child of the local merchants had been chosen queen.

He had stood around for a time being important while the notables had found their way to him. These events were organized and operated by boosters’ groups, and these people always wanted to ensure that Ted Forrest continued to sponsor their civic improvements. On this occasion, the one who took charge of him was a woman named Gail Hargrove. She was the former president of the chamber of commerce, a four-time councilwoman, and before that, a member of the board of education. She was a tall blond woman with a helmet of stiff hair and a lot of makeup who was as sexless as a civic-renovation project.

She conducted him to a big table where the local wines were being sampled in tiny plastic cups, and got him a real glass of the special cabernet that had reached its peak this year. She took him to see bins of exotic strains of white asparagus, broccoli rabe, radicchio, Japanese eggplant. She took him to see the architects’ model of the new municipal-refurbishment plans, and compared them to the concept drawings that had been done in elementary-school classes under the title “City of the Future.”Just when Gail Hargrove began to run out of other sights to show him, a bright flash distracted them. She took him toward the flashes, where she showed him the Harvest Queen and her court, who were on display across the room. They were on fake Louis XV armchairs from Zinsser’s Furniture, posing for group portraits.

Allison Straight caught his attention instantly. He felt the same sort of certainty he had felt when he had seen Caroline at about the same age twenty years earlier. She was simply the most attractive human being he had seen in years, a natural miracle.

Gail Hargrove seemed to notice the effect that Allison had on him, but maybe she was simply acting on some protective instinct around young girls by spelling out how young they were. She said, “Our queen and her court are particularly lovely this year, aren’t they? Whatever they’re giving them in the school cafeteria seems to be having wondrous effects.”

“Very pretty,” he said without much enthusiasm. He had to be careful around women like Gail Hargrove.

Part of her status in the town depended upon her reputation as a graceful and skilled ambassador to the powerful. Despite his tepid response, she seemed to believe she had figured out what interested him, so she offered him a closer look. The photographer had exposed enough film, and he was folding his tripod and putting equipment in padded cases, so she took Ted Forrest by the arm and led him to the girls.

They had little notion of who Ted was. One or two probably knew the name Forrest because they had seen it engraved on plaques on public buildings and parks; the others were ignorant. But they knew who Gail Hargrove was, and they saw her defer to Forrest and treat him like a visiting potentate. They all perked up as they had been trained to do, looked him in the eye, and gave him nearly identical good-student smiles-all but one, whose smile was distinctly different.

He surprised everyone by going down on one knee, bowing his head, and saying, “Your majesty, I’m deeply honored to be admitted to the presence of such a gracious queen and her beautiful princesses.” Gail Hargrove and the rest of the civic boosters laughed and applauded, and when the noise died down a bit, she introduced the girls.

The queen was Rebecca Sanders, the daughter of the plant manager for the packing and canning plant owned by a supermarket chain. Forrest said to her, “Say hello to your dad for me.” He was not surprised when he heard the names of three of the six princesses were Milton, Keller, and Cole, all names he knew. He said something friendly to each. Two of the others were Martinez and Garcia, and he said merely, “Very pleased to meet you,” as though it were true. Gail Hargrove, with a small-town politician’s delight in showmanship, saved Allison to the very end.

When Ted Forrest heard the name, at first he felt cheated. If she had been from a family he knew, he might have been able to contrive a way to visit her at home. If she had been from a family with business ties to his holding company or his water interests, he might at least have had some excuse to run into her. But he had never heard of anyone named Straight. He said, “Straight. That’s such a familiar name. Do I know your family?”

She gave him the mischievous look he thought he had detected earlier. “It’s only familiar because everybody you meet says they’re straight, even if they’re not.”

Ted Forrest laughed, the other girls joined him, and a half second later, the adults laughed nervously, too. But Gail Hargrove was not amused, and she didn’t pretend to be. After a moment, enough people noticed it and the irreverence was strangled. Gail Hargrove restored her frozen smile, took Ted Forrest away, and showed him the Japanese cucumbers and Chinese eggplants. After a minute or two, she had recovered enough to launch into her pitch for his support in the municipal-redevelopment effort.

Ted Forrest listened attentively, but did not say exactly how much money he was likely to give, or for which portions of the project. He had learned over time that his status diminished when agreement was reached. He also wanted an excuse to stay longer. He had at first planned to drive home at four o’clock, but he decided to stay for the evening’s fiesta. Ted Forrest had noticed that in order to obtain what he wanted, usually all that was required was patience and alertness.

Between the day’s events and the fiesta that began at seven, there was a lull, and he used the time to call for a room reservation, not in Mendota, but along Route 180 outside Fresno. He also drove to a liquor store and bought a quart of vodka, then stopped at a pharmacy for a flat white plastic bottle designed for a woman’s travel kit. He filled the plastic bottle with vodka, put the bottle in his coat pocket and locked the rest of the vodka in his car trunk, then went to the party.

The fiesta was held in the same few blocks downtown that the police had cordoned off for the earlier events. Mariachi bands strolled the sidewalks playing. There was a stage at the far end of the main street where two Mexican dance troupes performed folk dances in alternation. There was a beer tent run by a local bar, a wine-tasting tent run by a confederation of wineries, with the profits split in some unnamed formula with charities. If a person could make it past the crowds around those two tents, there was a long row of open booths where hot food was for sale.

Ted Forrest endured a couple of hours of the chatter of the town politicians and businesspeople. He knew that their patience and stamina weren’t as prodigious as his, and they drank more than he did. As they each expressed their bid for his support of some specific part of the renewal project, then ran out of words, fell silent, and finally wandered off, he waited. The time came when he was free.

He sauntered along the edges of the fiesta, scanning the crowd. He found the queen and her court, surrounded loosely by a swirl of people their age, slipped into the group, and asked the queen to dance with him.

They danced something like a Mexican polka to the music from the stage for a minute or two, and he handed her off to a boy she had been talking to. The boy seemed to have mixed feelings about dancing, but had no time to think of an excuse not to. Ted Forrest took the hand of the princess who was standing nearest, danced with her, and then handed her off to another boy. He had started a trend. Either the other boys were less afraid to dance, or the girls were more insistent, but he noted that most of the other princesses were dancing by now, so he moved to Allison Straight. As they began to dance, he guided her into the center of the court so it was clear he was simply showing the shy kids how to have fun. But he said to her, “You’re the most beautiful girl in the county.”

“You know that, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Then thanks.”

He tried again. “You seem much more sophisticated than the others. Have you traveled, or are you some kind of prodigy?”

“Kind of what?”

“Prodigy. You know, like a genius.”

She laughed hard, collapsing against his chest. “Oh, my God,” she said.

“You didn’t hear me wrong, did you?”

“So much for being a genius. But it’s not just me, it’s this band. It’s so loud.” She leaned against his chest again, then pulled back and patted his sport coat. “What’s this?”

He leaned close and said into her ear, “I brought a little vodka to get me through this.”

She looked up at him, her eyes excited. “Can I have some?”

“How old are you?”

She looked disappointed. “Busted. I’m sixteen.”

“If you think that’s old enough, then so do I. When this dance is over, go get some juice or a soft drink. It goes best with fruity ones, like orange.” He looked around. “Meet me by that row of trees at the edge of the park.”

“That’s no good. Couples go in there to fool around.”

“Where, then?”

“Don’t you have a car?” she asked.