Off Season - Jack Ketchum [17]
Less-than-serious complaining, though, the quiet kind, she couldn’t help but doing. The company was not great, if she was to be honest about it. Nick was fine as always—pleasant, quiet, dependable. He hadn’t even taken a hit of the joint when Dan offered it to him. But that girl of his, Laura, was a bit of a pain. If she was not silly she was posing, and if she wasn’t posing she was distant. There was a lot of wisecracking. She wondered what Nick—a man who had once loved her sister (and not so long ago, either)—could see in a phony, rather abrasive record-company flak from L. A. Who with her close-cropped hair and bubble gum and tee shirt and beat-up leather jacket was acting about ten years younger than her age. It stumped her. There was just no telling about men.
She could live with Laura, though. She’d have to. Otherwise it was going to be a long week. Maybe the posing, like the outfit, was just protective coloring. Probably. Oh hell, she thought, you’ve only just met the girl. Let it ride.
Anyhow it was Jim who was the problem. There was something about that man that Marjie just didn’t like. Carla had talked about Jim and said it was mostly sex with them, and Marjie could understand that—he was awfully nice to look at. But what an ego! Everything was I, I, I. I auditioned for this. They said I was right for that.
She had never met an actor who wasn’t utterly dim, and James Harney was no exception. He could talk theater, all right. But who in God’s name was interested? Here was somebody who actually wanted to be in a musical comedy—and you got the feeling that almost any musical comedy would do. Just like any commercial would do. Or any soap opera. The whole thing struck her as a colossal waste of time. Was that the payoff for being beautiful? Ego and soap flakes? She was glad she was just attractive.
She was being a snob about it, she knew, but it was hard not to. The guy was involved with her sister. She felt very protective toward her sister and knew the feeling was mutual. If the situation were reversed, Carla would have had exactly the same reaction. Why bother?
She wondered if it would matter to Carla to know that Jim had been cruising her pretty hard all day, touching her whenever he could, smiling, flirting. Probably not. But it mattered to Marjie. She didn’t like it at all. Laura she could put up with. But she wasn’t even going to try to like Jim Harney.
She had to admit she’d been a lot more comfortable with Carla when she’d had a real relationship going with a man, like the one with Nick. It was sad to see that fail—though she guessed it was really very nice that they were still good friends. She wondered how they’d managed that. She wondered about many aspects of that relationship, but she’d never asked. There was something about Carla’s self-sufficiency these days that scared Marjie off, that distanced her. As if Carla didn’t want to be bothered. As if she was too busy for personal problems and personal questions. But if they could have talked about things like they used to, it might have helped Marjie in her own tentative move toward Dan, and she could have used the help.
She glanced at him sitting beside her, at the low, bushy eyebrows and the high forehead, the well-lined face that let you know he was a man who got outdoors now and then, the strong wide shoulders. He was a goodlooking man and a nice one, too. And there were times she actually felt she wanted to hold onto him, to make the real commitment he had asked for. But it was hard for her. She needed somebody to talk to. She wished her sister were a little less closemouthed, a little less given to toughing things out these days. For her own reasons.
If