One Good Turn

by Judith Arnold

  They decided on six-thirty. She gave him her address and then told him she had to get back to work. After saying good-bye, he hung up, punched the air with his fist and whispered, “Yeah!” Energized, he swung open his door, prepared to offer Stella his soul in gratitude for having ferreted out Jenny Perrin’s extension at the State Department.

  Two steps before he reached Stella’s desk he heard a voice emerging from Lee Pappelli’s office. It was a smooth, assured baritone containing a well-practiced blend of humor and self-importance. Luke knew that voice; it was a voice that for nearly eighteen years he’d heard saying, “Oh, that’s my other son,” and now usually saying, “This is my boy, Luke.”

  Luke suffered a strange mix of emotions, prominent among them delight and dread. It had been this way ever since Elliott had vanished and his father had anointed Luke the favorite child. There was always the thrill of knowing that his father actually saw him, recognized him, took pride in him—maybe even loved him. And there was the uneasiness that came from wondering what kind of love it was, how long it would last, how hard Luke would have to work to keep earning it.

  He waited in the alcove near Stella’s desk, listening to his father exchanging a good-natured farewell with Senator Milford’s aide as they emerged from the inner office. A handshake, a final quip from Luke’s father and a final promise from Lee to look over an obscure clause in the latest revision of some farm support bill, and then James Benning turned and faced his son.

  Luke experienced another twinge of ambivalence. The broad smile his father beamed at him left him unsettled; he wasn’t sure whether he’d done too much or not enough to merit it. He scarcely had time to brace himself for his father’s crushing hand clasp. “There’s my boy!” James boomed as he appraised Luke. “You’re looking a bit thin, son. Are you eating enough?”

  From the day Luke was born his father had been complaining that he looked thin. Luke had inherited his mother’s lanky build and fair coloring, whereas Elliott had taken after their father, more robust in stature and endowed with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes. The fact that Luke had a perfectly healthy physique never registered on James. All that mattered was how lean Luke was in comparison to his father.

  “I’m eating fine, Dad,” he said, managing a smile. “When did you get into town? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  “It’s been hectic,” his father explained, flashing another blinding grin. He slung his arm around Luke’s shoulders and escorted him down the hall to the minuscule office Luke had been assigned. “I caught an early shuttle out of LaGuardia. It was all last-minute. As it is, I’ve got to catch a shuttle back tonight.”

  “You won’t be staying overnight?” Luke kept the master bedroom in the duplex in a constant state of readiness because his father frequently arrived in Washington without warning. He himself used the smallest of the three bedrooms.

  “Not this trip,” his father replied with a shake of his head. “But we’ll have dinner together before I leave. The City Tavern, all right? I’ll meet you there at—” he glanced at the thin gold Rolex adorning his wrist “—six o’clock. I’ve got to run, Luke. This damned farm support package is giving a certain client of mine heartburn.” He nudged Luke toward his office door and scowled. “I’m going to speak to Howard about getting you a larger office. This room isn’t big enough to store a mop in. Six o’clock, the City Tavern.”

  Before Luke could beg his father not to speak to the Senator about the size of the office, James Benning was striding down the hall and away.

  Typical. Luke sagged against the doorjamb and shook his head in awe at his father’s audacity. Wasn’t it just like him to blow into town, wreck his son’s plans for the evening and never give him a chance to sneak in a word edgewise?

  On the other hand, Luke couldn’t smother the gratitude he felt at his father’s invitation. When it came to James Benning, love had its price, and no son desperate for his father’s love would resort to haggling. Tonight the price would be having to break his date with Jenny.

  She’d hate him. It was nothing short of a miracle that she had forgiven him for last night’s stupidity. He couldn’t expect two miracles from her. This was it—he’d cancel their date and she’d tell him to drop dead.

  He stepped inside his office, closed the door, pulled the pink square of paper from his breast pocket and unfolded it. Reaching for the telephone receiver, he succumbed to an unexpected flare of anger at his father for being so high-handed. The nerve of him, taking over Luke’s life and organizing it down to the minute.

  Yet hadn’t he taken over Luke’s life the moment Elliott had disappeared? Hadn’t he been organizing every minute of it ever since? Why should anything be different just because Luke happened to have met a cute red-head?

  Sighing, he lifted the phone receiver and pushed the buttons. After a moment, Jenny answered: “Jennifer Perrin.”

  He sighed again. “Jenny, it’s Luke. I’ve got bad news.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, although he could hear laughter in her voice. “You’ve decided you’re going to try to get me into bed after all.”

  He felt an unwelcome tension in his groin. Her joke should have been funny but it wasn’t, not when he kept thinking of her spectacular hair and her compact body and her beautiful, perceptive eyes. “I wish,” he muttered under his breath, then continued out loud, “I’ve just found out I can’t make it for dinner tonight.”

  “Oh?”

  “My father’s in town. It was unexpected. He wants me to have dinner with him.”

  “Of course,” she said simply.

  Of course? “You aren’t angry?” he asked.

  “Why should I be angry? I think it’s lovely that your father’s in town. If my father was in Washington I’d rearrange my schedule to have dinner with him.”

  How many miracles was this woman good for? Luke dared to press his luck. “Are you free tomorrow, by any chance?”

  “Tomorrow?” She hesitated, then said, “I’m afraid not. I was planning to go to a concert.”

  “A concert.”

  “The Marine Band. They give free outdoor concerts in the summer, outside the Capitol building. They’re supposed to be very good. Maybe you’ve heard about them.”

  He had, but he hadn’t thought to attend their concerts. Who wanted to kill an evening listening to a military band play patriotic marches?

  To his surprise, he did. “We could go to the concert together,” he suggested. “We could have dinner first and then go afterward.”

  Again she hesitated. “It would be kind of tight. The concert starts at eight. I’ve got to leave work, go home and change my clothes. I’d barely have time to grab a sandwich and get down to the Capitol.”

  “We could have a picnic,” he said. “We could meet on the Mall at six-thirty, eat and then head over to the Capitol for the concert afterward.”

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s do that.”

  A picnic, Luke thought in puzzlement after hanging up. How had he come up with that brainstorm? He never went on picnics. They weren’t any more his style than Marine Band concerts.

  Yet it seemed like the perfect evening to share with a girl like Jenny Perrin. A picnic and a band concert. Why not? If he enjoyed himself it would be a miracle—and more and more, Luke was coming to believe in miracles.

  * * *

  “NOW, HERE,” SYBIL said as she pulled open the top drawer of her dresser, “is where I keep condoms. Please feel free to help yourself if you need one. Or two...”

  Jenny erupted in laughter. “I’m not bringing him back to our room,” she declared for what felt like the zillionth time.

  “Well, just in case,” Sybil drawled, closing the drawer and coming up behind Jenny, who stood before the mirror above her own dresser and attempted to braid her hair neatly. She and Sybil had managed to remove from the room the most flagrant evidence that its school-term occupants were male. Gone from the walls were the lascivious pin-up posters, the “Yield�
�� traffic sign and the calligraphed sheet of ersatz parchment reading “Abandon hope, all ye who enter.” The stray sweatsocks they’d exhumed from a corner of the closet floor had been stored in an unused drawer, along with the out-of-date schedule of Hoya games and the three poker chips they’d discovered among the dust balls under Sybil’s bed. But they’d been unable to peel the Playboy Bunny decal from the mirror, and Jenny did her best to ignore it as she examined her reflection and fussed with her hair.

  Sybil smoothed out the narrow shoulder straps of Jenny’s tank-style cotton shift, then pulled her brush from her hands. “Let me do it in a French braid for you,” she offered.

  “Thank you.”

  “And don’t pooh-pooh those condoms, honey. Better safe than sorry.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Bringing him back here. So you’ve said. But I saw the boy and he’s an eyeful. Rich and good-looking. A lot can happen.”

  “When you saw the boy you thought he was drunk,” Jenny reminded her.

  “And you told me I was wrong.” Sybil skillfully wove Jenny’s hair into a smooth plait. “You also told me he hit on you for an easy score.”

  “That won’t happen tonight,” Jenny said confidently. “We’re going to be outdoors in a public place. And anyway...” She fastened two shiny gold hoops to her ears and grinned. “I trust him.”

  “You are too trusting,” Sybil commented. “Trust him all you want, but if he tells you he’s had a vasectomy, you make sure you help yourself to my top drawer supply.” She stepped back and assessed Jenny with a critical eye. “You look great, Jen. And really, if things go well, I don’t mind spending the night on the living room couch. I’d expect you to do the same for me if the occasion presented itself—which I’m sure it will,” she added with a saucy smile.

  “For your sake, if not mine,” Jenny said, sharing her roommate’s grin, “I hope it does.” She grabbed her purse, stepped into her sandals, and checked her hair in the mirror one last time. “You’re an artist, Sybil. Thanks a million.”

  “Thank me in the morning,” Sybil teased before chasing her out of the bedroom.

  It was a few minutes past six when Jenny left the apartment, and she decided to walk to the Mall. While warm, the air had lost its midday humidity, and after a tiring day of typing memos, she believed a stroll would rejuvenate her. Besides, she still hadn’t figured out the city’s bus system. The Metro seemed less complicated, but there was no subway stop in Georgetown. As for the cabs, they were much too expensive.

  Jenny liked walking, and she especially liked walking in downtown Washington. She was aware that the city contained its share of rundown neighborhoods, but it also contained buildings of great splendor, monuments, parks, upscale boutiques, cafes and majestic houses. The sidewalks teemed with pedestrians, vendors selling flowers, religious cultists, protestors wagging signs, women and men not much older than Jenny, carrying briefcases and looking extremely important.

  She wondered whether someday in the not too distant future Luke Benning would be one of those important-looking young movers and shakers strutting down M Street or Pennsylvania Avenue with a briefcase gripped in one hand. That was evidently what he was grooming himself for, and yet she couldn’t see him happy at it. Sure, he was an eyeful, as Sybil had observed, but beneath his handsome veneer Jenny sensed a turbulence, a sadness, something she wanted to heal.

  She’d always been that way, adopting stray cats and nursing ailing Boston ferns back to health. At school she befriended not just the strong students but the weak. Among her achievements at college she counted not only her years on the Dean’s List but also her having talked an anorexic sophomore into seeking therapy and her having persuaded her freshman-year roommate not to quit school after she’d flunked Physics. Some of the girls at Chapin House had nicknamed her “Little Jenny Sunshine,” but they used the moniker affectionately and Jenny didn’t mind.

  She didn’t know whether Luke needed rescuing—and, if so, whether he wanted to be rescued. But when she’d seen him at the party the other night, she’d felt a powerful urge to try.

  And, if nothing else, he was an eyeful.

  At Lafayette Park she handed out two dollars worth of loose change to the homeless people who resided on the park’s benches. Then she turned south, heading for the Mall. As usual, it was teeming with tourists. She had learned to identify the tourists by their cameras, their backpacks, their wide-eyed expressions and their cranky, dog-tired children. Jenny was proud to think she was less a tourist than a resident. Even if she hadn’t yet mastered the public transit system she had come to think of Washington as her temporary home.

  Reaching the Mall, she turned left. Luke had promised to meet her in front of the National Gallery of Art, and as she neared the regal white museum she spotted him sitting on the broad granite steps, gazing westward, searching the crowds. He had on a fresh-looking white shirt and casual khaki trousers, and his eyes squinted slightly as he stared in the direction of the descending sun. His bare forearms rested on his spread knees, and between his legs on the steps sat a huge wicker basket. He wasn’t wearing socks.

  Within a minute of her seeing him, he saw her. He stood, lifted the basket by its handle and descended the steps to the lawn, slowing only to let a sweaty jogger pass him on the unpaved path. “Hi,” he greeted her, smiling tentatively.

  He smelled of wild mint. He seemed to tower above her. His eyes were still that golden honey color, but today they were warm and sweet and translucent. Jenny had remembered him as good looking, but somehow she’d forgotten the visceral impact he’d had on her at the party. For a fleeting instant she pictured Sybil pointing to the top drawer of her dresser and saying, “Help yourself to my supply.”

  No. Jenny was not going to need Sybil’s supply. No matter how attractive she found Luke, she wasn’t going to sleep with him tonight. She understood intuitively that if a relationship were to develop between them it would be based not on sex but on something much more profound. And if nothing profound developed, she certainly wasn’t going to settle for sex.

  She returned his smile and then lowered her eyes to the oversized picnic basket. “Are we going to be joined by some other people?” she asked.

  He touched her elbow lightly, guiding her toward the Capitol building, and then let his hand fall as they strolled across the lawn. “No. Why do you ask?”

  “That basket looks much too big.”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure what you’d like, so I asked them to pack it with an assortment of food.”

  “You asked them? Who’s them?”

  He shot her a quick, nervous look. “I ordered this from a caterer,” he said, his voice edged with contrition.

  She’d been expecting sandwiches and soda pop, not a catered feast. She was suddenly very glad she’d decided to wear a dress rather than the culottes she’d originally considered putting on after work. She was even more glad she’d dressed nicely when, upon deciding on a relatively out-of-the-way stretch of grass near the Capitol Reflecting Pool, Luke opened the basket to remove a red-checked linen table cloth, two wine glasses and a chilled bottle of Chardonnay. He deftly uncorked the bottle, filled the goblets, and handed them to Jenny to hold while he pulled from the basket doily-lined dishes of cold shrimp, Cajun chicken wings, sliced roast beef and Havarti, thick slabs of sourdough bread and wheat crackers, carrot sticks, celery stuffed with pate and florets of cauliflower and broccoli. And two red-checked linen napkins.

  “Oh, my,” Jenny said weakly.

  “You don’t like any of it, huh,” Luke guessed, although his eyes were twinkling.

  “I love all of it. I’m going to make a pig of myself.” Handing back his glass of wine, she helped herself to a stalk of celery. “This is heavenly, Luke,” she said after devouring it. “I can’t believe you went to all this trouble.”

  “I didn’t go to any trouble at all,” he insisted, uncapping a small tub of cocktail sauce and dipping a plump shrimp into it. “All I did was mak
e a phone call and tell them to have something ready for a six-fifteen pick-up.”

  She accepted the shrimp he’d prepared for her and tasted it. It was fresh and succulent. She sighed with delight. “You are rich, aren’t you,” she blurted out.

  He seemed startled. “What?”

  She smiled contritely. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid tact isn’t my long suit.”

  “That’s okay,” he assured her. He fell silent, absorbing himself with the task of arranging a slice of roast beef on a piece of bread.

  She’d made him uncomfortable. She nibbled on her shrimp thoughtfully, trying to decide how to repair the damage. “It was my friend Sybil who figured out you were rich,” she explained. “She said rich guys don’t wear socks.”

  He glanced at his naked ankles and laughed. Then he scrutinized her bare calves and her tiny feet crisscrossed by the leather straps of her sandals. “By that standard, you must be rich, too,” he deduced.

  “I’m not a guy,” she pointed out.

  He took a bite of his roast beef sandwich, chewed and swallowed. “All right. I’m rich. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I come from a wealthy background. My father does well, and his father before him did even better.”

  “Was your grandfather a power-broker, too?”

  “He had friends in high places,” Luke said vaguely. “He was a banker, not a lawyer. He was one of those lucky bankers who played econominc upheavals perfectly and always wound up on the top of the heap. He wears socks, though.”

  “At his age, he probably needs them.”

  Luke laughed. “How about you? Do you come from a long line of school teachers?”

  Smiling, she shook her head. “My parents run an insurance agency outside Chicago.”

  “Chicago, huh,” he said with a nod. “You’ve got an accent.”

  “No,” she corrected him. “Everyone else has an accent.”

  He laughed.

  “Did you have a good visit with your father yesterday?” she asked.

  His smile faded. “It was okay,” he said, then cut himself off. He averted his eyes for a minute, gazing up toward the illuminated dome of the Capitol building, then turned back to Jenny. “We ate dinner at a private club in Georgetown. The City Tavern. It’s one of my father’s favorite places to eat when he’s down here. And we sat there, eating and talking...and I kept thinking...” He drifted off again, curiously pensive.