by John Irving
This time Wallingford answered it. He knew who it was; even asleep, he'd been expecting the call. He'd told Mary the story of how and when his mother had died. Patrick was surprised how long it had taken Mary to remember it.
"She's dead. Your mother's dead! You told me yourself! She died when you were in college!"
"That's right, Mary."
"You're in love with someone!" Mary was wailing. Naturally Sarah could hear her.
"That's right," Wallingford answered. Patrick saw no reason to explain to Mary that it wasn't Sarah Williams he was in love with. Mary had hit on him for too long.
"It's that same young woman, isn't it?" Sarah asked. The sound of Sarah's voice, whether or not Mary actually heard what she said, was enough to set Mary off again.
"She sounds old enough to be your mother!" Mary shrieked.
"Mary, please--"
"That dick Fred is looking for you, Pat. Everyone's looking for you! You're not supposed to go off for a weekend without leaving a number! You're not supposed to be unreachable! Are you trying to get fired or what?"
That was the first time Wallingford thought about trying to get fired; in the dark hotel room, the idea glowed as brightly as the digital alarm clock on the night table.
"You do know what's happened, don't you?" Mary asked. "Or have you been fucking so much that you've somehow managed to miss the news?"
"I have not been fucking." Patrick knew it was a provocative thing to say. After all, Mary was a journalist. That Wallingford had been fucking a woman in a hotel room all weekend was a fairly obvious conclusion to come to; like most journalists, Mary had learned to draw her own fairly obvious conclusions quickly.
"You don't expect me to believe you, do you?" she asked.
"I'm beginning not to care if you believe me, Mary."
"That dick Fred--"
"Please tell him I'll be back tomorrow, Mary."
"You are trying to get fired, aren't you?" Mary said. Once again, she hung up first.
For the second time, Wallingford considered the idea of trying to get fired--he didn't know why it seemed to be such a glow-in-the-dark idea.
"You didn't tell me you were married or something," Sarah Williams said. He could tell she was not in the bed; he could hear her, but only dimly see her, getting dressed in the dark room.
"I'm not married or anything," Patrick said.
"She's just a particularly possessive girlfriend, I suppose."
"She's not a girlfriend. We've never had sex. We're not involved in that way," Wallingford declared.
"Don't expect me to believe that," Sarah said. (Journalists aren't the only people who draw their own fairly obvious conclusions quickly.)
"I've really enjoyed being with you," Patrick told her, trying to change the subject; he was also being sincere. But he could hear her sigh; even in the dark, he could tell she was doubting him.
"If I decide to have the abortion, maybe you'll be kind enough to go with me," Sarah Williams ventured. "It would mean coming back here a week from today." Perhaps she meant to give him more time to think about it, but Wallingford was thinking of the likelihood of his being recognized--LION GUY ESCORTS UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN TO ABORTION MILL, or a headline to that effect.
"I just hate the idea of doing it alone, but I guess it doesn't sound like a fun date," Sarah continued.
"Of course I'll go with you," he told her, but she'd noticed his hesitation. "If you want me to." He immediately hated how this sounded. Of course she wanted him to! She'd asked him, hadn't she? "Yes, definitely, I'll go with you," Patrick said, but he was only making it worse.
"No, that's all right. You don't even know me," Sarah said.
"I want to go with you," Patrick lied, but she was over it now.
"You didn't tell me you were in love with someone," she accused him.
"It doesn't matter. She doesn't love me." Wallingford knew that Sarah Williams wouldn't believe that, either.
She had finished dressing. He thought she was groping for the door. He turned on the light on the night table; it momentarily blinded him, but he was nonetheless aware of Sarah turning her face away from the light. She left the room without looking at him. He turned off the light and lay naked in bed, with the idea of trying to get himself fired glowing in the dark.
Wallingford knew that Sarah Williams had been upset about more than Mary's phone call. Sometimes it's easiest to confide the most intimate things to a stranger--Patrick himself had done it. And hadn't Sarah mothered him for a whole day? The least he could do was go with her to the abortion. So what if someone recognized him? Abortion was legal, and he believed it should be legal. He regretted his earlier hesitation.
Therefore, when Wallingford called the hotel operator to ask for a wake-up call, he also asked to be connected to Sarah's room--he didn't know the number. He wanted to propose a late bite to eat. Surely some place in Harvard Square would still be serving, especially on a Saturday night. Wallingford wanted to convince Sarah to let him go with her to the abortion; he felt it would be better to try to persuade her over dinner.
But the operator informed him that no one named Sarah Williams was registered in the hotel.
"She must have just checked out," Patrick said.
There was the indistinct sound of fingers on a computer keyboard, searching. In the new century, Wallingford imagined, it was probably the last sound we would hear before our deaths.
"I'm sorry, sir," the hotel operator told him. "There never was a Sarah Williams staying here."
Wallingford wasn't that surprised. Later he would call the English Department at Smith--he would be equally unsurprised to discover that no one named Sarah Williams taught there. She may have sounded like an associate professor of English when she was discussing Stuart Little, and she may have taught at Smith, but she was not a Sarah Williams.
Whoever she was, the thought that Patrick had been cheating on another woman--or that there was another woman in his life, one who felt wronged--had clearly upset her. Possibly she was cheating on someone; probably she had been cheated on. The abortion business had sounded true, as had her fear of her children and grandchildren dying. The only hesitation he'd heard in her voice had been when she'd told him her name.
Wallingford was upset that he had become a man to whom any decent woman would want to remain anonymous. He'd never thought of himself that way before.
When he'd had two hands, Patrick had experimented with anonymity--in particular, when he was with the kind of woman to whom any man would prefer to remain anonymous. But after the lion episode, he could no more have got away with not being Patrick Wallingford than he could have passed for Paul O'Neill--at least not to anyone with his or her faculties intact.
Rather than be left alone with these thoughts, Patrick made the mistake of turning on the television. A political commentator whose specialty had always struck Wallingford as intellectually inflated hindsight was speculating on a sizable "what if ..." in the tragically abbreviated life of John F. Kennedy, Jr. The self-seriousness of the commentator was perfectly matched to the speciousness of his principal assertion, which was that JFK, Jr., would have been "better off" in every way if he'd gone against his mother's advice and become a movie star. (Would young Kennedy not have died in a plane crash if he'd been an actor?)
It was a fact that John junior's mom hadn't wanted him to be an actor, but the presumptuousness of the political commentator was enormous. The most egregious of his irresponsible speculations was that John junior's smoothest, most unalterable course to the presidency lay through Los Angeles! To Patrick, the fatuousness of such Hollywood-level theorizing was twofold: first, to declare that young Kennedy should have followed in Ronald Reagan's footsteps; second, to claim that JFK, Jr., had wanted to be president.
Preferring his other, more personal demons, Patrick turned off the TV. There in the dark, the new idea of trying to get fired greeted him as familiarly as an old friend. Yet that other new notion--that he was a man whose company a wo
man would accept only on the condition of anonymity--gave Patrick the shivers. It also precipitated a third new idea: What if he stopped resisting Mary and simply slept with her? (At least Mary wouldn't insist on protecting her anonymity.)
Thus there were three new ideas glowing in the dark, distracting Patrick Wallingford from the loneliness of a fifty-one-year-old woman who didn't want to have an abortion but who was terrified of having a child. Of course, it was none of his business if that woman had an abortion or not; it was nobody's business but hers.
And what if she wasn't even pregnant? She may simply have had a small potbelly. Maybe she liked to spend her weekends in a hotel with a stranger, just acting.
Patrick knew all about acting; he was always acting.
"Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto," Wallingford whispered in the dark hotel room. It was what he said when he wanted to be sure that he wasn't acting.
CHAPTER TEN
Trying to Get Fired
THERE'D BEEN NEARLY a week of rapturous mourning when Wallingford tried and failed to ready himself for an impromptu weekend in Wisconsin with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior at the cottage on the lake. The Friday-evening telecast, one week after the crash of Kennedy's single-engine plane, would be Patrick's last before his trip up north, although he couldn't get a flight from New York with a connection to Green Bay until Saturday morning. There was no good way to get to Green Bay.
The Thursday-evening telecast was bad enough. Already they were running out of things to say, an obvious indication of which was Wallingford's interview with a widely disregarded feminist critic. (Even Evelyn Arbuthnot had intentionally ignored her.) The critic had written a book about the Kennedy family, in which she'd stated that all the men were misogynists. It was no surprise to her that a young Kennedy male had killed two women in his airplane.
Patrick asked to have the interview omitted, but Fred believed that the woman spoke for a lot of women. Judging from the abrasive response of the New York newsroom women, the feminist critic did not speak for them. Wallingford, always unfailingly polite as an interviewer, had to struggle to be barely civil.
The feminist critic kept referring to young Kennedy's "fatal decision," as if his life and death had been a novel. "They left late, it was dark, it was hazy, they were flying over water, and John-John had limited experience as a pilot."
These were not new points, Patrick was thinking, an unconvincing half-smile frozen on his handsome face. He also found it objectionable that the imperious woman kept calling the deceased "John-John."
"He was a victim of his own virile thinking, the Kennedy-male syndrome," she called it. "John-John was clearly testosterone-driven. They all are."
"'They ...'" was all Wallingford managed to say.
"You know who I mean," the critic snapped. "The men on his father's side of the family."
Patrick glanced at the TelePrompTer, where he recognized what were to be his next remarks; they were intended to lead his interviewee to the even more dubious assertion of the "culpability" of Lauren Bessette's bosses at Morgan Stanley. That her bosses had made her stay late on "that fatal Friday," as the feminist critic called it, was another reason that the small plane had crashed.
In the script meeting, Wallingford had objected to the word-forword content of one of his questions being on the prompter. That was almost never done--it was always confusing. You can't put everything that's supposed to be spontaneous on the TelePrompTer.
But the critic had come with a publicist, and the publicist was someone whom Fred was sucking up to--for unknown reasons. The publicist wanted Wallingford to deliver the question exactly as it was written, the point being that the demonization of Morgan Stanley was the critic's next agenda and Wallingford (with feigned innocence) was supposed to lead her into it.
Instead he said: "It's not clear to me that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was 'testosterone-driven.' You're not the first person I've heard say that, of course, but I didn't know him. Neither did you. What is clear is that we've talked his death to death. I think that we should summon some dignity--we should just stop. It's time to move on."
Wallingford didn't wait for the insulted woman's response. There was over a minute remaining in the telecast, but there was ample montage footage on file. He abruptly brought the interview to a close, as was his habit every evening, by saying, "Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto." Then came the ubiquitous montage footage; it hardly mattered that the presentation was a little disorderly.
Viewers of the twenty-four-hour international channel, already suffering from grief fatigue, were treated to reruns of the mourning marathon: the hand-held camera on the rolling ship (a shot of the bodies being brought on board), a totally gratuitous shot of the St. Thomas More church, and another of a burial at sea, if not the actual burial. The last of the montage, as time expired, was of Jackie as a mom, holding John junior as a baby; her hand cupped the back of the newborn's neck, her thumb three times the size of his tiny ear. Jackie's hairdo was out of fashion, but the pearls were timeless and her signature smile was intact.
She looks so young, Wallingford thought. (She was young--it was 1961!)
Patrick was having his makeup removed when Fred confronted him. Fred was an old guy--he often spoke in dated terms.
"That was a no-no, Pat," Fred said. He didn't wait around for Wallingford's reply.
An anchor had to be free to have the last word. What was on the TelePrompTer was not sacrosanct. Fred must have had another bug up his ass; it hadn't dawned on Patrick that, among his fellow journalists, everything to do with young Kennedy's story was sacrosanct. His not wanting to report that story was an indication to management that Wallingford had lost his zest for being a journalist.
"I kinda liked what you said," the makeup girl told Patrick. "It sorta needed sayin'."
It was the girl he thought had a crush on him--she was back from her vacation. The scent of her chewing gum merged with her perfume; her smell and how close she was to his face reminded Wallingford of the commingled odors and the heat of a high-school dance. He hadn't felt so horny since the last time he'd been with Doris Clausen.
Patrick was unprepared for how the makeup girl thrilled him--suddenly, and without reservation, he desired her. But he went home with Mary instead. They went to her place, not even bothering to have dinner first.
"Well, this is a surprise!" Mary remarked, as she unlocked the first of her two door locks. Her small apartment had a partial view of the East River. Wallingford wasn't sure, but he thought they were on East Fifty-second Street. He'd been paying attention to Mary, not to her address. He had hoped to see something with her last name on it; it would have made him feel a little better to remember her last name. But she hadn't paused to open her mailbox, and there were no letters strewn about her apartment--not even on her messy desk.
Mary moved busily about, closing curtains, dimming lights. There was a paisley pattern to the upholstery in the living room, which was claustrophobic and festooned with Mary's clothes. It was one of those one-bedroom apartments with no closet space, and Mary evidently liked clothes.
In the bedroom, which was bursting with more clothes, Wallingford noted the floral pattern of the bedspread that was a tad little-girlish for Mary. Like the rubber-tree plant, which took up too much room in the tiny kitchen, the Lava lamp on top of the squat dresser drawers had to have come from her college days. There were no photographs; their absence signified everything from her divorce that had remained unpacked.
Mary invited him to use the bathroom first. She called to him through the closed door, so that there could be no doubt in his mind regarding the unflagging seriousness of her intentions. "I have to hand it to you, Pat--you've got great timing. I'm ovulating!"
He made some inarticulate response because he was smearing toothpaste on his teeth with his right index finger; of course it was her toothpaste. He'd opened her medicine cabinet in search of prescription drugs--anything with her last name on it--but there was nothing.
How could a recently divorced woman who worked in New York City be drug-free?
There had always been something a little bionic about Mary; Patrick considered her skin, which was flawless, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, and her perfect little teeth. Even her niceness--if she had truly retained it, if she was still really nice. (Her former niceness, safer to say.) But no prescription drugs? Maybe, like the absent photographs, the drugs were as yet unpacked from her divorce.
Mary had opened her bed for him, the covers turned down as if by an unseen hotel maid. Later she left the bathroom light on, with the door ajar; the only other lights in the bedroom were the pink undulations of the Lava lamp, which cast moving shadows on the ceiling. Under the circumstances, it was hard for Patrick not to view the protozoan movements of the Lava lamp as indicative of Mary's striving fertility.
She suddenly made a point of telling him that she'd thrown out all her medicine--"This was months ago." Nowadays she took nothing--"Not even for cramps." The second she conceived, she was going to lay off the booze and cigarettes.
Wallingford scarcely had time to remind her that he was in love with someone else.
"I know. It doesn't matter," Mary said.
There was something so resolute about her lovemaking that Wallingford quickly succumbed; yet the experience bore no comparison to the intoxicating way Mrs. Clausen had mounted him. He didn't love Mary, and she loved only the life she imagined would follow from having his baby. Maybe now they could be friends.
Why Wallingford didn't feel that he was submitting to his old habits is evidence of his moral confusion. To have acted upon his sudden desire for the makeup girl, to have taken her to bed, would have meant reverting to his licentious self. But with Mary he had merely acquiesced. If his baby was what she wanted, why not give her a baby?
It comforted him to have located the one unbionic part of her--an area of blond down, near the small of her back. He kissed her there before she rolled over and fell asleep. She slept on her back, snoring slightly, her legs elevated by what Wallingford recognized were the paisley seat cushions from the living-room couch. (Like Mrs. Clausen, Mary wasn't taking any chances with gravity.)
