The Side of the Angels (34 page)

“Doug,” I said. “Doug, relax. I'm not going to tell anyone.”

“Sure, you're not going to tell anyone. You can't
wait
to tell everyone. To tell Tony, especially.”

“Why don't you get out of here? I'll keep my mouth shut. Go back to Washington and feed Goreman whatever explanation you want to. Tell him we're on our last legs. Tell him whatever he wants to hear.”

He was gasping. I began to be afraid he was having a heart attack.

“Doug, are you okay?”

He sat down in Clare's rickety swivel chair and put his head between his knees.

“I'm fine” came his voice from under the desk.

“Doug, are you having pain in your arm? Does your chest feel heavy?”

I should have taken that CPR course.

He raised his head and pulled out his inhaler.

“Shut up. I get a little dizzy when I get upset, that's all. Asthma, nothing else.”

I picked up his wrist to take his pulse, though I wasn't sure how. He flung my hand away.

“For heaven's sake, leave me alone. You terrible woman.”

“But I gave you those lobsters,” I said stupidly.

“That was you? I thought it was Margaret. There was no one else who would have …”

He rolled the chair away from me, backing it up until it hit the wall.

“No, me. Margaret helped, though.”

Doug slumped there with his head in his hands, breathing loudly and slowly, for minutes and minutes. If an outsider had walked in it would have seemed that we were parting lovers, Doug's pose was so classically heartbroken.

Clare's carriage clock struck the quarter hour from under the desk. He raised himself heavily to his feet. His hair was damp with sweat.

“I've never liked you,” he said. “You can keep the fucking lobsters.”

He walked out the back door of Clare's office without another word. I heard his car start and roar away.

I hadn't finished cleaning up when I heard the characteristic shudder of Tony's engine and the cling-cling of the main office doors. I poked my head out, and Tony came in and surveyed the carnage.

“I saw the lights on,” he said. “What's up?”

“An accident.”

“What sort of accident?”

“I don't know.”

“There's a poltergeist phenomenon in this office no one bothered to tell me about?”

He looked at me. I looked blandly back at him.

“That little shit,” said Tony, with no inflection. “I bet you felt sorry for him.”

I said, “How's mediation?”

“Trying again tomorrow. What were you doing here in the first place?” Tony said.

“Working. On the Detroit project.”

“Damnit, Nicky.”

“I had my pepper spray.”

“Which you haven't tried out since 1992, when you bought it secondhand from that woman at your office.”

“I could have taken him in a fight, Tony. I mean, if anyone had been here.”

“You are the stupidest woman I ever met.”

“I've always regarded
you
highly, too.”

“Well, as long as I'm here, let me get a broom. Don't step in that glass.”

We had to guess about where Clare's files belonged. She had her own idiosyncratic filing system. With Tony's help, only twenty minutes passed before the office was back in a state of reasonable order.

“I think that's it,” I said.

“Give me the trash can. I'll empty it out in the big bin so no one will notice.”

When he came back from the alley I was sitting on Clare's smallish
sofa, which was so small it was almost a love seat. The encounter and the cleaning-up had worn me out.

Tony parked himself beside me. I did not scoot over. Let him scoot if he wanted to.

He said diffidently, “Suzanne called. She's not going to be in Win-sack for a while.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“They're transferring her to New York. It's a promotion, really.”

“How nice for her.”

“She wants me to come visit when all this is over with.”

“Well, you've always liked New York.”

“I used to like it,” he said.

If he was trying to explain that he was all tied up with Suzanne and therefore could not follow up on our kiss, the message was coming through loud and clear. If he was trying to say anything else, the message wasn't coming through clearly enough. He could have been saying, “Our brief time in New York together was magical, but we both know, adults that we are, that it could never be repeated. Therefore, I am moving on with my life.” Or, he could have been asking me if I missed him and yearned for him and wanted nothing more than to roll time back to those wonderful autumn evenings when we rambled through the streets of Manhattan without even seeing the garbage on the sidewalks.

Then he said, “Suzanne's very excited about this new position,” and I decided that I had had enough of men for one night.

“I'm going home and catching some sleep,” I told him.

“I thought we could get some pie at Yancy's.”

Lovely. Yancy's for pie. He'd taken Suzanne to Les Chauffroix, and I got pie at Yancy's.

“I don't think I should eat pie late at night with someone else's boyfriend. Just save your appetite for New York, okay?”

He began to pace around the room, pushing at his forehead with the heel of his hand, a gesture left over from when he'd had more hair there. “Cut me a break, Nicky. What was I supposed to do, keep myself pure on the off chance you'd drop into my life again, like Mary Pop-pins floating down on an umbrella?”

“Of course not. You don't owe me anything. You didn't even have to feel obliged to send me a sympathy note when my dad died.”

He blinked, and stopped pacing.

“I didn't know your dad had died until a month after it happened, and I went back and forth for another month wondering if you'd want to hear from me.”

“They had no phone service where you were assigned at the time?”

“I thought about you a lot, Nicky.”

“Much good that did me.”

In an issue of
National Geographic,
I'd once seen a picture of snowfields stretching on and on. Was it in Siberia? Nepal? That's how I felt in the months after my father's death, as if I were trudging across vast, snow-stilled wastelands. That's how part of me still felt, when I missed my father. And seeing Tony standing there at a loss for words, I knew that I had held against him every single mile of the distance I'd traveled without him.

“You could have reached me,” I said. “You could have sent some message, somehow.”

“I was afraid I'd call and you'd hang up. Or worse, be all cold and polite.”

“Well, there you have it. Lock up after me, will you?”

“Nicky …”

“I need some sleep.”

But I wasn't destined to sleep for a while yet. When I got home, Mrs. Crawley said, “You have a visitor.” For a minute I thought it might be Doug, come to extract further promises of secrecy from me. Then Mrs. Crawley said, “I put her stuff in the little room off yours. We can add twenty dollars a night to the bill and call it even.”

I followed her into the parlor, and there was Louise.

She was wearing a favorite coat, a creamy-beige wraparound tie-sash coat with a fur collar she'd gotten at the Next to New shop in
Bethesda. Vintage fur didn't trouble Louise's conscience since the minks had been dead a long time. Her golden hair was splayed out over the collar, and she'd even remembered to bring a hat, a camel-colored cashmere beret I'd given her last Christmas. She didn't look well, though. Louise's cloudless blue eyes were circled in shadows, and she'd lost at least ten pounds. She had a large box of cinnamon buns tied with string in her right hand, and her rubber inflatable travel pillow in the other.

When we got to my room I said, “You look like you're running away from home.”

“I had some news I thought I should tell you in person. It's about your mother.”

“Ma? It's Ma? Oh, my God.”

“No, no, it's not bad news.”

She took off her coat and looked around her, taking in my Edwardian boudoir in all its glory.

“Great room,” she said.

“Jesus, Louise!”

“Your mom and Ira got married,” said Louise in a tone of tremulous pride.

“They got married?”

“Yesterday morning. By a judge in Upper Marlborough. They're going to have a Mass, with a visiting rabbi, too. Sometime later.”

“My mother got married to someone I've only met once?”

“They did it on the spur of the moment. Um, Nicky, could I have a glass of water? The plane air is so dry.”

“In a second. This was his idea?”

“It was his idea to get married. It was your mother's idea to do it on the spur of the moment. I brought you cinnamon buns from the airport stand. I know you like them.”

“My
mother's
idea? Wait a second. My
mother's
idea?”

“She's crazy about him, Nicky. You saw at Thanksgiving. She didn't want a big fuss. It was just her and him and me and Johnny. As witnesses.”

“You and Johnny? You and Johnny but not me? The blood tests and license must have taken a few days. Why didn't someone tell me?”

“She made me swear to keep quiet. Even Michael and Joey didn't know. I think she was nervous. About how all of her kids would react. Maybe you especially. You were always your dad's favorite.”

“Well, I sure wasn't
her
favorite, was I? Why didn't she tell me beforehand? Or call me afterward?”

“She said the eloping was because, for once in her life, she wanted to do something free-spirited. The truth is, I think she was anxious. She loves him so much that I don't think she wanted to wait for any arrangements at all, for fear he might be snatched away from her like your dad was. I'm sorry this was sprung on you this way. She was going to tell you tomorrow. They spent last night at an inn in Annapolis. A mini-honeymoon.”

“Let me get you that water. You look like hell. When was your last good night's sleep?”

“I've been busy. You know how the holidays are.”

“Have you eaten lately, Louise?”

“They gave us something on the plane.”

“Peanuts. What about real food? Did you eat dinner?”

“We have these cinnamon buns.”

I took her for a late dinner at Yancy's, but she hardly touched it. Overwrought from my tempestuous day, I demolished a chicken pot pie and most of Louise's Yankee pot roast. I had never seen her so dejected, so listless. Our Louise, who always had a Plan B for life, and never acted as if Plan B were a jot less wonderful than Plan A.

“Louise. Did you come all this way to break the happy news to me or was there some other reason?”

“What other reason? I figured I owed it to you to tell you in person. Aunt Maureen doesn't know I'm here, by the way.”

“Does Johnny?”

“Since when do I report to Johnny?”

“Since always. Since he's driven you to the airport ever since you took your first airplane trip by yourself.”

That had been for an exchange program in France that Aunt Pam had insisted Louise try when Louise was a miserable eighteen-year-old recovering from her first serious boyfriend. Louise hated flying, to the point that she'd been known to leave the plane ten seconds before the
doors closed. For that trip she'd been doctored up on pain medication left over from the removal of her wisdom teeth, regaining full consciousness only on the Paris-bound shuttle from De Gaulle. We'd frogmarched her on board, and Johnny had insisted on staying at the gate until we saw the flight take off.

“Johnny isn't my keeper.”

She was making a small construction with her french fries, as if she were laying sticks for a fire.

“God almighty, Louise. Talk to me. I'm your only close girl cousin.”

“You shouldn't have to listen to my problems when you've just gotten this news about your mother.”

“My mother can wait. Besides, she's just gotten married, not buried. Aren't you, of all people, supposed to be gamboling around with joy when a matrimony takes place?”

“I'm not in much of a gamboling mood these days.”

“I can see that. You look like grim death. And stop fiddling with those french fries. Give them to me. I'm hungry even if you're not.”

She switched plates with me and began making tiny Celtic-looking circles and crosses with her fork in the remains of my mashed potatoes.

“Nicky, do you think that there's just one person for everyone? That you get one chance and that's it?”

Now
she had to ask me this burning question, at one in the morning after a day straight out of Dante. I wanted to reel off some confident answer, some snappy dialogue from the penultimate scene in one of those movies where the heroine realizes that the guy of her dreams is about to get away and races to catch him at the airport. But more and more these days, I didn't know what I thought about anything. In the space of the past six months it seemed that I'd unlearned every certainty I'd won since adulthood. Maybe that was what happened. More and more idols crumbled until whatever mattered was left standing in the debris.

But my cousin shouldn't be treated to this jaded view. She was a pilgrim, a seeker with a mind so open almost anyone could walk in if the timing was right, and she was hoping to hear some wisdom that would restore her faith in love. I was lucky she hadn't asked
some Hare Krishna at the airport. I came up with the best answer I could.

“Louise, you know my opinion about you and Johnny. But if for some reason it doesn't work out with him, then, no, I don't think your whole life will be ruined. You know how to love, so if it isn't Johnny, it'll be someone else. Eventually.”

She sat back, relieved or disappointed, I couldn't tell which. Perhaps I should qualify my soupy reassurance.