By the time I arrived on the scene that fall, negotiations had been stalled for weeks by a corporate type high up in the administration, a guy bent on chiseling the secretaries down to a 2 percent raise in order to demonstrate to his boss that he could play hardball. Some snotty Wharton Business School graduate.
It should have been a dream campaign for me. The administration fat cats on one side, women with children to feed on the other. A few Hollywood alumni already interested. A contact at The Village Voice who was fired up about the story. And, as frosting on the cake, support from the gay community, because the union’s local president was a lesbian activist. I was assigned to help with leaflets, speeches, publicity gimmicks, and whatever else we could think of to make the college look like a worse employer than the California grape industry.
There was only one snag: I wasn’t wanted. Tony Boltanski, the Toilers’ national rep who was chief negotiator for this pink-collar unit, liked to play a lone hand.
“I really don’t have much for you to do here” were his first words to me.
“I’ll go shopping, then,” I said.
“No offense, but I’m used to handling these situations by myself.”
“I don’t see a contract yet. Your boss said a writer would come in handy.”
“You can stuff some envelopes,” he said. “That’s about it.”
After that reception I didn’t find him at all attractive. I generally preferred tall men—Tony topped me by only a few inches. I tended toward bookish types—Tony’s idea of great literature was The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams. I favored dark men with dark eyes. Tony’s light brown hair was coarse and curly and receded a little from his forehead, giving him what I felt was a completely undeserved look of intelligence.
I spent a week running the copying machine and drafting press releases that Tony vetoed. He eventually condescended to ask me to “glance at” a flyer he’d prepared, a flyer inviting students to a Rally for Fairness to Employees, to be staged at the university gates on the day a prominent human rights advocate was due as guest speaker in a lecture series entitled “Ethics in the Postmodern Age.”
The union must be somewhat desperate, I concluded, or Tony and Sheila, the local president, wouldn’t have taken the contract fight so public. Not that Tony had asked me to sit in on their meetings or begged me for ideas or anything like that.
The hall in which the lecture series would be held happened to be the site of one of the largest industrial accidents in the city’s history. Presently the chemistry building, it had once been a trouser factory whose snow-laden roof had caved in one February night in 1916, killing forty-two seamstresses, some as young as fourteen years old.
Tony’s rally flyer had a graphic photo of the Octagon Trouser Factory disaster and the headline, “Women suffered here then and they’re suffering now. Don’t let the bosses get away with it!”
“Can I make a few changes and get back to you?” I asked him.
Two hours later he was standing in front of my desk, glowering.
“What the hell did you do to this flyer?”
Using my handy computer layout program, I had changed the photo to one of Wilma Stevens, who worked in the library, handing a book to a student and smiling warmly. An inset displayed a chart comparing clerical salaries with the average cost of living in the outer boroughs. The headline now read, “The people who make this college run are only asking for a fair deal.”
The copy ran: We find that library book you’re looking for … we make sure your financial aid comes through … we’re there whenever you need us, in the cafeteria, the bookstore, and the health clinic. We’re the clerical workers of _____ College, and we’re hoping for your support.
A caption under the salary chart added, At _____ College, you can work full-time and still qualify for food stamps. That’s just not right.
“What is this bullshit?” Tony repeated, in case I didn’t pick up on his opinion of my handiwork.
“Look, Tony, the kids who go to school here aren’t going to remember the Octagon tragedy. If they come out for you on Tuesday, it’s going to be for that nice lady at the dining hall salad bar, not to fight for the female underclass in the male patriarchal hegemony. Where do you think we’re running this thing, Brown University?”
“This is the most namby-pamby piece of garbage I’ve ever seen,” Tony said. “My committee’s going to hate this.”
“Sheila already showed it to them. They loved it. Because everyone loves Wilma, that’s why.”
I brought the flyer up on the screen and added a few words under Wilma’s picture: Wilma Stevens is sixty-two and has worked here for nearly forty years. But she’s too poor to afford new dentures. Surely our college has too proud a tradition to treat its employees this way. Tell this administration, it’s time for decency again!
“Wilma doesn’t wear dentures,” Tony snarled.
I deleted “dentures” and typed in “eyeglasses.” He stomped away.
“Let’s print it in some really sweet color,” I called after him. “How about pale pink?”
“This isn’t getting printed,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Decency, my ass.”
I left the paste-up on his chair.
The next morning, stacked on the floor by my desk, were a thousand copies of my version of the flyer, printed by our members in the college print shop on pale blue paper and ready for distribution by our people in the mailroom. The pale blue was an even bigger concession from Tony than the copy itself, I knew. Pink would have been total surrender.
On the top copy in the stack Tony had scrawled, “We’ll try it your way.” I didn’t know if it was a challenge or an apology. But we got five hundred students at that rally, and the visiting human rights activist asked some questions that were very, very embarrassing for the stuffed shirts who ran the place. He asked them again, a week later, in a letter to the Times.
After that, when Tony wasn’t in bargaining sessions or meeting with the municipal unions to get their support, he spent every minute with me and Sheila, the local president, devising ways for us to up the ante on the administration. Sheila went home to her partner and her kids by 10 P.M., and Tony and I ate take-out Chinese and meatball subs in the office late in the evening, too tired to go out, too hungry to make it back to our separate hotels. Over sweet-and-sour pork one night, he gave me a brief history of himself. He was the oldest of three brothers. His father was a truck driver. His grandfathers were both mine workers; they both died of black lung before he was five. His mother died of a cancer he wouldn’t name (ovarian cancer, I learned later) when he was twenty. His football career had been ended by a shattered kneecap at the state high school championship in his senior year. His heroes were John Lewis, Caesar Chavez, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Larry Bird.
He gave me a nickname: “kiddo.” He talked me into going to a Rangers game one night on impulse, when we’d been up for forty-eight hours straight. He taught me how to eat hot chestnuts. And, three weeks later, when it became clear that the college was going to crack and I was ordered back to Washington, he took me out for lasagna at a little restaurant in the Village. We drank two bottles of red wine, and meandered the fifty-three blocks back to my hotel.
In the lobby he said, “I should walk you up to your room. This is a dangerous city.” At the door of my room, he said, “I could check your room for you if you like, make sure no one’s hiding under the bed.” He was kissing me before we’d turned on the light. I wanted him so much I didn’t even ask him if this was an end-of-campaign fling or the beginning of something.
“When you met me, did you ever think we’d wind up this way?” he asked me afterward.
“You were a pain in the neck at first, but I knew you’d think of something to do with me and my valuable skills.”
All night long he thought of things, and I thought of some too. After the new contract was voted up by the unit with triumphant joy, I went home and Tony stuck around to wrap up loose ends. For a
month I came up to see him in New York every weekend, and then he moved in with me, down in Washington. The plan was that he would fly off to his assignments during the week, and come home to me on weekends.
That first month in New York, how drunk we were, how crazy we were, with love. The only New York I know, the magic city, is the New York Tony showed me that September. When I go there now, I don’t stay long and I don’t walk around much, not for fear of being mugged but for fear of remembering.
My apartment, which is on the top floor of one of those shabby Beaux Arts buildings in Adams-Morgan, was more than big enough for his possessions and mine. In fact, for the first time the place was full enough that it didn’t seem to echo. Living there with Tony was the version of grown-up life that children dream of. With Tony, I could eat with my fingers, or leave my smelly socks on the floor, or forget the coffee filter was in the pot until mold grew on it. With Tony, I could lunch on apple pie and take a three-hour bath at midnight if I liked. Slightly eccentric himself, he made me feel beloved, for the first time in my life, for my own eccentricities.
Tony had been away on a work assignment when I left him the note saying it was over. I did the official dumping, but the truth is that Tony was really the one who left me.
When we first started living together, he was gone nearly every week but home on the weekends. Then he was away for two weeks at a stretch. Then he was always traveling, it seemed. At the end he was away even when he was standing in front of me, and I knew it was time to go. Tony had come home to a letter informing him that I’d gone to Louise’s. Not even a long, tortured explanatory letter holding out hope of a reconciliation. Just a scribble on the back of the gas bill that read, basically, “I give up and I’m getting out.”
I’d left because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Tony was slowly, surely being lost to me. What I hadn’t understood in those heady weeks of the campaign was that his real life was lived on the road, in the high drama and moment-to-moment decisions of his job. I soon became a pleasant distraction he returned to for forty-eight hours every so often, or that’s what I assumed I was to him, since he never indicated otherwise. When he missed my brother Joey’s wedding at the last minute in favor of a rally for underpaid dockworkers in New Orleans, I cried for a week. He knew, he should have known, what it meant to me to go alone to that wedding.
“You have to learn to be flexible, Nicky,” he’d said from a pay phone in Monroe, Louisiana. “You knew what my job was like when we got into this.”
I think I began to give up hope at that moment. After all, if I’d wanted to live with someone who mocked my fondest desires and downplayed my disappointments, I could have moved back home with my mother.
The year after Tony and I split up, my father died of a heart attack. He was gone before I got to the hospital. My mother and brothers were there, but I’d been in some dull meeting and it took them a while to reach me. Before my father went, some corner of me believed that there was no such thing as a last chance, that nothing you really wanted was ever lost to you forever. After my dad died, I knew better.
* * *
I was closing my notebook with the list of tasks we’d agreed on when I saw Tony glance toward the door.
“There’s one thing I forgot to tell you about,” he said. “Our professor.” “What?”
“We just call her that because she gets a little hard to follow sometimes.”
His voice sounded almost fond. Tony was not a nicknaming type.
“Weingould borrowed her from a friend of his at Hatcher and Draybeck, one of the big consulting firms in Boston. She’s looking into Coventry’s finances for us, digging up dirt with numbers to back it.”
The woman approaching us looked nothing like any professor I’d met. She possessed a degree of exquisite grooming and quiet assurance that you don’t see in people with harried schedules and stingy paychecks. She nudged Tony to make room on his side of the booth with a casualness that made me feel suddenly an outsider.
“Suzanne Perry,” said Tony briefly. “Suzanne, this is Nicky Malone, who’s here to help us with PR. She’ll need a few facts from you, maybe in words of one syllable. They think in sound bites, these PR types.”
I felt slapped. He’d sure been quick to put me in my place after our brief interlude of cooperation.
“Screw you, Tony,” I said. “Try doing my job for a day.”
“At least I’d have a chance to put my feet up.”
“You were putting your feet up just a minute ago.” It was true, his feet had been resting on my side of the booth, inches from my leg. Not that it meant anything.
Suzanne smiled calmly. She wasn’t really pretty, but she was enormously attractive. Her eyes were hazel under heavy, sleepy eyelids, and though her nose was a little long it had an interesting tiny crookedness in the middle. She was slender, and wore small wire-rimmed spectacles which may have been an affectation, since she seemed to remove them at will during the ensuing conversation without the dazed expression of someone who actually relies on glasses to see.
She tucked a strand of hair behind one of her shell-like ears. Her gestures had a deliberate quality, so studied that they were almost stylized, as if she’d gotten Balanchine to choreograph motions for everyday social encounters. She slowly pulled the wrapper off a straw and twisted it into a ring shape, then discarded that ring and took another wrapper. Soon there were a pile of perfectly made rings next to her hand. I watched in fascination as she repeated the ritual over and over again.
Her heather-green wool sheath and polished black loafers were simple and excellently made, and I could tell that the store where she purchased them was one I wouldn’t even feel well dressed enough to browse through. Her hair—a nothing-special medium brown—was cut in a long, sleek bob, the featured haircut of that fall, the haircut most women in Washington would be experimenting with several months from now. It was clever of her not to have gone blond, despite her fair complexion. This way, you noticed first those unusual hazel eyes, that clean jawline.
She was drinking out of Tony’s coffee cup, then brushed her hand against his as she reached for a packet of artificial sugar. If she were a cat, I thought, she would now be pissing daintily on his side of the booth, marking her territory. I raised my eyebrows, deliberately, so briefly that only Tony saw.
“So how’s it going so far?” I said, as Suzanne continued to say nothing. “What have you got for us?”
“There are areas I think bear investigation. For example, Coventry is moving money around in strange ways between the main corporation and its several subsidiaries. Thus far, I’ve found nothing illegal, but it’s an unusually complicated setup, even for the corporate health care field. Their Medicare billings are also unusually high, but as you know, there’s already a federal investigation under way there.”
“The corporate finance stuff is interesting,” said Tony. “But so far it only confirms that they can afford to have us camp out in front of the hospital all winter if they want.”
“Monetarily. We’ll turn up the heat in other ways.”
I said to Suzanne, “Can you find me money that’s being spent on inessentials? That silly waterfall in the lobby, for example, or executive salaries. Perks. Fancy cars, junkets to meetings abroad, extravagant entertaining allowances.”
“They’re paying the status quo for executives in this field. Six figures with generous, and I do mean generous, benefits is usual.”
“The public won’t like it even if it is the status quo. How far would one of those bigwig’s salaries go toward medical equipment? A PET scan machine, for example.”
“It’s a simplistic argument,” she said.
“I’m a simplistic sort of gal. As Tony just said.”
“Let me root around a little, if that’s what you want. It won’t be hard. I’m based in Boston, though. So we’ll have to do some of this by phone.”
“Fine.” By phone seemed a good way to deal with Suzanne, who might be less intimidat
ing if I didn’t have her right in front of me in all her tastefully packaged glory.
“But I manage to get up here pretty often,” she added.
She was inspecting Tony’s plate.
“Eggs again? I thought you were cutting down.”
Tony did not meet my eyes. Well, what had I thought? That Tony was lying on his chaste motel bed every night mooning over my photograph? Suzanne turned back to me.
“You know that Coventry is just one of several health care conglomerates that have emerged in the last decade, and by no means the worst. I can give you statistics on the increase in acquisitions of public hospitals by private companies in the past five years. Not to mention mergers, larger and larger health care networks, closings of community hospitals that serve the Medicaid and indigent populations. If Coventry is a villain, they’ve got a lot of company.”
“We don’t have to let them off the hook by talking about trends in the industry.”
“There’s something to be said for sounding factual and aware of the big picture.”
“Most people don’t give a damn about the big picture.”
“I’ll get the information, and you can do what you think best with it,” said Suzanne, acting a little miffed, like a doctor advising a hefty patient to go on a diet with little hope that the patient will actually follow orders. Did she have to sound like such a snooty expert? I’m convinced that half the reason people get graduate degrees is to feel entitled to talk down to us plebes who don’t specialize.
“There’s something else that struck me as odd,” said Suzanne, turning to Tony as if weary of my frivolity. “St. Francis is purchasing the bulk of its medical supplies from a small company called BioSupp, Inc. Does the name ring a bell?”
My mind flashed back to one of the folders Weingould had given me.
“They’re a wholly owned subsidiary of Coventry,” I said.
Suzanne nodded.
“And their prices are, I won’t say suspiciously high compared to the rest of the market, but high enough that it caught my eye.”
The Side of the Angels Page 12
