by Janice Weber
“Over thirty years since Ethel wore it. Just think.”
Whatever the memory, it wasn’t pleasant. Bendix turned to me. “What’s on the program tonight, Leslie?”
“This and that. Easy listening.” Gad, I needed a drink.
“Nervous, Fausto?”
“Hell no. I’m looking forward to it.”
Bendix eyed his old friend. “You won’t be dancing on top of the piano, will you?” he asked, only half joking.
“Not yet,” Fausto replied.
Very few words later, Bendix excused himself. “He smells something,” I said.
“Good! He should!”
Whatever their game, I was obviously not included. “I hope you’re having fun,” I snapped. “I’m not.”
“Hold on, sweet. The evening’s young.” Fausto dredged a shrimp through cocktail sauce. It was almost in his mouth when he spied someone across the patio. “My God! What’s she doing here?”
A zaftig redhead, highball in hand, backed away from the bar and into an elderly man, spilling his drink. Something about her looked familiar. “Who’s that?”
“Jojo Bailey’s girlfriend.” Fausto watched her mop tomato juice off the man’s tie. “Myrna Block. Maybe she’s trawling for a new job.”
Ah: that rear end. I had seen it before, in one of the photos Barnard had taken at the environmental conference in Belize. “How long have they been an item?”
“Years. She’s one of Jojo’s staff. He doesn’t go anywhere without her.”
“What about his wife?”
“She’s a psychiatrist. Can’t afford to leave her patients alone too long or they might get better.” Lifting a cigarette from an antique gold case, Fausto explained that the old man was New Jersey senator Phil Pixley. Although Pixley had served seven terms with absolutely no distinction, he had been Aurilla’s first ally in the Senate, so she owed him a few favors before dropping him. Pixley had just gotten himself reelected for the eighth time by eloping, after sixty years of bachelorhood, with a Latina beauty queen on Halloween night. The Hispanics all voted for him and it was too late for the gays to withdraw their support without looking petty. “Typical Washington marriages. Damn, I could use a drink.”
“You’re abstaining on my account? I’m flattered.”
Fausto exhaled at the stars. “I don’t want to let you down. Hello, Wallace. Nice party you’ve thrown together here.”
Aurilla’s aide-de-camp smiled. One hundred degrees outside and she was still wearing a poplin suit and stockings. Technically I suppose she was still at the office. “We’re so glad you could come.” After shaking my hand, she looked anxiously across the yard at her mistress. “Excuse me.”
“That’s Aurilla’s rottweiler,” Fausto informed me.
“She looks like a hamster.”
“Precisely. Oh God, look what just sailed in.”
Vicky Chickering and partner Rhoby Hall. Chickering had dressed for the occasion in one of her flashier tents and plenty of Indian jewelry. She lingered on the porch, wrapping up a cell phone call, while Rhoby fetched drinks. “Bestowing Paula’s blessing?” I asked Fausto as they headed toward the hostess.
“Of course. Aurilla’s toast without the First Lady behind her. Look out, here they come.” Fausto flicked his cigarette into the hedges. “Hello, ladies. How’s that traffic jam at the White House, Chickie?”
“Moving right along.”
Rhoby took my hand. She was a healthy brunette maybe half Chickie’s age and weight. Like her consort, she wore no makeup; unlike her consort, she didn’t need any. Her skintight black pants suit revealed muscle rather than curve. I guessed she ran sixty miles a week and hadn’t menstruated since Christmas. “I’m Rhoby Hall. I’m really looking forward to the program tonight. I used to play the cello.”
“You still play,” Chickering corrected. “Very well, too.”
“In that case, we’ll read a few trios someday,” Fausto said. “I’ve got all the music.”
“Oh no! I couldn’t! I’m not that good!”
“Yes you are,” Chickering corrected again. “Stop apologizing. They’ll play with you.”
“Victoria, please. I can handle this myself.” Rhoby’s smile returned when she looked at me. “What’s on the program? Aurilla’s kept everything so hush-hush.”
“Saint-Saëns, Wieniawski, Hubay, and a surprise.”
“Uh-oh,” Chickering clucked, pausing in whatever she was scribbling in the little notepad around her neck. “Your idea, Fausto?”
He only smiled. “Bendix’s.”
Rhoby forced her eyes away from either Fausto’s brooch or my cleavage. “Have you two played together before?”
“No. Tonight’s our debut.”
“Gad! Are you nervous?”
“Terrified.”
She couldn’t tell whether or not Fausto was joking. “Well, I think it’s wonderful Aurilla invited you to play,” Rhoby continued. “To tell the truth, I wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
Chickering’s frown now involved her entire face. “Is that a fact? I wish you had told me earlier.”
“Victoria, stop it. You’re such a wet blanket.”
Chickering’s glare could have sparked a forest fire. “Excuse us,” she commanded, steering Rhoby toward the hedges.
I watched them commence a peppery dialogue. “Rhoby must be the only person in Washington not terrified of the old girl.”
“That’s why the old girl needs her. Poor Chickering. One blessed day she’s going to pay for that weakness.” He lifted a snail from a passing platter. “Everyone does sooner or later. Desire is the ticket to destruction.”
I looked calmly at his round eyes. “What do you desire?”
“The most impossible prize of all, darling. Time.” He chuckled. “You?”
I looked over the lawn full of dedicated, desirous people, all closing in on that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Too many of them had the suicidally exultant look of skiers zipping downhill ten feet ahead of an avalanche. “I don’t want anything.”
“You do realize that wanting nothing is the greatest desire of all. Fortunately I don’t believe you.” His fingertips brushed my cheek. “And you’re blushing.”
His darts were landing a little too close so I went inside to check on my violin. The frazzled maid sent me upstairs with a key ring and instructions to open the first door on my left. I obeyed, only to interrupt Chickering deep in discussion with Wallace. They were probably hashing out seating plans at Aurilla’s swearing-in. Chickering broke off in midsentence, glaring as I said, “Excuse me. The maid told me first door on my left. I’m just checking my violin.”
“It’s across the hall,” Wallace said pleasantly. “Can you find it?”
Duh, I think so. “Sorry.”
My Strad lay unharmed on a chaise longue. Someone familiar with backstages had provided water, fruit, and extra toilet paper. Didn’t see Gretchen under the bed with a blow torch so I returned downstairs. Fausto was chatting nebulously with strangers. I huddled at his side like a chick with mother hen. Soon the dinner bell drew everyone to a pale peach room where round tables floated like gigantic lily pads beneath a chandeliered sky. Nine pieces of silverware and three goblets outfitted each Limoges plate. Bouquets and candlesticks vied for the remaining open space. Beneath portraits of illustrious Perles, Aurilla’s butlers awaited her signal to empty the kitchen.
“Impressed?” I asked my accompanist.
“Worth the trip.”
We were busted to musicians’ ghetto in the darkest corner along with the other least consequential guests, namely Myrna Block, Senator and Mrs. Pixley, and a Mr. Tanqueray Tougaw, all of whom seemed quite drunk already. Poor Myrna could not blather three sentences without crying, but her social status was about to go six feet under with Jojo. Pixley sported quite a tomato splotch on his tie. His twentyish bride Pila was insulted to be seated next to Tougaw, a black man wearing twice as much gold as she. Twice Pila told a butler that there m
ust be some mistake, then settled into a loud pout with her martini. Tougaw I couldn’t place. Maybe he was a cricket player.
After introductions and a toast, Tougaw got things off to a rocky start by asking Myrna how Jojo was feeling. “Horrible,” she wept, not at all indignant that a complete stranger knew about her liaison with the vice president. “He’s unrecognizable.”
“Now now,” consoled Pixley, donating his handkerchief. “Nothing you can do about these tropical diseases. Everybody down there catches ’em.”
“One day he was fine,” Myrna sobbed. Her curls and breasts shook when she blew her nose. “Just a little headache from the heat. A few aspirin and it went away. He made a terrific speech. Next day he was still fine except for another headache. But he had made every meeting on the agenda. Next day he was sick as a dog. I don’t understand.”
“You catch de dengue from de mosquito,” Tougaw said in a lovely tropical drawl. I lost my breath, momentarily flung into a writhing jungle.
“Everyone knows how you catch it,” Myrna snapped. “Why did one have to bite Jojo?”
“He mus’ have de sweetes’ skin.” Smiling at his brilliant deduction, Tougaw lifted his glass. “To a fine gen’leman. May his suffrin’ soon be ovah.”
Pixley shook his head as Myrna fled the table. “She’s a nice girl but none too bright. Headaches from the heat, my foot. Bailey was sloshed from the beginning to end of that conference. He could have been bitten by a tiger and not felt it.”
Tougaw looked up from his chestnut soup. “You were dere?”
“Of course.” Pixley puffed like an adder. “I’m the number one environmentalist on the Hill.”
“You’re the oldest one, at any rate.” Pila Pixley drained her glass as if it contained Kool-Aid.
“Jojo got his green conscience from me,” her husband continued after a generous little laugh. “I knew his daddy from the minute he came to Washington. Now there was an outstanding public servant. One of the best secretaries of state we ever had.”
That explained Jojo’s refuge in the bottle and perhaps Louis’s refuge in the jungle. Two tables away, Rhoby Hall beamed at me. “So politics runs in the family?” I asked.
“Absolutely. Old Bailey intended to be president himself. Ironic that Jojo, who’s a mere shadow of his father, would get within a heartbeat. Ah well. It’s all a crap shoot.”
“How amazing that Jojo alone got dengue,” I said. “Considering all the people who went to the conference with him.”
“Madame is missing of information,” Tougaw broke in. “Dere be two more suffrin’ as we speak. But we do not read of dem in American newspapahs. Dey be Belizean schoolgirls who performed one afternoon.”
Right: Barnard had taken a picture of Paula Marvel and the obligatory dancing locals. “They were so cute,” Pixley cried. “Why didn’t I hear of this before?”
“They don’t vote,” his wife sniffed. “Will they die, too?”
“Dey are younger,” Tougaw said diplomatically. “Stronger.”
Pixley whipped out his gold pen. “What are their names? We’ll send flowers.”
“Babette and Iris Auclair.” Tougaw paused as a waiter removed his soup. “Dey stay at Dr. Tatal’s dengue ward in Belize City. Sain’ Elizabet’. It is de place to go for dese sicknesses.”
Obviously news of Tatal’s death had not yet made it to Washington. My heart skittered into my throat as Fausto said, “Are you a friend of hers, Mr. Tougaw?”
“Oh yes. I see her at de conference. She introduce me to vera important people.”
“Aha.” No more questions. Maybe Fausto was too beset by preperformance demons to continue.
Myrna blubbered back to the table. “I’m sorry. I have to pull myself together.”
“That’s the spirit,” Pixley bellowed, positioning his empty glass beneath a butler’s upended wine bottle. “Life goes on. You have too many good years ahead of you to let something like this bog you down.”
Aurilla Perle, who had been slowly working over the room, now blessed us with her attention. “How’s everything here?”
“Couldn’t be better.” Pixley kissed her hand. The gesture looked less like gallantry than a plea for mercy. “Fantastic meal you’ve cooked up, Senator.”
The soon to be ex-senator wisely skipped over Pila. “How are the musicians?”
“Fine,” Fausto replied for both of us. “Thank you.”
“Tanqueray?”
“Dis is de bes’ evening of my life.”
“I’m so glad to hear that. And how are you, Myrna?”
“I’ll be all right.”
One big fucking country club. Worse, I was just one of the golf balls. As Aurilla transferred her unsmile to the next section of minions, I realized that someday she would be president. Ghastly thought, not because the woman wasn’t bright, persuasive, or connected. Maybe she even had principles. But I had seen that same bloodless glint in a mercenary’s eye in a rundown Belizean café. I had seen it in the obsidian gaze of the fer-de-lance that killed Yvette Tatal. It wasn’t a human look. Bobby Marvel didn’t have it, but his wife did. Bendix, too. Fausto was capable of it. I conjured a weak variant of that look each time I walked onstage, but I was just a musician, my foe imperfection. The look got more evil as the stakes got less noble. Those eyes in the Oval Office? Look out, America.
Aurilla’s departure left a reverent hole in conversation, which Myrna filled by asking Pixley for highlights of his career. The senator was delighted to furnish a Homeric history that took us through a rack of venison, a fussy composed salad, fiery sorbet, and many more glasses of wine. He finished with the recent funeral of one of his colleagues in the Congressional Cemetery, where Pixley hoped to repose someday himself. The place was a mess, though. Scandalously neglected, a national disgrace, an insult to the patriots buried there.
Finally Pila Pixley, who had been playing footsie with Tougaw ever since her husband’s riveting account of JFK’s assassination, couldn’t take any more. “Will you stop!” she cried. “Who’s going to visit you in a cemetery?”
Pixley switched to a soppy paean to Aurilla Perle, spewing encomia as if the candlesticks were bugged. Maybe, deep down, he knew as well as the rest of us that once she was sworn in, all the doors he had opened for her would be slammed in his face.
“A vera intrestin’ story,” Tougaw said as a waiter removed his panne cotta and fresh currants. “But did you not meet otha fine women in Washington? Marilyn Monroe?”
“She was a sweet girl with a nice voice.” Becoming melancholy now, Pixley took a long drink. “And I’ll never forget Ethel Kiss. She was magnificent.”
“I just told you to cut out the dead stuff,” Pila snorted.
Fausto’s entire bulk became still as earth. Beneath the table, I touched his thigh.
“Who was dis?” Tougaw persisted.
“Fausto’s mother. She was lovely. Talented. A princess. She made us all laugh. The whole town came to a standstill when—when we lost her. It hasn’t been the same since.” Pixley looked across the table. “I still miss her, Fausto.”
“Don’t we all.”
Silence as the waiters brought coffee and chocolates: after this repast, Aurilla would have better served her guests with a three-mile hike, not a concert. “Tell us about Jackie O,” Pila said.
“She’s dead,” Pixley snapped.
Fausto licked the vestiges of cream from an antique spoon. “Heard from Louis lately, Myrna?”
“No. Nothing. He’s somewhere in the jungle. Probably Belize, but no one knows for sure. We won’t hear from him until it’s too late.”
“Madman,” Pixley said. “What’s he doing there?”
“The usual. Boiling plants.”
“Who is Louis?” Tougaw asked.
“Jojo’s brother. He’s a scientist.”
“Does he know Jojo’s sick?” Fausto’s voice rose a tiny notch. I noticed, but I had been listening for it.
“I doubt it. We don’t know where he
is and we’re not about to send a search party into the rain forest. Last time we did that, they were gone for two months. I don’t hold out much hope that he’ll make the funeral.” Myrna edged close to sobs again. “When was the last time you heard from him, Fausto?”
“June sometime.”
Tougaw was impressed. “De jungle is a dangerous place. He goes alone?”
“Sometimes he takes an assistant,” Myrna said. “A Mayan boy. I forget his name.”
Fausto didn’t offer it. “Louis will turn up. He always does.”
“Now there’s a man who should’ve gone into politics,” Pixley boomed. “He had all the right stuff. Twice the brains of his brother. Sorry, Myrna.”
“Jojo has more personality,” she retorted, conceding the brains.
“Old Bailey thought Louis was going to carry on the family tradition. Then I remember the boy went abroad. England, I think. Something disgraceful happened. His father nearly died of shame. Know anything about that, Myrna?”
“That was before my time.”
Pixley’s glass clanked his plate as he replaced it, empty again, on the table. “That’s the game. One little slip and you’re out, sometimes before you’ve even started. Something always comes back to bite you in the ass. At times I wonder how I’ve managed to survive all these years.”
By farting with the wind, of course. Everyone knew that, including Pixley. “Soon you can retire,” Tougaw said brightly. “Move to Florida.”
Pixley glared at him. “I hate Florida. Nothing but swamps and mosquitoes.”
Far away, Aurilla tinkled Reed & Barton against Waterford. Fausto folded his napkin, looked over at me. “Excuse us. Musicians are not required to stay for speeches.”
I followed him to the foyer. “Wasn’t that a fascinating dinner?” he asked. “No one paid the slightest attention to you but Rhoby Hall, and the poor girl was two tables away.”
The maid took us to the bedroom directly above the speeches. My violin was untouched. “What a fairy tale,” Fausto said, flopping onto the bed. The canopy didn’t collapse but its ruffles flounced like startled geese.
I sat next to him. “How do you feel?”
“I’m still dying for a drink.”
