Who am I, he asked himself, after a day in the state of grace, to be talking about God to her?
Then he took the calls. Most of them were calling about the press conference. They thought he had pretty well scared WorldCorp off. He wished he could be so sure.
Then he ate a salad from the firm’s dining room, called Vincent and left a voice mail for him about the press conference, and went over to the club for a swim. Tired or not, he needed the exercise.
On the way back, he turned right on Madison Street and walked by St. Peter’s.
I was here yesterday. I went to St. Pat’s today to see how they have rehabilitated it. I don’t want to become a religious fanatic. I’m not going in.
However, he did enter the church and lit two votive candles, one for him and one for Anna Maria.
You’ll get tired of me showing up here. I know even less about who I am than I did this morning. I have been run ragged. Or maybe I have run myself ragged. I still feel I am being torn apart or maybe tearing myself apart. I feel like I am a beach swept away by a storm. Maybe I’ll never know who I am. Maybe I am being eroded away as I prepare for death. Maybe none of that matters.
However, I stopped by to thank You for Your goodness, whoever or whatever You are, for sending Your angels and one special human to take care of me. I don’t deserve such affection, but I am sure going to sop it up.
After he had left the church, he was astonished at what he had said. The seraphs had brainwashed him!
17
ANCHORPERSON: Mr. Neenan, we hear that you could probably make three times the value of your present holdings in National Entertainment if you sold your interest to WorldCorp. Is that correct?
NEENAN: More than that most likely.
ANCHORPERSON: Do you think your stock is worth that kind of money?
NEENAN: It seems that they estimate that to be a fair market price for NE’s worth to them.
ANCHORPERSON: And you expect us to believe that you’re not going to sell?
NEENAN: I don’t know whether you will believe it or not. I know only that I will not sell.
ANCHORPERSON: Do you mind telling us why not?
NEENAN: No, I don’t mind at all. Why did coach Gary Barnett refuse to go to Notre Dame?
ANCHORPERSON: Because he didn’t want to go there.
NEENAN: Same thing. I don’t want to sell. I like being CEO of National Entertainment.
(Michael, .dressed now in a navy blazer and gray slacks, but not wearing a tie, is seated at the anchor desk. The anchorperson cannot see him. Intermittently, Gaby flits in and out of sight. She’s wearing a gray sweater and jeans. They both nod vigorous approval of Neenan’s responses. Since TV cameras cannot pick up angel surrogates, it is reasonable to assume that no one in the watching audience can see them. Still, you never can tell about seraphs.)
ANCHORPERSON: Would you not continue in that role according to rumors about the offer?
NEENAN: (dismissively) Figurehead.
ANCHORPERSON: You don’t want the money?
NEENAN: What would I do with it?
ANCHORPERSON: You think you have enough money already.
NEENAN: What’s enough? Money you can’t take with you.
ANCHORPERSON: What can you take with you?
(Michael and Gaby frown, fearful that Neenan will spill the beans.)
NEENAN: Self-respect, some shreds of integrity, a sense that you didn’t betray your colleagues.
(The seraphs relax.)
ANCHORPERSON: Have you always felt this way?
NEENAN: I don’t think so. I experienced a very rough airplane flight recently and I had to make explicit some of the assumptions that have been influential in my life. The prime one is a gut feeling that you don’t let down people from your neighborhood—like Marty Scorsese said in Mean Streets.
ANCHORPERSON: I don’t believe I saw that film.
NEENAN: Probably too young.
ANCHORPERSON: And you intend to go ahead with your news channel—AMN as you call it?
NEENAN: We’re doing intensive studies of that venture at the present. We expect to have a decision by the end of next week.
ANCHORPERSON: You believe that this news channel will eliminate the need for programs like this?
NEENAN: I’m sure that it won’t.
ANCHORPERSON: Thank you, Mr. Neenan … . We have just talked to Mr. Raymond Anthony Neenan, chairman, president, and CEO of National Entertainment. He vigorously denied that his corporation is for sale, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars he might make on such a deal. He also insisted that his company intends to continue with their new project of a twenty-four-hour news station which will concentrate on regional news from all around the country. This channel could well revolutionize coverage of news in this country.
NEENAN: One more word, ma’am?
ANCHORPERSON: We’re running out of time.
NEENAN: (genially) I’m chairperson of NE, not chairman.
(Scene dissolves into a commerical. Michael and Gaby exchange high fives with each other and with Neenan. The choristers, their days off apparently over, sing something that sounds very much like a hosanna.)
18
Both Neenan and his wife were in a sleepy, grumpy mode when they woke up late.
“We’ll miss the plane, Raymond.”
“It’s my plane. We can’t miss it.”
“A lot you know.”
They stumbled and bumbled though their showers and dressing and last-minute packing. Wisely they stayed out of each other’s way.
“There’s rain and fog, Raymond,” she protested as she pulled a Loyola sweatshirt over her head. “Surely we are not going to fly today.”
“The pilot says there’ll be no trouble.”
“A lot he knows,” she said with a derisive sniff as she drew on her jeans. “What if we crash?”
That was a possibility that he had not considered: the two of them might die at the same time. Not very likely, however. “Then we both go to heaven together.”
“Hmmf.”
He had never seen this aspect of Anna Maria’s character before. So she had moods? Perhaps he had never noticed because he had never lived so intimately with her.
Maeve, believing that they both drank too much coffee, had prepared two thermos jugs of hot chocolate for them and two bags of her best cinnamon-raisin rolls.
“That woman,” Anna Maria complained, “will never give up on her anticaffeine crusade.”
Anna Maria sat on the backseat of the car as far away as possible from Neenan as she could be and still be in the same car. Thus he had to reach long when he nudged her.
“Sorry, Peter,” she said contritely to the driver, whose plastic separator from the back of the car had not been closed.
“Not at all, ma’am,” he replied cheerfully. “Haven’t I been telling her that for years?”
“The hot chocolate is wonderful,” Anna Maria said, trying to make up for her gaffe.
“Isn’t it always? … I tell her that chocolate is as addictive as caffeine. Doesn’t she say that it’s good for your heart?”
“Especially, Peter,” Anna Maria responded, “if you drink it with red wine.”
“Sicilian red wine,” Neenan said softly.
They all laughed. Peter closed the screen between the back and the front seat. Anna Maria reached over and took Neenan’s hand.
“Sorry, love,” she said softly. “Really sorry. Now you know what a bitch I can be when I wake up late in the morning. It’s one of the risks of our sharing the same bed.”
“I’ll gladly take that risk.”
Somehow she had managed to move next to him and lean on his shoulder. “I promise I won’t be this way in Florida.”
“I’d worry about improving my golf game if you are.”
“We can’t permit anything to interfere with that, can we?”
He put his arm around her. “No way.”
“I have a rotten Sicilian temper. I’m sorry.�
��
“I wasn’t exactly lively this morning either.”
“This last week has been wonderful, Raymond,” she said, snuggling closer to him. “It has also been very difficult.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, wondering to himself where all his patience and sensitivity had come from and feeling once again as if he were disintegrating, melting as the fog would when the sun’s heat burned it away.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, patting his arm. “I like you much better this new way, though I’m not sure about this airplane ride explanation. But I have to study you very carefully, so I can understand what to expect from you, almost as though you were a different person. That’s hard work.”
Neenan pondered her words. He had not believed that his explanation had persuaded her. Now he knew it hadn’t.
“It’s fun too,” she continued. “I don’t mind it, except sometimes I get a little stressed.” She slipped her hand under his sweater and caressed his belly.
“Do you plan to seduce me on the plane?”
“I kind of wish that cabin attendant wasn’t with us, even if she is a nice young woman who needs the job. So I guess I’ll have to wait till we arrive in Captiva.”
“You know what I’m thinking?” he asked. “I’m remembering that, when I was at DeKalb and didn’t have a car, I had to ride in on Greyhound to Chicago. I hated the trip so much I almost gave up on Chicago. It will take me less time to fly to Florida.”
“That means you’re a success?”
“No, that isn’t what I was trying to say. It means only that my life has changed, though perhaps it really hasn’t. Though I can get to the airport at Fort Myers quicker, I don’t know that I’m better off. I go to Captiva much less often than I used to ride into Chicago.”
“We’ll have to go there more often in the years ahead,” she said as her fingers rested lightly on his stomach.
“That’s for sure.”
That exchange made him feel sad. This would almost certainly be his last trip to Florida. How much more time he might have spent there with his wife, enjoying both the town house and her. Yet he had wasted the opportunity, just as he had wasted so many other opportunities.
So I must enjoy this one as best I can to make up for all I’ve missed.
He sighed, felt sorry for himself, and then ate another of Maeve’s cinnamon-raisin buns.
“More hot chocolate?”
“Why not?” he said.
He had never, come to think of it, enjoyed hot chocolate or cinnamon buns enough.
The rain and the mists were thick at Palwaukee airport.
“The planes are landing and taking off on time from O’Hare,” the pilot of the G-5 said to him. “Ceiling and visibility are notably above the minimum. It clears off at two thousand feet. Your call, Mr. Neenan.”
“Anna Maria?”
“If we crash we’ll all go to heaven together,” she said with a brave laugh.
“You sure?”
“Certainly! Let’s get on the plane. I’m sure Linda has come with coffee for us.”
Linda was the name of the cabin attendant. He could never remember. Trust Anna Maria to remember.
“I’ll bring the rolls along,” he said.
“You better. The crew will like some too. Also some of Maeve’s hot chocolate.”
Peter and the pilot and the copilot helped them to load their baggage and golf clubs into the plane.
“You packed light for us,” Neenan told his wife. “I hope you didn’t forget swimsuits.”
“Certainly not. I packed two.”
Then she whispered in his ear, “Both for me, none for you.”
“Why not?” he asked as he felt his face turn hot.
“You won’t need one.”
They took off without delay. Anna Maria clung to his hand until they broke through the clouds.
“That’s much better,” she informed him, “sunlight and blue sky. Almost in Florida already … . No thanks, Linda, enough coffee for now. I intend to catch up on my sleep.”
She curled up on her plush seat that Grumman provided for moguls and their wives and promptly went to sleep.
Neenan took a stack of reports out of his briefcase and began to study them.
Michael appeared in the empty seat ahead across from his and smiled benignly.
“You’re coming with us?” Neenan asked as he took off his reading glasses.
“We like weekends in Florida,” the seraph replied with a mischievous grin. “Did you think we were about to let you face your parents without our supervision?”
“I’m almost happy you will be there.”
Michael was wearing a white ensemble, suit, shirt, tie, shoes, socks, and homburg. He looked a little like pictures Neenan had seen of high-ranking voodoo priests.
“Aren’t you afraid she’ll hear you?”
“Nope, she’s a sound sleeper.”
“She said she was suspicious about my pretext for changing.”
“I heard. She did not ask for an explanation, however. So don’t worry about it till she does, which I don’t think she will.”
“I’m sad. My last trip to Florida.”
“Should have enjoyed it long ago,” Michael replied without a touch of sympathy. “Thank the Other that you at least will enjoy this one … if you don’t blow it.”
“Yeah,” said Neenan sourly.
Gaby materialized next to her companion. She was wearing white shorts and a red tank top and was devastatingly attractive.
“I want to know,” Neenan told her, “whether you look as gorgeous in your real form.”
She blushed and laughed. “This fellow is very fresh, Michael.”
“The straight answer,” said the boss seraph, “is that she is much more beautiful.”
Gaby dissolved into a cloud of multicolored lights that danced and spun and whirled and then filled the whole cabin of the plane, before bursting through the fuselage and escaping into the sky.
It was the most beautiful vision Neenan had ever seen. As it grew ever brighter, he had to close his eyes against the blinding radiance of the light.
“Small hint,” she said calmly.
He opened his eyes. The striking woman with the gray hair and the youthful face and luscious body was sitting across from him again.
“Can I get away, boss seraph, with saying that I am dazzled, but I like her better this way?”
“You’d better say that,” Michael said, “or you would be in the deepest of deep trouble … . Now, about your parents …”
“What about my parents?”
Michael kicked off his shoes and relaxed in his seat. Gaby picked up the latest issue of U.S. News and World Report and began to thumb through it. Could there be anything there that she didn’t already know?
“It is very easy to hate those who have given us life but have not given us the freedom to be ourselves instead of what they wanted us to be, is it not?”
“I suppose so.”
“It is much more difficult to stop feeling residual attachment to them, a feeling that might even be called love, though love contorted by powerful ambivalence, is it not?”
“I would not deny that either, though I have never looked at it that way.”
“One of the reasons for our being here,” Gaby said, not looking up from her magazine, “is to suggest that you look at the obvious from a slightly different perspective … . Incidentally, put those papers back in your briefcase. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for bringing them along. That’s contemptuous of the lovely woman we have given you.”
He wanted to argue that no one had given Anna Maria to him and that he had rather won her himself. It would have been a losing argument.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, complying with her instructions and putting the reports away.
“To return to your parents: they are elderly now and very angry. They feel they have been dealt an unfair hand.”
“I’ve bought them a home, provided them with s
ervants, made their days better than they possibly could have been …”
Michael held up his hand.
“I understand these things. They are, however, irrelevant. Your mother and father are angry at what life has done to them. They are unforgiving. They blame each other and you for what has happened to them, instead of assuming, each of them, their own personal responsibility. They are too old to change. You must therefore not expect gratitude, much less love. Do not enter their apartment with any expectations that you will be able to resolve anything, because, I assure you, that you will not. All that matters is your own willingness to put aside your resentments and forgive them, despite how they behave.”
“That’s asking a lot.”
“That’s asking for the bare minimum.”
“I understand,” Neenan said with a sigh.
“You must also understand that while you are the occasion of the anger and to some extent its target, they are really angry at themselves and one another.”
Gaby produced from somewhere a notebook computer, flipped it open, and began to type. In the meantime, the choir manifested itself again and returned to some of its favorite lullabies. Michael glanced up and frowned.
“Let them sing,” Gaby said, her eyes still glued to the screen. “They adore the human woman and want to sing for her. The song will make her sleep more peacefully. She needs the sleep.”
Michael shrugged as if he knew that he had lost the argument before it started.
“They sing very well,” Neenan said.
Gaby smiled and nodded, but did not take her eyes off the monitor.
Neenan noted that the computer seemed both smaller and far more advanced than any machine he’d ever seen. Still, why did they need it? Or was it merely part of the act?
“Your challenge, Raymond Anthony,” the male seraph continued implacably, “is to respond to them with charm and grace, no matter what they say and no matter how angry they are. You gotta problem with that?”
“Yes, I have a problem with that, but I’ll try.”
“You must do more than try.”
“The lovely one is waking, Michael,” his companion said firmly. “It is necessary for us to appear to take our leave. The offspring may continue to sing, but very softly so that she is not aware that she is hearing them.”
Contract with an Angel Page 19
