After I'm Gone

March 9, 2012


Sandy decided to call it a day after talking to No-Longer-Tubby Schroeder. One of the perks of being a consultant was making his own hours. The downside was that those hours could never be overtime. Work as much or as little as he wanted. Didn’t matter, no one cared. He earned a flat rate, no benefits.

But it filled the evenings, reading the Julie Saxony file, and he found himself gravitating back to it even as the days were growing longer. It was really two stories, parallel universes. A missing woman from Havre de Grace. A dead woman in Leakin Park. Fitting, he thought, for a woman with two lives—Juliet Romeo, Variety headliner. Julie Saxony, respectable business owner, valued member of the Havre de Grace Merchants Association, which had put up a reward when she disappeared.

He rubbed his eyes. Even now, after two years, the house ached with quiet. Not that Mary had been a loud person, quite the opposite. Nor had Bobby Junior been noisy, not by a child’s standards. When he was a toddler, Sandy and Mary had called him the colonel, mistaking his silence for dignity. Who knew, back then, what could be going on in a kid’s head? Mary knew. She always knew, even before the trouble started. She kept it to herself as long as possible, outright lying to pediatricians and teachers and, eventually, Sandy. So when Bobby’s problems started, about age six or so, they seemed to come out of nowhere. But it was just that Mary had papered over them for so long. For someone who usually couldn’t tell a mild fib, she had been a disturbingly good liar when it came to Bobby Junior.

Then there were the five hard years, the years when they fought about what to do, only to have the decision made for them: Bobby needed to go away. It was an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless, that Sandy had been happy to have Mary all to himself again when Bobby was sent to “school.” Maybe if Bobby Junior had been different, normal, Sandy wouldn’t have felt that way. How could he ever know what he would feel? His kid was born different, not right. The fact that Mary still gloried in Bobby Junior was the essence of Mary, the reason Sandy loved her so much. After all, she had gloried in him, too, despite his flaws, the mistakes that her parents said made him unsuitable as a husband. He was just grateful that the decision about Bobby was taken out of their hands, that they could stop fighting over it.

Mary wasn’t. But she rallied because that’s what she did and Sandy thought they had a pretty good time after that. Thank God her family had the money to pay for Bobby’s care, set up a trust. There wasn’t enough cop overtime in the world to pay for that kind of thing.

The Saxony file was open on the dining-room table, all the various pieces spread out. He started gathering them up, not because he was a neat freak, but because he knew the mere act of organizing a set of papers could highlight something he hadn’t considered yet. It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn’t show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs. It was a kind of muscle memory, ingrained by years of doing a thing. The body led, the mind followed. He was good at being a murder police and proud of being good at it. But was it so wrong that he had hoped to be good at something else in his lifetime?

Sandy’s retirement, almost ten years ago, had been full of promise. He had stayed on the job longer than most, making it to thirty years of service. But he was only fifty-two then and he had no intention of truly retiring. Almost no one who left the department did. They went to other government jobs, or into private security. Some of his older friends were double-dipping now, drawing two government pensions and their Social Security. They lived well.

But Sandy had a different idea for his retirement, a dream he had nurtured for years. He had wanted to open a restaurant, an authentic Cuban one that would serve the dishes of his childhood. There was no place in Baltimore that really did it right, and don’t even mention the Buena Vista Social Club to him, which was basically a great location that served nachos. Nachos! Sandy was going to make arroz con pollo and plantains and real Cuban coffee. People who had eaten in Miami’s best-known Cuban restaurants said Sandy’s food was as good, better.


And maybe it was, but that didn’t change the fact that no one came. If a plantain falls in the forest and no one’s there to eat it—he still had nightmares, thinking about the waste, the uneaten food, the not-special-to-anyone specials.

The location was good, or should have been. Mary—she was always up for whatever he wanted—found a storefront on Hampden’s Thirty-sixth Street, not far from their Medfield home. Hampden was gentrifying at a fast clip at the time, although, like most Baltimore neighborhoods, it never turned the corner all the way. But real estate was going up, up, up in a way that had never happened in Baltimore. It seemed so smart to extend themselves to buy the building, with a long-term eye toward renovating the upstairs for apartments. Within six months of the purchase, the building was worth twice as much as they had paid for it. Except they hadn’t really paid for it. They had put nothing down, borrowed 110 percent. Everyone was doing it.

Seven years later, when he went to sell the building, it was worth about 60 percent of the debt they were carrying. They had never established any real equity because they had used a second mortgage—and a third and a fourth and then cash from the money that Mary’s parents left her when they died, money outside the trust set up for Bobby Junior—for improvements to the restaurant. They sold it in a short sale, the most excruciatingly long process Sandy had ever endured at the time, although Mary’s allegedly fast cancer took half the time and felt longer still. Sometimes, watching television, Sandy came across a rerun of Seinfeld about a Pakistani guy who runs a restaurant that’s always empty and it’s played for laughs, being a sitcom and all, and all Sandy wanted to do was throw a brick at the TV set. Maybe running a failing business is funny when you’re a millionaire comedian, but when you lived it, the jokes didn’t come so fast.

Sandy was that rare person who understood he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. He had faked it well enough at work, knowing when to laugh, even getting a good line off every now and then, but he wasn’t inclined to see the funny side of things, and life didn’t tempt him to change his point of view.

And that was before Mary got sick. He knew the two things were not connected, that she didn’t get cancer from the heartbreak over the restaurant. He also knew it wasn’t the earlier surgeries, all those years ago, when she lost so much blood and needed transfusions, but he couldn’t shake the notion. She had allowed him his dream, bankrolled it without a single word of reproach when all that money went down a rabbit hole lined with black beans and flan. And then she got pancreatic cancer. Stage IV. Mary never did anything halfway.

His papers gathered, he started making coffee, the good stuff. He still cooked for himself, but there wasn’t much joy in it, and he almost never made Cuban food.

He wasn’t stupid or na?ve. He went in knowing that a restaurant was hard work; he came from restaurant people. He knew that most restaurants didn’t make it. But he also knew that he was smart and that his food was good. So why didn’t people come? Sometimes, he blamed the low-carb diet fad, which put rice and bread off the menu for so many people. He blamed the lack of Cubans in Baltimore. There had been a big influx of Latinos on the East Side, but they were all from Central America and Mexico. His food did not speak to them. It seemed that his food spoke only to him and a few stubborn regulars. There had been one young man, a guy who looked like an aging skateboarder, but he turned out to be in business himself, running a music venue with his father-in-law. Sandy and the kid talked about the perils of small business sometimes while the boy sat at the counter, wolfing down cappuccinos. But they never spoke about their lives, probably because Sandy kept that door closed to everyone but Mary. He was shocked, a year ago or so, to see the boy, as he still thought of him, pushing a stroller down Thirty-sixth Street, in the company of an attractive woman, although she wasn’t Sandy’s type. He didn’t like sturdy women. He liked the little flowers, the women who needed protection in this world. He had been drawn to Mary’s delicacy, only to be amazed by her steel. First with Bobby, then with her own illness.

Cancer. In his lifetime, it had become less of a thing. Everyone was so cheerful about it now. They forgot that it could still be pretty awful. Even he had forgotten. He had been stubbornly, stupidly hopeful, asking the doctor about those commercials, the ones for miracle places that cured people everyone had given up on. But Mary had accepted, from the first diagnosis, that she was being given a death sentence. If she had been thinking only of herself, she would have gone home and swallowed rat poison. She was a dignified woman, and there was no dignity in what happened to her over the next four months. “I carried you to your doorstep on our first date,” Sandy said. “What’s the big deal in my carrying you now?”

But he was carrying her to the toilet, which she found humiliating. Mary had been a woman who, through thirty-plus years of marriage, insisted on decorum, especially about bathroom matters. To have her body assert all its ugly reality in those final months grieved her so. She put on lipstick and beautiful nightgowns until the end. But she no longer wanted fresh-cut flowers in the house. “When they die, they remind me that I’m dying.”

Sandy had objected, defending the flower bearers in a way he was not inclined to defend most people. He had a pretty low opinion of people and whether that was because of the job or the job was because of that tendency was a chicken-or-an-egg question at this point. At any rate, he argued for the flowers. “No, they’re pretty, they’re nice, you’re not—”

“I am,” Mary said. “I’m dying. And look at those cut stems in water. They’re dying the moment they’re cut.”

The next day, he had brought her an orchid, in a pot. And although he didn’t know dick about plants, he learned to tend to it, and then another, and another, until the first floor was a bower, a word that Mary taught him. After she was gone, he thought about letting the orchids go, or giving them away, but Mary would be disappointed in him, giving up on yet another living thing, so he kept the bower, feeling for all the world like Nero Wolfe or goddamn Ray Milland when he played the villain on Columbo, complete with ascot. Only an a*shole wore an ascot.

Columbo—that was a good show. Utterly ridiculous, but it wasn’t trying to be a documentary on police work. At least the writers knew that solving a homicide was more talking than anything else, although some of those confessions—well, Sandy wouldn’t want to be the assistant state’s attorney who took Columbo’s cases to court.

He turned on the television to keep him company while he puttered among the plants. No one would accuse him of having a green thumb, but he saved more than he lost now.

The rowhouse was still set up as it had been in Mary’s last months, so she could live on one floor. Now Sandy lived on one floor, using the first-floor bathroom. He went upstairs only to shower and change his clothes. But he slept in the sofa bed where she died, although it bugged his back.

Mary’s last word was “Bobby.” He tried to tell himself it was for him, that she had reverted, in that final moment, to the given name he no longer used. But Mary had almost always called him Roberto. Her last word was for her son, who loved his mother so much that he had almost killed her.


A few days after she died, Sandy drove out to the group home where Bobby now lived; tamed and dulled by medication, the boy—a thirty-five-year-old man, but always a boy to Sandy—was puzzled by the news. “Where’s Mom?” he asked, although he had been told repeatedly she was gravely ill, that this day would come. “Where’s Mom? When is Mom coming to see me again?”

Sandy had not visited him since that day. It wasn’t a plan. Nobody plans to be that much of a bastard. Mary’s illness had disrupted what routine there was and she was the keeper of that flame. He forgot to go, something came up. Then something else came up and before he knew it, six months had gone by and the caretakers, when he called, told him that Bobby was fine. “Does he ask after me?” No, he was told. He asks for his mother, but never his father. Okay, so that was that. He had no relationship with his son. It wasn’t his fault that Mary could forgive Bobby Junior for throwing her through a plateglass window, while Sandy never could. It didn’t matter to him that Bobby was only eleven at the time, or that he did not understand what he had done, that he cried over his bloodied mother as paramedics tended to her. She had lost so much blood that day, almost enough to kill her. Did the transfusions cause her cancer? Sandy knew that was ridiculous, that he shouldn’t blame Bobby for killing his mother—and yet he did. He just did.

At the table, the one where Mary used to insist on taking her meals despite being so weak she could barely sit up, he ate an early supper and watched the news. He missed having an afternoon paper, although it had been almost twenty years now since one was published. Sometimes, he felt that he was born to miss things, to lose things despite his meticulous ways. In Spanish, translated strictly, things lost themselves to you and that had been Sandy’s experience. His restaurant. His parents. Mary. The promise of his son—not the boy himself, but the dream of the child who never was, the boy who had seemed so happy and healthy and perfect at birth, straight 10s on his Apgar. Nowadays, you couldn’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV, without hearing about autism and Asperger’s, and people were always telling you about this book they read or Rain Man or how their boss was on the “autism scale.” Not that people talked to Sandy about these topics, because there was no one left in his life who knew about Bobby Junior. But he heard things, on TV and out in the world. He heard things.

The local news got silly after the first break, and he opened Julie Saxony’s file again. It was the opposite of whatever picking at a scab was. Something was registering every time, even if he didn’t know what it was. He was beginning to prefer the more recent photograph, the one where she was too thin. Yes, to be honest, the va-va-voom shot of her in her stripper days had been what first caught his eye. But the 1986 photo, where she was all of thirty-three—she looked so old and sad. This was the woman who had been murdered, he reminded himself. A woman who had achieved a lot, but at some cost. If he were the kind of a guy who talked to photos, he might have asked her: “What made you so sad?”

But Sandy was not that kind of a guy. He didn’t talk to photos or even to himself. When he wasn’t working, he might go a day or two without speaking to anyone at all. And that suited him just fine.





Thrill

Me





November 2, 1980


We never got the bounce,” Greg said, staring at the television, numb. “We should have gotten such a bounce.”

Norman agreed. “We deserved a bounce. We deserved a motherf*cking bounce.”

Linda nodded, the third member in this mourning party of three. Greg and Norman had seemed old to her a month ago, even two hours ago, but she realized now that they were young, too. Young and preppy and rumpled, men whose clothes were no longer tended by mothers and not yet under the auspices of wives or girlfriends.

“How did we not get a bounce?” Greg asked.

“We never got a bounce,” Norman said.

They were a little drunk and this couplet, which they had been reciting in variation since the polls closed almost five hours ago, was coming more quickly now, abetted by drink and shock.

And although this was not a party per se—John B. Anderson’s small cadre of Baltimore believers was not that deluded—the volunteers had expected a slightly cheerier ending to this chapter in their lives when they planned the gathering at the Brass Elephant. But it was one thing to tilt at a windmill, another to feel as if you were pinned beneath it, arms and legs squirming comically.

The bartender, Victor, who had come to know them quite well over the last two months, had allowed them to bring a small black-and-white television and prop it up on the bar. It had been fun in the first hour or so, just because they were done; they had seen a hard thing through, unlike several other volunteers who had fled the sinking ship. No, they were jovial at first, not thinking about the big picture. About reality.

They muted the television when the networks began calling the election for Reagan. And now it was 1:00 A.M. and the enormity of the result had left them all a little numb. They hadn’t expected Carter to win, they hadn’t wanted Carter to win, and yet—and yet. The Reagan landslide felt literal to Linda, as if she were caked in mud, as petrified as a citizen of Pompeii.

“At least they can’t blame us,” she said, a variation on what she had been saying all night.

“Not in Maryland,” said Norman. “Still reliably Democratic, thank God, and the average Republican pol here is more Mathias than Agnew.”

“They can’t blame us anywhere,” Greg said. “When everything is said and done, there won’t be a single state where Anderson siphoned off enough votes to hurt Carter. Anderson wasn’t the problem.”

“I thought he was supposed to be the solution,” Linda said.

But this was too na?ve, even for her fellow travelers in idealism, who usually gave Linda extra leeway because of her youth. They had celebrated her twentieth birthday in this same bar, just two months ago.

They had returned three weeks later, the night of the debate, right here in Baltimore, when Carter had refused to appear and Anderson had debated Reagan one-on-one. He had done so well. That night, the young volunteers had come here in a haze of giddy possibility. It was happening. They were going to make history. Maryland’s best-known connection to third-party presidential politics would no longer be the assassination attempt on George Wallace, but the glorious ascension of this practical, reasonable man, a man who embodied the word “avuncular” in Linda’s mind.

“Are you going to make book on whether he lives or dies?” Uncle Bert, in their kitchen, joking to her father about the Wallace shooting only hours after it had happened.

Her father didn’t think it was funny. “If he dies, he becomes a martyr. That’s no good.”

Bert, quietly: “He’s not wrong about some things.”

Her father, fiercely: “He’s wrong about everything.”

Why was she thinking about this now? Anderson, third-party candidate, Wallace. Avuncular—uncle, Uncle Bert. Her father. Her father. How she wished she could talk to him tonight. Would he have been surprised by the result? His business had relied on him not being surprised about anything that involved numbers, always knowing the odds. Oh, he was apolitical because no candidate would ever support him, not publicly, although they all took his money, one way or another. But he claimed politics was just another game, its outcome shaped by probabilities.


Victor knew her father, it turned out. He spoke to Linda of him that very first night, after checking her ID.

“Class of 1960,” he said, handing her license back. “Just in under the buzzer.” The drinking age was going up to twenty-one, a year at a time, but she was grandfathered in. She would be the only Brewer girl who could drink before the age of twenty-one. Linda didn’t care about drinking so much. She just wanted to hang out with the other volunteers, who had claimed this place as their own.

The bar at the Brass Elephant was a little pricey for a group of unpaid volunteers, even those subsidized by their parents, but it was near Norman’s apartment on Read Street, and the converted town house’s muted elegance gave them a lift at day’s end. Plus, Linda enjoyed the cachet of Victor remembering not only her father, but her as well. He used to wait on them at the Emerson Hotel. Shirley Temples, with extra cherries. Linda was not yet eight, Rachel only six, and the hotel was far from its glory days, but the sisters had no yardstick for decline back then, had not yet observed firsthand how quickly elegance can erode. They certainly did not know of the Hattie Carroll incident, or even Bob Dylan, not in 1968. Linda had known only how much she and Rachel loved being with their father, dueling with plastic swords loaded with cherries, while men came and went, crouching next to Felix, whispering in his ear, then disappearing.

“Do you still drink Shirley Temples?” Victor had asked her after establishing she was one of those Brewers.

Linda had blushed, then blurted out an order for the most sophisticated drink she could imagine, which happened to be her mother’s drink, a vodka and tonic. The joke was on her. She hated vodka tonics. But she stuck to her original order that night and every night after. She’d rather sip slowly and grimly than admit she had been bluffing.

At least she never got drunk, which was a good thing, as she had to drive all the way out to Pikesville, where she was living with her mother and her baby sister, Michelle. Rachel had left for college just a few weeks ago, and it surprised Linda how keenly she felt her absence in the house. Had Linda been missed the same way during her year and a half at Duke? She thought not, somehow. Rachel was the family confidante, the keeper of all secrets, even their mother’s. Linda could be trusted to keep secrets, too, but she was bossy, determined to solve problems that no one else wanted solved. Put Daddy’s photos away if they make you feel sad. Don’t spend money you don’t have. If you must have the latest clothes, get a job at a shop where you can buy them at a discount. At least her mother had heeded the last bit of advice.

Tonight, as Greg and Norman drank themselves into deeper and deeper glooms, Linda found the nerve to turn her vodka tonic back to Victor and say: “Maybe a glass of wine?”

He didn’t tease or shame her. He didn’t even charge her for the half-drunk vodka tonic she pushed back to him. And she was pretty sure that the white wine he poured was not the house brand. It was far better than any glass of white wine she had tasted before. He poured her a glass of ice water, too, then made a quick call. Within fifteen minutes, he was putting appetizers and sides in front of the famished volunteers.

“My contribution to the cause,” he said, when Greg stammered that they couldn’t afford any food. Greg and Norman fell on the mozzarella en carrozza like dogs.

“Do you really remember my father?” Linda asked.

“Of course,” Victor said. “We talked about him the first time you came in here.”

“I mean—not just as a customer, or—what he became.” She never said “fugitive,” not out loud. It wasn’t really the right word. “Exile,” her mother said, when she was feeling magnanimous. “Coward,” when she was not. But never fugitive. “Did you have a sense of him?”

“He was a good guy,” Victor said. “And you know what? He would have preferred Anderson, too.”

“Really?” Linda was doubtful. Her father was so pragmatic. He was not one to pretend that lost causes were anything but lost causes. Wasn’t that why he had run? He couldn’t win, so he didn’t stay around to lose.

“I moved to the Lord Baltimore during the 70s, but your dad still came in, talked politics. He disliked Carter. Not so much the positions, but the man. He was talking up Udall right up—” He stopped, clearly not wanting to say: Right up until he left. “He thought Carter was small-time.”

“Really?” If small-time meant not cheating on your wife, then Linda wouldn’t have minded a small-time father.

“That’s how I remember it.”

“What else do you remember?”

“I remember how pretty you girls all were, the three of you.”

“The three of us?” Michelle hadn’t been born.

“You, the little one, your older sister.”

Linda, blunt within her family, was polite in the world at large, so she did not embarrass him by saying: I don’t have an older sister. And her mother, beautiful as she was, would never pass for Felix’s daughter.

But Julie Saxony might.

“He was a good man,” Victor said.

“Thank you,” she said. It often happened this way. With strangers, friends, even her mother and Rachel. She started down the road toward a memory, toward a vision of her father that she thought would bring her pleasure. Then she would stumble over something unexpected and ugly.

Now her memory was playing with her again, throwing something else in her path. Five-one-five. Five-one-five.

“We’re going to say it was a mix-up,” her father told Bert. “Five shots on the fifteenth. Five-one-five. Someone got confused, put out the wrong number. And we’ll substitute out five-oh-five, say it was a typo.”

“People will get pissed. You could have a f*cking riot on your hands.”

“They can play the state lottery if they don’t like how I run my game. Five-one-five will ruin us.”

I was sitting at the dining-room table, doing my homework. I would have been eleven, at the end of fifth grade. No, sixth, because Mama sneaked me into school early, the fall I turned four. She wanted Rachel and me to be three grades apart, not two, and with Rachel’s spring birthday, she needed to either hold her back or push me forward, and everyone saw even then that there would be no holding Rachel back. Mama had this weird theory that we would be better friends if we had more distance at school. And we are very close, which is wonderful. But we might have been close anyway. I didn’t understand for years what happened, that Daddy changed the number because too many people had played it and they couldn’t cover the payout.

So her father’s game was rigged, too.

Rachel may have been the family intellect, but Linda was no slouch. She had gotten into Duke on scholarship, only to find herself profoundly homesick. She had thought she wanted a new start, but found it wearying, trying to create a history that didn’t invite questions. She transferred to Goucher in the middle of her sophomore year. Bambi had been upset about that, far more upset than Linda could understand, given how much money was saved. Linda was happier at Goucher, too, where people knew just enough not to ask too many questions. Her only problem was that life as a commuter student at an all-girl school didn’t make for the best dating life. She volunteered for the Anderson campaign because some girl said it would be a good way to meet men.


She had met a lot of men, many of them keen to date the pretty new volunteer, some of them even suitable, if not Greg and Norman. But Linda, who had come looking for dates, ended up caring only about the candidate. Not that she ever got to speak to him or spend time with him. She met him only once, the night of the debate, when he was introduced to all the local volunteers. She was not invited to the dinner afterward, nor did she expect to be. But she was thrilled to wake up the next morning and discover that the received wisdom was that JBA had won the debate. A giddy day or two had followed before she realized how meaningless that victory was.

She had been so na?ve about politics. Lord, she hadn’t even understood how the Electoral College worked, and it still made her angry to see the election called with less than 100 percent of the vote in. She had thought a presidential race was one in which two men—three in this case—came before a nation and explained their positions and then the best man would win. The game was rigged. How could a man like John Anderson not get more votes? Her mother had said Linda was throwing both her vote and her time away, but Linda didn’t feel that way. In fact, she had believed so profoundly in the importance of her vote that she had committed a felony this morning in order to cast it.

It happened like this. Linda, usually the most organized of the Brewer girls, had registered to vote in North Carolina when she enrolled there in 1977. She had gone to a school meeting in the fall of her freshman year, in which it was explained that the town-and-gown tension in Durham could be improved if more students registered to vote, demonstrated a commitment to the community. So she meant to register there. When she moved back home a year and a half later, it hadn’t been an election year so there was no urgency to register at all. Caught up in the Anderson campaign this summer, she had quite forgotten that she had never registered in her home state. Yes, she saw the irony in forgetting to register when she had been sitting at a card table at the mall, signing up other people.

Embarrassed, she didn’t dare confide in anyone on the campaign. Instead she had asked her uncle Bert, who told her that all she had to do was swear on a form that she was a registered voter at her mother’s address, that she had sent in the application earlier this fall.

“It is a felony,” he said. “But it’s not like there’s going to be a recount that forces them to go over all the ballots.”

“It might be closer than you think,” she told Bert. He laughed and ruffled her hair, as if she were still eleven or twelve.

But this morning, only eighteen hours ago, Linda still believed that anything was possible, that improbable victories could be pulled out in the final moment of any contest. During the Nixon years, people had spoken of a Silent Majority. Reagan had invoked the term during this election. But the true silent majority, in Linda’s mind, were young people like herself. Oh, they made a lot of noise, but they forgot to follow through with the actions that really counted. It almost didn’t seem right for people over the age of sixty-five to vote. They had so little time left. Shouldn’t the policies affecting the future be set by candidates chosen by those who had to live in the world longer? If you were going to weight the importance of certain states, why not weight individual votes? When Linda was eleven, a film called Wild in the Streets had shown up on a second-run bill at the Pikes Theater and it centered on the nation’s first twenty-two-year-old president, made possible when the voting age was lowered to fourteen. Linda had gone to see it three times. (The lead actor was very handsome.) Crazy, yes—but it made more sense to her than the Electoral College. She wanted to pound her fists on the bar, say It’s so unfair.

Instead, she asked Victor for another white wine.

A man came into the bar. He glanced around in confusion, taking in the barely audible television, Greg and Norman wolfing down appetizers, Linda staring into her wineglass.

“Are you still open?” he asked. “Is this a private party?”

Although the question was addressed to Victor, Linda answered. “It’s clearly not a party,” she said. “As for private, anyone is welcome, but do you really want to be a part of this group?”

“Did someone die?”

The man was in his twenties, Linda guessed, with the most amazing eyelashes. He has eyes like a giraffe, she thought. Linda liked giraffes.

“Just my hopes and dreams.” She meant to sound blithe, devil may care, but her mouth crumpled, ruining the effect. “We all worked on the Anderson campaign.”

“Well—” He cast around for something to say. “Well,” he repeated. “Good for you. You did something you believe in.”

“But we didn’t change anything,” she said. “We didn’t even matter.” While it would have been awful to be the spoiler, to be blamed for Carter’s loss, it was worse, she decided now, to have had no effect at all.

“You don’t topple giants the first time out, despite what Jack and the Beanstalk, or even David and his Goliath, would have you think. It takes years of work.”

His kindness felt patronizing, as kindness often can. Linda drew herself up haughtily. “Really? Have you climbed any beanstalks lately?”

“I’m a public defender,” he said. “Which is as close to being Sisyphus as any mortal might ever know.” A sweet smile. “Don’t be mad at me.”

“Who says I was?”

“I can’t seem to get on the right foot with you. Should I go out and come back in again?”

And with that, he walked out of the bar, then returned, hopping on one foot.

“I’m a unipod,” he said. “I’m here to audition for the role of Tarzan.”

“You stole that,” Greg said. “Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.”

But Linda had to laugh. Her father had tried such stunts when Bambi was stewing. No, not stewing, quite the opposite. Bambi had gotten cold when angry with Felix. Very cold and quiet and grim. They called her the Frigidaire when she was angry.

Linda did a swift, familiar calculation—should she sleep with this man tonight? She had slept with exactly four men since she lost her virginity at seventeen, and she liked to think of herself as progressive, the kind of woman who took what she wanted when she wanted it, although it was a lot trickier since she had moved home.

No, not tonight. It might not be love at first sight, but she was in for the long haul if he was, she knew that much. Her next campaign, only with a lot more potential. She wondered how he would feel when he found out she was a college senior, living at home. She wondered what he looked like naked.

“I’m Linda,” she said.

“Henry,” he said. “Henry Sutton.”

By three that morning, they were making out in her car. It was hard to say who pulled back that first night. Both would claim later that they were waiting for a more genteel first time. That opportunity presented itself two weeks later, when Bambi went to New York with Michelle, Lorraine, and Lorraine’s daughter, Sydney. It was designed to be a whole Eloise-at-the-Plaza experience for the two girls, although Michelle, at seven, considered herself too sophisticated for both Eloise and five-year-old Sydney. If Linda hadn’t been so anxious to have the house to herself, she might have used Michelle’s antipathy to dissuade Bambi from such an extravagance. Her mother was good, most of the time. But in New York, with Lorraine, she would buy clothes she couldn’t afford, try to keep pace with her old friend, who was privy to Bambi’s difficulties. Maybe that was why it was so important to Bambi to try to hold her own with Lorraine.


But, for once, Linda forgot about everyone else—her mother, Michelle, Rachel, John Anderson, all the sad men she had to prop up. She even forgot about the phantom sister who had passed through the Lord Baltimore Hotel and may or may not have been Julie Saxony. For one blissful Saturday evening, she thought only of herself and what she wanted, opening the door to long-lashed Henry Sutton, who actually brought her a bouquet of supermarket daisies. She was mindful, as the door swung open, of the story of her parents’ courtship, how they had married less than eleven months after her father had found his way to her mother’s door the day after meeting her. And Linda had long ago deduced that she had attended her parents’ marriage in utero, not the cause of the nuptials, but a happy by-product of a progressive courtship.

There are worse ways to begin, she thought, lying beneath Henry in her mother’s bed, the only double bed in the house, taking care to cheat her face to the left so she would not be staring into her father’s eyes in the framed photograph on the nightstand.

Yes, they were very large and brown. She knew that. She knew that. But the man with her—he was gentle, a dreamer and idealist, someone who would never agree that the game was rigged. He probably thought she was a dreamer, too, given the circumstances of their meeting, but even as Linda was abandoning herself in this moment, she was also giving in to the pragmatic person she was meant to be. She would have to take care of both of them, she thought, circling her legs around his waist. She had to take care of everyone. That was okay; she was used to it. She remembered walking up the front walk, after the fireworks at the club. Her mother knew before they crossed the threshold. How had she known? Bert had taken Bambi to the side at the club, but Bert was forever taking her mother to the side over the last few months, since the indictment, then the trial. Bambi had run up the walk, thrown open the door, run from room to room, calling his name. “Felix? Felix?” There was no note, no reason to believe he was gone, yet Linda slowly began to see the details that made the case—the small gap in the closet so packed with suits, a drawer in his valet, opened and emptied of his best cuff links. Michelle was upset by their mother’s tears and shouts, so Linda put her to bed, singing to her as the little one cried, “Tummy hurts, tummy hurts.” She had gorged herself on ice cream and cake at the club. Then Linda and Rachel came into this very room and sat on this very bed with their mother’s arms around them. “He better be alone,” their mother had said, mystifying them. “Will we ever see him again?” Rachel had asked. Linda knew they would not.

“What are you thinking about?” Henry asked, tracing her jawline with his finger.

“The last time I saw fireworks,” she said.

And he kissed her, believing himself complimented.