Authors: Anna Quindlen
“Thank God it’s you, Bridge,” Evan said as he slipped into his seat next to mine, Meghan trailing behind with the network president. “I thought I was going to have to talk to one of those women all night. You know what I mean.”
“Where were you this morning? We had breakfast at your house.”
“Working.”
“Have you talked to Leo?”
“I keep missing the chance because of the time difference between here and Spain. I get ready to call and then I realize it’s the middle of the night. Knowing Leo, he’s probably out and about in the middle of the night, even in Spain, but I don’t want to take the chance I’ll wake the guy up. Meghan talked to him after you left, I think. I think that’s what she said.”
“I’m so, so honored,” said Ann Jensen as she came up behind him, and I grabbed his left hand and squeezed as he grimaced down at the gold-rimmed dinner plate and then pivoted deftly, breaking into his company grin. “I’m such a fan of your wife’s,” she added. Now there’s the kind of thing a guy loves to hear.
Meghan was across the table from me, an explosive spray of flowers between us, so that I could see only the top of her head. She never changes her hair for these events, or for the camera. It waves around her face. In her last contract, the network offered her her own makeup person, but Meghan said it wasn’t necessary. The women in the makeup room don’t forget that. When the circles under her eyes are darkest, they are there during commercial breaks with concealer and powder. One of them comes to the apartment and does her hair and makeup for evenings like this one. Her copper-colored hair shines in the light from the ballroom chandeliers. Her freckles shine through her makeup by design. She is forty-seven and looks thirty.
It would have been rude for me to monopolize Evan, but luckily on my other side was a pleasant older man with a handsome head of silver hair, a ruddy complexion, and blue eyes that smiled when he did, which is quite rare in New York. Meghan has frequently remarked that this is how our father would have looked had he had an opportunity to age gracefully, which is apparently how he did most things. At least according to Meghan. When she speaks of our parents, it is in breezy set pieces, as though they are people about whom she once did a story. Their death together in a car on a Connecticut curve merely seems like the obligatory coda. If the intention was to make me scarcely believe in them, it has worked. “No one knew him well beyond the obvious,” our aunt Maureen had once said tartly of our father. “Nice looks, nice voice, nice manners.” This stranger at my elbow seems much more real to me than the idea of John J. Fitzmaurice, a man whose reality was apparently so tenuous that he managed to join the Yale Club although, as we discovered some years later, he had never actually gone to Yale.
My dinner partner had just returned from climbing Machu Picchu and was discursive without being a bore about it. He spoke about the sense of peace he felt after the difficult climb. “Almost makes you believe in God,” he said.
I told him about a pilot program we were doing at Women On Women, to have the women who were living in our shelters act as aides in our preschool so that they could use what they learned to raise their own kids. Talking to people at dinners like this is a win-win proposition for someone in my line of work. A year ago I piqued the interest of an older man at a dinner party in some weird old loft building on a dirty block by the Hudson River; inside was ten thousand square feet of apartment, much of it made over into a facsimile of an English manor house, with a dining room large enough to seat forty-three. The man, whose name was Edward Prevaricator—and who spent five minutes convincing me it truly was his name, eventually showing me his platinum Amex as proof—was one of those rare New York men who ask after your work and then listen when you respond. He was the only dinner partner I’d ever had with an encyclopedic knowledge of early childhood education, and he told me a charming story about reading
The Cat in the Hat
to a grandchild who would move her lips because she’d memorized the book. He’d also had the most memorable blue eyes I’d ever seen, like those eucalyptus mints that taste like Vicks VapoRub and remind me of the illnesses of my childhood. When I mentioned his eyes, Edward Prevaricator had replied, “They are my one grace note.” It was as though he was a character from a Victorian novel brought to life, one of the good ones, the ones who liberate an orphan secretly and watch him prosper from afar. In some sense he was exactly that, for the following week he sent WOW a check for $100,000, the largest unsolicited gift we had ever received.
“You smoke the pole?” asked Tequila, our receptionist, when the check arrived in the morning mail. Tequila thinks everything is about sex or money, and often about the two together.
“He didn’t even make a pass. I didn’t even know he was rich,” I said. “I swear.”
Alison looked hard at the check. “Can this really be this guy’s actual name?”
“Let’s wait and see if the check clears.”
“Do you know a man named Edward Prevaricator?” I asked the man now sitting at my left, who was trying not to stare at my sister across the flowers.
“Here tonight, I think,” the man replied. “He’s a very philanthropic character. From Kansas City, I think, or Chicago. One of those midwest places. Very successful business.” He had lapsed into Manhattan shorthand. It’s as though the city is too busy for verbs or transitions.
At the other side of the table, I heard Meghan thanking one of the event chairs for holding the dinner on a Saturday night so that she could attend. She does a lot of work at events like this. She has always felt the need to do more than a single thing at once: the mail while on the phone, the newspapers on the treadmill. No matter how tedious the company, she interviews her dinner partners, and frequently finishes coffee with at least one idea for a story, on monetary policy or public health or Asian-American relations. This is disappointing only for the wives of the men who are seated next to her, who ask what they talked about, what she told them, what she was like. “She seemed interested in my work,” the husbands say, and the wives sigh or snort, depending on their dispositions and how long they’ve been married.
As the waitstaff was clearing the entrée course, I ducked to the back of the ballroom to the Women On Women table. All around the vast rococo space you could hear the hum of dinner conversation interspersed with the sharp impatient accented exclamations of the Waldorf waiters: Excuse me! Excuse me please! Meghan once did a story on why the Waldorf had no women waiters. Now there were a few women waiters among the men, wearing the same tuxedos, fetching the same vegetable plates for the vegetarians and the decaf for the older guests.
At good-conscience dinners, representatives from the various charities are seated at the tables so far back in the ballroom that the people with money would go nuts about the placement if they were at those tables themselves. It’s insulting largesse, but largesse nonetheless. The people seated at these tables are the only ones who praise the ballroom food. WOW had two tables, and because of Meghan we would get a nice chunk of the evening’s proceeds. We run a shelter for homeless women, a job training program for the women in the shelter, and an early childhood program for their kids, along with a little covert drug rehab that we prefer not to discuss with donors. Half of our staff was at table 82, so far in the back that six more feet and they would have been sitting in the foyer. Tequila was wrapping dinner rolls in her napkin and putting them into a shopping bag beneath the table.
“You brought a shopping bag to the Waldorf?” I said.
“Oh, Miss Smarty, that shopping bag is full of good stuff! You got lipstick, nail polish, a copy of
Cosmo
magazine, a nice T-shirt, maybe a little small for me but nice, some kind of candy bar—”
“Protein bar,” said one of the other women.
“Whatever. I still didn’t get to the bottom.”
“You’re supposed to take your goody bag on the way out,” I said.
“Look at all these people! You think they have enough bags for all these people? No way! And with my luck I get outta here, someone goes, Oh, no, sorry, Tequila, we got no candy bars for you—”
“Protein bars,” the woman repeated.
“You look at the color of the lipstick?” I asked. “Because usually the cosmetic companies give them whatever they can’t sell, and you wind up with some coral stuff, the kind of stuff grandmothers wear.”
“It’s actually a nice subtle pink, Bridget,” Alison said. “She showed me.”
“I got it on,” said Tequila.
“You’re right, it’s a nice color. What did you say to my sister coming in, Al? It was the most fun she’s had all night.”
“I told her that joke about the nun and the rooster.”
Tequila laughed. She has a kind of he-he creaky door laugh. “That’s a filthy joke,” she said.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and by the wide-eyed, slightly openmouthed look of every woman at the table, I knew who it was. “There’s nothing I like better than a filthy joke,” said Meghan, wrapping her arm around my waist.
“It’s the birthday girl,” Alison said.
“The bride,” Tequila said.
“I guess this is sort of bridal, isn’t it?” Meghan looked down at herself. “That’s probably what it was meant to be, the perfect dress for a third wedding.” Meghan’s hand rested on my hip; Alison had one of my hands in hers. A finger poked insistently into my hip. I hadn’t been felt up so much since eighth grade.
The finger belonged to a small girl in a flowered dress holding an autograph book. She looked up as I turned and shook her head. Not you. At least she was direct. I elbowed Meghan. She bent from the waist so she and the little girl were face-to-face. “What’s your name?” she said, and she signed accordingly: “To Kirby. You rock! XOXO Meghan Fitzmaurice.” It was Meghan’s newest autograph salutation. “Please, Mom, stop, you’re killing me,” Leo had said, but it was short and snappy and made Meghan seem hip. It had at least a year before the statute would run and she would move on to something else.
There was a ruckus at the door directly behind us, a cavalcade of men in black suits with lapel pins. Behind them came a balding man with a bad comb-over and a tux with too-wide lapels. He was carrying a plaque in one hand and fussing with the hair with the other. His face when he saw Meghan was like an acting improv exercise: displeasure, fear, followed by feigned joy and then long-rehearsed warmth.
“Meghan! My favorite morning host! And the country’s, too!”
“Hello, Mr. Mayor. How was the ribbon cutting at the Armory?”
“God, she’s good,” I murmured to myself. I shouldn’t drink at these events. Meghan never does.
“You know my schedule better than I do. Probably the president’s better than the Secret Service.”
“The president is at Camp David this weekend, actually, with the British prime minister.”
“What did I say? Did I call it, ladies? This lady knows everything about everything.”
“Picture!” said the official photographer, and Meghan and I pulled Tequila into a shot with the mayor, who was hustled afterward to the front of the room by his security detail. If Tequila finally killed her youngest child’s father, a course of action all of us at WOW would support, that photograph would wind up on the front of the tabloids.
“He’s got to do something about that hair right now!” Tequila said.
“He’s ridiculous,” Meghan said. “I did an interview with him during the campaign that left him looking like a fool in six minutes, and he doesn’t even have the balls to hold a grudge. I’d respect him a whole lot more if he’d just cut me dead when he sees me. Instead it’s all, Oh, Meghan, great to see you.”
“Smarmy,” said Tequila.
“Unctuous,” Meghan agreed.
“Get the dictionary,” said Alison. “Here come the vocabulary words.”
“She means the man is one kiss-ass mayor,” said Tequila.
“Exactly,” said Meghan.
“You going to keep the lipstick from your goody bag?”
“I don’t know,” said Meghan. “Is it one of those really bad colors? It’s not easy for redheads, finding good lipstick colors.”
“You never even take the goody bag,” I said.
“I might if the lipstick was a good color.”
Tequila narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “I’m wearing it right now,” she said, “and I’m thinking it’s too pink for a redheaded girl like yourself.”
The waitstaff eddied around us, crying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” like some breed of urban bird. The dessert was something pink in a chocolate cup with raspberries and the obligatory sprig of mint. The chocolate cup was the official emblem of charity dinners.
“Meghan, thank you so much for getting me those tickets last month,” Alison said, lifting her spoon.
“Oh, no problem. I was happy to do it. Oh, God, I almost forgot, I have to go to the ladies’ room, that’s why I came back here in the first place. And to see you girls, of course. Bridget, come with me. I’m on in about ten minutes and I don’t want to be at the podium thinking I have to pee.”
“What’d I get her tickets for?” she muttered as we picked our way through the ballroom foyer.
“No idea.”
“Oh. Okay, great.”
Ladies’ rooms are a nightmare for us. This one was not so bad. Only one woman reared back from the sink and cried, “It’s you!” Sometimes they say “It’s you” and sometimes they say “You’re Meghan Fitzmaurice.” Either way they seem to feel that Meghan needs to be told who she is. Mostly they seem stunned by the three-dimensionality of her: in the park, in the restaurant, in the toilet stall.
“If I didn’t wash my hands, it would wind up in the columns,” she said.
“You went back to see some of the clients,” Ann Jensen cooed when we returned, threading our way around table after table. It was like doing the wave: table 43 stares, then table 28, then 11, then the single digits.
“I know them,” Meghan said. “They’re friends of mine.”
“So gracious. So gracious.”
And she was. The mayor declared it Manhattan Mothers Day, the executive director of Manhattan Mothers introduced the film clip, Ann Jensen announced that the dinner take was close to two million dollars, and then she presented Manhattan Mother of the Year to Meghan. It was a crystal obelisk from Tiffany. Someday an archaeologist is going to be investigating ancient cultures and find blue box after blue box filled with crystal objects in Bubble Wrap with the name Meghan Fitzmaurice engraved at their bases. And he will wonder what in the world they were for. As did we.