“What did Horowitz want?”
There is an unpleasant inflection, she thinks, in the way he pronounces the word “Horowitz,” almost making it “Horrorwitz,” as she has heard Michael’s detractors pronounce his name before.
“The thing is, he can actually be very sweet,” she says. “There’s a kind of little-boy quality about him that’s kind of endearing—a guilelessness. He’s very persuasive.”
“That’s why he’s a good salesman. What did your Granny Flo say about him? That he could sell umbrellas in the Gobi Desert? The guy could sell condoms on the front steps of the Vatican.”
Condoms, she thinks. “Like one of your used condoms.” She says, “Do you realize how much I’ve got at stake in this launch party, Brad?”
“A lot, I’m sure. A lot.”
“Fifty million dollars.”
“That’s a lot.”
“The party’s on the seventeenth, Brad. That’s next Thursday. Will you be coming?”
“I’m going to try.”
“A funny thing happened in my office the other day. We were going over the plans for the party, and Mark Segal, our ad director, was showing us some of the press releases he’s prepared. In one of them, it says that you and I will be co-hosts for the evening. I mentioned that you might not be able to make it, and Mark said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter.’ I realize that sounds a little insensitive, but remember that all Mark thinks about is publicity. I just wanted to tell you that it does matter, Brad. It matters a great deal, to me. I want terribly to have you there.”
“Well, I’m certainly going to try.”
Then she says, “It’s a woman who’s been calling.”
“A woman?”
“The person I told you about, who calls and then hangs up. I answered a call the other day, when you were in Minneapolis. I identified myself. There was a little gasp at the other end of the line. It was a woman’s gasp. Then she hung up.”
“I see.”
“Do you have any idea who would be doing this to us, Brad?”
Still facing the window, he says, “Yes, I do.”
He turns, but his face is in shadow, and she cannot read his expression. “Have you ever made a mistake, Mimi?” he asks her.
“Of course I have.”
“Well, I made one about three months ago. I got involved with a woman. She’s a secretary in the office of one of our clients. Her name is—”
“Please,” she says quickly, “I don’t want to know her name. Have you been having an affair with her, Brad?”
“I did. It was very brief, and I’ve tried telling her that it’s over, but she’s become very demanding. She wants me to marry her. She’s been telephoning me at the office. She’s telephoned me here. She’s even come to the office. She’s threatened to come here. The other day, she was waiting for me outside my building and tried to force her way into a taxi with me. Sometimes she sits on a bench across the street and watches this building. Actually, I was just looking out the window now to see if she was there again tonight.”
“Is she?”
“No, thank God.”
“Do you love her, Brad?”
“No. If I ever thought I did, I certainly don’t now.”
“Is she … pregnant?”
“She says she is. I’m sure she’s lying. We always took … precautions. I’m positive she’s lying.”
“Still,” Mimi says, trying to keep her composure, trying to keep her poise, even though she feels herself about to be blown away, “how very unpleasant for you, darling!”
“Yes.” Then he says, “Look, Mimi. It was a mistake; I admit that. I’ve told her that. I’ve told her that I’m not going to marry her. I’ve told her I never want to see her again. I’ve told her I love my wife. I’ve told her I don’t want a divorce—unless you want one, Mimi, now that you know about this. I’ve told her that if she can produce a letter from her doctor, certifying that she’s pregnant, I’ll pay for an abortion. She hasn’t produced any such letter, which is why I’m sure she’s lying. But I’ve told her that this is absolutely as far as I intend to go. Beyond that, she is out of my life as far as I’m concerned. But she still refuses to give up.”
“I see,” she says. She stands up quickly and runs her fingers through her hair. “I see that you’ve thought this whole thing through very carefully,” she says. “You’ve covered every point in your usual thorough, lawyer’s way. You’ve thought of everything—including a letter from her doctor! You’ve thought of everything, except how I might feel. That somehow didn’t enter your head—how I might feel about this! And do you know how I feel? I feel like used goods, that’s how I feel! I feel dirty and abused and used and damaged, but perhaps to convince you of how I feel I should get a letter from my doctor certifying that! I hate you.”
“Have you ever thought about how I might feel?” he says quietly.
“How you might feel! I haven’t been running off and cheating on you, and telling lies about where I had lunch—telling me you had your partners’ lunch downtown, when I saw the two of you together at a table at Le Cirque! Do you think I’m stupid? I even found a letter from her, you know.”
“A letter?”
“Electric blue stationery. Monogrammed R. With a lot of silly yellow daisies on the border. Sound familiar? It was in the pocket of a suit you were sending to the cleaner’s. Do you think I haven’t known what’s been going on? ‘You said you had an unhappy marriage,’ she wrote. ‘You told me you loved me.’ But I suppose you thought you were handling things very cleverly—until she decided to put the screws on you, if you’ll pardon the expression, when she decided that you might be getting a little tired of screwing her!”
“I admit I’ve tried to let her down as gently as possible.”
“Oh, of course! We wouldn’t want her to make a scene, would we? That wouldn’t do. We wouldn’t want her to make any sort of fuss, would we? Like a lawsuit, or a scandal, or publicity—because how would that look to the commission up in Albany that’s considering you to fill out Senator Miller’s term? Anything like that would put the kibosh on that, wouldn’t it? Tut, tut. ‘Senate Appointee Accused of Marital Infidelity.’ That just would not do! That’s all you thought about, that’s all you cared about: covering your ass! You never thought about how I might feel at all!”
“I’m not talking about that,” he says. “I’m talking about how I’ve felt for the past two years.”
“Two years? I thought you said it started three months ago. Or was that another lie?”
“Two years—while I’ve been trying to have a marriage, and all you’ve thought about, or talked about, is a new perfume.”
Felix appears at the doorway again. “Dinner is served, ma’am,” he says.
“Excuse me,” she says, “but I’m feeling a little grippy tonight. I’m going upstairs to bed. Mr. Moore will be dining alone tonight, Felix.”
Felix nods, and lowers his eyes.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Mimi turns the key in her lock and flings herself, face forward, across her bed, dry-eyed. I am not crying, she thinks. I am not going to cry. She turns her head a little to one side, and lying still, the thoughts rush through her head. I made a scene, she thinks. I promised myself I would never make a scene, but then I went ahead and made one anyway. But what the hell. It was the rotten timing he chose to tell me this, even though I knew about it anyway. And I let him hurt me, even though I promised I would never let anyone hurt me that way again. I let him hurt me and, even worse, I let him know he hurt me. Yes, you picked a swell time to tell me this, you bastard. The words from a Kenny Rogers song flash by. You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille. Three hungry children and the crops in the field … You picked a fine time to tell me, you heel. A fine time to tell me, schlemiel. Edwee and a pornographic videotape. Condoms. Abortions. Filth, trash, sluttish women, filth and more filth. Candied Apple, rotten apples, filth rotting maggoty in a warehouse cellar, Mother, Daddy, Me, Badger, a man with a false scar, and
a man with foolish dimples and a smile, and a line that is probably also false and rotten to the core. What if I were to tell you that Badger is not your child, but his, that I’m sure of this now? What if I were to tell you that Badger is a bastard? In England, they call it a love child. But I must not think about these things, she tells herself.
I must think about the party, I must think about launching “Mireille” on the seventeenth, the fragrance that is on my throat and behind my earlobes and between my breasts and on my wrists right now, this lovely and intoxicating and exciting fragrance that bears my name, and the lovely and intoxicating and exciting party that is going to introduce “Mireille” to the world. That is all that matters now, the party. That is the single most important thing in my life right now, the party; the absolutely single most important thing in the entire world. It begins with a P. It is a party with a capital P, and a party is gaiety and laughter, champagne in silver coolers, caviar in ice-sculpted bowls, beautiful men and beautiful women in their most beautiful dresses, lipstick-red roses scattered across white tablecloths, a full-ounce bottle of “Mireille” at each place setting (Mark wanted five-ounce bottles, but I said “Too show-offy”), and waiters in lipstick-red mess jackets, especially dyed to match my “Brandy by Firelight,” that wonderful amber-crimson shade, red-gold, and gold epaulettes on their shoulders, a party to end all parties, champagne at sunset, not a bad name for a nail shade. Beauty. That is my business: Beauty. Perfume.
And she thinks: Did I just think that? That the only thing that matters to me right now is a party? Beauty? Perfume?
At the party, she will decide. At the party, she will make her choice. If Brad doesn’t come to her party, that will be a signal. If Michael comes, and behaves as sweetly as he has promised to behave, that will be her second signal. These signals, omens, will point the way. It will be a beautiful way.
With one eye, she sees one of the buttons on her bedside phone light up, indicating a ring. It lights again, and then a third time. Obviously, someone has been instructed not to answer. She watches the blinking button, and presently she is counting the yellow blinks, the way one might try counting sheep before falling off to sleep. Thirty-six, she counts, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine …
The phone will ring all night.
Suddenly she picks up the receiver and shouts, “Leave us alone, you filthy whore!”
Then she breaks the connection with her fingertip and leaves the receiver off the hook.
She prays that she will not have the dream tonight. Then it comes: the shadow flying across the windshield, her mother’s scream. Only she is not dreaming now. She is wide awake.
26
“Your father is dead,” her mother said on the telephone, and her voice was strangely calm, detached and dispassionate, as though she were making some not particularly interesting observation about the weather. This had been in April of 1962.
“Dead?” she had cried. “What happened?” Immediately she assumed that the stresses he had been under must have caused a heart attack.
“I’m not sure of all the details,” her mother said in that same distant voice. “The police are there now. Will you go over to the apartment and see what has to be done?”
“The police!”
“They’re there. At the apartment. I tried to call him there, and a policeman answered the phone. They’d just found him. Can you go over? I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
“Where are you, Mother?”
“I’m here—I’m in the Adirondacks. Or is it the Alleghenies? I came here yesterday—no, it was two days ago, on the train. It’s a place called—” and she heard her mother call out to someone, “What’s the name of this town? Oh, yes. It’s a place called Cohoes, New York,” she said. “It’s not far from Saratoga. I’m at a pay phone. There’s no phone in my motel room. Can you help me, Mimi?”
“What are you doing there, Mother?”
“We had a … a little disagreement the other night, your father and I. I had to get away. I had to find a little peace. And quiet. I went to Grand Central. I got on a train. I got off at the first town that looked pretty. And peaceful. I came here, to the mountains, to be alone for a little bit. And now it’s snowing outside.…”
“Have you been drinking, Mother?”
“A little—a little liquid courage. Mimi, didn’t you hear what I said? Your father’s dead!” It was the first time her voice seemed to register any emotion. “Please go up to the apartment and see what it is the police want. They were asking me all sorts of awful questions. I’ll be home as soon as I can. There’s supposed to be a train at—” But the rest was incoherent.
When she arrived at her parents’ apartment, she was met at the door by a young police officer who looked barely old enough to shave.
“You a relative of the deceased?” he asked her.
“I’m his daughter. Please let me see him.”
“Afraid you can’t. Besides, you wouldn’t want to, ma’am.”
“What do you mean?”
“Put a bullet through his head. Blew his brains out, ma’am.”
She felt her body sag against the door.
“It looks like a clear case of suicide,” he said. “He appears to have been alone here. No sign of forced entry, no signs of an intruder, no indication that a burglary was being perpetrated. A neighbor heard the shot and called the precinct. We’ve taken the deceased to the police morgue, where they need to perform a few more tests. Then we’ll release the body to Frank Campbell’s. Your mother specified Frank Campbell’s, ma’am.”
“Where was he?”
“You want to see where we found him, ma’am?”
She nodded.
“I warn you, there’s pretty much a lot of blood.”
She followed the young officer down the front hall toward the bathroom at the end.
“You sure you want to go in there, ma’am?” he said, looking at her uncertainly. “It smells kind of bad in there, too.”
She nodded again.
He held open the bathroom door for her. “We found him there.” He pointed. “In the tub.”
She took one brief look, then turned quickly away, feeling ill. “A little disagreement,” her mother had said. Had that been enough to cause him to do this dreadful thing?
“This was a considerate suicide,” he said. “He chose the bathtub—he was fully clothed, by the way—to minimize the mess.”
“Considerate,” she whispered.
“The lethal weapon was found there,” he said, and pointed to a section of the white-tiled floor beside the tub where the outline of a pistol was traced in black Magic Marker. “Smith and Wesson, forty-four,” he said. Then he sat down hard on the toilet seat.
She noticed for the first time how pale he was. Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead, though the apartment was quite cool, and there was a white, cakey substance at the corners of his mouth. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “This is my first one of these.”
“You poor thing,” she heard herself saying. “This must be awful for you.”
He cleared his throat. “They say you get used to it, ma’am,” he said. “That’s what they tell us.”
“Let’s go into another room,” she said.
Outside in the hall again, she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“O’Connell, ma’am. Detective Kevin O’Connell, nineteenth precinct.”
“How long do you have to stay here, Kevin?”
“Until I hear from the forensic guys. Till they’re sure they’ve got the—you know, all the things they need.”
They moved toward the living room, and she noticed that his hand was moving inside the pocket of his uniform jacket, and she realized that he was fingering his rosary beads. “Was there any sort of message? Any note?” she asked him.
“Not that we’ve been able to turn up. Like I said, he was considerate. Most suicides who leave notes are sado-masochistic manipulative personalities with persecution compl
exes and private agendas to work through. That’s what they taught us at the police academy, anyway. It means, like, they want to get back at somebody. This deceased was a considerate personality, in my opinion.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know of any reason, ma’am, why your father would have chosen to take his own life? Any enemies?”
“No. Yes. I really don’t know.”
“Business pressures?”
“Oh, yes. Many of those. Do you need me for anything else, Kevin?”
“We may ask you to come down to the morgue to identify the deceased. When we’ve cleaned him up a bit, that is. The widow, I gather, is out of town.”
“My mother’s on her way back to New York.”
“Meanwhile, you have my sincerest sympathies, ma’am, in your bereavement.”
“Thank you, Kevin. Or I should say, thank you, lieutenant.”
“Not lieutenant, ma’am. Detective. O’Connell. Nineteenth precinct.”
“And I hope they don’t make you wait here too much longer.”
“I’ll be okay, ma’am. It was just that this was my first of these. I mean, I’ve seen stiffs before, but not like this.”
He was still fingering the rosary beads in his pocket. She could hear the beads’ soft chink as they fell together from between his fingers.
“Say a bead for me,” she said, and let herself out the door.
It was not until she reached the elevator that her father began to die for her, and he died again when she opened the front door of the building and stepped out into the bright sunlight of the street, and yet again when she raised her arm to hail a taxi, and again and again, all the way home.
That night, as she lay in her husband’s arms, she said to him, “Was there something I could have done? Was there some signal I didn’t see? Did I spend so much time worrying about what was happening to Mother that I ignored what he was going through, that I became blind to what was happening to him? Have I spent too much time caring for Badger, and you, and not enough time trying to understand the hell that the rest of my family was going through? And that time, two years ago, when you tried to tell me how terribly wrong things were becoming, and I became so angry with you, and let you … let you move out on me: should I have used that time to be with Mother and Daddy, to try to help them, instead of … instead of … nothing? Oh, why have I been so selfish, Brad? Why didn’t someone—you—someone—tell me, show me, how selfish I was being, thinking only of myself? My comfort, my pleasure. You don’t deserve someone as selfish as me. I don’t deserve you. How could I have ever called you selfish, when I’ve been the only selfish one, the only selfish one, the only one.”
Shades of Fortune Page 41
