“If you’re right,” he told Michael, “I don’t know what to do about it.”
“What you did for that poor child this afternoon. You healed her by your word and example. Surprised even me and my companion, which is hard to do, especially her.”
Oh.
“You going to tell your companion about the incident?”
“I think I’d better.”
“I think so too.”
Neenan’s companion was sitting in the cabana by the pool, clad in her underwear, reading a script and sipping red wine. Normally he would have teased her about working on a vacation weekend. Now he was too empty to play the game.
“It took a long time to buy that suntan cream,” she said without glancing up. “You missed an important phone call … . Good heavens, Raymond, you look terrible. What happened?”
“I met an old lover in the drugstore.”
Anna Maria’s lips tightened in a thin line. “Is she more attractive than I am?”
“No.”
“Was she better in bed than I am?”
“Nowhere near as good.”
“Her breasts better than mine?”
“Different.”
Pause. “I’m sorry Ray for sounding like a Sicilian bitch, a jealous Sicilian bitch at that. Tell me about her.”
He told her the story, omitting only the seraphic interventions. Midway though his story, Anna Maria put on a thin kimono—as though the story required a more careful modesty—and curled up at his feet, her head resting against his knee.
“So I didn’t sleep with her,” he said at the end of his story.
She tapped his thigh vigorously. “Who ever said, even hinted, that you did!”
“No one,” he said sheepishly.
“I would certainly like to meet her, poor dear woman.”
With any luck I’ll be dead by then. “The two of you will bond against me.”
“Naturally. That’s what women do … . You were surprised that she made a pitch for you?”
“No … I had to try to put closure to the relationship.”
“Who ever said, even hinted, that you shouldn’t?”
“No one.”
“Were you surprised that you were able to turn her life around in a few minutes?”
“Did I do that?”
“You sure did.”
“Well, whatever I did, I was astonished.”
“I’m not. It’s the kind of man you are or can be when you put your mind to it.”
“I can’t see myself that way.”
“Work on it, lover. That’s who you are.”
She stood up, tossed aside her kimono, kissed him, and headed for their bedroom.
“Hurry up!” she ordered. “We’ll be late for our dinner reservation. I’ve already changed it once … . Oh, damn! I forgot the phone call.”
“Who called?”
“Jenny?”
“Jenny who?”
“Your daughter Jenny,” she said impatiently. “She said she’d call back. Maybe. We had a very nice conversation. She is a sweet and confused young woman. More sweet than confused.”
“What did she want?” Ice once more stabbed at his heart. Another opportunity. He could hear Michael saying, “Don’t blow this one.”
“To quote her verbatim, she is reconsidering her options in regard to her relationship with you. I gather she wondered whether there were any options left. She wanted to know if you hated her a whole lot. I told her that I didn’t think you hated her at all, at which she started to cry. She wants to make friends but isn’t sure she can.”
“I see,” he said uneasily. Was this another setup by the seraphs?
The phone rang.
“You get it,” he snapped at Anna Maria.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Please,” he added quickly.
She grinned as she picked up the phone. “Neenan residence.”
“Hi, Jenny. The old man is here now. It’s up to you whether you want to talk to him. I’m sure he wants to talk to you.”
She handed Neenan the phone and wrapped her arms around his waist, her head resting against his back, as if she were propping him up.
“Hi, Jennifer,” he said, trying to sound as if he were the charming male that people had lately been alleging that he was. “Good to hear from you.”
“Your wife is, like, totally cool, Daddy,” she blurted. “I really like her.”
“I do too, Jennifer. We’re very happy.”
“She says she’s improving your golf game!”
“I haven’t beaten her yet. I don’t think she’ll permit that.”
“Daddy, I have been trying to reconceptualize my relationship with you.”
“Totally cool” and “reconceptualize”—half teen and half would-be intellectual.
“I’m glad to hear that, Jennifer.”
“I mean, I go, like, I don’t know who my father really is. Mom tells me one thing and Vinny tells me another thing, and I don’t know which one is right. Then I talk to Annie and she confuses me all the more.”
“Annie?”
“Your wife, Daddy!”
“That Annie.”
Jennifer giggled. He had never once heard her giggle.
“So I’m like totally bummed out, you know … . What I wanted to ask you, Daddy, is, well, whether if I, like, you know, want to reconcile with you, you’ll take me back. I’m not saying that I will want to. I’m, like, just trying to find out whether if I do, there is any point in trying, you know …”
Her voice trailed off in tears. Neenan was crying too.
“Now there’s two of us crying, Jennifer … . To answer your question, anytime, anyplace, in a minute—if you want to take the risk.”
“Bye, Daddy,” she said in a gurgle of tears.
“Bye, Jennifer.”
He thought she had hung up. Then he heard her last, almost inaudible words: “Give my love to Annie.”
They both hung up.
“She said to give her love to you, Annie.”
He was as tight as steel fence, stiff with emotion in every cell of his body.
“Poor kid,” he said as the tension flowed out of his body. “What do you think, Annie?”
His wife continued to cling to him, her head still propping him up.
“In the long run, sure. In the short run, toss-up. Depends on whether she talks to Donna again.”
“I’m sure she will.”
“Better that way. She has to break that chain.”
“Did I do good, Anna Maria?”
“You did real good. You did perfect. Like totally. And you can call me Annie sometimes. Pretend I’m Irish.”
“Should I do anything?”
“Like call her back? Don’t even think of that. Give her time … . By the way, she had a small part in a film. One of yours, I think. Doesn’t want you to know which one. Thinks she might get a much bigger part soon. Maybe then she’ll call you again.”
He nodded dully. “Maybe.”
Somehow this was the worst experience yet. Anna Maria, Vincent, his parents, Honoria, Ben and Joan Harvey, Estelle—all wrenching experiences. But this poor child, messed up by her mother’s hatred and her father’s neglect. All he could do was speak cordially with her on the phone and pray.
“Is she seeing a psychiatrist?”
“I think so, Raymond … . If you want, we can forget about dancing at Captain Al’s tonight.”
“No reason to do that. It wouldn’t help poor Jennifer.”
He did not want to dance. Not at all. Yet the chances of Jennifer returning to him while there was yet time were thin. Maybe he would never dance with Anna Maria again.
“Are you sure?”
“If you don’t get a dress on right away, woman, I’ll drag you off the way you are.”
He spun her around and began to dance with her, suddenly more light-footed than he had ever been.
“You frighten me,” she said as she wiggled free, then dashed into t
he bedroom and slipped on a lime-colored sheath.
“Come on, Raymond, change your clothes, we have to eat tapas and then dance the night away.”
So they did dance the night away, the kind of activity that Neenan had never liked before, but which, with his boundlessly energetic wife, he thought he might learn to enjoy.
Back at their town house, they agreed that they were too exhausted for lovemaking, sank into their bed, and went instantly to sleep.
When he wakened in the middle of the night, he found his wife sleeping peacefully in his arms. He understood that in some circumstances holding a beautiful woman in your arms with no intention of making love can be a most pleasurable activity. He sighed contentedly, drew her closer, and went back to sleep.
He was dragged out of bed early in the morning for Mass before golf.
Look, Occupant, he prayed, or someone else altogether, if you prefer, I don’t know what to make of all of this. Your seraphs keep hitting me over the head with situations they’ve set up and for which I am totally unprepared. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going. Like I thought yesterday, I feel like a rotting pear at the side of a road, mostly corruption and rot. About all I can do this morning is thank you for my wife, who just now is so gorgeous that she is distracting me in my prayers. I hope you don’t mind if I devote my full attention to those distractions and to my fantasies about what I’m going to do to her—oops, with her—back at our house.
Since the Occupant did not offer any objections, Neenan directed has full devotion to his wife.
As soon as they were inside the door of the town house, he set about converting his fantasies into reality, first by unzipping the back of her white dress and summarily removing it from her body.
“Hey! We’re supposed to play golf!”
“Later.”
“Do I get a choice?”
“Only by a very loud protest. Now.”
No protest was forthcoming.
They played golf (taking two more strokes off his score), swam, played tennis, swam some more, and then packed their luggage and drove back to the airport. They took off just as darkness had settled on the island below them.
Pity the poor older man who marries a young bride, he told himself. Still, it was the young bride who was asleep, was it not?
He had given up trying to figure out what the weekend meant.
He knew only that a weekend with Anna Maria was worth many extra years of life. He figured that so far he was a winner in his bargain with death and the pushy black seraph.
What, however, if he should lose Anna Maria? And Vincent? And Jennifer, whom he had yet to win back?
He shivered at the fantasy of total desolation.
Fortunately, his wife was not awake to notice.
21
Neenan had resolved that he must concentrate on his work. He was the CEO of a major entertainment company. He was responsible for thousands of jobs, tens of millions of dollars in cash flow, potentially billions of dollars of capital, and resistance to corporate raiders. He could not let a little slip of a Sicilian girl so bewitch him that he was useless at his job. Anna Maria in the evening and on weekends. NE during the day. That’s the way life must be, right?
So he was going to die soon, perhaps very soon. He would do the best he could to put his life in order. The seraphs would continue to set up encounters for him. He would continue to do his best. But he could not let NE drift, not when it was under attack. God, he imagined, wouldn’t like that.
While Peter drove him into the Loop, he worked over a stack of legal documents that Neil Higgins had left at the house in Lake Forest on Sunday evening— along with a note that said, “The judge is going to give us a temporary restraining order Tuesday morning and we’ll go in with a motion that WorldCorp show cause why it should not be made permanent.”
Preliminary legal maneuvering that meant little or nothing. Neenan doubted that their injunction would stand up, not unless WorldCorp did something really stupid, which they might very well do.
However, the papers kept his mind off his wife for the ride into the Loop. He banished lecherous fantasies about her during Mass at Old St. Patrick’s at Adams and Desplaines, whose renewed interior made him feel that he had walked into the Book of Kells. He must remember to make a substantial contribution to the parish before he died.
Died?
Yes, he was going to die and soon. So was everyone else, if not quite so soon.
So what. There was work to be done first.
Imaginings about his vest-pocket Sicilian Venus had no place in such a solemn Celtic setting, did they?
Alas for his restraint, on his desk when he entered his office was the script of Starbridge with a note from Joe McMahon:
“This is a sure winner. We gotta do it. Four parts I think, just like it is written. Finance it internally so no one can interfere with our production. When they hear about it, the networks will come running. We’ll have a bidding war.”
Joe had the hardest head of anyone in the business. His enthusiasm never rose above mild. If he thought that Anna Maria’s script was a winner, then it certainly was. He’d give it to Vincent later in the day and get his reaction. Then he’d tell Anna Maria the good news.
At that thought, the images of her delicate delights that he had been repressing all morning flooded back to his consciousness.
He picked up the phone and dialed her private number.
“Anne Allegro,” she said primly.
“Hi.”
“Raymond?”
“Who else?”
“What do you want?”
“I wanted to tell you that I love you.”
“I know that.”
“I wanted to make sure.”
“Really, Raymond, I’m trying to read a treatment.”
“Sorry to have bothered you … . Oh, by the way, do you remember the script we turned down a year or two ago about the woman who died and went to heaven?”
“Sure. You turned it down despite my strong recommendation, if I remember.”
“I must have been wrong. What was it called?”
“Light in the Tunnel. First thing that has to be changed is the title.”
“I’ll look into it. I’m sure we have a copy around here someplace.”
“Do me a favor, Raymond?”
“Sure … don’t call you when you’re working?”
“No, silly, read the script yourself.”
“That would be a pretty radical departure.”
“I know.”
“OK, I’ll get it and read it.”
“And, Raymond …”
“Yes?”
“I love you too.”
His delight at those final words made him feel silly. He was acting like an adolescent male with his first crush.
“Mr. McMahon and Mr. Stein to see you, Mr. Neenan.”
“Thank you, Amy. Would you see if we have a script in the files for a film called Light in the Tunnel.”
“Certainly, Mr. Neenan.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s the news this morning, gentlemen?” he asked his two senior colleagues.
They were both taken aback by the enthusiasm of his greeting.
I guess I must not have smiled too often around here.
“I guess the first news,” Joe said with a cautious laugh, “is that the boss had a good weekend at the golf course.”
“Down to the low eighties anyway.”
They would not have dared to say that the boss had a good weekend in bed too. They would never have thought of it.
“Where do we stand with WorldCorp?”
“Despite your press conference and despite our legal actions and despite their denials,” Norm said grimly, “they’re acquiring as much of our preferred stock as they can through various fronts they have set up. No voting rights, but they could always go to court with a plea that we are not considering the advantage of our stockholders.”
“How can the
y make a case out of that?”
“It’s just harassment,” Joe suggested. “They’re also going after our executives. We’ve had five reports since Friday morning of indirect, one might say sneaky, approaches to our people and our clients. I’ve passed it on to Neil. It will be useful evidence when we seek to make the restraining order permanent—not that they’ll give up just because of an injunction, which they will appeal, though it will remain in effect until it is overturned.”
“It makes no sense to me,” Neenan said. “What do they know that we don’t know?”
“They’re spreading the rumor,” McMahon said carefully, “that you’re going to sell out. Take the money and run.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Neenan said bluntly. “You know that.”
“There are stories going around about your health, physical and mental,” Norm said softly, “that your behavior has been, uh, odd for the last two weeks.”
Just at that moment, Michael, dressed in a dark gray banker’s suit with a flower in his lapel, materialized in the office.
Neenan considered the situation before replying to his colleagues.
“Because I take a Friday off to play golf with my wife, I’m a sick and maybe dying man?”
“Someone somewhere leaked the changes you’re making in your will,” Norm Stein observed, his voice steady and neutral.
“Aren’t they perfectly rational in the circumstances? If I should not have made it back from Florida, would not the company have been in terrible shape to resist a hostile takeover? It only makes sense to think about an heir.”
Michael nodded, which was a big help. Get lost, seraph, if you can’t help me now.
“You never did before.”
“Then I was a fool.”
“We believe you, R. A.,” Joe said reassuringly. “All we’re suggesting is that you permit us to release your medical records.”
“Am I the president of the United States? Is there some thought that I might have AIDS? Or be addicted to drugs?”
Michael frowned and shook his head.
“Of course not, R. A.,” Norm said. “Not in the least.”
“Release them if you want,” Neenan said, giving up. “And add that I have no intention of selling out. If I knew I were going to die next week, I wouldn’t sell out!”
Contract with an Angel Page 24
