by John Jaffe
He watched her disappear around a corner. Why do I feel like I’m back in the soap opera from hell?
Jack turned to his computer, thankful for work to take his mind off Kathleen. He called up the master list of unedited stories. First up was something by feature writer J. R. Thelman slugged “Firehouse 773.” He opened the file and began reading.
“It was a hot, dusty August day. The noon sun had burned away the shadows and when they came back eight hours later they brought no relief.” Jack reread the sentences on his screen, made a whimpering noise, and slumped in his chair.
Arts editor, Mike Gray, looked up from the adjacent desk. “That doesn’t sound good. What’s up?”
“J. R. Thelman,” Jack replied.
“Let me guess,” said Gray. “His story starts: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ ”
“Close. ‘It was a hot, dusty August day.’ ”
“Why does J.R. begin every story with a weather report?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t take it any longer,” Jack said. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Good thinking, Jack,” said Gray. “I can see those management training classes have really paid off.”
Gray’s phone rang and he turned away, leaving Jack to face the hot, dusty August day alone. He glanced at his watch (wasn’t it time for a meeting?) then at his coffee cup (it was full), then checked his bladder (it was empty). He forced himself back to the screen. The problem, he knew, wasn’t the lede of J.R.’s story. In fact, the second sentence wasn’t half bad.
The problem was thirty years in the business, a twenty-year marriage he didn’t mourn, and three years of promises from Kathleen Faulkner. Six months ago, she’d made her choice: she’d moved back in with her husband while she was still sleeping with Jack. Jack swore he was finished with her and her lies, as he’d sworn many times before. Now she was back.
Problems. His neck was getting wrinkles; hair was sprouting from his ears; his right shoulder ached; words wouldn’t come, names were lost; rock and roll was dead. The problem was middle age.
The problem was Willoughby Treffle.
Jack remembered it more clearly than he remembered last week, though it had happened thirty years ago. It began when a rich dowager from Oakland, California, had bequeathed $100,000 to the city for public art. The municipal arts council spent $50,000 of the money on a commission for a statue to be placed in a prominent spot downtown. A local artist named Santino proposed a huge work—nearly twenty-five feet high—made from twisted steel girders. He called it Civic Duty.
It was a piece of modernistic claptrap; naturally, the arts council loved it. A year later, it was erected in an open square facing the courthouse. Howdy Doody, as it came to be called because the girders grinned like a big set of choppers, soon became the target of graffiti artists and snide newspaper columnists. It also became the soapbox for Willoughby Treffle, the city’s favorite gadfly.
Every day, Willoughby stood on the base of Howdy Doody and harangued passersby. Willoughby was against everything from the city’s housing policy (he had once been denied a housing voucher) to vegetarians (Willoughby liked steak). Aside from his oratory, Willoughby had other distinctions: he had a barfly’s thick red mottled nose, he always wore a black business suit covered with campaign buttons, he sold miniature American flags (three for a dollar), and he was vertically challenged. Will Treffle was a dwarf.
In 1972, the city council voted to disassemble the statue. They claimed that if radical war protesters booby-trapped Civic Duty the resulting shrapnel could kill hundreds. The fact was, no radical had ever considered the statue a target. The fact was, all the judges at the courthouse hated the thing. However, the day workmen showed up with trucks and cranes, war protesters did, too. They knew a photo op when they saw one.
Enter Jack DePaul, eager young metro reporter for the Oakland Tribune, who knew a story when he saw one. The courthouse square that morning was a pandemonium of protesters, workmen, cops, news crews, and innocent citizens called for jury duty. In the midst of the confusion, a tie-dyed protester climbed the statue and began shouting something through a megaphone. Immediately the TV cameras turned. Not to be outdone by TV, Jack climbed up after him. But he didn’t get far. About five feet up, Jack felt himself losing his grip. He reached out to grab on to the protester’s foot, but the man kicked him away. Down Jack fell, right on top of the flags, buttons, and diminutive body of Willoughby Treffle.
“The Midget Mash,” as it came to be called, was all over the TV news and for a few weeks afterward Jack was a minor celebrity in the Bay Area. His account of the statue protest led page one in the next day’s Tribune (Will Treffle wasn’t mentioned) and became his prize barroom tale for years (it once got him into the bed of a San Francisco anchorwoman). It was an exhilarating time to be a journalist: the world teeter-tottered every day between upheaval and possibility. The air seemed charged with extra oxygen. No one sneered in those days at a passion for truth or justice or peace, love, and understanding. In those days.
Jack scrolled down to the end of J.R.’s story and read the last paragraph. Then he checked the story’s length. At least fifteen inches too long, no matter how well written. He returned to the lede again with a sigh. It had been a long time since he’d knocked over a dwarf. The problem, he knew, was Jack DePaul, not J. R. Thelman.
CHAPTER 6
Great, this Jack DePaul guy’ll think he’s having lunch with Rocky Raccoon.” Annie examined the dark circles under her eyes as she looked in the bathroom mirror and cursed herself for staying up so late.
She’d read until 1:20 the night before because she’d stupidly promised three different authors she’d get back to them today. Rick Kantley wanted to know if he should agree to his editor’s changes on his new military thriller. That would be affirmative. And if he were really lucky, the editor would rewrite the whole damn thing. Kantley made Tom Clancy read like Hemingway. But his books hit the best-seller list and he was a dream to deal with. The other two authors were first-timers with solid, salable proposals.
“Well,” Annie muttered as she reached for the little blue tube of concealer, “that’s why God put Estée Lauder on the earth.”
Most days it took Annie twenty minutes from the time she rolled out of bed until she was out the door. This morning, Wednesday morning, Annie was still playing Barbie doll with herself forty-five minutes after she’d put on the concealer.
She stood backwards to her bedroom mirror, holding a small mirror before her eyes. She wanted to see if her butt looked big in a pair of charcoal linen pants. On her bed lay three other pairs of pants and two skirts, all of which had failed the butt test.
She knew she was being stupid. Just pick something, she told herself. You’ll be sitting down; he won’t even see your butt. Suppose he did, though? And suppose he was really as terrific as Laura had said and she showed up in something that announced, “I have saddlebags.”
With her eyes still focused on the small mirror, Annie took two steps to see how the pants moved when she did. Okay, so she was being stupid, the truth was she was having fun. She’d never been on a blind date before, and now that she’d broken the journalist barrier, she was getting more excited about the notion.
“Looks like Richard Dreyfuss or Steven Spielberg,” Laura had said. Well, that’s promising, she thought, I’ve had a crush on Richard Dreyfuss since The Goodbye Girl. The playful tone of Jack DePaul’s e-mails was promising, too. She liked that he wanted to be surprised when they met. “Why have preconceptions?” he’d written. It was a good beginning.
Then it struck her—this really was a beginning. Wednesday, May 29: the first day of the Dating Journalists Era, Part Deux. No one knew where it would lead. The lunch could be horrible— nowadays, Richard Dreyfuss looked like a paunchy sofa salesman (and there was that People magazine story about his rehab). It could be wonderful—she pictured Dreyfuss walking toward the Close Encounters spaceship. Either way, some kind of relationship was going to start
today. And if it didn’t, apparently there was a whole newsroom of men to think about.
She smoothed down the sides of her charcoal pants and brushed back her hair with her fingers. She thought about her relationships past. How less than a year after she left the Commercial-Appeal in disgrace, she’d met Thomas Harrington Boxer III, or “Trip” (for triple), eventually her husband, eventually her ex.
She’d felt like damaged goods, and Trip, six feet of steadiness and solidity, seemed like someone she could hang on to through every storm. Someone who would stay. Unlike her father, Milt Hollerman. Unlike Andrew Binder.
It took her years to realize Trip was never there to leave.
At first she thought he was the opposite of her father. She called it the Anti-Milt theory. Trip seemed to be everything her father wasn’t—responsible, loving, caring, hearing. But it turned out that Trip out-Milted Milt, right down to hearing loss.
Whereas Milt Hollerman had lost his hearing ducking mortar shells in World War II, Trip’s diminished auricularity resulted from too much skeet shooting and duck hunting as a boy. And what Annie had mistaken for steadiness turned out to be a deep coldness that made her father’s inept attempts at affection seem inspired. Annie’s mother called Trip “the Cardboard Box.”
To add insult to injury, Trip was even cheaper than her father, though Milt had an excuse—he could never make a living. Trip, on the other hand, had been a highly paid lawyer before he retired at age forty-six to live off what he called his “welfare checks,” the $400,000 he received annually from the family’s pharmaceutical business.
Despite his wealth, he always frowned when Annie came back from Sutton Place Gourmet with a bag full of cardamom seeds to put in their morning coffee. “I admit it tastes better,” Trip would say, “but at two dollars an ounce, I just don’t think it’s worth it. That’s almost a hundred dollars a year if we use two seeds a day.”
Their marriage got sick and died long before it arrived at the emergency room. On a mild fall Saturday morning when Annie picked up the phone to make a call and instead heard Trip arranging a tryst with their neighbor across the street, she realized she didn’t care. She wasn’t angry, sad, or even hurt. She felt nothing but the sudden urge to buy as many cardamom seeds as she could find.
When Trip went to meet his paramour, Annie went to Sutton Place Gourmet. With their Platinum Visa, she charged $347—the largest sale of cardamom seeds ever, the salesgirl told her. She drove back to their Bethesda home, packed three suitcases, and left one of the four large plastic bags from Sutton Place on their kitchen counter with the following note: “Trip, here’s something to remember me by, Annie.”
That’d been two years ago. She was pushing forty-five now, and her hormones were shouting “Last chance” so loud, all her body wanted to do was procreate. But other than the energy analyst, there hadn’t been anyone around to make Mother Nature think she was trying. And Mother Nature wanted her to try again. Maybe this Jack DePaul would be the answer. Or maybe he’d be an arrogant jerk or maybe he’d be boyishly charming or…
The possibilities were limitless.
CHAPTER 7
At 12:15 that Wednesday afternoon, Jack DePaul parked his maroon Pathfinder in the empty parking lot of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Inside, there was no one by the entrance to Donna’s with fiery hair, just a guy wearing a blue-and-white seersucker and a bad combover.
The last time Jack had been on a blind date was in high school. Thirty-five years later and he was still feeling nervous and goofy. He took a deep breath and told himself to relax. To kill time he went to the museum store. He circumnavigated the handcrafted earrings and painted silk scarves and found himself by the art books.
Thinking about hair, Jack picked up a twenty-pound coffee-table book called The Pre-Raphaelites and began thumbing through. Dante Rossetti’s women were there, in abundance. Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris, Alexa Wilding— all those models (and wives and lovers) Rossetti had turned into pouty icons of pseudo-medievalism. One hundred and fifty years later they were still sexy, with their fog-fed complexions and their great waterfalls of hair cascading down in colors of copper, wheat, and polished heartwood. Rossetti and his earnest band of young Victorian rebels had gotten it just right—the sleepy, sensuous look of passion about to be uncaged.
Jack looked at Lizzie Siddal as Dante’s Beatrice. Her ecstasy did not appear religious. Wavy locks of sunset hair spilled down her shoulders like lava. If this Hollerman woman looks anything like Elizabeth Siddal, Jack thought, I’ll give Laura my next three paychecks. Hell, make it the next ten paychecks.
He checked his watch: 12:20. He was starting to turn back to the Pre-Raphaelites when something caught his eye. By the front of the store, looking at the racks of arty postcards, stood a woman with her back to him. She wore a black linen jacket and loose charcoal pants. A green suede bag was slung over her shoulder. Flowing down to the middle of her back were curls the color of chestnut, if the chestnut was lit by a summer sun at, say, 7:30 in the evening.
She pulled a card from one of the racks. Just as it began to seep into Jack’s brain that she might be Annie, she walked off in the direction of Donna’s. Jack rushed to the card racks and peeked around the corner. The woman was leaning on the hostess stand. Jack still couldn’t see her face. She was turned toward the restaurant and the sculpture garden beyond the tables.
He stepped back into the store, out of sight, and looked into a small mirror with a wildly colored Haitian frame. He never thought it would happen to him, all that white hair. But then again, he never thought any of it would happen to him. That his marriage would shatter and fall. That the image of a long white shirt on a tall brunette would keep fluttering through his imagination like a nightmare bird. That he would live half a century and come up dry, the years behind looking more and more passionless in the rearview mirror. Nothing to paint a picture about.
With a shake of his head, Jack banished the memories. He slung his jacket over his shoulder, rolled up his sleeves a couple of turns, and loosened his tie. He thought of the once-and-future Lizzie Siddal. The wave of self-pity ebbed away; in its place, he was surprised to discover, came a fluttery feeling in his chest. He briefly flashed to junior high and Carol Davidson’s gap-toothed smile. To hell with age, he said to himself. Then he walked toward the woman who, from the back, looked as if she’d just stepped out of a Rossetti painting.
“If you’re not Annie Hollerman, this will be very embarrassing,” said Jack.
The woman turned. She wasn’t Pre-Raphaelite. She didn’t have the bee-stung lips, the dreamy British curves. This woman had bones. Good, strong bones from the old country. Her cheeks slanted slightly up and out; there was peasant stock in her, and exotic fragments of the far steppes. The wild red hair framed the lightest of olive complexions. Pre-Raphaelite by way of Minsk.
“So. You must be Mr. Dreyfuss,” said Annie. “Are there storm clouds over Lisbon?”
Jack grinned. “Not anymore.”
CHAPTER 8
By the time the coffee came, Jack had scored at least 100 points. He’d lost one when he was abrupt with the host, who didn’t have the outside patio table he’d reserved, and another when he dropped some farfalloni con fungi on his tie. Actually, the fungi bumble was funny. And Annie would’ve been the last person to fault someone for messiness. Besides, he’d spilled it because of her. Call it 100–1.
Laura deserved some points, too. She’d been right about the funny, smart, and brash part. But she forgot to mention how Jack DePaul’s bottom teeth were in a cute jumble with the middle one tucked slightly behind.
When Laura had told Annie she thought Jack was around fifty, that had sounded old. She’d never dated anyone out of his forties before, and she’d worried that Jack DePaul would look like someone’s grandfather.
Jack DePaul looked like no one’s grandfather. Yes, his hair was gray and he had well-worn eyes, but he also carried himself with a tight, coiled energy. And even though he w
ore baggy pleated pants, she could see the outlines of what she knew must be a great rear, just as Laura had said.
As the waiter poured their coffee, the words “What you need, Annie Hollerman, is a man with a good ass” rang through her mind.
“Something funny?” Jack said.
Annie hesitated, then she pictured Trip’s scrunched face and heard his familiar critical words: “You’re just like a ten-year-old, always blurting out whatever’s on your mind.”
So she said, “Yes.”
“Okay,” Jack said, “I give, what’s so funny?”
Annie remembered how Trip carefully measured every syllable he spoke. Then she gave Jack a sweet smile and said, “Laura’s first words to me about you were, ‘What you need, Annie Hollerman, is a man with a good ass.’ ”
That’s when Jack had fumbled the farfalloni con fungi.
CHAPTER 9
By the time the coffee came, Annie had put up so many points that the scoreboard was broken. It wasn’t just the cool hair or the way her slim body skimmed against her loose clothes that attracted Jack. Annie turned out to be as smart and bold as Laura had told him.
Lunch had been easy and fun from the start. Jack felt as if they’d jumped onto an inner tube and were shooting merrily down a snowy slope together.
Just after being seated, Jack opened the menu, peered at Annie over the top of it, and said, “So, who’s Annie Hollerman, and why does Laura Goodbread think she’s so great?”
Annie didn’t miss a beat. Without even looking up from the menu she replied, “Because Laura refuses to pee outdoors and won’t take her daughter camping. So I do it for her.”
“I bet there’s more to it than that,” he pressed her. “Laura told me Publishers Weekly thinks you’re a big deal. And you are Eda Royal’s agent.”
Annie made a little shrug.
“So it’s true,” Jack said. “If it weren’t for you, Confessions of a She-Devil wouldn’t have been on the Times best-seller list for eight zillion weeks.”