I set that notion aside, at least for the time being.
I searched for the name Harold Argent and found one hundred and sixty-two hits. None were particularly close to Washington. Not that I had any idea how I would approach the Colonel. When Melissa brought me home to meet her parents, her father quietly told me that he expected his daughter’s boyfriends to treat her like a lady. Then he showed me his gun collection. I could just imagine what he would do if I contacted him from out of nowhere and told him why I was looking for Melissa. I would be lucky if he only set the dog off after me.
I decided to Google Melissa, hoping to perhaps find some mention of her in an alumni newsletter or something. I was stunned to come up with nearly a million hits. Of course they could have been for any one of the ninety-eight Melissa Argents living in the United States or the many others around the world. I figured I’d start at the top with the “Official Melissa Argent website. I clicked on it – and suddenly found myself staring at a nearly full-screen image of the smiling, bright-eyed woman I adored.
Melissa had always been photogenic, but this shot was remarkable. It was inviting and appealing and my heart broke just looking at it. For several moments, all I could do was stare, until my brain finally considered the notion of finding out why there was an “Official Melissa Argent website” and how it could get me back to her as quickly as humanly possible.
One click took me to her bio page and another stunning photograph. There I learned that Melissa had indeed followed her dream of becoming an accomplished pianist. She studied at Juilliard and the London Conservatory of Music, and, while she was in Europe, began developing a style that bridged classical, jazz, New Age, minimalist, rock, and pop, and embarked on a career that gained her considerable notoriety within serious music circles.
My heart swelled with pride as I read on. Melissa was on the leading edge of a movement called “New Fusion,” and she was in the process of becoming something of a pop star. She’d released three albums and had appeared on numerous others. She’d toured on four continents, performed at the White House, and appeared on the “Today” show. I moved to a link titled “Photo Gallery” and found a slideshow of Melissa performing, talking to fans, reading to children in West Virginia, and posing with dignitaries.
And in each of the photos her eyes shone brilliantly blue. The last time I saw those eyes, they were puffy and red. Last night before I left – had it really been last night? – Melissa could barely contain her sorrow. But here she was beaming. Her smile belonged to someone at the top of her form and the top of her life. There was so much more to learn about this Melissa, but nothing would be as essential as the radiant smile on my screen.
I had accomplished my mission.
This should have made me unreservedly happy, and certainly I was very glad that my prevention of Ms. Hoffman’s horrible acts led to Melissa fulfilling one of her most important dreams. But seeing this website, with its reviews from major periodicals and its pictures of her with international figures, made Melissa seem impossibly far away from me. I realized now that, while there might be ninety-eight Melissa Argents I could send flowers to with a single click, not one of them was going to be the Melissa Argent I loved. She wouldn’t have a publicly listed telephone number. I wouldn’t be able to friend her on Facebook (though, as I would soon learn, I could become one of the tens of thousands of people connected to her through her fan page). She would have a manager and a team of handlers and an entire retinue of people whose job it was to keep guys like me from getting too close to her.
I went back to the home page of the website and stared at the picture there for a very long time.
I really am glad for you, Melissa, I thought. Incredibly glad. But we’re supposed to be together. How is that going to happen now?
Stephon was right. This was my new life. There were no more clever temporal tricks available to me – what I saw was what I had.
All at once, I felt terribly tired. I had no idea what my next step should be and no strength to take that next step. I needed to lay down, to recharge. Maybe something would come to me after some sleep – if sleep was even a possibility.
I went into my bedroom for the first time since I’d come back from Stephon’s. The blankets on the bed were yet another reminder that in this world I’d spent the previous night alone. As I undressed, I noticed an empty space on the nightstand. Once there had been a snapshot of Melissa and me that a helpful tourist had taken while we stood on the precipice of the Grand Canyon. Our love always seemed as permanent as that eternal, awe-inspiring gorge.
Now it was gone. As far as the brilliant, beautiful and beloved Melissa Argent knew, Ken Timian didn’t even exist. And he didn’t matter. I’d erased the trauma from her life, but I erased something else as well – the knowledge of what we were like together, of the singular magic we created when we held each other. She had no knowledge of this and therefore couldn’t possibly mourn its loss. That was left to me alone.
What was I supposed to do now? Could I just forget Melissa? Could I simply get on with my life? Stephon would almost certainly recommend that. And much as it pained me to believe it, he would probably be right. Where just a short while ago, I was convinced that I could cross any barrier to reach Melissa, I now felt overwhelmed by the odds. She had a fabulous life, a life I would have easily wished for her. It didn’t include me, though.
I had erased her from my world. Not from my memory. Never that. Still, she was gone all the same.
Today was Saturday. Tomorrow I would figure out how to rejoin the world. I would drive to the supermarket and buy food. I would live my life with the recollection of everything Melissa had taught me, everything she brought to me. I wouldn’t go back to being the person I was before I met her, but I couldn’t be the person I was with her either. I would need to become someone else yet again.
I got into bed and looked across at a pillow Melissa had never slept on and imagined her there.
She would always be with me.
Even if I was never again with her.
Chapter 11
Consolation Prize
I didn’t intend to sleep away most of Sunday. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d stayed in bed until the middle of the afternoon. When Melissa and I were together, we often lingered under the sheets on weekends, embracing, kissing, sometimes making love, but we always had something to do and those plans would ultimately roust us, get the coffee brewing. A more perceptive man would have seen my languor as a sign of depression. My first thought was that time travel had knocked me out physically.
I eventually ran a number of errands and spent a little more time reconciling myself with the person I was in this world. I straightened out the apartment, wondering if the guy who cleaned it still came on Tuesdays. That night, I spent several more hours reading about Melissa and downloading her albums.
Monday morning I got into the Audi and drove to work. Before I started dating Melissa, I took the train in, but afterward I didn’t want to share her with the rest of the commuters at the beginning of the day and it felt so much more intimate to have the extra time alone together, listening to NPR and briefing each other on our agendas. Maybe I’d go back to taking the train again, because the car felt very empty today, even with Melissa’s music filling some of the spaces.
The offices of Warwick and Gray were deserted when I arrived. It was before seven, and I wanted to scope out my work situation before everyone else showed up. My electronic key opened the lock with a reassuring buzz, and I stood by the receptionist’s desk straining to hear any noise. All was quiet other than the hum of the air conditioning in the subdued glow of overhead lights turned down for the night.
This was an Old Money firm and it looked the part. It was all polished wood and brass, like a robber baron’s office in 1898. Harrison Warwick – or Harrison Warwick III, as he preferred to be known – said the decor added dignity and solemnity to
the office. The rumor was that Harrison’s father made his son swear not to change the furnishings in any way and III didn’t have the backbone to challenge him. Harrison’s father was known as Warwick the Great; his son was known as Warwick the Lesser.
Several younger married attorneys swore their spouses could smell the mustiness in their clothes when they got home. Yet for all of its adherence to timeworn tradition, the firm’s systems were fully up to date. Warwick the Lesser’s agreement with his father obviously didn’t prevent him from making Warwick and Gray the most wired firm inside the Beltway.
This place was intimidating when I first interviewed for my job here. The Timians were no barons – my father owned a hardware store outside Philadelphia and made an adequate living until a big chain drove him out of business and into retirement. They were proud that their son made good, but I was the first member of my entire extended family to crack the six-figure salary barrier. I simply didn’t know from trappings like these. Still, they quickly became part of the backdrop – except on days like these (had there ever been a day like this one?) when I reexamined everything I saw.
Down thickly padded corridors I crept, under the gaze of portraits of the firm’s Founding Fathers. A former Secretary of State hung his shingle here, as did two ambassadors, a Congressional special prosecutor, and a White House Counsel. Power and influence hummed through this place like an electrical grid. Warwick and Gray didn’t advertise its connections. That would be vulgar and pointless. The rates we charged made it abundantly clear that we were very highly esteemed in this town.
I found my name on the door of my office on the west side of the building, overlooking K Street. It wasn’t a corner office – you only got one of those if the previous owner left feet-first – but my window gave me a nice view of the street. As my hand grasped the doorknob, I reflected that Melissa and my job had made up nine-tenths of my previous life. Now Melissa was gone, but my work was still there. It wasn’t much of a consolation prize.
I quietly opened the door and entered. My head spun just as it did when I first entered my apartment. My office was the same and it was different. There were still the shelves of dun-colored law books that always seemed to intimidate clients. Folders lay stacked on my desk, tabbed in red, blue, and yellow for quick reference. My law degree still hung from the wall in all its Gothic-lettered glory. The one concession to decoration was a watercolor of a blue-and-brown seascape depicting no beach I’d ever seen.
The majesty of law spread its imposing wings over this room. Dignity clung to it like the smell of polished hardwood. Yet where was the warmth? The signs that a unique, distinctive individual occupied this space? Things were missing, as I knew they would be. One was the photo of Melissa that should have graced the corner of my desk, replaced by a gray plastic file tray. Other personal touches were gone as well – the Redskins coffee mug, the handmade paper clip holder we got at a street fair, the titanium clock we got from a craft store – reminding me that I was more than satisfied with standard issue until Melissa taught me better.
And Mr. Smith had left Washington.
The day Melissa brought him to my office was etched in my mind. He was four feet tall, black-and-white like the pandas at the zoo, and he wore a Sherlock Holmes hat. She sat him in the corner beside a filing cabinet and looked up at me with a sly smile.
“A teddy bear in a law office?” I said. The assistants swore they could hear my voice on the other side of the building.
“It’s good for your image,” Melissa said. “I’ve already named him for you. He’s Mr. Smith – like Jimmy Stewart in the movie.”
“Is there a message there?”
“I’ll leave it for you to figure out.”
She sat in a chair opposite my desk, looking gorgeous as always. I was a little flummoxed, but it was hard to stay flummoxed when Melissa was in the room.
“How, exactly, is this good for my image?”
“It makes you seem more approachable.”
“I think I can hear the partners approaching now with my severance check.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Trust me on this.”
Of course she was right. The next day, I saw a prospective client. She was a senior executive with a Fortune 500 company. Her attire was Corporate Clone, down to the gray jacket, perfect hair, and humorless expression. She sat down, noticed the teddy bear and stared. Before I could stammer out an explanation – let alone throw a blanket over the thing – she smiled sadly. She told me that business had made her miss her daughter’s third birthday party the day before, and to make it up, she’d bought her a huge stuffed dog. She told me that she admired a person who could “be himself” in a corporate setting. The meeting took off from there. When Harrison Warwick came to congratulate me on picking up the case, he looked at the bear, shook his head, and walked away. He never looked at the thing directly again, but he certainly never suggested I find it a new home.
But Mr. Smith never resided in the corner of this office. Instead, he took his place in some little kid’s bedroom or warmed up the workplace of some other woman’s boyfriend. Maybe Melissa had found the bear in a store on her way to perform at the White House and bought it for another man. There was a thought I couldn’t even begin to contemplate.
I took stock of my current caseload. On my desk was the same case I was working on in my other life. It was a trade dispute pitting a big American multinational against a shopping mall masquerading as a Southeast Asian nation. I’d put in so many late nights and weekends researching that case. It was a huge undertaking, one that forced me to get up ridiculously early to phone Asia, regularly waking up Melissa who was a notoriously light sleeper.
I looked through some of the other files. There were fewer cases on my desk in this universe. I’d complained recently to Melissa that things were really starting to pile up and, in one of my least romantic moments ever, even suggested to her that the honeymoon was going to set me back months. There’s that old line about people on their deathbeds never saying they wished they’d spent more time at the office. An obvious corollary came to mind now.
My musings were interrupted by a knock on the door as my assistant, Sharon, entered.
“You’re in early, Mr. Timian,” she said cheerfully. Sharon was always cheerful, no matter how hectic work was or how stressed I became. That she could do so in the middle of a divorce was all the more remarkable. One of the truisms in this field is that behind every good lawyer there is a good legal assistant, and I had drawn the best. A plump peroxide blond with a cherubic face and a cheerful smile, Sharon didn’t have the polished look of the younger assistants. When she was first assigned to me a few years ago, I even groused to the office manager about the choice. But a certain glint in her hazel eyes led me to suspect that she had a sharp mind, and in the intervening time, I learned she had so much more than that. I looked at Sharon fresh-faced at eight in the morning and I felt reassured that there were still some good things left in my life.
“I had a lot of work to catch up on. I’m making headway.” I smiled. “Everything good with you?”
She seemed mildly surprised by the question. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”
Thank you for asking. I wondered what made her say that.
“The kids are okay?”
Her eyes narrowed a little. “They’re fine, thanks.”
It seemed that I was making Sharon uncomfortable with this innocuous exchange of pleasantries. Things moved quickly around the office and we often communicated in shorthand, but she had to know that I was always available. For more than a year now, we carved out some time in every week – either a lunch or just some coffee behind my closed office door – to catch up with one another. Ostensibly, it was to review the week’s agenda, but we always diverted onto personal topics. As it became clearer to her that she and her husband were heading toward a split, she confided in me her concerns, especially reg
arding her two sons.
Maybe that was gone along with Melissa and Mr. Smith. Maybe in this world, I focused only on my headlong rush toward a partnership. That sounded vaguely like someone I used to know.
“That’s good. Say hi to them for me.” I took a quick glance at my desk calendar. Sharon was definitely not on it. “Listen, can you schedule some time for us this week?”
“You and me?”
“Yes. Move something if you need to.”
Sharon seemed very nervous. “Can I ask why?”
I tried to give her a disarming smile. “I just think it would be a good idea to go over some stuff.”
She glanced off to the side for a moment and when she looked back at me, she seemed on the verge of tears. “Mr. Timian, if you’re going to fire me…”
“Fire you? Why would you say that? I’m doing the opposite of firing you.”
“The opposite?”
“Well, not the opposite exactly, but, jeez, the thought of firing you never even entered my mind. I just think it’s a mistake that we don’t set aside time to catch up. It’s bad for the team.”
“The team?”
I pointed between us. “This team. You and me. How can we do our best if we don’t have team meetings every now and then?”
Sharon nodded. She still seemed very uncertain. I tried to think back on what our relationship had been like earlier. I went through a fair number of assistants early in my career, but I thought Sharon and I had always clicked.
“I’ll put something on your schedule, Mr. Timian.”
“Thanks.”
“Remember that you have a ten o’clock conference call with Tim Golden.”
Golden’s file was on my desk. “Got it.”
“Would you like your coffee now?”
“That would be great.” I tried to remember if I liked my coffee differently pre-Melissa. As far as I could recall, that hadn’t changed, but anything was possible.
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