The Company You Keep (30 page)

I felt my breath literally catch. Then I stood and stepped to the right to try to see her through the crowd. Now I could see the flat of her stomach and the slim jeaned legs, crossed, ending at leather sandals over bare feet.

I must have been staring, for she suddenly looked up, meeting my eyes directly, holding my gaze across the crowded room with a puzzled expression, as if trying to think if she knew me. And I, suddenly entirely at sea, found myself crossing the room.

3.

Now, as to my initial appraisal of Rebeccah’s attractions, closer inspection showed that I had, if anything, underestimated them. They were, I felt strongly, unusual, as if the classic American handsomeness of her father had been mixed with some rogue gene that screwed with the symmetry,
the regularity of her features just enough to change her from pretty to beautiful. The man she was with, on the other hand, was so handsome, so clean-cut, and—when he stood up—turned out to be so broad-shouldered that I did not think he could appreciate the beauty of this woman. In fact, I was morally certain he could not.

Whether I was right or wrong to approach the daughter of my interviewee, that’s a more difficult question, and has to do with the dubious ethics of my chosen profession. But as to my method of starting a conversation with her, I don’t think I was that off. When you are as beautiful as Rebeccah, you tend to see a lot of different kinds of introductions, and certainly mine stood out. Come to think of it, you probably are as beautiful as Rebeccah, and know exactly what I mean.

Approaching her, I reintroduced myself, reminding her that we had met with her father that afternoon. She in turn introduced me to the man she was with. I disliked him immediately and with intensity. He, after a look at my face—admittedly unshaven, and probably showing both fatigue and drunkenness—seemed barely able to conceal amusement, and decided to go to the bathroom. At which point I, uninvited, sat in his chair.

“I had a great talk with your dad this afternoon.”

“Did you?” Rebeccah regarded me with curiosity. “What about?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“No. Why should he?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was interesting.”

“I’m sure he did too. I’m sure he found it interesting all thirty-five times he’s spoken to reporters about Jason Sinai this week.” At this, she delivered me a wide-mouthed, white-toothed smile.

I watched her, rendered temporarily speechless by the smile. The waitress came, and I ordered another drink, wondering how drunk I was. And perhaps my next move was in fact an indicator of inebriation. I turned to her solemnly and let my voice drop nearly to a whisper, so she had to incline her ear toward me to hear. “I’m not a reporter, man. See, I was with him underground in the sixties. Jason, I mean. We blew up the Haymarket together. Brought the war home to the honky moneyfucking pig, man.”

At that the wondering ovals of her eyes suddenly, in a flash, collapsed into dancing ellipses, and her mouth split into a smile.

“Bullshit. You’re no older than me.” Her voice had then, as it has now, the inflectionless clarity of a midwestern accent.

“Am so.” I put it in a five-year-old’s inflection. “What are you, a junior?”

“Senior.”

“See? I’m a real working person.”

“Oh, yeah? Working at what—besides being a pain in the ass.”

“Right now? Not much. Well, okay, I admit it, I
am
a reporter.
Albany Times.
”

“Is that right?” She was still smiling. “Where’s Albany?”

I didn’t answer that. “See, that’s why I came to see your father.”

“Uh-huh.” The clean-cut man was coming back, and Rebeccah gave me her wide smile again. “So nice to talk to you.”

“Um-hmm.” I stood, smiling agreeably at the man. For a moment, the thought of sticking my tongue out seemed an actual possibility. Then, just before leaving, I leaned down to Rebeccah and spoke quietly into her ear. “You’re aware that you’re out with a total bozo, aren’t you?”

With which words I left her, and returned to the bar and the business of getting blind drunk.

Fortunately, the crowd was by now too thick for me to continue observing her.

Although, looking at her or not, I’m not sure I can say that she ever really left the focus of my inner eye again, that evening or in the weeks to come.

4.

One difference between Rebeccah Osborne and me has to do with how we each woke up Monday morning. For my part, I had a splitting headache and a mouth so evilly dry that I thought seriously about dehydration. Also, I was filled with remorse. Rebeccah, on the other hand—as she was later to tell me—woke as she always did, luxuriantly in her sun-flooded bedroom on East Ann Street, stretched out in the full
length of her bed, and thought curiously about her day. I, covering my head with a pillow, felt my aloneness keenly, and wondered how hard it could possibly be to pick up a woman, no matter what woman, somewhere in this town. Rebeccah, as the night before reassembled itself, felt on balance glad she had sent her date back home—he was too damned handsome to go to bed with too quick, if at all. I, when I finally got out of bed, swung my legs to the ground, buried my face in my hands, and coughed for perhaps thirty seconds, clearing my lungs for the first cigarette of the day. Rebeccah, in contrast, was by then already out doing her daily four miles along the Huron River.

Fortunately, being hung over wasn’t an altogether unknown experience to me, and therefore didn’t keep me from doing what I had to, which was to take a mouthful of aspirins, drink a dozen or so cups of coffee from room service, smoke a few eye-opening cigarettes while padding around the room in my bare feet, and finally drink half a single of vodka from the minibar. Then I left immediately for Traverse City, a five-hour drive.

Long enough to allow me to piece together all I could from the night before, which was not much. I wasn’t quite sure what Rebeccah and I had talked about during our conversation, but I was fairly convinced she had not given me her address, her phone number, or an invitation for dinner. Still, there was something tugging at me about her, and although I certainly tried to shrug it off, it didn’t seem to want to go away.

I arrived at the Traverse City FBI office just before lunch—so closely before, in fact, that Osborne had already left. Apparently he had left word that he was expecting me—it made me worry that we’d been meant to eat together, and I’d forgotten—because they seated me not in the waiting room but in the little lunch area, where I could drink weak coffee and eat from a vending machine. What I couldn’t do, however, was smoke, and as the lunch hour ticked by, that became a more and more imperative need. In the end I asked for, and received, permission to make my way through a little communications room with a back door open to a little rear parking lot, and stood at the door smoking, while I listened to radio reports coming in from the field in the room behind me.

All that came of the waiting, however, was being there to overhear Osborne radio in that I was to be told he was being kept away by a murder investigation, and discouraged from returning. And whether simply by his voice or by a more obscure association centering around the rejection, I remembered what had been evading me earlier: Osborne had said his daughter worked in a diner in town.

Back in Ann Arbor that evening, without ever quite pronouncing to myself what I was up to, I liberated—or expropriated—a yellow pages from a phone booth and, guided by the Restaurants section, began a leisurely tour of the town. It was not until an hour later that I reached the first of the two entries under
F
and turned up outside a tiny corner diner close to the bar I had been in last night. The place was crowded, but nonetheless, through the window I could see Rebeccah working behind the counter.

For a time I sat and watched her through the car window: in a sleeveless T-shirt again, her strong shoulders steady as she took two overloaded plates from one end of the counter, next to the cook, and carried them smoothly, the weight on her hips, to a table. Her hair was up again, this time under a baseball cap, and while the oval of her head was so pronounced as to be nearly absurd, the length of her neck and slope of her shoulders obviated any suggestion of ungainliness. She was, I thought again, like a well-muscled swan, a combination of grace and strength that at the moment struck me as virtually impossible. It was, I thought to myself, a beauty so particular that no one in the world could possibly appreciate it to the degree that I did. And that, I know now, is a typical attribute of great feminine beauty: to make young men feel that only they are good enough, or sensitive enough, or in love enough, to understand.

At length I got out of my car and walked hesitantly into the little diner, without any clear idea of what I was doing. Inside, the noise was that of a party. There was an empty seat at the counter, which I took. Then I waited, watching as Rebeccah moved surely and definitely up and down the small restaurant—clearly she was the only waitress, and clearly she knew what she was doing. She did notice that a new customer was in—on one trip, passing by with more of the diner’s signature
overladen oval plates, she dropped a menu in front of me and asked if I wanted coffee. She did not, however, seem to notice who I was, which gave me the leisure to study her face in search of what it held, exactly, that made her so different from the superabundance of sun-bronzed, blond, pretty college girls that filled this, like any campus town. It was, I finally decided, that although her bearing was so American—the blond hair, the well-exercised body, the white teeth—there was also a somehow un-American, nearly Slavic cast to her face: the brown eyes, the slightly crooked smile.

Still without noticing who I was, Rebeccah took my order, and I continued my inspection while I ate, slowly. So slowly, in fact, that by the time I’d finished, the dinner rush was over, and the crowd in the little diner had thinned considerably. Now Rebeccah was much more involved in clearing tables than serving customers, and her pace slowed, enough that she actually poured herself a cup of coffee, standing with her back to my inspection. It was an appreciative inspection. Still, I cut it off finally by speaking to her, conversationally, as if continuing a discussion that had been going on all evening.

“So. You lose the bozo?”

“Which bozo?” She answered without turning.

“The one you were with last night.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She turned now and put her coffee on the counter in front of me, inspecting my face carefully. “I thought you looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite…remember you.”

“Um-hmm.” Holding my coffee cup in two hands, I gazed directly at her, feeling my stomach turn. And as I felt that, I also felt a sense of abandon. “So did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Lose the bozo.”

She answered with a smile of her white teeth. “You know, you were so right. Till you pointed it out, I just didn’t get it. I thought he was a Rhodes scholar, about to get a law degree, and squash team captain. Good-looking, too. Then you showed up and cleared it all up for me. What a bozo.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“Always glad to help.”

She widened her smile. “Um-hmm. See my dad today?”

“Nope. He blew me off.”

“Boy. Maybe he doesn’t know where Albany is either.”

I let my face show suspicion by deepening my frown and squinting. “Well, I doubt that’s it. I think there’s more to it than that. Much more.”

And now, at last, before my gravity, Rebeccah stopped smiling, as if something serious were going on. “Is that right? Like what?”

“Like, outside a few undergraduates writing earnestly for the college paper, no one gives a fuck about Jason Sinai.”

It was my turn to smile now, widely and innocently, and Rebeccah’s to frown.

“Well, you sure seem to.” Her concentration now was steady, and her big lips had settled into seriousness.

Not wanting to say what was on my mind, I shrugged, and Rebeccah, in response to a call from the cook, moved down the counter. As she did so, I suddenly remembered Osborne’s shrug from the day before.

In a moment, however, she was back with a plate of food, which she set in front of me and began to eat from, still standing behind the counter. She spoke with nearly complete uninterest. “So what are you doing here? I mean, your paper must think there’s a story to send you here.”

The question—a good one—made my stomach sink. And for lack of a better answer, I told her the truth. “Kind of. If you want to know the absolute truth, I’m using my vacation for this. And paying my own expenses. My editor thinks my talents would be better used covering the local 4H show.”

“You mean, you’re so obsessed by this story, you’re doing it on your own dime.” She seemed actually impressed by this—to me—depressing admission.

“Um-hmm.” Buoyed by her interest, I lit a cigarette. Then, noting her expression—she stared at me blankly, a forkful of food hanging in the air—I put it out again. With a nod, she let the fork finish its voyage to her mouth.

“Oh. Why?”

“There’s a story here.”

“And that is?”

“Well.” Now I dropped my voice and leaned forward on my elbows. “See, I think there’s still a vast underground out there, waiting to bring a revolution against capitalism. I think Sinai’s going to strike, and strike soon. And this time, they’re going to go all the way.”

Whispering, I smelled perfume.

“I see,” she whispered back while chewing, and now I smelled tamari. “So you’re a wacko.”

“Not at all.” Leaning back, I laughed now, and saw that she was laughing too. “Hey, I’ll tell you all about it. Come have a drink when you’re done.”

“No way. But thanks.”

“But why?”

“Why? It’s Monday night. I have work to do tomorrow morning. The only place I’m going is home.”

“Where’s that? I’ll come over tomorrow with my Doors collection. You got a bong?”

Now she laughed outright. “No thanks. I work tomorrow.”

“Well, when are you free?”

For a moment, she studied me. Then she said: “We can have coffee Wednesday afternoon, if you’re sticking around that long.”