My phone rang. Tequila answered it with the haughty voice again, then put the call on hold. “You are a popular girl with the men today,” she said. “It’s Mr. Altercation.”
“I don’t know anyone named Altercation. In fact, I don’t even believe there exists anyone named Altercation.”
“That’s not a real name, Tequila,” said Alison.
Tequila presented her enormous rack for inspection, which is what she does when she is annoyed. Tequila has the breasts of a grandmother and the spindly legs of a grandfather. She heightens the effect by insisting on wearing leggings and the sorts of oversize shirts that were popular when she was a teenager, usually with some kind of spangles on the shirt. Today a sequined tiger lurched toward Alison and me as Tequila bristled, perhaps because in this case she was remembering how often it’s been suggested that her name is not a real name, either.
“Altercation, Altercation. That man you know. That one who gave you all that money and you say no funny business but we think you lying. Him!”
“Prevaricator?”
“What I said!” said Tequila as the tiger lunged toward us.
“Miss Fitzmaurice,” he said softly on the phone.
“Bridget, please, Mr. Prevaricator. How’s your granddaughter?”
“My granddaughter?”
“The one who memorized The Cat in the Hat.”
He chuckled softly. “How good of you to remember,” he said. “She’s moved on to Amelia Bedelia.”
“I bet you enjoyed those,” I said.
“As a matter of fact, I was discussing them with your sister not long ago. That’s why I’m calling.” As he spoke, I reached for a pad and pencil, knocking my Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association paperweight and a jar of paper clips off my desk. I took notes, and Tequila and Alison stayed put. When I said, “How does she really seem to you?” both of them leaned forward a bit in the molded plastic chairs.
“Thank you,” I said, and then, “I can’t thank you enough,” and then, “Thank you very much again.”
“You were right,” I said softly. “She just wants to disappear for a while. No cell reception. No phone. No address. But I do have a fax number.” I pulled a sheet of paper off the pad and wrote in capital letters “WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME?” Tequila took it from my hands, and a moment later I heard a birdlike beeping as the old fax machine handed down to us by a law firm began to send. Everything we had was hand-me-down, every chair, every computer, every desk. The beeping stopped. Somewhere in the kitchen of a small seaside house in a remote part of Jamaica lent to Meghan by Edward Prevaricator, who had run into her at Grosvenor’s Cove and realized she needed a place to stay, there apparently was a fax machine and my words would spill out the other end.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going home.”
“Your nephew called, too. He say nothing important, just to talk. And Commissioner Lefkowitz say he’s out tonight at a meeting in Staten Island. He say that girl DeBra is at Rikers, got capped for drugs. She’s crying, carrying on, say it’s because her baby died.”
“Jesus, I’m so tired.” I could hear the rain hitting the metal hatch to the basement out in back of the house. The roof in the transitional building needed replacing, and I hadn’t found a donor yet to underwrite it. I hoped it wasn’t leaking. The rain started to come down hard. “You got an extra umbrella?” I asked Alison.
Next morning on my desk was a newspaper turned to a story on DeBra’s arrest, a warrant for one of the moms in the shelter on an old drug charge, and a sheet of paper that said in capital letters “I’M NOT. DON’T WORRY.” Somehow my pencil pot had gotten knocked down and broken into two big, ungainly pieces, so I stuffed the pencils in the drawer and threw the pot in the trash.
MEGHAN ONCE TOOK me to lunch at a place in midtown that is famous because it is the place where people like Meghan have lunch. Actually, Meghan herself rarely has lunch out, preferring a salad at her desk or at home after she swims. But when she does eat, she eats at this restaurant, which has mediocre food and a media clientele. Part of its charm is that the staff now know anyone who is anyone in television or movies or print journalism. Many of those people have spent so much time with their noses pressed against the window of the true American aristocracy or the new American big-name money that to have a maître d’ say, “Good afternoon, Miss Fitzmaurice,” gives them a feeling of well-being no amount of overdone salmon can quench.
I don’t quite get the point of the place, because it is impossible to talk about anything substantive there. The one time we went we couldn’t trash the woman from another network who is always angling for Meghan’s job because she was just a few tables over. We couldn’t trash Meghan’s producer, Josh, whom Meghan calls Josh 3.0—she likes to say that when the 4.0 upgrade comes out, it will have news judgment and a sense of humor already installed—because Josh’s wife, an agent, was at the table on one side of us. And we couldn’t even trash people who weren’t there because sitting back-to-back with Meghan was one of the gossip columnists for one of the tabs, and he was listening to everything we said so carefully that next morning there was an item saying Meghan had criticized her Cobb salad. I had it, too, and I can tell you it was lame, not enough cheese or bacon and too much lettuce.
We had been reduced to talking the entire lunch about Leo’s high school graduation, whether I should find a bigger apartment, and whether our aunt Maureen needed to be moved from her apartment to an assisted living complex. It was a real wow of a lunch, made worse by the sight of so many people who loathed one another kissing on both cheeks as though they had been born in France instead of the Chicago and Philadelphia suburbs. Most of these are not nice people, people who have risen triumphantly to the middle through the use of sharp elbows.
But there was one interesting moment, and that was when an entire table of guys—two television executives, one movie producer, and an agent—was disrupted by the sounds of their cell phones ringing simultaneously. They all took the calls, of course, rising from the table to move to more secluded corners of the dining room in case they were screwing any of their lunch companions in a business deal and were going to be told so by an assistant. General hilarity reigned when each returned, and before long the entire restaurant was in on the joke: three assistants had been calling to say that the fourth lunch companion would be late, while his assistant was calling to tell him she had told the others that he would be late.
“And he’s not even late!” they all roared.
Then the restaurant manager came over to personally deliver the message they’d just received that Mr. Blah Blah was running a little late. And the place went wild. The fact that everyone thought this was the hilarious high point of the day goes a long way toward explaining how lame most movies and TV shows are, particularly the ones that are supposed to be funny.
And he’s not even late! Cue the laugh track.
But the incident did illustrate how impossible it has become to tumble off the radar in our day and age. Yet that is what Meghan had managed to do, convincingly and utterly. Later she would show me a dusty stack of faxes from the network, pleading that she call and set up a lunch date with the president, asking that she meet and discuss her future, demanding that she respond immediately on when she would return, informing her that she was in breach of contract. But in a world in which everyone is instantaneously available, Meghan was almost completely out of reach. In a world that had become like that restaurant, friends and enemies and rivals and allies all with an ear cocked heavenward for the messages from cell phones and e-mails and lunch conversation, the only possible way to be silent was to disappear.
It reminded me of the first semester of Meghan’s first year at Smith, when she had not come home until Christmas. I sent her long, discursive letters about the difficulties of algebra and the cat I’d acquired at the pound and the painting I was doing of the park across the street at sunset. I got a handful of postcards back, so perfunctory as to sound like fortune cookies: “Pe
t that kitty for me!” “Don’t sweat the math!” “Freshman year is the hardest!” They sounded so unlike Meghan that I wondered if she had gotten them out of some big-sister primer. Only later did I discover that Meghan, miserable and feeling out of her league, had gone to ground and spent most of the semester in her room.
“There, and yet not there,” one of her high school friends had said.
It was fine for my aunt to talk again and again about Meghan’s determination to hide from adversity, to struggle alone, to go under the porch. But her disappearance was taking on a larger, more ominous tone, as though she was in a witness protection program for the walking wounded. Perhaps somewhere she was regaining her strength, but all I could think of was how shattered she seemed at a distance, how lost and weak.
The stories trailed off, the references to the FCC investigation became fewer after they’d levied a fine of $100,000 against the network, which was roughly commensurate to Meghan’s travel and entertainment expenses in any given year. As for Meghan’s whereabouts, the network couldn’t let on that they didn’t know and the other networks couldn’t show they cared about a rival star. The straight papers don’t cover that sort of thing unless they can do it as a business story—“Network in Ratings Slump as Morning Newscast Changes Personnel”—and the tabloids were preoccupied with a serial killer in Ohio, a sitcom star who had come out of the closet (unless you happened to be gay, in which case the announcement was about five years behind the times), and most troubling of all, a missing wife on the East Side. Long blond hair, two kids, what the tabs kept calling a $2 million co-op apartment, as though that would be anything larger than two bedrooms and a maid’s room in this market.
The supermarket tabloids remained on Meghan watch, but after she left Grosvenor’s Cove, they were reduced to reporting spurious sightings. Meghan on the yacht of a software mogul who was a rival of Ben Greenstreet’s. Meghan in a Buddhist retreat center in Nepal. Meghan angling behind the scenes for the job as evening anchor, the job she had really always wanted, which was true. The always wanting, not the current angling.
One morning I got a phone call from Hadley Booth, the loathsome socialite. That’s how Meghan always refers to her, as though it is her full name. She has had to be very careful over the years not to say this in front of Peter Booth, Leo’s friend, Hadley’s son.
“Bridget? Hadley,” she said, as though we were the closest of friends. “I needed to check in. Leo seems so distraught. So. Distraught. Not at all the same boy. And we do think of him as our second son.”
I shuddered, at the thought of anyone else thinking she was Leo’s surrogate mother, and at the idea that that person might ever be Hadley Booth, who had once thrown a fit because she was shut out of a Chanel show after arriving late. But even from the collagened, lying lips of Hadley Booth, the notion that Leo might be suffering disturbed me more.
“I didn’t know Leo and Peter saw each other when they were at college,” I said.
“So close,” she purred. “E-mail, phone, all those other techie things I don’t begin to understand. Peter is a rock for Leo. I’ve told him that I’ve had so many friends come out the other side of all this. I’ve seen it over and over, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
“You’ve had lots of friends who misspoke over an open mike on national television?”
“That’s the symptom, isn’t it, Bridget, not the illness.”
I refused to bite.
“I said to someone just the other day, I know Meghan Fitzmaurice, and Meghan Fitzmaurice will emerge from this crisis stronger than ever before.”
“Tanner,” I added.
“Excuse me?” Hadley Booth said, barely hiding her annoyance. She had taken time out of a very busy day of laser resurfacing, Pilates sessions, and shopping on Madison Avenue to get the scoop from the impoverished, obscure sister so she could spread it around town at dinner that night. And she was getting only sarcasm. It occurred to me that I sounded a bit like Meghan.
“She’ll be tanner,” I said. “She’s at the beach. Hadley, I’ve got to run, I’ve got a crack addict and a cop waiting for me. It’s always nice talking to you.”
I was definitely channeling Meghan.
When I called Leo to report on the call, he just sighed into the phone. “Don’t listen to Mrs. Booth, Bridey,” he said wearily. “She’s a complete bitch. And Peter never tells her anything. Besides, here’s what I decided: It’s kind of better this way. Dad doesn’t really want to talk until he can do it with Mom, and Mom can’t talk until she gets back. And if I don’t have to talk about it, I have some time to get used to the idea, you know?”
“It’s very sweet of you to make that sort of allowance for your mother,” I said.
“I learned that one at the feet of the master,” he said. I wasn’t sure whether he meant me or Evan. That was a bad sign.
The network was letting the morning newsperson, a nice young woman who was always tripping over stray consonants as though they were heaves in the sidewalk of a sentence, sit in for Meghan, and even having her say “Rise and shine!” in a way that somehow suggested she spent a lot of time practicing in front of a mirror. I found this dispiriting. Leo might have felt as a boy that Meghan had cheapened a greeting that was theirs alone by turning it into common parlance, but to hear come out of the mouth of Susan Lomenta the words with which my sister had awakened me, first when our mother was taking her much-vaunted beauty sleep down the hall, then when our aunt was working the early shift at the hospital, was infinitely more jarring than Meghan’s on-air imprecation against Ben Greenstreet had been.
“I don’t believe you, Bridget,” Evan said when I insisted I had no idea how to reach Meghan, which was almost true, as so many things are. I had not had a fax since that first declaration. But although I had given her assistant the fax number and insisted that she use it sparingly, I would be damned if I would have a stream of divorce documents scrolling their way out of thin air into the steamy, sweet-scented days in which I liked to imagine her, the blue sea spread before her like thin, shimmering cloth until it disappeared into the horizon somewhere short of Cuba.
Leo told me he planned to have dinner with his father every two weeks. Leo said the first two dinners were pleasant but, I divined, somewhat empty of content since he had declared a moratorium on any discussions of his mother, his mother’s whereabouts, his mother’s shortcomings, and his parents’ marriage. I could imagine their time together, Leo sitting quietly at a Thai or Greek or Italian restaurant not far from Grand Central so he could take the train back, Evan returning to Amherst, where he was always preternaturally lively, as though to illustrate through simple bonhomie that he was somebody, he had been somebody. “He’s gotten this bald spot on the back of his head,” Leo said thoughtfully, reminding me that he was just as apt to make judgments and find the jugular as his mother, although with no ill will. When I asked what he and his father discussed, Leo said, “The Yankees.”
“Go Yanks,” Irving muttered when I recounted the conversation in the back of a cab.
“They suck!” the cabbie had said in heavily accented English.
“Mets fan?” Irving asked.
“Certainly. The Mets are the team of the workingman.”
“You see?” Irving muttered. “This is why we should take my car everywhere.” More loudly he said, “I’m a cop.” The driver began to drive so slowly that Irving literally tore his own hair. “We’re in a hurry!” The driver gunned the engine, and we jerked forward, nearly colliding with a man and his dog in the crosswalk. By the time we got downtown, I was carsick. Of course we were going to a clam house, which is one of Irving’s three favorite kinds of restaurants. The man once sat across from me at a dinner and stared morosely at a bowl of cucumber gazpacho for nearly a half hour without speaking. He loves ketchup, nitrites, and crullers.
He loves me, too. He held my hair as the aroma of clam sauce and slightly ripe garbage overwhelmed me and I vomited in a gutter at the corner
of Grand and Mercer streets. Then he gave up zuppa di pesce to walk me down to a little place that served pancakes and pie and other sweet, heavy foods that settle your stomach.
“You eat today?” I shook my head. “See, that’s not good. You’re under way too much stress, and you’re not taking care of yourself. Take the day tomorrow. I’ll take the day tomorrow.”
“I can’t take the day off,” I said to Alison that night on the phone.
“Yeah, you can. You just think you’re indispensable.”
“Do not!” There’s nothing like a little insight to bring out the youngest child in a youngest child.
So we took the day off and went to Coney Island. We even took the subway, which is a mode of transportation I love, particularly with Irving. What is it about him? Sometimes I look at him and imagine that he looks like a middle-level capo in the Gambino crime family, the prosperous head of a family company that sells cheap sportswear to Kmart, the principal of Sheepshead Bay High School, even a reporter at a tabloid. Maybe it’s the eyes, which are deep brown but look black and are always a little narrowed. But if a guy is on the A train with Irving and he’s carrying a knife, a gun, a box cutter, a can of spray paint, or is simply a little behind on visits to his parole officer, he knows Irving is a cop. There is a force field around him, and I am in it with him.
The old men watching the water rise and fall from their benches on the boardwalk gave him respectful nods. At the aquarium they let us in free to watch the beluga whales smile from the other side of the thick glass, showing off their pale bellies as they glided against the side of the tank. At Nathan’s the counter guy handed over three chili dogs, two fries, and two root beers, and waved his hand when Irving gave him a twenty.
“You nuts?” the counterman said. “Paying?”
“You cops,” I said as we ate.
“It’s got nothing to do with the cops,” Irving murmured, his cheek full of chili and bun. “When I was younger I used to take my nana here every Sunday. If we see an old lady, you watch. She’ll act like I’m Jesus H. Christ on the cross.”