by Rosina Lippi
His voice came cool and from far away. He said, “I don’t believe it.”
Miserable, Angie nodded. “You’re right. You shouldn’t take my word for it. Nobody has said anything to me directly, not Rivera or Caroline. But—”
“You’ve seen how they look at each other.” He stood up abruptly and shook himself like a dog. When he looked at her she couldn’t make out his expression; she didn’t recognize him at all. He started to walk away and she called after him.
“Is it me you should be mad at, John?”
“You’ll do for a start,” he said, without turning around.
She watched him walk around the house and disappear into the night shadows.
When she could make herself go back into the house, Angie found that Caroline had left, too. She turned off all the lights one by one and then made her way upstairs by touch. Rivera’s bedroom door was open and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. The lamp on the dresser was on, but her face was lost in shadow.
Angie stood in the hall until Rivera raised her head and looked at her directly.
“That bad, huh?” Angie said.
“Worse,” Rivera said. “You’ve been so good, never asking. I know you’ve been worried and you must have been confused.”
“I’m still confused,” Angie said.
“Me too. Remind me never to get involved with Catholic girls, would you?”
“Ah.” Angie closed her eyes. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Neither is Caroline. She’s not ready to come out to her family; she’s not sure she ever will be, but hey. I’m supposed to be satisfied with the fact that she’s getting out of Ogilvie. Apparently, mastering the perfect Béarnaise sauce will be enough of a challenge for Caroline Rose.”
“And you fit into this where?”
“I wish I knew. I wish she knew.”
“That stinks,” Angie said.
“Yeah, well.” Rivera drew in a long breath. “What about you?”
“The other shoe just dropped for John. He didn’t take it well. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”
“Right now I’d be happy not to know a lot of things,” Rivera said. And then she got up and closed the door in Angie’s face.
TWENTY
Mrs. June Callahan Rose requests the honor of your presence at the marriage of her daughter
Caroline Mae Rose
and
John Ogilvie Grant
And to the reception and luncheon immediately following
Saturday, 8 July 11 in the morning The Gardens at Old Roses Ogilvie, Georgia
R.S.V.P.
In the morning Angie found out, to her surprise and considerable horror, that Tony and Rivera were going ahead with the videotaping of the Rose-Grant wedding.
“Nobody canceled, as far as I know,” Tony said as he took stock of his camera bag. “Anybody call you to cancel, Riv?”
“Nope,” Rivera said. She managed a grim smile. “We can handle this without you, if you’d rather not.” She was wearing black slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt, their standard costume for such gigs. She looked rested and calm and without a care in the world, which frightened Angie and irritated her even more.
“You’ll have to,” Angie said. “I’m going into the editing suite to work on the logging.”
“Well, good,” said Tony. “Because there was a message for you on the machine from Patty-Cake. You’ve got a special-delivery envelope in your mailbox in the department. Not that we won’t miss you at the wedding of the season, understand.”
It should have felt good to slam the door on the way out, but it only made her headache worse.
In Angie’s experience the English department, pretty much deserted during the week, was more like a mausoleum on the weekends. This suited Angie, who had almost perfected her schedule to the point that, if she was careful, she could avoid Patty-Cake completely. Of course there was no avoiding e-mail, and the continuous flow of tack-like little notes about her many transgressions. Angie had begun to cut paper dolls out of them and was constructing a collage on one wall of the bigger editing room.
Today there was next to no chance Patty-Cake would be in the department, and so Angie took the direct route to the main office, used her key to get to the mailboxes, and found the special-delivery letter. It had been mailed from a Savannah post office box, and while it looked very official and serious, with its multitude of rubber stamps and stickers, there was no clue at all as to who had sent it. Angie opened it on the spot.
The DVD box was of the plain vanilla variety. On the DVD itself there were two words in plain block print, written with a Sharpie: WATCH ME. A little shiver went up Angie’s spine as she tucked the case into her work bag and headed to the staircase that would take her to the editing suite, where she intended to hide all day long.
She let herself in and reached for the light switches with her free hand. The reception room sprang to life, and with that John Grant jumped up from the couch, startled and wild eyed, hair standing on end.
“Shit!” Angie dropped her bag and most of what was inside it spilled across the floor. The door closed behind her with a soft click and she jumped again.
“Christ,” John said. “You scared me half to death.”
Angie swallowed hard. “Then I’ll go out and come in again.”
“Very funny.” He scowled at her. “What are you doing here?”
“I work here,” Angie said. “What’s your excuse?”
John followed her into the kitchenette and raised his voice to be heard over the noise of water running into the empty coffee carafe.
“Why aren’t you at Old Roses?”
“I don’t have any business at Old Roses,” Angie said, looking at him over her shoulder. He looked thoroughly rumpled: his eyes were slightly bloodshot, he needed to shave, and he smelled like the Hound Dog on a busy night. “You do, though. You’ll make quite a splash, showing up like that.”
“I couldn’t go home,” John said. “I was afraid Caroline would come looking for me.”
After a full minute had passed she finally gave in and looked up at him. He was leaning in the doorway, his arms crossed, one eye closed and the other narrowed.
He said, “How long did you know, and not tell me?”
“Oh, so you’re in the mood to talk now?” Angie said. “Well, I’m not. Go to your wedding, John. I’ve got work to do.”
“I’m not getting married today, and you know it.”
“I don’t know anything,” Angie said. She marched back to the reception area, leaned down to her bag, and snatched the DVD case out of the mess. “And if I did, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
He had the good grace to flush at that. “You don’t think I have the right to be upset?”
“Sure,” she said, “but not with me.”
He followed her down the hall and into one of the smaller editing suites. He said, “There is such a thing as a sin of omission.”
“Listen to him.” She flipped the DVD out of its case and slid it into the slot. “Since when did you join the Vatican Council?”
“I just want to know,” he said. The line between his brows was deep enough to lose a penny in. “Since when has Caroline been involved with . . .” His voice faded.
“Her name is Rivera,” Angie said. “And I didn’t say anything because I had nothing concrete to tell you. All I had were a few . . . observations that I couldn’t present to you, because I knew—” She hesitated.
“What?”
“That you’d react like this. I still don’t know any more than you do, which brings me to a crucial question. Why aren’t you directing these questions to Caroline?”
“I’m sorry that things have come to this point,” said a voice from the computer’s speakers. “But you give me no choice.”
“The hell?” said John, and Angie sat down heavily on the chair in front of the computer. Patty-Cake Walker was looking back at her. Her expression, self-sa
tisfied, prim, superior, told the whole story before the bright orange mouth opened again.
She was saying, “I simply won’t allow you to interfere with the happiness of the people I love best in the world. John Grant and Caroline Rose were made for each other, and they deserve a perfect wedding day. All I’m doing is making sure you’re not around to cause more trouble.”
Angie punched the pause button, leaving Patty-Cake with her mouth contorted and her eyes half-open. She looked at John and he looked at her and they bolted. He got to the exit first, grabbed for the doorknob.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Well, no,” Angie said. “That’s just the problem. Patty-Cake thinks we’re doing too much fucking.”
When they got back to the computer Patty-Cake was still waiting patiently in suspended animation. Angie punched the play button.
“I know about that nasty business on the afternoon of the Jubilee, when you went to so much trouble to seduce John . . .” Patty-Cake said.
“See?” said Angie.
John threw up his hands. “How does she know about that?”
“Win Walker,” Angie said. “And an unfortunate condom sighting.”
“. . . I know a lot of things, and I’m making it my business to put an end to all your scheming. As anybody in the English department can tell you, it’s not wise to trifle with me, and you’re about to learn that lesson the hard way.
“Let me spare you some trouble. The phone lines and the Internet connections to this part of the building have been turned off. I understand these rooms were constructed with soundproofing and without windows for technical reasons. I expect that’s why there’s no cell phone reception. You’ll find a sack of groceries in the front closet and the plumbing is working just fine. If you get bored I suggest you turn on the television, which is working. On channel twelve you’ll find a live broadcast of John’s wedding to Caroline. I’m sure you won’t want to miss that.” She smiled broadly, and Angie was glad to see a smear of lipstick on one of her incisors. “Tomorrow morning, once they have left on their honeymoon, I’ll open the door.”
The screen went blank. Angie turned to John, who was wobbling on his feet. He looked vaguely green.
“Honeymoon?”
“Montreal,” he said.
“How elegant.” Angie said. “If you’re going to throw up, please don’t do it here.”
In the plastic cubicle that served as a shower, John stood for a half hour with his head bent until the last of the nausea left him. Then he wiped himself down with a fistful of paper towels, got back into clothes that deserved to be burned, and went to find Angie.
She was in the bigger editing room, working in front of a monitor.
Her gaze shifted from the screen to the paper in front of her and back again, her pen moving steadily. Once in a while her left hand reached out to touch a control that stopped the flow of film, and then to start it again. For a few minutes John listened to Miss Zula talking to her sister about whether it was 1960 or 1961 that Martin Luther King Jr. had stopped in Ogilvie and preached a sermon, and then he called her name.
She looked up, startled and confused and irritated, and John felt his throat closing on all the things he had wanted to say to her. Instead something completely different came out.
“It’s half past ten,” he said. “Can I turn on the television?”
Angie looked at the set, suspended from a ceiling mount in the corner. “If you’re dead set on watching Caroline get stood up, be my guest.”
He found a chair and the remote and then sat for a long minute, unable to push the power button. Not a half mile from here some hundred people were converging on Old Roses. Behind the scenes another dozen people would be hysterical, because the groom—probably some of them were still thinking of him that way—was missing. No doubt the Rose girls had sent their husbands and older sons out to look for him, and some of them would come to this very building. Possibly one or more of them was upstairs right now, knocking on his office door. They would be in touch by cell phone, this search posse, and in between calls they would be speculating on where he might be, and with whom, and what punishment he deserved for what he was about to do to Caroline. The fact that she was about to dump him would not enter into it at all; they would want his head on a platter.
John realized he had said that last bit out loud.
“Well, first,” Angie said, “it’s not like it’s your fault. We’ve got Patty-Cake on DVD. That should make it clear that you were stuck here against your will.”
“But not why I was here in the first place,” John said.
“Second,” Angie went on, as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “Second, she’s about to dump you in front of everybody anyway. Look at it like this, all you’ve done is to steal her thunder.”
He thought for a while, weighing the things he might say, the places this conversation might go. Once the disaster unfolding on the screen in front of them had played itself out, he would pursue one or more of those lines of discussion, but right now there was nothing to do but watch and wait.
“This is going to backfire on Patty-Cake, you know that,” he said.
“I’m counting on it,” Angie said. “What I can’t decide is, should I wait for the full force of public humiliation to wash over her before I kill her, or just indulge my fantasies straight off.”
John felt himself flush and stir, and what a mess he was: Angie Mangiamele said the word fantasies and he felt himself stirring. “That’s a question worthy of some deliberation,” he said, and turned the television to channel 12.
He was disappointed when Angie left the room; he was about to go find her to admit he needed her with him through this when she came back with a tray: coffee, milk, a few apples, and a pile of diet bars, the kind made of sawdust and fake chocolate, kept afloat by marketing and Orwellian names: Choco-Mint Extravaganza and Orgasmic Orange.
“Patty-Cake strikes again,” she said. “You can take this as a commentary on my figure.” And then, as she pulled up a chair to sit next to him, she did a double take at the television screen.
“Who the hell,” she said in a conversational tone, “is behind that camera?”
It certainly wasn’t Patty-Cake, who had stuck her microphone in Button Ogilvie’s face and was asking about her dress, and was that Dior? Patty-Cake herself was in a sheath of electric blue that showed off her cleavage and the exact shape of an obviously enhanced derriere and tilted her slightly forward, so that she looked like an exotic breed of chicken, which John pointed out because it was true, and because he desperately wanted to make Angie smile.
“The feathers on her hat complete the image,” she agreed.
There was some work to be done with Angie, John knew that; maybe being stuck here would be a good thing, in the end. Neither one of them would be able to bolt off when the discussion got rough, as it was bound to.
“John?” Angie said. “Do you know who’s behind that video camera?”
He said, “My guess is, Will Sloan. He’s got the public-access TV station all tied up these days.”
Tony walked past Patty-Cake and her cameraman and shot them an incredulous look. Angie snorted a laugh.
“This will be the best-documented no-show wedding in Ogilvie history,” John said. Then he realized that if Tony was there, Rivera must be, too. He thought about that, wondered if he should raise the subject, and decided there weren’t words enough in the language to sort out how he was feeling about Rivera.
Patty-Cake was running in tiny little steps to catch up with Kai and—John gulped as he saw this—his mother and stepfather. OP-TV wasn’t alone in wanting to talk to Lucy, who had her usual small crowd of admirers trailing along.
“Sam looks a little thunderstruck,” Angie said.
“Lucy Ogilvie in her element is more than most men can handle.”
“Lucy!” Patty-Cake was calling. “Lucy, won’t you spare a few words for Girl Talk?”
Apparently Lucy would not; she never sl
owed down, though she did throw Patty-Cake and her viewers her own version of the royal wave.
“She’s going to sit with Miss Zula,” Angie said.
John had successfully avoided the idea of Miss Zula for the last day or so, but there she was on the screen with her sister and a half dozen other Bragg relatives. For the first time he was actually glad to be locked in the editing suite.
