by John Irving
There was a pause that would have been polite, were it not for the newsroom women's exaggerated sighs.
"I've written a little something," Mary said almost shyly. The script was already there, on the TelePrompTer; she must have written it the previous day, or the day before that.
"There seem to be certain days, even weeks," the script read, "when we are cast in the unwelcome role of the terrible messenger."
"Bullshit!" Patrick said. "The role isn't 'unwelcome'--we relish it!"
Mary sat smiling demurely while the TelePrompTer kept rolling: "We would rather be comforting friends than terrible messengers, but this has been one of those weeks." A scripted pause followed.
"I like it," one of the newsroom women said. They'd had a meeting before this meeting, Wallingford knew. (There was always a meeting before the meeting.) They had no doubt agreed which of them would say, "I like it."
Then another of the newsroom women touched Patrick's left forearm, in the usual place. "I like it because it doesn't make you sound as if you're apologizing, not exactly, for what you said last night," she told him. Her hand rested on his forearm a little longer than was natural or necessary.
"By the way, the ratings for last night were terrific," Wharton said. Patrick knew that he'd better not look at Wharton, whose round face was a bland dot across the table.
"You were great last night, Pat," Mary added.
Her remark was so well timed that this had to have been rehearsed at the meeting before the meeting, too, because there was not one titter among the newsroom women; they were as straight-faced as a jury that's made its decision. Wharton, of course, was the only one at the script meeting who didn't know that Patrick Wallingford had gone home with Mary Shanahan the previous night, nor would Wharton have cared.
Mary gave Patrick an appropriate amount of time to respond--they all did. Everyone was quiet and respectful. Then, when Mary saw that no response would be forthcoming, she said, "Well, if everything's perfectly clear ..."
Wallingford was already on his way to makeup. Thinking back, there was now only one conversation he didn't regret having with Mary. The second time they'd had sex, with the dawn breaking, he'd told her about his sudden and unaccountable lust for the makeup girl. Mary had been full of condemnation.
"You don't mean Angie, do you, Pat?"
He'd not known the makeup girl's name. "The one who chews gum--"
"That's Angie!" Mary had cried. "That girl is a mess!"
"Well, she turns me on. I can't tell you why. Maybe it's the gum."
"Maybe you're just horny, Pat."
"Maybe."
That hadn't been the end of it. They'd been walking crosstown, to the coffee shop on Madison, when Mary had blurted out, apropos of nothing, "Angie! Jesus, Pat--the girl's a joke! She still lives with her parents. Her father's a transit cop or something. In Queens. She's from Queens!"
"Who cares where she's from?" Patrick had asked.
In retrospect, he found it curious that Mary wanted his baby, wanted his apartment, wanted to advise him on the most advantageous way to get fired; all things considered, she truly seemed (to a carefully calculated degree) to want to be his friend. She even wanted things to work out for him in Wisconsin--meaning that she'd manifested no jealousy of Mrs. Clausen that Wallingford could detect. Yet Mary was borderline apoplectic that a makeup girl had given him a hard-on. Why?
He sat in the makeup chair, contemplating the arousal factor, as Angie went to work on his crow's-feet and (today, especially) the dark circles under his eyes. "Ya didn't get much sleep last night, huh?" the girl asked him between snaps. She'd changed her gum; last night she'd given off a minty smell--tonight she was chewing something fruity.
"Sadly, no. Another sleepless night," Patrick replied.
"Why can'cha sleep?" Angie asked.
Wallingford frowned; he was thinking. How far should he go?
"Unscrunch your forehead. Relax, relax!" Angie told him. She was patting the flesh-colored powder on his forehead with her soft little brush. "That's betta," she said. "So why can'cha sleep? Aren't ya gonna tell me?"
Oh, what the hell! Patrick thought. If Mrs. Clausen turned him down, all this would be only the rest of his life. So what if he'd just got his new boss pregnant? He'd already decided, sometime during the script meeting, not to trade apartments with her. And if Doris said yes, this would be his last night as a free man. Surely some of us are familiar with the fact that sexual anarchy can precede a commitment to the monogamous life. This was the old Patrick Wallingford--his licentiousness reasserting itself.
"I can't sleep because I can't stop thinking about you," Wallingford confessed. The makeup girl had just spread her hand, her thumb and index finger smoothing what she called the "smile lines" at the corners of his mouth. He could feel her fingers stop on his skin as if her hand had died there. Her jaw dropped; her mouth hung open, midsnap.
Angie wore a snug, short-sleeved sweater the color of orange sherbet. On a chain around her neck was a thick signet ring, obviously a man's, which was heavy enough to separate her breasts. Even her breasts stopped moving while she held her breath; everything had stopped.
Finally she breathed again--one long exhalation, redolent of the chewing gum. Patrick could see his face in the mirror, but not hers. He looked at the tensed muscles in her neck; a strand or two of her jet-black hair hung down. The shoulder straps of her bra showed through her orange sweater, which had ridden up above the waistband of her tight black skirt. She had olive-colored skin, and dark, downy-looking hair on her arms.
Angie was only twenty-something. Wallingford had hardly been shocked to hear that she still lived with her parents. Lots of New York working girls did. To have your own apartment was too expensive, and parents were generally more reliable than multiple roommates.
Patrick was beginning to believe that Angie would never respond, and her soft fingers were once again working the rouge into his skin. At last Angie took a deep breath and held it, as if she were thinking of what to say; then she released another long, fruity breath. She started chewing her gum again, rapidly--her breaths were short and sweet. Wallingford was uncomfortably aware that she was scrutinizing his face for more than blemishes and wrinkles.
"Are ya askin' me out or somethin'?" Angie whispered to him. She kept glancing at the open doorway of the makeup room, where she was alone with Patrick. The woman who did hair had taken the elevator down to street level; she was standing on the sidewalk somewhere, smoking a cigarette.
"Think of it this way, Angie," Wallingford whispered to the agitated, breathy girl. "This is definitely a case of sexual harassment, if you play your cards right."
Patrick was pleased with himself for imagining a way to get fired that Mary Shanahan had not thought of, but Angie didn't know he was serious; the makeup girl wrongly believed he was just fooling around. And as Wallingford had correctly guessed, she had a crush on him.
"Ha!" Angie said, flashing him a frisky smile. He could see the color of her gum for the first time--it was purple. (Grape, or some synthetic variation thereof.) She had her tweezers out and seemed to be staring at a spot between his eyes. As she bent more closely over him, he breathed her in--her perfume, her hair, the gum. She smelled wonderful, in a kind of department-store way.
In the mirror, he could see the fingers of his right hand; he spread them as purposefully on the narrow strip of flesh between the waistband of her skirt and her high-riding sweater as he might have touched the keyboard of a piano before he started to play. At that moment he had a shameless sense of himself as a semiretired maestro, long out of practice, who'd not lost his touch.
There wasn't a lawyer in New York who wouldn't happily represent her case. Wallingford only hoped she wouldn't gouge his face with the tweezers.
Instead, as he touched her warm skin, Angie arched her back in such a way that she was pressing--no, make that snuggling--against his hand. With the tweezers, she gently plucked an errant eyebrow-hair from the bridge of his
nose. Then she kissed him on the lips with her mouth a little open; he could taste her gum.
He meant to say something along the lines of "Angie, for Christ's sake, you should sue me!" But he couldn't take his one hand off her. Instinctively, his fingers slipped under her sweater; they slid up her spine, all the way to the back strap of her bra. "I love the gum," he told her, his old self easily finding the right words. She kissed him again, this time parting his lips, then his teeth, with her forceful tongue.
Patrick was briefly taken aback when Angie inserted her slick wad of gum into his mouth; for an alarming moment, he imagined that he'd bitten off her tongue. It simply wasn't the sort of foreplay he was used to--he hadn't gone out with a lot of gum-chewers. Her bare back squirmed against his hand; her breasts in her soft sweater brushed his chest.
It was one of the newsroom women who cleared her throat in the doorway. This was almost exactly what Wallingford had wanted; he'd hoped that Mary Shanahan might have seen him kissing and feeling up Angie, but he had no doubt that the incident would be reported to Mary before he went on-camera. "You've got five minutes, Pat," the newsroom woman told him.
Angie, who'd left him with her gum, was still pulling her sweater down when the woman who did hair returned from her sidewalk smoke. She was a heavy black woman who smelled like cinnamon-raisin toast, and she always made a point of feigning exasperation when there was nothing Patrick's hair needed. Sometimes she squirted a little hair spray on him, or rubbed him with a dab of gel; this time she just patted him on the top of his head and left the room again.
"Ya sure ya know whatcha gettin' into?" Angie asked. "I gotta complicated sorta life," she warned him. "I'm a handful of problems, if ya know what I mean."
"What do you mean, Angie?"
"If we're gonna go out tonight, there's some stuff I gotta blow off," she said. "I gotta buncha phone calls to make, for starters."
"I don't want to cause you any trouble, Angie."
The girl was searching through her purse--for phone numbers, Wallingford assumed. But, no, it was for more gum. "Look"--she was chewing again--"do ya wanna go out tonight or what? It's no trouble. I just gotta start makin' some calls."
"Yes, tonight," Patrick replied.
Why not yes, why not tonight? Not only was he not married to Mrs. Clausen, but she had given him no encouragement whatsoever. He had no reason to think he ever would be married to her; he knew only that he wanted to ask. Under the circumstances, sexual anarchy was both understandable and commendable. (To the old Patrick Wallingford, that is.)
"Ya gotta phone at your place, I guess," Angie was saying. "Betta gimme the numba. I won't give it to nobody unless I hafta."
He was writing out his phone number for her when the same newsroom woman reappeared in the doorway. She saw the piece of paper change hands. This gets better and better, Wallingford was thinking. "Two minutes, Pat," the observant woman told him.
Mary was waiting for him in the studio. She held out her hand to him, a tissue covering her open palm. "Lose the gum, asshole," was all she said. Patrick took no small amount of pleasure in depositing the slippery purple wad in her hand.
"Good evening," he began the Friday telecast, more formally than usual. "Good evening" wasn't on the prompter, but Wallingford wanted to sound as insincerely somber as possible. After all, he knew the level of insincerity behind what he had to say next. "There seem to be certain days, even weeks, when we are cast in the unwelcome role of the terrible messenger. We would rather be comforting friends than terrible messengers," he went on, "but this has been one of those weeks."
He was aware that his words fell around him like wet clothes, as he'd intended. When the file footage began and Patrick knew he was off-camera, he looked for Mary, but she'd already left, as had Wharton. The montage dragged on and on--it had the tempo of an overlong church service. You didn't need to be a genius to read the ratings for this show in advance.
At last came that gratuitous image of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, shielding her son from the telephoto lens; when the image froze to a still, Patrick prepared himself for his closing remarks. There would be time to say the usual: "Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto." Or something of equivalent length.
While Wallingford hardly felt he was being unfaithful to Mrs. Clausen, since they were not a couple, it nonetheless seemed to him some slight betrayal of his devotion--that is, if he delivered his usual blessing to her and their son. Knowing what he'd done the night before with Mary, and thinking that he knew what the night ahead of him, with Angie, held, he felt disinclined even to speak Mrs. Clausen's name.
Furthermore, there was something else he wanted to say. When the montage footage finally ended, he looked straight at the camera and declared, "Let's hope that's the end of it." It was only one word shorter than his benediction to Doris and Otto junior, but there was no pause for a period--not to mention the two commas. In fact, it took only three seconds to say instead of four; Patrick knew because he'd timed it.
While Wallingford's concluding remark didn't save the ratings, there would be some good press for the evening news because of it. An Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, which amounted to a caustic review of the television coverage of JFK, Jr.'s death, praised Patrick for what the writer termed "three seconds of integrity in a week of sleaze." Despite himself, Wallingford was looking more irreplaceable than ever.
Naturally, Mary Shanahan was nowhere to be found at the conclusion of the Friday-evening telecast; also absent were Wharton and Sabina. They were no doubt having a meeting. Patrick made a public display of his physical affection for Angie during the makeup-removal process, so much so that the hairdresser left the room in disgust. Wallingford also made a point of not leaving with Angie until a small but highly communicative gathering of the newsroom women were whispering together by the elevators.
But was a night with Angie truly what he wanted? How could a sexual adventure with the twenty-something makeup girl be construed as progress in the journey to better himself? Wasn't this plainly the old Patrick Wallingford, up to his old tricks? How many times can a man repeat his sexual past before his past becomes who he is?
Yet without being able to explain the feeling, not even to himself, Wallingford felt like a new man, and one on the right track. He was a man on a mission, on his labyrinthine way to Wisconsin--notwithstanding the present detour he was taking. And what about the detour of the night before? Regardless, these detours were merely preparations for meeting Mrs. Clausen and winning her heart. Or so Patrick convinced himself.
He took Angie to a restaurant on Third Avenue in the Eighties. After a vinous dinner, they walked to Wallingford's apartment--Angie a little unsteadily. The excited girl gave him her gum again. The slippery exchange followed a long, tongue-thrusting kiss, only seconds after Patrick had at first unlocked and then relocked his apartment door.
The gum was a new flavor, something ultra-cool and silvery. When Wallingford breathed through his nose, his nostrils stung; when he breathed through his mouth, his tongue felt cold. As soon as Angie excused herself to use the bathroom, Patrick spit the gum into the palm of his one hand. Its shiny, metallic surface quivered like a puddle of mercury. He managed to throw the gum away and wash his hand in the kitchen sink before Angie emerged from the bathroom, wearing nothing but one of Wallingford's towels, and hurled herself into his arms. A forward girl, a strenuous night ahead. Patrick would be hard-pressed to find the time to pack for Wisconsin.
In addition, there were the phone calls, which were broadcast on his answering machine throughout the night. He was in favor of killing the volume, but Angie insisted on monitoring the calls; it had been in case of an emergency that she'd given Patrick's home phone number to various members of her family in the first place. But the initial phone call was from Patrick's new news editor, Mary Shanahan.
He heard the background cacophony of the newsroom women, the high hilarity of their celebration--including the contrasting baritone of a waiter reciting "to
night's specials"--before Mary uttered a word. Wallingford could imagine her hunched over her cell phone, as if it were something she intended to eat. One of her fine-boned hands would be cupping her ear--the other, her mouth. A strand of her blond hair would have fallen across her face, possibly concealing one of her sapphire-blue eyes. Of course the newsroom women would know she was calling him, whether she'd told them or not.
"That was a dirty trick, Pat," Mary's message on the answering machine began.
"It's Ms. Shanahan!" Angie whispered in a panic, as if Mary could hear her.
"Yes, it is," Patrick whispered back. The makeup girl was writhing on top of him, the luxurious mass of her jet-black hair entirely covering her face. All Wallingford could see was one of Angie's ears, but he deduced (from the smell) that her new gum was of a raspberry or strawberry persuasion.
"Not a word from you, not even 'Congratulations,'" Mary went on. "Well, I can live with that, but not that awful girl. You must want to humiliate me. Is that it, Pat?"
"Am I the awful girl?" Angie asked. She was beginning to pant. She was also emitting a low growling sound from the back of her throat; maybe it was caused by the gum.
"Yes, you are," Patrick replied, with some difficulty--the girl's hair kept getting in his mouth.
"What's Ms. Shanahan care about me for?" Angie asked; she sounded out of breath. Shades of Crystal Pitney? Wallingford hoped not.
"I slept with Mary last night. Maybe I got her pregnant," Patrick said. "She wanted me to."
"That kinda explains it," said the makeup girl.
"I know you're there! Answer me, you asshole!" Mary wailed.
"Boy ..." Angie started to say. She seemed to be trying to roll Wallingford on top of her--apparently she'd had enough of being on top.
"You should be packing for Wisconsin! You should be resting up for your trip!" Mary shouted. One of the newsroom women was trying to calm her down. The waiter could be overheard saying something about the truffle season.
Patrick recognized the waiter's voice. The restaurant was an Italian place on West Seventeenth. "What about Wisconsin?" Mary whined. "I wanted to spend the weekend in your apartment while you were in Wisconsin, just to try it out ..." She began to cry.