by Jeff Soloway
“Just talk to Freddie Bridgewater,” she said. “I know lots of editors through Grant. I’ll help you place the story—somewhere real, not online, in a magazine printed on paper and sold at newsstands. You’re a good writer. Even Grant says so. I’ve read your guidebook. I’ll add an Amazon review to prove it.”
An electronic beep sounded nearby. I ignored it, focused all my attention on her face and her voice.
“What will happen if Greenbaum finds Bridgewater?”
“He’ll kill him. So we better be quick.”
The tone continued steadily, like the beat of an EKG, and grew louder. A reader nearby sighed heavily into her Vanity Fair.
“You should tell somebody,” I said.
She started to answer, then stopped. The beep had gone from an indication, to a warning, and now to a threat. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but faces in the café all turned to us, like flashlights converging on a thief in the dark, so I knew that the source was nearby.
Victoria twisted around and pounced on the purse hanging from the back of her chair. After a furious hunt through its contents, she pulled out her phone and jabbed her finger at the screen. The tone vanished. The disapproving faces returned to their business.
“That’s a find-my-phone tone,” I said. “Somebody located your cellphone.”
“Grant.” She thrust the phone back in the purse but kept it in her lap, as if to guard it from resentful eyes. “We share an account. He probably called home and got suspicious when I didn’t answer. He can track where I go. He’s jealous. He tells me I can track him too, but I don’t. I don’t want to know.”
“He doesn’t trust you, even though you’ve always been faithful.”
“But not truthful. Not today.”
She turned in her chair to survey the rest of the store, looking for Grant. Nearby was the self-help section. Browsers were scanning shelves for the book that would teach them how to manage their lives.
“It’s a native app,” I said, “but you can turn it off. I’ll show you how. You don’t want Grant to know everything.” An old girlfriend—not the one from Florida—had showed me how the app worked and how to defeat it.
“Are you trying to teach me to cheat?”
“I’m trying to teach you that your husband’s a jerk. Not only is he spying on you, he lets you know he’s spying. And everyone else around you.”
“As long as he doesn’t lie to me. I can handle anything else.”
“You shouldn’t have to. You want a decent, trusting, faithful husband. So find one.”
Her eyes dipped for a moment and then returned to me, narrow and glinting. “What would happen, right now, if I touched you?”
“On the hand?” I wanted her to try it.
“Or the face. Grant likes to touch me on the cheek.”
“I don’t want to talk about Grant.”
“Me neither. But I don’t dare touch you.”
“Do you want me to dare?”
She paused, then shook her head.
“I have to go. I’ll call him from home and tell him I came here for a coffee. Listen to me! You’re teaching me to lie—maybe I needed to learn.”
“Why haven’t you told the local cops about Freddie Bridgewater?”
“They all work for the Grand Chalet. The best thing anyone can do for him is write up his story. You could save his life.”
“And your marriage at the same time. Okay. How can I reach him?”
“I need a day to track down the information. Meet me here tomorrow, same time. And don’t try to call me if you’re late. You know what’s better than disabling the app? Leaving the phone at home. He’ll think I never left.”
Chapter 3
When I got home, my apartment door was cracked open. I could hear a shuffling noise inside. One of Greenbaum’s thugs? Breaking into a cubicle-size Brooklyn studio seemed a little punkish for a mafia kingpin/hotelier, but he obviously paid attention to detail.
You can leave if you want, I told myself, but I couldn’t, any more than I could have turned and fled after I’d spotted Victoria sitting alone at Barnes & Noble. For me, curiosity is as paralyzing as fear. I suddenly remembered a long-ago morning at a Spanish hostel. I had returned from the shower to find a young Argentinian groping through my bedclothes, presumably for my wallet or my passport, which I knew he wouldn’t find, as I’d locked them in the safe at the front desk. When he was done with my bunk, he went through the other five in the room. Nothing there either. Finally, he turned around. I was ready for him to attack, yelp, beg, threaten. His face reddened, then purpled. “I would have shared it!” he howled.
I entered my apartment.
There was Jewel, struggling with my lowest, and stickiest, dresser drawer.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Help me. I’m out of T-shirts and I know I left a few. Your key’s on the table. How’s Victoria?”
With an expert jiggle, I opened the drawer for her. “Victoria?”
“Grant thinks you’ve got an angle on his wife.” She began stuffing garments into a duffel bag. I hoped they were hers.
“When were you talking to Grant?”
“Just now, in his office. Which, lucky for us, has no windows. We went to lunch afterward. He didn’t mention his wife again, but I could tell he was thinking about her. Kept checking his phone. He’s a big jealous hypocrite. I took the subway here when we were done. You don’t mind? I fed Yertle. Is she in love with you yet? You have to help me split them up.”
“Why should I help you? You dumped me and now you’re burglarizing my home. Say you’re sorry.”
“I’m sorry you’re unsuitable for me.”
“I’m unsuitable? Jewel, how could you fall for a married man?”
“An extremely beautiful married man. Anyway, if his wife leaves him for you, I’ll be respectable again. You like her, I can tell. But maybe you were also fishing for the latest on the Grand Chalet. I bet I got further than you. In every way.”
“She says she’s still in love with Grant. She wants him back. You should stop screwing around with him.”
“He doesn’t love her. It’s not her fault or his, it’s just a fact.”
“She thinks he loves her.”
“She’ll learn.”
“He’s not worthy of you, Jewel,” I said. “Maybe I wasn’t either, but he isn’t close. Look who he works for.”
“Just on a contract. By now he hates them more than anyone, and he feels guilty for taking their money. That makes him the best kind of source.” She leaned back a little as she looked at me, like a painter examining her work. She seemed to feel I was coming along nicely. “You’re not nervous. It’s good to see. I think you’re in love. Want a beer?” She fetched two from my refrigerator. We sat on the futon and drank them more companionably than I could ever have imagined just a few days ago. We hadn’t been alone together since the night she explained that she couldn’t stand me anymore.
“What do you two see in him?” I asked. “You and Victoria.”
“You think he’s a bullshitter, and he is, but it’s all professional. He has no tolerance for bullshit in private. He laughs at himself as much as we laugh at him. He sees what we see. But he also knows that people miss everything important about him.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll have to ask him. He’ll tell you everything.”
“I doubt that.”
“He told me. You wouldn’t believe how much he told me. He talked to me at a sports bar like he was whispering secrets in the middle of the night.”
Jewel ate up that kind of intimacy. I managed to control the urge to ask whether she enjoyed those chats with Grant as much as her chats with me. I had enjoyed them.
“And of course he’s absurdly good-looking,” she continued. “Beautiful smart people always get the benefit of surprise. But didn’t you think he was hilarious? He didn’t back down from either of us.”
Unusually for an activist, Jewel
took pride in her open-mindedness and sense of humor. I admired that in her. She was right. I was coming along. I liked her again.
“He’s probably home with his wife now,” I said. “What do you think they’re saying to each other?”
“Who cares? He’s got to pack to make his flight to Arizona anyway.” She drained the bottle and carried it to the kitchen. She always put the recycling next to the sink. She came back with a fresh beer. “Damage control. The situation’s getting worse. Some of the Arizona papers have been running stories about the bloody protest at the Grand Chalet. I just spoke to a janitor at the Grand Canyon infirmary. He said that when Freddie Bridgewater first came in, he was holding his face together with one hand. The other arm was totally smashed. The guy had to follow him all the way to the examining room, mopping up his blood. Apparently some thugs dragged him out to a construction site and broke his arm as a warning. That’s why he went into hiding. Once I find him and get the details, that’ll be it for Gus Greenbaum and the Grand Chalet. This is the kind of story that energizes people. I just have to track down Freddie Bridgewater.”
“What if another reporter finds him first?”
“Come on, Jacob! No one beats me to a source.” She laughed at her immodesty, knowing I always forgave it. “Remember Glenda Greenbaum at the press event? Do you know who she is? Not just Greenbaum’s wife. Not just the Grand Chalet’s general manager. She’s also the mayor of Tusayan! It’s all rotten, the whole town, and they’re the ones in charge of protecting the Grand Canyon.”
“Just be careful, Jewel. Victoria told me about Gus Greenbaum. You and the activists are the ones in danger. The Grand Canyon can take of itself. It’s made of stone.”
“It’s also made of wildflowers and juniper trees and horsetail rushes and bighorn sheep and snakes and hummingbirds. All of which need water to survive. Have you been to the Canyon?”
“Of course.”
“On a press trip, right? They put you up at the El Tovar and bused you out to the East Entrance the next day, so you could write up the crap they sell at Cameron Trading Post. Okay, I’ve done those trips too. But to understand the Canyon, you’ve got to hike down into it, if not to the river at least to the Redwall, where the cliffs are as tall as skyscrapers. It’s the most beautiful place in the world. And without water, nothing can survive in it, including people. If the springs dry up and the river stops flowing, then no one will be able to hike it anymore, not for more than a few hours. The most beautiful place in the world will be dead to us all. Everything else I’ve ever done, Jacob, every article, every interview, it was all just practice for this. Will you take a look at my draft when I’m done? I’ll even show you my notes—except the secret stuff. You should see the quotes I got! Maybe you can help me cram some more of them in.”
“I should burglarize your place for your notes. Steal the story for myself. You have no backups. You’d be helpless.”
She laughed. She knew I could do it. One evening just after she returned from a trip, I watched her extract some handwritten notebook pages from a pocket deep inside her backpack, where normal people might hide their wallet and passport. I was shocked to discover that she hadn’t typed them up and saved them to the cloud, or even on her laptop or phone, like everyone else. For a radical, she was shockingly old-fashioned.
“Good thing I can trust you,” she said. “Computer docs mean nothing to me. I need things I can feel.”
A few weeks ago, this could have been the time for her to run her finger up to my crotch, to make her point by making me squirm. Instead she raised her hand and spiraled her fingers into a small but powerful fist, an emblem of her power. I should have known that I could never last long with someone who had such confidence. Self-doubt is the one emotion I can’t live without.
“What if you can’t find Freddie Bridgewater?” I asked.
“I still have Grant as a source.”
“He won’t betray his employer.”
“I think he will. He’s had a couple of days to fall in love. That’s about how long it took you, right?”
“To fall in love with you?” Now at last her self-assurance was irritating. Irritation was encouraging—it meant I was no longer in love with her.
“No,” she said. “With her. With Victoria. See? I know you.”
After she left, I checked the Amazon page on my Caravan Guide to Bolivia and Ecuador. There was a new review from a Vicki Fly. It read: “A masterwork of the travel genre, heir to the classics of Jan Morris, Paul Theroux, and Herodotus. Every human who ever left home or wanted to should read it immediately.”
Chapter 4
In the two weeks following our first talk at Barnes & Noble, Victoria and I met up three more times, once in the B&N café and twice for dinner. Some months before, I’d had the foresight to sign on as the New York stringer for 1,000 Places to Dine Before You Die, and even though all the restaurant blurbs had long been written, the publisher was still adjusting the Honorable Mention list (subtitled “Still Not Ready to Die?”). My involvement in the project was enough to ensure that I would eat out for free until the book’s publication, which I and all the other stringers fervently hoped would be delayed as long as possible. Since Grant was spending most of his time in Arizona dealing with the Grand Chalet’s ongoing PR issues, Victoria didn’t have to invent excuses to get away.
Victoria never dished out Freddie Bridgewater’s contact information but always insisted that she was just on the verge of running it down. I wasn’t sure if she was fibbing or deluding herself, and I didn’t care. Instead she told me how the Grand Chalet’s backers had infiltrated and eventually taken over Tusayan. The operation was long in gestation, clever, and, in hindsight, easy to execute. The backers’ initial proposal for a megaresort had been rejected out of hand by the Tusayan town council, but in the years that followed, Greenbaum and his business partners had proceeded to buy up all the local businesses they could—Gorge-us George’s Diner, the Yippie-Ei-O! Steakhouse, a convenience store that everybody called Eight-Dollar Milk—fired the old employees, and replaced them with out-of-state imports, whom they housed in trailers built back from the main road. Once enough of the new workers established town residency to constitute a major voting bloc (Tusayan only had a few hundred official residents), Greenbaum began running friends and minions for local office. They won. He appointed his wife, whose background was as mysterious as his, the hotel’s general manager, then nominated her for mayor. She won too. Now Greenbaum could have all the building permits he wanted, and the new resort project was quickly approved. It was the same old American story: The Grand Chalet didn’t have to break the rules. It was enforcing them.
The Grand Canyon division of the National Park Service, which had always opposed the megaresort, decided to negotiate rather than fight. It managed to win an agreement to have the water levels in the area monitored regularly. The environmental activists just complained. What else could they do? No one was offering to negotiate with them.
I delighted in the verve and detail with which Victoria told the story, but I always wished she would hurry up. When the business portion of our meeting was done, we would move on to other topics, increasingly intimate and emotional the more we drank. And we drank a lot. We always ended up at a bar.
Four encounters, a dozen hours of urgent conversation: more than enough. Why are we so open with people we’re attracted to? On my second date, I found myself describing the Christmas morning in my fourteenth year when my mother, after a year’s long absence, rang our doorbell, coaxed me out in my socks onto our snow-dusted front step, and asked me to come away with her to a new city. “As if you were her long-lost lover,” Victoria said, encapsulating my mother’s wistful and hopeless desire to win me back. Victoria seemed instinctively to understand how much I loved my morose, lonely, and totally dependent father, how much I hated myself for wanting to leave him, and how close I came to doing it. Even today I can feel the chill in my stockinged feet and see the prints I might have left
across the frozen lawn. My mother eventually forgave me for rejecting her; I felt that Victoria understood, better than anyone else who’d heard the story, perhaps better than me, how much it had cost my mother to do so.
After our third meeting, Victoria began to occupy at least half my mind at every moment, even when I was swiping my MetroCard at a turnstile or trying to concoct a new restaurant-review synonym for slather. If I couldn’t be with her, I was happiest when I was alone and idle and could devote myself completely to pondering her. My favorite pastime was to replay highlights from our conversations. When I tired of those, I conducted imaginary conversations with her on topics we’d yet to broach. These were as likely to be philosophical, literary, or political as dirty. I liked the idea that I was preparing myself for whatever she might say or do, so that our conversations could, as I knew she liked them to, quickly leap over the mundane into the surprising and delightful. Of course, to me the mundane was delightful too.
For variety, I conducted imaginary conversations with third parties about her. (It seemed premature to try a real conversation with a real friend, especially while Victoria was married to someone else.) One of my favorites was set in the office of a real-life lawyer buddy named Shep, who, I hoped, would know the quickest way to dissolve her marriage. But, of course, Shep would first need to hear all about her.
“No divorce is easy,” Shep would finally conclude (his voice came from Yertle, whose thoughtful grimace had a lawyerly gravitas). “Do they have kids?”
“No.”
“Ah! Well played. Have they been married ten years?”
“Only five.”
“Then she won’t win alimony.” (I had googled basic New York State divorce law.)
“She has a teaching job. She won’t need alimony.”
“Good. Because you, Mr. Smalls, sure as hell lack the cash to take care of her! She must have fallen damn hard for you.”
“It’s hard to say. I think so.”
“What do you mean, think so?”
I explained that, on our last date, she had, albeit gracefully and sympathetically, repelled my attempt at a kiss. She told me she was afraid of falling in love.