Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  “I don’t know anyone else I can talk to about this.” His voice wavered, enough that he heard it himself, wondered if it made him sound weak.

  And it was from his voice, the shake in it, its fluttering pitch, that Cadence took her cue. She felt obligated, at least somewhat. “Talk about what, Richard? What’s happened?”

  He recognized the repeated use of his first name as a device; in our most intimate relationships, we use any excuse not to call someone by name. He’d called Cadence all sorts of things—Cate and Catey-Cat and Cat and just C.—when he wrote her notes, and he didn’t much like Cadence using his first name; it sounded like he was being scolded.

  “I need to tell you in person. You’re going to have to have faith,” he said, resisting the urge to use her name. “Can you come see me?” he asked, and knew immediately from her sharp intake of breath that she would refuse to come to his apartment precisely because it was his. “That isn’t what I meant,” he said, trying to preempt the argument that rested just under the surface of their conversation. She’d say something about how she wasn’t going to go home with him, not under any circumstances, and he’d say whatever he could to avoid that part of the discussion. He worried that Cadence might hear the irritation in his voice. “I just need…” He stretched it out; how strong the urge was to blurt out what had happened, to just admit how strange everything had been in the past seven weeks, in the last several hours, but to admit it required more strength than he could muster. If there was one thing that could make this evening better, it would be the solace of Cadence, his familiar. The story of his life was getting bad news on the telephone, and he wasn’t about to contribute to it now. “I need to see you.”

  Lemko and the shoeshine guy tried their level best to maintain a discreet distance, but the three of them were standing in a cramped men’s room, so Richard just walked past them out into the terminal corridor and headed to the exit. Lemko fell in behind him, a good three steps back.

  “I need you,” Richard said. “I need help.”

  That, for Cadence, was enough.

  She wouldn’t meet him at his apartment, she said, and she did not have to explain to Richard the reasons why. “My place is a mess,” she parried, as if anticipating his suggestion. “I’m repainting my end tables, and there are brushes and newspapers everywhere.”

  “I guess that leaves the Cleveland,” he said. A favorite bar. A demilitarized zone almost exactly halfway between her apartment and his. It occurred to Richard that they’d spent the entirety of their time together floating around the city, going from event to event, happy hour to fund-raiser to concert to the Kennedy Center to cultural evenings at the Smithsonian. He wondered how many times they’d simply spent the evening inside, cooking dinner together, afterward lounging on the sofa while he absentmindedly rubbed her feet. Not often enough. He wanted nothing more than that kind of quiet now, a woman nestled against him, a dog at his feet. Gabriel.

  “One hour,” Cadence said, and hung up.

  Lemko took his phone back from Richard, and they stopped in front of the next airport newsstand. “I’ve never understood why they sell luggage at airports,” Lemko said, pointing at one of the open stores. He was desperate to lighten the mood. A combination of bureaucracy and a confluence of unimaginable events—a dead pilot, snow, another overworked crew, unusually heavy traffic to Dallas—had defeated him in his only task for the afternoon, which had been to see to Richard MacMurray’s safe delivery to Texas.

  Richard let him off the hook with an easy laugh. “For people who plan to do a lot of shopping.”

  “Maybe.” Lemko handed Richard the papers he’d been toting around. “This is a boarding pass for tomorrow morning—9:40 departure, gate B25. There’s a voucher in here for airport parking if you need it, and instructions on how to keep track of your expenses. And I want you to know that if you need anything, you can call me direct at these numbers.” He produced a business card.

  Richard started to leave, and Lemko grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him back around.

  “Is there anything else I can do? Something I’ve overlooked? We can put you up at a hotel closer to the airport. I can send someone back to your apartment to pick up some things. Hell, we can sit down at the bar over there and have a drink.”

  Richard took the business card and tucked it into the inside pocket of his overcoat. He extended a hand, for what reason he was unsure, and Lemko took it as his absolution, shook it vigorously. Richard could see in the lawyer’s face that he was deciding whether or not to pull him into a hug (despite the express prohibition of such personal interaction with a contact). He took his second hand and put it on top of their grip, keeping Lemko at a distance. “If I think of something, I’ll let you know.”

  Lemko headed back toward security, and while Richard wanted very much to be out of his visual range, he instead found himself wandering into the newsstand. Meeting Cadence required at least some semblance of preparation. He grabbed a toothbrush and a travel-size tube of paste, some cinnamon-flavored gum. How much time had he spent at airports in the past four years? Were they all like this, incongruent? He’d landed in Florida somewhere at eight p.m. one night, and the only thing open had been the bars in the international terminal. Kansas City looked like Milwaukee, which looked like Memphis or maybe Nashville. The terminal in Bismarck, North Dakota, was built according to the same blueprints as the original terminal in Prague. Richard didn’t know if he could face another airport. He was supposed to get on a 9:40 a.m. flight to Dallas, pick up a six-year-old boy who was essentially a stranger, and explain to him that his mother was dead and that he would be coming to live with Uncle Richie.

  The woman at the register repeated herself—“Will there be anything else?”—and Richard walked over to the shelves displaying all the junky Washington DC memorabilia—Redskins T-shirts and miniature monuments and paperweights in a heavy plastic that were supposed to resemble the lead-crystal paperweights of the Capitol dome that congressmen sometimes gave as Christmas presents in the days before ABSCAM and the Congressional Post Office scandal and the check-kiting scandal and the scandal with the boy interns and the one with the girl interns. He saw the perfect gift. A miniature license plate. He’d given his nephew seventeen of them, one from each state he’d traveled to in the past few years, but somehow never a Washington DC plate, and there was one at the bottom of the first row that spelled out GABE—not GABRIEL, but it would have to do—and Richard added it to his purchases. He would not arrive in Dallas empty-handed.

  50

  POLICIES AND procedures meant that Carol Nessen and Brad Lemko were expected to produce a written narrative accounting for their whereabouts in fifteen-minute blocks; their report would identify shortcomings in the notification process and point to potential improvements. The general counsel, an obsequious little bastard named Gullett, had already warned Nessen to make her recommendations detailed and specific. His management style mimicked whatever business book was in vogue at the moment. She could imagine hearing him even as she made notes for her report: Don’t identify a problem unless you can identify its solution. Nessen knew also that Gullett hated her because she was taller by a good six inches and had never worked airside, whereas Gullett took every opportunity to mention how he’d loaded baggage carts every summer of college.

  Nessen hated Gullett because he covered her desk with inconsequential memos on policy and procedure, and because he wore his hair plastered to his head with Vitalis or VO5, some old-fashioned goop that smelled like the feet of senior citizens tarted up with lilac. And since the reports went to Gullett, it made sense to find Lemko, compare notes, agree on a strategy. Lemko was Gullett’s anointed successor, and if Nessen could get him to sign off on her ideas, she was golden too, if only by association.

  With no standby pilot, a piece of defective equipment taken out of service in Cincinnati, and the East Coast bogged down under a winter storm stranding some 940 Panorama passengers in the Washington metropolitan are
a’s three airports, a morning flight back to Dallas was a long shot. Seating preference would be given to passengers paying full fare, so Nessen made arrangements for them at a decently luxe hotel in Pentagon City, just a five-minute taxi ride to the airport.

  By 9:00 p.m. Nessen had retrieved the rental car, left it with the hotel valet. Lemko had seen Richard MacMurray off in a taxi and taken the Metro to the hotel, where he waited in the lobby for his partner. He stood to greet her, and the bellman who wheeled in their two bags stopped a few feet away.

  “Don’t you even have a topcoat?” Nessen asked.

  “In the bag there,” Lemko said, pointing to his suitcase. “Going to join the fire department?” he asked, giving her yellow rubber footwear an obvious once-over.

  “They’re loaners from our friend the sergeant. Can’t do the job without the proper equipment, he says. Besides”—Nessen held up a small plastic grocery bag—“my shoes are ruined. It’s snowing. Note to self: more than one pair of shoes is required on each trip.”

  They handled the business of check-in and reconvened in the hotel’s top-floor lounge. Nessen came loaded down with the policies-and-procedures binder and a laptop, looking entirely like a woman expecting to work.

  “Wouldn’t you rather deal with all that”—Lemko used a tilt of his head to indicate the notebook, the laptop, the report—“in the morning?”

  “I want to hit it while it’s fresh in my mind.”

  Lemko sighed. “I don’t know that it will be any different. I keep thinking about how I’d explain what I did today to anyone who didn’t work for us. ‘What did you do at the office today, honey?’” he said in a pitch-perfect falsetto. “‘I knocked on doors and told people that a person they loved was dead.’”

  “How else should it work? You want to call them on the phone? Send a telegram? A priest and a pilot, like in those old war movies?”

  “It’s a horrible duty. You’re brushing your teeth in the morning and thinking that you’ve got this two-day swing to Buffalo but you’ll be back in time to drive little Benjy to soccer practice, and wham!” he said, his flat palm making a solid thwacking sound in a tiny bit of condensation on the bar top.

  Nessen was older and, as such, felt entitled to play the role of a grizzled veteran. “You did good work today. It won’t feel like it, not for a while. But you have to trust that how we tell them is better than hearing it from the neighbor or watching it on television. If you can’t do that, then at least you can sleep knowing you put a human face on the faceless corporation.”

  Lemko shrugged and gestured with his drink to the corner of the bar, where a duo—jazz guitar and stand-up bass—picked up their instruments. Nessen turned to watch them begin, hoping the music might offer some distraction. She was expecting a Christmas song for some reason, but they launched into something syrupy, a pop melody she couldn’t place. She felt pressed up against the very limits of language itself; what more could she possibly tell Lemko to make him—to make herself—feel good about the job they had done? She wanted to forget about the contacts and her plans and get drunk and half-lost in her favorite songs. Instead the guitar player vamped between two chords, and she realized she was waiting for the vocals to begin but hadn’t seen a microphone. The words were what had always been most important to her. The songs that transported her were always about the narrative. Now music that she had once loved, college-radio bands from Athens, Georgia, or the UK, floated in the background as she picked over organic produce at an upscale grocer’s on her way home from work. The hope of the future, four lads who shook the world, reduced to Muzak.

  Outside, the wind picked up, and she imagined the building moving with the slightest perceptible sway, the way certain skyscrapers did, the Sears Tower, World Trade. Snow clotted on the windowsills and blew past the picture windows, almost whiteout conditions, the storm and the lights of the city together casting the room in a soothing gray-blue glow.

  She stood and leaned into Lemko a bit, took his hand and sandwiched it between hers. It did not mean anything other than a moment of connection. Later, alone in her room, she would think of how good it felt to touch someone—to touch a man—at the end of the day; she wanted to be lost in the sensation of strong fingers on her shoulders, her wrists, warm breath at the base of her neck.

  “It’s just too cold for me,” Lemko said.

  “What? My hands? The weather?” Nessen swallowed the last of her drink. She was leaving and didn’t want to give the impression that her impulsive grab had been an invitation, tried to deliver the brightest, warmest smile she could muster.

  “All of it. The city, the weather. Every damn thing.”

  51

  DESPITE THE snow, the Metro was still running at a regular clip. Richard took the train from the airport, transferred once, and was at a table in the back room of the Full Cleveland within twenty minutes. The bar stood at the top of the service road that led local traffic into the Dantean confusion of Dupont Circle, and its clientele were almost completely removed from the world of politics that was Richard’s orbit. It was a dive, and its patrons were failed musicians, chain-smoking graduate students, and young professionals just out of college who’d spent the fall learning how quickly the city consumed the paycheck of someone who worked in a nonprofit cubicle farm.

  The taps at the Full Cleveland were filled with beers that had once belonged to the blue-collar man—Pabst and Ballantine—and the coolers were packed with tall-boy cans of Black Label and Schaefer, which Richard couldn’t see without singing the jingle from the commercials of his childhood: Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one. His father had often come home from a Redskins game at RFK stinking of beer and singing that song, talking about how he and his boss, the congressman, had gone out for a few pops with the announcers from that game, Lindsay Nelson and Paul Hornung, Lombardi’s own golden boy.

  One fall afternoon, after a Redskins–Packers tilt, old Lindsay Nelson had taken a shine to Lew MacMurray, so much so that they had actually traded sport coats, Lew’s Brooks Brothers navy hopsack for Lindsay Nelson’s Hart Schaffner Marx Gold Trumpeter label in a cacophonous houndstooth of red, white, and black that would have been more appropriate as one of Bear Bryant’s hats. Lew had worn that jacket with a white turtleneck and gray slacks to the stadium nearly every Sunday for the rest of his life. “This jacket was given to me by the voice of Notre Dame football himself,” he liked to say, and from a good Irish Catholic, there could be no prouder statement.

  It had been almost six hours since he’d eaten anything, and that was just a handful of peanuts at the Pilgrim Hotel bar. The smells from the Italian restaurant next door wafted in, reminding him of his hunger. Richard and Cadence had eaten maybe two dozen meals at that Italian place, evenings when inertia had dragged them into the welcoming comfort of the familiar. The restaurant was part of the city’s legacy and made only two kinds of pizza, sausage and four cheese, and the red sauce, heavy with garlic and basil, was something Richard once thought he could eat every day of his life, but he’d never eaten there without Cadence. On one of their first dates, he’d stolen an ashtray—Mamma Agnelli’s Ristorante Italiano, pink lettering on black ceramic; it now sat in the corner of his desk, a souvenir he could see traveling with him for a lifetime. Only now Cadence wasn’t part of his day-to-day life, and he hadn’t eaten at that restaurant in more than two months; a FOR LEASE sign had appeared in the building’s front window.

  With no conversation to distract him, Richard for the first time noticed how much of a true drinkers’ bar the Full Cleveland really was. Over the table was a chandelier on a dimmer switch, the arms of the fixture covered with a dark-gray fake fur that looked like the balls of dust and lint that collected under his bed. At the end of each of the eight arms, a bulb glowed a quiet pink-yellow that reminded Richard of the tubes of the old Magnavox console television from his parents’ basement. He was lost in thought enough not to notice Cadence’s approach to his tableside.


  “That’s where the polar bear head used to be,” she said, pointing to an old wool pennant for the Toledo Mud Hens hanging diagonally above them.

  Richard stood, and they gave each other a timid hug. He thought about kissing her on the cheek, a noncommittal move, but he hesitated, and Cadence used the moment to slide into the booth.

  There was a twinge of weird there, a moment he was certain she felt too. In the early days of their dating, Richard used to insist on sitting on the same side of the booth with Cadence, something he never saw any other couple do. He wanted the same vantage point, the same frame of reference.

  Cadence reached across the table and pulled a hair, one of hers, from Richard’s white shirt. It was long and straight, the dark brown-black wire of the kind he used to find in his bathtub or on the floor of his bathroom. He wondered if it was vanity that she always wanted him to look perfect and presentable, or if it was a little reminder that she once possessed him, a way of asserting that she knew she could again. Maybe it was one of those Discovery Channel mating instincts, like rhesus monkeys grooming each other to remove lice and nits, or simply the last reflexology of a dying love.

  “There,” she said, sliding back in her seat. Richard noticed the definition of her lipstick, the same color as the burgundy-black vinyl that covered the seat of the booth, and took it to be a good sign.

  “I’m perfect now. All fixed.” He decided to play along. The conversation was going to be hard enough. Maybe after a drink, he’d relax.

  “It’s a start,” she said.

  Richard watched her hands fidget in her lap. Soon they would search out some other imperfection; perhaps she’d touch up her lipstick at the table or take a napkin and begin wiping the surface of the tabletop.

  It was difficult for Richard not to blurt out all the news he had in a series of impulsive comments. My sister is dead. I’m expected to fetch my nephew and bring him to live with me. Oh, and I have a new job, two hundred miles away. Instead he indulged in the self-flagellation of nostalgia. He wanted to revisit all the high points of his relationship with Cadence, if only to reassert for himself that those lovely things had actually happened. Like the fixing. That impulse had been there in her from the very first. After crashing her shopping cart into the door of Richard’s car, she had taken out a tissue and tried to wipe away the scratches. Ten days later, between their second and third dates, he had found Cadence on her knees in his parking garage with a can of rubbing compound and a tube of no. 70 Metallic Candy-Apple Red touch-up paint. He liked that she was willing to get her hands dirty.