Deadly Beloved (7 page)

“I’m fine. I’ve got everything. Don’t I have some kind of appointment at quarter after two?”

“Right.” Tiffany scratched her head. “The people from the Steel Council. They gave us a lot of money for the campaign.”

“I thought I had some health care people. Pennsylvanians for a Single Payer System. Something like that.”

“Pennsylvanians for Health Care Reform,” Tiffany said. “That’s not until four. You have the Girls Club people before that. About the day-at-the-office thing. The role models.”

Julianne went back to the powder room. The skirt and blouse she had shucked off were lying on the floor. She wadded them into a ball and stuffed them into her big canvas bag. Her canvas bags were like Bella Abzug’s hats. They had become a media trademark. Tiffany had followed her to the door. Julianne got the bright red dress with its big splotches of flowers off the hanger over the radiator and started to put it on.

“One of the things about not having been particularly attractive as a teenager,” Julianne said judiciously, “is that you aren’t unduly worried about the depredations of middle age. Did anything exciting happen while I was out?”

“Not exciting, exactly,” Tiffany said. “I did the clippings.”

“And?”

“There was a paragraph about you in a piece in
The New Yorker
about women being elected to Congress. There was a paragraph about you in a piece in
Boston
magazine too, but it was just a reference, because you did all that work with the Environmental Jobs Council last year. I think they’re trying to start the same kind of thing in Massachusetts.”

“That’s nice.”

“It was a slow day, really. Not like during the election, when you were in the papers every day. I think I kind of miss it.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, I suppose it must have been horrible for you,” Tiffany said, “being followed around like that. But for the rest of us, it was neat. It was like being connected to a celebrity. I mean, you
are
a celebrity.”

“I’m a congresswoman. It’s not the same thing.”

“During the election I could go into bars and if I said I worked for you, fifteen guys wanted to take me home. I’m not kidding. I never do that well usually. Most of the time, guys in bars go for the tall types. The model-actress types. They don’t want secretaries.”

“You could try not going to bars.”

“You can’t find men if you don’t go to bars,” Tiffany said. “You don’t know what it’s like out there. It’s terrible, really. There aren’t enough men to go around. And all the men there just want to get laid.”

There was nothing she could do about her hair, Julianne decided. Usually she wore it up, teased and colored and wrapped until it looked half fake, but today it was limp and colorless and it was going to stay that way. Julianne went through the drawers of the vanity until she found a bright red scarf. She twirled it into a band and tied it around her head. She reminded herself of one of those sweater-girl publicity stills from the forties, except that her face was far too heavy and far too lined. She rummaged in her canvas bag again and came up with a pair of long, dangling earrings. They were turquoise and silver and constructed of hundreds of tiny pieces, each meant to swing and sound in the wind.

“There,” Julianne said.

“There was something else,” Tiffany told her. “In the clippings. Not about you.”

“Not about me?”

“It was about that friend of yours. At least, I think she’s a friend of yours. One of those women in that picture you keep on your desk.”

“Oh? Which of those women?”

“Karla Parrish.”

Julianne left the powder room for the outer office. There was a picture of Karla Parrish on her desk, although Karla hadn’t been the point of it. The picture had been taken in one of the living rooms of Jewett House at Vassar College in 1967. All the women in the picture had been juniors then, and only one of them was in the least bit noticeable. That, of course, was Patsy MacLaren. Julianne picked up the picture and then put it down again. She hated looking at it. She had no idea why she still kept it.

“So what about Karla Parrish,” she asked Tiffany. “Does she live in Philadelphia?”

“I don’t know where she lives. The article didn’t say. She’s a famous photographer.”

“Is she?”

“She takes pictures of war zones and refugees and things like that. She has a photograph on the cover of the Sunday
Times Magazine
this week. New York.
The New York Times
, I mean.”

“I’d heard she was taking photographs,” Julianne said. “I hadn’t realized she was that successful.”

“The article made her sound like the greatest thing since Matt Brady. ‘Documenting the horrors of the twentieth century.’ ‘Bearing witness to the atrocities of our age.’ ‘Arguably responsible for more relief efforts than the UN.’ That kind of thing.”

“I’m impressed,” Julianne said. Actually, she was more than impressed. She would not have expected Karla to get so far. She would have expected her to disappear back into the hinterlands somewhere, playing assistant to the president of the local savings and loan.

Tiffany picked up the photograph and studied it. “Is she the pretty one?” she asked.

“No,” Julianne said. “She’s the one in the turtleneck.”

“Oh. You never can tell, can you? Did the pretty one get famous?”

“No. No, she didn’t.”

“Well, there you are. It’s never the people you expect to get successful that get successful, is it? I’d have thought the pretty one would end up as a movie star, but I don’t recognize her and you’re a congresswoman and Karla Parrish is a famous photographer. She’s coming to Philadelphia, by the way. Karla Parrish, I mean.”

“I know you mean Karla Parrish. Why is she coming here?”

“To give some kind of talk at Penn. On photography, you know. That was what the story was about. It was in the
Inquirer
today. Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity.”

“A good opportunity for what?”

“For a photo op or whatever. You know. You and Karla Parrish. You’re old friends. You’re both concerned with refugees and relief efforts and that kind of thing. I thought it would get us some good press. If the two of you met up again, you know, in public.”

Tiffany had put the photograph down on the desk. Julianne picked it up herself and looked it over. There were six of them in this picture, but only four of them counted: Patsy MacLaren and Karla Parrish and Liza Verity and Julianne herself. Julianne couldn’t even remember the names of the other two. She put the picture back down on the desk and rubbed her forehead.

“Well,” she said. “A photo op. That’s fine, if Karla wants to go along with it.”

“I’ll contact her people. It’ll probably be a good career move for her too.”

“Maybe it will be.”

“I’ll get you the things you need for the health care people,” Tiffany said. “There isn’t much you need to know. There’s nothing you’re going to be able to do for them this year anyway.”

“Mmm,” Julianne said.

Tiffany hurried out of the office and shut the door behind her. Julianne picked up the photograph again. She could remember buying this frame, the urgency she had felt at the time to keep this remembrance pristine, to make sure it didn’t tear or fade. She had just come back from India and just started law school. She was living in a fifth-floor walk-up only two blocks from the university and eating Chef Boyardee macaroni cold out of cans at least three times a week because she couldn’t afford to use her electricity for cooking. She rubbed the side of her face with her fingertips and thought that she ought to grow her nails long and paint them scarlet. If you were going to transform yourself from nothing into something, you ought to take care to make the transformation complete.

“If you could go back and do your life over again,” Tiffany had asked her once, “what would you do that was different?”

“I’ve got the sheets you need if you want to look at them,” Tiffany said now, coming in with a stack of papers. “Do you want to see these people as soon as they come in, or do you want me to make them wait?”

“I’ll see them as soon as they come in,” Julianne said.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Tiffany asked her. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine,” Julianne said.

Then she looked down and made herself concentrate on the lists of figures on health insurance premiums, which didn’t matter because, like most things in life, they could only get worse.

A
S SOON AS LIZA
Verity came in from work she saw the red light blinking on her answering machine. There was something about the way it was blinking that made her not want to hear the message—although, God only knew, even Liza knew, answering machines didn’t have moods. Maybe it was just that she wasn’t in a very good mood herself. Sometimes Liza didn’t really mind the way things had turned out. Life seemed to be a matter of choices, and these were the choices she had made. Other times—now—Liza knew it was all wrong. She had graduated from
Vassar
, for God’s sake, and back in the days when it was an all-women’s college and just as hard to get into for girls as Harvard and Yale were for boys. Liza Verity, class of ’69. Women like her did not end up wearing a nurse’s uniform nine hours a day, not even as the heads of ICU wards. They didn’t end up saying “yes, doctor” and “no, doctor” to overgrown boys who had barely had the grades to make it into Penn State. They became doctors, or lawyers, or congresswomen, like Julianne. At the very least, they married rich men and lived splendidly somewhere in the Northeast Power Corridor and hired Martha Stewart herself to cater their daughters’ graduation parties. Liza threw herself down on her small couch and stretched out her legs. Her white uniform shoes were heavy and awkward. Her white uniform stockings reminded her of the silly things they used to wear when she was first in college, back when miniskirts and being mod were still in vogue. Liza remembered thinking, at the time, that there was no end to possibility. She would just go on and on and on, experiencing everything. She would never have to stop. She would never want to stop. She would never grow up or grow old or find herself in a two-bedroom ranch house on a quarter-acre plot in the worst residential section of Gladwyne, just plain stuck.

I should have done something serious to get myself stuck, Liza thought. I should have had an illegitimate baby or blown up a bank or been in a terrible accident or run through dozens of men.

The red light on the answering machine was still blinking and blinking. Liza stabbed at the play button and threw her head back against the couch, closing her eyes. Her uniform was made of some sort of synthetic material that was always too stiff and too sharp. When she had first been in nursing school, she had gone out of her way to get uniforms in real cotton and not minded the extra expense of having them starched and pressed at a laundry. Then the other women in her class had found out what she was doing and it had been impossible. They had all started out half sure that she was just some stinking rich bitch, coming in from Vassar and thinking she was better than everybody else. After they knew about the uniforms, they wouldn’t talk to her at all.

“Liza,” a voice said from the answering machine. “This is Courtney Hazelwood. Would you be available to do special duty work next week?”

Courtney Hazelwood was the head of the pediatrics nursing unit on the fourth floor. She was ten years younger than Liza, but she had gotten further faster, probably because she had no attitude problem. When Courtney Hazelwood said that nurses were serious professionals who deserved more money, more responsibility, and more status, she meant it.

“Liza.” It was a male voice this time. Pompous. Young. Insufferable. “This is Dr. Martinson. Could you call me as soon as possible about the Brevoric case? You forgot to make some notes on the file.”

Liza made a face at the machine. Dr. Martinson was barely thirty. He thought he was the next best thing to God, but he was always screwing up, and that was what this would turn out to be. Liza never forgot to make notes on the file. She was meticulous. Dr. Martinson, though, always forgot to make half the documentation he was supposed to. He was always in trouble with the administration about it, because they all had to be so careful with the legal ramifications of everything these days.

“Liza?”

Liza sat up a little straighter on the couch. The voice belonged to Julianne Corbett. Julianne never called anymore, not since the election. She had gotten to be too damned important to bother with Liza Verity. Of course, before the election, while she was campaigning, Julianne had been behaving like the best friend Liza would ever have in the world. Liza had organized a party so that Julianne could meet all the really important people in the nurses’ union.

“Liza, listen,” Julianne’s voice said. “I just found out something wonderful. Karla Parrish is coming to Philadelphia.”

Liza’s eyes went automatically to the small oak liquor cabinet on the other side of the room, where she kept all her important photographs in frames. Then she looked away, embarrassed, because of course the picture wasn’t there. She had taken it down nearly five years before. It makes us all look silly, she thought now. Like the heroines of one of those women’s novels who all thought they were the best and the brightest but who had turned out to have failed lives and second-rate lovers instead.

“Anyway,” Julianne was saying, “you should call me, because I’ve had the best idea. I think we ought to have a party for Karla when she comes, don’t you? A kind of Vassar College mini-reunion. She’s spent the last ten years or something in Africa and I’m sure she’s just dying to catch up, so why don’t you give me a call as soon as you have the chance and we can work it all out. My number is—”

Liza reached out and turned off the machine. She knew what Julianne’s number was—or at least what her office number was. She didn’t have Julianne’s home number, which was supposed to be all right because Julianne used call forwarding. It was probably just a way for Julianne to keep her at a distance. So was this business about getting Liza to call Julianne back. Julianne knew perfectly well what Liza’s work schedule was. Liza had had the same one for two and a half years.