“Sometimes I can’t believe she’s interested in me,” he’d told me once when we were having breakfast in the shabby apartment they rented one summer in Boston. It was the summer Meghan was an intern at the network affiliate there, the summer that would become the fat paragraph in every profile, and already she had started to shine like a copper ornament in the garden of everyday.
“I’m not sure it’s going to work out,” Meghan had said about Evan that same summer, and then, when she saw the look on my face, “Oh, God, Bridget, just stop. I can’t stay with a guy because you want a big brother!”
Evan had three older sisters, and he never seemed to mind having acquired overnight a younger one. If Meghan was working for the summer as an intern in Boston and he was taking a course at Harvard, they enrolled me in an art history enrichment program and found a place with a sleep sofa in the living room. If the two of them were going on a ski trip with college friends, they insisted I skied as well as I walked. (That was true, I guess; for years I could barely get from the front door to the curb without falling down. When I was four my mother nicknamed me Clumsy, until my father apparently told her to stop because it was just country clubby enough to stick. Or at least that’s what Meghan says.) When I graduated from college, Meghan was stuck on assignment at a coal mine collapse in Kentucky, but Evan sat with my aunt and uncle. He gave me a watch for a gift; he had picked it out himself. I’ve worn it ever since. I’m a creature of habit.
“Tequila,” I called, “call Evan’s office and ask his secretary for the number of a friend of Meghan’s named Harriet. The last name is Kraft with a K, I think, but it might be with a C. Or maybe even two f ’s—Kraff. And call Meghan’s assistant at the office and get the number of her most recent cell phone. I just really need to track Meghan down.”
“I bet everybody in the world is trying to find your sister, baby,” she said, “but Tequila gonna make it happen.” She came to the door. She was wearing stretch leggings so tight you could see her cellulite, and a sweater with a koala bear on the front, probably handed down from some charity grab bag. She’d spent most of the weekend having her hair braided. If she’d had wrinkles, she would have had a face-lift and a hairdo all in one, but Tequila was only thirty-five, although her oldest child was twenty.
“He taking a hike?” she said.
“Apparently.”
“He got a girlfriend?”
“He says no.”
Tequila let out a “huh” that sounded like the noise a weight lifter makes when he cleans and jerks two hundred pounds. “Men,” she said. “Can’t live with them. I’m gonna find your sister, baby, wherever she is.”
She’s under the porch, I thought.
“IT WILL ALL be over by tomorrow,” I muttered to myself as I turned onto West Sixty-ninth Street, trying to convince myself. “It will all be over by tomorrow.” A couple passed me, a forty-three-year-old woman talking to herself on the street, and didn’t even look twice. When I first moved to the city, I figured that people who talked to themselves on the street were either actors going over their lines or crazy people. Now that there were these tiny cell phone headsets, every third person on Broadway was barking orders or chortling wildly. The whole town appeared to be peopled by unmedicated schizophrenics.
“It will all be over by tomorrow,” I muttered as I turned the corner onto the block where I lived, passing the newsstand and the sweet-faced Indian man who smiled at me every evening. “Meg’s Name Mud” one of the tabloid headlines read on the front page. Thank God they didn’t know the real story: Meghan and Marriage, Over and Out. Tequila had finally somehow gotten Harriet’s number, and I had gotten Harriet’s machine. Harriet, according to her slightly breathy message, was in Kenya at a conference on malaria. “Meghan!” I yelled after the beep. “Meghan! Pick up right now!”
Meg Mum on Marriage, and everything else. It was Tuesday evening, less than two days since the Greenstreet interview, three since the dinner at the Waldorf, and yet I felt that a crack in the sidewalk had opened and swallowed my life as I knew it. I would not have been surprised to find my apartment building in flames, my furniture on the street, the subways stopped, the park gone. Instead I saw Irving Lefkowitz swinging down the street toward me, and the blanket of dread lifted. He had a spring in his step, a song in his heart, and a bottle of middling California chardonnay, proving that even the least kempt among us are not immune to the wine impulse.
“Talking to yourself,” he said with a grin.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” he said. “You live here. I like it here. What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“We can talk when we get inside,” I hissed. My sister once told me that you never know where a reporter might be hiding.
The good thing is that my apartment is on the top floor of a five-story building, with a view of carefully landscaped town-house yards. The bad thing is that it’s a walk-up. More than once Irving, who is twenty-four years older than I am, has predicted a coronary and an ambulance trip to Roosevelt Hospital on the third-floor landing. Then he gets inside, bends at the waist with his hands on his knees, breathes deeply a couple of times, and is all ready for a drink and a cigar.
“Look, you’re overreacting to this,” he said, putting the wine in the fridge and pulling out a beer. “Everybody’s overreacting to this. It’s got a day or two more in the news cycle, and then it’s over. It’ll follow your sister around for a year or two, and then before you know it people will be saying, Yeah, what’d she say?”
“Did you actually see the show?”
“Nah, you know I can’t watch that crap. I slept on the office couch and took a shower in the commissioner’s bathroom. Then I went out for a jumper on the Brooklyn Bridge, which turned out to be nothing.”
“They needed you for a jumper on the bridge?” I took his beer and took a sip. The cat sat on the couch just behind Irving’s left shoulder. They say cats can always sense those who hate them. Irving took the beer back, put his hand under the cat’s behind, and flipped her onto the floor.
“Whatever,” he said enigmatically.
Irving is the deputy commissioner for public information for the New York City Police Department. This is a position that is traditionally held by well-connected former reporters, what the rank-and-file in the department like to call “lame-ass hand jobs.” But for some reason the mayor appointed a serious hard-guy cop as commissioner, and the commissioner appointed Irving, who is frequently called in the tabloids “a cop’s cop.” Much of this is because he looks, shirtless, as though he has a third nipple just below the one on the left. This is the scar of a bullet hole. Legend has it that, spewing blood and clearly on his way to a splendid police funeral, Irving nevertheless managed to kill the guy who shot him, who turned out to be a serial rapist who had used his gun in a fashion that was apparently impossible for him to use his penis. For this act of bravery, Irving won the department’s highest honor and was christened by the Post “The True Blue Jew.”
There are very few Jewish guys in the department. “Because,” Meghan had once said tartly, during one of our many disagreements about Irving, “Jewish boys tend to go to college and then find remunerative work with regular working hours.”
“Wait a minute,” I’d replied. “Most of the guys you know work seven A.M. to nine P.M. when they’re not on a plane to Bonn. Those are regular working hours?”
“None of them sleep on their office couches,” Meghan said.
It was true that Irving led an irregular life. Often I kept track of him by watching the news and seeing him behind a bank of microphones, trying to wrap his mind around the word perpetrator when he would have preferred scumbag. If he’d been up all night, he looked it, with a dark jaw and a tie that appeared to have been recently balled up in someone’s fist. He was good-looking, but in an old-fashioned way, with a thatch of gray hair and a big, square face full of nose and brows.
“I ordered a pizza,” he called from t
he kitchen, where I heard him pop another beer. The cat strolled across the back of the couch and curled up on the spot where Irving had just been sitting. “I’d move if I were you,” I said.
“Why’d you ask if I saw her this morning?” he said, executing a lacrosse sweep that landed the cat on the other side of the coffee table.
“You understand this stuff better than I do, but I’m pretty sure she made it worse. She was supposed to give this apology, but she did it as though she thought they were all morons. And I don’t think I was the only one who knew that.”
Irving clicked the TV remote and went to one of the cable stations. The retired anchor of a defunct morning show was talking. “Jeez, she’s had a bad lift,” Irving said, cranking up the volume with his thumb. “I’m not sure she can survive this in terms of her credibility with the American people,” said the woman, her plumped lips pulled into a tight little O-ring. “It seems to me that the line between outspoken and inappropriate—”
“A line which she’s always been in danger of crossing,” said the host.
“Shut up,” I said to the TV.
“Well, certainly there are those who think so. And there are many people who think it has now been crossed. She will probably have less supporters in-house and out.”
“Fewer!” yelled Irving and I simultaneously. One of the things Irving and I have in common is a powerful affection for grammar.
“Sources at the network say they are putting Meghan Fitzmaurice on leave until the FCC takes a look at this,” said the host. Then they ran again the clip of the end of the Greenstreet interview with the appropriate bleeps. The New York Times, in its inimitable fashion, had referred to Meghan’s use of two barnyard epithets, which I thought sounded lively. Naturally the Times had not done a story on a network news personality swearing on air. That would have been beneath them. The paper did a story on whether standards had slipped in what they called “the everyday tenor of public conversation.” Meghan was exhibit A, and the answer was yes.
The tabs just said she had a potty mouth and should be soundly spanked.
“What’s Meghan say?” Irving asked.
“I haven’t talked to her since Sunday. I can’t reach her anywhere. I’m going out of my mind. I’ve left messages everywhere, and she won’t call me back. She could be dead in a ditch for all I know.”
“She’s not dead in a ditch,” said Irving. “I’d know if she was dead in a ditch.”
“It gets worse,” I said. “Much much worse. Evan came to my office this morning.”
“Your office? Evan went to the Bronx?”
“He’s left her. He says—Oh, God, I don’t know what he said. They don’t talk anymore. They have nothing in common.”
“He’s got a girlfriend. Bet on it.”
“That’s what I said!”
“Well, that explains everything. That’s why she blew. She’s got a mean temper. You know she’s got a mean temper.”
The bell rang. The pizza guy and Irving had a deal; Irving buzzed him in, then met him on the third-floor landing. Then Irving gave him twenty bucks for a ten-dollar pizza. It worked for them both, and Irving never worried about letting a strange man into the building since he tended to be wearing a shoulder holster when the pizza handoff was made.
“It’s not really about the woman,” Irving said around a mouthful of cheese. “It’s just that, to have the balls to do it, he’d have to have another woman. Guys can’t do the alone thing. Or straight guys can’t.”
“I asked him over and over who it was. If it’s someone we know I’m going to kill him.”
“Yeah, but who it is isn’t important. It’s someone ordinary, someone normal. She’s someone not too famous. She’s someone not too busy. That’s the main thing. I’m surprised the poor bastard has hung in there that long.”
“Hey! That’s my sister you’re talking about! And what I always thought was her supposedly happy marriage.”
“Baby, I love you. But if people were always elbowing me aside to get to you, that could change pretty fast.”
“It’s Meghan’s fault that her husband is bailing on a twenty-two-year marriage?”
“It’s not anybody’s fault. It is what it is. No guy wants to feel like he’s a bag carrier for his wife.”
“Which women have been doing for men for centuries.”
“If we’re going to have the interchangeable argument again, I’m going to come out where I always come out. It ain’t so. The important thing is to figure out what kind of bounce this will take in terms of your sister’s situation. If the brass knew she was under stress because of marital troubles, would they cut her a break?”
“It doesn’t make any difference. She’d sooner cut her own throat than go public with something like this. Meghan Fitzmaurice, ditched? No way. That’s why she’s avoiding me. Actually, there’s probably a lot of reasons why she’s avoiding me. She knows how much I love Evan. Or how much I used to love Evan.”
“Whoa,” Irving said.
“And I talked to my aunt today and it seems like Meghan’s been upset for a while, anyhow. Apparently she’s been going up to Westchester and having grilled cheese sandwiches with Maureen once a week for the last couple of months.”
“Is the grilled cheese sandwich symbolic?”
“Yes, wiseass,” I said, hitting him in the shoulder. “It’s what Maureen makes us when we’re sick, or upset.”
“So she saw this coming. The Evan thing. Not the work thing.”
“How can that be? If she did, why wouldn’t she tell me? We ran six miles Saturday morning!”
“Your sister doesn’t do failure,” Irving said. “Especially with you.”
He narrowed his eyes. I’ve always suspected that it’s the way he looked when he shot that guy, the last sight the guy ever saw: Irving Lefkowitz on his knees on a narrow street in Brooklyn outside an auto body store, bleeding into an oil slick, raising his weapon like a third eye.
“I gotta cogitate,” he said. It’s one of Irving’s favorite expressions.
“This isn’t your problem.”
But he was making it his problem for my sake. He didn’t like Meghan, and she didn’t like him. Maybe that was inevitable, but it wasn’t helped by their first meeting, which had been a disaster. Six months after I’d begun to go out with Irving, I brought him to a dinner party at Evan and Meghan’s apartment. For so long she had been demanding that I find the right man, a man who was accomplished, secure, intelligent, mature. Irving was all of those things, as well as authorized to carry a gun at all times. And in New York City, where psychobabble, half-truths, obfuscation, and downright lies are the order of the day, he always, as he likes to say, calls a spade a spade. So does Meghan. That’s precisely what she thought she was doing at that dinner when she called the senior senator from New York a moron. It was the sort of pronouncement she was used to having greeted with rapt attention.
“Nah, he’s not,” Irving said flatly, turning his fish fork over in his big fingers. “He’s done a lot of dumb things and he’s got a problem with how he handles himself in public, but he’s actually a pretty smart guy.”
Meghan assumed her attentive television face. A child could have seen that her neutral expression was insincere. “I appreciate that someone in your position would have to give him the benefit of the doubt,” she said, “but I’ve interviewed him at least a dozen times on various topics, and I can tell you unequivocally that he’s a moron.” She began to turn to the man on her left.
“Nah, he’s not,” Irving said, a little louder this time. “We went to junior high together, so I’ve known the guy almost fifty years. Smart guy. Reads a lot, thinks a lot. Like I said, the problem is with how he handles himself, but even in junior high he was smart.”
“Junior high?” Meghan asked, as though it was a technical term.
“Yeah, in Coney Island. I remember even at his bar mitzvah the old guys were talking about how he should go into politics. Funny, right?” Irving looked
around the table. I remember that Evan gave him a grin. Meghan was flushed beneath her makeup. “The kid glad-handed everyone in the temple reception room. And he gave some great speech during the service, something about his Torah portion and Adlai Stevenson, maybe? The New Deal? Jeez, am I that old?”
Meghan replied sweetly, “I guess you must be.”
“She’s everything people told me she would be,” Irving said afterward. And the more I pushed, the less he said. From time to time he had accompanied me to Meghan’s house, but not very often. Four years in, and the two people I loved most were still in a battle for my soul, although Irving’s chief weapon was passive resistance. Meghan preferred the barb, about his cheap cigars and rumpled clothes. Most of the time she simply ignored his existence, as though if we did not discuss him, he would cease to be. All the young lawyers and college professors and stock analysts and junior executives she’d fed and cosseted at dinner parties on my behalf, watching their eyes glow with the combination of merlot and proximity to power. And somehow I’d run through a personal trainer, an actor who worked as a bouncer at a club, the guy who made bread for a chain of caterers, only to end up at Irving, whose signature line, faced with a phalanx of microphones, was “Yo! Listen up!” He usually said this while pulling at his mustache, his mouth twisted to one side. When Irving thought deeply, he seemed to be acting out deep thinking in a game of charades. Ditto pissed off and reaching orgasm. It was one of the things I loved about him. There was no nuance. I have a red couch and a bed surrounded by mosquito netting and twinkle lights and a cat named Kitty Foyle. I hate subtlety. My least favorite color is beige.
“Are you married?” I’d asked when Irving first asked me to dinner.