“The weather is terrible.”
“Look out the window! There’s not a cloud in the sky!”
“It will rain tomorrow.”
“I told you we were good on weather fronts. It will be eighty, the last summer day. You’ll have a great time on the course.”
“I’ll have work to do.”
“You’re going to take your wife to Mass, then you’re going out to the club with her and enjoy her skunking you. Got a problem with that?”
“Don’t shake that contract at me again!”
Merely talking about Anna Maria in his present state of ecstatic afterglow and sexual hunger tore at Neenan’s dubious stability. He twisted uncomfortably in his seat. The damn seraph was playing games with him.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet? There’s a lot of things you will have to straighten out in the next few months. She’s decisive.”
“You mean my salvation depends on how I act with Anna Maria?”
“You got it.”
“I don’t get it at all.”
“That’s the whole problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“To begin with, after eight years of marriage, you don’t know who she is. To end with, you don’t know how lucky you are.”
“I certainly do know who my wife is.”
“OK. Let’s go down the list. You say she buys expensive clothes and jewelry. How much does she spend?”
“I don’t check the bills.”
“That’s right. You never see them. She buys them with her own money, which is less than the salary to which she is entitled for the work she does. Moreover, she buys the clothes at outlets and discount stores. She looks good in them because she has good taste, and doesn’t mind being six months behind the fashions, and she’d look good in anything anyway.”
“Oh … I don’t care how she spends the money.”
“Secondly,” Michael went on implacably, “if you had any taste at all, you’d be embarrassed at the jewels she wears to your fancy dinners, they’re so inexpensive compared to what the wives of other CEOs wear. They look at Anna Maria and hate her for her good looks and then feel sorry for her because she has such a cheapskate husband.”
“I’m not a cheapskate.”
“Is that so? Tell you what, ask one of your buddies in the industry how much they pay for the jewels they give their wives for Christmas. If you are capable of feeling like a heel—which I very much doubt—they’d make you feel like the lowest of heels.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“We can’t lie, R. A.,” the seraph said with a benign smile. “We can work truth a little around the edges, but we don’t tell outright falsehoods. Not in our nature. You can believe me about the jewels.”
“I didn’t know …”
“You think that is a valid excuse?”
“I guess not.”
“Then the matter of her reading. What’s she going through now?”
“I don’t know … some woman romance writer. Huge books.”
“Susan Howatch?”
“Something like that.”
“You think she’s just a romance writer?”
“Isn’t she?”
“She’s been writing theological novels for a decade. Kind of an Anthony Trollope of the late twentieth century.”
“I don’t care what the hell she reads … . Is this woman commercial?”
“Sells a lot of books.”
“Maybe we could do a film …”
“Miniseries.”
“Yeah, good idea. We’ll have to get a writer.”
“Got one.”
“Not my wife!”
“Yep,” the angel chortled gleefully. “Most of the script is done. She’s got a dozen or so lying around. You wouldn’t know that, of course. You’re too dumb to wonder about it.”
“Are they good?”
“Every one of them is commercial, as you people say. Too much sex in them for your good friend Reverend Wildmon. But no worse than R.”
“I can’t believe any of this.”
“You don’t know anything about what she gives to charity either. Or that she tutors down in Pilsen for the Jesuits at their new high school or that she is one of the principal founders of that school. With her own money, not yours. You’re too dumb to know and too insensitive to care.”
The angel song was rising in volume, celebrating his wife no doubt.
“It’s all impossible.”
“So you been chasing around these women executives because you think they make interesting temporary slaves—and thus getting even with your mother—and the most interesting woman you’ve ever met is the one you sleep with, and not often enough either. You don’t even let her in your bed.”
Neenan was speechless.
He let pass the comment about his mother. And the one about not sleeping with Anna Maria often enough.
“She likes having a bedroom of her own. Wants privacy.”
“If I weren’t the head of the heavenly armies, I’d say bullshit. She likes sex, as you know. A lot. But women also like to snuggle and hug. Fat chance of doing that when you’re behind a closed door dreaming up new ways of sticking it to Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch and Walter Murtaugh. You’re the one that’s afraid of letting a real woman—and she’s all of that—intrude into the privacy and secrecy of your life.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yeah? You’re beginning to believe that it might be true and you’re cracking up like an iceberg in spring. Well, boyo, that’s only the beginning.”
“So I guess I’d better play golf with her tomorrow, huh?”
“Minimally. And you’ll have to invite her because she’d never think of inviting you.”
“I don’t want to go to church with her.”
“You forget who I am? And whom I work for?”
“There’s a link between that One and Anna Maria?”
“She’s as close as you’re likely to get to the Other in this world, not counting me and my companion, if she consents to meet you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I didn’t expect that you would.”
“We can’t change the habits of eight years of marriage.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy. None of the changes that you’re going to have to make in the next couple of months while you still have time are going to be easy. Still, this one should be more pleasurable than the others … . Even now you’re caught between hunger and fear as all the defenses you’ve built up against her start to crumble.”
“I don’t have any defenses against her!”
“You gotta be kidding!”
“You sound like you’re going to enjoy my humiliation.”
“Nope. We don’t do that kind of thing. I’m going to enjoy your joy … if there is any.”
6
Meenan’s head was whirling as he approached the stately and somewhat static Norman house on the lakeshore. He was breaking apart like a wave crashing on a beach. He could make no sense of anything that had happened since the seraph had announced himself on the MD-80. Could he have been married to a woman for eight years and not know her at all? Could he have been that much of a fool?
Were his days numbered? Would he be dead before Christmas?
He put the key in the front door with a shiver, despite the sultry weather. Had someone just walked over his grave?
He was certain about only one thing: he wanted with an aching hunger this strange woman who was his wife. Let humiliation, disintegration, and death come later. In the moment of love there would be a brief eternity of pleasure. That would be enough. The worries could come later if they wanted to.
Michael had apparently taken his leave, perhaps respecting the intimacy of marital passion. Neenan wasn’t sure he could trust him, however. It did not follow that, because he was invisible, the dark-skinned angel was not lurking somewhere judging Neenan’s every move and finding him wanting.
He searched throu
gh the ground floor of the house and did not find her. Damn! Where had the woman gone? She knew he would be coming home sometime today. Why wasn’t she waiting for him?
He didn’t need the seraph to tell him how foolish that question was.
Finally he saw her in the garden, now blooming with mums, at the side of the house. She was lying on a wide chaise, her eyes closed and an open book on her belly. Gently he opened the sliding door. His head was thumping, his teeth gritted together, his heart pounding, his fingernails digging into the palms of his hands. The choir began to hum a serenade. So they were still around.
In the garden the scent of mums reminded him briefly of a funeral home, perhaps a funeral home for his wake.
He looked down at her and his whole being filled with tenderness. She was dressed as though she were about to receive guests for a casual Sunday-afternoon cocktail party: neatly pressed designer jeans, a paisley scarf for a belt, expensive sandals, and a gleaming white blouse against which her long hair had fallen in a carefully designed black shower. Two buttons of the blouse were open instead of one, hinting at wonder and mystery. All the requisite jewelry was in place: earrings, necklace, bracelets, rings, even an ankle bracelet.
Had she dressed to welcome him home? Or had flawless dress and grooming become an end in itself?
Was not the extra open button the answer to that dumb question?
Yet he had never returned home from a business trip to seek pleasure in the heat of an afternoon. Perhaps she had dressed for him just in case this return would be different.
It would certainly be that.
She had changed hardly at all in their eight years together. Still unbearably lovely.
He sat on the chaise next to her. Her fragrance was strong enough to blot out the deadly aroma of mums. He drank her in, celebrating her, reveling in her, anticipating his pleasure in her.
She opened her eyes in momentary surprise. Her hand leaped to her throat. Then she relaxed and smiled.
“Raymond!”
“Napping?”
“Partly daydreaming, partly napping,” she said, her smile still very much alive.
“Daydreaming about me?”
“Not really,” she said, shifting her position on the chaise in a sensuous movement that said that she knew what he wanted. “I daydreamed about you at Mass this morning. I’m afraid I got myself all worked up.”
“Dirty thoughts in church? Isn’t that a sacrilege?”
“Not if they’re about your husband.”
“You got yourself all wet in church?”
She lowered her eyes in shy modesty. “’Fraid so … . Rough trip home? There was a big thunderstorm just south of us.”
“The angels had to work overtime to bring us through that.”
She opened her eyes in astonishment. “Angels?”
“Angels.”
Hearing themselves mentioned, the angel choir turned up the volume again on its serenade. Their song was deafening.
Her eyes locked with his. “Out here, Raymond? In the autumn sunshine?”
“Why not?”
“Why not indeed.”
He took the book off her belly and placed it on the grass. It was Susan Howatch, as predicted.
“Do you hear someone singing, way far off in the distance?” she asked.
Not far off in the distance but all around us.
“Do you?”
“Not exactly,” she said with a frown.
“Maybe it’s the same angels that brought us through the storm.”
He touched the third button on her blouse.
“Raymond!” she exclaimed.
She squirmed on the chaise, twisted her head to one side, and arched her back.
The angels, anticipating the event perhaps, broke into a triumphant celebration.
The interlude of passion was for Raymond Neenan an exploration of a new and unfamiliar country, dense with thick and blossoming vegetation, filled with mysterious sounds and smells, and alive with wonders that lurked everywhere. He did not know this strange land. Somehow he had missed it in his past travels. But he did realize that he had to treat it with great care, cherish it, reverence it, nourish it, heal it, sustain its fragile brilliance.
Then something or perhaps someone else intervened, not so much to distract him from his exploration as to enhance it. The ecstasy from the plane ride swept back into him, filled him, exalted him. He was swept away on wave after wave of eternity. He no longer feared death, much less Michael’s “small stuff.” Somehow everything would be all right. He lost all sense of his own selfhood. There was only the presence of the Other and of this human link to the Other that he must protect and hold dear for the eternity of their union.
It seemed that he and his beloved were dancing on the vanilla ice cream clouds above the storm, naked, free, serene, and utterly enveloped now in the Other, who was somehow dancing with them.
In the distance he heard two voices crying out with unbearable pleasure. Eternity was everywhere.
Later, as Anna Maria slept peacefully in his arms, her sweat-drenched body as close to his as another human body could be, he relaxed in serene confidence. The warm sunlight bathed them in tranquillity. The satisfied joy of the moment, he knew, would not last. But it must be savored while it was there. All the other problems in life were far, far away.
“Not bad,” Michael remarked, “not bad at all. You’re beginning to realize who she is.”
He was sitting on one of the lawn chairs, his tie open and his hat and jacket on the table.
Neenan grabbed his wife’s blouse from the grass and covered her with it.
“She’s gorgeous all right,” Michael agreed. “The Other outdid Herself in putting that one together. And it is proper for you to protect her modesty. But we don’t react to her beauty the same way another human might.”
“You were watching.”
“No, I wasn’t. I can see the results, however. You’ve crossed your Rubicon, R. A., no doubt about lit.”
“Your friends were watching?”
“The singers? Only from a great distance. They’re on your side, R. A. Her side too. Don’t worry about them. You’ll get used to them.”
“How come the ecstasy bit?”
“We don’t control that. It happens. Not infrequently when people are making love. The Other apparently likes to intrude when passion is intense. Don’t ask me why.”
Anna Maria stirred in his arms. He caressed her bare shoulder, soothing her. She settled back into peaceful sleep.
“I know what you’re up to,” Neenan said, jabbing his finger at the seraph.
“Really? What?”
“You’re trying to do the Faust scenario in reverse.”
“Ah?”
“Yeah. In the story, the devil turns a good man bad with the temptation of illicit love. In this story an angel turns a bad man good with licit love. A nice paradox for the seraphic field marshal!”
“You just figure that out? To quote that great diplomat Oliver North on another subject, it’s kind of a neat idea, isn’t it?”
“It might make a great premise for a TV film,” Neenan said, deflated by the angel’s claim.
“Feature film. I wouldn’t appear in anything less. And you wouldn’t dare do that kind of sex on TV. Maybe not even in a feature film.”
“Well …”
“Don’t get too cocky, R. A., you should excuse the expression. You’ve got a lot of work here and everyplace else. Don’t forget you’ve lived with this woman for eight years and had no idea who or what she was. You have a lot of catching up to do.”
“So far it’s been fun.”
“Some of it won’t be fun at all, like being humiliated on the golf course tomorrow. Well, I’ll see you later.”
Michael didn’t fade out or even disappear. Rather, he was just not there anymore.
Neither were his hat or jacket.
Much later, Neenan and Anna Maria were sitting in robes, hers a glorious peach color, i
n the garden enjoying the golden glow of the sunset. She had made roast beef sandwiches and opened a bottle of Château Lafitte. Nothing but the best red wine for a picnic in the garden after a romp through eternity.
When she passed to go into the kitchen and then when she returned, she touched his face affectionately. She did not, however, mention their interlude of love, perhaps because it had not seemed to her at all unusual or perhaps because she was afraid to ask what had happened to him.
He filled her Waterford goblet.
“Thank you … . You’re just trying to get me drunk so you can have your way with me again.”
“That’s not a bad idea, but you’re the one who brought it up.”
She sniffed disdainfully, but grinned.
I’m not up to it, he told himself, not twice like that in the same day.
“How much do you hate me, Anna Maria?” he asked suddenly.
“Hate you?” she replied calmly, as if it were a perfectly ordinary and normal question. “Well, sometimes a lot. But usually I don’t hate you.”
“Ah?”
She pondered the direction of the conversation. “No, I don’t hate you all that much. I dislike you intensely much of the time.”
“Why?” he said, feeling his stomach tighten.
“You’re so much of a little boy, a twelve-year-old boy, who thinks only of himself and his silly little games.”
“You mean National Entertainment?”
She bit into her sandwich delicately.
“And your foolish little-boy fights with the other little boys like Eisner and Murtaugh and Turner and Murdoch. As though they were the most important people in the world and the game you all play is the only game in town. Why does everything have to be so secret? Why do you and your friends act like little boys in a tree house, obsessed with what you think are your dirty secrets? Why do you ignore the rest of life when you’re babbling about your secrets?”
“You think I should grow up?”
“That would be nice,” she said, then sipped from her wineglass. “Mind you, I don’t think that will happen.”
“Yet you’re ready to make love with me whenever I want.”
“I suppose I could say that you don’t even think that there might be times when I want it and you’re not interested.”
“You could say that.”
Contract with an Angel Page 6
