The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,42
of the car and walked up to the glass door. Laurel pushed the discreet button that sounded the bell in the loft upstairs. Then they waited. No answer came through the intercom, and they didn’t get buzzed in. The padlock wasn’t on the metal grate, so Laurel gave the door an experimental push. It gave under her fingers, so she went through it, Bet stepping in behind her.
The Spotted Dog smelled like every other small theater Thalia had dragged Laurel to, a dry must stuck to air that had been waxed with greasepaint. The lobby had a ticket booth and a concession stand and an old red velvet chaise longue and matching love seat. Behind the concession stand was a doorway hung with a once plush velveteen curtain, also dull red. The doorway led to the dressing and costume rooms, and to the stairs up to Thalia and Gary’s quarters.
Laurel walked to the counter and called, “Hello?”
After a minute, Gary poked his head from behind the curtain, his mouth turning down when he saw Laurel. He wasn’t drop-dead handsome, exactly—he had regular features set in a flat face—but a low hum of energy seemed to leak out of his skin. Laurel could always feel him as a presence in a room, even when he wasn’t speaking.
“And here you are.” He said it like Laurel was a cold sore he was resigned to having show up every now and again. Then he saw Bet standing behind her. “Good God,” he said, eyeballing the ruffled Wal-Mart halter. “What’s this?”
“This is Bet, a friend of Shelby’s,” Laurel said, and when Gary’s eyebrows went up, she added, “Actually, she’s Shelby’s third cousin.”
Laurel could see him make the connection to DeLop. His expression softened. “Right. Pleased to meet you, third-cousin-in-law.” He tipped her an imaginary hat and turned back to Laurel. In a far more baleful voice, he said, “I didn’t think you and herself were speaking.”
She could feel his dislike for her rolling off him in salty waves, but it didn’t bother her. She’d stopped liking him first. That had baffled him, because Gary didn’t think it was humanly possible for a person not to like him. He was smart and funny and talented on top of his generic good looks, the whole package, and in truth, she had liked him fine initially. Right up until the day he married her sister and the two of them moved to Mobile to live out the most elaborate conceit that Laurel had ever seen.
They pretended Thalia had no idea that he was gay. He sneaked around having thrilling, forbidden trysts with multiple men who thought they were hiding from Thalia, which allowed Gary to hide them more easily from one another. He clambered out of whatever bed he’d been tumbling around in and came home to Thalia every night. They slept cuddled up like kids at a slumber party, enough created drama swirling around them to make life as interesting as anything in Noël Coward.
Thalia claimed it was the perfect marriage because they both were first and forever in love with theater. “Gary keeps the lonelies away,” Thalia told Laurel once, after a five-martini birthday lunch. The birthday and four of the martinis had been Thalia’s. “You let yourself get lonely, then you want to be in love, and love is an illusion, Jesus Bug. A delusion, even. It leads to marriage and monogamy. M&M’s—the candy that kills art.”
Not that Thalia lived celibate. “Wronged, chaste wife” was casting her too far from type. Thalia’s idea of a perfect marriage included running out and getting some sex the way Laurel went to Albertsons to get celery, but she always came back home to Gary.
Laurel couldn’t fathom whatever it was Thalia and Gary had, but Thalia couldn’t seem to fathom her marriage, either. More than once Thalia had tried to shock Laurel with wild tales of the delights of catting, as if sex were something Laurel was missing out on. She used words Laurel had never heard to describe acts that sounded perfectly filthy.
After one particularly foul-sounding and one-sided conversation, Laurel had gone to Urban Dictionary online and looked up all the phrases she hadn’t known. All but one turned out to be things she and David had figured out for themselves long ago, and Laurel felt she could limp along through the rest of her life and be completely happy without ever once experiencing that last one. All she was missing was Thalia’s vocabulary, which did not