Alexandra Waring

by Laura Van Wormer

  They drove out the Plaza driveway, turned down Fifth Avenue, and then turned right on 57th Street. They went all the way west, passing the CBS News facilities, and turned right on Eleventh Avenue, heading north. They passed car dealerships, gas stations and parking lots; they passed the ABC radio studios; and as enormous apartment complexes loomed up around them, they stopped, at 67th Street, to make a left turn. The traffic parted and as they turned in, the guard in the guardhouse waved them through.

  They drove in on an elevated driveway that suddenly veered sharply to the right, in behind a massive apartment building, and then veered sharply left again, to head straight out to the Darenbrook Communications complex—which looked, from here, like a group of some sort of pale gray warehouses, with not a window in sight. There were several ramps exiting the elevated driveway, but they drove straight out, the limousine swinging around to stop right behind the tremendous concrete wall of the center building. Jackson and Alexandra got out and he led her around the corner of the building, her heels and his boots sounding gritty over the salted concrete.

  The buildings were not warehouses at all. What they had just walked around was the center building of three, and the complex was shaped like a U, facing away from the access road. And on this side of the buildings, inside the U, there was nothing but glass. Three stories of sparkling glass surrounding a beautiful square.

  They were standing in front of a small wrought-iron gate, between two of the buildings, looking in. There were trees and shrubs and, outlined under the snow, flower beds. The walkways were swept clean of snow and so were the wood benches. There were iron lampposts along the walkways too, looking as though they were still supposed to use gas.

  At the far end of the square was a thick line of fir trees. They could hear cars passing behind it on the West Side Highway, but they could not see them. All they could see over the tops of the trees was the blue-gray beauty of the Hudson River and the cold gray clouds of the winter sky.

  Jackson made a little whistling sound through his teeth. “It’s very pretty, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Alexandra said.

  And then Jackson squatted down to brush a little snow off the brass plate on the gate with his hand.

  WEST END

  it said.

  3

  Gordon Strenn

  He smiled.

  Sitting next to the plate-glass wall of his third-floor office in Darenbrook III, Gordon was watching Jackson and Alexandra down in the square. Jackson was in front of her, walking backward down the path, gesturing wildly as he talked. Alexandra was laughing, shaking her head, and then Jackson was laughing too, saying something, arms outstretched to the sky. A big gust of wind blew in off the Hudson at that moment and Alexandra’s cape billowed up behind her as she shielded her face from the snow with her one arm. Jackson jogged over to her and with both hands pulled her hood up over her head. Hands on her hood still, he stood in front of her a moment longer, and then he moved to the side, touching her back, guiding her across the square into Darenbrook II.

  “Ground control calling Gordon,” his assistant, Betty, said from the door, “come in, please.”

  Gordon turned around, swiveling his chair.

  “I thought you’d like to know that Princess All-Light-and-Love has arrived,” Betty said, taking a step in. (Betty said Alexandra always sounded too nice on the phone to be for real.) “Emma in reception says she’s already got the place in an uproar. Everybody’s trying to get a look at her.”

  “I just saw her crossing the square,” Gordon said. “With Jackson.”

  “Well if I were you,” Betty said, coming in a little further, ‘I’d finish those figures for Langley before we lose the bocce set.”

  Jackson had given Gordon a bocce set with the idea that he and Betty, as the first and only inhabitants of the third floor of the television building, Darenbrook III, could get to know other Darenbrook employees at West End by inviting them over to play. And it was fun, setting up the pins at one end of the eerily vacant floor and then rolling balls down the seventy-five yards of carpeted hallway in an attempt to hit them. But Betty really loved playing because she found she did not have to aim at all but could simply hurl it as hard as she could and the ball would ricochet off the office walls all the way down and smash the pins on the diagonal.

  At any rate, Langley Peterson, the president of DBS—who was not known for playing games—had recently sent his white-haired secretary, Adele, over with part of the miniseries budget for Gordon to revise. When Adele did not come back, Langley had come over from Darenbrook I to find her and find her he did—playing bocce in the hall with Betty and Gordon and a guy visiting from the newspaper division over in Darenbrook II.

  “Right, Langley’s numbers,” Gordon said, listlessly pushing some of the papers around on his desk.

  “Pardon me for saying so, boss,” Betty said, putting one hand on her hip, “but we either better get cracking around here or let Culver City handle this stuff. Winslow’s agent’s screaming at me every forty-five minutes and I can’t get the contracts out until Langley gets the revised numbers.”

  “I know,” Gordon said.

  And he did. He was way behind on everything. The three weeks he had spent down in Washington after Alexandra was shot certainly had not helped things. And still, if his mind wasn’t on Alexandra’s injuries, it was on her coming to DBS, or if it wasn’t about their living arrangements in New York, it was on how long it would be before they were married, and if his mind wasn’t on any of these things, then he was probably thinking about how not to think about Alexandra so he could get his work done.

  “I’m not a piece of furniture, you know,” Betty said. “If you’d tell me what Langley wants, exactly, maybe I can help you out.”

  She was right. She probably could.

  Four years ago, when Gordon was finalizing the budget for This Side of Paradise for public television, Betty Tellerman had arrived in his office as a temporary statistical typist. Like many aspiring actresses in Manhattan, Betty had been making ends meet as a temp because it kept her schedule flexible for auditions. But then Betty the temp kept catching errors in the figures being called in from L.A., and she and Gordon had gotten to talking—about how she had kept books for her father’s shop in Valley Stream, Long Island, and about how Gordon as a boy from Locust Valley, Long Island, had watched his father do the books for his mother’s company. (“Cannondale Clothing?” Betty had shrieked. “Your mother’s a Cannondale? Even the name sounds like money.”)

  Gordon had ended up offering Betty an office job with him, which she declined. He liked her a lot and was sorry she had. As the director who later gave Betty an audition at Gordon’s request said, “She’s got as much chance as an actress as I do as a racehorse.”

  About five months ago Betty had called Gordon up to ask him if he had any work for her to do. It seemed she was in very bad straits with some institutions named American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Diners Club and Bloomingdale’s, and while she wished to continue pursuing an acting career, she thought she had better work a steady job for a while to stay out of debtor’s prison. (“Truth is,” she had sighed over the phone, “I’m addicted to a special kind of actor—the kind that’s only confused about his sexuality until he makes some money.”) Gordon told her about producing Love Across the Atlantic as a miniseries for DBS, about the home base for the project being in New York, about his need for an executive assistant for the duration of it and how, if she took the job, she had to stay in it for one year—no ifs, ands or acting parts.

  “Agreed,” she had said. “Only…”

  “Only what?”

  “I better tell you that I changed my name since the last time I saw you.”

  “So? What did you change it to?”

  “Uh,” Betty said, “Cannondale.”

  And so Gordon Cannondale Strenn’s executive assistant was named Elizabeth Cannondale, but the two were not related except by temp agency. Ms. Tellerman’s dark b
rown hair was gone too; Ms. Cannon dale had light-brown hair—streaked with blond—was seriously into aerobics and was very attractive in an L.A. kind of way. But what was important was how very bright, fast and personable Betty was simply amazing at dealing with difficult people—and what a godsend it was for Gordon to have someone who had a head for numbers and was a closet perfectionist.

  “Look at that,” Betty murmured, looking past Gordon to the square.

  There were four—five—now six people scurrying across the square toward Darenbrook II, clutching themselves in the cold.

  “They’re stalking her, for crying out loud,” Betty said. She shook her head. “What is it about her, anyway?”

  “Fame,” Gordon said, turning back to his desk.

  “I mean,” Betty said, putting her hand on her hip, “what is it about her that gets guys like you and Jackson so gaga?”

  “Jackson?” Gordon said.

  “You know what I mean,” Betty said, looking at him. “Why guys like you always go for those WASP-y types.”

  “Alexandra is not a type,” Gordon said.

  “Yeah, right,” Betty said, “but we know all about your taste in women, don’t we? I’m sorry,” she added a second later, holding her hand up. “Really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “You could quit while you’re ahead,” Gordon suggested.

  “It’s just that I saw your ex-wife on Johnny Carson last night,” Betty explained.

  Gordon only looked at her.

  “She looked terrible,” Betty offered.

  Gordon still only looked at her.

  Betty sighed. “Yeah, all right.” She looked outside again. Two more people were hurrying across the square. “I’ll give her this,” she said, “this is the first sign of life around here we’ve seen since we moved in.”

  It was true. In the six months they had been here, they had never seen anyone in the square except Jackson and the children from the day-care center.

  “Alexandra has that effect on people,” Gordon said.

  Gordon’s best friend and roommate at prep school in Pennsylvania had been David Waring, the son of the big-shot congressman from Kansas. That first year, as freshmen, when Gordon was fourteen, he accepted an invitation to spend Thanksgiving at the Waring farm, and, as their plane made its descent into Kansas City International Airport, he was given his first protocol lesson.

  “This side, east of the Missouri River, is their Kansas City,” David told him, pointing out the window. “The other side, west of the Missouri, is our Kansas City. Don’t confuse the two or Mom and Dad will be lecturing you all weekend.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to—”

  “They’ve got the people and the problems,” David said, “and we’ve got the solutions. That’s all you have to remember, okay?”

  Mrs. Waring and nine-year-old Alexandra had been waiting at the airport gate for them. Alexandra was only about four foot ten at that time, and almost all of it eyes. When Gordon looked down to say hello to her, she thrust a camera in his face and blinded him with the flash. “Hi, Davy,” he then heard her say. One eye closed, Gordon could vaguely make out Alexandra hugging her brother.

  “That’s not a very polite way to greet poor Gordon,” Mrs. Waring said, laughing, shaking his hand. “Hello, Gordon, welcome.”

  “So what is he?” Alexandra asked her brother, letting her camera hang from the strap around her neck and pulling a pad and pencil out of her coat pocket.

  “Five-six, five-seven?”

  “Lexy keeps files on people,” David explained.

  “But don’t feel bad, Gordon,” Mrs. Waring said, taking his arm and leading him away, “she even keeps one on her mother.”

  “Five-seven and growing,” David told his sister.

  “Identifiable scars, birthmarks?” Alexandra asked Gordon, scooting up to walk alongside him.

  It was a three-hour drive to the Waring farm, the cityscape quickly falling behind and the horizon opening up to miles and miles and miles of what seemed to Gordon to be nothing but cold gray nothingness. The wind, however, was something, hitting the side of the Ford station wagon and moving it a foot sideways this way, and then—boofff—a foot sideways the other way, a phenomenon that no one but Gordon seemed to be aware of.

  They turned off the highway and drove for several miles through gently rolling fields, with an occasional house popping up on the roadside. Then they slowed to turn into a large wooden gate, painted pale gray, which had a big old mailbox next to it that said, simply, WARING FARM. David, who had been growing more excited by the minute, started pointing in one direction and then another, saying, “We’ve got fifteen hundred acres of wheat, a thousand of corn…” and reeling off livestock inventories and grazing-feed patterns. Then, hanging over the front seat, he started cross-examining his mother about some horse.

  Alexandra, who had been very quiet thus far, sitting up front, now turned around and raised one eye up over the seat to look at Gordon. “You grow potatoes in Long Island,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Um, yeah,” Gordon said. “Some people do.”

  Alexandra looked over at her mother and, satisfied she wasn’t paying any attention to her, looked back at Gordon and narrowed her eyes. “We don’t have potatoes here because we don’t like them.”

  “I heard that, Lexy,” Mrs. Waring said, interrupting David. She looked at Gordon in the rear-view mirror and smiled. “Of course we like potatoes.”

  Alexandra’s expression was one of high skepticism. She shrugged a “Who cares?” and turned back around in her seat.

  “Brat,” David said, giving his sister a little punch in the shoulder. When he did not get a response, he did it again. “Brat.”

  Alexandra’s head whipped around. “Why don’t you just go back East and grow potatoes—with him?” she added, jerking her head in Gordon’s direction.

  As the main house came into view, Mrs. Waring told Gordon its history. It had begun as a one-room cabin with a porch and cellar in 1805. In 1811, David’s great-great-great-great-grandfather added three rooms and then, in 1839, David’s great-great-great-grandfather had added another four, making it—if nothing else—surely the longest house in Kansas at the time. After the Civil War, in 1874, David’s great-great-grandfather started work on the second floor, which actually didn’t get finished until 1902, when David’s great-grandfather had thought to change the front of the house from facing east to south, and added yet a couple more rooms and a tremendous veranda to this cabin-turned-farmhouse-turned-mansion of stone, pale gray clapboard and gray-weathered shingle. And so, Mrs. Waring finished, the original one-room cabin was part of the kitchen today, and the original front porch was that little porch Gordon could see jutting out from the side of the house toward the driveway.

  Before going inside this Kansas landmark (or so said the plaque), Mrs. Waring pulled Gordon aside on the historic porch to apologize for Alexandra’s behavior in the car, explaining that she was still upset about David going away to school. Though Gordon was an only child, after spending only a little time with the Warings, even he began to sense that Alexandra might have more to be upset about than just David being away.

  Tall, dark, powerful Congressman Waring hadn’t been home since September. Tall, dark Paul Waring, Jr.—with his wife Ann—was home visiting from Harvard Law School for the first time since June. Tall, dark and lovely Elizabeth—with her “very serious beau,” Alan, was visiting home from Vassar. Tall, dark and wild Linc was home visiting—with his girlfriend, ZuZu, who was also the lead singer in his rock band—from the University of Colorado. And according to the happily plastered old geezer—who claimed to be Congressman Waring’s father (and must have been since everybody was calling him Granddad)—Mrs. Waring herself spent at least every other week in Washington with her husband, leaving Alexandra on the farm in the care of Grandmother Waring, a very tall, correct old lady who Gordon couldn’t believe was married to the crocked old geezer—but was.

 
What a circus the household had been. Gordon had never had a holiday like it. There were all these people, everywhere. And they were all very friendly and nice to him, except Alexandra, who really was the strangest kid. When they sat down to the big Thanksgiving dinner with a couple of farm workers and neighbors joining them at a series of tables that extended the dining-room table all the way out through the living room—Alexandra had sat across from him, taking copious notes on his every move with unswerving concentration.

  David, sitting next to her, looked over her shoulder and read, “Likes turnips.”

  “Uh-oh!” Elizabeth said, sitting next to Gordon.

  “I’ve heard of some weird preferences, man…” Linc said.

  “What’s that? Turnips?” Congressman Waring said from the end of the table. “Wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see that information turn up when you apply for a passport, Gordon.”

  “Put the pad away, Alexandra,” Mrs. Waring said.

  Alexandra, eyes down, slipped the pad and pencil under her chair and dropped them to the floor.

  “You shouldn’t let her bring it to the table in the first place, Liz,” Grandmother Waring said. “I don’t allow it.”

  Mrs. Waring exchanged looks with Congressman Waring.

  “I think our Lexy’s falling in love,” Paul, Jr., said, earning the laughter of most everyone at the table—and a look from Alexandra that was surely meant to wither his heart.

  Granddad Waring, quiet until now, banged his fist on the table, making everybody jump. “Leave her alone,” he said, “all of you.”

  “Tom,’’ Grandmother Waring said sharply.

  “It’s okay, Granddad,” Alexandra said quickly, leaning forward to look up the table at him. “I don’t mind. Honest.” She smiled to prove it.

  “That’s my girl,” Granddad Waring said, giving her a wink. “Show ‘em what you’re made of.”

  And then dinner and the lively chitchat resumed.

  Gordon stepped out of the elevator onto Sub Level 2, the television floor, careful not to trip over the rolls of carpeting.