This Will Be
Jane Cooper Ford
Peckham Press
Copyright © 2018 by Jane Cooper Ford
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. This novel’s story and characters are fictitious. Certain historical events, famous people, locations and agencies are mentioned, but the characters involved and the situations are wholly imaginary. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is entirely coincidental.
ISBN - 978-1-989084-00-7
[email protected]
Peckham Press, 110 Cumberland Street, Suite 164, Toronto, ON. Canada M5R 3V5
For my friends Jacqueline Benyes and Ali Callan
with love and gratitude
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Also by Jane Cooper Ford
1
June, 1977
“My baby, My husband, Mom, my cousin Jenny, French vanilla ice cream, blueberry pie, Central Park, Sunlight, Moonlight, Cat Stevens…”
30-year-old New York literary editor Constance Pell leaned out the window of her 17th floor office of Peckham Press and absently gazed down at Sixth Avenue below. A long way down.
“And Penny,” she whispered.
Penny Langston, her best friend at the office. She loved her like she loved her husband but with twenty percent more joy.
Connie looked down and watched the rectangular roofs of yellow cabs and the tops of hairdo-d heads of uptown business people walking by below.
She closed her eyes and let the warm wind of a sudden and early New York City summer blow against her face.
“My baby, My husband, Mom, my cousin Jenny, French vanilla ice cream, blueberry pie, Central Park, Sunlight, Moonlight, Cat Stevens... Penny.”
She leaned back inside and closed the window.
2
Penny Langston peered out of the train window on the 1:36 p.m. from Scarsdale into Grand Central.
She flinched as the conductor made his way through the car, calling in a volume for the morning dozens not the two riders actually present.
“TuckaHOE! Next station stop is TUCK…ahoe!”
“Oh good lord,” she muttered.
“Afternoon, Miss.”
Penny glanced up. He was smiling at her – ah, yes, him. Chet? Chuck? Something like that.
She smiled back. “Yes! Hello. Nice to see you.”
“You’re riding late today.”
“I am.”
Penny kept the smile going as he made his way past her down the aisle. It almost cheered her up.
That’s what you did if you grew up in England - you said it all inside and then made polite chit-chat. Sure, it caused ulcers. And sure, the uptight, wealthy Londoners she grew up with were, no doubt, seething with inner rage and probably outer hemorrhoids. But that’s what you did. You were polite. And people who weren’t polite were heathens.
Penny peered outside at the greenery passing by and caught her reflection in the train window - bags under her eyes, sorrowful gaze. Lovely. Add a missing tooth, she thought, and her Dickens character was complete.
Her heart ached from this morning’s disappointment. She glanced around the car for distraction. The rows of three burgundy and blue vinyl side by side seats, two high back, the aisle one lower. The ad for Viceroy cigarettes by the doors, with the “I’d rather fight than switch” blonde model with a fake black eye. The yellow and blue Broadway poster for some musical called Grease playing at the Royale Theater.
The car was empty except for a thick-thighed teenaged girl in painted on, faded designer jeans facing towards her in a four-seater a few rows up. Her brown hair done Farrah Fawcett style, she boarded the train when Penny did in Scarsdale. She was flipping through a Rona Barrett’s Gossip movie magazine.
Penny usually rode the 7:36 a.m. into the city to be at her desk at the publishing company on Sixth Avenue by 8:30. But today she had a doctor’s appointment.
With Dr. Haarten - whom her husband Davis kindly referred to as, “That Dutch Quack on the Post Road.” And who always smelled like freshly chewed Doublemint gum, complimented Penny on her British accent as if he’d never heard it or one before, smiled at her like she wasn’t married and he wasn’t either - which was even more troubling, given he was an OB-GYN - and at least four times in the conversation would pepper in the words, “Surely a beautiful woman like you…”
“Surely a beautiful woman like you must get lots of offers for magazine covers as a top editor…”
“Surely a beautiful woman would get in to Studio 54 no problem. Have you been?”
But there was none of that today. Well, yes, the gum, but not the rest.
“Sorry, Penny…You’re not pregnant…”
He said it cheerfully, like, “I got a parking space!” as he plunked back down behind his desk with a clipboard of results and a newly lit Pall Mall Red dangling out of his mouth.
“I don’t know, Penny,” he continued, “We’ll run some tests. But this has been awhile now you and Davis have been trying. And you’re nearly thirty six. You may not be able to conceive.”
“Maybe you waited too long…” her idiot doctor said.
“Maybe it’s genes.”
“Maybe it’s not meant to be.”
Penny stared out the train window at the lush, green awning of a New York summer arriving hot and too early. Only June 7th and it had felt like 85 degrees in the scorching sun on the platform in Scarsdale, as she stood there, staring at the shops up on East Parkway Road to keep from crying. Someone came out of Jesperson’s bakery. Someone else went into Pierce and Schiller cigar store.
She’d felt a bead of sweat fall down the back of her navy silk blouse. A drop of life to remind her that life went on, whether your heart was broken or not.
“Summer
of ’77 looks like it’s going to be a hot one, folks,” Mack Mackerson the local Meteorologist said on TV the night before . A world away now. Back when Penny thought she might be pregnant. When today was supposed to be a bright, new beginning, instead of this stupidly hot June crap of a day where all she was instead was late for work.
"Alright, Penny, snap out of it,” she muttered, glancing around the car. The girl with the movie magazine was twirling her hair and reading.
Penny forced her eyes to focus on the vista going by, the houses and the main street of Tuckahoe.
"Find something beautiful," she whispered to herself.
Since she was a child, Penny Langston did this trick to pacify bad news, She’d do it as a teenager when her mother was in one of her ‘moods’.
"Maybe I should just drive the car over the line into traffic. No one would miss us."
“Pretty doesn’t last forever, Penny.”
And when the last of the gin bottle had been gulped down, wealthy socialite Louise Langston would tromp through the five-bedroom manse to locate 16-year-old Penny so she could bark out the old standby, "You're a whore."
Which was always nice to hear when you're on the phone with, oh, say, the Prime Minister’s daughter, who happens to go to your boarding school.
But even as a kid, Penny Langston would never let her mother’s ‘words’ be the last word. She would cast her eyes across a London landscape, wherever she stood, and find the something beautiful. The orangey hue of a popsicle-colored kittycat, the glossy red and yellow multimedia shmear of rained on autumn leaves.
Now she was passing through Tuckahoe, New York, not quite North London where she grew up. And it was all a not quite:
A mint green AMC Pacer with a popped-off hubcap and a half removed daisy flower decal on the side. A scratched-up blue Schwinn bicycle with threadbare silver streamers on the handlebars. A matted, dingy, little white poodle on a leash outside a deli, hunched over, about to…
“Christ, Dog, please no…” Penny whispered.
Yes. Have an unceremonious poo.
“Right. Well, there we are…” Penny said, “There’s my life.”
“Tuck-aHOE…this station stop is TUCKahoe…”
Her eyes welled up against her will. She slipped open her brown leather satchel briefcase and slid out a manuscript to edit. Enough thinking.
"I love you," she had secretly whispered last night to the No One in her stomach. And now on this train, she felt like the world could see last night’s stupidly hopeful hope.
She peered at the manuscript in front of her. “Seventy Seconds” by one of her authors, Grant Stanton. 240 pages, bound with a geometric metal paper clip fastener.
She slipped off the fastener and shuffled through the pages, landing on page twenty-three. Her red pen edit marks visible down half the page - tighten, add more of this, new paragraph, not needed, repetitive, great section here.
Her heart ached so hard it made her wheeze.
“TUCK a hoe..” The conductor crowed as the train doors slid open with that mechanical vacuum pack chuff and hiss sound. “Tuck a HOE…”
She stared hard at the pages in front of her. Words and work would save her heart. It better.
3
"What's the difference between the Addams Family and the Munsters?"
"If you don't know, I'm not telling you."
"Come on, Brennan. I never watch TV.... What happens on Name That Tune?"
"Are you seriously asking me this? It's a dog show and then couples have group sex. What do you think?"
"Ooh, that sounds good. I'll have to get a television."
Jamie Brennan looked up from the typewriter. She had just finished typing some notes for her new novel, sitting at a sturdy 1950’s office desk to the side of the cash. Second floor, Murphy’s Bookstore, 10th Street and Broadway. The desk was supposed to be used for the billing and bookkeeping. But Jamie would pop an invoice into the typewriter, roll it in, and begin writing whatever she felt. A recollection. A moment. Notes for the new book.
She glanced up to see her co-worker and best friend, non television watching Lynette Reyes standing over her like a crabby shadow. Her shiny black bangs, her dark eyes glimmering, a perpetual smirk at the irony of the world.
“You got a smoke, girl?”
“In my jacket, behind the counter.”
Lynette plunked a stack of books down she was carrying and reached under the counter for Jamie’s jacket.
Jamie leaned back in her chair and flipped through her typed pages.
“So I hear you’ve got an admirer, ” Lynette said.
“Really? Who?”
“That cute Irish girl who works in Receiving. The tall drink of water with that fit body and the sparkling blue eyes like they only make in Ireland,” Lynette said. “Although why she likes you and not me… it’s insulting.”
Jamie rolled the paper out of the typewriter. “Well, let’s see… you’re not gay? And you’re married?”
“So?” Lynette sniffed. “Seriously, James, I heard from Dennis on the first floor she asked you out.”
“I don’t think that’s what it was.”
“Go out with her you idiot – she’s gorgeous. She’s like a tall, gangly, Irish movie star with combat boots. She’s like if Wonder Woman and James Dean had a baby. In Ireland. That’s her.”
"She's like 20."
"And you're what... 27?"
"28."
"See? Even sexier? A younger woman. Go for it."
Lynette pulled the smokes out of Jamie’s jacket. “Girl, it’s 80 degrees out there today. Why do you bring a jacket to work?”
“I get cold.”
“Anyway, she’s adorable. That sing-songy accent. I love people from Dublin.”
“By Dublin, I’m pretty sure you mean Belfast.”
“She’s from Dublin.”
“She’s from Belfast.”
Lynette finished lighting the cigarette. She exhaled a plume of smoke and dropped the used match into the overflowing glass ashtray on the counter.
“Whatever, same thing,” Lynette said.
“You know that MFA from Yale has really done you no favors.”
“Brennan, I’m an artist. I don’t have to be smart.”
“And yet….you went to Yale.”
Lynette shrugged and smoked. “What can I say?”
Jamie stood up from the desk and slipped the paper she was writing into a file she kept in the desk drawer.
Lynette stared thoughtfully into the distance. “I wish a girl would ask me out – just for the fun of it. I’d make a great lez.”
“You could start being one by not saying lez.”
“No, it’d be great, seriously, maybe I should lez. ”
“And it’s worse if it’s a verb.”
“ – I mean, imagine all the listening that happens. Like, you say stuff… like I say to Danny…” Lynette mused. “But it’s to another woman - so it goes in one ear…. and doesn’t go out the other one. It like… stays in the head…”
“I’m only in it for the listening…” Jamie said, eyeing a stack of books on the counter. “So who’s shelving these? The shelving fairy?”
“No, I left them for you.”
“You don’t say.”
“I’m smoking,” Lynette said. "Hey, Dennis said that Irish girl told him you look like Cheryl Ladd. Who's that?"
"One of Charlie's Angels."
Lynette took a leisurely haul of her cigarette and exhaled the smoke through her nose. "Who are they?”
"A gang in Bedford Stuyvesant. Please get a television."
Lynette tapped her cigarette on the glass ashtray for what seemed like a full minute, eyes on Jamie.
“Anyway, she thinks you’re pretty - so do half the guys in receiving,” Lynette said. “Oh, hey - you hear the latest Son of Sam letter Jimmy Breslin got?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“The cops say he’s taunting them.”
“This is a fun co
nversation.”
“I swear - that police sketch they keep putting out. It could be anyone from the guy in the Dr. Pepper commercial to my dry cleaner.”
“Well, let’s hope it’s not your dry cleaner.”
“I know. He gives me a discount.”
Jamie closed her eyes to make the conversation go away.
Son of Sam. This random killer. With his random awful violence that had gripped this already randomly violent city.
It was like a fucking reminder every day of a darkness she knew only too well. The violence of a stranger out of the blue. Not for you and just for you.
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Oh man, Brennan! Did I tell you about what happened when I brought my portfolio up to the Pace Gallery?”
Lynette started talking about the death of real art in the city. And how impossible it is, despite women’s lib, for her to get a gallery show in any of the major galleries. As she talked, Jamie looked up and spotted a pretty young woman in a jean jacket and corduroy skirt. She was standing near the Books Into Film Table. A sweet smile. Long, wavy light-brown hair, pinned off her forehead with a cute barrette. Her piercing green eyes peered into Jamie’s.
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