All the Beautiful Lies(25)

It didn’t happen exactly like that, but after swimming every day for a month, there was a night in June when Jake asked Alice to slowly strip for him in the living room while he sat on the couch and watched. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked Alice to do this, but it was rare, and usually after they’d come back from a nice dinner out. That night in June they’d driven all the way into Portland to go to a new French restaurant that had recently opened. The food was good, but when Jake had ordered a bottle of wine for the table, the waitress had asked for Alice’s ID. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Jake had said. “I don’t think you brought it, did you, Alice?” The waitress, slightly flushed, had suggested to Jake that “your daughter can order something else.”

“We’ll both have water,” Jake said, his jaw tensing.

That night, after Alice was naked, Jake asked her to sit on his lap, and said, “You are perfect.”

“Thank you,” Alice said, thinking of the daily, lung-burning swims in the cold ocean.

“I have something to ask you,” Jake said, his voice a little hoarse. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but I’d like to take some pictures of you, just as you are now.”

“What do you mean, naked?”

“Just for me, I promise. No one else will ever see them.”

“Why do you want pictures when you can see me whenever you want, just like this?” She leaned back a little on his lap, nearly slipping off, and opened her arms.

“Here’s the thing, Alice, and I understand that you’ll never grasp this at your age, but the way you look now, you are not going to look like this forever. And you’ll want to preserve it somehow. In pictures. Trust me.”

“Do you want to take the pictures right now?”

“No, not right now. I just wanted to make the suggestion. If we do it, I’d want to make everything perfect. The lighting. Everything.”

“I don’t mind, but I don’t want anyone to see them except for you. Ever.”

“I promise,” he said. “They will just be for me. And for you. One day, you’ll cherish them.”

That weekend they took the pictures. Jake bought a fancy-looking camera for the occasion, plus a light meter, and Alice posed on the bed in the master bedroom. At first she was nervous, and self-conscious, but then it started to get fun and sexy. Jake was surprisingly quiet the whole time; Alice thought he might have specific ideas for how she should pose, but he didn’t—he let her do what she wanted. When she thought they were done, however, Jake said, “Let’s take some in your old bedroom.”

“Why?” Alice asked.

“It’s more you,” Jake said. “In here it looks like you’re playacting. In your room it will look more natural.”

She did what he asked, feeling a little strange posing on her single bed underneath the Duran Duran poster, and the small shelf that held her cross-country trophies. But it made Jake happy, and after he put the camera away, they had sex in Alice’s old room for the first time. Afterward, Alice asked, “Where will you get the pictures developed?”

“I have a friend at work with a darkroom, and he said I could use it.”

“You won’t show him?”

“No, of course not. Those pictures are just for us.”

“I don’t want anyone else to see me like this. Ever. Just you.”

“One day you will. One day I’ll be too old for you—I’m probably too old for you now—and then you’ll find someone else, someone younger. I won’t mind. It’s natural.”

Alice didn’t say anything right away. It was not that she didn’t know that Jake, almost fifty, was considered too old for her—although she thought about Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, and how hot he was—but she had somehow never imagined him getting older. She imagined herself getting older, but him staying the same. “I don’t know about that,” she said.

“You will,” Jake answered.

They lay on the bed a little longer. “Did you always want this?” she asked.

“Want what?”

“Want me. Want me more than you wanted my mom.”

Alice heard the faintest clicking sound. It was Jake, tapping his teeth together, something he did when he was thinking. “Yes,” he finally said.



That whole first winter after her mother died, Alice had successfully avoided any contact with the kids she’d known from Kennewick High. All except Gina, who wrote frequent letters from New York City that Alice would occasionally answer. At the end of her freshman year at NYU, Gina had, predictably, gotten a modeling contract that was going to keep her in the city throughout the summer. But in August, she came home for two weeks, and showed up unannounced at Alice’s house on a Thursday afternoon.

“I knew you wouldn’t answer my calls, so I just thought I’d come over.” She held out a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine.

Alice suggested they go to the beach, but Gina said it was too hot. They ended up drinking the wine in the living room, and eating Triscuits with port wine cheese. Gina was skinnier, and prettier, than ever. She’d lightened her hair, and it had been styled so that it lifted off her forehead, then cascaded down her back. Her dark, thick eyebrows had been shaped, and her nails were painted a neon orange.