12
C
ARRIE SHRUGGED into her leather coat as Jeannie picked up her bags to load them into her car.
“You're crazy, you know that?”
“I have to go,” Carrie said, and she meant it. She hadn't known how much she meant it until the call came. The mystical call.
“You're killing Truck”
“Yeah, well, he'll survive.” There she was, the old Carrie, pushing everything aside, every consideration. Every want, need, desire. Every
one
. The career was the thing, the stepping stone to superstardom.
“Listen, you called this guy a weasel, Carrie. You said he was ruthless, a shark. What do you think he really wants?”
“You know,” Carrie said as she locked up the house, “I actually thought about that. It isn't that he just snapped his fingers and I come running. This is a desperation move, he's pulling whoever he can from any quarter. So if I keep my head, and keep him out of my way, I have a chance to make my mark.”
“But do you really want to?” Jeannie asked. “What's it going to get you in the long run?”
Carrie paused as she opened the car door. “I don't want to think about that just yet because I don't really know.”
And maybe that was the most troubling question
about her decision to leave. She was throwing away too much for an indefinable gain.
Well, she thought, she'd deal with that later. And anyway, she'd done as much as she could here...at least for now.
Carrie shoved every feeling about Truck to the deep recesses of her mind. She knew how to do it, too. It was like focusing a bright beam of light straight ahead, and letting it fill your sightline so that everything else receded into shadow.
That was Truck, her phantom lover once more, creating enough memories to keep her warm for a lifetime.
He hadn't come to say goodbye.
Once Truck had understood her mind was made up, he'd gotten out of bed, had packed his few clothes and without another word, he'd left her.
And she hadn't even cried.
That told her something: that nothing in Paradise could hold her. And she'd always been ready to go.
Â
THERE WAS NOTHING like New York in the early fall, with the cool crisp air, and everyone moving with a sense of purpose and always, it seemed, with someplace to go.
Carrie walked from her hotel, arranged for by the company, to the offices of Global Vision International located at Third Avenue and 52nd Street.
Nothing had changed. The lobby of the building was built top to bottom of marble.
When Carrie stepped into Global's familiar chrome-and-mirror reception area, she felt as if she was stepping back in time. She gave her name to the receptionist and settled herself in one of the cushy brown leather sofas that lined the mirrored walls.
Behind those walls was the creative department, an
open space where writers and artists worked together sharing ideas and opinions as they created awardwinning ad campaigns.
And back there, in the corner office that had once been hers, Elliott was waiting for word she'd arrived.
His secretary came to get her.
She was pleasantly surprised by how many people waved to her, remembered her as they made their way through the maze of cubbyholes and desks.
“Carrie.” Elliott came forward to meet her, his hand extended. Elliott hadn't changed either except that he was heavier. But he'd always been stocky with a professional air about him and a comfortable face, lined and lived in, that belied his sharp wit, intuition, off-the-wall humor and outrageous ideas. “God, I'm glad you're here. Come on in. Roxanne, get coffee.”
“Right.”
“Sit,” he said, motioning her to a leather sofa in the far corner of the room. “This is great.”
“Is it?” she asked curiously.
“Look, we were a great team. And I need teamwork for this project. This is huge. We've got a whole floor sectioned off and we're working in the utmost secrecy. I'm afraid you're going to have to sign a hundred papers pledging not to talk, butâ” he waved his hand “âthat's nothing compared to the prestige this account will bring if we win it. This is the first go-round to the golden ring. So, are you game?”
She'd gotten smarter, she thought. She couldn't be bowled over by Elliott's tactics anymore. She couldn't even see what she had ever loved in him. His quick mind? His golden tongue? He could sell ice to an Eskimo; and he'd sold her a bill of goods.
But not this time. “Let's talk money. I don't live here
anymore. How badly does Global want the account? What are they prepared to spend?”
“They want it, I want you, and we're both prepared to deal.” He named a figure.
Carrie didn't blink. “That's nice. That's real nice. But I need a place to live, I need meals, I need transportation.”
“They'll pay the full three months' rent in the residential hotel across the street. That encompasses the deadline, the due date and the end of round one. They've rented three floors in the Casa Suites. They want minimal outside contact. You'll get breakfast, lunch and dinner here. We're talking here about being totally sequestered until we come up with concept and campaign. Like sitting on a major trial. So?” He paused, and stared straight at her.
“Okay. You've got me.”
“Great. This is really great. Guess what, you're going to work right now.”
He grabbed the container of coffee from Roxanne's hand as they passed her out the door.
The war room was on the next floor. She had to be processed through a personnel office to get a badge, a key and ID. She had to sign papers that said she would forfeit her salary, her perks, and maybe even be prosecuted if she ever revealed the nature of the work going on behind those huge high walls.
What am I doing here?
“Oh good,” Elliott said. “Breakfast is on.”
Elliott brought her into the war room and introduced her around. She knew some of the faces, and some of the names, big names that had been brought in for recognition value and creative juice.
After that, she got the debriefing and pounds of corporate papers to study.
The floor had been sectioned off into offices surrounding an open space. Each writer-and-artist team was assigned one room in which they were set up with everything they would need from computers to fax machine, and of course, a coffeemaker. There was a common supply room, a library and three large conference rooms.
“And,” Elliott said as he showed her around after breakfast, “I'm going to be your partner.”
Carrie wondered why she wasn't surprised, and she found she was liking him less and less and she hadn't even been here three hours. What was it about him? He was running on nerves, she could tell that because she knew him so well, and he thought he was still trading on an affection that didn't exist anymore. She didn't care about him at all, and he thought, he hoped, she did.
No, she understood she was here for the recognition and the money, and it was clear to her that she was going to do hand-to-hand battle with the other heavyweights to get her due.
What the hell had she gotten herself into?
Still, the excitement of being back in New York was a heady sensation. And the adrenaline rush of beginning something new left no room for anything else. She had to focus every resource she had on the project.
That was good. That meant there was no time to think about Truck, to miss him, yearn for him or have regrets about might-have-beens.
Â
IT REALLY WAS a full-immersion project. Every morning the hotel desk awakened her at six-thirty, as she'd instructed. She showered, she dressed, she was across the street at the office at eight for breakfast, at which point they were already working, and she usually was not back in the hotel until ten.
It was a ferociously difficult campaign for a client that was notoriously jittery about making the wrong move, a client that had the reputation of never taking its agency's advice. A client that was mired in its own inability to be decisive and was losing some major market share.
I'm tilting at windmills.
And Carrie didn't even feel like she was really in New York. The war room could have been in any building anywhere in the country. All she got of the city every day was the rush of traffic on 52nd Street on her way back to the hotel.
No Bloomingdale's. No theater. No concerts. No museums.
But then, those were intertwined with memories of Elliott: corporate seats at Madison Square Garden for the Knicks, the Rangers, the hottest Broadway shows, the best restaurants.
Elliott was the kind of guy who couldn't sit still and who always had to be seen.
There'd never been time for the small moments. A walk in the park. A steamy pretzel from a street vendor on a brisk fall day. A street fair in Brooklyn. The city on a Sundayâquiet, serene, and still full of an energy found nowhere else on earth.
Truck would like walking in the city, she thought, despite its size. He'd love the park, the dogsâ
they
would have a dog, she thoughtâand sitting for hours with the
Times
on a Sunday...
They would have a what?
Dear Lord, was she so stir-crazy already that she was planning a life she never wanted?
But there was no time to analyze those too-frequent moments when Truck crept into her thoughts.
There was just time for pure, concentrated creative development. And time passing, rushing, fast.
Â
CARRIE HAD BEEN GONE a month, Truck thought, and it felt like a lifetime. She'd written him short notes every few days which had devolved into E-mails, brief and frustratingly impersonal.
Client is difficult. Working round the clock. Off to try a new concept. Got to work up a new campaign.
Truck couldn't understand work like that. Too nerve-racking. He liked things he could touch, things he could put together, he liked problems he could solve and immediately see the result.
And he couldn't for the life of him solve the puzzle of why Carrie had gone.
Maybe it was one of those things: the past doomed to repeat itself. Maybe he would never understand.
“Go get her,” Old Man kept telling him. “Maybe you shouldn't have let her go.”
But how did you
keep
an independent spirit like Carrie when all the desire in the world was not enough?
And if he'd ever mentioned love, she would've left the first day back in town.
Love
... He'd fallen faster than a summer storm the minute he saw her. But love wasn't in the vocabulary of the high flying, big-city woman Carrie had become.
And Elliott, who was just a deep raspy voice on a piece of tape still had had the power to move Carrie four hundred miles south while he, Truck, with all the intimacy they'd shared, didn't have the magic words to keep her in Paradise.
That said something potent about love and desire... and the foolishness of dreams.
Or had he just been hanging on until Carrie finally understood what she was fighting so hard.
He knew, but now wasn't the time to console himself with the words. Right now he had to find a way to just keep going.
So he worked on her house in the mindless numbing hours after work when there was nothing else to do. He retiled her bathroom, he rewired the electrical system. He thought about the winter, and how the heating system that Old Man had rigged for her mother wouldn't be even adequate after the previous year's storms, and how he could fix that problem.
“Come on, Truck,” Jeannie egged him on, urging him to go out with her and Tom. Whenever he ran into Jeannie she looked proud, pretty and together, and Truck supposed that while she might never come to terms with her broken marriage, she had learned to be reasonably content with the outcome.
Jeannie was back in her house on the Pond, she was studying for her real estate license, and she was almost ready to jump-start her own business from the ruins of Eddie's real estate firm.
And Tom was definitely in the picture.
Sometimes a person's life did turn around, Truck thought. And then sometimes it just got turned upside down.
And it made a man understand: he'd been waiting for Carrie all these years, waiting for love.
And all for nothing. Carrie was gone, and with her, he'd lost another piece of himself.
Â
ANOTHER FRUITFUL and fruitless day. Elliott caught up with Carrie as she exited the building. “How about we get a drink? There's a bar right in the hotel.”