Bryant and Hickman were both taking copious notes.
“I mean, there’s foreign governments that want Uncle Sam to sell them more arms. There was a Save the Earth group in Seattle that opposed the new airport. They dumped a bunch of dead seagulls on our lobby. Smelly things. Then there was the Armenian guy who poured blood on our carpets—”
“Foreign governments?” They both wanted to know.
She paused, fighting hard to clear her head now, to maintain her brief burst of energy, survival instincts kicking in. She was thinking about day care and car pool, about a better lock for the sliding glass door in back. She was thinking about how she would explain all this to Jamie. His nightmares about bombs on the Metro were already bad enough.
She stared at the men before her: two gray men in suits off the rack, working their note pads like some B-movie news reporters. Alexander was still holding her hand. It felt warm and strong, and, strange as it seemed, she wanted to take him under the hospital covers with her, to kiss him again.
“Foreign governments.” She repeated herself. “Yes. Turkey. The Jordanians. The Swiss on that Jewish reparations thing. A number of state-owned enterprises in the PRC—you know, mainland China. A lot of different interests.”
Rachel turned back to both her inquisitors. “Officer,” she asked, “do you really think I was the target of the bomb?”
“Well, you were supposed to be there.”
“Right! I was supposed to be in Jonathan’s office at nine o’clock. We had clients due there at. . . at ten. A senator at noon. Canadian Ambassador later. Chinese Embassy guys, too. I mean, it’s going to—it was going to be a long day. You think somebody was trying to kill us all?”
The men conferred briefly in a whisper. The cop spoke first, with a sigh. “Mind if we sit down, ma’am. This is gonna take awhile.”
Then they started all over again, at the very beginning.
It was nearly three hours later before Alexander learned of Jonathan Talbott’s fate. Alexander was sitting behind the wheel of his green Saab in the parking lot of Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, listening to local updates on all-news radio, when he heard.
Five or six people had died, the WTOP reporter said. They included a garage attendant, a pedestrian, two or three people in a taxicab, and one person in Talbott’s office. Alan Porter had been sitting in the open room, opposite Talbott’s desk, and was killed instantly. Talbott, who had been in the mahogany-lined private bathroom, was trapped by debris for ninety minutes, but the D.C. fire squad brought him out, virtually unscathed.
This was the information Alexander took with him as he entered Jamie’s school building. Alexander was envious as he walked the hallways. It was like another planet, a place of primary colors and bright-faced, tousle-haired kids giggling in the corners. Bulletin boards were covered with cheery projects. The linoleum floors and lime colored tiles on the walls felt like the 1950’s. It had been many years since Alexander had been inside a public school. In this wholesome world, so near a city full of self-absorbed grown-ups, he felt like an intruder.
When he reached the principal’s office, Jamie was waiting, quite still and serious in a straight-backed chair. He was calm, as if this was an altogether familiar routine, as if Alexander picked him up every Monday. They chatted quietly as they rode home, talking of baseball, the Nationals, and the beginning of Little League season. Alexander tried to be chipper for the boy’s benefit.
At home in Rachel’s kitchen, Alexander poured a bowl of Fritos and two root beers while Jamie curled up in an oversized chair in the living room to watch the end of the Opening Day broadcast on Channel 20. It was the sixth inning. The Nationals were down 7-2. Shadows reached into all corners of the decrepit Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. Alexander found himself turning on lights and checking doors. An Arlington police car was parked across the street now; Alexander walked out and spoke briefly with the officer. He would have to explain things to Jamie, and soon.
Alexander procrastinated before he resumed his solitary patrol of the house. He was snooping now, going far beyond a basic security check.
What the hell am I doing? he wondered as he nosed into the private closets and upstairs corridors. He was looking for some clue, though he knew not about what. He peered into intimate spaces—in drawers and medicine cabinets. He checked the showers, ran his hands down an elegant blue silk nightgown trimmed in white lace hanging on the back of the master bath door. It smelled of Rachel—her hair, her perfume—arousing his senses with an electric wave.
Gradually, he discerned a schizophrenia about the interior. There were two different homes here, or so it appeared upon closer inspection. The design was all smooth surfaces and chrome, IKEA furniture with not enough cushions. But the hallway tables and the master bedroom upstairs were cluttered with photographs of Jamie on a horse in the Wyoming mountains, grandparents and grinning uncles in cowboy hats. Rachel’s bedside table was busy with books and catalogues, with stacks of pictures back from the photo shop. An unworn dress, still on the hanger, had been tossed over a rocking chair already piled high with clothes.
By contrast, Barry’s private study was like an airplane cockpit, a table full of computer gadgetry, a color printer, a large shredder, and not a single book. There was a large sharp-edged filing cabinet with a combination lock. An immaculate desk held nothing but a matching set of gold scissors and letter opener set placed just so. A black leather couch with a bedroom pillow was at one end, a light on in the guest bath. An FM radio station, chatting away from hidden speakers, was the only human touch in Barry’s inner sanctum.
The common spaces in the house were white and tiled, the dining room too fancy for a kid, the table polished and evidently unused. The kitchen was messy, with items on the counter from breakfast, notes, lists, and the weekend newspapers. The finished basement was similarly segregated. The playroom was pleasant chaos—stacks of shoe boxes filled with K’nex, Lego towers, stuffed animals, old puzzles. But the workroom was too neat, with tidy compartments for every screw and nail, tools all hung on labeled hooks, and a bolt lock on the interior door.
Alexander went back up to the second floor, finally entering Jamie’s room to pull the shade down and turn on a light against the falling dusk. There, on Jamie’s hastily-made bed, was his baseball glove, a Nationals logo ball in the pocket. By his bed was a tiny framed photograph of just Barry and Jamie—Barry wearing a suit and a shiny grin, Jamie looking serious in his team jersey and cap.
It seemed almost as if Barry was deceased, memories of his dutiful fatherhood reverentially kept intact, a shrine to his perpetual absence. Barry was a gentle and kind father; Alexander had seen it. Rachel was quick to defend his parenting, his most endearing attribute. But Barry was such an absentee, Alexander knew, flighty and secretive in his world of business travel, inaccessible even to his oldest friends. Rachel had confided her fears of late that Barry had some secret life, “another wife and kids tucked away in Jersey like that guy Charles Kuralt had.” She’d said she felt marooned, despairing of the wait for the return of a once amiable stranger.
Alexander lay back and thought of Barry flying on that corporate plane to nowhere. Peddling technology to the Chinese, brokering some Korean telecom deal. He was angry now—angry with Barry, angry that he still hadn’t heard from the man seven hours after his wife had nearly been killed. He was angry at the shadowy figures exacting vengeance, making some idiotic statement by blowing people up on a Washington street corner. Mostly, as he lay there on his ten-year-old godson’s pillow, Alexander was angry with himself. He was angry for the reserve he had allowed to grow thick like a hedge about him.
Why should a simple walk down an elementary school hallway make me feel like an alien? He wondered how he had come to feel so estranged from such a normal family routine.
As Alexander ruminated on Barry’s failings—and his own—his thoughts drifted to his father. His father, tossing the ball with him by the outfield fence amidst the soft morning promise of
a Sunday game. His father the grinder. His father, sweaty in the tunnel of the Fresno stadium, spitting tobacco juice, toweling off after a shower and another loss. His father, ever stoic, never cursing, as he laced up his spikes for another game played in the minor leagues.
The rhythms of trial and failure were so much a part of his memories. With Mom at his side, driving, and his three sisters in back of the old Chevy station wagon, Alexander had ridden up and down Highway 99 year after year to watch Dad. Through Fresno and Modesto, Stockton and Sacramento, Pop had shuffled, from the Oaks to the Kings, to the Bees and the River Pilots. They would eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sing Motown songs on the radio, driving the potholed route his father had followed in the vain effort to make it to the big leagues, before a dead arm and a fondness for Gallo jug wine extinguished the dream.
It was after dark when Alexander awoke with a start. Jamie, quite motionless, regarded him with sad eyes as he stood over him. Evidently, he had been there for some time.
“We lost.” It was all the boy said.
EVENING AT THE OASIS
There was a series of calming eddies in Rachel’s memories, gently swirling pools into which the flow of time became diverted. Once immersed pieces floated to the surface, presented for re-evaluation. These recollections held clues from a past that had seemed too rushed. She could examine them, as a geologist would a slice of sedimentary rock, experiencing the moments once more, learning anew. Invariably during these reflections, she returned to that last fall together at Stanford, to that shared life before things became so terribly complicated.
It was late in the evening, she recalled this time, and they had been blowing off steam with one of their Friday drinking games. They were settled in at a gritty little beer and burger joint on El Camino Real, just over the Menlo Park line, called The Oasis.
They had made it into a sort of clubhouse for their group. There was a familiarity about the place that gave them comfort, something unpretentious about the garish green martini glass on the neon sign out front and the rotund waitresses inside. The floor was covered with a thick layer of sawdust, creating a roadhouse feel. Juicy burgers arrived at tables in red plastic baskets, color-coded toothpicks marking the cheese. The fries were crisp and hot, the pitchers of beer frosty and cheap. There was a scruffy crowd, a mix of deliverymen and the local bowlers who tolerated the students in their midst.
With Alexander, she had ridden over to the guys’ house, rolling on their bikes down streets with bucolic names like Lemon and Orchard. Alexander had produced some pungent Mendocino buds and they had gotten high along the creek bed at dusk, savoring the smoke and the easy talk it brought forth.
Later in the evening, they were all gathered in the bar. Barry was impressively drunk, his hands gripping Booth’s shoulders as he egged the others on and called for another round. Branko was holding his own, working on a late burger, deep in conversation with Lee. They drank from their mugs, soaking in the welcome camaraderie. It had been another long week running tutorials and composing thesis chapters in the student carrels lining the Serra House hallways.
Rachel, her back turned to Barry, was ensconced in the corner booth, engaging Mickey. Their conversation had started as light banter, in keeping with the mood of the evening. She remained gracefully buzzed from the sunset joint. She had felt provocative ever since, unconcerned about the sense she was, or wasn’t, making. She was pleased to suspend her insecurities and assume everything came out sounding profound.
Mickey was retelling stories from one of his adventures in the Colorado mountains. Rachel was amused and curious. She wondered, as she often did, at the components of his kaleidoscopic personality that flashed through his beery grin. She was seeing Mickey in a new light this night. She was fascinated by his ability to be all things to all people. He was a consummate performer. Here was a guy who could track bear on horseback, but also ace the college boards. Here was a guy who could sweet-talk the hard-bodied California beach girls, but who also spoke fluent Mandarin.
For some reason that night, she had probed deeper. Mickey had been teasing her about her primal fears, snakes and spiders, and asking about her phobias. She had suddenly turned toward him and leaned right into his face. Holding him with her eyes, she asked him directly: “Simple question: name that which you fear most.”
Mickey shucked and jived a bit. His shoulders would actually drop as he rolled back from the hips, maneuvering to laugh it off. Rachel just held her pose, prodding. “Give it up, Dooley.”
“You’re really serious?” he asked after a while.
“Dead serious. No dodging this time.”
He stroked his chin, throwing her yet another sideways grin, then peered beyond her, searching for one of the gang to rescue him. It was to no avail.
He smiled cautiously as he began. “That which I most fear. . .”
“Yep.”
“Sheesh, got me there. I mean, just between you and me?”
“My lips are sealed.”
“The truth is,” he said, “I’ve always been afraid of dying young.”
“Dying young?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit. You push the edge all the time. Cliff-diving, hang gliding out at Point Reyes, all that survivalist stuff you guys do out in the desert.”
“No, Rachel. I mean, I think that’s why I do it. The waste of dying without having fully lived. Scares the hell out of me.”
“I’ve never seen you afraid,” Rachel countered, regarding him skeptically. “I’ve never even seen you flinch.”
“That’s the point,” Mickey said. “It’s probably death defiance. I just think it would be fucking tragic to pass some mundane existence in the ’burbs, only to get run down in some shopping mall parking lot.”
“Tragic?”
“Sure. In some ways, I’ve always thought I’d die young. Half expected it even. Something I saw in the desert once. Maybe it was the peyote or the Budweiser. It made me want to do it all. To cheat death, to outrace my demons. I wanted to see every continent. Taste every dish. Seduce every pretty girl.”
“Every one?”
“Present company excluded, of course.”
“I should be flattered?”
“Roomies’ girl.” He was flirting with his eyes now, his trademark “aw shucks” look. “Hell, Rachel. You’re like a sister.”
“Story of my life!” She was laughing now, but exasperated. There was something simple and pure that rang true in his confession. “I wonder if you ever had—”
“Hey! What’s this heavy tête-a-tête? Gotta share!” It was Barry, leaning in to break up the private moment he’d spied out. Before Mickey or Rachel could respond, Barry was shouting over them at their comrade. “C’mon, Lee! Rejoin the party! Gotta keep up, my man.”
Lee appeared sullen, a bit far gone. He gazed warily at the shot glass in his right hand as Branko tried to explain something he wasn’t following.
“Truth or Dare!” A shout erupted. It had been Barry’s idea. Truth or Dare, the guys’ adaptation of a game of self-revelation—a game where they threatened to expose their deepest secrets.
Barry was circling now, grinning, a bit too eager as he roared: “Branko goes first!”
Branko regarded him coolly for a moment, thinking as he chewed, a bit of onion caught in his brown moustache. The others had gathered, so Branko played along, turning first to Alexander.
“OK, let’s start with you, Alexander,” Branko began matter-of-factly.
“What the hell are you doing living here in academic nirvana with a bunch of engineers and business whizzes? Shouldn’t you be off writing novels somewhere? Don’t writers need to go suffer for a while before they have anything to say?”
Alexander smirked, but did not miss a beat. “I’m a plant,” he said. “I’m spying for Reader’s Digest, collecting material on how The Chosen Ones live.”
He reached and sampled one of Branko’s fries before continuing. “My assignment is to chronicle
the rise of an entire generation devoid of ideology. You’ll all end up as characters in my first bad novel.”
He raised his glass and gave a slight bow.
“Pretty weak, Bonner,” Mickey said, moving to reclaim the lead. “Barry, you’re next. Your question is for Booth.”
Booth was grinning, his thick red curls splayed in several directions. “Martin B., OK,” Barry hesitated. “Would you sell out your country for a million bucks, or—”
“Or a babe!” Mickey added.
“Yeah, a hot one,” Barry parroted.
Booth pressed forward, ever earnest, struggling to play against type, emboldened by the whiskey shooters Mickey and Barry had been pushing. “I won’t need to. I will be Secretary of State, preaching democracy to the developing world, and bringing freedom to the godless Communists. Then I’ll step down and tour the nation giving inspirational speeches with Billy Graham.”
“For a fee, of course,” Mickey interjected.
“Of course. A big fee. I will have a limo and driver, and run diplomatic errands for the UN before I retire home to Iowa to raise thoroughbreds. I’ll be livin’ the dream, guys.”
Next, Booth threw a lob to Rachel, something about describing “perfect foreplay.”
“A kiss,” she offered, swigging her beer. “A good kiss.”
But the boys leaned in, wanting more. “C’mon, girl,” Mickey demanded. “Give it up!”
“It’s that simple. That’s all you need, really. A kiss that communicates. Mischief. Intimacy. Desire. An invitation to an unveiling.”
Mickey let out a long whistle of admiration to break the awkward silence that followed. Rachel had captivated her male audience, as usual.
Then, a bit sobered, she turned to Branko and asked him why, if his parents were European, he seemed obsessed with studying all things Chinese.
The Mandarin Club Page 8