The Side of the Angels (33 page)

“We'll see what they counteroffer in talks,” said Clare. “We'd agree to a mandatory overtime clause of no more than four hours.”

“They'll never go for four hours,” said Tony.

“We have to offer something,” said Clare.

“I know, but they'll never go for it. They're just wearing us down.”

“What else have we got?” said Kate.

“Precious little,” said Doug. Kate, Tony, and I glared at him, but Clare sat with her head bowed, turning a plain silver bracelet round and round her wrist.

“We had a few other things we haven't tried yet,” said Tony, pretending to glance down a list he knew by heart. “There's a rumor that the Rhode Island secretary of state is going to call for an investigation by the inspector general into the way state licensing officials hurried their review of the licenses of the scab nurses. We have Mae Carroll and the seniors to thank for that.”

“The IG and the old folks brigade. Great backup,” said Doug.

“If you have any other ideas, Doug, feel free to share them with the group.”

“How about facing the facts?” said Doug.

“What facts?” Tony, when angry, speaks very quietly. Those who are wise don't press him at such times. Doug wasn't wise.

“We all know that Weingould and the rest of them at headquarters want us to wrap things up. I've been honest with Clare already; we've had a good run and now it's time we started talking about ways and means for winding down.”

“Clare's decided to see what mediation brings,” said Tony. I was sitting next to him, and saw his hand ball up on his thigh under the table.

“You know it'll bring zero, Boltanski. Zero. We need to get realistic. We owe these people that much.”

“Speaking for my people, we appreciate your concern,” said Kate. “But don't do us any favors.”

“How many paychecks can you easily miss, Kate?” said Doug. “Your husband's a doctor, right? You're not clipping coupons yet, I bet.”

Tony put up his hand and said, “I wouldn't continue with this, Doug. I mean it.”

“Or what? You're going to tell Alan Weingould on me?”

“This meeting is over,” said Clare, and stood up and left without a glance at Doug.

Doug's plump cheeks went heart-attack red. I'd noticed that he surreptitiously unbuttoned the top button on his trousers before he sat down for the meeting.

“Have you had your blood pressure tested lately, Doug?” said Kate sweetly. “We run a free program down at the Shop and Buy.”

“Laugh. Go ahead,” said Doug. “But don't come crying to me, any of you, when this thing blows up in your face.”

What had happened to the Doug who was so sweetened and calmed by his Holiday Elf gifts? Even for Doug this behavior was extra antagonistic. He must have been rejected by a lady dancer at one of his contra nights, or been told by Goreman that he wasn't delivering the goods in his fifth-column activities. But surely even Goreman had to be pleased by how few strings were left in our bow. There was no need to harry and depress us any further.

“I can't imagine
anyone
coming crying to you, Doug,” said Kate. “Not in a million years.”

*      *      *

Clare and Tony went into mediation at four
P.M.
At nine I was still at the office, more for the comfort of Kate's company than because I had any remaining St. Francis work to do.

“Five hours,” said Kate. “Is that good?”

“Don't get your hopes up. I have a feeling we'll see them back here only too soon.”

“Without a tentative agreement?”

“Without anything. Through no fault of their own.”

While she ran off the next day's picketing flyers on the copying machine, I played around with photos and copy for the Detroit bus stop ads that Ron had bungled so badly, the ones that were going to get women to drop what they were doing and make a mammogram appointment.

Wendy had e-mailed me some stock-service photos she'd scanned, shots portraying African-American mothers and daughters together. One photo in particular caught my eye. It depicted a mother in a business suit and a daughter in modern-dancer clothes walking down the steps of the daughter's high school. The model playing the mother looked proud, fond, glad to enjoy this marvelous child's company. My mother had never looked at me like that. In most photos of us from my childhood onward, she was clearly examining me for flaws, her lips pursed and her nose wrinkled with worry.

I dropped the scanned photo into a layout template and wrote a main head, “Show her that smart women take care of themselves.”

The copy underneath could run: “You've taught her so much. About working for the future. About hairstyles and high heels. Now set a good example for the rest of her life. Get a yearly mammogram after forty.”

But the picture and head together gave the impression that the mother was about to hand the daughter birth control pills or a mutual fund prospectus. I flipped through the other choices. They were too affluent, too posed and cheery. Most mothers and daughters in inner-city Detroit did not shop together at pricey designer boutiques wearing affectionate smiles and matching linen separates. Nor did they hang around their patios on Sunday mornings lingering over cups of coffee, with gardening implements at their feet and spaniels cavorting on the
lawn. Wendy had obviously chosen photos that appealed to
her
ideal of the mother-daughter bond. In the demographic we were targeting, it made more sense to don a bulletproof vest to go outside and pass up the spaniels in favor of a pit bull.

“I'm going,” said Kate. “And you are too.”

“I've got hours left in me.”

“You're high on cold pills.”

“I'm high on life and on this strike, Kate. It's the party of the century.”

“Tony said we weren't supposed to stay in the office alone,” Kate said.

“Tony is not the boss of me. I have pepper spray and a telephone and we can double-lock the doors when you leave, okay? Tony will never know.”

“I don't like it,” said Kate.

“I have to get this mammogram thing right before Ron comes up with another screwball idea. A wet T-shirt contest or something.”

“If you're not gone by midnight I'm telling on you, Cinderella. And I will call and check. And I
will
know if you're just not answering the phone, so don't think you can get away with that.”

“Okay, okay.”

For the next few hours I lost myself in playing with typefaces and logging on to photo-library sites. I found an oldies station broadcasting out of Providence on Tony's vintage portable radio, and cranked it up, wearing the headphones so as not to disturb the sleeping residents of the apartment building next door. It was cathartic to warble along to “Back Field in Motion,” “Arizona,” and “Five O'Clock World” without worrying if anyone thought I was off-key. Before I knew it, it was almost eleven o'clock. I'd mapped out a few more concepts for the client, any of which would be an improvement on Ron's, but nothing that gave me that zingy, bells-ringing feeling you have when you know you've got it right. I'd let it all percolate in my sleep. Sometimes that did the trick.

I was zipping up my computer bag when I heard a noise in Clare's office. Kate and I had checked it earlier, but the office was way in the back of the building and had that separate steel-doored entrance onto
the back alley, an entrance that could have been tampered with without my hearing, given my stupidity in putting on the headphones. I grabbed my pepper spray and was dialing 911 when the noise repeated. It was a cough, a prolonged, throat-clearing cough, and I knew whose cough it was. Doug's cough. I put down the phone in a rush of relief, mingled with fury at him for frightening me this way.

I didn't particularly want to talk to Doug after this afternoon's events, and he would want to spout off a few more of his dark prognostications. He was a regular Tokyo Rose, the way he seized any opportunity to try to convince us that this whole foolhardy enterprise was all washed up. I cracked open Clare's office door and called softly, “Don't want to startle you, Doug, but I'm heading out.”

He had his back turned to me and didn't hear. I pushed the door wider, and that's when I saw that there were papers all over the floor. Files had been pulled out of Clare's drawers and tossed on the shabby old carpet. Her three African violets had been upended, and clumps of potting soil were strewn from corner to corner of the room.

“Doug?” I said. “What are you doing?”

He turned around. His face went slack.

“What are you doing?” I said again.

“It's none of your business what I'm doing,” Doug said in a soprano squeak.

“Look at this place. Oh, my God.”

“Keep your voice down. Someone might come in.”

In a better-scripted life, I'd have pointed a finger at him and said, “I see it all now! It was you!
You're
the prankster!” For of course it had been Doug behind all the dirty tricks. He knew our habits and hours and had a key to the office.

These thoughts didn't come to me with any coherence at the time. There was only the certainty that Doug was doing something repulsive even for him. There had always been a reposeful quietness about Clare's office, the sense of a peaceful, orderly soul at work. Doug had stepped into that quietness and laid waste to it. Clare's photos of her border collies had been swept to the floor. Doug had rubbed potting soil into the finish of her oak desk chair and upended the small bookshelf where Clare kept her textbooks from nursing school.

The willow ware was still intact. I like to think Doug wouldn't have broken the willow ware.

Tonight he must have parked out of sight and come in the back way. He'd have seen that the parking lot was empty; he wouldn't have spotted my car because the lot had been full that morning and I'd parked around the corner. He'd have waited for Kate to leave before beginning his mischief, probably stayed slouched down in his car for a good while after she left, to make sure the coast was clear. Bad luck for Doug. His good luck had been that I'd been playing the radio so loudly and wearing headphones. Thus I hadn't heard him tearing Clare's room apart, and might have left none the wiser if not for that very recognizable cough.

Doug put his hand on my shoulder and said, “We can talk about this in the morning, Nicky. I think we'd both better get out of here now.” He spoke as if we were jointly guilty of the mess around us.

I did not like the feel of Doug's hand, its hot weight through my thin sweater. I could smell onions on his breath, and the sickly odor of the nicotine-supplement gum he chewed.

“I don't think so,” I said. “I think you'd better explain.”

“This is all okayed. I'm authorized,” he said. “By … by people who know what they're doing.”

“To wreck Clare's office? Her cherished possessions?”

“I'm doing her a favor. I'm just hurrying up the inevitable for the sake of everyone concerned. This is sanctioned by the very top. The very top.”

I removed his hand from my shoulder.

“I suppose you mean Grief Goreman. Weingould would never allow this.”

His eyes flickered, and I knew I was right.

“You people can't wait, huh, Doug? Does Goreman hate Weingould that much? But you guys are a little early, aren't you? We're not waving the white flag yet. It must drive your boss crazy, the way we're hanging on. Lord, I can't believe you did this. No, forget it, of course I can believe you did this. I just can't believe none of us cottoned on to you earlier.”

“God, you are so self-righteous. Underneath that liberated exterior,
you're just a prude, you know that? You can't just look the other way, oh no. You'll have to go running to Tony. Tattling. One more thing you can do to try and get him back.”

My cheeks burned. Doug's breath and the musty smell of his sweat overwhelmed me. I backed up a little.

“Making eyes at him at meetings. Ratting on me.”

“I'm not the rat, Doug.”

“Tony's just laughing at you, Nicky. He and Suzanne. Suzanne especially. She just finds you pathetic, you know that? She told me so.”

I felt as if my legs were filled with lead ball bearings being slowly deposited in my ankles and feet, weighting me to that spot as Doug's mouth continued to move and move and move. I didn't want to breathe so close to him, to inhale his smell.

He was wheedling now.

“Nicky, don't drag Tony into this just to get a pat on the nose from him. It's not in his best interest, really it's not. If he keeps his head low he can come out of this no worse off than when he came in.”

I backed up farther and took a deep gulp of air. For a moment I believed him, believed him completely. I
was
pathetic. The truth had been brought home to me, by Doug of all people.

But none of it mattered, suddenly. It didn't matter that I'd kissed Tony in his hotel room without any sequel, that I'd sneaked around the hospital with Kate, that I'd tried and failed to fix my cousins' lives. I was an idiot, and a laughingstock. What the hell. If you loved anyone at all, if you went out into the world with any hope, you were going to be a fool now and then. It wasn't fatal; it was just the opposite. I laughed out loud, in great relief.

“What are you laughing at?” Doug yelled. “
What
are you laughing at?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You're laughing at me,” he shouted. “You're laughing at me!”

This was how he must have looked as a small boy, plump and despised, railing at some playground bully to stop tormenting him. There was a quality of despair to those shouts. What was Doug, after all, but a still-despised and frustrated kid, an errand boy for the despicable Goreman? We were the only two people awake on this whole
deserted, run-down street, and Doug was shouting at me in this empty office that was really a broom closet, his little hamster hands waving in the air, his face gone babyish in its sorrow and frustration. Suddenly I had had enough of making fun of him, of making him the enemy.