by John Jaffe
But if Matthew was tuned to his father’s emotional bandwidth, he didn’t show it. Instead, he stuck the piece of feta in his mouth and said, with a smirk too cocky by half, “Of course, if you blow it, I could be next in line. Just call me the Graduate.”
“Watch it, pal,” said his father, “or I’ll rewrite you right out of existence.”
CHAPTER 42
Would she want a small wedding the second time around? Should they have klezmer music? Annie pictured Jack dancing the hora. (Trip had refused.) Maybe they should just skip the wedding and live together. Somewhere halfway between Baltimore and Washington? Yuck, that’s Columbia. But Ellicott City would work. They could find a funky cottage; her primitive stuff would look great with his sturdy mission furniture.
They were sitting on their sunny veranda eating tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella drizzled in aged olive oil and a touch of balsamic—she was wearing an orange batik wraparound skirt and a gauzy white shirt that caught the breeze and brushed her nipples— when a ugly green sign announcing the Beltway suddenly came into view.
Annie blinked and read the white letters again. “Holy shit, how’d I get here?”
Then she realized where she was: in her car, on I-95 South. Her hands were on the wheel; she was driving.
The Beltway already? What had happened to Columbia, Laurel, Scaggsville, Burtonsville, and all the other towns between Baltimore and Washington? She didn’t remember passing any of them.
Somewhere after getting on Baltimore’s Key Highway, Annie had left her body in charge of driving and her mind in charge of replaying last night. Once again she had dinner at Remmy’s, walked in Federal Hill Park, explored Jack’s body and had hers explored. Then, most likely around Laurel, her thoughts had catapulted forward—to the hora and a summer dinner of tomatoes and basil on a big white veranda.
After coming to at the Beltway, Annie tried to stay focused. But no sooner would she force herself to concentrate on the lines in the road or the upcoming exit signs than she’d hear Jennifer Warnes and find herself dancing in the moonlight with Jack.
Somehow, she managed to reach her Dupont Circle apartment. The light on her phone was blinking. Five new messages. The first four were from her mother (why had she told her about the upcoming date with Jack?), the last was from Laura, who had called at 8:30 that morning to see if Annie had spent the night at home. “Just making sure you did the right thing. Was I right about his butt? I expect a full report.”
After a long shower, she thought about a nap. She should be tired, shouldn’t she? But the endorphins were still carbonating Annie’s blood, so she threw on some clothes and headed for the office to finish up the pile of paperwork that had spread over her desk like kudzu while she’d been in North Carolina.
It was the brightest day of spring. The tufts of clouds merely accented the light blue sky; summer’s humidity was still in hibernation. Red, purple, and blue pansies tumbled out of clay pots and window boxes on P Street.
Annie found herself humming, “I’m walking on sunshine…” and smiling at passersby. Everywhere she looked, there were couples. They were talking intently in the cafés and holding hands on the sidewalks; men and women, men and men, blacks and whites, browns and browns, Democrats and Republicans. With all this love around, Annie thought, this could be Paris. Why hadn’t she noticed it before?
Could she be in love? The sensible-shoe side of her brain said, “No, it’s way too early.” Okay, if not love, then serious like? “All right,” said sensible shoes, “but call off the wedding and cancel the caterers. You’ve been planning weddings after every first date since Eli Weintraub in eighth grade.”
Annie unlocked the heavy, brass-trimmed doors of her building and stepped inside. For a moment it was last night, and she was stepping back into Jack’s apartment. This was a very serious like.
It wasn’t simply her body celebrating the end of loneliness. She was sure she wasn’t just trying to convince herself of that. When she had first met Jack it was like being reacquainted with an old best friend. Then the e-mails came. Just the past week she’d read another article, this one in Newsweek, about breakthroughs in the study of memory. Good memories can cover over bad ones, it had said. Ever since Jack had taken her to the night of flamenco, her past had become a better place. He was making love to her and healing her at the same time.
Annie walked into the office thinking she owed Laura big time—at least a dozen sticky buns.
“Hey, Punkin. What are you doing here?” It was Fred, feet up on his desk, several manuscripts on his lap.
“I could ask you the same question. You were here yesterday,” said Annie. “My excuse is I’m nowhere close to catching up from the trip. What’s yours?”
Fred swung his long legs down to the floor. Annie noticed that he was wearing his usual work outfit: slacks, white shirt, bow tie.
“I needed to keep my mind busy today. I couldn’t do it at home. Alone.”
Annie frowned. What was so special about today? She looked over at the wall calendar. And she knew. It was May 19, Fred and Lillian’s anniversary. It would have been their twenty-seventh.
“Oh. I’m sorry, Fred.”
Fred made a wry face. “No need to be. It’s not your fault she’s no longer with us. I’m glad you got to know her.”
“Me too,” Annie said. “I love that story about how you met. Tell me again. Fireworks, right?”
Fred smiled and put his feet back up on his desk.
“Fireworks, indeed,” he said. “I met her on a rooftop in Georgetown. It was the Fourth of July. Some friends had invited me to a fireworks-watching party. There were twenty or so people. Lillian and I had both been divorced for a few years at the time and we were the only singles. It didn’t dawn on me until after we were married that the hosts had fixed it up that way.
“I first saw her up there on the roof. She was holding a glass of champagne and eating a hotdog. She was wearing a straw hat and a blue-and-green madras sundress. Men don’t usually remember details like that, but I remember it exactly. The way she stood, lanky and loose-limbed like a teenage girl, how tanned she was. ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ ”
“Shakespeare?”
“Shakespeare stealing from Christopher Marlowe.”
“What happened?” Annie sat down on a chair next to Fred’s desk and put her feet up, too.
“I did every charming thing I could think of. I regaled her, I poured her wine, I juggled nectarines. It started sprinkling during the fireworks show so I held an umbrella for us both and wise-cracked about the shapes and colors of the explosions. In other words, I was an utter idiot.”
Annie laughed. “But something worked. She fell in love with you.”
“Not really. Not at first. I think she felt sorry for me. And she appreciated the effort. ‘You were very game,’ she used to say. Eventually, you’re right, something worked. We were married nearly a year later, on her birthday.”
“Oh. Today.”
“Today.”
Annie felt her heart drop, but Fred leaned forward and gave one of the feet propped on his desk a squeeze. “Let’s don’t get too melancholy. Lillian would hate that. It’s also a day of celebration. A celebration of the twenty-seven great years we had.”
“You’re lucky, you have no regrets,” Annie said, thinking of the twelve regretful years she spent with Trip.
“No regrets? Rubbish. I have a thousand regrets. We always wanted to go to Sicily and never did. There’s an artist in town, Linda Pepper; we both liked her work. I kept saying I was going to buy Lillian one of her paintings. It got to be a joke between us, the gift she never got. I never took her to Café Atlantico.”
“But Café Atlantico wasn’t even open when Lillian died,” said Annie.
“I know, Annie. I know.”
The two of them sat silently for a moment, feet up. Then Fred said, “I think your man has the right idea about regrets.”
“My man?” said Annie, a flush
creeping up into her face. “Who’s that?”
“You know very well who I mean: the estimable Mr. DePaul. At least I presume he’s estimable. I like how he’s writing away your regrets with his messages. I thought about that this morning over coffee. I was thinking that I wished I had done that for Lillian. Then I thought, maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I should write a memory of Lillian and me on a date at Café Atlantico. She would have loved the tuna tartare on tablespoons.”
Fred got up and stretched his big hands toward the ceiling. “It’s too beautiful a day to be inside any longer,” he said. “I’m going for a walk. There’s a double-shot espresso somewhere nearby with my name on it. Don’t work too long, Punkin.” Then he gave her a sly smile and added, “Or you’ll regret it.”
CHAPTER 43
Mom says I get to be flower girl. But I’m almost thirteen, you know, so couldn’t I be like a junior bridesmaid or something?”
On another day, Annie would have teased Becky about the apple not falling far from the tree. But how could she? A few hours before, she’d been playing the same fantasy.
“Becky, hasn’t your mother given you the Gloria Steinem lecture yet? ‘You can be anything you want to be’?” Annie said. “Go get her for me, okay, sweetie? And tell her I owe her a dozen sticky buns.”
Annie looked into the little black holes on the telephone receiver as she waited for Laura to pick up. She thought about Fred’s farewell and tumbled the word “regret” around for a while. It was a squat, ugly troll of a word that perched like a succubus over the sleeping past. Its silent cry of self-pity echoed forever.
Just a few weeks ago, Annie would have ridden such morbid thoughts to the most painful moments of her life. Once again, Charlotte Commercial-Appeal city editor Mark Snowridge would stand by her desk, nervously jangling the change in his pocket, and say, “Molitor’s piece is bullshit, Hollerman. I refuse to run one more column about cutesy license plates. How’s your Metro column coming? We really need it for tomorrow. But it’s gotta be into the desk in the next half hour.” Inevitably, she would answer, “No problem. It’ll be there.” And he would reply, as he always did, “You’re the aces, H. You always come through.” And, as always, she would feel the rising panic and see herself look at the clock, look back at her blank computer screen, and again reach for a folder filled with clippings of columns she’d gathered over the years.
But today she avoided the tour route from hell. Instead, thoughts of echoes and pasts took her to Nepal, where she and Jack had heard the sounds of a tiger and where she had been wrapped up by the shadows of Jack DePaul’s body.
She might have stayed in that rattan room for hours if Laura’s voice hadn’t come through the little black holes Annie was staring at so blankly.
“Annie? You there?”
Annie put the phone to her ear and said hello.
“A dozen sticky buns?” Laura said. “Jeez-louise, this is better than I’d hoped for. Okay, Hollerman, time to talk. Was I right?”
For the next twenty minutes, Annie gave Laura a blow-by-blow description of her night with Jack. “He’s terrific … he’s … he’s … terrific. Did I say he was terrific yet?”
In response, Laura had only one word to say: “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Annie said, “wow is right. But it ended all wrong. When we said good-bye, I was so tongue-tied I sounded like an idiot. I really need to write him something, but I’m not sure what. I can’t decide between honest mush or jaunty irony.”
“Hmmm,” Laura said. “I’ve been out of the game so long it’s like asking Bob Hope to host the MTV Awards. What about honest irony? Forget it, that’s an oxymoron. Jaunty mush?”
Fred’s conversation came back to Annie. “Laura, you’re a genius! Jaunty mush. I’ve got it. Four words. How about, ‘Great night. No regrets’?”
“Perfect. He’ll think you’re a genius. Men don’t believe in morning-after regrets.”
CHAPTER 44
That night, Jack caught a couple of innings of the O’s game on TV, then sat down at the Mac. As he signed on he considered the threesome at lunch. “She’s real,” Matthew had said. Well, he hadn’t raised a fool: Annie’s real, all right. Is she getting someone just as real in return? Do I want her to? Am I afraid to?
The string of question marks would have stretched on longer if his message list hadn’t contained something from ahollerman.
Jack clicked on and read Annie’s four words. “Great night, no regrets.”
He stared at the screen for a while, thinking about how past deceits seem to drag around behind you like Marley’s chains. Oh, fuck it, he said to himself, just write her what you feel. And he did.
To [email protected]
From [email protected]
Subject: Regrets
Annie,
I came back from One World about two this afternoon. (Matthew says you’re awesome. I agree.) I started to straighten up the living room and while I was putting the pillows back on the couch I found a pair of women’s underwear, a small hair clip, and a little tangle of wavy red hair. It made me laugh out loud. It’s been a long, long time since I had a couch in such disarray and strewn with a woman’s things. I closed my eyes and immediately it was last night, Jennifer Warnes singing, and you were in my mouth. I close my eyes right now and you are in my mouth.
You say ‘no regrets.’ We both know that’s not true. Of course you have regrets. And you wonder: Is he really what he seemed? Is there less or more there than meets the eye? Does he mean any of it? Was I a fool? How will it be when we meet again?
But it may be, and I hope it is, that the regrets are small and time will erase them. And after all, no matter what, we had the night. Electric, pulsating night. And I have the memory of your beautiful vibrating body.
I can’t wait till we’re together again.
Jack
CHAPTER 45
Before Jack could take a second sip of coffee on Monday morning, Laura Goodbread was standing by his desk. All five feet ten inches of her loomed over him as he sat with the Post propped in his lap.
He slid his glasses down his nose with his index finger and looked up.
“Yes, Ms. Goodbread, is there something I can do for you? By the way, fine job on City That Reads.”
Laura sat down on the edge of his desk and leaned over to Jack. “We’ve got to leave employee-employer land for a moment, okay?”
Jack nodded. We’re going to Annie-land, he thought. No matter, he’d been there all morning himself.
“About Annie.”
Jack nodded again. For an instant, he saw a small redhead in purple silk and white lace. “What about Annie? She’s fabulous. Everything you said. I owe you for this. In fact, it’s going to show up in your evaluation under ‘Works well with editors.’ That’ll be a first.”
“Very funny,” Laura said. “But I’m serious. Don’t do anything stupid. She’s had enough hurt in her life.”
Jack pushed his glasses back up and focused on Laura for a second. “I don’t know what’ll happen. Who does? But I have no intention of hurting her. Why would I? Even a slime-sucking editor like myself can recognize a good thing when he sees it.”
Laura stood and smoothed down her skirt. “Good,” she said. “Now that that’s settled, what’s the word on Houston? Did you get them to spring for the trip? Remember, you owe me.”
“That’s against the rules, Goodbread. You can’t mix personal and professional favors. I’ll keep trying, but I wouldn’t be packing my bags if I were you. ‘Profits are off, the budget’s tight,’ is what I’m getting from the top.”
Laura scowled. “Christ, Jack, that’s total bullshit. We both know it. They’ve got enough money to send an army of editors to that circle-jerk management conference this week, but they can’t come up with four hundred bucks for me to go to Houston? You tell me which the readers would prefer: more smooth-talking editors or a story about a dying girl’s last chance?”
It wouldn’t have been smooth for Jac
k to tell Laura the truth: that the only thing he’d ever found interesting about the conferences were his nights with Kathleen and that Laura’s dying-girl story was compelling. She’d found a seven-year-old Towson girl with inoperable brain cancer. Her parents had taken out a second mortgage to pay for a trip to Houston so she could be treated by an alternative doctor specializing in pediatric brain cancer. Laura had planned to follow the family, report on the first treatment, investigate the doctor and the patients he’d saved (and lost), then later track the girl’s progress.
“It’s got everything. It could win us a Pulitzer,” Jack had told the editor when he’d tried to get money for the trip.
Not this year, the editor had said. We don’t have it in the budget. “If it were my paper,” Jack said to Laura, whose face was turning a visible red, “I’d send you. It’s a great story. That’s not the issue. I don’t control the money. I wish I did.”
“Yeah, well maybe you can take that up at your conference,” Laura said.
Jack watched her stride away, a printout fluttering to the floor in her angry wake. He knew he was facing a three-day pout, at least. He took the delayed second sip of coffee. It helped. Newspaper people didn’t bleed printer’s ink, they bled caffeine.
He had just turned back to the Post when a new shape loomed over his desk. This time it was Arthur Steinberg’s squat five feet seven inches.
“Arthur. My, isn’t this is a pleasant surprise?” Jack’s voice oozed false jollity.
“Not really,” said the ever-dour Steinberg, who had arrived even more rumpled than usual. His tweed jacket lacked a button and his shirtfront was seeded with shreds from a chewed cigar.
“What can I do for you, Arthur?” asked Jack, this time without sarcasm. Arthur never understood newsroom banter anyway. He took it so personally that Jack thought one day a pointed remark would drive him to the top of the Bromo Building with a rifle.