The Tell Read Free

false, a put-on, like the man himself.
    â€œBut it’s an interesting idea,” Wilton said. “Which of us is actually the real person? But that doesn’t happen so much anymore.” He gave Owen an unhurried gaze that seemed to take in his thready chinos, faded blue T-shirt—a gift from the Spruance Middle School PTA—his averted dark eyes, his thick-veined arms, his loose hands, a flop of hair just starting to gray at forty. The sweat of scrutiny appeared above Owen’s lip. “Most of the people who are old enough to remember my show are the same people who are old enough to forget. That’s the irony of history. Those who’ve lived it have forgotten how it went.” Wilton wagged his head, levered himself off the doorway and opened his hands, as if to say you couldn’t do anything about the way some people were.
    The notion wasn’t untrue, but it had a rehearsed feeling to it, Owen decided. The man was actorish in a way he found embarrassing, with the too-expressive face, the stagey intonation. And all that feeling, that hammy honesty. The blowsy clothes, the feminine ankles. He wondered if the man was gay.
    â€œHistory doesn’t matter—not when there’re always reruns,” Mira said. Sleepless in the middle of the night since the break-in and watching the TV newly installed in the bedroom, she spoke like a recent convert. Her face flashed with authority. “One, two, three o’clock in the morning. Seven days a week, if you want.”
    â€œInsomnia?” Wilton asked. “Insomniacs and the Japanese. My fan base these days.”
    â€œI couldn’t figure it out at first,” Mira said, taking a step back and weaving her fingers through her curls. “You were completely familiar, so familiar that I couldn’t really see you, I couldn’t make sense of your face. Were you someone I knew? I wasn’t exactly expecting you to show up at the back door.” She recounted their meeting as if it were already their delightful history. “And then.”
    â€œAnd then,” Wilton said. “Here I am.”
    Owen caught Wilton glance at himself in the mirror by the basement door and disapproving lines etched around the man’s mouth. He was a less robust version of the star he once was years before, but he puffed up his chest and Mira rounded her shoulders to catch his attention. And who wouldn’t look at her the way Wilton did just then, returned from his own troubling reflection, at how her pants sat so swingy on her hips that you couldn’t help but calculate the rousing rise of her bones, the braless statement of her full breasts, the way she moved like she was on a boat commanding the waves and whales? No, the man wasn’t gay; he looked carnivorous, a drop of moisture at the corner of his mouth. Mira’s eyes were a remarkable, colorlessly pure element and expertly focused. She never wasted her attention and she could be fierce with her loyalties, fierce with her stubbornness. Wilton blinked and blinked as if she were a very bright signal.
    â€œSo, you bought the house next door,” Owen said, taking a step closer to Wilton, to get him away from his wife.
    With exaggerated concern, Wilton back-stepped out of the doorway to look at his hulking purchase. They followed him out onto the cool bricks of the patio. “You say that so ominously. Why? Is there something wrong with the place?”
    â€œNothing wrong with it at all,” Mira assured him. “It’s an amazing house, one of the few old beauties still left and not chopped up into condos. You’re very lucky.”
    â€œAn old beauty,” Wilton repeated.
    â€œDid they tell you that the previous owner died in it? Let’s just say no one checked in on her for a few days.” Owen offered the details as a challenge, a way to bend the air and see which way Wilton might sway, or if he would sway at all. “It wasn’t