Authors: Frank Baldwin
We walk across a floor covered with sawdust and peanut shells, past a long bar crowded with young grads. Guys with their ties
pulled free of their collars buy drinks for girls who came for happy hour and haven’t left. We find a small wooden booth near
the back and slide in across from each other. The wall beside us is covered with college pennants, two hundred of them at
least, in all colors, and in among them are plastic busts of old rock stars. Buddy Holly, Elvis, Janis Joplin. I can hear
Alanis singing from the jukebox about broken trust as a waitress in a Duke sweatshirt smiles at us and takes a pen from her
hair.
“I’ll take a Bass,” says Jake.
“A glass of chardonnay, please.” She walks off to the bar.
“The friend you’re meeting — she’s in the wedding?” Jake asks.
“Anne’s my maid of honor. She’s in charge of the bridesmaids’ dresses, and I’ve had to put her off all week. She said if I
don’t meet her tonight, they’ll all wear jeans.”
He laughs. “Can I see?” he asks, looking at my ring.
I lift my hand to show it to him. He takes it, his thumb resting on my pulse a second, then lets go as our waitress returns
and places our drinks in front of us. Jake raises his pint and touches it gently to my thin-stemmed wineglass.
“The outside world,” he says. “It’s good to see it again.”
“Thanks for all your help, Jake — it made the difference.”
“Sure.”
I take a sip of wine. I’ve been drinking a full glass before bed for a week now. Since the send-off party last Friday.
“This place reminds me of my frat house,” he says, looking around. “Except for the girls. Is your school up there?”
I scan the colored pennants and find the familiar blue and white. “Between Duke and Syracuse.”
He looks surprised. “You’re a UConn girl?”
“Yes. Why?”
“It’s a party school.”
“That’s an unfair rep.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
“Where did you go?”
He motions with his eyes. “Up at the top, in the middle.”
“Hamilton?”
He nods. “Thirty grand a year. Nonrefundable, it turns out.”
I laugh. I can feel the wine starting to warm me. It’s 9:40. If I’d put off Anne and gone home, I’d be in the bath now, soaking
away my thoughts, the steam rising from the water as I slide down into it.
It’s time, Mimi
.
“Can I ask you something, Jake?”
“Sure.”
His green dress shirt sets off the blue of his eyes. There is something in them I can’t place. Something buried.
“You got into Diane Silio’s car last Friday,” I say.
He takes the pint from his lips, surprised. Wary. He places it carefully on the table.
“She told you that?”
“No. I couldn’t take the smoke in the bar. I went outside for air. You were speaking to the driver, and then you got inside.”
Jake looks down at the table, then back at me. These past six nights, working side by side in the conference room, there’s
been something in the silence between us. Something rich. Narcotic. He understands it now.
“You watched her leave?” he says.
“Through the bar window. She opened the car door and hesitated.”
“For just a second.”
“Yes.”
“Two more here?” asks the waitress, appearing again. My glass is empty, and I see that my fingers, gripping the stem, are
white. I let go.
“Red this time, please,” I say.
“The house cab?”
“Fine.”
Jake nods yes to another pint, and the waitress walks off. I look down at the old wooden table. People have cut their initials
into it.
LN. JB. TR loves BN
. We’re quiet until she returns with our drinks, sets them down, and leaves. Under the table my free hand finds my stocking.
“What do you want to ask me, Mimi?”
I try to meet his eyes, but I can’t. My legs feel light.
“Why were you in her car?”
“That’s not what you want to know.” His voice is different — harder. My face is crimson, and he sees it. “You want to know
what we did.”
The wine in my glass is so dark that it’s black. I look up and see something new in his eyes — flint. “I’m going to tell you
a story my grandfather told me,” he says, his voice low but all I hear now. The clink of glasses, the music, the hum of the
bar — all gone. “And then, if you still want to, you can ask your question.”
I manage to nod.
“Grandpa married his wife at nineteen, and six months later he shipped out to Europe to fight in World War Two. She was pregnant
when he left, and he was stone in love with her. She wrote him every day he was gone. And he wrote back. Even from the front,
he wrote back. Wrote on anything he could find. Newspaper, and when that was gone, toilet paper. If the guys in the foxhole
had found out, it wouldn’t have been a German trying to shoot him.”
Jake takes a sip of beer. His eyes stay on mine, measuring me.
“Her letters came in bunches, during breaks in the fighting. Two weeks would pass with no mail, and then ten would come in
a day. He read them over and over. In trenches, by moonlight, by the light of artillery fire. Read about his new son. ‘He’s
crawling now, he’s standing up, he’s got his first tooth.’ Through all the fighting, he carried those letters pressed against
his skin. Mud, blood, sweat, rain, everything got on them. Most dissolved away to nothing.
“One day he opened a letter to find a picture of her in a cotton dress, standing on the porch at sunset. I’ve seen the picture
— she was beautiful.”
Jake looks away a second.
“Grandpa used medical tape to tape that picture over his heart. Late in the war, his unit gets pinned down in a ditch at Saint-Mihiel,
in France. Surrounded, nowhere to go. Getting it from all sides. They lose twenty-six of thirty men. Night comes, and they
run out of ammo. Start throwing rocks. They run out of rocks. They lie still and wait for dawn, when the Germans will come
to the mouth of the ditch and kill them. They draw their knives, hoping that between the four of them they might take one
German with them. When the first rays of light come, Grandpa takes the picture from his chest and holds it to his face. He
wants it to be the last thing he sees.
“Dawn breaks — no Germans. They wait — still no Germans. They crawl out of the ditch — no Germans. They left during the night.
“The war ended a month later. Grandpa spent his last night over there in Paris. Lying in a bunk, staring at the picture of
the beautiful wife he’s going home to in six hours. Rereading the few of her letters that had survived. At two
A.M
., he gives up on trying to sleep and goes for a walk through the streets. Paris is newly liberated — a carnival, right? He
walks through the different quarters packed with revelers. Soldiers, British and American. Civilians. He keeps walking, and
after a while the streets thin out. They are cobblestone now. Passing a small church, something in the doorway catches his
eye. It is a woman. A young Gypsy beauty, standing alone, the light of a streetlamp falling on her black hair, her flashing
eyes.
“They stand looking at each other. And then she beckons him, and he steps into the doorway. She’s eighteen, maybe, and smells
as clean as the spring rain. She speaks softly to him in French. He doesn’t understand, but her hands are on him now, touching
his face, his chest. She feels the weight in his shirt pocket and pulls out the picture. She holds it to the light. ‘Elle
est très jolie,’ she says.
She’s very pretty
. Then she takes his hand and puts it under her dress, right on her thigh. He’s never felt anything that smooth. That warm.”
Jake looks away, then back at me.
“Then she says, in English: ‘Ten francs.’”
Jake is quiet.
“She was a prostitute,” I say.
“Yes. A whore.”
“What did he do?”
“He walked away.”
We are both quiet.
“He told me that story the day I left for college. And he said this: ‘God doesn’t show you what you’re made of—that’s the
devil’s job.’” Jake leans forward, the sleeve of his shirt brushing my bare arm.
“When is the wedding?”
“In a month.”
“You met in college?”
“Yes.”
He looks at the wall a second, his eyes on the pennants but not seeing them. He looks back at me.
“Ask me, Mimi.”
My nails press through my stocking, into my knee. I can’t say a word.
“A month ago I saw the first crush of my adolescence through a Benetton window. She was still a beauty. A week later I went
back to her store at closing time. I took her for a drink, and then I took her back to her empty store.” Jake holds my eyes
until he sees I understand.
“Diane Silio was one of many, Mimi. Tomorrow it will be someone else.”
“You have sex with them,” I say finally, my voice far away.
“More than that.”
I feel the blood in my head. I’m dizzy.
“You want in, Mimi — you have to ask in. Ask me.”
My hand goes to the top of my blouse, and his eyes follow it. I look up at him.
“What do you do to them?”
Jake leans toward me, then puts down his pint. He looks at me, past me, then stands and smiles.
“You must be Anne,” he says, and reaches like a gentleman for the hand of my maid of honor.
• • •
I’m all caught up, finally.
Seven o’clock Saturday evening and I sit in my office at the firm, grateful for the mountain of returns and extension forms
and client reports that have kept me at my desk all day. Grateful because they’ve kept my mind off of Thursday night and Jake
Teller and the question I can’t quite believe I asked him. Anne rescued me from an answer, but two nights later, as I print
out and now sign this last tax return, I think again of the electric moment in the small booth just before she walked up on
us. The heat in my face, the look in Jake’s eyes. I think of it and I look at the phone on my desk. His extension is seven
two six. He must have accounts to catch up on, too.
Enough. Back to work, Mimi
. I pull out the Brice account binder. One last pass through it, then I’ll stop for the night. I’ll call Mark and ask him
if he knows anyone who can be at my place in an hour with a bottle of wine and a Caribbean movie. Mark booked our honeymoon
today, and he called earlier to say that the travel agency had given him a video and that when I see it, I’ll forget about
the ceremony — and the reception, too — and beg him to elope tonight. It’ll be just the evening I need. Maybe I can even forget
Thursday night.
I open the binder and start in. Mr. Stein’s lunch with Andrew Brice will be delicate. “Dragging him from the nineteenth century
to the twenty-first,” as Jake said, “without pissing him off.” I scan the stock portfolio that Brice’s father left him so
long ago. An investor’s dream, really, filled with first-tier stocks that would have risen like redwoods these past three
decades if Brice hadn’t cashed them in as soon as he got his hands on them. He’ll have to start over now.
I turn to the investment scenarios we prepared. Clipped to the top of the first one is a handwritten note, and reading it,
I feel the breath go out of me.
To answer your question, Mimi
.
Tax Statutes: Volume 47, Section 38.1
.
Jake
I look up suddenly, as if he might be in the doorway. It is empty. I sit still and listen to the soft sounds of the office
— the hum of the air conditioner, the faint clicking of a keyboard down the hall. Another associate, logging weekend hours.
I look down again at the note.
The firm keeps its tax statute books in the conference room. I take the Brice binder with me and walk down the hallway. I
don’t see anyone, and when I reach the conference room I find the light on but the room itself empty and quiet. It is my favorite
room in the firm, smelling of wood and made cozy despite its size by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the walls,
each filled with leather-bound volumes so beautiful that it’s easy to forget they aren’t classics but tax tomes. They always
remind me of the gold-embossed hardcovers by my bed at home, my graduation gift from Grandma just weeks before she died.
I walk to the shelves and run my fingers along the black spines, down one row, up the next, until I reach volume 47. I pull
it out and page through the statutes, the book heavy in my hands, its pages creamy and thin, like those in a Bible. Section
35, 36, 37. Here it is — 38.1. Tucked between the pages is a page torn from a magazine. It is folded in half, then in half
again, so that all I can see is the back of it — a cigarette ad. I replace the book on the shelf and walk with the folded
page to the window.
I could throw it out and let the wind take it God knows where. Not even look at it. Put an end, right here, to this… game
I’m playing against myself.
You’re a month from the altar, Mimi. A month
. I close my eyes. Mark wrote the check for the honeymoon today. Thirteen days and twelve nights in Jamaica. A stone hot tub
on a balcony on the cliffs looking down on the sea. Long walks on the white-sand beach at sunset.
I step from the window to the conference table and sit down. I switch on a green banker’s lamp and place the folded page in
its light. I close my eyes, unfold it, and smooth it with trembling fingers against the hard oak table. I open my eyes.
A woman lies on a bed, wearing only bra and panties. A black blindfold covers her eyes, and her wrists and ankles are tied
to the bedposts with white silk. In the bottom corner, handwritten in blue ink:
The bar at the Roosevelt Hotel — 10:00 Saturday night
.
I fold the picture in half, put it in my lap, and open the Brice binder again. I turn to the investment scenarios. Three separate
ones we designed, each a careful mix of blue-chippers and high-upside stocks. I try to focus on our “governing principles”
— reward him in a runaway market, protect him in a slack one. A cautious approach, as Mr. Stein advised, but not a weak one.
I close the binder and look at the picture again. Her lips are parted in a gasp, and each of the ties is stretched taut —
she can’t move.