Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Five Fortunes / 239
“You sound great, lovie.”
“I think things are pretty good,” Jill agreed.
Business was slow in January, and Dagmar was still at home living on a brew of lemon, ginger, and garlic, so Amy had no one to play with. She accepted an invitation to a lunch party up on Beekman Place, a bridal shower.
“Is there a theme?” she asked the bride’s godmother.
“The boudoir,” said Elayne with a giddy laugh. Amy knew how to shop for that. She was thoroughly versed in the best places to find silk charmeuse, not rayon, trimmed with real lace.
On the Friday she took a taxi to the restaurant. It was a little French one, new to her, dark and cozy, the kind of charming neighborhood place New York used to be full of. The party was at the back of the restaurant, where two tables were dressed with place cards and party favors. Amy knew about half the guests, none of them well.
The bride-to-be was sweet and not very pretty. She was dressed in a Chanel suit, or copy, and looked as if she’d much rather be mucking out a stall someplace. She was a very good sport when, over dessert and champagne, she had to open the presents.
As the black teddies and slinky pink nighties emerged from frothy wrappings, Amy slipped off to the ladies’ room. She was thinking of the far-off day when perhaps she would give such a party for Jill.
She happened to glance in the mirror over the bar as she turned to rejoin her table, and for a very long moment her heart ceased to beat.
She could feel all color draining from her face and her hands began to shake. She remembered thinking that this might be the end, she might be going to slip to the floor with a heart stopped cold and die there by the waiter’s station.
Then her heart began to pound, and she flushed so hot that her ears were filled with a roaring. She thought she might pass out from boiling heat rather than silent cold.
In the mirror over the bar she could see in profile a couple at a side table. They were leaning over their glasses, their foreheads almost
240 / Beth Gutcheon
touching. They held hands; they murmured to each other and smiled and smiled, and from time to time the man would kiss, very gently, a knuckle of the girl’s hand. The girl brushed his cheek with her fingertips, a gesture so full of tenderness that it made Amy’s throat ache. The girl was twenty-something, a brunette with wide black eyes and lush, loose hair; she was model-beautiful. The man was Noah.
Amy walked back to her place at the table and assumed a smiling face. A primitive reptile part of her brain enabled her to nod and laugh when the group nodded and laughed, to turn her attentive face to the bride-to-be and seem to watch with interest as yet another package was unwrapped. She drank an entire glass of ice water without knowing she had done it. She swallowed and swallowed, as if the heat of the pounding blood in her head had burned her throat dry.
When she felt marginally calmer, Amy lifted a finger to catch a waiter’s attention. She whispered in his ear, and gave him a lovely smile and a twenty-dollar bill. Then she watched.
The waiter went to the bar, and then to the table where Noah sat with his inamorata. He presented Noah with a perfect martini, straight up, in a chilled glass. He spoke a few words, smiling, and with his head gestured to the back of the room. Amy watched Noah raise the glass and turn to offer a smile of thanks to the giver, expecting to find a former patient perhaps, or an old colleague. Even as far away as she was, she could see his face change color as he saw, instead, his wife, waving hello.
He whipped around in his chair, giving her his back again. He put the drink down as if it were poison, and began talking fast to the young lady. Amy bet she knew the scenario. The girl had been told that the wife was old, ugly, bedridden, deranged. The wife didn’t understand him, hadn’t loved him for years, but wouldn’t give him his freedom. The last thing he would want on the face of the earth was the wife and his mistress face-to-face.
Amy slipped from her chair and whispered to her hostess that she’d been taken ill. She would call tomorrow, don’t get up, please explain to the others later. Then she walked, smiling pleasantly,
Five Fortunes / 241
through the bar, toward the door. As she approached her husband’s table, the young brunette’s eyes locked on hers, her face full of surprise and fear. Amy might have had some sympathy for her if she hadn’t been so full of rage. But steadily, smiling, she held the girl’s eyes.
As she walked past the table, she dropped her wedding rings into Noah’s martini.
H
unt Knox had been wrong about the candidate from Sandpoint. Lloyd Prince was not just a transplant with a big ego. He was a millionaire many times over who had had a religious experience he wanted to share.
“He sounds like a zealot,” said Hunt. It was a meeting of Laurie’s war machine.
“No, he’s not, or at least he conceals it well. He’s an interesting mixture of things, and he’s also smart, and very attractive,” Walter said.
“Does he have an appeal beyond the Christian right?” Laurie’s brother Bliss had agreed to be campaign treasurer, and he was beginning to realize it was going to take more time than he’d thought.
“It’s early days,” said Bunker Elwies, the campaign chair. “We know he’s serious, at least. He’s made a pledge not to take any special-interest money. He’s spending his own.”
“Don’t we call that ‘trying to buy a Senate seat’?”
“Certainly
we’ll
call it that…”
“He’s for balancing the budget, he’s for prayer in schools, an anti-abortion amendment, and absolutely no gun control.”
“What programs does he want to cut?”
“All of them, except environmental ones. ‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves,’ but Mother Earth can’t help herself.”
“Why is this guy a Democrat?” Cinder asked.
“He
was
a Republican,” said Lynn Urbanski. “He switched parties down in Orange County to run against Bob Dornan.”
242
Five Fortunes / 243
“So it’s the same deal here?”
“Exactly. He didn’t expect any Democratic competition. The last serious race against Jimbo was Puck Brown in 1984.”
“Would the party support him?”
“To some extent.”
“He doesn’t care if they do or not. He’s rich.”
“How rich?”
“I told you. Very. And he’s willing to spend it.”
“It’s going to force us to spend a lot of early money,” said Laurie.
“Yeah. Well.” Welcome to the real world.
“Could someone please explain this guy to me?” said Hunt. “Why here? Why now? He’s not from Idaho.”
“He was in a head-on collision he never should have survived,”
Lynn explained. It was a story she knew well, part of Prince’s press kit. “He was visited by an angel while he was trapped in the wreckage waiting for the Jaws of Life. The angel told him he was being spared for a reason. This is the reason. That’s the best explanation I can give you.”
“An angel,” said Hunt.
“That’s right.”
“Bright nightgown? Wings?”
“He couldn’t see him. He had too much blood in his eyes,” said Lynn.
“Aiyiyi,” said Hunt, and fished in his pocket for absent cigarettes.
“So the message is Christian self-reliance; clean, simple living; and a pure environment.”
“So he walked away from this wreck? What was he driving?”
“He didn’t walk away. He’s in a wheelchair.”
“He’s in a wheelchair?”
“Didn’t you know that?”
“We’re up against a handsome born-again zillionaire Yalie in a
wheelchair
? Aiyiyiyiyi.” There was another silence. Finally Hunt asked, “How are his numbers?”
“Name recognition isn’t high, but he hasn’t really begun to spend yet. His numbers are real good up in the Panhandle, where he’s 244 / Beth Gutcheon
known, good among the Greenies, and surprisingly high among transplants.”
“I thought those computer people were all cappuccino liberals,”
Hunt said.
“No, it turns out the cappuccino liberals move to Oregon. The ones who want school prayer and elk hunting with assault weapons move here.”
“I have to go,” said Laurie. “I have a fund-raiser in Lewiston.”
Y
ou have reached the offices of Dr. Morris Fischbein,” said Jill’s answering machine. “Dr. Fischbein is with a patient.
Please leave a message at the sound of the tone.” There was a beep.
Jill was sitting in a half lotus on a cushion on the floor. She had turned herself to the window so that the morning sun would shine on her eyelids as she meditated.
From the machine’s speaker, she heard her mother’s voice.
“Hello, Jilly—I’m sorry I missed you, and—”
Jill had practically fallen over the phone.
“Mummy?”
“Oh, honey! You’re there!”
“
I’m
here,” said Jill. “Where are
you
? I left three messages!”
“I’m so sorry. Have you been worried?”
Jill, who had been frantic, didn’t answer at once as she absorbed the fact that her mother was once more at the other end of the phone line, where she was supposed to be, and not dead in a ditch somewhere.
“Oh, well,” said Jill. She was recovering.
“Is everything all right with you?” Amy asked her daughter.
“Yes, sure. If you’re all right. But are you and Daddy out of town or something?”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“No.”
Amy gave a short laugh, which sounded to Jill a little bleak.
245
246 / Beth Gutcheon
Amy took a deep breath. “I’ve left your father.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say good-bye. It was a little sudden.”
“What do you mean, say good-bye? Where are you?”
“I’m in Idaho.”
“Mother!”
The two were silent on the line at opposite ends of the country, listening to each other breathe. Jill, who had been standing over her desk, now carried the phone to her bed and sat down with her back to the window, as if she wanted to huddle over her feelings and sort them out without even the sun seeing them.
Jill said, “What happened?”
Amy described the tryst at the restaurant. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this. He’s your father. But I didn’t want you to think I had left you for no reason.”
Jill was silent. In a way, she really didn’t want to know any more about this than she had to. But…
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well…I guess I can understand that.”
“Your father doesn’t know where I am, by the way, and I don’t want him to. I want to decide what to do about this without him pressuring me.”
“Okay.”
“Does that make things too hard for you? You may want to go home, or spend time with him. You wouldn’t be able to be completely honest with him.”
“I’ll deal,” said Jill.
At the other end of the line, in Coeur d’Alene, Amy became aware that her elderly mother was on the stairs and would soon be in the kitchen. “I can’t talk much longer, love. I’ll call you soon though, and you can call me anytime. You have the number at Granny’s?”
Jill said she did, and sent her love to her grandmother. They said good-bye.
Five Fortunes / 247
A girl named Lesley who lived at the end of the corridor appeared at Jill’s door. She was from Edinburgh, and she called Jill Jillian.
“Can I come in? I heard your phone ring. Was it your mum?”
Jill nodded.
“Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She’s left my father.”
Lesley plumped down on the bed. She was holding an empty mug, probably looking to borrow some instant coffee or a tea bag.
Lesley’s mother seemed to have an imperfect idea of what was a passable amount of pocket money for a student in New York City.
But Jill didn’t mind Lesley’s borrowing. It made a good excuse for her to visit, and everyone knew that Jill had a virtual grocery store of herbal tea and ramen noodles in her room. Jill seemed to be living on air-popped corn and green Chinese dieter’s tea, a powerful diur-etic known to have killed at least one young mother in California.
This was thought to be a bold improvement on the meals you got on the food plan.
“Does she do that often?” Lesley asked. “Leave your father?”
“No,” said Jill. “I don’t know why not, though.”
“Is she coming back?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“What do you think?”
Jill shrugged. “I can picture it going either way.”
Lesley was thoughtful. “Is it a shock?”
“Yes.”
What would happen if her mother didn’t go back? They would get divorced? Where would they live? That is, where would her mother live? And would that, then, be home? How could it be?
“Are you freaking?” Lesley asked. Jill realized she had been completely lost for some time, maybe a minute. She took a deep breath.
“No. I think I need to get outside. I think I need a long walk.”
“I wish
I
could take a walk. I have to write ten pages on Cindy Sherman. You don’t have any diet cocoa, do you?”
Jill did. She gave Lesley a packet and then burrowed in her closet for her snow boots.
248 / Beth Gutcheon
When she opened the door to the outside, the bright expanse of snow seemed blinding. Cold air stung her eyes and nose, and burned the inside of her lungs. She walked happily toward the gate out to 117th Street, but when she turned the corner to strike out toward Columbia, she walked almost directly into a dark figure. She opened her mouth to scream and strained to make a sound, but could not.
It was MacDuff.
A
my had gone directly home from the restaurant Friday afternoon, packed a suitcase, and taken a taxi to Kennedy. From there she had taken the first flight to Spokane and spent what remained of the night in an airport motel. She woke early, still on New York time, dressed in corduroy slacks and snow boots, and rented a car as soon as the agency opened. She was at her mother’s kitchen door before Retta had finished breakfast.
The house, which had once been full of Amy’s skis and skates and bikes, and of her father’s hunting rifles and fishing gear, was now largely a domain of stacked magazines,
TV Guides
, and remote controls for the giant TV. Amy and Noah had had a huge satellite dish installed for Retta one Christmas. Amy had been afraid it would be too complicated for her mother, but when she and Jill arrived at winter break, they found that Retta could ring variations on it that even Jill didn’t understand. Retta’s mother had been born in a sod hut in North Dakota, and she thought a lonely old age with only the sound of the wind for company was the shits.