Amanda Bright @ Home (20 page)

“I know, but—”

“But?” He raised his hands, as if to say,
So what
?

John Barrington the Fourth took the microphone case. “I’ll put this in the car and meet you over there.”

Alan was looking at her meaningfully now. Amanda averted her eyes and said, “Look, you go, okay?”

“I’d really like you to come.” He drew her aside. “Is something wrong?”

Amanda resented the intimate scene he was creating in front of the others. One of the actresses—the activist—had returned from the bathroom in her street clothes and was watching them with interest.

“No, nothing’s wrong. I’m tired and—”

“We don’t have to stay late. I don’t want to stay late. Would you rather go somewhere—
just the two of us
?”

“No!” Amanda jerked away so sharply that Alan could no longer be uncertain of her intent. A flash of hurt crossed his face, but he got rid of it quickly. When he spoke again, his voice was sulky and defiant.

“Fine.
I’m
going for a drink. Let’s go, Theresa,” he said.

Only then did Amanda realize that she had trapped herself. Evidently, she no longer had a ride home. A taxi from out here would cost at least thirty dollars. She had brought just a few dollars with her and a credit card.

“Alan,” she said, trying to sound as friendly as she could manage, “I came in your car, remember? If you go for a drink, how will I get home?”

“I’m sure the front desk could call you a cab.”

“Are you going to the District?” asked Theresa, slinging her bag over her shoulder.

“Uh-huh.” Amanda was still staring after Alan, not quite believing he was prepared to treat her so casually.

“I can give you a lift. I’d like to get home, too.”

“Thanks.”

Amanda collected her purse from her chair. Alan preoccupied himself with the lighting equipment.

Amanda closed her front door gratefully, the smallness of her house for once enveloping her like a tight embrace. The baby-sitter appeared on the upstairs landing, carrying an empty bowl of popcorn. Hannah was the fourteen-year-old daughter of their neighbor. She had, in the past year, developed the habit of answering adult questions like an unhelpful bureaucrat: usually when Amanda asked how everything had gone, Hannah would look at her feet and answer in a monosyllable. But tonight Hannah greeted Amanda excitedly.

“You got a phone call from Susie Morris,” she said, clomping down the stairs. “She’s, like, that person from TV?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Cool.”

Amanda waited for Hannah to reveal what the message was, but Hannah flipped her short, oily brown hair and continued, “She was, like, totally nice to me. Asked me about my school. She’s doing, like, a show with that guy from MTV?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Cool.”

Amanda took the empty bowl from Hannah and carried it to the kitchen. “Did she want me to call her back?”

“Oh yeah—she said it was, like, really urgent. It’s about dinner Sunday night.”

“Dinner?”

“She says she has a friend in from out of town and wants to bring him over.” Hannah seemed to find this improbable—that Susie Morris would wish to dine with the likes of Amanda. Only one thought occurred to Amanda—Susie wanted to bring over Jim Hochmayer? This struck her as equally improbable.

“Okay. I’ll call her.”

“How do you, like, know Susie Morris?”

“We went to college together.”

“Wow. She doesn’t seem—” Hannah stopped herself.

“That old?” Amanda finished for her.

Amanda noticed a scrap of paper beside the telephone with Hannah’s loopy scrawl upon it.

“What’s this?”

“Oh—sorry. That’s another message. For Bob.”

Amanda read the name: Grace Bertelli.

“I don’t know if I spelled it right.”

Amanda felt her insides seize up, as if she had been bitten by something poisonous.

Chapter Thirteen

EVERYTHING ABOUT JIM HOCHMAYER seemed to spill over the sides. His long arms and legs splayed beyond the canvas deck chair; his great, booming voice reverberated into the neighboring gardens. Each time Amanda returned from the kitchen—first bearing hors d’oeuvres, then drinks (“A beer will do fine and don’t bother with a glass—I’ll drink it the way God meant it to be drunk”), she was jolted by the sight of a billionaire in her backyard. Hochmayer, however, seemed fully at ease. He was a man who gave the impression that he would be fully at ease anywhere, whether it was eating beans out of a can on the Texas range or escorting the queen of England in to dinner. If he was uncomfortable in his rickety chair, he didn’t show it. If the sedentary heat of the evening was causing sweat to appear in the creases of his shirt and pants, he said nothing about it. He helped himself to the mozzarella balls and slightly stale French bread as eagerly as if they were delicacies from Fauchon. Every so often he would pause in his conversation or interrupt someone else to offer Amanda a compliment—and not some all-purpose compliment but a custom-made one.

“Did you put rosemary in the oil?” he’d exclaim. “Damn if it isn’t delicious.”

Susie sat only a few inches away from Hochmayer and gazed at him so rapturously that Amanda worried Hochmayer might wilt under the klieg lights of her affection. But Hochmayer took Susie in stride the way he did everything else, and now and then he would direct one of his bespoke compliments to her: “Tell me, has anyone ever seen eyelashes as long as this lady’s? How long are they anyway? ’Bout two feet?”

Bob, meanwhile, struggled to light the charcoal grill. Small puffs of smoke rose like Indian signals, hovered for a few seconds, then died away. After a few minutes, Hochmayer lifted his tall frame from his seat and excused himself to join his host.

“Bob, my man,” he said good-naturedly, inspecting the bag of charcoal, “I applaud you for going for the real stuff and not caving into those sissy, self-starting briquettes …”

“I thought they
were
self-starting.” Bob examined the bag for himself.

“… but if you don’t mind a word of advice from a Texan who’s been around a few barbecues, you’re going to need some kindling.”

“Kindling?”

“Uh-huh.”

Hochmayer began hunting under the straggly bushes that lined the fence. Amanda now confronted the extraordinary spectacle of her guest—in his khaki linen pants and shirt that probably cost more than one of Bob’s suits—down on his knees, pawing through the dirt. Susie shrugged and smiled as if to say,
Isn’t he the most incredible man you’ve ever met
?

“Now, where I come from,” Hochmayer was explaining from beneath a shrub, “we use something called mesquite. It’s basically a weed that grows like brushfire. Until a few years ago no one knew what to do with it. Then some guy gets this bright Idea to sell it to easterners. It’s no longer a weed, you understand, it’s a ‘gourmet’ grilling wood. Huge industry now, shipping our weeds to you folks. Whoa, what’s this?”

Hochmayer held up a mud-encrusted toy stock car. “Bet someone was mighty upset to lose that.” He handed it to Amanda and continued his search. She prayed he would not reach the corner bushes where she had concealed the children’s plastic yard junk. Soon Hochmayer seemed satisfied with the handfuls of dried mulch, broken twigs, and old Popsicle sticks he had managed to amass, and after requesting some newspaper from Bob, he covered the rubbish with coals and stoked them into a steady flame.

“Give it forty minutes or so, and you’ll have a good cooking fire,” Hochmayer said, patting Bob on the back and guiding him back to the circle of chairs.

Amanda replenished everyone’s drinks and went to take the seat next to Hochmayer. He leaped to his feet and remained standing until Amanda had sat down before he took his own chair again. Amanda was so surprised that she could not help glancing at Bob, who was chatting with Susie and had not noticed.

Hochmayer caught Amanda’s faint look of disapproval and immediately sought to dispel it. “Your Bob’s a real good fellow,” Hochmayer said, sotto voce but not so sotto that Bob’s ears missed it. “Clever. Honest. Solid. A fine lawyer.”

Amanda was not much in the mood to hear Bob’s praises sung, but she acknowledged Hochmayer’s observation, and allowed herself to believe, for the first time since Susie had asked to bring Hochmayer to dinner, that the evening was not going to be a total disaster. Darkness had begun to coat the tips of the trees, and the fireflies commenced their doomed, incendiary courtship. Their twinkling against the deepening black-green foliage veiled the garden’s ugliness, and as the light dwindled to the glowing pools cast by two citronella candles, Amanda’s astonishment and anxiety at having Hochmayer in her house gradually subsided, too. Susie had brought boy friends to dinner many times before: she claimed that she liked to audition potential mates in a familial atmosphere. Amanda doubted that this was true: the domestic scene at their house resembled less a Norman Rockwell painting of family life than it did an advertisement for birth control. More likely (Amanda suspected), Susie used Amanda’s family as a flattering backdrop to her own beauty, just as florists will showcase the exotic loveliness of their orchids against an arrangement of ordinary ferns.

Still, this theory did not explain why Susie would want to bring Hochmayer to dinner. He clearly needed no inferior setting to be persuaded of Susie’s uniqueness. And if this was a test of some sort, Amanda could not see what was being tested—unless it was Hochmayer’s tolerance for bad food, which, come to think of it, might not be a bad qualification for matrimony. Yet if Hochmayer truly wished to visit with Susie’s “oldest and dearest friends”—the excuse Susie had given her—why had they not simply gone out somewhere? Susie insisted that a home-cooked meal would be a real treat for a man like Hochmayer, who was always traveling. And Bob—who was, if anything, even more nervous about entertaining Hochmayer than Amanda—thought it would be wiser not to be seen in public dining with a man who would be one of Justice’s star witnesses at the next day’s Megabyte hearings in the Senate.

“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it,” Bob had said. “It’s just that it might be taken the wrong way—you know, the Justice department getting cozy with Megabyte’s enemies.”

“It’s purely social,” Amanda countered.

“Yes, but appearances in Washington often matter more than facts, and I don’t want to take the risk.”

“Well, I don’t want to take the risk of entertaining a billionaire—good God, what are we going to serve him?”

Yet within twenty minutes of Hochmayer’s arrival, his easy nature had convinced Amanda that having him to their house had been an inspired idea. The children had been unusually cooperative, agreeing to go to bed before the guests arrived in exchange for an extra half hour of cartoons the next morning. Amanda had planned a simple dinner on the assumption that Hochmayer would see through any attempts to impress him with fussy food. The swell of the cicadas’ overture relaxed her nerves, and Amanda sipped her wine and followed along as the conversation took pleasant, meandering turns. Bob and Hochmayer seemed to have come to some silent agreement not to raise the Megabyte case before dinner; instead they discussed Susie’s new television show, which had debuted just a few days before. Distressingly, the debut had garnered few reviews, and those that had appeared were dismissive—
talking airheads
was the subhead in the
Post
’s brief notice—but Hochmayer expounded so ardently on the show’s certain success that for the moment they were all swept up by his confidence and enthusiasm.

“I tell you there is a market for this sort of program. And Susie here’s got enough charisma to launch an entire network,” he said, with a fond look at Susie.

As Amanda rose to check one last time on the rice, the screen of the back door squeaked open and a sleepy Sophie padded out onto the terrace, clutching a small blanket. The little girl hesitated to draw too near, but stood shyly a few feet away, her eyes darting from adult to adult.

“I can’t thleep.”

“Sophie!” Amanda was about to scoop the child up and carry her back to bed when she noticed Hochmayer’s enchanted expression.

“Get a load of those curls! Come here, my princess!”

It was not like Sophie to take to strangers, especially strange men, but she rushed into Hochmayer’s outstretched arms, and he pulled her up onto his knee.

“Sophie,” Bob said sternly. “It’s way past your bedtime.”

“I was thcared,” she told Hochmayer.

“Scared? Well you better stay here with Uncle Jim for a few minutes,” he cooed, jiggling her up and down on his knee and whinnying like a horse. Susie fastened a melting gaze on the two of them and, to Amanda’s utter amazement, began praising Sophie’s hitherto unremarked-upon virtues.

“Sophie’s smart as a whip, too, aren’t you, sweetie? Not just cute, but brainy!”

“Got that from your mommy, didn’t you, princess?” Hochmayer said, winking at Bob.

Hochmayer only agreed to relinquish the little girl when Amanda announced that dinner was ready.

“They’re just magical at that age, aren’t they?” he marveled as Amanda led Sophie away. “I missed my own children’s growing up. Curse myself every day for it. Worked too damn hard. I look at them now—why, my boy practically towers over his old man. He’s got feet the size of school buses. I think of him back when he was all chubby cheeks and”—he chuckled—“so filthy that you could smell him coming from a mile away. Thought his daddy was the greatest hero who ever walked God’s earth.”

He smiled sadly. “You can’t have them back that way again for one minute. Not for one damn minute.”

“How old are your children now?” Amanda asked, pausing at the screen door.

“Jim Junior’s just graduated from college. My daughter Katie’s a sophomore—stunning girl. A regular spitfire, like this one.” He nodded his head toward Susie, who wriggled with pleasure.

Bob carried in a platter of smoking kabobs and set it down in the center of the dining room table.

“I think I may have overcooked them a little. It was hard to tell out there.”

The preassembled kabobs, which had looked so plump and appetizing on the “ready-to-grill” counter at Fresh Farms, had shriveled to half their original size.