Alexandra Waring (49 page)

She shook her head. And then she shrugged. “What’s there to say? I figured it had to be something like this. Not that you lost your money trying to help your brother, though.” She smiled. “I knew that you had to have done something to get DBS News started a year early. When I first came, you know, Langley hated Alexandra and I always got the feeling he thought she was responsible for some terrible corporate problem.”

Jackson sighed, smiling, leaning farther across the table. “Well, she was a pretty inspiring investment, I must say.”

Cassy laughed. “To sell your miniseries, I should say so.” She shook her head, smiling, looking at him. “Does Hargrave own all of it?”

“Two thirds now.”

“So you do have some ground to stand on when you tell your family.”

“A smidgen,” Jackson said, smiling at her.

“And Gordon has no idea?”

Jackson shook his head, still smiling.

“Well,” Cassy said, “seems like have my work cut out for me.”

“You still want the job?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she said, smiling back. And then, a moment later, she said, “Or do you think there might be some reason why I shouldn’t take it?”

His eyes were searching hers. “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”

“Uh, excuse me,” Alicia, Jessica’s secretary, said, appearing out of nowhere.

“Alicia,” Cassy said, straightening up.

Alicia leaned over to whisper something in her ear.

“Come on,” Cassy said to Jackson, quickly getting up.

Leaning back against the rail in the shadows of the bow, Jessica exhaled cigarette smoke in Langley’s face. Her dress, underneath the steward’s jacket, was pulled down to her waist, and her breasts were in Langley’s hands. She held the cigarette to his mouth—stabbing his cheek with it twice before finding his lips—and he shook his head and buried his face in her neck, falling forward against her.

She laughed, letting her head fall back, and she brought the cigarette to her mouth up over his shoulder, smoking to the stars, while Langley, in a state of half collapse, continued to feel her breasts.

There were whispers across the deck. Figures moved away, leaving three there in the shadows. Then, in a moment, they started across the deck.

Jessica flicked her cigarette away, blowing smoke, and let her head fall forward, chin thumping down on Langley’s shoulder. She squinted over Langley’s shoulder and then smiled. “Hello,” she said.

Jackson reached out to tap Langley on the back. “Lang—Lang,” he whispered. Langley made some incoherent sound, more determined to feel Jessica’s breasts than ever.

“I need to talk to you, Lang,” Jackson whispered, taking hold of his right elbow and gently tugging. “Over here, Langley, I have to talk to you over here.”

“What?” Langley said, lifting his head from Jessica’s neck.

“Oh, just
go
,” Jessica said, giving him a shove.

Langley tripped and nearly fell; Jackson caught him and righted him, pulling him to the other side of the deck. Jessica stood there, jacket open, her breasts exposed, squinting, closing one eye to see.

‘Jessica?” Cassy said gently, moving closer.

“Hello,” Jessica said, trying to lean back on the railing, but her elbow kept missing, slipping off.

“You must be cold,” Cassy said. “Let’s do up your coat and take you inside to get warm.” Cassy closed the steward’s coat over Jessica’s breasts and started to do up the buttons.

“Can I have a cigarette?” Jessica asked her.

“No,” Cassy said, finished with her coat and now pushing Jessica’s hair back off her face.

“Excuse me,” Jessica said, eyes wandering, unfocused.

“Yes?” Cassy said.

“Can I have a cigarette?”

“Let’s go see if we can find one,” Cassy said quietly, taking Jessica’s arm and looking back over her shoulder. “Denny?”

“I want a cigarette,” Jessica said, slipping down against the railing.

In a second Denny was on the other side of Jessica, holding her up. “Come on, Jessica, stand up. That’s it.”

Jessica looked at him, closing one eye again to see. “Do you have a cigarette?”

“You don’t smoke, Jess,” he said.

“Oh,” Jessica said, allowing them to lead her away.

Across the deck, Jackson was holding Langley while he threw up over the railing.

“She’s fine,” Denny whispered to Alexandra outside the stateroom. “She’s washing up. She’s not in a blackout anymore.”

Alexandra sighed, shaking her head. “And I’m told my assistant is drunk in another room around here somewhere.”

“Kate, right?” Denny said.

“Yes.”

“She’s in that one,” Denny said, pointing to a door down the hall. “But she’s just crying—maudlin, you know. Her boyfriend’s in there with her, so I’d knock first if I were you.”

“Thanks,” Alexandra said, continuing on. She knocked on the door, listened, knocked and listened again. Someone said, “Come in,” and she opened the door. Kate was lying face down on the bed, crying, while her boyfriend was sitting there, looking as though he felt pretty useless. “Hi,” Alexandra whispered. “Why don’t you let us talk for a minute, okay?”

He got up off the bed, seemingly eager to get out of there.

Alexandra closed the door behind him and then leaned back against it.

Silence.

Kate sniffed and then, cautious, raised her head to look.

“Hi,” Alexandra said.

Kate sniffed again, wiping the side of her tear- and mascara-stained face with the back of her hand, sitting up. Alexandra pushed off the door, went into the bathroom and came out with some tissues. Handing them to Kate, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Kate blew her nose and then, dropping her hand, sighed. Then she sniffed again and looked at Alexandra. “I’m sorry,” she said, eyes starting to fill again.

“For what?”

“I don’t want you to leave,” Kate wailed, falling forward to cry on Alexandra’s shoulder.

Alexandra smiled slightly, patting her back. “I’ll be back before you know it. It’s okay, Kate, it’s okay,” she murmured. “Really, it is. You’re over-tired and—”

“And why didn’t you tell me you were getting married?” Kate suddenly said, jerking away from her. “Before, I mean. Before this week.” She wiped at her eyes with the tissues. “Chi Chi said she’s known for months,” she added. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”

“No,” Alexandra said quietly. “How does it make you feel?”

The question seemed to throw Kate. She gave Alexandra a look out of the corner of her eye—like,
Oh, fuck you
—and blew her nose. Then she slammed her fist down into her lap. “It makes me feel horrible, that’s how it makes me feel. Like I’m some sort of lackey for you, like you don’t even like me.”

“But you know that I do like you, very much,” Alexandra said softly. “And that I care about you a great deal. And the reason why I didn’t tell you was because I wasn’t sure I was going to get married myself.”

“Chi Chi says Cassy knew you were getting married months ago.”

“Well, maybe Cassy did,” Alexandra said, “but I didn’t, and you can tell Chi Chi that from me. And I didn’t think there was any point in telling you that I was engaged if I didn’t think I was going to get married, all right? And in the meantime, I’ll have you know—you’ve known more about my life with Gordon than any other human being on earth. For heaven’s sake, Kate, you even know what kind of birth control I use—don’t you?”

Kate nodded.

“So I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings,” Alexandra said, her voice softening again. “I didn’t mean to. I would never want to.”

Kate had lost her despairing look and was quickly regaining her adoring one.

“And I’m going to miss you too,” Alexandra said. “But you’re going to have a very important job while I’m on the road. Otherwise, I’d take you with me.”

“But—” Kate said, getting a pained looked again.

“But what?” Alexandra said.

“But I love you,” Kate blurted out, starting to cry.

Alexandra looked pained then too, debating, it seemed, what to do next. Then she smiled and said, “I love you too, Kate—that’s what close friends are all about.”

Kate looked at her, sniffing.

“You are my friend, aren’t you?” Alexandra asked her.

Kate nodded.

“Good,” Alexandra said, getting up from the bed. “Then why don’t you let Gordon and me drive you and Mark home tonight? Friends do that, you know—double-date.”

Kate’s face lit up. “You mean in your limo?”

“There it is,” Betty said, standing next to Gordon on the bridge.

“Looks strange from here, doesn’t it?”

They were talking about West End. There was the bright ribbon of the West Side Highway running past but, because of the high fir trees behind it, this close to shore all they could see of West End was the second floor, when they had hoped to see the square.

“I’m going to miss it,” Betty said, moving away.

“Me too,” Gordon said.

“Oh, look,” Betty said, pointing over the railing to the aft deck below. “Jessica’s back in action.”

She was sitting in a deck chair, Alexandra standing next to her, resting a hand on Jessica’s shoulder, both of them talking to Mr. Graham and Lord Hargrave.

“Never would have paired those two as friends,” Betty said, shaking her head.

“Alexandra has a thing for the walking wounded,” Gordon said.

“So I noticed,” Betty said.

The launches glided back and forth from the ship to the dock, the wakes spreading white over the black night water. The orchestra stopped playing and voices became hushed, reverent, for under the lamps of Riverside Park, under the glow of light from buildings on the ridge above, under the light of the moon filtering down across the water, it was so eerily beautiful. Eerie because it was New York City and yet it smelled only of ocean and of cool damp earth and of lush green trees, and there was the gentle ebb of the tide, the strange echo of their voices over calm water, and a very keen sense of being alone and alive in a place where no one else seemed to be.

“This, right now,” Alexandra said quietly, sitting in the launch across from Kate and Mark and Cassy and Kyle, “makes everything worth it.” She looked up at Gordon beside her, and he kissed her on the mouth.

Cassy turned away, looking back over the water to the ship. She wanted to see if she could see Jackson.

But she couldn’t.

And she felt awful.

33
After the Party
Part I: Rendezvous

“Psst,” said a voice from behind the rock wall bordering Riverside Park.

Uh-oh
, Cassy thought, pulling her shawl tighter around her shoulders and veering toward the Drive,
after all these years, I’m finally going to be a statistic
. She stood under a street light, happy to have the cars passing by, waiting to cross the four lanes to the residential side of the street where the doormen were.

When she climbed into Alexandra’s limo with Kyle and Kate and Mark and Gordon and Alexandra, Cassy had been so depressed she could have screamed. She was not up for men who had wives and children they loved in their summer houses in Maine; she was not up to watching twenty-three-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them; and she was certainly not up to watching a handsome young man nuzzling the neck of his fiancee. And so, before she did start screaming, she had asked to be let out at 79th and Riverside Drive, and they had waited there—Kyle and Kate and Mark and Gordon and Alexandra—until Cassy got a cab and was safely on her way. And then, at 81st Street, Cassy had climbed out of the cab to walk along the brick promenade edging the park, to think, to
breathe
(she couldn’t breathe in that damn limo, she had felt so upset), figuring that the dog walkers would be out. And the dog walkers were out, but there wasn’t one at hand at the moment, now that someone was hissing over the wall at her.

“Psst—hey,” the voice whispered.

God help me, a cordial killer
, she thought, willing the light to change so she could cross. And then she thought she could just toss her bag over the wall.
Right, Cassy, then he can afford to take a cab over later to return your wallet and kill you at home.

But then, at the same moment that she saw a man waiting to cross the Drive with what she hoped could somehow be a savagely fierce beagle, she realized that she recognized the “Psst—hey” voice, that it had sounded like
…

She whirled around to look at the rock wall. The streetlight was filtering down through the arborway of trees over the promenade, casting an intricate pattern of shadows over it. She took a step closer. “Jackson?” she whispered.

A glint of eyes appeared just over the top of the wall. “What are you doing walking out here at this time of night?” he hissed. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Oh, God,” she sighed, letting her shoulders slump. “It is you. I thought you were a mugger.”

“Excuse me?” the man with the beagle said, walking past her to the brick promenade that ran along the wall.

“Oh, hi,” Cassy said, smiling. “I was just talking to my friend over there.” She pointed to the wall. Of course, Jackson was no longer there. “Jackson,” she said sharply.

Silence.

The beagle was taking a whiz against the tree; the man was looking at Cassy.

“Psst—hey,” the voice whispered.

“A friend of mine is playing games behind the wall”

The man looked at the wall and then back at Cassy. “He could be dead by now,” he said. “Something coulda gotten him by now.”

“Jackson,” Cassy said, walking over to the wall. She started to lean over it but decided against it.

“What?” came a whisper.

“Would you come out of there?”

“What’s he doing behind there?” the man with the beagle said, coming over. “Is he all right?”

“I’m fine,” Jackson said, finally standing up, the white of his dinner jacket and shirt luminous in the night. “I was just following this lady here. You know what she did? She got out of a limousine, caught a cab, took it two blocks, got out and walked over here to get attacked and killed. What’s the matter with you, anyway?” he asked her.

“So you’re okay now?” the man asked Cassy. “I can go ahead and walk Mickey-Luck?”

She nodded.

The man and his dog went on their way.

“Bye, Mickey-Luck,” Jackson called softly.

Cassy watched the man and his dog stroll down the arborway, acutely aware of how hard her heart was pounding. The second she realized it was Jackson, something inside her head had clicked over into a dream world, where none of this was quite registering as real. And there was this peculiar feeling coming up over her shoulders, into her neck, this strange sensation that something was about to happen and that it was going to be very important. And then that feeling passed and she felt scared; she could feel it, the fear, a chill, right there, in her diaphragm, making her breath difficult. But mixing in with that fear was—coming fast—the adrenalin of thrill, creating something new, keenly alive, urgent, swelling her chest, making her chest feel tight. She turned back to him. “You were following me?” she managed to say.

“Yes, I was following you,” he said, putting his hands on top of the wall and swinging himself on top of it. “I didn’t want them to see me.” He jumped down to the other side, dusting off his hands, and walked over to her. “And I wasn’t sure if I wanted you to see me either.” And then he took her in his arms and kissed her very hard on the mouth.

Is this happening?
she thought, letting him hold her, letting him kiss her, not being able to respond yet.

He kissed the side of her mouth. He kissed the other side of her mouth. Then he” hugged her to him, enveloping her in his arms. “I don’t know what the right thing to do is,” he whispered. “But as soon as you left, I knew that wasn’t right. I knew I—” She felt him kiss the top of her head.

His arms felt wonderful. He felt wonderful. But her mind was racing back over what was wrong with this. Why she couldn’t do this. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she whispered.

His body tensed for a moment, and then he released her. “Oh,” he said, backing away a step, sliding his hands down her arms to take her hands. He looked at her—frowning—and then he dropped one of her hands and pulled her to walk with him under the trees of the promenade. “I keep forgetting that you don’t know,” he said, more to himself, it seemed, than to her.

Cassy felt elated suddenly, strangely, wonderfully elated, walking along with him like this, holding his hand, feeling the breezes of summer, walking through the moving nighttime shadows.

“That I don’t know what?” she asked him, thinking how nice his hand was, how large and warm it was.

“That I think I might be in love with you,” he said, looking straight, walking on.

There were no cars on the Drive at this moment, and the sound of their soles over the brick inlay seemed very loud.

“I’m pretty messed up, you know,” he continued after a while, still walking, still looking ahead, still holding her hand. “I’m not the sort of guy who’s done real well with love. I don’t seem to know how to do it very well. Love people, I mean. Something always seems to happen to them. And so I don’t think I’ve liked it for a long time. Love, I mean. I mean I do love people—there are a lot of people I love, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t seem to do very much good for any of us. What I mean to say is, Cassy,” Jackson said, abruptly stopping and turning to her, taking her other hand, “is that there aren’t any recommendations for somebody like me. I’ve tried and it didn’t work out. And I’ve had an awful lot of women in the last years. So, for someone like you, I don’t think you’d want someone like me, but I guess I wanted to find out if maybe there wasn’t something about you that maybe could make it not be such a disaster.”

Cassy didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that you scare me,” he said, frowning. He paused, swallowing. “But I’m more scared of not saying anything, of not doing anything, now, while you’re—before someone else—I mean, I know this isn’t a good time with your divorce and all, but then someone like you—some other guy will—” He looked away, searching for whatever it was he was trying to say, and then he looked back at her, anxious.

She smiled.

He smiled, nervous, put his arms around her and kissed her again.

This time Cassy slid her arms up his back to hold him too.

But then he backed away slightly, parting them, and he held her hands again, just standing there, staring down into her eyes, the wind rustling through the trees above them. Another dog owner went by; Cassy could hear the jingle of tags, though she couldn’t see anything but the pain in Jackson’s eyes, and all she could feel was the gentle warmth of his hands and how hard her heart was pounding because in this moment, in this very second, she did not think she had ever felt such an exquisite kind of pain as this.

She reached up to kiss him again, and he must have wanted proof that she really wanted to kiss him because he didn’t lean down this time, but just looked at her, his mouth parted slightly, his eyebrows flinching. “Come here,” she said, pulling on his neck. “Come down here so I can kiss you,” and he did, and she, holding his face in her hands, kissed him as warmly, as tenderly as she knew how.

When she stopped, they parted, and stood there, smiling at each other.

He closed his eyes then, inhaling deeply and holding the breath, and Cassy stepped in close to him, sliding her arms around his waist, laying the side of her face against his chest. He gently rubbed her back, sighing. “I don’t know what to say now,” he said.

“Please don’t say anything,” she murmured. “Please, let’s not talk at all. Not now.” She pressed her forehead against his chest and held it there, wondering how it could be that she had done something to deserve this. This that she thought she had long lost. This that she had told herself would never, could never happen to her again. That in one moment she could step out of the world and into this wondrous basking of healing, where nothing existed save the divine sensation of slipping away. Just gone from the world, born into another, into a place where it felt splendid to be alive, so impossibly, exquisitely alive in ways that could only register in the ache of her heart and the longing of her body, and not get analyzed to death in her mind.

Somehow they were standing at the wall, when or how they got there she was not aware, but they were standing by the wall now, looking over it. At this place, overlooking the glen, the wall dropped fifty feet down and so they were looking down through the trees into the park, seeing how the lamps glowed along the paths below, how richly green were the trees and grass. The forest smell was delicious.

He turned to her and she to him and in that second Cassy felt something fall down through her that made her almost ill with longing. He was kissing her again, holding her, but that was not enough now, and she opened her mouth further, in a kind of plea he seemed to hear, because he pulled her in so tightly that she could feel him—God, yes, this was wonderful—against her.

Another dog was being walked past them and they smiled a bit in the midst all of this deep exploration of mouths, but they did not give in to self-consciousness and continued, and when the sound of whoever faded away, Jackson’s hands slid under her, lifting her up and closer into him, making a slightly groaning sound as he did so, finalizing Cassy’s body’s decision about what it wanted to do more than anything else in the world right now. But then she heard that awful mind of hers starting to argue—
What do you think you’re doing? You can‘t do this! What about your work?
—and she wanted anything but that awful mind of hers to start up and so she tried to shut it down, only for it to conjure up Michael. Michael!

Cassy pulled away from his mouth—out of his mouth—inhaling sharply through a smile—oh, God, how good he felt against her—and pushed his shoulders back so she could look at him and make sure he was not Michael, not her husband, not the man she had been sleeping with for twenty-two years, but Jackson. And, thank God, it was Jackson, and it was Jackson who was now down into her neck, and she was thrilled it was Jackson, still not believing it was him, but knowing it had to be because it felt so different, was so different, and they were acting like fools—oh, yes; yes, yes; this was good—like teenagers, grappling with each other in the middle of Riverside Drive with people walking their dogs around them and cars going by and muggers probably ready to drop down out of the trees on them and, oh, God, Jackson practically had her off the ground, he was pulling her up so hard against him—

“We have to go somewhere,” she gasped, breaking away from him, pulling him over to the edge of the Drive. “We’ve got to go,” she repeated, waving her handbag at the cars. She looked back at him and saw that his face had fallen. “What? What?” she said, going back to him, holding his face. “We’re going to go together. I want to go somewhere with you.” She kissed one side of his mouth and then the other.

A vacant cab finally came down the Drive; they flagged it down and fell into the back seat.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“Where?” Jackson asked her, kissing her ear.

“Where are you?” she asked him, pulling his head around so she could kiss him on the mouth.

“Here I am,” he said, kissing her back.

“Gonna have to be a little more specific than that,” the driver said in the front seat, flooring it to his unknown destination.