Amanda Bright @ Home

by Danielle Crittenden

  “Am I dressed okay?”

  “You look great.”

  A butler opened the door before they could ring the bell, and they entered a front hall crowded with guests. The house seemed to unfold in every direction. To the left of the stark white foyer was a curved staircase leading up to a similarly cavernous second-floor landing. To the right, a pair of lacquered doors had been thrown open to expose a suite of rooms that stretched farther than Amanda’s eyes could see. Straight ahead a pair of tall, skinny columns framed a two-story window, showcasing a wooded view of the Potomac River.

  A waiter stepped in front of them bearing a tray of white wine. Amanda and Bob each took a glass.

  “Please, stay with me,” Amanda whispered, grasping Bob’s hand. “I don’t know anyone at all.”

  They stood rigidly for a few seconds, uncertain how to proceed.

  “Look, there’s Sussman with Chasen,” said Bob, pointing to the big window. Bob’s boss was huddled in animated conversation with their host, Jack Chasen, founder, largest shareholder, and chief executive officer of TalkNet, the biggest Internet service provider in the world. “Do you want to say hi?”

  “Oh God, no. We can’t just go barge in on them.”

  “C’mon, don’t be so frightened.”

  Bob gripped Amanda’s arm and steered her through the crowd toward the two men. Sussman smiled when he saw them and waved them closer.

  Amanda had met Frank Sussman a couple of times at Bob’s office. He was a short, thin man with the waxy complexion and sunken cheeks of a cadaver. Chasen, by contrast, was tall and handsomely tanned, as if he spent most of his waking hours yachting or playing tennis rather than sitting in front of a computer screen plotting the downfall of his archrival, Mike Frith.

  Sussman greeted Bob enthusiastically. “Do you know Bob Clarke?” he asked Chasen. “He’s my most valuable soldier. He was on to Megabyte from the beginning.”

  Chasen circled an arm around Bob’s shoulders. “Of course I know Bob. I’ve been working with him a lot these days. So glad you could come tonight.”

  Amanda stood behind Bob waiting to be introduced. Bob, flushed from Sussman’s compliment, seemed momentarily to have forgotten her.

  “You know, Frank,” Chasen continued, turning back to Sussman. “If I had one guy as smart as Bob working for me, we’d have put Megabyte out of business a long time ago.”

  “Sorry, Jack, you can’t have him.”

  The three men launched into a discussion of the looming Senate hearings on the Megabyte case. That very afternoon, apparently, the Judiciary committee had nerved itself to summon Mike Frith to testify in person.

  Amanda sipped her wine and swiveled her head back and forth as if she were part of the conversation, her irritation gathering with each turn of her neck. Neither Sussman nor Chasen acknowledged her with so much as a glance.

  Chasen appeared unusually interested in what Bob and Sussman had to say. He asked them questions solicitously, even humbly. And while Sussman answered with lawyerly evasiveness, Bob was soon expounding his views at length. He spoke in a manner entirely unfamiliar to Amanda, with the solemn, lowered voice of a panelist on one of the Sunday-morning political shows.

  “See, Frith’s so arrogant,” Bob was saying, “I think he’s going to come off badly no matter what the committee asks him. I think the best thing these hearings could do for us at this point is show the public what a vain jerk Mike Frith is. Right now the polls aren’t great: people don’t like Megabyte very much, but they like the idea of the government going after it even less. It’s really critical we get popular support on our side—and Frith can help us do that.”

  “That’s an excellent point, Bob,” Chasen said.

  Amanda discreetly prodded her husband in the back.

  “Oh, excuse me, this is my wife, Amanda,” Bob said.

  “Amanda Bright,” she added, extending her hand toward Chasen.

  “Do you work at Justice as well?” Chasen asked.

  The firmness drained from her grip.

  “Um, no …” she stammered. “I used to be at the National Endowment for the Arts—but now I’m at home with my kids.”

  “Ah.” Chasen dropped her hand. “Well, that’s a very noble calling.”

  Sussman nodded perfunctorily, mumbled how nice it was to see her again, and turned back to Chasen. After several minutes of maintaining a frozen expression of interest, Amanda excused herself to find a bathroom.

  Amanda supposed she should not feel so angry or hurt. She had grown accustomed to being treated at certain kinds of Washington parties as if she were invisible. But never before had she been invisible to her own husband. She edged her way back to the front hall, where she figured there would be a bathroom if she really needed one. She didn’t, but it gave her a purpose: so long as she kept moving, she wouldn’t appear stranded and alone.

  A short, ridiculously foppish man stepped into her path. His hair was gathered in an elaborate comb-over. Over a sky-blue T-shirt, he wore a baggy white suit that looked as if it ought to belong to a gangster or a rap star. His eyes furtively scanned the room like two heat-seeking missiles locating their targets. She knew at once who he was.

  “You must be Sherwood Pressman,” Amanda said, with more warmth than she felt. “I’m Amanda Bright. We’ve spoken before on the phone.”

  The lawyer from Silicon Valley fixed his eyes upon her. He obviously could not decipher who she was.

  “Bob Clarke’s wife,” she added, flushing.

  “Yes, yes. I see.” He nodded impatiently. “Is Bob here?” he asked, looking over her shoulder.

  “I just left him. He’s over by the window, talking to Frank Sussman and Jack Chasen.”

  “He is?” Pressman barged past her, leaving Amanda staring speechlessly into the empty space that he had so flamboyantly occupied a second before.

  She drew herself up and continued walking. A waiter dipped by and exchanged her glass for a full one. There didn’t appear to be a bathroom off the foyer, so she followed a corridor to a dining room where another big crowd surrounded a long table laden with hors d’oeuvres. Amanda noticed French doors leading to a flagstone terrace overlooking the Potomac. The terrace was empty; she wandered out and rested her elbows on a wrought-iron railing. In the winter the steep cliff might seem rocky and perilous, but at this time of year it was upholstered in green, and the river looked unimpressive, a muddy trickle taking its time to reach the Atlantic.

  The early-evening heat cloaked Amanda’s bare shoulders like a fur stole. Almost immediately circles of sweat began to form under her arms. Amanda was wearing a black silk camisole and a black linen skirt that she had found after much rummaging through department-store sale racks. She had bought the outfit on the advice of Christine, whom she had consulted in her pre-party panic. Christine warned her not to try to compete with the wealthy guests, but instead to choose something simple and black (“and spend your money on the shoes—those are what they always judge you by”). Christine, as usual, was bang on. Amanda stood out less starkly than she thought she would. A small minority, the very richest women, wore pale pantsuits that obviously cost thousands of dollars. But most of the women at the party were dressed in the familiar Washington cocktail outfit, what Amanda had come to think of as “the doorman suit”: a big-shouldered synthetic blazer in a bright jewel color, with rows of shiny brass buttons. At the crushes she and Bob occasionally attended—events put on by organizations like the American Bar Association, in the stadium atmosphere of a downtown hotel ballroom—hundreds of these suits would bump up against each other, wearing plastic nametags in place of brooches.

  Amanda retreated to the refrigerated comfort of the indoors. She saw, at a distance, Bob being buttonholed by Pressman, and decided to walk in the other direction. Amanda passed into a formal sitting room, painted lemon yellow and crammed with the brand-new “antiques”—Chippendale chairs, Colonial side tables, Ming vases—of office-tower boardrooms. Amanda recognized one of the comb
ative hosts of Left/Right speaking to a tall silvery blonde, a right-wing regular on Live from the Hill. The two seemed to form their own eddy of Washington fabulousness, and Amanda instinctively steered wide of them. Between the sitting room and an equally commodious library was an arched antechamber, punctured by a small white door that Amanda guessed led to a powder room. She tried the handle and it opened into a tight, tomblike space encased in pink marble. Two walls were covered from waist to ceiling by mirrors, and in their reflections the tiny room redoubled itself into infinity.

  Amanda locked the door behind her and sat down on the closed toilet seat. She removed her sandals—pretty, impractical, and expensive sandals that she had bought on impulse for her new outfit, which had rewarded her by carving red grooves in her feet. She dampened a linen towel and dabbed at the inflamed skin. She didn’t mind the excuse to rest for a few minutes in a place where she wouldn’t be seen. Not that she had been seen. The lines of Amandas in the mirrors assured her she existed, but out there, she would have to rattle the blinds to turn a head.

  She ran more cool water from the tap—a brass rendering of a swan’s neck—and wondered how much longer Bob would want to stay. Bob did much better than Amanda at these types of parties. Even before he had become important to the Megabyte case, he could walk up to a cluster of people and speak in a way suggesting they should know who he was. Indeed, it was at an anonymous party like this that she and Bob had first met. Susie had dragged her to that one—a keg party on Capitol Hill, in the row-house apartment of some junior-assistant-to-a-congressman, who put out some beer and welcomed anyone who cared to show up. The living room was jammed, but the crowd parted to admit Susie and, as an afterthought, Amanda. The two of them found their way back to the kitchen, where a group of young men wearing suit pants and open-necked dress shirts were standing around a plastic cooler, jocularly debating a health-care bill that was then making its way through Congress. Their joshing ceased the moment Susie entered. One pulled out a stool; another hunted through the cupboards for a glass for her beer. Susie accepted this all as her due—and then won even more admiration by refusing the glass and swigging her beer straight from the bottle.

  Amanda had helped herself to a drink and stood by the doorway, turning her attention to the scene in the living room.

  “Amanda,” Susie called. “Tim here says he works for Congressman Weinblatt. Isn’t he the one you know?”

  Perched on her stool with her legs crossed, Susie reminded Amanda of a showgirl about to do her big number.

  “Weinberg,” Amanda corrected, turning away.

  Amanda noticed a man approaching the kitchen. She reflexively stepped aside to allow him to pass. To her surprise, he stopped; he did not push through her to get to Susie. He did not push through her to get a beer. Nor was he seeking directions to the bathroom. Instead, amazingly, he seemed intent on striking up a conversation with her. Amanda.

  “I’m Bob. You look as bored as I am.”

  She liked his face right away. She liked the way he looked at her—as if he had known her already for some time and was just reestablishing their acquaintance.

  “I came here with a friend.” Amanda nodded toward Susie in the kitchen. Bob glanced over her shoulder and appeared unimpressed. “I’m Amanda, by the way. And yes, I’m dead bored. How could you tell?”

  “You seemed critical.”

  “Critical? That’s different from being bored.”

  “Not really. When intelligent people are bored, their faces don’t become all soggy and apathetic, like a fish’s”—he paused to demonstrate, glazing his eyes and pouting stupidly—“they become critical. You were just thinking, Hmm, how on earth did I wind up here? And who is this big galumphing guy coming toward me?”

  Amanda laughed. “I wasn’t—not really.”

  Her laughter drew him closer to her. “Yes. You were.”

  “Not the galumphing part. I would never use a word like galumphing.”

  “Goofy?”

  “Goofy yes. But not to describe you.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  Bob leaned against the doorframe as he spoke to her, with one arm instinctively shielding Amanda from the jostle of people passing in and out of the kitchen. He craned forward to hear her every word. They talked and talked—at first, perfunctory details of where they worked and how they came to Washington, building to an almost urgent swapping of life stories, as if each of them could not get to know the other fast enough. Gradually every corner of the room filled up, and they moved outside to the front stoop of the house to carry on their conversation. Bob led her through the crowd clasping the tips of her fingers.

  It was January, and Amanda had worn only a light leather jacket (vanity ruled against her more practical boiled-wool coat). They huddled together on the top step, the lit dome of the Capitol visible through the icy webbing of black trees.

  “Cold?” Bob asked her.

  “No,” Amanda lied.

  He shook off his heavy overcoat and wrapped it around her shoulders, refusing her pleas to take it back.

  “You’re freezing,” he said reproachfully, as much to himself as to her. He arranged and tugged at the coat in the same way he might tuck a child into bed. “Do you want to go inside?”

  “No. I like it out here with … all this quiet.” She had nearly said with you but shied at the last moment from its honesty—although she sensed honesty was the right approach with this man.

  Amanda nestled into the coat’s heavy folds, relishing the unfamiliar yet newly intoxicating smell of him—a minty scent of shaving soap mingled with the faintest residue of sweat. She sensed, suddenly and keenly, that Bob’s gesture offered more than a passing moment’s comfort, and if she embraced it, this thrilling, all-enveloping feeling of warmth would never leave her.

  “There you are!”

  It was Susie, who had come up behind them. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” She sounded irritated but also slightly amused.

  Bob and Amanda scrambled to their feet, and Amanda introduced Bob to Susie.

  Susie waited for the usual show of sycophancy and when it didn’t come, she turned back to Amanda without showing any further interest in him.

  “Are you ready to go?”

  “I guess so.” Amanda glanced at Bob with unconcealed disappointment.

  He accompanied the two women to the curb, where he insisted upon hailing them a cab. He dashed into the street still wearing only a sweater and jeans, and frantically waved at taxis that were either occupied or off-duty until one finally slowed and pulled over. Other partygoers were starting to spill down the steps.

  “What about you?” Amanda asked.

  “Oh—I live nearby. Don’t worry.”

  Reluctantly she surrendered his coat. Reluctantly he accepted it. Susie had already slid into the backseat. Bob touched Amanda’s cheek.

  “May I call you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Soon?”

  Amanda smiled. “Yes.” She climbed into the taxi. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  He closed the door and it was only after they had pulled away that Amanda realized she had not given Bob her number.

  Fortunately, there were not too many A. Brights at the National Endowment …

  It had been quite some time since Amanda had experienced anything like a man’s full attention. As a married woman, she no longer radiated sexual possibility. Without that whiff of promise, she felt like a rose stripped of its scent. At least when Amanda had held a job, men listened to what she had to say. Now, without sexual possibility, without a job title, who was she in the eyes of men but a house elf, a drone, a low-status person they had to endure only if she were seated next to them at a dinner party?

  It was a harsh assessment, Amanda told herself, but true. What was going to happen when she put on her sandals again and smoothed her skirt and emerged through that bathroom door? To whom was she going to talk? Perhaps she would end up, as she so often did, seekin
g out another mother like herself. Amanda could always spot one: she was the woman standing slightly to the side of a group, laughing and nodding at whatever was being said, while wearing a vaguely distracted expression on her face, as if she were expected somewhere else.

  Amanda mustered as much confidence as she could and opened the door. I am not a drone! she repeated to herself, determined to walk up to the first group she met and break in. But when Amanda reentered the living room, whom should she see chatting in the middle of it all but her friend Susie.

  “Susie!”

  “Amanda!”

  The two women embraced, and Susie stepped back with some surprise to admire her.

  “You look fabulous!”

  “You think so?” For once, Amanda was greatly relieved by Susie’s company.

  “Hey, girls, what about me?” The man to whom Susie had been talking stepped forward to introduce himself. “I’m Jim Hochmayer, of Texas. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Jim, this is one of my dearest friends, Amanda Bright.”

  Hochmayer was a tall, well-groomed man who looked to be in his early sixties. His bearing, however, suggested a man much younger, and when he reached forward to take Amanda’s hand, he moved as if all his joints were kept as well oiled and finely tuned as a race car. He greeted Amanda as if the whole point of attending the party had been to make her acquaintance.

  Amanda beamed at him and then, turning to Susie, said, “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Well, I’m glad you both did,” said Hochmayer in his dry Texan drawl. “‘Cause now I can stand here with the two most beautiful women in the room.”

  “Just ignore him.” Susie laughed dismissively. “He’s been making comments like that all evening.”

  Hochmayer grinned. “You can’t blame a man for speaking the truth.”

  Amanda’s usual reaction to the antiquated compliments of Southern gentlemen was to arch her eyebrows, as if to say, Don’t think that old sexist rot works on me. This time the compliments seeped into her like water into a parched plant.