“Hmm …”
“And you have to understand, Raymond Anthony, that when a woman abandons most of her inhibitions, as I did this morning when I left the door to my room open, she becomes totally vulnerable. She depends completely on the sensitivity and, what should I say, the delicacy of the man. It’s a big risk to take.”
Her cream-covered fingers reached his belly, where they slowed down.
“Very nice flat stomach for a man of your years.”
“Thank you, I think … . But you take the risk?”
“It seems to me that sex is there to be enjoyed, like food and drink and singing and dancing and reading and laughing. So I take the risk. You may have your limitations as a husband, but you’re lacking in neither sensitivity nor delicacy in lovemaking, once you can drag yourself away from your empire long enough to think about it. Sometimes I wonder how, given your experience, you became that way. But I don’t worry about it that much.”
She wouldn’t.
Her fingers lingered on his belly, then tickled him.
“Come on, let’s do our swim before we misbehave.”
They dove into the pool together. The water did nothing to cool his emotions.
8
“So what did they say about me in the locker room?” she demanded, tapping her finger insistently on the table.
They were sitting in the oak-paneled Old English dining room of the country club, eating supper in dim and what anywhere else would have been considered romantic light. She was wearing a loose-fitting summer print dress. Her hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. She looked as if she might be fifteen or sixteen.
“You’re getting awfully pushy in your questions.”
“It was you who changed the rules,” she said as he consumed a small bit of sea bass.
“I did, didn’t I? … Well, they said that I was probably the only man in the club whose wife would dare beat him on his home course.”
“They did! And what did you say?”
“I said I didn’t mind that you beat me because you had shown me how to straighten out the slice that had tormented me for at least twenty years.”
“And then?”
“Then they asked whether you were good at anything else, and I said that you were good at everything.”
“You did? … That was sweet … . What tone of voice?”
“A tone which suggested that they could draw their own conclusions.”
“Well, that wasn’t so bad … . It shut them up, I bet.”
“It did that. Do women say anything about me in the locker room?”
She blushed. “That’s not an appropriate question.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so … . Some of them have the nerve to ask whether you are any good in bed.”
“And you say?”
“I roll my eyes and smile.”
“Good response.”
“They also ask how often you insist on sex.”
He felt his face grow hot. “And you say?”
“I roll my eyes again.”
“You might have to change your answer soon.”
“I might just … all of this change is because of a bumpy ride home from National Airport?”
Neenan thought for a moment about his answer. It had to be true but not the whole truth. Enough of the truth to satisfy her.
“It’s true that in situations like that your life rushes before you. I didn’t like a lot of what I saw. So I decided to try to change some of the things that need changing.”
She nodded as she sipped from a glass of Pinot Grigio.
“I’m not complaining. I hope it lasts.”
“So do I.”
A loud angelic cymbal crashed in approval. So now they were adding timpani to their combo. Had he decided that his life needed changing or had Michael and the Other decided that?
The question was irrelevant. He was locked into change now. It was only mildly painful these last thirty hours. It could get a lot more painful.
“I think I’m going to give away some money,” he continued.
“Oh? How much?”
“Five million.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You can afford that … . To whom?”
“I thought I’d ask you if you minded if I gave it to Loyola. You went there. You liked it. You said you learned a lot. I don’t know whether it helped you in your story reading for us … .”
“It did,” she said promptly.
He doubted it. Her instinct for stories was almost certainly “natural.” But it didn’t matter.
“I thought we might give it to Loyola for four or five chairs in the humanities.”
“How wonderful!” she said, her eyes glowing with admiration.
“If you don’t mind, I thought we’d name the chairs in your honor—the Anna Maria Allegro chairs.”
Another woman might have been embarrassed at the prospect of such publicity. He had a hunch she’d love it.
“Raymond,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I hope this new version of you never changes. But even if it does, I’ll treasure these last two days forever.”
“You don’t mind if we name the chairs after you?”
“Mind? Why should I mind? It’s marvelous.”
“Still, it was a good thing I asked.”
“You’d better believe it. I wouldn’t want my name to be used without my permission.”
“I thought so … . Now tell me about this Susan Howatch person you were reading yesterday when I so rudely interrupted you. She’s a kind of romance novelist, isn’t she?”
“Well, she is and she isn’t. She used to write these long romances about the English country nobility, romances which were far better than anyone else was writing. Then she experienced some kind of religious conversion and turned to writing theological novels … . You know who Trollope is?”
“Sure. The Barsetshire saga?”
“Well, I found out about him when someone told me that the six books in her Starbridge saga were something like a twentieth-century version of Barsetshire. Trollope in the twentieth century with more freedom to talk about sex.”
“Sounds interesting. Could we make films of any of them?”
“Women would be delighted. She is very popular with us, even when she talks about theology and spirituality with a touch of the occult thrown in. Her men are very attractive.”
Neenan eased his plate out of the way and turned to his wineglass.
“Sounds like it couldn’t miss.”
“The best bet, I think,” she said, warming to the subject, “would be an eight-hour miniseries called Starbridge.”
“I’ve never known you to be wrong about a story idea. Why don’t you find someone to write us a treatment.”
“Actually, I think there’s someone who has written a script. Let me look into it.”
This was the tricky and secretive Sicilian woman who occasionally surfaced. She was not yet ready to tell him that she had written the script. She was, he reflected, particularly entrancing when she played that role. Michael was right: she was the most interesting woman he had ever known.
Or maybe the most interesting woman he had never bothered to know.
“If you think it might be worthwhile, pass it on to me. It sounds like an appealing idea.”
“I’ll get back to you about it in a couple of days.”
Neenan couldn’t blame her for the secrecy. She was protecting herself and her work from the possibility of failure. Neenan was willing to bet that it was a script that was ready to go into production and that the series would be a huge success. Probably earn the $5 million he intended to give to her alma mater and a good deal more.
He didn’t trust his judgment on her work. He might not be critical enough or he might be too critical.
After he read it, he’d give it to a couple of people at the company—Joe McMahon and Vincent anyway—to get their reaction.
Funny, he wouldn’t have thought of giving it to
Vincent before his encounter with the seraph.
Back at their home, the songsters having quieted down, he gazed at the computer in his bedroom, thought about turning it on, then decided that was a temptation.
Then another, and much more benign, temptation entered his room—his wife in a white silk robe. She sat on the edge of his bed.
No angelic hoopla this time.
“I want to ask you a question,” she said hesitantly, “or maybe make a suggestion.”
“Ask away,” he said, grateful to the seraph that he had not turned on the machine.
“You have apparently decided to accept my challenge.”
“It would certainly seem so.”
“Perhaps it would facilitate matters if I slept in your bed every night.”
Gulp. Michael had warned him about this issue, and he’d forgotten the warning.
“You’d give up some of your privacy.” By that he meant that he would lose some of his privacy. He did not like sexually aggressive women. Now she was being sexually aggressive. Somehow he didn’t mind anymore.
“That would not matter.”
“You would like it?” he asked her.
“Naturally.”
“Why?”
“A woman likes to have a man to cuddle with even if they are not making love, a man beside her when she wakes up, a man who reassures her after nightmares.”
He joined her on the bed. “You should have told me that long ago.”
“I didn’t think you’d listen. I’m not sure you are listening even now.”
He eased the robe off her shoulders. It fell back on the bed. She looked delightfully defenseless.
“You realize the risks?” he asked gently as his hand sought her thigh.
“What risks?” she said with a modest laugh.
“A beautiful woman like you might just be assaulted almost every time she appears in a man’s bedroom.”
“I can live with that,” she gasped.
The songsters had not gone to sleep after all. They started up again, this time with an elegiac melody that hinted not at autumn but at spring. And at new life.
9
“It’s not a good idea,” Neenan insisted in his suite in NE’s offices in the Sears Tower as he stood at the windows staring at the deep blue lake, quiet as if it had decided not to wake up this morning. “She hates me too much ever to reconcile.”
“Then that’s her problem.” Michael waved his hand. “You have to try, just like you’re going to try this weekend in St. Petersburg with your mother and father.”
“I’m not going to Florida this weekend,” Neenan thundered.
“Yes, you are. The weather will turn cold in midweek. If you intend to continue your golf lessons, it will have to be at the King’s Crown Country Club on Captiva.”
“The Gulfstream isn’t ready yet.”
“It will be.”
“How do I know that Anna Maria will want to go?”
“Call her and find out.”
So he called her about the change in the weather at midweek, despite the lovely late-summer morning whose high clouds hung like a benign ceiling over the city and the park and the smooth lake in the distance.
“I don’t mind a trip to Florida,” she said. “But they were saying on TV this morning that the summer weather will hold for another week.”
“I’ve told you that my weather forecasters are unbeatable.”
Michael smirked at this comment.
“You should stop at St. Petersburg and say hello to your parents.”
“If you insist,” Neenan conceded.
Michael rolled his eyes.
“Fine. It sounds like fun. When do we leave?”
“Friday morning from Palwaukee.”
“Wasn’t that easy?” Michael asked.
“She wanted to go. It won’t be easy when I get to St. Petersburg. She’ll have to come with me to see Mom and Dad.”
“Don’t even think about asking her.” Michael dismissed that suggestion with a characteristic casual wave of his hand.
What did the seraph mean by that?
The next problem was Neil Higgins, the law partner of Lerner and Locke who earned his living as head of the NE litigation team.
“Thought I’d talk to you about the pension case,” Neil began nonchalantly as they seated themselves at a worktable and began to drink their midmorning coffee.
Michael beamed contentedly as he joined them at the table.
“What about it?”
“Are you ready to settle?”
“Why should we settle? We didn’t break any law.”
Michael frowned.
“We’d probably win the case,” Higgins agreed, “though you never can tell in a federal courtroom these days. Every judge wants to become a media celebrity. It’s not my field obviously, but there might be a lot of nasty publicity, more than there has been already.”
“What do we give them?”
“Their jobs and their pensions back. Maybe with apologies for a regrettable mistake. It would cost less than extended litigation.”
“And Tim Walsh?” Neenan asked, referring to the plaintiff’s celebrity lawyer.
“He’s a kind of friend of yours, R. A., isn’t he?”
“Kind of.”
“He’ll be at the opera Wednesday night. You might off the record suggest that we’d pay his fees, as reasonably calculated. It would be a relief to him. He knows that it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pursue the case, and since he’s not likely to win it, that would be money down the drain. He’s already won his brownie points as the friend of the oppressed by bringing suit. An equitable settlement will win him some more. You’ll still save a lot of money.”
Michael nodded his head vigorously.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have fired them,” Neenan admitted. “Though they were all drones and hadn’t earned their salary for years.”
Michael waved a warning finger.
“It might have been unwise,” Higgins agreed. “Better not to do it again. It’s practically impossible these days to prove incompetence.”
“But I don’t like to cave in.”
“I understand that.”
“Is there any downside?”
“Some of them won’t want to settle. They want a piece of your hide.”
“They’d never win punitive damages.”
“Early on, Walsh hinted that they might. That was braggadocio and he knew it. Yet some of those folks hate you badly enough to try for punitive.”
“Walsh will have to talk them out of it.”
“He probably will, but it might take time. Normally, I don’t give this kind of advice, but maybe you should talk to him personally tomorrow night. He’s afraid of you.”
“As well he might be.”
Michael shook his head in strong disapproval.
“It’s not a hell of a lot of money, R. A., and you can’t take it with you.”
Michael brightened at that remark.
“Well, that’s true, I guess … . All right, I’ll sound him out tomorrow night.”
“Good,” Higgins said, emptying his coffee cup. “Tell him to get in touch with me about the small stuff.”
“You almost blew that one,” Michael said when Higgins left the office.
“We fired only the loafers. To call them loyal executives, like the Chicago papers did, is a farce.”
“As you know, the print media hate the visual media, even when they own a lot of visual stuff. Moreover, even drones have some rights. At least to their pension.”
“All right, all right.”
“Now the next visitor is Bennett Harvey. You remember him, I presume, and his wife?”
“I remember him all right.”
Ben Harvey was ten years younger than Neenan. A brilliant entrepreneur and a rotten administrator. Neenan had snatched up his New York cable firm for a song when Harvey had run it on a financial reef. Bennett had no more legal sense than administrative sense an
d tried to resist the takeover, which made matters worse for him. Neenan had also taken over his wife, Joan, a tall, aristocratic, and sophisticated professor of English literature. At her pleading he had kept Harvey on as president of the firm but under the supervision of NE’s financial wizards and with little real power.
“Mr. Harvey to see you, Mr. Neenan,” Amy Jardine had announced. “I would remind you that you have to leave for DeKalb at eleven, given the traffic on I-88.”
“I’ll remember.”
“You should offer him a chance to head up your new DTV project,” Michael informed him. “It would be a challenge to his innovator’s skill and not a threat to his negligible administrative skill.”
“Am I the CEO of this firm or are you?”
“Don’t push me for an answer on that.”
Tall, slim, blond, and handsome, a perpetual youth, Ben Harvey had the knack of entering someone’s office as though he were the aloof, powerful boss and everyone else worked for him. Presumably five generations of Yale did that if you were also an Anglican. Neenan had always disliked that style, but this time there was something particularly obnoxious about the man.
Michael continued to watch Neenan carefully. This man is a fool, he felt like saying, why should I worry about him?
Nonetheless they shook hands cordially and sat again at the worktable. Harvey turned down the offer of coffee disdainfully, as though it were a vice beneath his notice.
He had come to Chicago, he explained to Neenan in a tone of voice that said he had no obligation to explain anything, to visit his daughter, who was a student at Northwestern, and to see the Lyric’s presentation of Faust on Wednesday night. They wanted to compare the Lyric’s efforts with that of the Metropolitan. He said the word Metropolitan like a devout Catholic might have said the Vatican.
“The man acts superior only because he is afraid of you,” Michael warned.
“No, he doesn’t. He acts superior because he thinks he is superior.”
“We’ll see you and Joan there on Wednesday night,” Neenan said casually. “Why don’t you join us for drinks at the first intermission.”
He had become accustomed to the reality that when he spoke directly to Michael, no one else heard him, though he wasn’t ready to try it yet with Anna Maria because he half-suspected that she might hear him.
Contract with an Angel Page 9
