Read Online Long Shot by Paul Monette - Free Book Online Page B

and she was shocked to see how little it had changed. Nothing was ruined. Nothing gone.
    When Jasper was in a picture—that is, when he wasn’t on camera—he segued from one to another of the recreational drugs. It was as if he had to work up a state of reverie over the story he was starring in. An air of distraction went with him wherever he went, like a background instrumental. So you never knew, late at night when he talked nonstop and went out slumming, if he was playing some kind of game or only lost in the role of Jasper Cokes. Vivien saw what Artie meant. For a man wrapped up in a starring role, there was no telling where a game might lead when the night began to fight it out with the morning. You might get carried over it like a falls.
    â€œWhen you went away, Viv, did you know you were coming back?”
    â€œOf course,” she said—dismissing it even before she took it in, imagining they had turned to lighter matters. They plodded ahead. If Artie was right, it was only an accident. Jasper hadn’t planned a thing. She wondered if this made her feel any less betrayed.
    â€œBecause I missed you, Viv,” he said. From the hunch of his overmuscled shoulders, she saw how it shied him to say it out straight. “See, I never would have stayed this long. Not for Jasper’s sake. It got so he made me very sad. He didn’t mean to, but like I told him, what’s the point of protecting a man on the outside, if all the risks he takes are in his head?”
    From the first, there were birds around them, lighting in the sagebrush whenever they stopped, and betting they’d break out the sweet rolls early. A few kept pace—a scatter of sparrows and a pair of jays—but now they bristled and squawked. They had to turn back. They were hilltop birds, and they had no range in the canyon.
    â€œDid Jasper think I was gone for good?”
    â€œIt’s the first time you ever left when he was shooting.”
    â€œYou’re not answering my question.”
    â€œI know. You’re not answering mine.”
    Somehow, she’d never gone out of her way to see what it was between Jasper and Artie. She supposed they must have been lovers once, long ago in college in Vermont. At the time, they must have been equally matched. But as Jasper’s name got brighter, till they knew him in every town on earth that had electric lights, Artie’s scope got narrower and narrower. He was chief valet and dialogue coach, as well as the unofficial final word on Jasper’s look in a given scene. At night, with his stash of whites and blues, he was Jasper’s last connection.
    â€œI would have said goodbye, you know, if I wasn’t coming back.”
    Though she had no knack for friends, she and Artie were something close. By dint of their lives’ geography, they’d passed eight years in the same house, and neither one with a job in the outside world. Of the four of them, they were the two who most often had nothing to do, and they tended to do it together. Over the years, they’d logged a thousand hours of ordinary things. Walking half the night in the streets of foreign capitals, while Carl and Jasper hustled distribution rights. Or sitting on hotel terraces, sipping the local water, saying whatever came into their heads. They’d done a lot of getting by, and in the end they lived by a kind of shorthand.
    â€œI miss you, too, whenever I go away,” she said. She saw she owed him proof of what had survived between them. “I used to want to take you with me, only Jasper always seemed to need you here. We should have done it anyway. It might have made you famous.”
    â€œNo,” he said reproachfully, “don’t say that. Some people are better off left in the background.” He had to keep his back to her to speak about himself. The horses were footing a tricky bit of slope, so all their eyes were on the trail. “You don’t want to