The Eggnog Chronicles

by Carly Alexander

  “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see it, Jane, but, I’m sorry, I don’t. I hate to disappoint you, but I think you’re a better fit in obits right now.”

  I smiled. So this wasn’t going to be easy.

  “I won’t hold you to that if you want to change your mind,” I teased. “Really. Marty, can you think it over? I’m ready to move on.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to master celebrity obits first?”

  I blinked. Hello? Hadn’t I earned the nickname “Angel of Death?”

  “What’s yet to master? I think I’ve been to the mountaintop and beyond.”

  Marty reached over and picked up the folder with my marked-up pieces. “Not quite. I pulled these two pieces from the vault. My friend is an art dealer and he tells me Zachary’s health is failing, and Fitzgerald wanted to see what we had on Ms. Antoinette Lucas.” Fitzgerald is one of the bears on the publishing board. I don’t know what any of those men do, but I find them tiresome, cigar-smoking fat cats. “Anyway, when I read these I was struck by a certain trend in your writing. You’re a fine writer, Jane, but reading your profiles I’ve become concerned by the subtext in some of them. It doesn’t occur when you’re writing about men of intellectual and academic accomplishment.” He lifted his reading glasses and swung them open. “The men of stature seem to be safe from your scorn; it’s the rest of us slobs who feel it.”

  He smiled, and I grinned, not sure where he was going with this.

  “But in some of your profiles I sense a lack of compassion for your subjects. I see it more in the finished pieces, but also in the early drafts. You’re so critical.”

  “Critical can be good. I can make it work for me.” I folded my arms, wondering how this had turned into a critique of me. “You know, critical is an asset when you’re writing about food.”

  He shook his head, as if my writing weakness wounded him, then put on his glasses and read from my piece on Antoinette. “‘When diagnosed with cancer, she took up the cause and used her influence to raise millions of dollars for breast cancer research,’” he read.

  I shrugged. “Has that changed?”

  “No, but this description is cool and perfunctory, not what Antoinette is about. Have you met her?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “Very personable, isn’t she?”

  “We had a few laughs together,” I admitted, remembering how Antoinette had told me a few surprising anecdotes about her recovery from the mastectomy.

  Marty shook his head. “She’s just not coming through here. And Zachary Khan . . . This is so bland. I didn’t learn anything about this young man from reading this piece. It’s generic, almost boilerplate.” He took off his glasses. “Uninspired, though I know you have the skills to make this read like poetry. We can’t let the Herald appear to be passing judgment, Jane. We must treat every person’s death with dignity and inspiration.”

  I bit back a twinge of guilt. Marty had hit on one of my nasty habits. To be honest, my weakness is for brilliant, gifted men—geniuses who aren’t afraid to let their vision of the truth shatter illusions. Sometimes when writing up a scientist or inventor or lawyer, I have to admit, I fall a little bit in love. Last month, while working on the obituary of Roy Sheridan, a legal theorist who, while he was a third-year law student at New York University, fashioned a significant part of the argument used in Roe v. Wade, I was gritting my teeth. How was it that this brilliant man had been in the world and I’d never met him? He’d walked away from legal work in the eighties and traveled the country in a Volkswagen van with his collie. Now there’s a sexy image: brilliance on the road. A combination of Alan M. Dershowitz and Jack Kerouac. Of course, Mr. Sheridan’s bio was edited down when Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers died around the same time, but Sheridan still got two columns, above the fold.

  I took the file from Marty. “And you think this writer has a future in obits?”

  “She’s ripe with possibility,” he said. “Possibility to be plumbed.”

  “I really want out,” I said. “I’d rather be sampling crème brûlées.”

  “Hell on your cholesterol level. You’ll thank me someday.”

  “Put me on a toxic waste investigation. Let me shadow detectives tracking a serial killer. I’ll even travel through Rotterdam on a shoestring to write the Budget Traveler column.”

  “Charming though those options may be, we need you in obits at the moment.”

  “Marty, please, I don’t want to write about dead people anymore.”

  His eyes opened wide. “But that’s the source of your problem, Jane. The people you’re profiling are very much alive. That’s what you need to capture.”

  Tucking the folder under my arm, I turned toward the door with a sense of defeat and frustration, but before I could open the door, Genevieve slid down the hall on the other side of the glass and tapped. She opened the door and popped in, her gold hair gleaming in the fluorescent light.

  “Marty, I just wanted to leave these new bios with you,” she said, nearly curtsying over his in-box.

  “What’s that?” I asked, eyeing the folders. “You didn’t pitch those yet.” I turned to Marty. “Since when do we open up bios without pitching them?”

  “Genevieve is going on vacation,” he said with a shrug. “She’ll miss the meeting, so I gave her the green light on these bios.”

  “Just trying to work ahead,” she said dutifully. As she stepped around me I noticed that she was wearing open-toed sandals. Sandals in December, and on her big toenails were tiny red poinsettias.

  Oh, to drop a bottle of paint thinner on her feet. They were doing construction on the eighth floor. What were the chances? I thought as she sashayed right back out the door.

  “Jane?” Marty was on his feet, coming around the desk. “Are you all right? You look a little pale.”

  “I’m okay.” I pressed the folder to my cashmere sweater, wishing the cloying smell of Genevieve’s cologne would fade. Well, at least I could breathe through my nose again.

  Marty reached out toward my elbow, then pulled his hands back and folded them under his chin. “Compassion,” he said, as if praying. “Please revisit your profiles with a new perspective. Especially Antoinette Lucas and Zachary Khan. You might want to meet with them again.”

  “Right,” I said, heading back to my cubicle. Time to order up a side of compassion, hold the tears. Compassion with roasted garlic and butter.

  Braised compassion with a side of risotto. And for dessert? Compassion à la mode.

  Oh, Marty would regret not promoting me to restaurant critic.

  6

  “I’ve had it with the corporate world,” I told Carter as we shared a buttery sirloin steak, red in the middle, sizzled black on the outside. My sense of taste and smell had returned, and suddenly I felt a voracious appetite for life again. “The corporate world is so unproductive. The Herald office is one huge fish bowl, everyone swimming around aimlessly. Everything private is public. You can’t make a gynecological appointment without having the curmudgeons in copyedit know your business.”

  “I’m with you on that,” he said, slicing off a hunk of meat. “They make you come into the office, and once you’re there they act like it’s an inconvenience to allot you any space. They sit you down at a desk with a divider and a computer and that’s supposed to be a productive environment?”

  “And there’s the water cooler. Or the coffee cart. Or the restroom or the smoking area. There’s always some meeting place where the staff wastes their time kvetching,” I said as I scooped a mound of homefries onto my fork. “A total waste of time, waiting for elevators and subway trains. Commuting back and forth. I’d really love to go freelance and work at home.”

  “I don’t mind going in,” Carter said. “I sort of like the atmosphere on Wall Street. The way you can turn the pressure on and off during market hours.” I wasn’t sure exactly what he did at the brokerage firm, but I had met him while writing a profile on an infamous stock broke
r who died in jail. I liked to imagine Carter on the selling floor of the New York Stock Exchange, yelling trades and accepting huge bids, but in reality he was probably an unglamourous phone trader. In any case, when I felt his hand slide over my knee under the table, I realized just how much better I was feeling.

  “Should we go to your place?” I asked.

  “If you don’t mind the dog.” Carter had an Irish setter—it was a crime to keep him in a small apartment, but this just testified to Carter’s lack of awareness and responsibility. “Red is fine, as long as you keep him out of the bedroom.” There is something unnerving about having a dog’s eyes on you while you’re having sex, but let’s not even go there.

  “Red is a good dog,” he said, running a finger along the inside of my right thigh. I closed my eyes, savoring the tingling feeling and the taste of real food for a moment. “He just doesn’t like to be alone,” Carter added.

  I slipped out of my high-heeled mule and strategically lifted my foot to Carter’s lap. Gently, I pushed up his thigh, massaging his groin with my toes.

  He sighed. “Whoa.”

  “So Red waits in the kitchen?”

  “The kitchen.” He nodded, then signaled for the check.

  “Let me get you from behind,” Carter whispered in my ear, moving back so that my legs dropped from his shoulders.

  I flipped over on the bed, beginning to feel as if I were in an aerobics class. Carter and I had always enjoyed sex together, but lately he’d been quick to stop midstride to change positions.

  “Have you been reading sex manuals or something?” I asked as he knelt behind me and teased himself between my legs.

  “Why, am I getting better?” he asked, reaching forward to slide a hand down my belly.

  I didn’t want to tell him that he was pulling out just as I had orgasm in sight. “You’re definitely more adventurous.”

  He bit into my shoulder, fingering me at the same time. “I’ve always had a wild sense of adventure. I was going to be an archeologist.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” I asked, not wanting to imagine Carter all sweaty and grimy, squatting over dirty bones. I grabbed his hand. “My father was an archeologist. It’s not so adventurous.”

  He shoved my fingertips into his mouth and sucked. “It’s a fantasy. The wild side of foreign places, mysterious treasures.” He took my moist fingers and brushed them over my erect nipple. “Exotic beauties. Dangerous sex.”

  “That’s a fantasy, all right,” I said, thinking that it had no correlation to what my father did.

  “How do you fantasize about me?” he whispered as his hands massaged down my torso, teasing the edges of the lips between my legs.

  “I’m more into the urban fantasy,” I said, trying to think up one quickly since Carter wasn’t prominent in my fantasies. “How about Wall Street? Millions at stake. Power oozing from the beads of sweat on your handsome brow as you pace the office with a headset strapped on.”

  His fingers dipped inside me, and I moaned.

  “Boring!” he shouted, nuzzling me with his cock. “Indiana Jones! I am going to throw you down on the jungle floor and ravage you!”

  He thrust into me, and I welcomed him with a surge of moist desire. I could give up the Wall Street scenario for a brief rain forest expedition. As I recalled, Indy did have fabulous credentials and taught at a university. I cast Carter as a young Indy racing through a canyon of towering palms, taking me by the hand, pulling up my skirt.

  He pumped against me, setting up a new rhythm, and I let my elbows fall to the bed as I crouched in the darkness for my swashbuckling archeologist. “Go, Indy!” I whispered as the heat rose between us.

  Afterwards we fell to the bed. Carter groaned and cupped one of my breasts. “You okay, babe?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You just seem, I don’t know, a little tense.”

  I sighed. “It’s all this crap at work.” I usually didn’t get really personal with Carter, but since he’d asked . . . “You know my nemesis, Genevieve? Well, she’s stepping all over me, and my boss is letting her get away with it.”

  “I hate my boss,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t hate mine, but that doesn’t mean he’s always right. There’s an opening coming up—a big one. Restaurant critic. But Marty doesn’t think it’s right for me, and to be honest, that really hurts. He thinks I’m better suited for obits, and yet he’s not satisfied with what I’m writing now. It’s totally fucked up.”

  Silence.

  “Do you ever feel that way at work?” I asked him. “Undervalued and overwhelmed?”

  More silence.

  “Carter?” In the darkness, I saw his chest rise and fall steadily, his eyes closed.

  Oh, that just did it!

  For once, I opened up to him, and did he listen? He fell asleep!

  As I pulled on my clothes, I wondered if Carter and I had outgrown this relationship. Despite my fantasies, Carter wasn’t joining Mensa anytime soon. He wasn’t one of the geniuses of my fantasies . . . which, in the absence of emotional connection, left us with occasional sex. Jiffy lube, as one of my exes once called it. The ten-minute oil change could be a good thing, but shouldn’t there be some consideration involved? A tiny bit of interest? Enough to keep him awake and listening while I was pouring my heart out?

  Maybe it was time for a new guy. I’d always been so critical of my sister Ricki for hanging onto her schlumpy realtor. I mean, the payoff of that relationship was diminishing for her, yet she clung to him like ivy on a trellis. Was I clinging to Carter, despite diminishing returns?

  “Take a look at yourself, girl,” I said, staring into the dark mirror. Too dark to see. As I opened the bedroom door, Red hopped off the living room couch and trotted over to face me in the doorway. I looked back at Carter’s prone figure, then turned to Red.

  “I hope you two are very happy together,” I said as I grabbed my coat and headed out of there.

  7

  Six days later, I dug into my plastic vial of antibiotics, gulped the horse pill down with water, then slammed the glass down onto the kitchen counter as if I’d just toasted the Russian fleet with vodka.

  Six days without a drink. I would have to remember that the next time I worried about being recruited by AA. Of course, I still had a few days left on the medication, but since it was Sunday, I figured that a glass of wine with Emma wouldn’t kill me. We had decided to take in a movie, The Last Samurai, then grab dinner. Afterwards, we landed at Duke’s, where it was so crowded we decided to eat at the bar, where our friend Macy was dispensing white wines faster than quantum speed.

  “What’s with all these people?” I asked Macy, eyeing the invasion of uninvited guests who swamped my favorite watering hole.

  “Duke rented out the back room for a Christmas party,” she said. “Then he had the nerve to go skiing with his girlfriend. Noah and I are up to our elbows here.”

  Emma and I turned to each other and exploded: “His girlfriend?” at the same time.

  “Owe me a Coke!” Emma said, squeezing my arm. “What girlfriend? Who’s the girlfriend? We’ve never met her.”

  “And you never will.” Macy placed two glasses of chardonnay in front of us. “He won’t bring her around here. The man won’t play in his own backyard.”

  “Well, there’s a mystery solved.” I lifted my wineglass and held it midair. “Here’s to you, Duke, for keeping us guessing.”

  Macy laughed and shimmied her shoulders. “I had him pegged all along. I knew he liked sisters.”

  “I might have to take him off my list,” Emma said sadly. “If he’s serious enough to go away with this girl for the weekend, they might be a couple.” Emma had a running list of men she’d sleep with in a minute, which she was constantly revising when one of those men got married. She thought it was pure evil to break up a marriage, and almost as bad to cause a rift in an otherwise healthy relationship.

  “You had Duke on your list?” Macy rolled h
er eyes. “You need to get out more, girlfriend.”

  “Well, I added him when I had to pull Russell Crowe.”

  “I thought you replaced Russell with Tom Cruise,” I said, knowing that Tom had gone back on the list soon after he and Nicole split.

  Emma shook her head. “No, Tom came back on a while ago, and after seeing Last Samurai, I’m glad he did.”

  “Uhm-hm. Mr. Cruise can ride my horse anytime,” Macy tossed off as she carried two tall drinks down the bar.

  “What are the specials today?” I said, looking up at the chalkboard. Emma ran her finger around the stem of her wineglass, her mind elsewhere. “Hello? Are we eating here, or what?”

  “He called me,” she said. “This week . . . yesterday, he called me. He wants to get back together.”

  Tom Cruise? Then the ugly truth hit me. “Jonathan?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been sick about it. I don’t even know if I can eat. Can you believe that? All those hours in the gym trying to burn carbs, and now one phone call and I’m fasting.”

  I squeezed her wrist. “Don’t tell me you’re actually entertaining the idea. Oh, Emma . . . no!”

  “He reminded me that New Year’s Eve would be our one-year anniversary,” Emma said dolefully.

  “I see he still has a penchant for drama.” I remembered last December, when Emma had first connected with Jonathan. She and I were partying it up in a pack of tourists huddled on Times Square. Emma wore a silly paper crown and I had a wig of foil streamers over my head and the air was so charged with intoxicating spirit that I didn’t mind giving up champagne for a few minutes of noisy revelry in the cold.

  Emma and I were laughing when the crowd shifted and a bunch of people shoved into us, knocking Emma into one of the blue wooden police barricades. Two cops rushed over and quickly helped Emma to her feet. One of them took a special interest in brushing off her coat. Officer Jonathan Thompson lit into Emma with his blue eyes. She fell for his tousled dark curls, unmarred by a riot helmet, his easy laugh, his street stories. From that moment on, Emma was a hopeless cop groupie. She started watching all the crime shows on television. She waved to every passing patrol car and smiled at uniformed officers hanging out on street corners. She started telling me about Jonathan’s exciting days and nights, his “jobs,” the chatter of the dispatcher that she heard through his cell phone, his “gun runs” and “ten-thirteens.” In Emma’s eyes, Jonathan lived on the edge of danger (though I suspected he inflated his superhero stories when trying to impress chicks). Somehow, by having sex with him she felt connected to that exciting underworld, not to mention that seducing an officer fulfilled some weird sense of civic duty.