by D. W. Buffa
“You have to go?” I asked as she started to push back her chair. “But I thought there was something you wanted to talk about. When you called…” she pulled her chair up to the table. “That must have been what you thought it would be like for you. Is that what it was? That if you took the job with that Wall Street firm, you’d never be able to do what you had always dreamed of doing?”
I started to say something, though what it was I don’t really know. The dreams I had had then were not the dreams I had now.
“Yes, you’re right. There is something I wanted to talk to you about. There is something you need to see.”
We left the grill, but instead of leaving the hotel, she led me to the elevator. When she pushed the button for the eighth floor I felt a dim, inexplicable panic, a strange sense of foreboding, the whispered secret that you had always known, this thing that until now you didn’t know you knew at all.
“Joanna? Are you sure?” her eyes did not move. They stared straight ahead until the elevator came to a halt and we stepped into the corridor where in the haunted confines of my mind I could still see the faces and hear the voices that had been there once before. At the end of the corridor, Joanna reached inside her purse and found the hotel key. She unlocked the door to the corner suite that faced out onto Central Park and went inside.
Rushing across the room, Joanna threw open the window. “Look! Isn’t it wonderful?” She glanced over her shoulder for just an instant to make sure I agreed.
“You can see everything from here.” she pointed into the distance, toward the side of the park bordered by Central Park West.
“Where I lived then, where you live now. And there, on the other side—See? We’re neighbors, you and I.” she turned away from the window and drifted back toward the door. She stood there for a moment, moving her eyes around the room.
“You remember that day? When you were here? You left sometime in the middle of the afternoon, didn’t you?” her eyes moved back to mine. The saddest smile I think I have ever seen settled on her frail, trembling mouth.
“That was the reason I came,” she continued, “because I thought you would be here. I wanted to come earlier, but it was Christmas Eve and I went shopping with my mother and I remember I bought a dress because I wanted to wear something new for you. I had not seen you since the end of summer, when you went back to school, and you were not coming back and I had not stopped thinking about you. And then, I heard you were coming down for Thomas’s party, and I had to see you because I thought that there was still a chance we could start all over and that maybe this time you would not want to leave, that maybe this time you would want to come back.”
I started toward her. “Don’t,” I said, shaking my head, but it was too late. It had been too late for years.
“No, I have to,” she said through bitter tears. “I had come to find you, but you were gone, the way you had gone before. I couldn’t find you, and what I found instead was Thomas and that girl, Annie Malreaux.
Thomas was a child, a baby; all that astonishing intelligence— he understood everything, except himself. I came in, looking for you, and Thomas was standing there—right over there,” she said, pointing to a spot next to the window. “He had this look on his face, gleeful, triumphant—like a child! They were going to get married. That’s what he told me when I walked in and asked about you, that they were going to get married.
They were going to run off and do it, get married and then go to Europe somewhere and never look back. I came to find you and I found them. I told him he couldn’t do it: that there were things he had to do; that he had responsibilities. I told him he couldn’t throw it all away. She told me that Thomas could do whatever he wanted to, that they both could, and that I had no right to interfere. That’s when it happened, right there.”
Joanna gazed at the window, the only emotion a kind of wonder, as if after all this time she was not any longer quite certain that it had really happened and that it was not instead a bad dream, and that if she tried hard enough, she could wake up and never have to think about it again.
“I shoved her. I was so angry that after everything he had done he would just give it up. I shoved her hard.
I remember the look on her face. It struck her as funny, what I had done. She started to laugh, but then she stumbled, and then she fell, and in that instant, the instant it happened, everything changed. All that time I had been protecting him, from his grandfather, from all the people—people like her—who wanted to use him for what they could get; and then, in that instant, he started protecting me.
“It was an accident. I didn’t mean for her to die.
I didn’t; I swear it’s true. I wanted to tell the truth, to tell the police what happened, but Thomas would not allow it. He knew it was an accident, he knew I didn’t mean it, but he knew what would happen if anyone found out.
He told me it was not just a question of a scandal, but that I could go to jail. He was in love with her, he was going to marry her, and now, because of me, she was gone, but he protected me because nothing could bring her back and because I had always protected him.”
A grim expression moved deathlike across her eyes.
“How much we grew to hate each other because the only tie between us was this sense of obligation that could never quite be met. Yes, we had two children—both of them conceived while we each imagined we were making love with someone else.”
I had no more sympathy left. “What about the trial? What about Jimmy Haviland? What about me?” I asked.
“There was not any White House conspiracy, was there? Thomas—Thomas Browning—was behind all this? He used Haviland? He used me?”
It had become a habit, and the habit had become instinctive. She had to protect him. It was all she knew.
“They used it the last time. That is how they won.
They would have done it again, and it would have been worse—it would have destroyed Thomas—because someone would have discovered the truth. There was not any choice. Don’t you see that? The choice was made here, Christmas Eve, nineteen sixty-five, when I pushed Annie Malreaux and she stumbled and fell. It was an accident, and it ruined our lives.”
“But what about Haviland—what about what he had to go through? And what about what my great good friend Thomas Browning did to me? Using me to prove a White House conspiracy that did not exist.”
“You have to decide what you want to do about that.
It’s the reason I brought you here and told you what I’ve never told anyone. If you want to tell the world what I’ve told you, I won’t blame you for it. But is it always better to know the truth?”
I turned away and stared out the window, across the park, shining with snow the way it had that day, years before, when Annie stumbled and died. From the first time I saw it, an island of quiet sanity in the shouted madness of the city’s rush to keep moving forward, faster every day, driven by the vanity of its claim to be the best and by the fear that if it even once slowed down it might become second-rate, I had been drawn to it, made to feel that it was the place I eventually wanted to be. Everything that had ever happened to me in New York—everything important—had happened here. And now this.
Thomas Browning was a genius and he had played me like a fool, and like most things ingenious it had been simplicity itself. There were people all through government who knew he would be a better president than what they had; there were people in the White House who owed their loyalty to him. I had been right, after all. The evidence against Jimmy Haviland had been manufactured by the government, but it was a part of the government that Thomas Browning controlled.
The only thing I did not know is whether the decision to tell me what he had done had also been his, or whether Joanna had done it on her own. I turned around to ask, but Joanna spoke first.
“Do you know the worst memory of all? The memory of all the things I missed, the things that never happened, the things that might have been and never were.”
; When we said good-bye outside the Plaza, we both knew that there was nothing more to say and that we would never see each other again. It had been her idea to tell me everything because she thought she owed me that, and because she had to tell someone and I was the only one she could trust. Browning would never know unless I decided to take what she had given me and use it for some purpose of my own. Should I do that? Should I tell the world what I knew and destroy forever Thomas Browning’s chance for the presidency? I wanted to let that question somehow answer itself; but it kept coming back, taunting me with cowardice and indecision.
On Friday evening, Gisela came up for the weekend and in the sweet savagery of the night I forgot Thomas Browning and what he had done; I forgot about the trial and about Jimmy Haviland; I forgot about everything except the sheer delight I took in being with her. We slept till noon, and then, like Saturday’s children set free in Manhattan, we crossed the park under a brilliant azure sky and climbed the crowded steps to the Metropolitan.
We wandered through the Greek and Roman exhibits, and I listened to Gisela with her European education tell me things I did not know.
“What was it like at the funeral?” I asked, curious what she thought about the service held for the chief justice at the National Cathedral. “Any tension?”
“Between Browning and the president? They didn’t sit near each other. The president came alone.
Browning was there with his wife.”
“Joanna?”
“I forgot, you knew her, didn’t you?”
“I saw her this week. We had a drink together, at the Plaza.”
Gisela led me down the marble hallway, past the statuary and into another exhibit.
“Did she tell you anything interesting?”
“You could say that.”
Before she could ask, I told her there was something I wanted her to see. The crowds were thick, pulling in all directions at once. I stayed in front of her, guiding her through.
“Can we look at this first?” she asked, squeezing my hand. “There must be five Picassos here.”
As we stood in front of the first, her eyes brightened.
“I don’t think he’s going to run. I think he’s going to get out.” She looked up at me, an eager smile on her mouth. “That’s the rumor now. They say that Walker hasn’t decided to run a second time, that he’s ‘praying on it.’ Maybe God will tell him the same thing the public-opinion polls say: ‘Browning has a huge lead.’”
Gisela looked back at the canvas, but a moment later smiled at me again. “I have news you could not have heard. Jamison Scott Haviland…”
“Jimmy? What’s happened?” I asked, remembering what Browning had done.
“What’s happened is that the only people who don’t think he should run for Congress are the ones who think he should run for the Senate. He’s become a hero, the decorated war veteran who became an innocent victim of a White House conspiracy. The money is there, whatever he wants to do. Your friend Thomas Browning seems to have done a few things on his behalf.”
“Did he?”
“You look a little strange,” said Gisela. “Is everything all right?”
“I want you to see this,” I said as I took her hand and led her into the next room. It was still there, on the wall in the far corner, The Boy in the Striped Sweater, the painting by Modigliani that had once caught my attention and held me there, staring at it, remembering the Thomas Browning I had once known.
“Does it remind you of anyone?” I asked after she had examined it from several different angles.
“No, but I like it quite a lot. Why, does it remind you of someone?”
“You don’t think it looks like Thomas Browning?”
“No. I don’t see that at all. Do you?”
I looked at it again.
“I suppose it reminded me a little of what he looked like then, when we were in school together. It was a long time ago,” I added as I put my arm around her shoulder and led her away.
Outside the museum, I bought us pretzels with mustard, and then we wandered aimlessly into the park.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?” asked Gisela, laughing as she wiped mustard off her chin.
“Tell you what?” I was dazzled by how she looked. I did not want her ever to change.
“What Mrs. Browning—your friend Joanna—said.”
“What she told me, I’m not sure you’d believe. It’s a great story, though; a story that I suppose could change the world if anyone knew. But I won’t keep you in suspense. I’ll tell you everything she told me.”
“When?” asked Gisela, her burgundy black eyes pulling me deep inside.
“I lived here, in New York, a long time ago—one summer, when I was in law school. You know what I used to think about then? How one day, when I was old enough to have a little gray hair, I wanted to have an expensive apartment right on Central Park and be madly in love with a gorgeous young woman barely half my age, someone who looked exactly like you.” she was up on her tiptoes, her hand on my shoulder, teasing me with her dark, haunting eyes.
“When are you going to tell me, tell me what she said, the story that could change everything?”
“Soon,” I said with a distant smile. “A few weeks after Thomas Browning finishes his second term. It’s all written out, in a sealed envelope I’ve never opened and probably never will.”
“That’s probably wise,” she remarked as she let the subject drop.
Almost imperceptibly, Gisela’s mood began to change. She stopped talking except when I said something first. Even then, she made only brief, largely noncommittal replies. Something was on her mind, but when I asked her what it was, she said it was only work.
There was so much going on, so much she had to do.
Washington was chaos and, as the only reporter for her paper, she had to try to cover it all. At dinner she told me that though she did not want to leave, she could not stay: She had to get back to Washington that night. Next weekend might be better; perhaps we could have more time then. When I suggested I come down to Washington for a few days, she said it would only make her feel guilty because she would not be able to spend as much time with me as she would like.
After I put her in a cab for the airport, I wondered if everything she told me had been the truth. She had said it a little too quickly, and with a little too much reserve.
It was like watching someone hold her breath while she tries to get all the way through a lie. I told myself that I was imagining things because I was disappointed, that I had no reason to be jealous of her work; but no matter how many reasons I came up with, none of them could quite banish the feeling that things were not right.
Perhaps she had met someone else, someone more her own age.
The next morning, having barely slept, I went for a long walk in the park, past the bench where I once had sat with Joanna’s father; past the place where, just a few days before, I had watched her throw snowballs as if she did not have a care in the world. I must have wandered around for an hour or more before I found myself back on the sidewalk across the street from where Thomas Browning lived when he was in New York. Sitting on the bench where I had waited for Joanna, I traced the route she had followed as I remembered how she had looked, bundled up against the cold.
Then I saw her, the last person I expected to see, leaving the building, an overnight bag slung across her shoulder.
“Gisela!” I shouted across the traffic and the noise.
She looked up, a puzzled, guarded expression in her dark, impenetrable eyes. She saw me and her eyes went cold, as if her name had been called by a stranger she had never met and did not want to know. A car was waiting; the driver held the door. She slipped inside and never once looked back.
I turned and walked into the park, feeling lost and lonely and more than ever a fool. Thomas Browning had left nothing to chance. He had exploited every weakness I had. But then, I should not have expected anything less: He had always known how to use the
people he needed.
When I reached the other side of the park, I looked down Central Park West. From somewhere far away yet whisper close, I listened to Joanna’s voice, that voice I had heard that night she introduced me to her parents, telling them that we had just met and that she was going to marry me the day after tomorrow. I should have stayed in New York, stayed and married her. Annie Malreaux would still be alive, married to Thomas Browning. And Browning and I would have gotten together every so often—perhaps at the bar at the Plaza—and talked about all the good times we had had in law school and afterward. We would have complained, the way middle-aged men do, about where the country was headed; and then, because we would have grown happy and content, kidded each other about our lack of ambition. It would have been a good life, so much better than the lives we led instead.
The End
Read on for an except from
HILLARY
The latest riveting thriller from D.W. Buffa
Now available from Polis Books
Chapter One
Richard Bauman sat just inside the doorway to the suite, annoyed that he was reading for the second time that evening the sports section of a day-old paper. He was in the most expensive suite in one of the most expensive hotels in New York, and all he could do was sit there and let his eyes wander down the box score of a game he did not even know had been played. Tossing the paper on the coffee table, he walked over to the window and stared out at the moonlit shadows of Central Park, wondering what it would be like to have the kind of money to be rich enough to come here on his own. The thought vanished as quickly as it had come as he glanced across to the double doors that led into the bedroom.
“Strange business,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Three or four times every month they stayed here, in this hotel, and always in this same suite. There was never any reason given; everyone understood. It was a simple matter of logistics, the easy convenience that did not even need the lie. Another room, on the other side of the suite, a door that could be unlocked to add another bedroom, or, which was here the point, kept separate and apart. It was a way to get privacy with discretion, a way to make sure that all the rumors remained only that; rumors that, even if nearly everyone believed them, no one could actually prove.