The Side of the Angels (9 page)

Louise said to Johnny, very quietly, “It's a good thing we've never had a real war.”

“Why?” he said. I could barely distinguish their words, but years of eavesdropping had sharpened my hearing.

“I would never have let you go.”

“I'd want to go. Talk about an adventure.”

“If you wanted to go I'd have to knock you in the head and put you in the trunk of my car and not stop until we got so far into the Canadian wilderness you'd never make it back.”

“I'd be mad at you if you did that,” he said, but he didn't look mad. Louise was staring out at the water. Below us on the plinth Joey was doing a little soft shoe to “If I Only Had a Brain.” He was three sheets to the wind.

Louise didn't see the way Johnny looked at her then. Her lovely hair was blowing back from her face, and Johnny took a lock of it between his fingers. If I hadn't been drunk, this might not have struck me as anything but the usual cousinly affection. But I saw something
I hadn't seen before, and Mike saw it too. I remember Mike looking at me, to see if I noticed.

Joey did not go over to the war. It ended too quickly, to his deep disappointment. There's always been a kind of halo around that night for me, though. If not war, the shadow of war, and if not love, the beginnings of love.

The Mennonites left the dining car, and I read for a while in luxurious solitude. It was such a pleasure to read my old Agatha Christies, especially now that Jeremy was no longer looking over my shoulder, commenting on my frivolous taste in reading, and trying to interest me in some dreary, waterlogged modern novel set in the English Midlands or a depressing, newly released anthology of World War I poets.

That was Jeremy—he never stopped trying to broaden my insufficient horizons. He thought my musical education was lacking, so he would force me to listen to Bartók, or to the sort of aimless, circular jazz that makes you feel as if it's 2
A.M.
on a stifling summer night and you've just become aware that life is meaningless. While I wanted to play Chopin, Eartha Kitt, and the Gin Blossoms over dinner, Jeremy wasn't happy unless he was inflicting upon me the latest album by one of those lamenting, undernourished females singing bitterly of inadequate men in eerie, angelic voices.

“You should challenge yourself more,” Jeremy had objected when I refused to attend an exhibit by an acquaintance of his who worked exclusively in neon.

“I don't think something you have to plug in is art, that's all. Unless it's a Tiffany lamp.”

“You're so hidebound, Nicky. You can't spend the rest of your life visiting the Turners in the National Gallery and reading
Middle-march
.”

To me it seemed there was no reason I shouldn't go on doing exactly this. But Jeremy, who was in truth a gifted teacher—I knew because I had visited his classes—was bothered to his core by ignorance. It truly upset Jeremy, for example, that I didn't know or care much about world affairs. I believed that the British should leave
Northern Ireland and that we should stop trading with the Chinese until they stopped selling sneakers made by preschoolers, but beyond that I got lazy. I am ashamed to admit, for example, that I never did figure out the difference between Croatian Serbs and Serbian Croats.

Only when Jeremy entered my life did I start taking the morning paper; I did the jumble while he read about who was slaughtering whom these days, sharing the more gruesome bits over bacon and eggs, an ungentlemanly habit, I told him.

When some man has done you wrong, it's wise to dwell on his faults. But Jeremy had a lot to recommend him otherwise. He was intriguing, sharp-witted, funny in a cynical, sophisticated way. And he was the first man since my breakup with Tony whom I could stand for any length of time.

Oh, and he was romantic, Heathcliff-romantic in a way you wouldn't have expected of a man whose scone-baking, weepy-letter-writing, America-hating mother still knitted all his sweaters. We had even met romantically.

It was at a crowded party one spring night, at a Dupont Circle penthouse without enough furniture (our host preferred to sink his money into rent and entertaining; he spent most of the time between festivities flat on his back on a mattress on his bedroom floor, with a cool washcloth over his eyes). Jeremy was pushed into me by a large, red-faced girl of very good pedigree and terrible manners, whose out-flung arm made him stumble and spill champagne down the front of my dress.

I teetered on my high-heeled evening shoes and turned an ankle. He grabbed my shoulders with both hands to steady me, and I looked into his eyes—intending to lambaste him, but stopped short. Those eyes. Jeremy's eyes are such a color, a gray-green in which the gray does not dim but somehow enhances the green. I've seen pictures of Ireland, though I've never been there, and his eyes reminded me of those green, green hills shrouded in mist. He claimed not to have any Celtic blood in him, but those eyes made me wonder about his mother's milkman. His hair was lovely, too: dark, heavy, lustrous curls clipped close and a beard that hid his only flaw, a slightly weak chin.

He helped me hobble to a corner couch, brought me strong liquor
to ease the pain of my twisted ankle, and talked to me all night about … I can't remember. One of those everything-under-the-sun conversations. He took me home in a taxi and walked me to my door. Then he called for a week to see how my ankle was coming on, just like Willoughby did for Marianne in
Sense and Sensibility
. At the end of that week we went out for dinner. At the end of that month we went to bed.

We were wonderful in bed. Chemistry surrounded us in a golden cloud. After more than a year together, we still kissed on park benches. We still left dinner sitting on the table whenever passion distracted us, which was often. We were rowdy and hot-blooded, and when he swore he'd never known anything like our lovemaking, I was fool enough to believe him. I was fool enough to think that only with me did his face take on that expression of wonder and absorption, followed by anguished bliss, followed by sleep. Only with me, I thought.

We hadn't been a perfect couple, but we'd had so much that was good, and he'd treated it as casually as a chipped old coffee cup you use every morning but wouldn't miss if it broke.

I threw away the debris of my lunch and lurched back through the rocking train, on the way accidentally grabbing the shoulder of a woman in a lambskin coat who started up, probably fearing that I was some animal rights activist about to spatter red paint on her. Back in my seat, I read with a concentration that had served me well in the past months. With a stack of books by your bed, you can survive any heartbreak. In the watches of the night, reading soothed me as hot toddies or Valium never could have.

In an Agatha Christie mystery, Jeremy would be the slimy step-brother or the not-too-grieved widow's opportunistic lover—some character too self-preserving to have done the murder, but handy for adding confusion to the plot. I could learn to dismiss him that way, if I practiced long enough. In the meantime, I was suddenly glad to be leaving town, glad of the comfort of having a job to do. It beat staying here in Washington, being bombarded by self-pitying love notes from Jeremy and reproachful telephone calls from Ma. If distance did not
bring me perspective and healing, at least it would make it harder for them to find me. No small blessing.

As the train flew up the coast, I thought of all the times Jeremy had looked at me with laughter and desire, how his eyes at such times would do what men's eyes in my mother's romance books did: they would actually change color, the mist on the green hills coming down, veiling and intensifying their beauty. He would never look at me that way again—or if he did, how could I believe him?

I huddled in my seat and watched Wilmington and Philadelphia go by. In my mind's eye I was rocketing up the coast like an arrow, shooting straight up and away from all of it, all the mess and noise and exhaustion of my daily life. Even if all I traded it for was
another
brand of mess and noise and exhaustion, the trade alone would be a relief. If one could not always demand liberty, as Charlotte Brontë said, one could at least ask for a new servitude. I let my hair drop over my eyes to block the light, and fell asleep.

“I
SEE YOU'RE
still doing that
Girl From Uncle
thing,” said Tony when I walked into strike headquarters. “Or is it
The Avengers?
”

For the train trip, I'd chosen a black pinstriped pantsuit that zipped up the front, with a hip-length leather jacket I'd bought with my first bonus from Ron. I'd wanted to look professional in a streamlined and sexy way. Tony made me feel merely stagey.

“And you look the way you always did,” I said, trying to convey by the coldness of my tone that this was not necessarily a good thing.

He had not, to my regret, run to fat or lost his hair. He was much the same as I'd known him. Tony had always had the air of an attractive roughneck, and he still did. The appeal of his blunt features lay in their mobility and humor rather than their individual handsomeness. He was the sort of guy that people instinctively trusted to know what to do in an emergency, the kind of guy you see on the evening news who, after saving three people from a house fire, says awkwardly, “I was just doing what anyone would do.” The maddening part about Tony was that being this guy was not all there was to him. Observant, skeptical, and occasionally generous to a fault, he despised anyone who fell for his pose of tough-talking man of action.

Tony's eyes were the light blue you see on four of five Polish-Americans in the part of eastern Pennsylvania where he'd grown up. You'd think that color would look wishy-washy. Tony's, however, were quick and keen, and when they regarded me for the first time in five years, they didn't soften a bit, neither in gratitude for my assistance in this crisis or in appreciation of my female charms.

“Weingould warned you I was coming up here? He told me he would.”

“I got a whole two minutes with him. He's still hemming and hawing about giving me a budget on paper, but he said he'd definitely pay for you. I don't know how your friend Ron managed to get in so good with him. Usually Weingould's on the phone telling me to make sure and order the cheapest brand of toilet paper, in bulk, for the campaign office bathroom, and here he is hiring high-priced consultants.”

I disliked being made to sound like a hooker being given as a bachelor party gift, but said only, “I've never seen Weingould put a budget in black and white for any campaign he's used us for, so I wouldn't hold your breath.”

“Yeah,” said Tony. “If he doesn't get his ass in gear I'll just do what I always do. Spend what I want and tell him afterward he approved it in advance. He never knows the difference.”

His demeanor was calm, and his handshake had been dry and brief. Right down to the sarcasm about my outfit, he came off as one jaded old pro greeting another jaded old pro. Well, if he could play it that way, so could I. Only, he was on his own turf and I was the newcomer learning the ropes. It gave him the advantage.

My first impressions of Winsack had not been happy ones. Driving into town in the rental car (which had developed a weird throb as if the camshaft were about to go on me), I saw the mill clock first. It was visible miles out of town. The dark red tower with its gilded numbers looked quaint and old-fashioned, but the sheer hulking size of the crumbling textile mill reminded me that one of the worst factory systems in the country had originated in this state. I had read this information in a library book entitled
Touring Historic Southern New England
. I like to learn a little bit about the places I'm assigned to, so that no one accuses me of that ignorantly smug “I'm from Washington and I'm here to help you” attitude.

The rushing Blackstone River had supplied the power for the mills and factories all through this area, the book said. Today, in the aftermath of a rainstorm, you could see why. The river rushed turbulently between its brambly banks, a dirty brown-green flecked with yellowish-white foam. The town was no more cheerful or appealing than the river.

I'd grown accustomed to the broad, leafy avenues of my adopted city, its low open skyline, its pink and silver marble and wide green parks. The palette and scale were different here. Winsack huddled on three lumpen hills, a study in maroon brick, gray stone, dingy white clapboard, black shutters, and black iron gates. Only the white spires of the Quaker and Congregationalist churches and the golden twin domes of the Russian Orthodox church showed bright against the sodden sky. You couldn't imagine anyone turning this place into a cheery little object lesson on the Industrial Revolution as had been done in Lowell, Massachusetts, and other locations. Of course, the people in Salem have created quite a nice little theme park around the witch trials, so I guess anything is possible.

The strike office was on a side street off the main drag. It occupied the first floors of two adjoining buildings that, by the evidence of unlighted neon signs out front, once housed a doughnut shop and a drugstore at some time in Winsack's more prosperous past. On the doughnut shop side, the original doughnut counter was still there. So was the tin ceiling on the drugstore side, lovely in its tarnished intricacy. That side had creaky hardwood floors that reminded me of the Woolworth's in Bethesda, Maryland, near where I'd grown up, even down to the comforting smell of the old-fashioned floor varnish.

The doughnut shop counter was even more hideous by comparison with this faded elegance. It was a bright orange elongated U, and the windows on that side were thin plate glass, open to daytime glare and the harsh light of streetlamps. Clearly this had been a java spot right out of an Edward Hopper painting.

The counter was piled with food although the local wasn't even officially on strike yet. People bring more food by a strike office than they do to an after-funeral lunch. There was a lemon layer cake at one end of the counter, and a huge tray of stuffed grape leaves at the other end, with assorted casseroles, cold cuts, salads, and huge fresh loaves of Italian bread in between. My stomach curled with hunger. I was damned if I was going to look hungry in front of Tony, however. He would probably interpret it as yearning for his strong, masculine physique.