by D. W. Buffa
She smiled, laughing a little at herself.
“You didn’t know. And here I assumed that was the reason, or part of the reason, you wanted to see me—to see if my name could be of some use. I write under a pen name, Joseph Antonelli—and yes, I remember you, and of course I’ve read all about you in the papers. I have even from time to time thought about giving you a call to see if just by chance you might have remembered me, Annie Malreaux’s shy and quiet friend.” She had her hand on my wrist, holding it like an old friend. “Here,” she said as she drew me with her to the bookcase. “I’ll give you a signed copy and then, if you ever read it, you can tell me what you think, and whether I got at all close to what Annie was really like.”
A shadow fell over her eyes as we started again to walk toward the door.
“It’s fiction, of course. I could not write the whole truth: that Annie fell out a window on the very day she became engaged.”
I was moving toward the door, caught in the confusion of memories of my own, wondering why I had not remembered that I had once been told that the woman who lived in this house was Rebecca Long, one of the most critically acclaimed authors in the country.
“‘Became engaged’?” I asked without comprehension, repeating a meaningless phrase.
“Yes. Didn’t you know? She was going to marry Thomas Browning.”
CHAPTER 15
Annie Malreaux was going to marry Thomas Browning. She had told Helen Thatcher, but—and this was the tragedy of it—she had not told him. Browning was desperate to have her stay longer, desperate to find someplace where they could talk, away from all the other people who had crowded onto the eighth floor of the Plaza Hotel. He wanted to tell her that he would do anything—give up everything, run off to the other side of the world, if she liked, anything—if only she would go with him, be with him, marry him. He was desperate for her to stay and she kept telling him she had to leave, and he never knew that it was because she did not want to tell him—not with all those other people around—that she wanted to marry him, too. And then, when he finally had her alone, Jimmy Haviland walked in, angry and demanding, and ruined it all.
I remembered Annie Malreaux. That light, fleeting, ethereal, take-nothing-too-seriously attitude was a mask, a pose, a way of watching the world, the amused spectator of the awkward follies of people around her, a way of making sure no one could see too closely into what was important to her. Who knows how many times Browning may have asked her to marry him, but this time, the last time, sometime that Christmas, she had made up her mind to say yes, to marry Thomas Browning. That was something far too important, far too serious, to be announced in the middle of a party that had gone on so long no one could quite remember when it began.
I wondered if I should tell him, or whether that would only make a bad thing worse. Still, it was the truth, and that carried a weight of its own. Perhaps it might put things in a different perspective, changing the way he remembered Annie Malreaux from the girl always just beyond his grasp, the woman too young, too elusive ever to belong to anyone, to the woman who had changed her mind, given up the antic possibilities of moving breathlessly and irresponsibly through the world, and said yes without condition to living her life with him.
It was nearly six o’clock. The temperature was dropping, the air chilly and damp. The fog had run in from the ocean, billowing up against the Golden Gate Bridge, drawing a gray curtain around the city and the bay, everything in front of it colorful and bright, full of action and life. Three blocks from Helen Thatcher’s Pacific Heights home, famous because it was owned by San Francisco’s best-known writer, the world-famous Rebecca Long, I stopped at a corner, watching through the narrow aperture of a steep twisting street the sunlit sky turn purple, lavender and pink, as the fog swirling around the towers of the bridge changed from a dull, amorphous gray to a deep, mysterious rose. I could see the traffic heading out of the city, crossing over to the other side; the traffic coming the other way, toward the city, was buried in the fog and could not be seen. It was like watching a memory at work, some things indelible and clear; other things almost more real because they never quite come back the way you think they should.
I shoved my hands into my pockets and began to walk in a deliberate, purposeful stride, bracing myself against the gathering cold. Keeping to the same brisk, steady pace, I went another block before I began to slow down, wondering why I thought I had to hurry. No one was waiting for me at home; no one would worry about me if I were late. I had dinner when I felt like it, and went to whatever restaurant I chose. I did not need to consult the desires, or try to anticipate the wishes, of anyone else.
There were a number of places I went, and if there were not quite so many as there had been when I first started dining alone, it was only because it was easier to go somewhere close. There were two or three restaurants I went to with some regularity, and one where I suppose I dined more often than the others combined. It was an Italian restaurant, a quiet, neighborhood place, not at all like the crowded, noisy restaurant in New York where I might still be waiting for a table if I had not used Bartholomew Caminetti’s instantly influential name.
I ate in the same restaurant, but there were other places I could have gone. I dropped my clothes at the same dry cleaners, but only because it was convenient. I bought groceries, when I bought them, at the same market, and I stopped at the same café for a cup of coffee every Saturday afternoon I was in town. I walked past the same store windows and browsed in the same small musty bookstores. It may have had all the outward appearance of a dull-as-dust middle-aged, middle-class life, but that was not how it felt. I was in love with the city. I could sit in that same restaurant for hours, watching the way the waiter made friends with a couple who had never been there before, watching the way the two of them seemed to become more interested in each other, watch them linger late into the night, sometimes until the restaurant closed. I had a nodding acquaintance with some of the bookstore clerks and with a few other shop people as well, part of that circle of anonymous friends that makes city life more comfortable than life in a small town. It is the surface of things, not the illusion that things are what they look like, but the more interesting, the more mysterious illusion that things are as heartbreakingly beautiful, as tragically romantic, as you ever imagined they could be. New York was energy and excitement, ambition, power and wealth; San Francisco was the end of the rainbow, the place you kept dreaming about because it was the place where you never stopped dreaming.
It had been a mistake to let Thomas Browning talk me into going back to New York; it had been a mistake to get involved in the lives of people I had not seen in years and only thought I knew. Because I did not know them; I did not know them at all. I would have known them better— Browning, Joanna, Jimmy Haviland, all of them—if I had not known them years before, if we had never met. Then I would have begun with simple ignorance, writing what I learned on a blank page. Instead, I saw them through the distorted lens of what I thought I remembered about how they had been before. When I lived there in my twenties, that summer in New York, I thought I knew it, what made it work, why everyone thought it was the only place to be. I could have stayed there—I would have stayed there if I had understood what Joanna had been trying to say—and become a New Yorker and tried to fight my way to the top. It was too late for me now; I had been away too long: They were all strangers to me. I wanted to stay here, in San Francisco, where I never felt like a stranger even among people I did not know.
Nob Hill was a few blocks away. The fog had swallowed the bridge, taken the avenues—the long, straight streets that stretched flat on both sides of Golden Gate Park—and begun to roll up the hills.
Across the bay, on the eastern shore, Berkeley glowed a shiny scarlet gold under the dying light of a bloodred sun. The sunlight was warm against my face; the mist, moving ahead of the fog, was damp against my skin. The seasons were a scandal, always changing what they were, and never the same thing twice; but each new thing s
omething that made you wish you could see and feel it again. I did not want to go back to New York.
The doorman was not at his usual place under the green awning in front; he was not anywhere in view behind the glass-paned wooden door. As I reached for my key, he suddenly appeared and with a backward movement of his long, bulky left arm pushed open the door.
“How are you this evening, Mr. Antonelli?” he said with his usual husky grunt.
“Fine, George,” I replied as I headed toward the elevator, a few feet across the dark tile floor. He was right behind me. His thick-fingered hand reached in front of me and pressed the button to summon the elevator.
“Might get pretty thick out there a little later tonight, don’t you think?”
“It might,” I replied, staring down at my shoes, waiting for the elevator door to open. It was George’s habit to wait with you, then reach inside and without looking press the button for your floor. Old women seemed to like it; I was still trying to think of a polite way to ask him to stop. The door opened and I stepped inside.
“What do you think about the news, Mr. Antonelli?” he asked. Whatever the news was, it made him forget what he normally did next. With a certain satisfaction, I pushed the number of my floor. Smiling, I raised my head.
“What news is that, George?” I asked as the door began to slide shut. He stepped back, a dull, puzzled look on his thick, square face.
“About the vice president. You really haven’t heard?”
The door shut tight and the elevator began its smooth, methodical ascent.
What about the vice president? I wondered with a growing sense of urgency as the elevator stopped on the second floor. A prim well-dressed octogenarian with a snide-looking Pomeranian in her arms got in. She was talking to it, scratching it under the chin, apologizing that they had to wait while the elevator went up before they could go down, the whole time looking at me as if it were my fault, that if it had not been for me they would not have had to wait. “Sorry,” I said when the elevator finally reached my floor. She raised a single white eyebrow, lifted her minor chin and pressed her wrinkled mouth. It was as close to forgiveness as she was prepared to go.
What about the vice president? I asked myself as I unlocked the door and let myself in. I turned on the television, but the last time I had it on I had been watching one of the old movie channels. Before I could change it, the telephone started to ring. It was Gisela Hoffman.
“It’s nice to hear your voice,” I said. “I thought I might see you in New York.”
I slouched against the back of the sofa, sank into the cushions, my feet against the edge of the coffee table in front of me, listening to her funny, girlish voice. I could see her face in front of me, that blushing, puzzled expression each time she mispronounced a word.
“I saw you at the arraignment, but I…”
“You were there—in court? Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be there? We could have had dinner; we could have talked.”
“I just came up for the arraignment. I could not stay.
I need to ask you—on the record,” she added in an awkward voice, a little embarrassed that she had to strike a note of formality. “What is your reaction to what happened today? Will it make any difference in how you plan to conduct the Haviland defense?”
I pulled my feet down from the table and sat up.
“What happened today?” I asked, finally alert to the fact that something of profound importance had taken place and I seemed to be the only person who did not know about it. “What about the vice president?”
There was a dead silence. She could not believe I did not know. “Your friend, Thomas Browning, did something no one expected—something no one imagined.
He resigned. Three hours ago.”
“He resigned the vice presidency? He quit?” I was incredulous, but then I realized that I was not incredulous at all. There was always a reason for the things Thomas Browning did. There was a reason for this as well.
“Why did he quit?” I asked, intensely interested. My mind raced from one thing to the next. Did it have something to do with the trial? Was there something I did not know—something he had never told me? “What reason did he give?”
“He did not give one,” replied Gisela in a baffled tone. “It’s what has Washington on its… What is the phrase? Yes, ‘on its ear.’ Browning resigned the office— the letter he sent, the letter his office released to the press, says only, ‘I hereby resign the office of vice president of the United States.’ He doesn’t give a reason; he doesn’t say anything.”
“But he has a reason, doesn’t he?” I asked, thinking out loud.
“Yes, I think so. He must.”
A chill ran up my spine. The president’s people had wanted him off the ticket. They were the same people who had beaten him for the nomination by using those ugly anonymous rumors about Browning and a murder in New York. I was defending a man accused of that murder, a case Browning was convinced had been started for no other reason than to make sure he would never have a chance to run for the presidency again.
And now he had simply quit, handed in his resignation, given up? Why? Unless it was the only way to save himself from something worse than political defeat. With a gnawing sense of panic, I asked Gisela what she thought.
“I don’t know. He could have resigned anytime he wanted: He chose to do it today, on a Friday afternoon, just in time for the evening news. It’s what everyone will talk about—speculate about—all weekend. It’s what they’ll be talking about on the Sunday shows. Browning resigns and no one knows why. Everyone will be waiting for next Friday to find out.”
“Friday? Why, what happens then?”
“Browning scheduled a press conference for next Friday afternoon.” she paused, and when she spoke again her voice had a different quality about it. She was not a reporter anymore.
“When are you coming back to New York?”
“Tomorrow. The trial starts Monday. Will you be there?”
“Yes. Can we see each other? There is something I have to tell you, something I think I better not tell you on the phone.”
We said good-bye and I sat in the lengthening shadows of the fog-shrouded sun, trying to concentrate on what she had told me; trying, and failing, not to think too much about her. There was something elusive about her, something I could not quite put my finger on. She was married, but she was going through a divorce; she was a European who stumbled over English words, but knew more about American politics than I ever had; she was shy and at times withdrawn, with fine, delicate features and beautiful dark eyes, but she could put herself forward and demand answers to questions she thought should be asked. But more than any of that, more than the fact that she showed different sides of herself at different times, there was a sense, profound, haunting, and irresistible, that I knew her and that she knew me, and that, in the way that sometimes happens, we had known each other from the first moment we met.
An hour later, I was still thinking about how much I liked her voice and how much I wanted to hear it again.
When the phone began to ring, I hoped it was she, calling back to tell me she just wanted to talk.
“How are you, Joseph?” asked Thomas Browning in a calm, considerate voice. “I know I should have called you before I made the announcement. You must have thought when you heard it that they’d forced me out.
You must have thought that I had to resign because Annie’s death wasn’t an accident.”
Browning waited for me to answer, to admit that I had at least wondered if it might be true, that Annie’s death had not been an accident and that he had known it all along.
“No, that never occurred to me.” It was not entirely a lie. I had thought about it, as I had before, but I could not bring myself to believe that Thomas Browning had anything to do with the death of Annie Malreaux.
Browning would never have allowed someone else to be blamed for something he had done. I was certain of that, or as certain as I co
uld be.
“Do you know why I did it? Why I resigned?”
It is remarkable how one suddenly remembers something. “Because you had already carved your initials in that drawer?” There was a quick, breath-catching silence, and then he started to laugh, and then I knew why he had done it. I remembered the look on his face, that look of disdain directed as much against himself, his own weakness, his own vanity, his own failure of imagination, as against William Walker and the other people who had talked him into accepting the nomination for vice president. He had carved his initials in that drawer where they had all left their marks, the men who had settled for second place; had broken the tradition by doing it the first, instead of the last, day he was in office. He was going after the only thing he wanted, the only thing besides Annie Malreaux he had ever dreamed of having.
“You’re running for president. That’s what you’re going to announce next week—that you resigned the vice presidency because you’ve decided to challenge the President for the Republican nomination. You wouldn’t have resigned if you had wanted to stay on the ticket with Walker.” I paused, and then I guessed. “You were never going to do that; you were always going to go after the presidential nomination, weren’t you?” he denied it, in a fashion. “No, that’s not quite true. If they had wanted me to stay on as vice president for a second term, then of course I would have been a fool to do anything else. No one could have challenged me for the nomination at the end of Walker’s second term. And when I first started talking—publicly—about refusing to quit, about running in the primaries, letting the convention decide, I thought that might make them change their minds, decide that it was not worth the fight. But then, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that if I was going to have to fight them anyway, I might as well fight them for the whole thing. Walker should never have been president, and if I have anything to do with it, he won’t be president again.”
