The Side of the Angels (38 page)

“Jeremy, if I came back today, in a week I'd be getting on your nerves again.”

He didn't argue with this, which was a little insulting.

“I'll miss you, you know,” he said.

When he'd hung up I sat for a moment drawing cubes and spheres on my blotting pad. No, I could not fix it with Jeremy, not in this life, not as we two were and were likely to be. We each ought to get ten or twelve lives simultaneously, and in each life have the chance to live out fully every love that crosses our path. Every love.

That's easy to dream of, you see, when the one person for whom you'd gladly sacrifice other visions of happiness is not yours to make that sacrifice for. I had never stopped loving Tony, though I tried to ignore it for a while. Only with him, of all the men I'd known, did I feel that ease, that lack of constraint. If Tony and I were to part and
meet again ten years from now, we would resume our conversation as if we'd spoken only the day before. If we were disguised in other faces, other bodies, in the wrinkles of old age or the damages of illness, we would still recognize each other. Always, always. In any life to come or in any future world, if such worlds and lives existed, Tony and I would find ourselves, eventually, right where we were in this one, in the middle of our endless and endlessly fascinating conversation.

You see couples like this. You see them at a coffee shop or walking slowly along a paved path at the river's edge, or helping each other up the steps of a medical office building, talking and talking. I wanted to be half of one of those couples, and I wanted to be that with Tony. I wanted code words again and secret language, midnight fights and long car rides filled with mishaps. I wanted that joyous ease.

It was December 20. Two nights before, the nurses of Toilers Local 302 had voted on a new contract, and there had been only a few dissenters, snide, discontented critics who'd always had it in for Clare. If she'd kept them on the line until the Utopian deal they demanded was achieved, they'd have said she hung them out to dry. That was all right—the moaners and complainers, like the poor, would always be with us.

I still liked Clare, and respected her, though I was less in awe of her than I'd been when the strike started. She'd turned out to be, as many politicians are, a little hard to get to know, a little lacking in humor. I wondered how that single-minded seriousness would affect her happiness down the years. My guess was that the right kind of man for Clare wouldn't be bothered by it. He would find her very inability to see a certain kind of joke endearing. Women dream of finding a kindred soul in a man, but men, I believe, are often looking for something else. A contrast, a balance, someone to hold them to one specific place on the earth lest they wander off too far. Clare could do that for someone. She would, I thought, end up with the kind of marriage people refer to as “solid.” And it would make her happy.

That night, in the parish hall at Sts. Jude and Rita, a Christmas party was being thrown. It would be part belated holiday spirit finally
bursting loose, part farewell for some of us, and part sheer triumph. A victory celebration complete with champagne, dancing, and mistletoe. The mistletoe was Louise's idea. Even in the depths of her own depression, she feebly reached out to matchmake. Oh, Louise. Our true believer.

“Dress up,” the party announcement had said baldly, so Louise and I went to the mall, wandering its endless sterile halls and finally finding outfits in the Juniors section at Filene's. If you stay away from the teen-slut styles, Juniors can be very rewarding, and much cheaper than the women's section for nearly identical merchandise. Louise got a rosy pink taffeta with a low scoop neck and a flirty tea-length skirt overlaid with pale pink chiffon. It had a little rose velveteen stole thrown in. Thirty bucks on sale. I found a long, sinuous shrug of a dress in corded black lace over beige silk, with tight elbow-length sleeves. I even sprang, full-price, for a pair of strappy black sandals.

“We're crazy,” said Louise, as we rifled through jeweled hair clips at one of those discount accessory stores where you never see anyone over twenty-one. “I buy the perfect dance dress when there's no one I especially want to dance with, and you get dolled up like Mata Hari when Tony probably prefers you in one of his old flannel shirts.”

“This is not for Tony.”

“Then maybe you'd better erase the words ‘Eat your heart out, chump' from your forehead.”

“May I remind you, Louise, that I'm going home in a few days. Tony will forget me faster than he can get his next assignment. He's forgotten me already.”

“We'll go home together,” said Louise. “Don't think I'm leaving before you do.”

I found comfort in the thought of Louise and me on the train, reading
Harper's Bazaar
and
World of Interiors
and eating a big box of Russell Stovers. She likes the nuts and caramels, I like the soft centers, and we both leave the peanut butter crunch alone.

For days Tony had been busy, on the phone, or closeted with Clare working out details of the tentative agreement. That week, a gushing
feature about him appeared in
Today's Hospital Nurse
, usually a very conservative publication, with a sexy black-and-white photo of Tony in action at our rally.

Though not as gushing as the
Nurse
article, Weingould had additional words of praise for Tony when he telephoned to express his congratulations.

“Plenty of people told me I should have gone with a bigger firm, but I told them I'd gone with the best,” Weingould said in a forty-second phone call, the longest discussion he'd ever had with me. “And plenty of people told me I should take Boltanski out of there, too, but I wasn't listening to them. I have faith in that guy. I have faith in you both.”

(When I reached home a few days later, I found a holiday card from him in my mailbox, one of those printed business holiday cards, to which he had added, in a sprawling script, “All good wishes to you, Micky, and Happy New Year.” I helped save his butt for him against his own best efforts, and he called me Micky. Well, Ron would have said, that's what they paid us for.)

The strike victory had been a huge shot in the arm for Weingould and the union's diehards. The Toilers were now going ahead with previously stalled nurse-organizing campaigns in six states, and Goreman was putting a good face on it by attempting to claim that his leadership had supported and inspired the St. Francis local to endure until this milestone contract could be won. But those in the know were aware of who deserved the credit. Tony was golden, no doubt about it.

There were even rumors that he'd be tapped to head a pending, all-out campaign to organize the strawberry workers in Sampsonville, California. To Tony, this kind of assignment was better than a vacation. It would be dangerous, difficult, and prolonged. He would be off to new adventures, headed to California without a word to me about what had happened between us on this strike. Well, what
had
happened between us? A stray kiss? A few heated words? Just remnants, in his eyes. As for me, I would take up my life again on my own. I wasn't as scared as I'd been five years earlier, when we first separated. I knew now, as I hadn't fully appreciated then, that I wouldn't really be alone.
I had Louise, I had my brothers. I had Johnny, if he ever spoke to me again after the way I was hiding Louise. I had friends. I felt that my life was a caravan in which I traveled with these people so dear to me. Sometimes it was a pretty shabby, raggedy caravan and sometimes, rare times, it was splendid and triumphant. In my twenties, the end of a romance could plunge me into despair. Now, having survived unhappily concluded love more than once, I knew that it wasn't in any man's power to leave me completely bereft. Still, my heart, my chicken heart, was dreading the departure just the same.

It felt good to be getting ready for a party with Louise. All our lives we'd been preparing for festivities together. We'd made our first Communions at the same time, at the same parish, Louise in a simple batiste dress embroidered with white daisies, me in my mother's idea of a junior wedding gown, complete with a scratchy crinoline and a tucked elasticized bodice that left marks on my skinny chest.

Neither of us had gone to St. Madeleine Sophie's prom, but during my senior year of high school, when I'd gotten a little prettier and Louise had gotten cleavage, we were sometimes invited to formals at the boys' school down the road. Often our dates would be boys who were friends with each other, and so Louise and I would get dressed at my Aunt Pamela's house and be picked up there. I never thought at the time of how this must have hurt my mother, never wondered if she'd been disappointed that I didn't dress at home so she could see me teeter off on my high heels.

Louise and I had chosen together our first little black cocktail dresses, back when we went to the loud dull parties and unamusing receptions we thought were required of us in our twenties. It had been Louise who got me ready for my father's funeral, who'd run out and purchased for me a simple navy shift that would suit my mother's ideas of propriety, who made sure I had a coordinating shade of hose and matching shoes.

Tonight she looked about sixteen in her pink party dress, standing in front of the mirror trying different ways of draping the velveteen stole. I'd bought her a present, a fresh, sweet-smelling Crabtree &
Evelyn cologne called Savannah Gardens, so light that she could spray it on in abundance. Louise likes lots of perfume.

As I was buckling my sandals, struggling with a strap, Louise said, “I think I might take a trip.”

“A trip? Where?”

“Anywhere. Maybe Central America. They say that Costa Rica is lovely.”

“Who says that Costa Rica is lovely?”

“Well, I'm sure it is.”

“I'm sure it's filled with mosquitoes and bad drinking water. Catching malaria is no way to forget Johnny.”

“I need an adventure, Nicky. Something so difficult that it'll take my mind off things.”

“How about learning Russian, or Chinese?” I regretted this idea as soon as it was out of my mouth. Leave it to Louise to meet some louche, insinuating type the moment she stepped foot in class, some Eastern European lothario who took languages in order to pick up credulous American girls. Washington seemed full of such types right now.

Before Louise could reply, Mrs. Crawley stuck her head in and announced, “Louise, you've got company. And this young man does not look happy.”

Mrs. Crawley had been touchingly pleased with our contract victory. She seemed to attribute it to the nourishing breakfasts she'd been feeding me all along, and had been regarding me with a proprietary, pleased air, as if I were a niece who'd done something clever. Now, though, she looked apprehensive and dubious. I was afraid this mysterious visitor was some Coventry flunky bent on intimidating Louise about casting blame on the hospital in press interviews. One had tried already.

I followed her down to the parlor. There, among the bric-a-brac and ottomans, looking crowded, miserable, and blazingly annoyed, stood Johnny.

Louise didn't say anything. The woman who'd had such presence of mind when flinging herself between a frightened child and an angry attack dog was reduced to immobility by the appearance of a man she'd known her whole life.

“What are you doing here, Johnny?” I finally said. “And how did you know where Louise was?”

“How do you think I knew? I saw her picture in the
Montgomery County Record
.”

The
Record,
a venerable Maryland weekly, included small features on county natives who'd made good.

I turned to Louise.

“When did you talk to them? I didn't know about this.”

“It was a five-minute interview. I forgot to tell you. They didn't ask me much.”

Johnny took a clipping, much tattered, from his pocket. The article was in error about Louise's age, the college she'd graduated from, and her present occupation, noting that she ran a catering firm. But there was Louise in the famous picture, quite identifiable, with an account of what Kate was now calling the Unfortunate Incident.

“That stringer must be making a pretty penny on this photo. It's all over the place,” I said. Johnny glared at me.

“So this is where you were,” he said to Louise. “I might have known. At least Nicky had the consideration to call me even if she did lie. I was out of my mind for twenty-four hours. You didn't answer your machine, you didn't answer your intercom at the apartment, you didn't answer your e-mail.”

“Why should you care where I was?” said Louise, darting a glance of reproach in my direction for my betrayal of her whereabouts. “Did you think I'd rat you out to Betsey?”

“To hell with Betsey,” said Johnny. “You go off, don't leave word with anyone. You disappear, which is something I've never done to you. Then I find you up here, getting into God knows how much trouble.”

“In the first place, Johnny, I am not a child. I don't ‘get into trouble.' “

“As you can see from the photo, she knows how to handle herself in an emergency,” I observed.

“And in the second place, you had no right to know where I was. You have no rights in my life at all. Not after the way you treated me.”

“The way I treated you? You didn't give me a chance to treat you any way at all. You were out of there like a bat out of hell.”

“Because I saw how you looked at me.”

“I think it's reasonable for a guy to look startled when he's in bed with one woman and the woman he thought he was going to marry calls on the phone.”

“You didn't look startled. You looked like you wanted to scream with horror.”

“Not over you. Over the situation. There you were, right next to me, and somehow here I was committed to marry another woman. It was like that nightmare Nicky used to have all the time, the one where Aunt Maureen forced her into a wedding with some faceless stranger. It was my not being free. I never wanted it to happen for us that way, don't you get it?”