Free Potboiler by Jesse Kellerman Page A

you’ve been around.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s as much my fault as yours.” She sighed. “We’re like a couple of children, aren’t we.”
    He smiled.
    “Let me get cleaned up,” she said. “Then you can tell me all about it.”

29.
    They ate at the same Italian restaurant, ordered the same delicious wine, stuffed themselves with pasta. He thought he had never seen her so beautiful, her strong features mellowed by the liquid flicker of candlelight.
    “You must be very busy these days,” Carlotta said.
    “Off and on.”
    “You were in town,” she said. “I saw the poster at the bookstore.”
    His nerves had been deflating over the course of dinner, but under her unwavering stare, terror ballooned anew, larger than before, and he braced himself for the pinprick that would burst him in an instant.
    “You didn’t call,” she said.
    He said nothing.
    “Why?”
    “I didn’t want to upset you.”
    “Why in the world would that upset me?”
    “We didn’t exactly leave things on a major chord.”
    “All the more reason to call,” she said.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Silly man,” she said. “I forgive you.”
    The waiter arrived with dessert menus. When he had gone, Pfefferkorn girded himself to ask the question hanging around his neck like an anvil.
    “Did you read it?”
    She did not look up from the menu. “Of course.”
    There was a silence.
    “And?” he said.
    Now she looked up. She cleared her throat. “Well, like I said, I’m no thriller expert. Bill is my only point of comparison. But I thought it was very good.”
    He waited. “That’s it?”
    “Don’t be such a writer. I said it was very good.”
    He wasn’t looking for praise, though. He was looking for exoneration. He studied her closely as she debated out loud whether to order dessert. He sought a clue. Some preoccupation around the eyes. Some tightness in the lips. Some backward-canted posture of concealed revulsion. He waited and waited, yet all she seemed to care about was whether the strawberry zabaglione was worth the calories. At first he wouldn’t allow himself to accept what was happening. But it kept on happening, and by “it” he meant “nothing.” Nothing was happening, because she had no idea what he had done. It was the stuff of bad novels, but it was true. It struck him then that the stuff of bad novels was far more likely to occur in real life than the stuff of good novels, because good novels enlarged on reality while bad novels leaned on it. In a good novel, Carlotta’s motivations were far more complicated than they appeared. In a good novel, she was withholding her accusations so she could spring them on him later to achieve an unexpected end. In the bad novel of life, she simply didn’t know. His troubles ended here. That she did not seem to care for
Blood Eyes
was beside the point. It mostly wasn’t his book. He wanted to jump up and sing. He was safe. He was free.
    “Signora?”
    Carlotta relinquished the menu and ordered a cappuccino.
    “And the
signore
?”
    “Same,” Pfefferkorn said.
    The waiter departed.
    “If you knew I was in town, why didn’t you come to the reading?” Pfefferkorn asked.
    “I didn’t want to upset you.”
    “That’s the same excuse I used,” he said.
    “Well, I thought you were angry at me.”
    “I wasn’t.”
    “It was a reasonable assumption based on our last conversation.”
    “Why is it,” he said, “that when I misjudge you I’m wrong, but when you make the same misjudgment of me it’s reasonable?”
    “Because,” she said.
    “Right,” he said.

30.
    He extended his ticket and they spent a blissful ten days eating, laughing, and making love. There was a refreshing abruptness to their romance, a welcome dispensing of preliminaries, as they enjoyed each other for their own sakes. Bill’s name seldom came up, and when it did it was spoken with a kind of abstract fondness, as though he were a memorable character in a novel they had both enjoyed. The