Romancing the Holidays Bundle 2009

by Susan Wiggs et al

  “May I have this dance?” Axel said to Elaine, offering his hand. The nails gleamed from a Japanese manicure. His laser-whitened teeth flashed as he smiled.

  Winning his business was the sole purpose of the night, she reminded herself. She said, “Of course,” then turned to Tony. “Jenny and Melanie will take good care of you.”

  “That’s okay. I need to get going anyway.”

  She felt a stab of panic. How could he leave her when she’d only just found him again? “But—”

  “I always go to midnight mass with my family. ’Night, Elaine. Thanks for having me.” He gave her a brief peck on the cheek and then turned away. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

  Before she could say another word, he was gone and she was dancing with the holy grail, unthinkingly maneuvering him in front of the photographer from W, insincerely offering a blissful smile for the camera. Old habits died hard. It was pointless to think she could spend a successful Christmas Eve with Tony Fiore. She’d tried that in the past and it had never turned out well for her.

  She heard herself chatting blithely with Axel, heard him laugh with sensual appreciation as he led her around the dance floor. He was a flawless dancer, she conceded. But he didn’t sweep her away. He didn’t make her feel glad she was alive. He didn’t make her wish she could love Christmas again.

  At the end of the dance, he handed her a white business-size envelope. “This is for you.”

  The envelope contained a printed travel itinerary.

  “I want you to come skiing with me,” he said. “Just give your passport information to my service, and they’ll take care of the reservations and tickets.”

  Skiing. In Gstaad. With European royalty. It was a moment, Elaine had to admit that. So why did she feel so underwhelmed?

  She glanced at the departure date. “This is for tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  She shoved the paper into the envelope. “This is so unexpected—I don’t quite know what to say.”

  He sent her a practiced smile. “Come now. You expected it. I’m sure your parents will be delighted. If we’re going to do business together, we might as well have fun doing it, yes?”

  He was all but offering her his business. It should have been the biggest moment in her career—her life, maybe. But it wasn’t.

  She smiled brightly, falsely, spying her reflection in the slick black glass of the picture window. “I’ll let you know.”

  Without another glance at him, she headed for the foyer.

  Jenny and Melanie hissed questions and protests in an undertone. “What are you doing?” Jen demanded.

  Elaine filled them in on Axel’s invitation.

  “Don’t tick him off,” Melanie warned.

  “Are your passports current?” Elaine asked them both.

  “Mine is,” Melanie said. “But what—”

  “I’ll tell you what.” With a little laugh, Elaine handed over the envelope. “It’s your lucky day. You’re going skiing in Switzerland tomorrow. Staying at the Hotel Grande Suisse. Just contact this agency, and they’ll take care of the paperwork.”

  Leaving them gasping and sputtering—Melanie with a broad grin breaking through her surprise—she headed for the cloakroom. “The Gallignani,” she said, indicating her coat, which hung from a portable rack set up in the guest room. She felt light and free. “The gentleman who left a short while ago—did he mention where he was going?”

  “No.”

  Well, of course he hadn’t. But he lived in Brooklyn. That narrowed it down.

  “He forgot his gloves,” the girl added, holding out a large, lived-in pair.

  Elaine shoved them in her purse. “Then I’d better take them to him.”

  On her way out, she found her parents to say good-night.

  Startled, her mother studied her. “Are you ill?”

  “I’ve never felt better.” Elaine leaned forward for the customary makeup-preserving air kiss, then impulsively hugged her mother close and embraced her father. “Merry Christmas,” she said to them both, and realized it was the first time she’d said those words in years.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OUTSIDE, the world had gone white; the streets and sidewalks were smooth and clean. Sable, the doorman, who was actually a woman, phoned for a taxi and they waited together in the gleaming, mid-century-era lobby.

  “So, the man who just left—Mr. Fiore—didn’t take a taxi?” Elaine asked.

  “No. He had his own car.” Sable studied the thick fall of snow on the pavement outside. “Bad night for driving.”

  “Did you see which way he went?”

  “Toward Roosevelt, I guess.”

  Nervous, Elaine studied Sable. The unflattering double-breasted uniform had not changed in generations, and on a young woman, it looked particularly absurd. At least in winter, the traditional warm coachman’s cloak helped conceal the two-toned fashion crime. “Do you have plans for tonight?” Elaine asked her suddenly.

  Sable glanced behind her to see who Elaine was talking to. “Me?” She put a hand to her chest. “I got to play Santa Claus to my two kids.”

  Until now, Elaine had never realized Sable had kids. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Oh, it is.” Her glance crept almost imperceptibly to the lobby clock. “This year, there’s a bike and a dollhouse to put together. I imagine my husband made a good start on the bike, but he doesn’t know the first thing about dollhouses.” She smiled, and there was a special quality to her smile, a softness made of love and pride and wistfulness. “He’ll have his hands full getting them to bed.”

  “Then you should go home and help him,” Elaine said, surprising herself with the words.

  Sable glanced at the lobby clock. “Ravi doesn’t come in for another hour.”

  Despite her urgency to find Tony, Elaine felt a keen sense of sympathy. She hesitated, the dilemma weighing heavily on her.

  She’d lost Tony for a long time. Now she knew where to find him. Yet here was a woman who was working rather than tucking her babies in on Christmas Eve. How could anything in the world be more important than that? True giving meant sacrifice, didn’t it? “I’ll cover for you.”

  Sable laughed. “I don’t think so, Ms. St. James. I could lose my job if someone found out.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Things like that don’t happen to good people on Christmas. Now, hand over the cloak and hat and whistle.”

  Sable looked torn to the point of breaking. Elaine put a hand on her arm. “Please. This is as much for me as it is for you.” She gestured outside. “Look, your cab’s here.” Seizing the doorman’s accessories, she pushed and bullied Sable out through the cold night and into the waiting taxi. Then she prepaid the driver and stood on the sidewalk, watching the yellow car pull away. Sable turned and waved through the rear window until the snowy night swallowed her up. The woman’s smile was the last thing Elaine saw, like the grin of the Cheshire cat before he disappeared.

  As she returned to the lobby, Elaine felt the satisfying weight of her mission. Maybe Christmas was a disaster for her, but that was no reason for anyone else to give up on it. Christmas really meant something to women like Sable, who worked hard all year and deserved to spend time making their kids happy.

  With a dramatic flourish, Elaine flung on the crimson and dove-gray cloak, fastening the ornate frog closures down the front. Turning to the gilt-framed lobby mirror, she donned a matching flat cap, angling the patent leather bill jauntily down over her eye. She looked ridiculous. An overgrown organ grinder’s monkey. What were the building managers thinking, making the doorman work in this getup?

  They were thinking residents like the St. Jameses wanted it that way.

  A movement outside caught her eye. A party of well-dressed couples emerged from a Town Car at the curb. Clients! She hurried to let them in, holding the brass-and-glass door wide for three couples. It was on the tip of her tongue to greet the Wyndhams, the Blantons and the McQuiggs, old friends of her parents. Over th
e years, she had attended school and summer camp with some of their kids.

  They swept past her in a laughing, babbling mass. No one looked at Elaine. No one greeted her. She didn’t feel hurt, but mystified. Was it just this group of guests or did everyone treat the doorman this way? Everyone, she thought, answering her own question. In her world, the help was invisible, and friends were chosen for their social value as much as for their personal qualities.

  After the next group swept through, she realized it was no fluke. They ignored her, too, even though she’d sent one couple a Tiffany bowl as a wedding present not so long ago. Then a man she recognized, a famous orchestra conductor who had come to dinner several times while she was growing up, alighted from a taxi. Certain he would be delighted to see her, she arranged her face in a smile. But his eyes barely flickered in her direction as he gave a curt, dismissive nod and headed for the elevator. These people, Elaine realized, treated the doorman with no more regard than a potted fern.

  As she stood watching the polished-steel elevator doors closing, Elaine made an even more disturbing realization. She was one of “these people.”

  When Ravi arrived for his shift, she made a hasty explanation he clearly didn’t understand, then called a cab for herself. She slid into the back seat, shivering as her thighs touched the hard plastic upholstery. She tucked her warm designer coat more securely around her and thought for a moment. The fact was, she had no clue where she wanted to go.

  She wanted to find Tony. She wanted to tell him that seeing him again had caused her to step back and take a hard, painful look at her life. She’d left the best party in town and put her career in jeopardy to work for an hour as a doorman. All because she’d seen him again and realized the dream was still there, hiding, waiting for the right moment. So she was either losing her marbles or turning into a different person.

  She felt the driver eyeing her in the rearview mirror. “Brooklyn,” she said. Ordinarily, even an hour ago, she wouldn’t have given a second glance at a cabbie. Now she frowned as she detected something—a flicker of recognition?—in his glance.

  “Got it.” He turned south on Roosevelt Drive. “You probably want to be more specific.”

  She thought hard. “Do you know of a Catholic church in Brooklyn? One that holds midnight mass?”

  He narrowed his eyes in the mirror. “That’d narrow it down to a couple dozen.”

  “Maybe I’ll think of the name on the way over.”

  As it turned out, she had plenty of time to think because traffic came to a standstill a few blocks north of the bridge.

  “Great,” Elaine said. “I’m going to throw myself at a man for the second time in my life, and I get stuck in a traffic jam.”

  “The second time in your life? What happened the first time?”

  “He didn’t show.” The chime of bells shimmered from the radio speaker. There was a silvery quality to the chimes that made her shiver.

  “I thought he explained all that.” Something in his voice caught her attention, and she studied him with more than passing interest. He was just a cabbie, she told herself. He wore a cap with earflaps and a bright red muffler.

  The back of her neck prickled. Clutching the back of the seat, she leaned forward to read the driver ID affixed to the meter box. Lawrence E. Simms.

  “Larry?” she said.

  At last, they reached the bridge. The normally busy span was oddly deserted. “That’s me.”

  “Larry the elf? Larry the Zamboni driver?”

  The cabbie seemed not to hear her as he cranked down his window and stuck his head out. “Hey, lady. Do you see what I see? Oh, man.”

  She craned her neck and squinted, straining to see through the foggy curtain of snow lit by the headlamps of the taxi. “What?” she asked.

  “There’s someone on the bridge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He slowed and pulled over. “There. Isn’t that a jumper?”

  A woman stood alone on the wrong side of the bridge rail. She had somehow gone around the protective chain-link fencing and was facing out over the river. She wore no coat, and the wind whipped her hair around her face.

  Chills zipped down Elaine’s spine. “What’s going on? Is that woman…” She stopped, unable to voice her fear.

  “They say this is the time of year for it.”

  She wrenched open the door of the taxi and got out. Eerily, there was no one in sight—only the taxi…and the woman on the bridge rail.

  Elaine walked through the snowy night, feeling the cold feathers of snowflakes on her face. She headed toward the woman, no longer intent on finding Tony but on trying to help.

  It was absurd, of course. What could she possibly do to help? She whipped a glance around, but still no cars emerged from the storm. “This is the busiest bridge in the city,” she muttered through chattering teeth. “How can it be deserted?”

  Down on the river, the heartbeat rhythm of a boat motor pulsed into the ghostly stillness of the night. The winter wind off the water smelled cold and harsh. Shuddering with apprehension, Elaine approached the woman. The misty glow of a sodium vapor light illuminated the slender form, the delicate profile, her features seemingly frozen by the wind off the water. She wore nothing but a suede skirt and cashmere sweater—no coat, no hat, no gloves.

  An icy sense of recognition raced over Elaine. Her heart jolted. Numbed by dread, she stepped to the chain-link fence and clutched at the cold wires. “Bobbi,” she said, obeying an instinct to keep her voice low. “It’s me, Elaine.”

  Bobbi didn’t seem startled, so that was something. Nor did she seem in the least surprised to encounter Elaine. As fragile and brittle as a snowflake, Bobbi did not move. She simply stood there, like a figure-head at the prow of a ship.

  “Go away,” she said simply, her voice clear and firm.

  “Not on your li—not in a million years. I’m so glad I’m here,” she said. “Please don’t hurt yourself, Bobbi. Please.”

  “What does it matter to you?”

  “Well, for one thing, I didn’t get a chance to tell you how sorry I am about today.”

  “Oh, that’s great, Elaine. Let’s make this about you.”

  Elaine was slightly encouraged by Bobbi’s anger. “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Then what are you doing, Elaine? Trying to improve my life for fun and profit?”

  Elaine was wracked by guilt, as well as fear. In the frigid night, she was forced to truly see her relationship with Bobbi. They’d made friends for all the wrong reasons—Elaine had “created” a media figure, nothing more. Their friendship had never had any depth or genuine intimacy. It had been, like all of Elaine’s other relationships, a business arrangement.

  “I was wrong,” said Elaine. “I was awful to you. Bobbi, please. Think what you will of me, but don’t hurt yourself. For heaven’s sake, it’s Christmas.”

  “Another work day, as far as you’re concerned. What’s suddenly so special about Christmas?”

  “Well, there’s…” Elaine’s voice trailed off. Suddenly, at the very worst possible moment, she had absolutely no idea what to say.

  “There’s what?”

  “The Christmas tree,” Elaine said. “What other time of year can you put such a large home fashion accessory in your living room and actually feel good about it?”

  “That’s only because you know you’re going to take it down. And if that’s supposed to give me a reason for living, you’ll have to do better. You wouldn’t know the true meaning of Christmas if it slapped you upside the head.”

  “Then maybe I’m the one who should be out there on the bridge,” Elaine snapped. She was still terrified, but keeping Bobbi engaged in conversation was at least stopping her from doing a swan dive into the East River. “And I do, too, know the meaning of Christmas. It’s to celebrate the birth of Christ. Everybody knows that.”

  “Actually, Christmas is not the birthday of Christ,” Bobbi contradicted her. “He wasn’t bor
n in the middle of winter.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, for one thing, the sheep were out in the fields. It would have been very cold at night in the hills of Judea, and shepherds in that area never keep sheep in the fields after the end of October.”

  “What’s that got to do with—” Elaine shut her mouth.

  “Besides,” Bobbi went on, “Herod never would have ordered people to travel to their hometowns for tax registration in the middle of winter.”

  “I can believe that,” Elaine said. “Everyone knows you pay taxes in the spring.” This was nuts. She was supposed to be convincing Bobbi of the true meaning of Christmas so she wouldn’t take a flying leap off the bridge. Keep her talking, Elaine told herself. That was the key. “But listen,” she said, “December twenty-fifth is as good a time as any to honor Christmas.”

  Bobbi hugged herself against the cold. “Jesus wouldn’t have celebrated his own birthday because it wasn’t a Jewish custom to do so.”

  “Anyone with half a brain ignores birthdays,” Elaine said. “Look, Christmas is not just a time for people to be extra nice to each other, to make ourselves feel good by giving gifts. Christmas is to celebrate the fact that we don’t have to shoulder our own burdens alone, that a humble child can be our salvation. It’s a joyful thing, Bobbi, and what better way to show joy than to share it? I’m not doing such a good job giving you a reason to come down off this bridge, but here’s something I know. I’ve been awful. I need to learn kindness and generosity again. I’m learning it from people like you, Bobbi. The world needs you in it.”

  “What, more thieves?” Bobbi’s voice broke.

  “More people like you to show people like me what desperation really is. You were desperate, and I didn’t let myself see that.”

  For the first time, Bobbi turned her head to look directly at Elaine. “That’s a little more like it. But it’s still about you.” She turned back to stare at the river. “This isn’t the life I wanted for myself. I need to be with people I love, with family. I need for my life to mean something more than a media opportunity. You didn’t give me anything, Elaine, except the chance to live a phony life. Today I finally woke up to that.”