The Daughter-in-Law (4 page)

“Well, if we both need to apologize, maybe we should meet. How does dinner sound?”

“Fine, but only if you let me cook it. That’s the least I can do for someone who saved my life.”

“Is your cooking as good as your flying?”

“Hell, no. Not nearly as good.”

Jonathan sighed. “Then why don’t I just let you buy me dinner?”

He was so excited when he hung up that he knocked his morning coffee across his desk. Typical of his luck, his father walked in at just that moment to see if his son had made it back to work.

Nicole arrived in a little black dress of perfectly cut satin with spaghetti straps that showed her flawless neck and shoulders and gave a generous hint of cleavage. Her hair was an off-platinum blond, shoulder-length and casually styled. Her eyes were a deeper blue in the dimly lit restaurant, and the smile that she had shown so reluctantly in the airplane now came easily. She was a flawless dinner companion.

The setting was appropriate, an intimate French restaurant on the West Side that catered more to neighborhood diners than to Midtown credit cards. There were only a few items on the menu, and the chef had been democratic enough to give the French offerings English subtitles. Jonathan had obviously been here before, and ordered a wine without looking at the list.

“You look different without your flying gear,” she said as soon as the waiter left.

“Disappointed? I know that some people mistake me for Captain Marvel when I’m wearing my helmet.”

“No, relieved actually. You look . . . softer. Less imposing. I remembered you as being like a . . .” She was grasping for the word.

“Like a nazi,” he said, completing her thought. “That’s what I want to apologize for.”

“A nazi? I wouldn’t go that far. Maybe like a school principal...”

He did look different. His face was rounder than she remembered. The helmet had pinched in on the sides and made it look longer. While his mustache was full, his hair was thinning in front, something she hadn’t noticed before, even when he had taken the helmet off. But the mischief in his eyes was the same, as was the smile that pulled one corner of his mouth higher than the other. His complexion was as she remembered—light and even a bit windburned.

His shoulders weren’t quite as square, nor was he as tall as she had thought, though he was still a few inches higher than she was. Certainly not tall, dark, and handsome, but still quite attractive in his requisite Manhattan-black jacket over a dark shirt. He might not be every woman’s first choice, but when you added the fact that he had a few hundred million in pocket money, it was amazing that no woman had ever been able to take him down.

Nicole made her apology. Her mistakes had been grave, she admitted. “Even if I didn’t kill myself, I was a danger to everyone around me. Isn’t that the first rule of a team sport—watch out for your teammates?”

Jonathan nodded, but his eyes were fixed on hers, and a smile was playing on his lips. It was plain that he wasn’t interested in discussing team sports.

“Anyhow, I was so glad that you were okay that I. . . well, I was more affectionate than I usually am with strangers. So, when you chewed my ass out, I felt like a complete fool. I suppose that’s what turned me into a total bitch.”

“You don’t always throw the bird to our naval heroes?”

“Oh, God, I really did that, didn’t I? And then what did I say? That I never stop at just one?” She dropped her face into her hand to hide her embarrassed laughter. “But then I came to my senses. How could I be angry with a man who had saved my life? Just because he gave me a tongue-lashing that I probably deserved. So that’s when I began looking up Donners in the phone book. But, I couldn’t even be sure what book to look in.”

“It’s Manhattan, but I’m not listed.”

“To avoid telemarketers who are hawking yachts?”

“No, just to deter unsatisfied clients who want me dead.”

The wine arrived, and she watched as it was uncorked, tasted, and approved. Then they got into the brief versions of their life stories.

Hers followed a well-traveled path, a Midwestern prom queen who left junior college and came to New York to take the world by storm. “I could sing and dance. I wasn’t bad looking. The folks back in Muncie, Indiana, thought I couldn’t miss. The problem is that there are about a million attractive girls who can sing and dance who come to New York because they can’t miss. There are new ones arriving every day.”

There were no folks back in Muncie. Her mother had died when she was in high school. Her father, who clerked in a hardware store, died while she was in college. There had been an older brother, but he had gotten himself killed in his teens, racing a train to a crossing. “He was just a passenger. The driver, another teenage immortal, walked away without a scratch. He said he was sure he had the train beaten by a mile. But it ended up in a tie.”

She had avoided getting involved with drugs. “The pot put me to sleep and, and the pills were too dangerous.” Instead, she had found her identity in her high school’s theater club, where she did the lead in two musicals. “The school orchestra hasn’t been on-key since the school opened, so I really didn’t know how I sounded. But all the teachers said I couldn’t miss. Except for the guidance counselor. She said I needed a bit more polishing and talked me into junior college. In truth, she probably knew I was just ordinary and feared that I’d end up on the streets of New York.”

She came to the city eight years ago, and wasted two years going to tryouts, modeling at trade shows, and paying for voice lessons. During that time she had realized how much talent was sitting on the bench, and that her chances of making the big leagues were slim at best. “And that was what it was all about: making the big leagues. I probably could have eked out a living in the chorus of traveling productions, or maybe become a regular with a smalltown theater company. But I was bitten by New York, and New York is all about making it big.”

So, she had started over with a clerical job in an insurance company. “Dead-end, but it did pay my share of the rent and put me through a secretarial school. I switched to Wall Street when the
Dow shot past eight thousand, started my savings plan, and took the internal brokerage course to earn my license. So here I am. A New Yorker and making enough money to stay in the game.”

Ballsy, Jonathan thought. This was one tough young lady who wasn’t about to step out of the way for anyone. “And then you decided to kill yourself by jumping out of an airplane?” he said, as if that were the logical next step in her story.

“Not kill myself. Just add a little excitement. It’s been eight grinding years, ten if you count the two I spent in college.”

“Why not a houseshare in the Hamptons? Or rollerblading in Central Park?”

“Did that,” Nicole answered. “Neither quite do it for me. I took up golf down at Chelsea Piers, and tried sailing out of City Island. Then I saw an ad for a weeklong jump school upstate and I gave it a try. You can fill in the rest. You know what it’s like. An adrenaline rush that goes on and on, assuming you don’t have to stop to rescue some stupid girl.”

They were well into dinner when his turn came up. He tried to pass. “Nothing nearly that interesting about me,” he confessed. “I’m still exactly where I started.”

“And where was that?”

“Well, let’s see. I was born in Rhode Island where my parents have a summer house.”

“On the beach?” she asked pleasantly.

“In a way. It’s on the cliff at Ocean Drive.”

She blushed. “I was thinking of a bungalow with a screen porch.”

“Think of a castle on the Rhine,” he advised. “You’ll be a lot closer.”

“You grew up in a castle?”

“Yes, but not that one. There’s another castle out on the Long Island Gold Coast in a place so exclusive that not even squirrels are allowed to live there. That’s where
I
found out that hashish made me sneeze. Of course, pills were another thing. They were expensive, but we owned a couple of drug companies.”

His voice took on a cynical tone. The words might be taken for boasting but instead Jonathan seemed ashamed. He was apologizing for his life of privilege and hinting that having everything can be just as debilitating as having nothing.

He had been tutored at home, then moved to a boarding school
where the teacher addressed ten-year-olds as “gentlemen.” Then on to a New England prep school with alumni that smiled out of the pages of corporate annual reports all over the world.

“College was the first time I broke the mold. My father wanted one of the military academies. He thought my spine needed a little stiffening and he had enough congressmen in his pocket to get me an appointment. Mother wasn’t big on the academies. She thought uniforms were for doormen and preferred one of the Ivies. My grades weren’t that good, but the family could always promise to donate another building.”

“And you?” Nicole asked.

“I wanted a small college in Florida. They had a wide-open curriculum, and the only athletic team they fielded was in beach volleyball. I wanted to study oceanography. I’d had all the academic courses I could stand, and I thought if I saw one more building with leaves growing up the wall I might become an arsonist.”

“What was it like?”

“The school in Florida? How would I know? I went to Dartmouth.”

Nicole had to put down her fork while she stifled her laughter. Jonathan was certainly bitter, but he had decided to laugh at his fate rather than rage against it.

“From there it was business school at Columbia and then right into Sound Holdings. Mother couldn’t stand to have me start at the bottom and Dad was too smart to put me anywhere near the top. So they compromised and put me in the middle. That way only half of the company is pissed off at me.”

What was his job? He told her that he didn’t really know. “I manage a small fund that represents a very small part of the family’s holdings. The only clients are businesses that we control, so there isn’t a hell of a lot of bitching. Basically, I watch it go up and down with the market. Every now and then I sell something that has really tanked, and buy something else to replace it. Oh, I also have to write very imaginative quarterly messages. Things like ‘The market went down because it stopped going up,’ or ‘We had unexpected losses with International Freightways because a wheel fell off their truck.’ Sometimes I think I took up skydiving because I was hoping the chute wouldn’t open.”

Nicole turned down dessert, lying about the difficult time she
had zipping up her dress. But they lingered over single malts for another hour, and moved from the past to the future. Jonathan wondered what she hoped to get out of a career as a stockbroker.

“I think a healthy portfolio is essential if we’re going to bring fresh milk to third-world countries,” she said, imitating the teary-eyed idealism of a Miss America contestant. After they laughed together, she rephrased her answer. “Who was the bank robber who said he went where the money was? I think Wall Street is the fastest road to riches.”

“Rich is overrated,” he allowed, as he raised his glass to his lips.

“Maybe,” she said. “But I won’t know until I get there.”

She seemed dead honest in defending her choices. She wasn’t impressed by the American dream, not because she thought it was too materialistic but because it was the wrong material. “I don’t want to spend my life paying down a mortgage,” she said at one point, and seconds later added, “I won’t let myself get so tied down that I can’t just pick up and move to another opportunity.”

She turned to Jonathan. “And what about your future? Is it possible you could come to terms with the Sound Holdings investments?”

“Not a chance,” Jonathan answered. “I’m not working there because I think there’s hope. The fact is that I haven’t yet gathered the courage to leave. A hundred times ‘I’m outta here’ has been on the tip of my tongue. But Mother would be suicidal and my namesake would be disappointed. And of course there’s the fact that I probably couldn’t make a living without it.”

Nicole wouldn’t believe that a man who jumped out of airplanes could lack self-confidence. He couldn’t be worried about making a living. There must be some sort of escape plan. She asked him point-blank.

“I have a modest trust that I could probably keep if I decided to walk. And there are things I could probably devote myself to. Doesn’t one of the Kennedys sail up and down the Hudson, trying to save the river? So maybe I could take my money and devote my life to saving the fiddler crab. Or head a committee to return Manhattan Island to the Indians.”

“How about a dive boat?” she asked. “Or maybe open your own jump center?”

He shook his head. “It would have to be something that sounded
very idealistic. Something that the family could lie about to explain my failure.”

“So, find something. You can’t go on doing something you hate.”

Jonathan shrugged. “I’m like you, I guess. You went to where the money is. That’s where I am, and I’m a bit hesitant to leave.”

They finished their drinks and made their exit. Then came the awkward moment on the street when any future they might have together was on the line. If there were no future, Nicole would say something like “Thank you for a lovely evening.” And he would explain, “I’ll be busy for a while, but I’ll give you a call.” But if they were taken with one another, then one of them had to make a move.

“You realize of course that I belong to you,” Nicole announced.

He was taken off-guard. “You do?”

“Certainly. I was in the process of killing myself when you butted in and saved my life. That means you’ve assumed responsibility for me. I’m like the baby left in a basket. Once you take me inside, I’m your problem. My life is in your hands.”

He squinted suspiciously. “Is that an invitation to come up to your place for a nightcap?”

“Certainly not,” she answered immediately. “Just the opposite. It’s your duty to protect me from cads who want to come up for a nightcap. So you’ll have to stay very close to me to safeguard me from men with evil intentions.”

Jonathan smiled. “Sounds like the kind of work I’ve been looking for.” Then he asked, “Do you like baseball? I’ve got some tickets for the Yankees. I think Baltimore is in tomorrow night. Or maybe it’s Cleveland. I don’t really keep on top of it.”