“Whatever,” says Fanny and shifts in her seat, crossing her arms. “We can leave it in the realm of unsolved mysteries if you like. But I’m taking him up on his offer.”
“Absolutely not.” Jenny isn’t kidding around.
“What the actual fuck, Mom?” Fanny is genuinely confused. And not happy to have a plum internship snatched out of her grasp.
Jenny fishes through the bins of her mind, trying to reel in a reason. “I don’t want you living alone in Washington.”
Couldn’t be lamer. Fanny is, after all, living alone in New York in the fall when she starts up at Barnard.
Jenny lurches forth with unreason. “Yes. But that’s in a dorm. With other girls.”
“Hello? You live with other interns in Washington. Deborah Martin is going, I could room with her.”
Jenny shifts gears. “Why would you want to be an intern anyway? A lot of coffee fetching. Xeroxing. Envelope licking. Really great experience.”
Jenny accelerates. She’s tired. She’s tired of this conversation. She wants to have dinner with her daughter and not squabble over Lee Rogers.
“Look, Fanny, I just don’t feel right about it. Please don’t call him.”
Fanny’s a dog with a bone in her teeth. “We’re talking about my future!” She is genuinely stumped by her mother’s stubbornness and the more interesting question of what she doesn’t want to talk about. “How often does an internship with a top-flight senator drop in your lap? C’mon, Mom! Tell me. What’s with this guy? What’d you ‘chat’ about all those years ago, Jen Jen?”
Jenny is too tired to resist further.
“Okay. Okay. It was more than a chat. We had a few dinners.”
“And?” She knows when “dinners” means more.
“And nothing. He’s married. So I broke it off.”
“Whatever. Twenty years later and he clearly wants to have a drink, ‘to catch up.’ So catch up, Mom. And while you’re on the phone with him, put in a good word for your daughter. You know, the straight-A daughter. Make her happy.”
Good idea, thinks Jenny. Make your daughter happy. And change the subject while we’re at it. She takes a small box out of her bag. A nice, expensive looking box. Hands it to Fanny.
Fanny’s face lights up. What’s more fun than beautifully wrapped packages? Which, let’s face it, are often far more exciting than what’s inside.
“Déjà Vu!” says Fanny as she opens the box, takes out a crystal bottle, and turns it in her hand. Her eyes twinkle in the reflections cast. Déjà Vu, the par excellence of perfumes. Fanny’s genuinely knocked out by her mother’s generosity. “Mom,” she says, “this cost a fortune.”
“Nothing but the best for my daughter.”
“Which is why,” Fanny says, “I want you to talk to Rogers.”
Jenny calls on her maternal authority: “Fanny. Drop. It.”
The car speeds down Highway 101. Conversation skitters along in other directions. Fanny drops it.
But determination is written all over her face. There are lots of ways to skin the Washington internship cat. If her mom won’t make the call, Fanny will find another way.
CHAPTER 5
Lee Rogers is very much on Jenny’s mind as, at last, she lowers herself into a lavender bubble bath before bed. Not the Lee of earlier today but the Lee she met in…dear god, was it really the previous century?
“Your eyes look so blue in that shirt.” It was a pretty dumb thing to say. (Why would anyone’s eyes look more blue in a white dress shirt?) But the words tumbled straight out of Jenny’s mouth when she met Lee Rogers on that flight from San Francisco to D.C. so many years ago.
Rogers lit up like a firework.
“Mostly sweet, a little bitter, that’s how I like it,” he said as Jenny placed a coffee cup on his seatfront tray.
Another charmer, Jenny thought. And his eyes were blue.
The Captain came on the speaker and let the passengers know they were passing over the San Juan Mountains and were more than thirty thousand miles above sea level and could expect a pleasant flight and were free to walk around the cabin. Rogers had Jenny’s phone number long before the plane landed at Dulles.
Jenny remembers their exchange with pleasure—and some mild embarrassment—as purple bubbles gather on her chest.
“Nope,” he told Jenny when she came to clear the dinner plates. “I’m not giving you the tray. Unless you give me your phone number.”
“Sir, I need to clear your plate so that you can stow your tray table before landing. FAA Rules. Now tell me: why do you need my phone number?”
“I need your number because you are the prettiest girl in the sky.” That’s what Rogers had said. Jenny remembers listening intently when he added, “And I just left my kids in Colorado for a ski vacation, and I’m all alone, which is nice for now but in a day or so I’m going to be lonely and sad and a drink with someone just like you would cheer me enormously. Also, I’m a lot of fun, and I bet you’ll have a good time.”
Jenny remembers liking the odd mix of dopey lines and seeming straightforwardness. In truth, she doesn’t know exactly what it was she liked about Lee Rogers or why she gave him her phone number but she did.
He called when he said he would, two days later. “Just as I thought,” came the voice on Jenny’s cell, “I’m lonely and sad, and a drink with someone like you would cheer me enormously.” Arrangements were made.
The next day, after the 5PM flight from Atlanta landed at Dulles, she met Rogers for a drink. Two drinks in fact. After the second, Jenny was a little loopy. But not so loopy that she failed to take note of Lee Rogers’ left hand, which did not have a wedding ring on it.
Rogers took Jenny’s hand on the way out of the Capitol Bar. “Lets try Thai,” he said. “Phuket.” It wasn’t so funny really but Jenny laughed a wild laugh and laugh succeeded laugh until dinner was done and Lee Rogers, leaning in, very politely said, “Come home with me.” Easy as that.
The M Street townhouse was lovely and impressed Jenny, as did the fact, revealed in photos of children and horses and family holidays, that Lee Rogers was a very married man.
Jenny found herself a little intoxicated—not just by drink, but also by Lee Rogers, his attention, his charm, his hunger.
What happened in the guest bedroom of Lee Rogers’ home had rarely happened either to Lee Rogers or to Jenny Cours. There was a blood-boiling madness to their connection. They could not have enough of one another. Afterwards both Jenny and Rogers enjoyed a singular sense of being both entirely sated and completely ravenous for more. It was a thrilling, exhausting night for both of them.
Jenny was up at 5:35 the next morning for an early-bird flight to Miami.
“Fly me to the moon. Or have dinner with me next Monday,” Lee said into Jenny’s cell about ten minutes after the plane landed in Florida. Jenny was charmed that he’d checked the arrival time and thoughtfully timed his call ten minutes after landing so that Jenny had time to clean the cabin and could devote her sole attention to him.
“Jupiter, Mars, say where you’ll be and I’ll be there,” said Jenny. Monday was her day off. And she could fly Loft anywhere she liked.
Jenny sighs at the memory of how young she was. And how long ago it all seems now.
Intoxicated though she was by Lee and by a carnal adventure more intense than she’d ever dreamt she could have, Jenny Cours had enjoyed a happy life for too long to lose her head. She saw that she’d fallen hard for Lee in ways she couldn’t control—she caught herself thinking about him when she should have been thinking about putting suitcases in overhead compartments. (She clopped two different passengers in the head with carry-on cases on the flight to San Francisco.) And she began to find it increasingly discomforting to sleep at night without him.
“Senator Rogers, I think I’m in love with you,” she told Lee at dinner at one of their now twice-weekly D.C. trysts.
“You think?” said Lee with an odd blend of total surprise and complete awareness. (And yes, “Se
nator Rogers” was the pet name Jenny had used for Lee ever since she’d learned his occupation, on that first night at the Thai restaurant.)
“This is a problem for me, Senator. It’s a problem because you are married—to someone else.”
Rogers traded his teasing expression for one that was very solemn.
Jenny then said what every woman who has had the misfortune to fall for someone who is cheating someone else out of a husband eventually says: “This isn’t right, Lee. I can’t do this. I love you. But I can’t.”
A long silence followed. Then Rogers reached for Jenny’s napkin. He wrote the following message, opening the napkin for extra room. “The part of me that is your friend and respects and admires you beyond measure wants you to have all this and more with someone who can make you happy, forever. The part of me that is in love with you wants never to let you go. In a nutshell, L.” He handed the napkin to Jenny.
A woman less committed to her own best interest would have melted. Swallowed her resolve and gone with Rogers when he said, “Come on, let’s go to the Ritz. We can have strawberries and champagne in bed and flip coins or throw darts or something that will help us out here.”
Stretching her long legs out in the bath, Jenny smiles. A sad smile.
“No, Lee,” she told him. “You’ll never leave your wife. And probably you shouldn’t. And I shouldn’t go with you to the Ritz.”
Jenny kissed the senator on the mouth, softly, hailed a cab for Dulles airport, flashed her Loft ID at the gate and got on the redeye flight west. She’d seen Lee Rogers once more after that, when she’d thought it might change everything; but it hadn’t, and she hadn’t seen him again, until this evening when she bumped into him at SFO.
CHAPTER 6
At another airport three time zones away, Nick Sculley saunters into the Hudson News at LaGuardia and picks up a pack of Skittles.
Nick Sculley is lanky, intense, preoccupied with…oh, who knows what preoccupies lanky, intense 32-year-old men?
His shirt is bright white and starched to within an inch of its life. Nick likes it like that, always has. This one is tucked into his jeans. Nick’s Arthur Ashe shoes give him an athletic look. He could be a pro at one of the suburban country clubs nearby. Except he’s not from the suburbs and country clubbing plays exactly no part in his life.
Nick fingers the stack of New York Posts at the newsstand register. Goodbye to all this, he thinks. Nick is heading west.
His photography career has not gone well in New York. No big tragedy or anything, but Nick hasn’t quite panned out.
He had a promising start—in St. Louis at the Post Dispatch, where he had an Uncle, Mack, the night shift news editor, who gave him a new Leica camera and his first job, as an assistant on the news department’s photo desk. That was in August of 2014.
A week later, a young white police officer called Darren Wilson shot an 18-year-old unarmed black man, Michael Brown, dead in the street in Ferguson, a nearby, mostly black town in the greater St. Louis area, in circumstances that would be the subject of heated debate and the occasion for what polite newspapers called “unrest.”
The body of the dead black man lay in a sad and crumpled heap on the street for four full hours after the shooting and neither this nor the fact that the Ferguson police had a history of questionable incidents involving police violence against unarmed black men had contributed much to fellow feeling on the corner of Chambers Road and West Florissant Avenue when Nick arrived, with reporters, that evening.
Nick stepped forth into the big, noisy crowd just as police started lobbing tear gas at them.
He had just taken his camera out of the padded canvas case slung over his shoulder when a tall black man reached into the street and pitched a canister of smoking gas back at the police.
Snap. Snap. Snap!
Nick lucked into what turned out to be a series of good clean shots, one of which fast came to be the iconic image, the visual statement of race relations in the town of Ferguson, MO—and many other American cities during the summer of 2014.
It did not hurt that the black man who lobbed the tear gas canister back at the police happened to be wearing a shirt patterned with stars and stripes. Yes, an American flag shirt, which Nick had not even noticed when he took the shot.
Snap!
As it happened, the man was also holding in his left hand, as he reached for the canister with his right, a bag of potato chips emblazoned, in big red letters, with the words “The Flavor of America,” which fact had also escaped Nick’s attention at the time he took his shot.
Snap! Snap! Snap!
Millions of people saw Nick’s image, which was tweeted 22,341,276 times and retweeted another 878,982 times in the week after Darren Wilson pulled the trigger on his police-issued gun.
It was on TV too, and on magazine covers and t-shirts sold not just in this country but also in Europe and elsewhere around the globe. Nick’s phone started to ring and, a week after the shooting, he had a new agent, and also a ticket to the Big Apple.
Snap!
Not quite. Nick had meetings with big-name editors at big-name venues and even sold a few pictures here and there. But the heat that Nick’s iconic image generated evaporated far sooner than did the tension in the streets of Ferguson, which erupted once again, in November of 2014, when a St. Louis grand jury decided not to indict Officer Wilson in connection with the shooting.
Was it possible Nick had flamed out entirely just months after his career caught fire? It was an unsettling possibility. One that prompted Nick to redouble his efforts and spend the next year and change (ah, hell, call it what it was, two solid years) beating the bushes for work. None forthcoming, Nick found himself accepting an invitation from a college friend to travel out to L.A., regroup, maybe find work on a movie set.
He puts the Skittles in his brown leather messenger bag and makes his way down the concourse towards Gate 24, Flight 271, departing for Los Angeles, stopover in Vegas.
Nick is one of thousands of travelers in the concourse but it is Nick alone who has the great good fortune to pass the Admiral’s Club Lounge just as its big mirrored door swings open and Elizabeth Diamond, nee Elizabeth deCarlo, formerly of Pennsylvania and more recently of Las Vegas, walks out.
The reinvented Elizabeth is a willowy blonde in a flowing skirt and high leather boots. She rolls a Louis Vuitton bag behind her as she heads towards the departure gates.
Nick does not notice the $3,200 bag. He focuses instead on Elizabeth. Her hips sway slightly in front of him as they walk towards the gates. He instinctively takes out his iPhone—the only camera he’s got on him that isn’t packed—and shoots. Nick doesn’t quite know why he’s doing this, but some new muse is speaking to him. Suppose he photographed the beginning, the middle and the end of a relationship? Might that be the subject of a photo essay? Suppose they met, fell in love, married, had a slew of kids? It could be a whole book. But Nick is getting a little ahead of himself while his subject is getting away. He takes off after her.
And fate intervenes. She turns into Gate 24 and stops in front of him at the ticket counter. Maybe everything will be this easy from now on. Would be nice.
He shoots Elizabeth rummaging through her bag. “Where is that ticket?” she says to no one in particular and drops a slim paperback on the floor.
Nick pockets his iPhone and bends down and picks up the book (time to step out of the stands and onto the playing field). He sees that the book is Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.
“How strong is your faith?” Nick asks Elizabeth as he hands the book back to her.
“Excuse me?” She is still looking for the ticket in her bag.
“Would you give up the greatest love of your life for your faith?” Nick asks.
Elizabeth slows the excavation mission through her bag. “Oh the book. I don’t know. I just started it. It’s little. I needed something for the plane.” She looks at Nick. She flashes him a heart-stopping smile.
Ever
heard of lust at first sight? Nick has just discovered it.
“And you just spoiled the ending.” Elizabeth looks Nick in the eye.
It will later become clear that Elizabeth Diamond is not much of a reader. Longing for a little distraction, she’s been east on a weekend shopping trip with her friend Lisa who came up with Greene when Elizabeth asked if she had a book, a quick book, that she could finish on the five-hour trip home.
She fumbles for her ticket some more, finally turning it up. Then she looks up at Nick apologetically. “It’s okay,” she says, “even if you did spoil the ending. I’d much rather chat than read. I get so bored on these long flights to the coast.”
Nick can’t place Elizabeth’s accent. Bedroom maybe.
Nick tells Elizabeth he’d love to join her. Yes, yes, yes, he definitely would like to join her. “But,” he says glancing at her first-class boarding pass, “I’m traveling steerage.”
“I’m sure we can do something about that,” Elizabeth says. Then she smiles that smile again.
Nick watches her sway back to the ticket counter. There is something about her gait, or is it the golden hair, that puts him in mind of a lioness, and he is thinking pleasant thoughts of visiting her lair when she returns a few moments later with a new ticket in hand.
Fifteen minutes later, Nick sits snug in his economy-class seat. Elizabeth, gauzy skirt spread like a picnic blanket across her thighs, is beside him.
“Good seating arrangements. You’re a bit of a miracle worker.”
“It’s not that hard to trade down to a tourist-class seat. That kid that was seated next to you is now in seventh heaven. He just ordered three dinners!”
Nick loves when her eyes brighten. He is not a practiced flirt. But it’s coming very easily. Amazing what a little lust can do.
“Nothing like giving a leg up to the 99 percent,” he says.
Elizabeth wants to know what percent Nick is. “Pure 99,” he says. “But I have a plan.”
“Really?” says Elizabeth. “Let’s hear it. And make it slow. It’s a long flight.” She sinks into her seat.
Are Snakes Necessary? Page 3