But he persisted, like the big fucking overgrown boy that he was.
So, when they walked into the Point of View Bar on the eleventh floor of D.C.’s W Hotel and a young guy bore down on them, Janey was already flashing plastic.
But the guy ignored her and smacked David on the shoulder, saying, “Bro, you are getting some heat.”
David all but shuffled his size thirteens, squeezed into the pair of leather dress shoes he’d last worn on the day they were wed six years before at the Brooklyn Marriage Bureau, and said, “I got lucky.”
“A lot luckier than Mike, man.”
“Hell yeah.”
“Bummer.”
“Major bummer.”
The guy was moving off and they got drawn into the crowd in the bar, all media types, all there to raise a glass to their departed comrade, Michael Emerson.
It wasn’t a formal memorial, just a gathering to drink and share war stories. Emerson had been buried the day before in his native Pennsylvania with much hoopla, a phalanx of lenses trained on his family—steelworkers who were numbed and shell-shocked at having to grieve on the world stage—and this, by contrast, was all hip and mellow, high on irony and low on sentiment.
Janey hadn’t wanted David to come, even though a bunch of people—people who, a week ago, would have walked past him on the street—had called and asked him to be there.
Because he was hot.
Because he’d scooped all the heavy hitters.
Because, in the unspoken superstition of these Fourth Estate vampires, just by being in his orbit might result in some magic rubbing off on them.
“It’s hypocritical,” she’d said, pacing their cramped front room that afternoon, dressed in sweats and a baggy hoodie, her red hair uncombed, her pixie face wearing a scowl and a blush of annoyance that made her freckles pop like Benday dots.
“Jesus, Janey,” David had said, “stop being so Emily Post.”
“Emily Post?”
“Yeah, you know, so old school. So all the about the etiquette.”
“Have you even fucking read Emily Post?”
David had sighed and raised a hand in surrender. “Okay, let’s drop the Emily Post metaphor—”
“Analogy.”
“Whatever.” Shaking his head. “I’ve always been outside staring through the fucking window, Janey, now I’ve been invited to the buffet I’ve been trying to get at for years.”
“Michael Emerson’s wake?”
“Hell, you know it’s just an excuse for networking. Nobody even fucking liked the guy.”
She’d dragged one side of her mouth down and crossed her arms across her boy’s chest. “Why did I expect more of you?”
“Jesus, this is my chance, Janey. You know how narrow these windows are. Next week it’ll be something else and I’ll just be that guy again. I want to go to this Emerson thing, I want to hustle. I want to land a job, for Chrissakes. We need it.”
What he’d left unspoken was that a year ago she’d walked out on a gig contributing political pieces to The Huffington Post to write a novel, a roman à clef set inside the Beltway, seen through the eyes of a jaundiced journalist not unlike herself.
The novel, though, was coalescing with all the speed of crawling ameba, and David—a good man and true—had never once called her on this, had just brought home the paychecks and let her sit at her desk and write.
Or pretend to.
So they’d gone to the W Hotel. She’d insisted on being there, in the misguided belief that she could protect him.
She huddled against a wall, drinking a dirty martini, standing on tip-toe to watch him, hulking and awkward and sweating, as he was danced through the room of poised and charming and voracious sharks.
Janey caught up with him near a window framing the Lincoln Memorial that seemed to float above a ghostly bed of snow.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. People are making me crazy offers.”
“I’ll bet.”
“But I’m staying cool and aloof, biding my time.’
“You? Cool and aloof?”
“Hey, I’m trying.”
Her eyes were drawn to a tall, dark-haired woman in jeans and a sweater under a black cashmere coat who moved through the crowd effortlessly, people parting before her, until she was at the bar and getting the attention of the bartender ahead of a crush of other drinkers without seeming to do anything more than raise an eyebrow.
“Who’s that?”
“Who?”
Janey pointed at the brunette who rested an elbow on the bar, surveying the room with an air of infinite boredom; a woman who’d perfected the art of making ennui look sexy.
“That’s Lucien Benway’s wife.”
“As in ‘the disgraced ex-CIA operative Lucien Benway’?”
“Yep. Nadine or Nadia. Something foreign. She’s Croatian. Or maybe Bosnian.”
“Bosniak.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“She’s gorgeous.”
“If you like the just slightly dissipated ex-supermodel type.”
“Which you obviously do.”
“Not me,” he said. “Why eat goulash when I can eat carrot cake?”
Janey punched him on the upper arm hard enough to make him wince.
“What’s she doing here, do you think?” she asked.
“Rumor has it that she was banging Mike Emerson.”
“For real?”
“Uh huh.”
“Emerson was screwing Lucien Benway’s wife? Are you sure it was the jihadists who got him?”
“Oh yeah. Jesus, if you had to behead all the guys who’ve boned the lovely Mrs. B. the road to Damascus would be lined with skulls.”
“She’s easy?”
“As a sleeper sofa, baby. You can be sure she won’t leave here alone tonight.”
A correspondent for Newsweek, a toothsome man with a hair weave who was a frequent pundit on political chat shows—reliably glib and simplistic as he gnawed on the week's news—barged up and started talking to David as if he’d known him forever, and Janey turned and downed her martini as she watched planes take off from Reagan National Airport, trying to let the booze wash away the nameless terror that lurked in her gut.
FIFTY
Nadja Benway did leave the W Hotel with a man: a New Zealander named Eddie Jones, a photographer specializing in images of conflict and suffering. One of his pictures—a carrion bird eating the eyes of a skeletal Somali toddler—had been a contender for a Pulitzer in the nineties.
It was a widely held belief that the child had still been alive when the vulture had started its snacking and Jones had been criticized for not scaring the bird away, to which he’d replied, “I document the fucking news not make it.”
An unsightly man, shading fifty with a sagging gut and a skin as pockmarked as one of the bullet-scarred ruins in his photographs, he’d stood alone at the bar, drinking a steady succession of vodkas as Nadja had observed him from her vantage point farther along the counter.
He was one of those drunks who seem to become more grounded and steady the more they consume, and when the stool beside his was vacated and she slid onto it he took an age to look up from his drink and into her face.
“My, my,” Jones said in his strangled Kiwi accent, “a beauty.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, darling, thank whatever gene pool you doggy paddled out of.”
His eyes were back on his drink.
Michael Emerson had worked with him frequently, out of necessity rather than choice. Jones was one of the few photographers who’d been prepared to accompany Emerson on his increasingly kamikaze quests.
“He’s brave,” Michael had said.
“Or sociopathic,” she’d said.
“The distinction,” he’d said as he shoveled moo shoo pork into his mouth, “is a fine one.”
When Nadja placed her hand on Jones’s, feeling t
he scrofulous texture of his skin, he sighed and stared at her in the mirror behind the bar, raising his eyebrows.
“Would you like to fuck me?” she asked.
“What’s the price of admission?”
“Why should there be a price?”
“When I look like me and you look like you there’s always a bloody price.”
She nodded. “Okay. I understand you were in Jordan with Michael?”
His eyes narrowed. “So?”
“Tell me about his last days and I’ll let you do whatever you want to me.”
“What’s your interest? Professional?”
“No.”
Jones pointed a nicotine-stained finger at her and wagged it slowly. “Ah.”
“Ah what?”
“You’re her.”
“Who?”
“The love of his fucking life.”
Despite herself she felt a quickening of her heart. “He called me that?”
“No, darling, he didn’t say one bloody word about you. But I knew. You always know.”
“How?”
“All of a sudden he was being careful. Like he had something to lose. In my experience there’s only one thing that does that to a man.”
“What?”
“The big fucking L.” He smiled at her revealing long yellow teeth.
“So if he was being careful why did he leave Amman for Syria?”
“That, my beauty, is the twenty-million-dinar fucking question. Well, one of them.”
“What’s the other?”
“Why didn’t he take me with him?”
She stood. “Can we go somewhere?”
He shrugged. “Sure.” He threw back his drink and sighed. “I’ll tell you what little I know. And you don’t even have to fuck me.”
“No,” she said. “I want to.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because every man I fuck helps me remember Michael. Does that make any sense?”
“You know, it does. It does.”
Jones stood, keeping a hand on the counter for a moment, steadying himself, then he walked slowly and with great purpose from the bar, not once looking back to see if she was following.
FIFTY-ONE
Harry Hook emerged from the ocean just after dawn wearing the ratty pair of black swimming shorts he hadn’t removed since his impulsive decision to come to the island two days before. He had no fresh clothes in the bungalow, so when he’d risen an hour ago he’d washed his T-shirt (rank with sweat) at the kitchen sink and hung it from the branch of a tree to dry.
While searching the kitchen closet for detergent he’d stumbled upon a plastic Tesco bag containing a Grumbacher tin with a tray of twelve virgin watercolor cakes, a clutch of new sable-haired brushes of various sizes, a couple of 2b pencils and a spiral-bound book of white cotton paper. He’d brought the painting supplies on a long-ago trip with Bob Carnahan and forgotten about them.
Hook had filled a plastic tumbler with water and walked down the beach until he had a view of the ocean in the foreground, with the bungalow behind framed by the jungle and the cliff. A notion had taken him to paint the scene and give it to the child.
To his granddaughter.
He sat on the sand, dripping, and watched the sun rise until there was enough light to open the watercolor book on his knees and sketch the scene in pencil.
Satisfied, he started to paint a wash of azure and pink that captured the flat mirror of the ocean. The jungle, verdant green and dense, he rendered in quick strokes, as he did the sky that changed before his eyes from rose to lemon yellow to the flat blue of the tropics.
He was busy contemplating the bungalow, trying to formulate a strategy that would allow him to portray it realistically without finding himself becoming fussy and over-detailed—a failing of his—when a small figure came out on the balcony and waved.
Hook waved back and the girl skipped down onto the beach. As she approached he laid the watercolor book face up on the sand, unable to close it, even though he wanted to, for fear of smudging the paint.
The child stood and squinted down at his handiwork.
“That’s pretty.”
“It’s not done yet.”
“I know. But it’s still pretty.”
“Well, I’m nothing more than a Sunday painter.”
“But today’s Thursday.”
Hook laughed. “Yes, it is.” He saw her bemused expression. “A Sunday painter is someone who dabbles, does it as a hobby. Someone who isn’t very good.”
“Well, I like it.”
“Thank you.”
“Can I have it, when it’s done?”
“Yes. I was painting it for you, actually.”
She blinked and looked at him for a long time. “You were?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought it might be a little souvenir. A memento, for when you go.” Hook saw her face and regretted his words. Unused to the exacting business of talking to a child.
“I don’t want to go,” she said and looked close to tears.
“Oh, you’ll still be here for a while.”
“And you?”
“Yes, me too,” he said, knowing he was lying to the girl.
For the truth was he had no plan, and it shamed him to admit that beyond the wild melodrama of the finger in the plane wreck (a byproduct of terrible coincidence and his toxic post-binge imagination) he’d had no strategy. The coming days were a blank canvas.
“Suzie!”
They both turned and saw Kate in the doorway of the hut, beckoning.
“You go on,” Hook said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
The child ran back toward the bungalow and stood on the balcony with her mother and JP, who had risen from his hammock, and then the three of them went inside.
Hook selected a medium-sized brush—a corrective to his tendency to fussiness—wet the bristles in the water container, and applied the brush to the umber pan and dabbed the brush in the mixing tray. Then he rinsed the brush in the glass and lifted some yellow ochre and mixed it with the umber.
The resulting hue was close enough to the bamboo of the bungalow and he kept his wrist loose, allowing himself to paint in easy strokes, and, so absorbed was he in capturing the essence of the hut without losing himself in detail, that it was only when her shadow fell across the page that he realized that Kate was standing over him.
Hook felt embarrassed, as if he’d been caught at something trivial and somehow humiliating.
He put the watercolor book down on the sand.
“A man of many talents,” Kate said.
The roar of the Zodiac’s outboard rescued Hook from having to reply and they watched JP and Suzie bump away toward the neighboring island.
“Are they going for provisions?”
“Yes,” she said.
They didn’t speak until the inflatable disappeared.
“Look,” he said, unable to bear the silence, “I think what we’re busy with here is kind of an improvisation.”
“You’re not talking about the painting are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“You mean you don’t have this thing all figured out and tightly plotted?”
“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
She looked at him and he saw something in the line of her jaw and the squint of her eye that was uncomfortably familiar.
“Did you ever?”
“Well, I saw that plane crash on TV and—”
“No, I mean years ago.”
“Back in my heyday?”
“Yes.”
“No. No, I didn’t. I always liked to leave room for happenstance. I believed that you could sketch out a scenario and then you had to step back just a little and let life fill in the blanks.”
“Very Zen.”
“Or something.”
“It’s okay.”
“What’s okay?”
“T
hat you don’t have it all mapped out.”
“That’s not what you said the other night.”
“I was pissed off the other night. Mostly, about a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with you.”
“Well, I was a participant.”
“Only tangentially.”
“Now that’s a nice five-dollar word.”
She smiled. “And look what happened? That Burke guy showed up and moved it all along.”
“He’s just a puppet. Mrs. Danvers has an arm up his ass.”
“That’s an unfortunate image.”
They both laughed.
“What’s Philip doing, do you think?” she said.
“I think he’s doing what he does best. Bending circumstances to his whim.”
“Meaning?”
“Look, he has it in for Lucien. What he did was a form of patricide, or Mrs. Danvers would see it that way, shafting him and taking control of what Philip had spent years creating. He’s lighting a fire under Benway’s feet and he’ll sit back and watch him dance.”
“A dangerous sport.”
“Very.”
“And there I was thinking he was doing it all for me.”
“Oh, Philip has his sentimental side, of course. And you better believe he’s convinced himself that he’s doing something noble, doing this to help you and maybe even me. But he’s a master at biding his time. And here’s his opportunity.”
“How did you get involved with him?”
“With Philip?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “That’s long ago and far away.”
“Tell me.”
Hook shook his head. “The past is just another fucking lie.” He stared out over the ocean. “Let’s stick with the present.”
She stared at him. “We’re going to have to deal with Lucien, aren’t we?”
“Yes, we are.”
“So,” she said, “what would you do if you were me?”
“Well, I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”
Laughing, she stood and set off back down the beach. Hook sat a moment, listening to the small waves kissing the sand, then he started to paint again, and before he was even conscious of what he was doing, he had, with a few dabs of the brush, captured his daughter walking away from him, the wind teasing at her hair that, by the day, was returning to the same shade of brown as his own.
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