His expression, bland and confident, didn’t change.
“Wendy needs the experience, Nicky. She can’t play social secretary forever.”
Why did I think that he was quoting Wendy herself here?
“Fine. Then send her out there with me, and I’ll make sure she gets her feet wet. Or wait for something less challenging than Samp-sonville, and give her that.”
“She wants this one,” he said, almost as if he’d forgotten I was there. “This is the one she wants.”
A nasty idea that had been knocking around in my unwilling subconscious suddenly, with huge reluctance, took form.
“You’re sleeping with her.”
He ruffled through the invitations on his desk. I saw one decorated with dancing penguins in tuxedos. Original.
“God, Ron. Wendy? It’s bad enough that you’re running around on Dana. Did it have to be Wendy?”
He swallowed, and for the first time in our acquaintance I noticed his Adam’s apple.
“There’s an attraction there, Nicky. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”
“It’s called turning forty-five, Ron.”
“Do you think that for one second you could talk to me like a human being?”
I stood up.
“You weren’t straight with me, Ron. She’s sitting in there with a fancier desk than I have and a nosy little finger in all my campaigns, and now we both know why. And it stinks. You’re screwing over the two women who’ve been with you longest—your wife and me—all for some twenty-five-year-old nookie at lunchtime. You’re such a little shit.”
I was about to leave when he began to cry.
He didn’t cry like a child, which would have been preferable. He cried silently, trying to stop the contortions of his face, putting his palms up to his eyes—the way men cry who never cry, which breaks your heart.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, and pulled out a dozen tissues from the guest box on the coffee table. I shoved them into his hand but he ignored them. I went over and put my arm around his shoulder. It felt warm and damp, and less muscular than I’d thought it would be, and I had a chilling intimation of Ron’s later years, as he lost his good looks and had to rely more and more on his facile charm.
“Okay,” I said. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out. Okay.”
“I am so fricking messed up, Nicky. I’ve wrecked my life. I’ve wrecked it. I’m in love with this girl, or obsessed with her or something. I can’t stop it even for my business. Even for my wife. My wife who’s been so good to me, do you think I don’t know that?”
Maybe it was hard to have a spouse who was good to you. Who you’d come to rely on as stronger than you were. It must make you yearn to look wise and sophisticated to someone fresh and lovely who thought you had things to teach her.
Wendy would eat him alive. In that moment I felt very, very sorry for Ron. I even stroked his hair, a gesture I later squirmed to remember.
“It will work itself out,” I said. “Everything does.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Maybe not, but in any case I’ll be around. As long as—”
“As long as I don’t let this thing with Wendy screw you up, too. I get that. I’m sorry. She pushed and pushed on this California assignment. She wants to play in the big leagues.”
The big leagues. Definitely Wendy’s words again. I wanted to ask Ron where she got these expressions, but it wouldn’t be kind to him in his current distraught state.
“I’ll tell you what, Ron. Do send her out there, but with me. She can’t get into too much trouble while I’m keeping an eye on her, and it’ll give you a break to sort out your … to sort things out.”
He looked up, finally saw that he was holding tissues, and blew his nose.
“That would be one answer. You’d really be willing to do that? I know you two aren’t the best of friends.”
“But I’m your friend. It’s too late now to change my mind about that. So pack her off to California with me, and take it from there. What the hell.”
At one-thirty that afternoon, I left the Advocacy, Inc. office to meet Tony, who was coming into Dulles on a four o’clock plane. From K Street I caught the Washington Flyer, a big coach-bus that usually whisks you out there in forty minutes or so. But the snow that had seemed so beautifying and benign when I’d been striding down Connecticut had turned into a major storm. Flights from the north were reported by the airline as late, then canceled. No takeoff time was yet listed for Tony’s at my last check before boarding the Flyer.
We sat on that bus for three hours, ten of us. There was a French Canadian couple speaking a specific regional dialect with now and then a word I recognized, pronounced in a way I didn’t expect. There were two American University students going home for Christmas, each weighted down with a duffel bag full of presents, talking about final exams and pre-Christmas breakups on their dorm hall. There was a guy in dreadlocks who was reading Kant, and there were two businessmen who tried to look blasé but kept checking their watches and calling their wives. Last to board was an old lady with teased white hair, carting a John Grisham thriller, a bucket of fried chicken, and a cat in a carrier. The cat yowled miserably and finally, looking around a little nervously, she took it out of the carrier and held it in her lap, feeding it bits of white meat. It was a Persian, with fur as white as its owner’s hair, and it looked out indifferently at the white world we were traveling through and suffered itself to be petted.
Running from the office, I hadn’t brought as much as a magazine, though I did have the raspberry caramels to chew on. I had never met Tony at the airport before. He’d never let me, years ago. He’d used to say that the time between airport and home was his decompression time. Now when I offered, he said, “That would be great. It’s a drag to get off the plane with no one waiting for you.”
Louise had offered to go with me, but she had enough to handle right now, making up for lost time both at her business and with Johnny. Louise and Johnny were dating. Actually dating. Louise felt they had to go back to the beginning and do it right, or, as she put it, “our relationship will have a psychic blight on it.”
My mother, who had called from Jerusalem the night before “just to check in,” had predicted that they’d be married by summer. She’d set all the wheels in motion, and now she was looking forward to bossing Louise into a June bridal.
“I’m betting on fall, so rearrange your thoughts about the location and color scheme,” I said. “Never underestimate Louise and her stubbornness. And Ma, I should fill you in on something.”
I told her about Tony. It didn’t take much time, but it seemed as if I recited the story of Tony’s and my happy reconciliation for hours, because my mother said nothing at all while I was talking. I tapped the receiver with my fingernail.
“Hello? A reaction would be good here.”
“As long as he makes you happy,” she remarked in pinched tones.
“How should I know if he’ll make me happy, Ma? We just got back together. There’s every chance that he’ll make me unhappy. Every once in a while. And very, very happy on occasion. We’ll see how we do the rest of the time. He’s a difficult guy, you know.”
“You’re not exactly easy yourself,” she pointed out.
“Now you’re siding with him?”
“I’ll be back for New Year’s Eve. We’ll have a big party at the house.”
“Could you try and like him, Ma? I’ll try to like Ira.”
“What do you mean? No one couldn’t like Ira.”
“You’re right. Ira is a saint, a living, breathing saint. You be even more of a saint and give Tony a chance, or he and I will be celebrating the new year with one of those Holiday Inn champagne weekend packages. I hear they’re pretty nice, and you don’t have to drive on New Year’s Eve.”
“Don’t get huffy with me. Louise says he’s improved a lot, so we’ll see. Since there’s no talking you out of this.” Of course she’d alrea
dy hashed it over with Louise. Why had I wasted my breath giving her the news?
“If that’s the best you can do, Ma …”
“Have I ever been rude to a guest in my house? I said bring him, and I meant it.”
So, God help me, I had a place to go for New Year’s Eve, and even a date.
I’d looked in on Wendy on my way out of the office. She was wrapping Christmas presents for all the secretaries. I hadn’t even bought one for my own secretary yet. Her energy amazed me. She could wreck Ron’s life and scheme her way to the top, and still find time to pick up tiny muslin sachets to tie into the ribbons of her gifts.
Career robot, I thought. But when I looked again, she seemed to be another person entirely. Just twenty-five, just young and making every mistake her character and situation could predictably work toward. If she stayed with Ron, she’d be taking on a man far more confused and weak-willed than she realized now. If she left him, the break would be ugly, painful, and public, since I would bet that every employee in the place knew what was going on, and had probably known sooner than I had.
At Wendy’s age I had yet to meet Tony. Or Jeremy. My father was still alive. I thought I knew all there was to know about love and work and friendship, and I’d barely started on my way.
“I hear we’re going to be traveling together,” I said with false joviality.
She stared at me.
“California,” I said. “I wasn’t going to let Ron throw you to the lions out there. I’m coming, too.”
There was disappointment in her smile. I wanted to throttle her. Then I saw a package on her desk, a package marked “For Nicky” in bubbly schoolgirl handwriting. Wendy had gotten me a present. The stupid kid. The poor, stupid kid. I’d have to buy some suitable basket of overpriced toiletries at the duty-free and wrap it tonight, though I had no wrapping materials at home except tinfoil and the Sunday comics. Also some duct tape and a leftover shirt box from Macy’s. It would have to do.
“We’ll have a good time in California,” I said. “It’ll be an adventure.”
She nodded.
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
I hadn’t asked her about her plans before this. Why hadn’t I? Wasn’t that just the normal kindness you’d show to anyone you worked with? For all I knew Wendy was an orphan, with nowhere to go for the holidays.
“I’m staying with my mother, in Aspen.”
“Skiing?”
“I don’t know how. My mom can’t believe it. She’s always bugging me to take lessons, because skiing’s what she does all day and she doesn’t like to leave me alone. My dad’s in Vermont, and he said I could come up there, too, but he and his wife have a new baby, so I thought Aspen would be better all around.”
“My mother just announced she’s having a big New Year’s bash, if you’re back by then.”
“Maybe,” she said, and smiled at me, a quavery smile completely unlike the practiced teeth flashing that was her usual office smile.
“Great food,” I said, reminding myself to make sure to force Ma into ordering party platters and sheet cake from the grocery store. “Dancing. Think about it.”
Then I left before I could ruin even this feeble beginning. It was painful, somehow, to think of Wendy by herself in some condo in Aspen, thumbing through Vogue and pining after Ron, maybe calling one of her girlfriends, only to get the answering machine. I couldn’t feel angry at her for this mess with Ron, when I’d made many an equally sorry romantic mistake in my time. Only luck and chance had thrown me back together with Tony. Otherwise, I might be just like Wendy, taking what I could get from a man who didn’t have much to give.
Maybe Louise was right. Maybe it wasn’t for us to judge what other people did in the pursuit of love.
In that underheated bus, staring into the snowstorm, my feet curled up under me, I was paralyzed to think that it wasn’t a sunset Tony and I were walking off into, it was the mess of complications that any sea change brings. If I could have rung the bell for the bus to stop and dashed out onto the highway, I think I’d have thumbed a ride to Florida or some other silly warm place and not looked back. I was that frightened that we were asking for disaster. Disaster had been our modus operandi up to that point, you could say.
Louise had advised me almost two months earlier to make room for love in my life, and here I was, literally doing that. It might even work out. My brothers would welcome Tony instantly as one of them, as they had before. My mother would accept him when she got it through her head that he wasn’t going away. I had a misty vision, suddenly, of us all pooling our money to buy a cottage somewhere on the Eastern Shore, for weekends and vacations and bird-watching, should any of us ever learn to identify a heron or an osprey. We’d get a pair of communal binoculars and fight over who got to use them, though only Michael would ever spot anything other than a possum. Ira’s grandchildren could come down on summer vacations and teach Joey and Maggie’s current and future babies—and Johnny and Louise’s?—how to swim.
I had an imagination and it could take me that far, even if I didn’t have the optimist’s blissful certainty that everything would be fine. Louise will always be the one of us who peers ahead with trust and confidence. The gift of hope was not a gift that the godmothers laid in my cradle, but if I ever learn it, at some creaking and advanced old age, it will be because of my cousin. My cousin, my companion, my ally until the end. My undeserved blessing.
There was a foot of snow on the roof of the airport, big drifts of it that looked as if they’d bring down the whole tentlike structure. It seemed to take hours to crawl from the airport entrance road up to the Flyer drop-off spot. I was out of the bus while the others were still assembling their bags, stopping to tip the driver five dollars for getting us there alive.
Tony’s flight was due in ten minutes, the arrivals board said. I felt that the whole airport should know this, that all the hurrying, clamoring, self-obsessed people should stop their noise. What did they know? Could anyone on any plane, traveling toward this place on a thousand converging flight paths, could any traveler be more important? I wanted to shove aside every baby carriage, every luggage trolley, every twittering tour group in my way. I stood on the people mover, cursing every passenger who darted in before the door could close and we could lumber to the correct terminal. Airports weren’t fast places, I remember thinking. Not really. They just looked fast.
And then I was at the gate, in an anxious, pressing crowd. We waited a long time, people milling about, inaudible static on the PA system, clots of angry customers for the next flight out of that gate mobbing the gate agent. Then the airline rep announced that Tony’s flight had touched down and was on its way to the gate, as if this flight were no more unusual than a pleasure trip on a sunny June day. The crowd pressed forward once again. The passengers came off the airplane, so many of them, all strolling from the plane as if they had infinite leisure, the lazy worthless bums. The selfish pigs. One after another they plodded up the carpet and were claimed and made much of. And still no Tony.
Then there he was, at the top of the gangway, lugging the largest duffel bag ever allowed in carry-on. It must have held every possession he owned. I don’t know how he’d been able to lift it, with his bad knee. When he saw me, over the heads of the jostling, clumsy crowd, he dropped it there and came to me and held me tightly.
“I thought you’d never get here,” I said.
“As if you’d be that lucky,” he said, and kissed me over and over again.
No one noticed. He recovered the bag and we each took a handle, although Tony protested that he could carry it himself. We joined the crowd heading down the long corridors, so numerous and slow-moving it looked like a procession. A procession of the unwittingly fortunate, I knew in my rejoicing heart. Of travelers who—this time at least—had arrived in safety, and were heading home.
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The Side of the Angels Page 32