In the rear corner of the studio, a folding table covered with a blue tablecloth had been set up, and a decent party spread of crudités sat at one end, opposite a dozen bottles of top-shelf liquor.
“Leftovers?” Richard asked as two stagehands busied themselves making drinks. One poured a Bloody Mary from a pitcher into a clear plastic cup, tracing his finger up the side of the cup to catch a stray drop.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell. A little bonus compensation for having to work today. Most of these guys came in at four o’clock this morning. They get twelve hours at double-time to pay for all the Christmas presents they’ve bought. Or they’re pulling a double shift, like me. I’ve worked every day for nineteen straight days. So what’s the big toy this year, anyway?”
“How would I know? The last time I got wound up about that sort of thing was 1977. Mattel electronic football. I didn’t get one, but my next-door neighbor Dale Whiteis did.”
“Do you want something to eat?” Toni steered Richard to the buffet table.
He picked through the dozen or so fifths, grabbed a bottle of Pimm’s, and read aloud the printed instructions from the side panel, how to make a Pimm’s Cup. “What is this stuff, anyway? You’re supposed to know these things. Australians are part of the empire, right?”
“Castoffs of the empire. At university, I did a summer program at Cambridge, and we drank gallons of that stuff at brunch. You put a splash of seltzer and a cucumber stick in it. I’d ask the guy who owned this pub near Christ College what Pimm’s was, and he’d say, ‘Brilliant. It’s brilliant.’ And then I’d ask what was in it, and he’d say, ‘Genius.’”
Richard let the bottle settle in his hand, then replaced it on the table and took a bottled water from a tray of ice. “I don’t know about brilliant. But this open bar could make some good reality TV. Bring on some members of Congress, give them a few drinks, let them fight it out. Last man standing wins.”
Toni gave Richard a look that he took to mean something along the lines of get serious. “What’s the latest with your Texas kiddies?”
Richard poured himself a cup of coffee. “Oh, the subversives. A city councilman keeps saying they were planning to go Columbine on everyone. And the principal found out that they used the computers and printers in the journalism room to make the newsletter. Then they broke into the faculty lounge to photocopy it. He wants them to reimburse the school district at forty cents a copy.”
“How’s this all going to work out? Litigation? Do I need to send a camera crew somewhere?”
“Doubtful. The kids are going to go to college and become even more disillusioned with me, the principal, the whole system. If we’re lucky, they’ll continue on to law school.” Richard snorted out a laugh, hoped this wasn’t how Toni saw him, just another well-paid cynic. “Don’t worry about these kids,” Richard told her between sips. “They’re pretty resilient. In the end, the smart one runs for Congress and gives his life over to children’s issues and winds up with a post office or a courthouse named after him.”
“Are you sure? Why can’t this be the beginning of the long downward spiral? They barely make it out of community college, end up selling Chryslers at the auto mall, get picked up for drunk driving every four or five years.” Toni pinched her banana peel in half, tossed it in the small steel can.
“That’s not how this is going to end,” Richard said. “The dean of some journalism school is going to sweep in and give these kids a scholarship, liberate them from Texas. This is their ticket out, the admission to a life of comfortable northeastern liberalism. They’ll buy corduroy suits at the Salvation Army thrift shop, join Students for a Democratic Society, intern for some network. They’ll report from war-torn Beirut, work for the Christian Science Monitor or NPR.”
“You sound pretty confident,” Toni said.
Richard laughed. “I’m a firm believer in the happy ending.”
18
MIKE WAS aware that he rarely thought about the practical issues of child-rearing, just as he was aware Mary Beth might see it as a deficiency in his character. Perhaps that would explain her minor outbursts, the fact that all morning, her expression had consisted of wetter-than-usual eyes and the slight downturn of her lips that usually led to a full-on quiver. He had no idea how to interject himself into that part of Mary Beth’s life. He’d been an only child, had no children of his own. In his heart, the begrudging confession to himself: children were inconvenient, alien. But a more recent portrait of the boy seemed both motherly and practical. The boy. How often did he even say his name? Even in his deepest thoughts and especially in his conversations with Mary Beth, Gabriel was always the boy. And what was the point of another formal picture? School pictures were artifacts that came in the mail a few times each month, postcards in search of abducted children, bearing the heartbroken plea Have you seen me?
Why didn’t Mary Beth take more pictures of her son? God knows every young couple these days managed to document their child’s most mundane achievements on video: first steps and first day of school, sure, but also first day of chicken pox, first solo shit. Sometimes on sales calls he had to watch and pretend to be enthralled by the ordinary things, just because they’d been committed to video. He much preferred the snapshot era he’d grown up in, four-by-four Kodachrome prints, the month and year stamped at the bottom edge. Permanent memories.
Mike had taken the last photo of his own father, Artie Renfro, sitting in a plastic lawn chair, the collar of his camp shirt loose enough that the fabric fell away to reveal his tracheotomy scar. Was it an exaggeration for Mike to think that he’d photographed death itself, Artie gaunt in the way that only the chronically ill can be, savaged by esophageal cancer and its poisonous treatments?
On his dad’s knee sat a half-drained bottle of Lone Star, the last basic pleasure he could tolerate. Mike was fourteen, maybe fifteen—he could not remember without doing the math—and the camera was his father’s old Brownie, the kind with a flash-arm attachment; the picture had to be taken outside because the night before, a bored Mike had gathered all the flashbulbs and thrown them up in the air, shot them with a pellet pistol, watching the phosphorescent burst rain down on him like fallout. Mike did not know how to load the roll of 126 film; his father had to do it, beer sheltered between his legs. Artie wanted a picture of his scarred throat. His “war wound,” he called it. But his shaking hands spilled his beer, and his cursing, his retreat inside for a dry pair of slacks—that last picture almost didn’t get taken at all. Instead, his father returned a few minutes later wearing dark-brown pants, the same pair he wore in all of Mike’s memories. Artie eased himself down into the chair with a sigh, a slight grimace that the adult Mike knew he should have understood as a sign of metastasis; the tumors had spread to his pelvis, his lower spine. He took a sip from a new beer and flinched, as if the beer had turned on him, and he turned to Mike and said, “I can’t even enjoy this.”
It would have been nice to have a snapshot of him and Mary Beth on New Year’s Eve, but he didn’t own a camera, and his father was the reason.
Now, as Mike Renfro drove along the access road at the entrance to Salt Lake City International Airport, the silence became a third passenger in the car. He wanted the comfort of small talk, an assertion that everything was okay. He pointed to the mountains that rose on Mary Beth’s side of the highway. “They look like a rib cage, don’t they?”
“Oh, yeah. We’re right in the belly of the beast,” Mary Beth said, then pulled down the visor and squinted at her reflection in the makeup mirror. “Sorry. I just don’t feel much like being profound right now.”
The flatlands around the airport glimmered in the direct wash of the noonday sun, the light dancing in reflection across the fuselages of the various jets. Mike pulled to the curb lane in front of the terminal and shifted into park, let the engine idle. He hurried out of the car, fetching Mary Beth’s bag and leaving it in front of the curbside kiosk. In the background, the public-address system alternated betwe
en issuing the usual red-zone parking warnings and paging random travelers: Mr. Agajanian, Tamar Shelton, Captain Cliff Ellis.
Mary Beth stood in front of Mike. “I should call my brother and wish him a happy New Year. I didn’t even talk to him on Christmas.”
“How is Richard these days?”
“Still trying to save the world, I guess. Or remake it in his own image. I haven’t talked to him in a couple months. You’re back in the office Friday?”
Mike nodded. “You’ve got my cell phone in the meantime. But I can’t imagine there’ll be a reason to call. At least not work related. The billing is done, and no one’s working the rest of the week. Take Monday off and let the voicemail pick up everything.”
“I just might do that. Take Gabriel to school and have a day of leisure.”
“An excellent plan.” Mike turned to the rear passenger door, opened it, and handed over a black plastic bag. “It’s not much. Just a little something for the boy.”
Mary Beth reached into the bag and, with the flourish of a stage magician, extracted a stuffed brown bear with ears that stuck out in half-moons from the nine- and three-o’clock positions on its oversize, nubbly head. The bear had a pink T-shirt that said UTAH in letters of raised felt. “He’s kind of, I don’t know, pathetic. The bear equivalent of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree,” Mary Beth said, showing her warmest smile. She felt a bit like a salesperson, certain Mike would see through her facade.
Mike thought of the bear as slightly off, defective yet charming; it seemed cruelly blunt to admit that the bear, with its large head and protruding features, could remind him of a six-year-old, a comparison that was, at the least, honest, but one he knew he could never explain to the child’s mother. That Charlie Brown comment was exactly how Mike pictured Gabriel; he was the kid flailing at a yanked-away football, knocked ass over teakettle off the pitcher’s mound by a screaming line drive. But Mike knew that Mary Beth could understand how the bear’s defects, even his ears, might seem endearing.
“I don’t know if I ever told you about Whit Carrboro,” he said. “My first boss, with this agency in Houston. I go to this conference one time and I see this promotional bear, and I take one because he looks a little like a bear I had when I was three. Back in the office, I prop the bear up against the electric pencil sharpener in the corner of my cubicle, behind the phone. One day at a staff meeting, we come in and the boss hands out this memo outlining the proper decor of cubicles. And specifically outlawed are stuffed animals or other quaint items.”
“Well, this one is very cute,” Mary Beth said, giving the bear a hug. “When my brother was a kid, he used to take all his bears into his crib and pick the fuzz off their heads until they were bald. He’d stop and hold up the bear and say that now that all the fur was gone, the bear looked like Dad.”
“Hopefully this guy will get to keep all his fur. It’s just a little something. A quaint item. So, will I see you on Friday?”
“I promise. You’ll have the weekly schedule on your desk. The accountants come in around ten-thirty.”
“I don’t want to drive away thinking that the last thing we talked about was work.”
“What else are we going to say? That’s the beauty of it, don’t you think? I finally met someone smart enough to know that there’s no point in talking something to death when it’s already dead.” She shook her head at the end of the sentence; her memory felt edgy, vibrant, her anger justified. It wouldn’t be until she was in her seat on Flight 503 that she would realize this: she’d talked to Mike the same way her ex-husband used to talk to her.
There wasn’t a lot of bustle for the middle of the day, no three lanes of traffic, no diffident-looking flight attendants sharing a smoke with ticket agents and airport cops, just two drivers in red tunics sitting near the terminal’s automatic doors, keeping a watchful eye on their hotel-shuttle vans. They weren’t listening. Neither was the skycap, standing a discreet distance behind Mary Beth’s shoulder. Mike knew he must have seen worse, heard more embarrassing discussions. Nonetheless Mike whispered, “Do you really want to have this conversation here?”
An imported hatchback rolled by, the driver invisible behind tinted windows. The car rattled with the locked-down groove of bass and kick drum, some aggressively loud song burping out as it made the left turn to circle back toward the terminal. Mary Beth shook her head. “I don’t. I don’t want to have this conversation here, and I’m not sure I want to have it back in Dallas. I leave, I take the quaint item home to my son. You stay here and look for space.”
Mary Beth handed her ticket to the skycap and, pointing at her only bag, said, “Dallas.” Mike tried to hand over a tip, a trio of crumpled ones, but Mary Beth intercepted him by the wrist. “Relax. We’ll be fine. I’m going to take care of things for myself for once. Maybe this is the beginning of a new era. One where I come first. A pro-MB phase.”
Her thoughts: There had never really been a pro-MB phase. Everything she’d ever done, she felt, had been at the behest of the men in her life, the clothes she wore, the way she did her hair. She’d chosen a university and majored in international relations at the insistence of her father, and then he was dead. She’d moved to Atlanta, then Memphis, and finally Dallas following the vagaries of her ex-husband’s career, or his political whims, or his firm belief that real estate or gold or crude-oil futures were going to skyrocket. Clark, her ex, had mandated even her choice of undergarments. There should have been a way to make that sexy, but instead it felt creepy.
Perhaps she would even have time to sit in the airport lounge, writing a postcard for Gabriel and having a quiet drink. She wasn’t much of a drinker, never had been, first out of fear and later because of her husband’s insistence; his attempts to control her behavior spiraled outward to include not just what she wore on her body but what she chose to eat and drink. A jingle popped into her head: Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one. Schaefer, the beer she had refused to buy for her brother when she was in college, because there were lines of propriety that Mary Beth wouldn’t cross. Her reticence went away after a while; one weekend when Richard was in college, they’d actually smoked weed together. A week later—in an era when long-distance was expensive and people actually wrote lengthy and considered letters—she’d written to confess to her brother how her husband sometimes slapped her for “making a spectacle,” and a few years later, the husband had stolen all of their money and disappeared six weeks before she’d discovered that she was pregnant.
But she’d never made that spectacle. Clark had made her feel silenced and small, so she behaved accordingly. She supposed that Mike had given her a voice. Mike, who discovered she was as good at navigating the little Byzantiums of insurance companies as she was at projecting a feeling of warmth to his clients. Her clients, she thought. Maybe she’d study for her licensure, write a few different lines of life insurance, workers’ comp policies. She didn’t want to be an office manager. Everything about her job felt limiting—its title, its responsibilities. Her inner dialogue about work relied heavily on the word only, as in, I’m only the office manager. He’d given her a voice, so why was she so reluctant to use it? She needed something she could call her own. Surely Mike could help her stand on her own feet in that one way. And if he couldn’t, maybe a pro-MB phase was a no-Mike-Renfro phase too.
She tipped the skycap, then returned to her conversation with Mike. She wanted her face to be blank, not just to Mike but to the flight attendants, the other passengers, the world. She felt like a weary traveler between more exotic destinations, waiting for her luggage to catch up, hoping she could be rerouted through Helsinki. Her brother did that, lied to people on planes about his destination, his career; he thought of it as entertainment; he was a roughneck, a bond trader wanted in Hong Kong, the author of a forthcoming series of children’s books about a purple Airedale terrier who taught at Harvard Law School and spent his evenings fighting crime. She wanted to be someone else, a retired figur
e skater, a courier carrying a diplomatic pouch. Anything except what she actually was, a middle-aged woman with limited prospects. She wanted just to be able to watch Mike Renfro drive away without hoping that he might turn back.
Standing on the curb with Mike at street level, she could see the expanse of scalp that threatened to emerge through his once-impressive head of lacquered black hair. And that’s where she chose to place her kiss, on the top of his head, intimate but without the upheaval of romance. She did not want to stir herself that way, not before her flight. As she stepped in for the kiss, he moved toward her, forcing her to reacquire the target; he was too close now, and her lips came in inches off, a motherly landing point that left the outline of her lips stained across Mike’s forehead. She didn’t tell him about the lipstick above his Soviet-looking eyebrows and resisted the urge to forage through her handbag for a tissue. Mike pursed his lips, an expression Mary Beth assumed meant just what it did at the office: he was giving up. He wasn’t going to fight.
When he retreated to the driver’s side of the Jeep, he still had three dollars crumpled in his right hand. He stuffed the bills into his shirt pocket, then watched as Mary Beth disappeared behind the sweep of the automatic terminal doors.
19
IN THE green room, Richard passed time by flipping through Tuesday’s issue of Barron’s, last week’s U.S. News and World Report, the most recent Foreign Affairs, all publications that in a normal, busy week he would have already read. The holidays made everything a bit more casual, and he was regretting his lack of preparation. It reinforced the idea that his career frequently felt like an elaborate charade. He wasn’t being a pundit so much as pretending to be one. The guys who did the same thing for a living, the ones he saw on television every day, had staff, young lawyers, interns, assistants, all tasked with boiling down the issues of the day into talking points on a three-by-five card. Maybe, Richard thought, he should hire an intern.
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