“Death and taxes,” Mike said. “Why shouldn’t I be realistic with these people? I’m sorry, but the unthinkable happens. More often than you could ever believe.”
7
CADENCE WILLEFORD sold bomb-detection machines, behemoths the size of a delivery van, to large international airports in the U.S. They were designed to sniff the plastics, leathers, and ripstop nylons of checked baggage for the subatomic chemical taint left by certain types of Czech-manufactured high-tech explosives. Her job was to keep the nation’s airline passengers safe in the skies.
The job meant travel, big city to big city, three weeks out of four. And travel meant she’d adopted certain behaviors. She drank bourbon on the rocks, because her career meant selling $30-million machines to committees of older white men who were easily impressed by a woman who could hold her liquor. The men who bought the machines liked to jokingly offer questions about mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, and because she had a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins (she never mentioned that it was in English) and wore severe suits in navy or charcoal, their jackets winged with lapels that looked primed for takeoff like the vertical doors of an Italian sports car, they assumed she knew what she was talking about. She didn’t.
The technology was beyond her. It had taken only a few weeks for her to realize that she would never have to talk about subatomic particles and molecular traces and chemical off-gases. All she had to do was talk about liability, the implied question of who would be responsible for another Lockerbie, and the fact that the ED60 system was the only one of its kind, and she’d somehow accomplished the hardest part, which was to sell the first machine to the first airport. The others she could sell on fear; Cincinnati is protected, why not Denver? The rest fell in line, and she got a commission check from her company and a royalty for every year that the annual service contract was renewed. It was a more-than-comfortable living but not exactly a vocation. No one ever dreamed as a teenager about a life spent selling machines designed to detect the residue of explosive compounds.
Her professional life—hotel to hotel, airport to airport—left her catching bits of breaking news wherever she could, taking up residence in a frequent-flyer lounge to watch live coverage of a high-speed police chase, the aftermath of a tornado, the attempted rescue of a child trapped in an abandoned well.
She reconstructed each vagabond month from her day planner and a stack of wrinkled credit card receipts. Her vacations were financed with frequent-flyer miles and hotel points. On weekdays, she had become accustomed to deciphering what city she was in based on the newspaper she found in front of her hotel-room door. But sometime in the last year or so, the chains had all begun to deliver USA Today, so she was never sure where she was except that on this New Year’s Eve she was in Chicago, in a room on the twenty-seventh floor of the InterContinental Hotel. And because it was New Year’s Eve and a Monday, she decided to take some time off, relax.
Since Cadence wasn’t trying to make a sale, she’d been wasting time with this guy Chadley. A boy, really. A temporary measure. Cadence no longer trusted her own judgment—her judgment had led her to Richard MacMurray, and she was still questioning the wisdom of that decision. So for the past two months, Cadence had depended on a simple strategy to fill the hours that had once belonged to Richard; on Thursday nights, she met girlfriends to drink wine, eat prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and cornmeal-dipped calamari, and pretend to discuss the novel of the month. She stuffed her social calendar with happy hours and dinners out, reconnecting with the friends she had neglected as the infection that was her relationship with Richard grew. On one of those outings, Chadley made his move.
Chadley had presented himself on the first of December, a day to notice the oncoming winter’s lengthening darkness. Cadence tagged along with a bunch of younger coworkers to after-work drinks, standing in the crush at a bar that offered a view of the Georgetown waterfront. The event showed up on the shared electronic calendar of her department. Cadence often suspected that her presence wasn’t truly welcome, merely tolerated, and now the kids who worked for her didn’t have the temerity to disinvite her.
But hanging out for a half hour bought her some street credibility at work. She’d throw down her credit card for a couple of rounds for her team and leave early. It was, like so much of what happened in her adopted city, an elaborate charade. She figured on escaping in a taxi, undoing the damage of cocktails with a salad and, later, forty-five minutes on the treadmill that dominated the corner of her bedroom nearest her overstuffed closet.
The crowd made her anxious; she knew she was being appraised, hip deep in a line of men and women a decade younger. The conversations around her were about where to find the best bargain happy hour, who needed a summer share in a beach house at Dewey, and, for the younger women, how to avoid further inflaming the married creeps from marketing who populated middle management. Socializing with her coworkers might be less stilted if Cadence had adopted one of the staff assistants to mentor; she could choose from a horde of entry-level college graduates who came and went in regular cycles each September and June. They referred to themselves as cogs.
She had been preparing excuses for her departure when this boy wandered over, tilting toward her to ask loudly, “So here’s a typical Washington question. What is it you do? Who do you work for?” A wave of his drink came spilling over the edge of his glass, nearly hitting her, and she jumped about a foot backward. “Shit,” he said. “Sorry. I’m somewhat drunk.”
It felt like the first honest thing she’d been told in months. She decided then to answer him in kind. “I sell humongous, multi-million-dollar machines to the quasi-governmental entities that run our largest international airports,” she said.
“What kind of machines?”
“The kind that detect the subatomic residues of certain nonmetallic explosive compounds on passenger baggage.”
The look on his face told her he either did not understand or did not believe her.
“You sell freedom,” he said.
“Exactly. I sell the concept of safety. You can stop kids from shoving a .22 down their pants, and you can stop the guy from getting on board the plane with a parachute and a few sticks of dynamite, and you can reinforce the airframe so that a blast at altitude would require so much explosive that the mere bulk of it would make even the most narcoleptic security guard turn his head. You can train the pilot and the flight attendants in close combat techniques and put air marshals on every flight, and still no one is going to have faith.”
“That’s because faith requires a machine.” He smiled the kind of self-satisfied grin that Cadence took as encouragement.
“People need the machine. A doctor can tell you about the tumor, he can recognize its fibrous mass just by palpating it. He can say how it’s the size of a walnut or a baseball or even a grapefruit because all tumors have to be compared to the totems of our everyday life, and everyday life is nothing but sports and fruit. He knows just from the look of it that it’s malignant, but no one believes him until they take a biopsy or a cold-frozen segment or a needle extraction and run it through a machine. The machine gives me credibility. They believe me because I believe in the machine.”
He regarded her. “I’m almost sorry I asked. Almost.” He smiled, showing off bright-white teeth of an extraordinary symmetry. They looked so unnatural that Cadence thought they might be dentures.
“Why? It’s a typical Washington question.” Cadence cut him off. “But you’re not a typical Washington guy, right? This is an ironic stance.”
“How did you know? I’m Chadley, by the way.”
“The purple tie. That’s supposed to say how you’re not really all about your day job—you have a band that plays out on weekends, or you’re sitting on an idea, trying to get some VC together for the start-up, get parole from the nine-to-five world. But what you really want to do is write a book.” Cadence knew she was being harsh, but Chadley looked willing to take the abuse. The alcoholic flush o
f his complexion said that he was a couple of drinks ahead of her. This was actionable intelligence.
“Actually, I’ve always thought I had a decent book in me.”
“Everyone says that. They also say things like, I’m not looking for anything serious right now, or, My job is in transition.” Cadence folded sixty dollars together and slid it across to the bartender.
“You’re done? Without even letting me buy you a drink?”
“Barring a drastic shift in the prevailing winds, I’m gone.”
“Too bad. I’m thinking I should ask you to lunch. A limited-time trial offer. You know, low pressure.”
“Low pressure is good,” Cadence said.
“I’m all about low pressure. I’m an auditor. Even when I go in and find that the books are fucked, you know, the CFO has been writing some questionable checks, or the big boss has a five-thousand-dollar shower curtain in his executive washroom, all I ever get to do is hand the bad news over to someone else. My entire career consists of saying things like, I think you ought to take a closer look at this, Dave.”
She liked that Chadley wasn’t serious. Richard was many things, and serious was right at the top of the fucking list. With Richard, she’d gotten used to conversations in which he and his friends commanded the bar, riffing about Senate confirmations, appeals-court decisions, the prospects for peace in Ireland, home rule, defense appropriations, a four-hundred-ship navy, the market prospects for securitized mortgage instruments, the two-state solution to the Palestinian question.
Somehow, she stayed for a drink. Almost immediately, Chadley told her he lived in the suburbs, not anywhere near her neighborhood. His condominium consumed almost the entirety of one of his twice-monthly paychecks. He described the expansive view from his balcony in the marzipan-and-spun-sugar suburb of Crystal City. The neighborhood turned itself off at 5:30 each night as parades of military officers and Defense Department bureaucrats trudged from office building to subway through a series of tunnels, rarely venturing to the hotel-lined streets above.
“The only problem might be the nightlife. Or lack thereof. The place is like a test site for the neutron bomb,” Chadley told her. “The only time I see anyone is on the subway, on the way to the airport.”
“Which airport?” Cadence asked, meaning it as a test. Maybe half the poster-size subway maps had been changed to add Ronald Reagan to the airport’s name.
“National,” he said. “I can’t pronounce the name Reagan without bursting into flames.”
“You just did, Skippy. Besides, I’m thinking,” Cadence said, “you’re probably a closet Republican.”
“I don’t make enough money to be a Republican.”
Chadley offered a certain safety. He was obviously younger, uninterested in talk of children or commitments. Which made him ideal as a temporary distraction.
After two weeks, she knew that Chadley Billings was yet another of her strange enthusiasms. Dressing for their dates, she would sing a line from a song she had loved in college, a lyric she thought described the situation perfectly. A simple prop, to occupy my time. She thought of it as a disorder, these frequently appearing mini-obsessions. Because she feared the traditional holiday gain of five pounds, December’s fixation had been her new diet, an implausible combination of high-protein vegetarianism that equaled gallons of yogurt and tofu in a million impossible ways. But for the New Year, sequestered with Chadley on the twenty-seventh floor of Chicago’s InterContinental Hotel, in the heart of Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, she had a craving.
“We’re going for red meat,” she announced from in front of the bathroom mirror. Chadley had busied himself flipping through the tourist guides he’d found on the desk in the room’s corner, and Cadence knew by the time he’d decided on a restaurant it would be impossible to get a table. He hadn’t made dinner reservations either, which, given the holiday, she found mildly irritating. Wasn’t the New Year built around the idea of elaborate plans?
After a couple of days being cooped up together in a hotel room, she was beginning to notice the specific disadvantages of dating a younger man. Not all younger men, just this one. Chadley had a difficult time committing, an equally hard time letting go. He possessed surprising inhibitions. Even their fucking had been far too choreographed. He couldn’t go with the moment, couldn’t even let it slide that somewhere in Cadence’s recent past was an ex-boyfriend; he wasn’t perceptive enough to notice that she had never asked about his recent past.
Chadley might learn in the next few years to appreciate the difference between fucking and making love, something all older men knew, something Richard understood intuitively, but God knows how long that would take. And as she went over the rims of her eyes with pencil, she mumbled his name, Chadley, and the thought struck her, What sort of name is Chadley anyway? She worried that she might have asked the question aloud.
In front of the bureau mirror, Chadley tended to his hair in an intricate ritual involving two different styling products and a series of contortions with the blow-dryer. As Cadence poked her head out the bathroom door, he clicked the machine off and asked, “What?”
She walked to the television, where a cable news channel was showing a clip of an on-air confrontation between two men in suits, the younger one standing in front of the older, looking for all the world as if he was about to take a swing. She couldn’t get the context without turning up the volume, and she wasn’t about to do that, because the younger man was Richard. The screen filled with chyron titles: IRATE DEBATE.
Cadence clicked off the TV, announcing, “I have a craving,” then retrieved her skirt from the paisley armchair at the foot of the bed. She held the skirt in front of her, snapping it out like a matador, but before she could step into it, Chadley wandered over, kneeled to plant his face just beneath her navel, and started kissing his way down. To her, this was performance.
He looked up long enough to whisper, “I have a craving myself.”
8
FOR MARY BETH BLUMENTHAL and Mike Renfro, the New Year arrived like this: they and two hundred other couples packed themselves into a hotel ballroom ringed in green-and-white awning-striped wallpaper; Salt Lake City meant the New Year’s Eve crowd was lily white, and there was no line at the bar, because the citizens of Utah prided themselves on restraint. That applied to their dancing too, tentative maneuverings that reminded Mary Beth of the cautious classmates she’d watched at her twenty-year high school reunion, moving stiffly with hands and elbows tucked to their sides.
Atop a temporary knee-high stage at the far end of the ballroom, a dance band robed in matching purple jackets meandered through a catalog of familiar songs from the last five decades; when they weren’t playing, the four-piece horn section jerked together in stiff choreography, white boys imitating the Four Tops. During the twenty-year-old tunes, couples bounced and circled on the dance floor, percolating gently, singing along as the vocalist slurred out his urge to celebrate good times, come on!
That was exactly what Mary Beth wanted to do.
She attributed her giddiness to the altitude, or maybe the remarkably pleasant weather, not to the bourbons or the champagne she’d had at the table. She felt relaxed, confident, her face radiant with a good, even suntan. Without the pressing demands of her child pulling at her hem, her worry lines had eased. She could not describe the relief of a four-day vacation, no obligations and no hurrying to the telephone. Tomorrow she would return to Texas, to her responsibilities and her routine, but tonight she wanted to give herself over to the occasion.
Mike and Mary Beth staked their claim to a table near the back of the ballroom. Mike retrieved a pair of cocktails, and they nibbled selections from the hors d’oeuvre trays of passing waiters. Mary Beth led Mike back to the dance floor as he chewed a scallop wrapped in bacon. But he didn’t protest, just discreetly palmed the toothpick from his snack and fell in behind her, hands on her hips, as they conga-ed toward the band.
When the next song sped up, Mike dabb
ed at his hairline with his ubiquitous clean handkerchief. She liked that Mike did not have the big man’s usual reticence to strut; he moved with a grace he inhabited easily despite his size. So many of the men looked flustered by the up-tempo music, but Mike moved with the confidence of a man armed with more than just lessons in the Arthur Murray method of dance; he was a surprisingly competent dancer, and that was the word that best summed up Mary Beth’s feelings about Mike as a partner: competent, a possessor of minor but nonetheless impressive skills. He could choose a patterned tie that matched a striped shirt, make a decent dinner that did not include red meat, fillet any number of small, bony fish; he never forgot the birthdays of any of the girls who worked at the Mike Renfro Agency; he wasn’t fazed by the cartons of Mary Beth’s Swedish furniture that arrived labeled SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED; tonight, he demonstrated the secrets to dance steps that lived on in the films of the forties, the fox trot, the Lindy.
Since there wasn’t some great passion, Mary Beth knew she was feeling a sort of Cinderella effect. She’d been treated well for the past three days and hoped both the feeling and the treatment wouldn’t vanish once they returned to Dallas. Maybe it was the alcohol, the way they gulped the last of their drinks before heading out to dance, but Mary Beth could not help but feel she was on the precipice of some important change, a way she had not felt since her high school days, when she gave too easily of her heart and body. How refreshing it was to learn that under the weighted yoke of decades of minor disappointments might lurk an optimist.
Mary Beth swayed along with Mike, surveying the crowd, writing histories for each blank face she saw. The party was filled with couples, long- and short-term, alliances of permanence or convenience, anniversaries ranging from paper to gold. The song morphed into something newish; the younger couples nodded their heads in agreement, mouthed the words. She was one of the very few who did not know the song. Mary Beth limited her movements to half arcs in front of Mike, who danced behind the beat, then lurched to a stop.
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