Happy Endings

by Sally Quinn

  Just then there was a commotion coming from the O.R. A blood-spattered nurse appeared at the door, a look of sheer desperation on her face.

  “Dr. Sokolow, we need you in here,” she said.

  The doctor started as though he’d been shot himself and dashed out of the little room.

  It was about fifteen minutes later when the double doors opened from the operating room. People came pouring out, all of them grim-faced. Sadie leapt out of her chair and went to stand by the door of her little room waiting for the gurney to come rolling out, carrying Rosey to the recovery room. There was no gurney.

  Several doctors began walking toward her, all of them now in what appeared to be red clothes. Their masks were pulled down around their necks and their faces were contorted with emotion.

  Sadie started shaking her head slowly in horror as she backed into the room, waiting for what she now knew would be the news.

  The one called Sokolow spoke first.

  “We tried. We tried. We really tried. We did everything we could. We made every effort. But there was just too much damage. He went into shock, we couldn’t get the pressure…”

  One of the other doctors put his arm on Sokolow’s shoulder to steady him.

  “We’re very sorry, Mrs. Grey. The President is dead.”

  She didn’t say a word for several moments. Then finally she spoke.

  “May I see him now?”

  “Of course.”

  He led her into the operating room where the now motionless body of her husband lay.

  Several nurses and doctors and a few Secret Service agents dressed in green hospital garb were still in the room. They were all in tears.

  As she approached Rosey, who was covered with a sheet, except for his head, she motioned for the others to stay away.

  They discreetly turned their backs on her.

  She stood for a long moment memorizing his features. The wavy light brown hair with the perfectly graying temples. The high forehead with a few more lines than when he became President. The fair eyebrows, slightly arched. The pale lashes. The beautiful aquiline nose—his best feature. His cheekbones, high and etched. His mouth, nicely shaped, though his lips could have been fuller. He had a strong chin. Altogether it was an extraordinarily handsome face, a patrician face, a kind face.

  “Oh Rosey,” she whispered. “I did love you. I was just stupid and silly and immature. I never stopped loving you. And in my heart Willie is your child. You are his father. You always will be. To him and to me. Nothing can ever change that. I was never worthy of you. But why do you have to leave me now when I’m just learning from you what real love is? You’ve taught me everything that’s noble and fine in my life. I don’t want to lose you now. I can’t lose you now.”

  She leaned over and softly kissed his lips, brushing them gently with her own. For just a moment she felt his energy surround her and nearly lift her off the ground. The force was so strong that she gasped for breath and then looked up as the charged atmosphere moved from around her arms and neck to her head and then above her.

  “Rosey, it’s you. It’s you. You are there. Don’t leave me now. Please come back.”

  She could feel the desperate tears begin to come now as she felt him slipping out of her grasp. She raised an arm to catch him as his energy seeped away.

  “Rosey, I love you. I love you. I always will,” she whispered.

  But he had gone, leaving his beautiful, empty body on the bed.

  “Goodbye, my darling,” she said finally and turned away.

  Dr. Sid Sokolow, who had gotten control of himself, came up to her. He held a package in his hand, which he gave to her.

  “One of the nurses found this in the President’s pocket,” he said. “It’s for you.”

  It was a gaily wrapped present, with pink and blue paper and blue ribbon. The paper was badly cut and the Scotch tape was put on wrong. He had tried to curl the ribbon with scissors and taken all the body out of it. She had always teased him about how hopeless he was at wrapping presents. There was a tiny envelope that said “Happy Birthday.” It had her name on it.

  She tore off the paper and found a small box.

  She held her breath as she opened it.

  Inside was an exquisite antique ring of turquoise and marquise diamonds in a gold setting. She recognized it right away. It had belonged to his paternal grandmother, who had been raised in India. It was the only thing that had belonged to Rosey’s mother, Miz G., that she actually coveted.

  But the ring was even more significant than that. She had asked Rosey recently if they couldn’t renew their wedding vows privately. He had told her he wasn’t ready to forgive her yet.

  She slipped the ring on her finger slowly before she opened the note.

  Inside, in his bold handwriting in black ink, it said:

  “I take thee Sadie to be my wife for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, ’til death do us part.”

  2

  Allison had had too much to drink. Julian had ordered endless bottles of vintage red wine, a huge extravagance, and she had obliged him by practically drinking two all by herself. Not that she didn’t have a good excuse. A person’s fortieth birthday was not an everyday occurrence. And though she hadn’t really worried too much about her age, the idea of being forty and childless suddenly depressed her. Forty, unmarried, and childless. She had to stop thinking negatively. The positive aspects of her life, that’s what she should concentrate on.

  She was the London correspondent for the Washington Daily. She had a bright future at the paper. She was the goddaughter of former President Roger Kimball and one of the most powerful women in American journalism. She was blond, thought to be quite beautiful, intelligent, talented, witty… and forty, unmarried, and childless. This was ridiculous. She was supposed to be having a good time.

  It was not like Julian to throw her a birthday party. He usually didn’t show his emotions. He preferred to be known as cool and elusive. And most of the time he was.

  “I’m a cold, cruel sadistic Brit, so what do you want?” he would say, with those taunting pale blue eyes.

  Generally, Allison didn’t find British men very attractive, or at least sexually attractive. Most of them seemed devoid of a basic animal magnetism or whatever it was that made American men so appealing. Maybe they were too studied, too effete, too anemic.

  Julian was different.

  He was tall with a lithe, sensuous body, blond hair, and perfect features. He looked every bit the aristocrat he was, but he had a roguish quality that belied his upper-class manners. Julian was a renegade, a bad boy, always doing the unexpected, shocking the establishment, outraging his titled father. He was the delight of the journalistic left except when he occasionally turned on them for their sanctimonious moralizing. Julian belonged to nobody. He was his own person. His father had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He had lived in the desert, spoke fluent Arabic, and had written several books on terrorism in the Middle East. Everyone called him Julian of Arabia.

  Julian had chosen the Groucho Club for her birthday party, a rather funky private club in Soho named for the famous Groucho Marx line about not wanting to join any club that would have him as a member. There was a comfortable lounge bar on the first floor with deep, overstuffed sofas and chairs and a decidedly undecorated look. Upstairs were private rooms for parties and a small restaurant. The club catered to the publishing crowd, journalists, and television types of some reputation and little money. It was the scene of most of London’s book parties and literary magazine launchings. Allison had wanted to keep the party small, so they had stuck to twelve. As it happened, her two closest American friends were out of the country on assignment, so there were only Brits at the party.

  Julian was looking down the table at her now. She caught his glance though she was feigning a deep conversation with her dinner partner. Julian had seated himself next to a rather icily beautiful British fashion magazine writer who was clearly
infatuated with him. Not that Julian had any interest in Clarissa. It was just his way of getting Allison’s attention. Because Julian was in love with Allison and Allison was not in love with him. They had never discussed it. It was simply understood. One day she would go back to America and that would be the end.

  Julian was standing now. He had rapped on his glass to signal a toast. Everyone was only too happy for another opportunity to drink a little more of the amazing claret. “I would like everyone to drink to our smashing expatriate… and to hope that this is not the last birthday she will spend on our fair isle.”

  It was the closest he would ever come to asking her to stay.

  Allison smiled. He was brilliant and clever, facile and sexy. And titled and rich. Why couldn’t she be in love with him? He had such pride, too. That appealed to her. She hated men who made passes. She liked to be the one to select her partners. Julian would rather be left in the desert to die of thirst than to ever suggest she marry him. Even when they had first met it was she who had invited him to her house for dinner, not once but several times, before he asked her out. It was she who seduced him.

  Clarissa was reaching a hand up to draw him down to the table again. She had not liked the long smoldering look he was giving Allison. He gracefully shrugged her away and began walking down toward Allison’s end of the table, wineglass in hand. He sat down, leaning his arm on the back of her chair and taking a handful of her hair. She could see that he was a little drunk, but his eyes were as clear as most people’s were when sober.

  “Why don’t we get the hell out of here,” he whispered in her ear.

  “Your lips are purple from the claret,” she said. Their faces were so close they were almost touching.

  “Bugger off.”

  “I bet you don’t talk to Lady Clarissa that way.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “Do you want to go to bed with her?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “What a dumb question. You’d fuck a camel.”

  “They don’t call me Julian of Arabia for nothing.”

  He smiled wickedly and bit her lower lip. She didn’t even bother to see if anyone was watching. She didn’t care either. They were all so smashed that it hardly mattered.

  “I suppose she made a pass at you.”

  “Not at all. She merely invited me to visit her in Barbados next month. Her parents have a house there. Very grand. Quite the toffs, you know.”

  “I don’t give a damn if she is Lady Clarissa, she’s nothing but a clapped-out slagette.”

  Allison was quite pleased with herself over this shot. It annoyed her that Clarissa had invited Julian to Barbados right under her very nose. Clarissa wouldn’t even be at the party except that Julian’s best friend had brought her. She pulled back a little to show the proper indignation.

  Julian threw back his head and laughed.

  “Good girl,” he said. It always sounded like “gell.” “It’s been a tough go but you’re finally learning to speak our native tongue.”

  “Your tongue is purple, too,” she said.

  “Well,” he whispered very softly, moving his head closer to her and lowering his eyes to her mouth. “I can arrange for you not to have to see it.

  He took her head in his hands pulling her to him as he covered her mouth with his. She could feel herself giving in, letting her body relax into his arms, only vaguely aware that there were people around them laughing and talking.

  Then suddenly there was a shout, and someone came running into their private dining room.

  “The President has been shot!”

  Allison rose out of her chair as though she had been submerged and was coming up for air. She had had so much to drink and was so engrossed in Julian that it took her a moment to focus on what had been said.

  “What? What did he say?” she asked nobody in particular.

  “The President of the United States has been shot.”

  “Rosey? Oh no. Oh God. Oh no.”

  Allison looked wildly around the room as if for confirmation that what she had heard was false.

  She looked at Julian, comprehending at last. He was grim and suddenly very sober. He stared at Allison’s ashen face.

  “Bloody hell,” he said softly.

  * * *

  She couldn’t imagine how Julian, as drunk as he was, had managed to navigate his car from the West End to her office on Upper Brook Street. Within minutes she was on the phone with the desk in Washington. The Daily was in an uproar and she could hardly make sense of what Muchnick, the foreign editor, was saying. The President had been shot on deadline, just as the paper was being put to bed, and had been rushed to George Washington University Hospital. Nobody knew anything more except that he was in surgery.

  “Get reaction” was all Muchnick would say.

  “But what happened?” she demanded. “You know: who, what, where, when, and why?”

  “I don’t have time for this now, Sterling,” he said testily and hung up.

  “God, I hate that asshole,” she shouted. She was standing at her desk, the phone cradled under her arm, pacing back and forth. Julian came into her office just as she finished her conversation, two cups of black coffee in his hands.

  “Drink,” he ordered. “It’s just possible that you are the asshole at this moment, and a slightly drunken one at that.”

  “How drunk am I?”

  “Too drunk to call the Prime Minister’s office and too drunk to call the American ambassador. Why don’t you call Reggie?”

  Reggie was the palace spokesman, a jovial party boy himself and good friend to most of the foreign press.

  “I’m not that drunk…. Do you think Muchnick could tell I was drunk?”

  “I don’t think it occurred to him.”

  “Well, why the hell shouldn’t I be drunk? It’s my fortieth birthday and it’s two o’clock in the morning. How was I supposed to know the President would be shot?… Christ, the President’s been shot. Rosey’s been shot!”

  The realization stunned her only momentarily as it had when she first heard the news. But her head was compartmentalized. Emotions and news were in separate compartments. This was news. It would not register until much later that Rosey was a friend. Somebody she cared about, somebody with whom she had shared a great deal of pain.

  She grabbed her Rolodex and began thumbing through it for numbers as she turned on the BBC radio. The clackety-clack of the wire machines in the hall churned out the mounting details of the shooting. Julian ripped off the streams of white paper and carried them into Allison’s office. Her shoes were off, her hair was tied back, and she had put on a sweater. She seemed oblivious to anything but The Story.

  The black coffee, or maybe it was the story itself, sobered her up fast. She placed a call to the Prime Minister’s national security guy, a frequent lunch partner and sometime source whose home phone number she happened to have. Jeremy gave her some colorful reaction that she wouldn’t have gotten from the Prime Minister’s press secretary. Then she placed a call to the PM. She wanted to get the Brits out of the way and file before she called the American ambassador.

  It was about four in the morning when she finally called E. Cotesworth Tennant III. He was one of Rosey Grey’s closest friends and had been chairman of his reelection campaign in Virginia. They were both from Richmond, both First Families of Virginia, roommates at the Episcopal High School, clubmates in Saint Anthony Hall at the University of Virginia, classmates at Virginia Law School.

  Allison had never really known Cotes when she was in Washington. He had stayed in Richmond because his wife was dying of cancer. Even though Rosey had been President for two years before he actually ran for office, it wasn’t until after the election that he had named Cotes to the Court of St. James’s.

  They had become friendly when, two years earlier, they both arrived in London. She knew the conversation with Cotes would be difficult. She didn’t know how difficult.

  He picked up the p
hone on the first ring.

  “Cotes, it’s Allison.”

  “Do you know anything?”

  “Only what’s come over the wire. He’s in surgery at G.W.”

  “Jesus Christ, Allison. I can’t believe it. I was only just talking to him yesterday on the phone. He was all excited about Sadie’s birthday present.”

  Allison stiffened at the mention of Sadie’s name even now. But Cotes wouldn’t have known why.

  “Goddamn Secret Service, where the hell were they anyway…” he stopped in midsentence, his voice cracking.

  She could hear another phone ringing in the background.

  “Hang on,” he said. He didn’t put her on hold. There was a long silence after he answered.

  “You’re sure?” he said finally. “Yes, no, no, nothing. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Allison?”

  “Yes?” She held her breath.

  He took a deep breath of his own.

  “He’s, um… he’s uh… Allison?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s dead, Allison. He’s dead. The President’s dead. Rosey’s dead.”

  “Yes.” Her mind was whirling. She couldn’t just hang up on him. He was so distraught. But she had to get on the story. Get more reaction. Get to Downing Street.

  “I’ll let you go then,” she said. “I know you must have a lot to do. When will you…? I’ll call you later this morning. And Cotes… I’m terribly sorry.”

  Her first file had had only a few bland quotes that she knew the desk wouldn’t use. Now she had to call everybody again and file a real react story for the late edition. By the time she had finished it was almost six in the morning and Julian had fallen asleep on the sofa in her office. She wasn’t the least bit drunk anymore. Her adrenaline had taken over and she was on a deadline high. She had so much energy she felt as if she would jump out of her skin. The fact of Rosey’s death still hadn’t sunk in. The emotion compartment was still closed.

  She had an overwhelming rush of sexual desire. She desperately needed the release. It was probably the combination of Rosey’s death and working on a tight deadline. She had read about people often wanting to make love after a death. It was supposedly a confirmation of their own aliveness. It was not an unfamiliar feeling either after finishing an emotionally charged story. Des used to say he felt a postcoital slump after finishing a big story, then an enormous surge of sexual energy.