Tied to the Tracks

by Rosina Lippi

  “We’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this forever. We can’t pass this up.”

  Angie forced herself to hold Rivera’s gaze. She said, “Of course we can’t. Of course we’ll do this.”

  Rivera narrowed her eyes and then made up her mind to believe Angie. “Good.”

  “Good?” Tony echoed. “It’s fucking great.” And he grabbed her for another polka around the room, leaving the details to Angie.

  That’s what Angie did: she took care of the details, she kept things going, she talked suppliers into another month’s credit, the clients into seeing things Rivera’s way. Tony Russo did camera work and sound, Rivera Rosenblum directed and edited, and Angie did a little of everything, from writing the script and lending another pair of eyes to the editing process, to balancing the books. She was the practical one, lacking the urge to polka, or even to be unreservedly happy about this change in fortune. And after three unfunded grant proposals and a year made notable by the fact that even wedding work wasn’t coming their way, “miracle” was the only word that came to mind.

  And now, according to the words on the page in front of her, she would be talking to John Ogilvie Grant, chair of the English department, about the arrangements for a long stay in Ogilvie, Georgia. Starting as soon as they could get there.

  Rivera looked up from the fax. “We could teach, too, if we wanted. In the fall semester. They’ve got film theory for you and introduction to digital filmmaking for me. Or the other way around, but I don’t think Ogilvie undergraduates are ready for my film theories.”

  “We’ll be done shooting by September,” Angie said. “And we can come back here to do the editing.”

  “We aren’t going to get footage of her in the classroom?” Rivera’s tone made it clear that this wasn’t really a question but the opening salvo in a battle.

  “And they’ve got an editing suite—” Tony began, and then stopped, entranced by what he was reading. He thrust the fax sheet under her nose. “We can’t rush out of there, Ang. It would be the death of us if we took shortcuts on this one.”

  Angie shot him her sharpest look. “You mope, when have you ever known me to take a shortcut?”

  “So we won’t be back here in September,” Tony said. “Admit it.”

  One thing Angie prided herself on was knowing how to pick her battles, and this one, she could see very clearly, was well and truly lost. She nodded. “Okay.”

  Rivera did a shimmy that made her earrings dance while Tony rushed to the windows. He leaned out over Washington Street and bellowed. “So long, Hoboken!”

  Rivera touched Angie on the wrist and she jumped. “Angie, Zula Bragg asked for us.”

  “She did,” Angie agreed.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “No problem,” Angie said, producing her biggest, brightest, falsest smile. “Not a problem in sight.”

  Tied to the Tracks was located in a warren of small rooms over An Apple a Day, the diner that belonged to Angie’s parents. The advantages of this arrangement were substantial: they paid rent only in those months when they had the money to do so, and food was always available in abundance. The disadvantages were small by comparison. Ten-gallon cans of tomatoes stacked in every corner, boxes of pasta, crates of eggplant: these were things she could live with. Angie repeated that to herself as she went downstairs an hour later, hoping to slip out without being noticed. At least for now; at least until the signed contract was in the mail.

  “Give it up, Angie,” her father’s voice boomed as she opened the door to the street. “I got your lunch plate right here waiting for you.”

  They all turned to look at her. The regulars along the counter, her mother at the cash register, her aunt Bambina picking up an order at the window, three dozen other faces she saw pretty much every day of her life. Angie went to eat the lunch her father had dished up for her.

  Tommy Mangiamele was a long twist of a man with a shock of white hair neatly plastered to his head from a middle part, a great hooked nose, and liquid brown eyes that missed very little of what went on around him. He slid into the booth across from his daughter and put his coffee cup in front of himself.

  “So what’s all the dancing around? I thought the ceiling was going to come down on our heads. Bad for business, noise like that.” He wiggled his eyebrows to make sure she wasn’t taking him seriously.

  “Call Ma over,” Angie said. “I don’t want to have to tell the story twice.”

  He leaned toward her, talking out of the side of his mouth while he scanned the restaurant. “Go on, give me a hint. I’ll keep it a secret from her as long as you want. You got a job?”

  “Yup,” Angie said, examining a forkful of chicken. “That’s it. Gotta go see the lawyer about the contract, go make copies, stop at the post office. So I’ll come back later and give you all the details, how’s that?”

  He was eyeing her now suspiciously. “You going to see that Edsel guy?”

  “Ford, Dad. His name is Ford.”

  Her father waved a hand. “Ford, Edsel, Chevrolet. What I want to know is, who names a kid after a car?”

  Angie’s mother slid into the booth next to him, nudged him with an elbow. “Rich people with no taste name their kids all kind a crazy things. But he’s a good boy, Tommy, leave him be. Angeline, did you even look in the mirror this morning? And you got gravy on your chin. Here, let me.” She leaned across the table.

  “Fran, the kids got new work,” Tommy said as his wife and daughter wrangled over the napkin.

  “Nice job keeping that secret,” Angie said, grinning in spite of herself. “Gotta go.”

  At heart, Hoboken was a small town. There might be a tumbling stream of stockbrokers, artists, and nostalgia buffs who settled for a year and then moved along, but for the most part Hoboken was still the same place it had been before the money showed up with the bulldozers and the renovation bug. Angie had grown up here, gone to college across the river in Manhattan, and come back again. She had never lived anywhere else. She knew everybody, everybody knew her.

  She couldn’t wait to get away, and the key to that was in the contract tucked under her arm.

  John Grant. John Ogilvie Grant, to be precise. She had asked him once why he bothered to sign all three names and he had looked at her with those blue eyes and told her: he had made a promise to his grandmother.

  And that was secret of his success. John’s particular talent was dealing with people by giving in on the points that didn’t really matter to him and negotiating his way on the important stuff. Southern charm with a veneer that came from old Manhattan money and the Ivy League. Tall, broad of shoulder, sandy brown hair, big hands, deep voice, deeper laugh. Deadly.

  She caught a glimpse of herself in a window, small and quick, a little too round, jeans and a T-shirt, her hair a jumble down her back. She had been growing it for five years and had no plans to cut it. Had had no plans; if this thing with the Bragg documentary actually happened—please God—she’d have to rethink that.

  Someday soon she would open a door and he would be there, and she would have to hold out her hand and smile and be adult.

  It would probably be best to cut her hair.

  The law offices were two small rooms above Mrs. Romero’s shoe store. Angie ran up the stairs and into the outer office. She nodded to Marlene, who was typing so fast that her purple nails clattered on the keys like castanets. Marlene squinted at Angie from the cloud of smoke that surrounded her head, wiggled her cigarette in greeting, and turned back to the computer screen as Angie knocked on the inner office door and went in.

  Ford looked up from the papers in front of him and smiled. He had an endearing smile, sweet and willing, and she warmed to it every time. They had dated for a little while, until Angie faced the fact that the best she would ever be able to say about Ford was that she liked him just fine.

  He said, “I thought you’d be here a half hour ago. Lasagna?”

  “Chicken and gravy,” Angie said, to
ssing the envelope onto his desk.

  “That’s right,” he said. “It’s Wednesday.” He slipped the sheets out and made a fan of them on the desk. “So this is it, huh? The big offer?”

  “That’s it,” Angie agreed as she fell into a chair. “If there’s something wrong with this contract, Rivera and Tony will slit my throat. So tell me it’s all good, please.”

  “They signed it already,” Ford said, vaguely disapproving.

  “Hope springs eternal. I’m supposed to send it off right away if everything’s in order.”

  A half hour later Ford cleared his throat and Angie, who had been sure she would never sleep again, bolted up out of a dozy daydream.

  “Somebody down there in Georgia must love you,” Ford said.

  Angie jumped. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Ford couldn’t have looked more startled if she had slapped him. “It looks good,” he said. “They used the Guild contract and didn’t mess with it. Credits, residuals, it’s all here.”

  Angie relaxed back into the chair, trying for nonchalant and coming no closer than embarrassed. “It’s solid?”

  His eyes were still moving back and forth on the page. “Looks like it,” Ford said. “Nobody down there is trying to screw you, at least not at first reading.”

  “Pardon me?” she said faintly.

  “Contractually,” Ford said, flustered now and confused, too, and why shouldn’t he be; she might as well just admit what was going on. John Grant had materialized out of her past, just as she had always feared he might. John Ogilvie Grant: the biggest mistake and the best summer of her life. Angie closed her eyes and shook her head, willing it to clear and not getting very far at all.

  She called the office to give Rivera and Tony the good news, heard the beginnings of a party in the background, and made excuses having to do with the unreliability of the fax machine and a decent printer. At the copy shop she could use a computer to write the cover letter and then fax the damn thing off, before she thought better of the whole business.

  Except writing the letter wasn’t going to be all that easy.

  Dear Dr. Grant.

  No, he hated to be called “doctor” and it was stupid to pretend they were strangers.

  Dear Professor Grant. Dear Mr. Grant. Dear John.

  Better address the letter to the President, pretend she had overlooked the bit about communicating with the English department. Angie put it together in her head as she trudged down Washington. We are very pleased to accept your offer. Signed hard copy to follow by mail. Succinct, businesslike, but not unfriendly. Couldn’t go wrong there. Why was it then that a different letter kept writing itself in her head?

  Dear John. We need the work. We’ll do a good job and deal with Miss Zula. I’ll go out of my way to avoid you if you’ll do the same, and why is it you aren’t married yet?

  Of course, he might be. She tried to imagine that, and failed. She could see him as many things: chair of a department, dean, president. But not married, not yet. It wasn’t in his plans.

  He had charted the perfect career for himself. Ogilvie as an undergrad, advanced degrees at Brown and Harvard, a year at Cambridge, assistant professor at Columbia, promotion and tenure and then five years as a tenured professor at Princeton. Now back to Ogilvie. A lifetime ambition, and one he had never been able to explain to her, not so that she understood. Because he didn’t understand it himself.

  You can always tell the chair of an English department, he told her once. It’ll be the person who runs the slowest. But he had gone to Ogilvie of his own free will, she knew that without being told: it was impossible to imagine him doing anything that he didn’t want to do. With some exceptions.

  Better not to think about John Grant in her bed, but memories couldn’t be erased, not even if she wanted to. Which she didn’t. And that was the heart of the problem.

  They had watched each other for a whole academic year, September to May.

  Angie first saw John Grant crossing Waverly Place; he caught her attention because, she told herself, he was a new face in the familiar river of students and staff and faculty. She soon realized two things: first, that she saw him most often around the English department building on certain days of the week, and second, that he was watching her, too.

  There was nothing she could do about needing to pass that particular corner every day. It was on a straight line between the apartment she shared with Rivera and the film center. And anyway, she lectured herself, why should she? She saw thousands of faces every day, about half of them men. Some of those men looked at her; sometimes she looked back. She had had a fair share of men in her life, and would have more.

  She could simply stop one day and ask him if he wanted to go for coffee. Except she didn’t, but neither could she keep herself from looking for him, and when she did find him, he was looking right back at her.

  Not a month after it all started Rivera caught on. She was at first mystified that Angie, who had never been shy, should hang back. Then she decided to take the matter into her own hands. In short order Rivera had established that John Grant wasn’t new faculty at all, but a visiting professor who came downtown from Columbia three days a week to teach a course on Whitman’s New York. Straight and unattached.

  “Good for him,” Angie said, keeping her eyes on the script in her lap.

  Rivera said, “The only question is, which one of you will give in and make the first move.”

  “Not me,” Angie said. “Not this time. It’s too corny for words, falling for a professor from afar.”

  “Sometimes corny is what you need,” Rivera said.

  “No, what I need is very simple, and I get that from Scott.”

  To which Rivera snorted. She didn’t think much of Scott, a grad student in comp lit who was too quiet and too predictable for Rivera’s tastes. Angie liked having Scott around for just those reasons.

  The problem was, there was no avoiding John Grant. The very idea of him was everywhere, floating in the air, unavoidable. Total strangers seemed intent on sharing things Angie couldn’t possibly need to know. Waiting in line at Starbucks, she heard undergraduates discussing ways to run into him, what might interest him, if it would be a good idea to try to get into one of his courses uptown, if it was true that he was one of the Grant Grants and lived in twenty rooms on Morningside.

  “He rows every morning,” one of them said.

  “Should have gone out for crew,” said her friend.

  But Angie didn’t have to hatch plots; wherever she went she ran into John Grant, and soon he was featuring in many of her dreams.

  “It’s redirected anxiety,” she told Rivera when they were in the editing lab together. “Easier than worrying about what comes next.” Neither of them had gone on the job market, sticking to their early plans to stay independent. The hard part was watching the other people in their class flinging themselves out into the world, accepting jobs with Lucasfilm and PBS. Of course she had to find something else to obsess about, Angie told herself, and a man she would never talk to was just the ticket.

  By January they were saying hello, holding glances a little too long, each of them calculating the next step, the potential gain and the complications. Scott called and she found herself making excuses.

  John Grant was faculty; she was a grad student. Angie had nothing to do with his department, but it was touchy, these days, professors and students, no matter the details. That excuse made Rivera laugh out loud. She wasn’t one for rules when it came to basic human instincts.

  “There he is,” she would say in an exaggerated whisper, elbowing her. “Your guy.”

  Rivera described herself as part English, part Jewish, part Puerto Rican, part Mohawk, and all nose. She could smell attraction on the skin; she said it reminded her of apricots cooking.

  On the day they finished the last of their class work—nineteen years of schooling, done and over forevermore—Angie and Rivera sat out on the roof of their apartment building on W
est Eighth Street and drank red wine. There were three different parties going on in the building across the street, one on each floor. It was more entertaining than television, which felt like work.

  Rivera matched up people from one party with people from another, man on man, woman on man, woman on woman.

  “Those two,” Rivera said. And: “Those three.” She picked out somebody for herself, a young black woman wearing what looked like a Chanel suit. Rivera considered it her mission in life to wean women from their preoccupation with penetration.

  “Go on over,” Angie encouraged her.