She took a deep breath and slowly blew it out. “Why can’t we just say we’re dating? Or engaged? And then just break up when the election is over?”
“Because politicians don’t date, Ryan. They are either married or single. And they really don’t date pregnant bartenders who live in studio apartments in Queens.”
“But you marry them?” she spat. “How noble.”
“Marriage will give it all some legitimacy.”
There was a knock on the door and then, without asking permission, that Wallace guy walked in, looking around her home as if it smelled bad.
“This place looks like my shitty dorm room,” Wallace said. “Nice loft.”
“Fuck you,” she snapped, and the venom felt good.
“Oh, she’ll make a lovely addition to the family,” Wallace laughed. “Your mother, in particular, is going to adore her.”
Harrison herded Wallace toward the door. “Give us a second, would you?”
“We need to move,” Wallace said. “We’re already late for The Carter Center conference.”
“I know. I’m hurrying.” Harrison shut the door behind Wallace and turned to face Ryan.
He still glittered. She was sweaty and sick and ruined, and he was still more beautiful than any man should be. But his wattage was turned down, the fairy dust wiped away by a certain weariness, a reluctant helplessness.
The glimpse of this vulnerability had a predictable effect on her and because she was an idiot, she wanted to hug him.
Don’t believe this, she told herself. This version of him is an act to get you to do what he wants. Underneath he’s the soulless robot who knows too much about your life and thinks you’re stupid.
“Marriage isn’t going to fix this, Harrison.”
“It won’t be easy. But it’s a start. My family—”
“Is complicated.” She laughed, remembering when he’d said that. For regular people a complicated family might mean their mom was gay, or they had two sets of stepparents who couldn’t stand one another. She never would have been able to believe he meant he was a Montgomery, American royalty. “You told me.”
“So is yours.” He shook his head, a ghost of a smile on his face. “We should put your brother and my mother in a room and see who makes it out.”
Ryan refused to smile and Harrison crossed the room. He hesitated for a moment before picking up her hand. His fingers were warm and dry against her damp, cold flesh. “We can make this work, for the both of us.”
For a moment they both stared at their conjoined hands, and she was wondering what he remembered about her. About that hotel room. What details, if any, kept him up at night, burning and alone.
Though the idea that Harrison burned, alone or otherwise, seemed unlikely.
Harry burned. Harrison was far too cold for those memories.
She pulled her hand away.
“I can’t do it,” she said.
“I hope you can think of this as an opportunity, Ryan. To change your life. The life of your child. I have resources you can’t even imagine, and you can use them to secure a future for yourself,” he said, and with that he was gone, the door clicking shut behind them.
Ryan put the teacup down on the floor and barely made it to the bathroom before throwing up.
Harrison went out the back door of the apartment building, to a tiny alley where his car and driver had been waiting. Wallace, glancing around for any photographers, opened the back door of the car and Harrison slid in. Wallace followed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Wallace said to Dan the driver, and they turned off 48th onto Queens Boulevard and made their slow way out to LaGuardia, where the family jet was waiting for them.
“So?” Wallace asked, while Harrison dug his BlackBerry out of his coat pocket. The thing had been going nuts while he was in Ryan’s apartment. Twenty text messages. Ten voice mails. Three of those from his mother. One from the Times. Two from the Journal-Constitution.
We are in serious trouble.
“Get Bruce on the phone. We need to have a contract drawn up.”
“She agreed to your indentured servant idea?” Wallace asked.
“Marriage.”
“You say potato,” Wallace muttered, but he was getting his phone out, putting in the call to Bruce.
“She hasn’t agreed yet. But she will.”
“Why don’t you just follow in the incredibly long and noble line of politicians who pay their mistakes to go away?”
“Because in the twenty-first century that doesn’t work anymore. The world has changed, and …” He rubbed at his forehead, at the headache just under the bone that he couldn’t reach. “I don’t know why I have to keep saying this, but that is not me. That’s not the way I want to live my life. Paying off a woman who is pregnant with my baby to be quiet?”
I am not my father. I might have made the same mistake, but I will not do what my father did.
“So you’re going to pay her and marry her?”
“The campaign—”
“Listen to me, Harrison.” Wallace leaned forward, giving an impassioned plea. Harrison usually liked Wallace’s impassioned pleas, but this one was going to be in direct contrast to his own goals. “No matter how you spin this, it’s going to hurt.”
“Everyone loves a love story, don’t they?”
“You honestly believe you are going to be able to convince the world that you have fallen in love with a tattooed, foul-mouthed bartender from Philly? I mean, she’s beautiful. I’ll give you that, but come on. This is the weirdest Hail Mary I’ve ever seen. This campaign is over.”
“What about the next one?” Harrison put voice to his greater fear, imagining the unimaginable. “And the one after that. We don’t get a hold of this story, it will ruin my career. I’ll always be the guy who knocked up a tattooed, foul-mouthed bartender from Philly, tried to pay her off, and failed.”
Wallace sat back, his silence eerily telling. “When you put it that way …”
“Right. Call Bruce.” It was bleak every way he looked at it, and the only option that left his future open was getting Ryan to agree to this proposal.
“You sure she’s going to agree to this?” Wallace asked, lifting the phone to his ear.
“She doesn’t have a choice,” he said. “Neither of us do.”
Chapter 10
Saturday, August 24
The next morning Ryan was awakened by someone knocking on her door, and by the time she got down from the loft and into her robe, that someone was pounding.
“Hey!” she cried, undoing the chain. “Hold your horses.”
The moment before she unlocked the two deadbolts she remembered the journalists outside and the easily bribed Mr. Jenkins, and kept the door shut.
“Who is there?” she yelled through the wood, her heart suddenly thumping in her throat.
“It’s me, you skinny white bitch, now open up!” Ryan looked through the peephole to confirm. Right. Mary from 3B. “Skinny white bitch” was nearly an endearment in Mary’s vernacular, so she opened the door.
It was Mary and five more of her neighbors, surrounding Mr. Jenkins.
Everybody looked angry.
The hallway smelled like fried eggs and curry.
“Well, good morning,” she said, cocking her hip against the door. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“What the hell is going on outside?” Mary asked. “I can’t get to work without getting harassed by about twenty assholes with cameras outside my door.”
“Wait … what? Twenty?”
“At least!” Mary cried.
“They’re starting to go through our garbage!” Vasquez from upstairs yelled. “My wife caught one of them coming in through the emergency exit out back.”
“I’m … I’m sorry.” Speaking was hard through the thumping of her heart in her throat. “I’m sure it will die down.”
“When?” Mary asked, crossing her arms over her chest, her expression dubious.
“I
… I don’t know.”
Her neighbors erupted in outrage.
“Have you called the cops?” she asked Mr. Jenkins, who up until this point and for most of her association with him had remained silent. He was kind of like a silent, balding troll in work pants with a key ring he liked to jangle in his pocket.
“Of course. It hasn’t done much good. They moved back to the street for about an hour, but they are right at the doors again. This needs to end,” he said, jangling the keys in his pocket.
“You know what needs to end?” she demanded. “You letting strangers into my home.”
Jenkins didn’t even flinch. “It won’t be your home if you don’t get rid of the journalists on the sidewalk in front of the building.”
“There you go,” said Mary, nodding her head in approval. “That’s how we do.”
Oh fuck you, Mary, she thought but had the good sense not to say. Mary worked as a baker, kneading bread. Mary could tear her apart. Like with her bare hands.
“You can’t just threaten me with that, Jenkins. I have renter’s rights.”
“Not when your actions have a direct and potentially dangerous effect on other residents of the building. Look at your lease.”
Holy hell.
“Okay,” Ryan said. “I will … I will do what I can.” She met the eyes of her neighbors over Mr. Jenkins’s bald head. They were all glaring at her. Half of them no doubt still pissed about her complaining about the noise after midnight last year. She’d been big on petitions for a stretch there and she did not make friends with the locals. “I promise.”
Someone somewhere was making coffee, the smell as powerful as a house fire.
It made her cranky and she shut the door in their faces.
Pushing away the siren song of the three Starbucks within a two-block radius, she grabbed her phone and called her brother.
“Leave a message,” his machine said.
“Wes,” she said after the beep. “You have to call me. You have to. Because you have fucked up my life in an epic way. You need to make it right.” She was pacing between the kitchen and the bathroom. This little part of her apartment had never seen so much activity. “By first of all telling me what you’re doing with a DHS badge. You could get in serious trouble for that; and secondly, getting the pack of rabid journalists off my goddamned sidewalk. And third—”
His phone beeped at her, indicating she’d gone on too long.
She hung up and tossed her phone on the couch.
Surely, this morning, of all mornings, she deserved a coffee. A small one. A sip. Just a sip.
She glanced at the clock above the stove. It was eight a.m. She had thirty-six hours before she had to give Harrison her answer.
And if he told the press that she was a bartender who was trying to blackmail him, the press numbers outside her door would only grow. The harassment of her neighbors would only get worse. She imagined Mary might start selling “stories” to the press. Hell, half of them would.
And the quiet, simple life she had been fantasizing about with this baby was totally in jeopardy.
She leaned back against the wall.
Wes had to make this right. He just had to.
Her phone, in the cushions of the couch, started to ring and she dove for it.
“Wes—”
“Wrong sibling.”
Nora. The sound of her sister’s voice brought Ryan to her knees.
They were Polish twins, born eleven months apart. They’d slept in the same bed. Shared secrets and stories and air under the Holly Hobbie quilt their mother had got for them on sale at Woolworth’s.
They’d borrowed each other’s clothes, beaten up the bullies that called them names, and stolen each other’s boyfriends.
Well, that was her mostly, stealing Nora’s boyfriends.
And she’d been living in exile for so long.
I’m sorry, she thought. I’m sorry for all of it.
“What the hell have you done?” Nora asked. That familiar voice saying familiar words triggered a familiar response.
“I haven’t done anything,” she snapped back, because she and Nora couldn’t have a normal conversation without going for blood. “It’s Wes—”
“Wes slept with Harrison Montgomery? I find that hard to believe.”
“Really?” she asked, trying to make a joke. Trying to do anything to make all the things wrong just a little bit right. “Because I wouldn’t put anything past Wes.”
“Oh, that’s rich, Ryan. That’s so rich coming from you.”
Ryan heard the sounds of pots and a pan getting thumped down on the old yellow stove on Nora’s end. She was probably making breakfast. Dad sitting at his spot at the kitchen table, the newspaper pulled apart and set out in his paper-reading tradition. A coffee cup at his elbow, dressed for a job he didn’t go to anymore.
Olivia might still be asleep, or just dragging ass on her way downstairs for breakfast.
She and Olivia emailed each other, and Ryan sent her things from the city. Funky clothes and jewelry that would stand out in Bridesburg. But it wasn’t the same. It was almost worse, never seeing her in those funky things.
“Are you in trouble?” Nora asked.
“Do you care?” Ryan shot back out of habit. And then immediately wished she could take it back.
“Not particularly. Look, we’ve got journalists hounding us. Dad stood on the sidewalk last night with his shotgun and some asshole showed up at Olivia’s piano practice, asking her questions about you.”
“I’m … I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. And I’ve heard that before. Olivia has college visits this week. And I know that probably doesn’t mean anything to you—”
“Of course it does!” she cried.
“Then make this shit stop. I swear to God, if you blow this for her …” Ryan heard the quick inhale of a cigarette being lit. Nora was smoking. Shit was bad if Nora was smoking.
“I’ll make it stop,” she whispered, running her pinky over the fringe of her red blanket. She didn’t know how, but she’d do what she could to make this right.
“Good.”
“Can I talk to—”
“No.”
Nora hung up. Ryan sat there on her knees beside the couch, listening to the silence for a few moments, before she finally hung up and set the phone back down on the couch.
She did know. She did know how to make this right.
Wes wasn’t going to be able to get those journalists and photographers off the sidewalk. Wes wasn’t going to be able to fix this. That was Wes’s lot in life, making messes he couldn’t fix.
And maybe she wasn’t smart enough to see another solution, or she was too damn tired to try, but the key to making this stop was in her hands.
And in the end it wasn’t even a decision she had to make. She just had to come to grips with what was happening.
Well. Crap.
She got off her knees and sat on the floor, her back to the couch, her legs in front of her. From under the couch, she pulled out the notebook and pen she used to make grocery lists and draft petitions to piss off her neighbors.
There wasn’t any other option but to agree to Harrison’s proposal. And she could survive anything for two years; she’d been married to Paul for four, after all. She could do this, particularly if it meant giving her baby a better start than the one she could provide on her own. Particularly if it meant protecting Olivia, and Nora and Wes and Dad, from the stupidity of Wes’s sense of justice.
What did a congressman’s wife do? Smile. Wave. Drink tea … she didn’t really know what else would be required of her, but she could do it.
She’d done worse.
But she would come up with her own terms for this indecent proposal and she’d look out for her family. The baby and Nora and everyone else back home.
The thought spread, turning to hope. Perhaps this was the way to get back in Nora’s good graces. The way to get back home. Being Harrison’s wife didn’t feel like
such a horror show when she thought of it that way.
The phone behind her rang and she reached up to grab it.
Wes.
“You’d better have a good explanation for this,” she said, not bothering with hello.
“I was trying to do the right thing,” he said, his voice glum and contrite and sad and angry. “I swear I just wanted him to own up to his part in this.”
Weary, she laughed. “What are you doing flashing around a DHS badge?”
“Causing trouble,” he said. “Look, I’ve got a call in with Harrison; hopefully I can fix this—”
“You can’t, Wes. It’s past that. The press is onto the story. They’re in front of my house. They’re in front of Nora’s, harassing Olivia at piano. Dad’s going to shoot somebody.”
“Jesus …” he breathed.
“Yeah. Listen, I got this, but I need you to get me a lawyer. A good one. A … scary one.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m getting married.”
Harrison couldn’t believe it had barely been forty hours since Wes Kaminski had burned his life down to the ground, but he couldn’t put off his parents any longer. He arranged for a meeting at his campaign office for six o’clock Sunday night, knowing that would keep Dad away. Dad wouldn’t show up to his campaign office if he was on fire and Harrison’s office had the only water in the city. Dad met Harrison on his own turf. His pathetic way of trying to maintain some power.
“Has she called?” Wallace asked.
Harrison shook his head. He was in the middle of making phone calls to some of his big backers, trying to reassure everyone that his world wasn’t going up in flames, but he got the very real impression that only half believed him.
“You want me to have Jill set up the press conference for tomorrow morning?” Wallace was lying down on the couch in the corner, tossing a tennis ball in the air with one hand and catching it with the other. This was Wallace’s deep-thinking ritual.
They’d both slept in the office last night, putting out fires. Jill, his press secretary, tried to quit early this morning. Thank God Wallace talked her down off that ledge.
“Yes.” Harrison dropped the pen so he could rub at his eyes with both hands.
Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop) Page 9