The Side of the Angels (2 page)

Lest she sound too good to be true, Louise is also impractical, maddeningly slow to put any plan of her own into action (though she's usually sure of what
I
should do), and chronically, outrageously late, to the extent that I always bring a book when I go to meet her in a restaurant. Most annoyingly, Louise spends much of her time in a bright mist of hazy, optimistic pseudo-spiritualism. There are few side roads on the journey to enlightenment that she hasn't explored—group
therapy, tai chi, vegan purification diets, past-life regression—and it gets on my nerves sometimes. It's one thing to keep an open mind. It's another to seriously consider joining your local witches' coven.

The phone rang again. I threw down my forkful of chicken in tarragon mayonnaise (there is an excellent gourmet shop around the corner from Louise's business) and snatched up the receiver.

“Ron, I specifically told Myrlene to tell you not to bother me. For one hour. One lousy hour.”

“I know, but we've got a problem,” said Ron's mellifluous voice. In his college days, Ron earned extra money as a radio announcer.

“What problem?” I injected some controlled fury into my voice. Ron is like a dog—he responds to tones more than actual words. “This better not be that Mallard Pond thing again. That's your baby.”

Three years ago I would never have used a phrase like “that's your baby,” but you can't touch pitch and not be defiled, I guess. I only hoped that Ron's effect on my moral fiber was less insidious than his effect on my vocabulary. It wasn't as if I'd been overburdened with moral fiber to start with.

The Mallard Pond account was more trouble than it was worth.

Mallard Pond was a tiny, algae-filmed lake near a planned community in northern Virginia, a spot that had been farmland when I was growing up. The Mallard Gardens Homeowners Association had hired Advocacy to get some press attention for their fight to save this pristine if not particularly scenic body of water from rapacious developers. The homeowners, I suspected, were more concerned that the arrival of video rental emporiums and movie cineplexes would lower property values than they were about preserving nature's beauties. Their aim was noble enough for
our
standards, though. Our standards were not high.

I'd warned Ron that this account would require a level of client coddling out of all proportion to the money we'd see from it. Did he listen? Of course not. I can count on one hand the number of times my opinion has influenced Ron's behavior.

“Not to worry, Mallard's under control,” said Ron. “The
Loudon County Observer
just came out on our side. ‘Save Our Southern Walden.' That was the title of the editorial. My idea.”

“Great, Ron. Now go visit a library and see if you can find out whether General Lee ever recorded in a letter home that he let his horse, Traveler, bend and drink from Mallard's cooling waters. Then we'd be home free.”

“What?”

It was possible that Ron had never heard of General Lee. He was from Minnesota, where history seemed to be measured in droughts and blizzards. He probably thought Pickett's Charge was a new kind of credit card.

“If it's not Mallard, then what is so damn important?”

“This is for the Toilers Union,” Ron said. “A nurses' strike in some blue-collar town in Rhode Island called Winsack. It's about twenty miles northeast of Providence. The nurses there have been in contract negotiations for twenty-one months and the hospital's not budging, so they're close to walking. I told Weingould we'd be over at two o'clock. Myrlene can clear your calendar.”

A strike. There went all my free time until Thanksgiving, perhaps until Christmas. The only bright spot was that taking this assignment would give me an unimpeachable excuse to refuse Louise the request she'd been leading up to when Ron interrupted.

“Ron, what am I supposed to tell Janet Stratton-Smith about the planning meeting for the Campsters Christmas gala?”

“Wendy can meet with her.”

Wendy was my assistant, an exhaustingly perky twenty-five-year-old whom Ron had hired as a favor to his tax accountant, whose niece she was. Ron owed his firstborn child to his tax accountant, for reasons I preferred not to think about.

“Janet won't like that.”

“Wendy can smooth her down. She's good at that. Tactful. Sweet. Unlike some people.”

“Fine. I'll see you in Weingould's office at two. Who's he got on the ground there?”

“A guy named Tony Boltanski. You know him?”

For a moment I couldn't speak. No one I knew, except Louise and my mother, had mentioned Tony's name to me for five years. Most of my friends knew that I liked to pretend that Tony had been lost at sea
in a tragic marine archaeology expedition, or been blown up in a foolhardy but courageous attempt to crack a Columbian drug ring. Anything rather than the knowledge that he'd gotten over me, that he was out there doing the job he'd always done, the job he'd preferred to me by such a large margin. I was not the sort of generous soul who bids her lovers good-bye with earnest wishes for a happy life, a wistful, philosophic smile, and “What I Did for Love” playing softly in the background. I wanted them all to suffer.

“Tony Boltanski? I knew him a long time ago. A campaign in New York. He's capable.”

“Better than capable, according to Weingould.”

Tony and I had lived together for a year and a half. I'd thought I was going to marry him. With Tony, for the first time in my life I'd felt I was home safe. More fool me.

“Could you meet me in the lobby at a quarter of to discuss strategy?”

“Don't push it, Ron.”

He clicked off. He knows that note of finality in my voice.

“I have twenty minutes,” I said to Louise.

“You're going on assignment?”

“Yeah. Rhode Island. I hear it's lovely there this time of year.”

“And Tony's involved?”

“I'll tell you about it later.”

She pushed a plate of warm pecan brownies to my side of the table. My favorite. I began to gobble, though I knew Louise had provided this delicacy specifically to soften me up for the pitch she was about to make: namely, that it was time I availed myself of her services, as it seemed that every other desperate single person in the Washington metropolitan area was doing. Her company, Custom Hitches, sole proprietor Louise Geary, stood ready to cure my solitary state. This pitch, which had never had much of a chance, was doomed to failure the moment I heard Tony Boltanski's name for the first time in five years.

Damn Ron. Leave it to him to put together the perfect combina-tion: working with an old lover from whom I'd parted bitterly, for Weingould, the compulsive looker-over-the-shoulder, on a strike that already sounded more like a siege than a winnable campaign, up
north, as winter started. Faced with this cheerful prospect, I was in no mood for Louise's canned lecture about how the Universe held a mate for each of us if we would just make room for love in our lives.

My name is Nicky Malone. Nicky is short for Dominica, the middle name of my mother's Neapolitan mother, but no one ever called me that except my mother in her more dire moods. My full name is Dominica Magdalen Regina (confirmation name) Malone. I like the short version. It sounds like the name of the hero in one of those forties detective stories. “Nicky Malone here,” I could see myself barking into the phone, my hand caressing the fifth of scotch in my drawer, my eyes lingering on a hunk in a fedora and a pinstriped suit who, at any minute, would attempt to seduce me to throw me off the trail.

I have two brothers, and would have had more if something hadn't gone wrong with my mother's insides during her last labor and deprived her and my father of the six kids they'd have liked to bring into the world. My older brother, Michael, is gay, to the eternal lamenting of my mother, who refers to Michael's gayness as if it were a disease (“I should have
seen
it coming on. If only I'd made him stay in Little League”).

Michael is dark and slim with coal-black hair. With his heavy-lidded black eyes and long straight nose, he resembles one of those beautiful, melancholy youths in Etruscan portraits. No trace of Irish blood in him. If it wasn't for our eyes, you would not know we were brother and sister, to look at us. He's an investments counselor—he shows people who have a certain amount of money how to make even more money by carefully, carefully playing the stock and other markets (or, as Michael would say, “developing a well-balanced portfolio that will yield sustained and steady long-term growth”).

My younger brother, Joey, whose snub nose and mischievous grin mark him as a mick from twenty paces away, is married and has a new baby, a baby new enough that it still scares me to hold him. Since my father's death from a heart attack four years ago, Joey has managed River Road Auto, the car repair shop that was the reason my dad brought us all down from Boston when I was five. The shop is a fancy
place now: foreign cars, computer diagnostics, twelve bays with hoists, ten employees where there used to be four.

Our cousin Johnny Campbell, who came to live with us when he was thirteen, is Joey's head mechanic. The best mechanic I've ever known, and my father was pretty damn good at his job. My dad had talent and an attention to detail, but Johnny has intuition and at times pure genius. There is nothing on wheels that Johnny can't fix. When he flexes his long fingers over the hood of a fractious automobile, it quiets itself like a horse being gentled

Johnny is loping and kind, with long, deep-set blue eyes. His Irish half is tempered by his father's blood, a mix of Lowland Scots and French Canadian. He's steadier, more equable than Joey—but of the two, you'd rather cross Joey, because Johnny never forgets a betrayal.

Johnny was in love with Louise, who is no blood relative of his. Johnny's mother is our father's sister, and Louise's father is our mother's brother. Louise was unaware of Johnny's feelings, probably because Johnny had accidentally gone and gotten engaged to someone else and was due to marry her next June in a tasteful ceremony in some Connecticut suburb.

That's all of this generation that live here, although we have numerous cousins up in Boston and on Cape Cod whom we rarely see. And so, as I've said, Louise is the closest I'll ever have to a sister. She knows what that means to me, and sometimes she trades on it—as she was about to do now.

She refilled my coffee cup and gave me a second brownie.

“Have you ever thought it might be time to do something about freeing a path for a man in your life, Nicky?” Louise said, as casually as she might have said, “Don't bother to clear up, I'll do the dishes later.”

When Louise wants something from you, she always approaches the subject with a throwaway air and a deceptively mild directness. I took a wolfish bite out of my brownie and glared at her. She clasped her hands in her lap and gazed at a point just over my head, as if to encourage me to join her for a moment in reflecting on my priorities.

“I don't need a man in my life, Louise. I just got
rid
of a man in my life, remember? Having men in my life is what got me in the mess I'm in today.”

Louise dropped the Buddha act.

“What mess? You're gorgeous, you've got a great career, a great apartment, great friends.”

“If my life is so great, then why are you so hell-bent on seeing me paired up?”

“I don't mean that you need a man in some
groveling
sense, like it's a terrible tragedy to be thirty-two and single. All I mean is that it's time to try.”

“You're going to break into the chorus from
Georgy Girl
next.”

“I just think you've felt bad about Jeremy long enough.”

“Felt bad? That's for when you miss a lunch appointment or tap someone's bumper, Louise.”

“You know what I mean. He's still looming way too large.”

“Ma put you up to this, didn't she, Louise?”

To my mother, my being unattached at this advanced age was a dire circumstance, as if I had leukemia. In fact, a life-threatening illness would have been preferable. In that case, she would be “poor Mrs. Malone, bearing up so bravely” and not the failed mother of a daughter who might now never get married. Sad, sad, sad.

For years my mother had been trying to get me to young-adult dances at her parish, St. Ignatius, and when I got too old for those, to Catholic professional singles groups where I might meet some nice Timothy or Patrick who'd soon convince me that birth control was an invention of the devil. Now she was resorting to Louise and her half-baked clearinghouse for lonely hearts. She must be really desperate.

I wasn't ready yet to consign my romantic future to the tender but muddleheaded mercies of my cousin. I'm not gorgeous by any means, despite Louise's encouraging words, but I get my share of Saturday night dates and sidewalk glances. What's most noticeable about me is my hair. It's auburn with gold strands twining through it, and it's thick and long and wavy. Providence must have given me good hair to make up for my cup size, a B on a good day.

My eyes, a legacy from my Italian grandmother Antonella, are so dark a brown they look black. My skin is creamy and pale and without a freckle, though on the debit side it's a paleness with olive undertones
that can look sallow if I wear the wrong color (Grandma Nella again). My legs are long and I'm five foot seven. I'm not every guy's type—not like Louise, who has the classic appeal that comes with being blond, petite, and reasonably stacked—but those whose type I am, I am
indeed
, if you know what I mean. Surely fate had something better in store than Louise's wifty maneuverings.

“You promised me that you would think about dating in the fall,” said Louise.

“Isn't it against your yenta code of ethics to rush me?”

“Sometimes we all need a little karmic shove.”