Amanda Bright @ Home (24 page)

“Such a lovely house, isn’t it?”

They all obediently admired the lit hull of the Saunders residence. “It’s a perfect night for a party, too. The rain seems to have cooled everything off.”

Bob, who had been looking desperately around for a drink, grabbed a glass of white wine from a passing tray and took several large gulps as if it were lemonade. Amanda, sensing she might be called upon to drive later, accepted a glass of mineral water.

At that moment Colin Fenshaw, abandoning all pretense, tugged at his throat again and said, “Caught you last week on
Left/Right
. Thought you did well. You were in a tough spot.”

Bob’s face lost its hunted expression. He shifted bashfully and said, “Not as tough as this week.”

“Yeah—must be quite a thing to be the target of a guy like Mike Frith.” Fenshaw shook his head, impressed. “You must be doing something right.”

“That’s one way to look at it, I guess.”

“It’s the only way. I mean, where does Frith get off acting like a martyr? The guy’s a bully. If you ask me”—here Fenshaw nodded deferentially at Bob—“not that I’m an expert in antitrust or anything—but the whole case raises important issues of whether consent decrees are going to be enforced …”

Fenshaw began dissecting the case as if it were a law school exam problem. More guests began to drift over, and soon a small huddle of people had gathered around Bob. Bob, rather than shrinking from the attention, entered into a friendly debate with Fenshaw; Amanda noticed that the other people’s interest fell off when Fenshaw began to speak and only revived when Bob replied.

Presently, Christine returned. She directed everyone to help themselves to the buffet and find a seat at one of the small, candlelit tables overlooking the pool.

“Of course, Bob,
you
must sit next to me,” she insisted, sparkling with charm, and leading him away.

If Amanda had suspected this party was not the last-minute affair Christine had claimed, her first glimpse of the lavish array of food confirmed it. No caterer could have thrown this together with just a few days’ notice. There were two chefs working at opposite ends of the buffet table, one carving a huge side of beef, the other preparing pasta to order. Waiters dipped in and out to replenish serving dishes heaped with salads, shrimp, and chilled lobster.

“That’s Bob Clarke—you know, that guy from Justice who’s involved in the Megabyte hearings,” Amanda heard the man ahead of her in line say to his wife. They both paused to watch Bob and Christine cross the patio. By the time Amanda finished filling her plate, all the chairs at Bob and Christine’s table had been taken. Bob was regaling the other guests with a story about Sherwood J. Pressman, his face flushed, his hands making exaggerated gestures in the air, while Christine laughed gaily and egged him on.

Amanda took a seat at a nearby table, where two women were engaged in conversation. Her eyes fastened on Christine and Bob, and then on Christine alone, and she marveled at the subtle, yet astonishing—or maybe astonishing because it was so subtle—transformation of her friend’s appearance. Watching Bob’s obvious enjoyment of Christine’s company—apparent every time Christine shook her hair and showed off the trussed cleavage visible through a sheer black blouse—Amanda did not feel jealousy—not exactly. Her friend was cheering Bob up, and Lord knew the man needed cheering. Amanda just wished that it could be she who was applying the balm. Her first impulse in the hours after the story broke had been to defend herself against Bob’s unspoken accusations: yes, she shouldn’t have spoken to “The Ear” reporter, and yes, it was her friend Susie who had brought this all upon them. But wasn’t Bob culpable, too? He was the lawyer, not Amanda, and he should have known better than anyone the risks of entertaining Hoch-mayer. And hadn’t it been Bob who raised the topic of the hearings at dinner? Bob might reply that the discussion had been ethically in bounds—that his words had been willfully misconstrued—but didn’t that excuse apply to Amanda, too? Hadn’t her remarks been perfectly innocent until taken out of context?

Yet Bob had steadfastly refused to discuss what had happened, even as the story grew bigger and bigger by the day. Amanda still did not fully understand why the barbecue had become such a huge story; she only knew that it had. Within twenty-four hours of the
Wall Street Journal
’s editorial, it seemed that every cable news show, political reporter, and gossip columnist in the country had called her house. The phone rang again the instant it was set down. Amanda gave up answering it, and learned to ignore it the way she would a constant jackhammering outside their house. Sherwood J. Pressman left several messages, as did Cathy O’Toole, who threatened a weekend “cover story” in the conservative
National Standard
to which “Bob might like to respond.” Amanda’s e-mail became so overloaded that her computer crashed; at one point, she had to eject a
New York Post
photographer from her front stoop.

Miraculously, the children remained wholly unaware of the turmoil. Ben and Sophie went about their daily routine unconscious of the sharp jolt of dread that awoke Amanda every morning, uninterested in the lengthening silences between mother and father. To the degree Bob said anything to Amanda, it was to insist that he was not angry with her. In the past it had always been Amanda who withdrew in times of trouble, and Bob who pulled her back. Now it was Bob who shrugged off all Amanda’s attempts to console him. He answered her questions in precise sentences or with an exasperated “I have no idea what’s going to happen.” She read that the Justice department had issued a short statement—barely a bleep in the “Federal Watch” column—condemning the news stories as “without substance,” but Amanda also knew that Sussman had asked Bob not to attend any more of the Senate hearings so Sussman could do damage control on Capitol Hill. Amanda did not ask how Bob occupied himself all day. He didn’t give her the chance. When he came home at night, he retreated almost immediately to the bedroom.

Any hope Amanda harbored that Bob’s notoriety might quickly fade was dispelled on the final day of the hearings—yesterday—when Megabyte’s Mike Frith himself took the stand and promptly launched into a long, self-pitying complaint about his persecution by the Department of Justice. The cable channels carried his testimony live: with his pointy-collared beige dress shirt, brown knit tie, and goofy perm, Frith looked exactly like a high school graduation photo snapped in 1977. Yet instead of provoking mockery or the merciless grilling that Bob had predicted, this eccentric corporate baron somehow managed to capture the sympathy of the committee and the press. And when Senator Benson pressed Frith for evidence of persecution, Frith waved a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
editorial and identified Bob (!) as the ringleader of “those faceless bureaucrats who have been working day and night to thwart innovation in this country.”

With that, Amanda’s pity for Bob, her pity for them both, came crashing down upon her. It no longer seemed important who was to blame. Bob’s situation was undeniably worse than hers, and that very evening Amanda sought to make amends with him. Maybe she should have gone about it differently—maybe, she thought now, she shouldn’t have opened with, “Look, Bob, we both have our sides in this …”—but the effect was to shut him down even further. When words failed, she tried touch. She rolled closer to him in bed, but his very skin seemed to radiate hostility toward her. She had never known him to be physically indifferent to her—he had always welcomed her rare initiations of intimacy—and his rejection left Amanda feeling drained of all her power; she hugged her pillow, careful not to let even her ankle stray near his lest it cause him to jerk away.

Two men joined Amanda’s table—husbands, apparently, of the women already seated—and the talk shifted to the sudden explosion of stock prices that summer. Megabyte shares might have slumped, but the rest of the market, which experts had called dangerously overvalued in the spring, was now rocketing rewardingly upward—to the benefit of everybody at the table except Amanda.

Amanda studied the female faces around her. They seemed almost enviably indifferent to everything except their children, their houses, and the stock market. They picked delicately at their plates and inserted an observation whenever a pause in the men’s conversation permitted it.

“Do you go to St. Cuthbert’s as well?” a voice asked from Amanda’s right. It belonged to a woman of about fifty, wearing what looked like a floral housecoat, who seemed politely concerned that Amanda should feel included in the conversation.

St. Cuthbert’s was Christine’s Episcopal church, a membership in which she took as much pride as in her club: two Supreme Court justices and the last vice president worshiped there.

“Oh—uh, no,” Amanda stammered, as she tried to pull her thoughts out of their whirling tempest. “I don’t.” She’d nearly added
go to church
but realized that it might seem offensive to this thoroughly inoffensive woman.

“Yes, I didn’t think I’d seen you there, but then it is a large congregation. Do you go to another in the area?”

“No, we live in the District,” Amanda said, as if that settled it. Seeing that it did not—the woman was still looking at her quizzically—Amanda rummaged around in her mind for the name of a nearby church.

“Christ Church is lovely, if you’re in Georgetown,” the woman continued. “And I’ve always adored the Foundry Methodist—the building at least—”

Amanda nodded, all the while thinking to herself,
C’mon, c’mon—there is that one over by the supermarket, and then that large modern place we pass on the way to school
—what is its name?—
where every Christmas on the front lawn there is a live reenactment of the crêche scene …

“We go to …”—
what is it
?—“St. Paul’s.”

“St. Paul’s Catholic Church?”

“Oh no, not
Catholic
. The St. Paul’s on Massachusetts Avenue.”

The woman looked surprised. “You mean the
new
St. Paul’s
Baptist
Church?”

“Er, yes.”
Jesus!
How did she stumble into that one? Amanda took a large forkful of pasta to tie up her mouth for a few seconds.

“That’s very interesting.”

“Not really.”

“Why, yes it is. I wouldn’t have guessed you were a Baptist.”

“Really?” Amanda sat up stiffly, as if the woman were implying something derogatory about Baptists, her newfound people. “Why do you say that?”

The woman caught the implication and flushed.

“Oh, no reason in particular. It’s just that you seem so … so …” It was now the woman’s turn to grasp for the right answer, and Amanda was not displeased—perhaps it would put an end to the cross-examination.

“… progressive,” the woman said finally. “Progressive people are not usually Baptists. They’re usually
ex
-Baptists.” And she laughed as if she’d just made an especially witty
bon mot.

Amanda did not return the laugh.

“How did you come to be a Baptist?” the woman persisted. “Your parents?”

“Look, we belong to a new movement of Baptists,” Amanda said desperately. “
Neo
-Baptists. We’re quite different.”

The woman looked puzzled. “I’ve never heard of it before. How is it different?”

Amanda fumbled around for what could be a plausible distinction between traditional Baptists and her hypothetical progressive Baptists.

“Well, our minister—she’s a lesbian.”

“I see. That
is,
er, progressive.” The woman made such a considerable effort to sound nonjudgmental that Amanda suddenly felt guilty for leading her on. Why didn’t Amanda admit that she didn’t attend church in the first place? She wasn’t ashamed of the fact—if she just hadn’t been so upset …

Amanda abruptly excused herself to get more food. She took a circuitous route to the buffet, passing Christine and Bob’s table. She paused behind Bob’s back.

“Are you doing okay?” she whispered in his ear.

Bob turned his head, startled.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

Amanda sat down in her chair again, and pushed around a small second helping of pasta. Both of her tablemates were now engaged in separate discussions, leaving Amanda to her worsening mood and untouched food. When the meal ended and the other guests rose to take dessert and coffee in the living room, she stuck to her seat, hoping Bob would come and collect her. He didn’t, and Amanda ended up trailing everyone else through the grand French doors.

Bob stood by the mantel drinking an amber shot of something, surrounded by a fresh cluster of guests. The alcohol had capsized his usual discretion, and his voice was louder than Amanda had ever heard it in company. What little remained of her instincts warned her that she had better pull Bob out of there. She approached him and gently grasped his elbow.

“Bob—”

He was midsentence and ignored her. “—my opinion was that the DOJ was getting scared—”

“Bob,”
she interrupted, this time more emphatically.

The members of the cluster looked to her, and the loss of their attention momentarily cut Bob off. Amanda pinched her husband’s arm in the universal marital code that indicated,
I’m ready to go.

Bob did not move. Instead he said, “Oh, this is my wife, Amanda.”

“Hello, Amanda. We haven’t had the chance to say hello yet this evening.” Brian Saunders, Christine’s husband, leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek. He was a pleasant, golf-shirted man with whom Amanda had never exchanged more than three sentences of conversation. He introduced her to the group, including the Fenshaws again, who all turned back to Bob, eager to hear him finish his sentence.

“I’m sorry, Bob, but I’m really quite tired. Do you mind? …”

“In a minute,” Bob replied stubbornly.

“I really think—”

“Oh, I’m tired, too,” announced Janet Fenshaw, with a knowing look at Amanda.

“About time we thought about heading out, too,” one of the men said to his wife, catching on. He began patting his pockets for his keys.

Bob saw his audience dissolve.