“Get yourself some coffee. You’ll be okay,” he tells her as he gets into the car.
He looks back and sees she’s flopped over and is lying on the bench. The driver sees her too. It doesn’t look good.
Nick returns to the bench and tries to stir Fanny. “Go ahead,” he tells her, “you take the cab. I’ll walk.” Fanny doesn’t move. The driver toots his horn.
Fanny sees it. She gets a giddy look. “Le taxi!” she says.
“Yes. Le taxi,” Nick says dryly. “I can drop you off. Where are you staying?”
“The Eiffel Tower,” says Fanny. And giggles.
Nick is having something like a bad dream. “C’mon. You’re not that drunk. Where’s your room?”
“Drunk!” says Fanny. “I’m not drunk at all.” She drops her head on Nick’s chest. “I’m just verrrry haaaaaapy. When I should be verrrry sad. Isn’t that smart?”
Brilliant. Totally brilliant, Nick thinks. The driver tells Nick it’s late, he needs to get the cab home. Where should he take the young man and his friend?
Fanny is sound asleep again when the cab pulls up at Nick’s hotel. He takes her bag and her arm and, in something a lot like a sleepwalk, she trails him up the steps.
“Is this the elevator?” Fanny asks when he opens the door to his room. Nick tells her no, it’s his hotel room. Fanny bumps into the bed, grabs the headboard to steady herself. “How many of you are there in the room?” she asks Nick.
“One,” he says.
“Well, that’s one good thing,” she says, looking around. “Can I sleep here?”
Nick tells Fanny that is the general idea and she flops onto the bed. Nick walks over to the table by the front door, pours himself a Jack Daniels and swallows it. He puts the glass down and goes over to Fanny and the bed.
“Are you going to sleep with me?” she says.
“No,” says Nick, “I like my girls…conscious.”
This strikes Fanny as a perfectly reasonable preference. She turns over onto her stomach and passes out.
CHAPTER 27
Lee Rogers is in bed with his wife.
The air conditioner hums through the Rogers home. All is cool and tidy inside the four-story Georgetown townhouse.
Lee’s career has been foremost in Connie’s mind for more years than she can remember. The house is a showcase for his achievement. It is stately, grand and smells, vaguely, of money.
Connie has decorated the house in what is called a traditional style. The tradition apparently involves horses, dogs, bourbon and men who speak in hushed voices about things that seem to matter a lot and either do or else don’t matter at all.
Connie’s money, the money that’s paid for the house, is Jewish money. But you could not guess this from the look of things here.
There is a careful collection of photos in the front parlor. These show Rogers shaking hands with innumerable dignitaries and all five living Presidents.
There are also photos of the Rogers children, Willa and Deron, jumping horses and running dogs on the Maryland shore. They do not show pictures of Deron entering the Silver Hill mental health facility where his parents sent him to recover from a drug habit.
Heroin. Heroin. Never in a hundred years would Connie or Lee Rogers have imagined their child, a private school graduate who spent summers at Echo Hill, would have a drug problem, a heroin habit.
Most painful—or shocking—of all to Connie was that she had no idea Deron was in trouble; he left college and went west to California where, Connie thought, he got a job as a paralegal and enrolled in an LSAT course. How could she possibly have been so completely in the dark as to what was going on in her own family?
Connie did not believe Willa when she called, months later, to say Deron was not in a paralegal program, was not studying for the LSAT, and was not living in the Pacific Heights apartment for which his parents sent him $2,900 per month for rent. He was in fact living in a cheap SRO in the Tenderloin and using the rent money to support his new habit.
Connie did not want to tell the senator at first. She worried that the discovery might interfere with Lee’s work, his image, the re-election prospects around which family life had long been centered.
Connie and Willa flew to San Francisco and persuaded Deron to get help. Doctors recommended Silver Hill. It was only after Deron was admitted that Connie told the senator.
“I am sorry to hear you have had a bad patch of it and will support you always,” Lee said to Deron on the phone when he called him moments after his admission. An outsider would have been forgiven for thinking that Lee was calling a candidate for Congress to wish him well after a bad bout of publicity.
Deron recovered in time (and after much expense) and Connie and Lee tacitly colluded in the collective effort to make Deron’s “problem” disappear from family memory. Two years later he was back West, in Petaluma, working on a horse farm.
Connie sometimes wondered after that if he might be in trouble again but never said so and most definitely never asked; at family gatherings, Connie spoke to her son mostly about horses and the Senate. The whole mess brought Connie and Rogers closer together. It cemented an ongoing conspiracy between them.
Lee and Connie’s bedroom has the cozy, well-appointed warmth of a high-end hotel room. Much thought has gone into creating the general sense that everything is in order.
This order is disturbed now by a ringing phone. Lee switches on the light. He says, “Hello, who is it?” into the phone, in the voice of someone expecting a call at 1am.
“It’s Jenny Cours,” says the voice on the other end. “Lee. I’m sorry to wake you. I’m worried about Fanny. Very worried.”
“Fanny?” says Rogers. He is suddenly very alert. “What about Fanny?”
Connie, rail thin and full of Parkinson’s medications, stirs slightly and inches closer to her husband.
Jenny says she does not want to panic. But Fanny was supposed to be home, in Menlo Park, this evening. She didn’t show up.
“Something’s wrong.” Jenny’s voice is as tense as he’s ever heard it.
Rogers sits upright in his pressed blue broadcloth pajamas. He is the picture of reassurance. He pats his wife’s drowsy head. “Now take it easy,” he says. “Maybe she missed her flight. It’s probably something simple like that. Kids. Lots going on.”
“No,” Jenny says, “she would have called. She always calls. Or texts.”
Jenny is increasingly frantic. The fact that she’s calling is, in fact, a sign of how frantic she is. She never called Lee at home, even when they were seeing each other twenty years ago.
Jenny says she’s checked all of the airlines and there is no record of Fanny traveling.
“I begged her not to work on your campaign,” she says, concentrating her worry into a dart she throws in the senator’s face. “I knew something like this would happen. Lee. Please. I need your help.”
Connie gets up to go to the bathroom. Her gown is white with roses. Half asleep as she pulls herself out of the bed, Connie regards her husband with affection and mild concern. Late-night phone calls are not uncommon; Connie is proud her husband is vitally involved in so many important matters. And yet, that name. This particular important late-night matter involves that girl, Fanny.
“I’ll make some calls and see what I can find out,” Rogers says as the bathroom door shuts behind Connie with a click.
He hears Jenny break into tears. “I’m sorry, Lee,” she says. (Why do crying women always apologize?) “Fanny means everything to me. She’s so reliable. I can’t believe I haven’t heard from her. I keep thinking of that girl, the intern in Rock Creek Park.”
“Come on, Jenny. Calm. Let me see what I can find out,” says Rogers. “We’ll find her. I’ll call you when I find out what’s what.”
Rogers hangs up the phone and quickly dials another number. He is thankful that Connie is still in the bathroom when he reaches Brock.
“Get over here, Bart. I need some help,” he says.
“Mm-hm,” says Rogers, slipping quietly out of bed and into the dressing room. He hangs the broadcloth pajamas on a hook, outfits himself in khakis and polo shirt and goes downstairs to wait for Brock.
CHAPTER 28
The senator’s cleanup man arrives in khakis and a polo shirt. If Rogers weren’t agitated, he would find this comical. But he is agitated and says nothing about the fact that the men are in matching outfits.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Brock asks. He sips the coffee Rogers has brought him.
“Two nights ago.” Rogers is crisp and to the point. He anticipates the next question. “I saw her here.”
Brock is not surprised. He has not forgotten the circumstances under which the two men first met.
“Who knows about her?” Brock asks. He is skeptical when Rogers says absolutely no one knows.
“She didn’t tell a soul,” Rogers insists. “She knew all the staffers gossip. She was determined not to make the same mistakes.” It’s not clear whether Rogers is trying to convince Brock or himself. “She used to say, ‘The only way to keep a secret is to tell no one.’ ”
“Right,” says Brock, not at all convinced. He looks Rogers in the eye. “So where is she?”
Rogers does not know.
“Was she upset about anything?” Brock asks.
Rogers is evasive. “Not that I could tell.” Rogers stirs his coffee with a spoon. He sips awkwardly. “Well, she was a little unhappy about not going to Paris,” he offers.
Now Brock is surprised. “You were going to take her to Paris?”
“We planned a little holiday after the conference.” Rogers has been around long enough to know that full disclosure, to his chief aid, is in his interest.
“Not smart” is all Brock says. He knows his job and does it well. A fixer’s job isn’t to judge, it’s to fix.
Rogers sounds like a teenager caught with illicit substances: “She wasn’t coming as videographer! And she wouldn’t have been travelling under her own name.” He is uncomfortable. “I got another passport for her.”
This does not look good. Brock wants to know whose passport he planned to use to bring his young lover across the sea with him.
Nothing to do but come clean. “My daughter’s. They look similar enough.”
“Jesus Christ,” Brock says. “Why didn’t you let me handle this?”
“Because,” says Rogers, “I knew you would have talked me out of it.”
“Damn right,” says Brock. “This is a fucking disaster.”
Rogers’ handsome, if slightly disheveled, image is reflected in the mirror on the parlor wall. It does not look like he is going to enjoy the rest of his late-night conversation with Brock.
“How long do you think it’s going to take, Senator, for the hysterical mother to hit the airwaves screaming about her lost daughter and the predatory older man who was the last to see her?”
Rogers tells Brock not to worry. He knows Jenny. He can handle her.
“She’ll listen to me,” says Rogers.
If only he could calm Brock with a pat on the head, the way he patted Connie’s head earlier in what is fast becoming a very unpleasant night.
“Don’t worry about the mother,” he tells Brock again. “ She isn’t our problem.”
“Really?” says Brock. “Does she know you’re fucking her daughter?”
That little oversight is going to send Rogers back to personal injury law in Broomall, Brock tells the senator. Assuming he doesn’t wind up disbarred. Assuming he doesn’t wind up in prison.
“So what do we do, Bart?” Now there’s an honest question.
“You wait and pray,” says Brock.
“For what?” The senator is genuinely confused.
“If you’re lucky, she’s turns up dead and soon.”
CHAPTER 29
Fanny is gone when Nick wakes up. Odd, he thinks. But, honestly, what isn’t odd about her? Also, judging by the presence of her bag by the door where Nick left it last night, she will be back. Nick is tired. The couch was not an ideal resting place.
He lumbers into the little kitchen. Though it is French in every conceivable way, it strangely looks much like the mess of a kitchen Nick had in the little Vegas apartment where he enjoyed those fabulous lost days with Elizabeth.
Nick tinkers with the French press coffee contraption, ooh la la, pours himself a cup and takes it outside on the little balcony that’s connected to his room. Tres Français. And Vive la France too because it is a lovely day and a good one, as most are, to have a balcony that overlooks a plaza full of very thin women and nondescript but somehow obviously European men. He checks his phone for any messages. He sees the set call is for 8AM.
Nick sips the coffee and eyes a blonde in the plaza. She’s willowy and tall. She reminds him of Elizabeth. The pang comes fast in his gut. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. He looks away.
Just to her right, there’s the girl from last night taking a big swallow from a cup of coffee and flipping the pages of a copy of the International Herald Tribune. She has the look of an American in Paris: rumpled jacket, no lipstick. She’s finger-combed her hair.
She smiles up at Nick. Nick smiles back and whips out his iPhone to snap a quick picture. What’s the ending here? he wonders.
Nick’s phone vibrates. He looks at the display and steps inside. It’s Manny, his agent.
“Hey, Nick,” says the agent. “Hi, Manny,” says the client.
Manny says he just wants to let Nick know that the producer is very happy with his pictures.
“Any word on my book proposal?” That’s what Nick wants to know.
“Sorry, pal. Not a peep.”
“I bet they didn’t even read it,” says Nick.
“The title doesn’t help.” Manny has been harping on this for weeks and Nick is genuinely perplexed.
“What’s wrong with the title?”
“Happy Endings?”
“Yeah. Happy Endings,” says Nick.
“Apart from the fact it makes people think of handjobs,” says Manny, “what is it that’s so happy about your ending?”
“My pictures will tell the story,” says Nick.
“Whatever you say, kid,” says Manny. “All I can tell you is, it doesn’t grab me. Or the publishers.”
Nick digs in his heels. Literally. He digs Stan Smith heels into the 19th-century French hotel floor.
“It’s a good proposal. Get them to look at it.”
“Okey dokey, kid. You’re a visionary,” says Manny. “Oops. Got another call. Talk to you later.”
Nick returns to the balcony. No spring in his step. The girl is smiling at the bright blue sky.
He takes another picture of her.
Could she be his story? There’s no love vibe. But there’s something about her…
Nick finishes his coffee and deposits the empty cup in the sink, then heads out to the plaza.
* * *
Fanny sees Nick approach. She takes the Tribune off the seat beside her so he can sit down.
“Feeling better?” says Nick.
“Yeah. Thank you for last night,” says Fanny. “I think I had a little bit too much to drink on the plane.” And a lot too much off it.
Nick extends a hand towards her. “Nick Sculley.”
She takes it. “Fanny Cours.” She looks around the plaza. “This is very beautiful. You’re lucky to get to stay here.”
“Just for a little while longer,” he says. He tells Fanny about his movie gig. It pays enough, he says. While he waits for his book proposal to gel.
Fanny’s thinking that it’s nice to be in Paris and not be blotto drunk. Nice to not have to face her mom and tell her about Lee Rogers.
(Though she knows she should give her a call. She will. When she’s ready.) Also nice not to think about how she might go about confronting Lee now that she’s in Paris. There are so many things to not think about, in fact, that she’s relieved to be able to focus on Nick for the moment. “What’s your book going to be about?”
What is the book going to be about? “It’s about a relationship between a man and a woman,” Nick says. “How it begins, where it goes, and how it ends.”
And just like that, Lee Rogers is back in her mind. “Who’s the man?” asks Fanny.
“The photographer,” Nick says.
“And the woman?”
For the first time since Nick saw her crumpled up on the train, there’s a vaguely flirtatious tone in Nick’s voice.
“I don’t know yet.”
CHAPTER 30
Lee Rogers is concerned. You would be concerned too if the young intern you were sleeping with had disappeared and her hysterical mother were sitting across from you in your living room.
“I’ve done some checking,” Rogers tells Jenny Cours. “Fanny left her apartment two nights ago and hasn’t returned.”
Lee Rogers deploys his best everything-is-in-order voice. Jenny Cours isn’t buying it.
“I know that. I called her roommate fifteen times,” she says. Jenny wants real help. Not pabulum.
Rogers stirs his coffee. Maybe Jenny and her hysteria will dissolve like the sugar in his cup.
“Did Fanny have a boyfriend?”
Jenny shakes her head. Not a proper boyfriend—Fanny never mentioned anybody special.
Rogers is relieved, on many fronts.
He is relieved, for example, that Connie had a doctor’s appointment and returned to Philadelphia yesterday morning, before Jenny called to say she needed to see Lee right away. She was on her way to D.C. on a late-afternoon flight, she said, could they meet in the early evening?
Lee felt a familiar excitement in the face of Jenny’s urgency and forgot, just for a moment, that Jenny was calling about Fanny. And, of course, that he might have a real problem on his hands.
Are Snakes Necessary? Page 10