The Up and Comer (8 page)

"Did you feel fine to drive?"

"Absolutely."

"Then what happened?" I asked.

"I started to drive home."

"And?"

"And along the way I went to change the radio station. I must have taken my eyes off the road, because when I looked up again I was heading right for a telephone pole. I tried to swerve back, but it was too late."

"How fast do you think you were going?"

"I have no idea," she said.

"Did your air bag deploy?"

"Yes."

"Was the car heavily damaged?"

"Fourteen thousand six hundred and seventy-eight dollars," she said, sounding out every syllable. "The insurance company's appraiser looked at it yesterday."

"There was no other car involved, right?"

"Right."

"How about anyone who saw the accident?" I asked.

"No. But there was this woman who came out of her house afterward, saying she'd heard the crash and all."

"Was she the one who called the police?"

"Yes. She called before she came out."

"Did she wait with you?" I asked.

"Part of the time. She said she had a baby inside that she had to go back and check on."

"Did you say anything to her about having had a couple drinks?"

"Do I look that stupid?"

"You'd be surprised how often innocent people say incriminating things, Sally," I said. It was one of my pat lines for when I had to ask clients sensitive or downright insulting questions. What I neglected to mention was that guilty people also often say incriminating things. Nonetheless, I think she bought it.

I pressed on. "So the police finally arrive. One car, two cars?"

"One."

"One officer, then?"

"Yes."

"Now this is when the details really matter," I said. "What happened next?"

"The cop gets out of his car, comes over, and asks me if I'm okay. I tell him I am, just a little shaken up."

"Did you use those exact words?"

"I think so."

"Good. What next?"

"He asked me what had happened — no, wait
 
— he asked me for my license and registration, which I got for him. Then he asked me what happened, and I explained about reaching for the radio, you know, losing my bearings and all."

"Do you remember whether or not you actually said
bearings'?"

"I'm not sure exactly," she said. Suddenly she realized how it could've been a poor choice of words. "Oh, that wasn't too bright if I did say that, huh?"

"That depends. When did he ask you if you'd been drinking?"

Her hesitation was answer enough.

"Right after that," she confirmed, followed immediately by "Fuck!" It was loud enough to turn a couple of heads.

"Don't worry about it; it doesn't matter," I said to her. "The policeman asks you if you've been drinking, what was your exact answer?"

"I told him that I'd had one, maybe two drinks tops. After that, he has the nerve to ask me to walk a straight line."

"Tell me, what type of heels did you have on? High… medium… flats?"

"Medium."

"At least an inch, maybe?"

"Sure."

"You do the walk, how'd it go?"

"A little wobbly, to be honest, I was so nervous at this point."

"I don't blame you," I said. "Did he follow that by asking you to lean your head back and put your finger to your nose?"

"Exactly. I even thought I did that pretty well, but the next thing you know, he's telling me that he's arresting me for suspicion of drunk driving."

"Did he read you your rights?"

"Yes. Then the son of a bitch handcuffed me! Jack told me it was standard procedure, but, I mean, come on, isn't that a little much?"

"Yeah, I always thought that was a little excessive," I said. "Okay, he brings you down to the station. What happened from there?"

"More cops and paperwork, lots of it. Meanwhile, I keep asking to use the phone and they keep telling me, in a minute, in a minute. It was really ticking me off. Finally, I tell them I'm not going to cooperate any further unless I'm given my one phone call. How's that for chutzpah?"

"Not bad. Did it work?"

"You better believe it," she said. "I was on the line to Jack not a minute later. That's when he told me not to take the Breathalyzer, to have them take me for a blood test instead. You should have seen these guys' faces when I told them that. It was like who's ticking who off now? I loved it!"

I smiled. "What hospital did they take you to?"

"Westchester County."

"The emergency room?"

"Yes."

"And Jack met you there?"

"Right. He insisted on having the cops explain anything and everything to him. It was all his way of stalling. Though at that point, I was so tired of the whole thing I just wanted them to take the damn blood so I could go home."

"Speaking of that, who actually drew the blood from you?"

"Well," said Sally, "this one nurse was about to do it when all of a sudden there was this commotion out front. Apparently some kid had fallen out of a tree in his backyard and had just arrived. Head injury, internal bleeding, that's what we overheard them talking about. So we ended up waiting even longer. I asked Jack if maybe he hadn't pushed the kid out of the tree himself on the way over to the hospital to stall some more. I wouldn't put it past him. Anyway, this other nurse, a real old-timer, finally came by and drew the blood."

There were more questions though little else to be learned. Somewhere in between we ordered and ate, and it was only fitting that Sally's meal consisted entirely of three cucumber rolls. (Surely the calories expended on chewing alone outnumbered those in the food.) We were eating at Sally Devine's "favorite sushi restaurant," and it was a good bet that she in fact had never had the sushi there.

Last chance, Mr. Funt.

NINE

Click!
That was the sound I heard every time I tried to call Jessica in the wake of her storming out of the hotel room on me. As silent treatments go, she was off to a pretty impressive start.

By nature I was a proud and stubborn guy, rarely given to fits of groveling. Nonetheless, I was ready to apologize to her pretty much by lunch the day after our spat, a lunch that found me having turkey on wheat instead of Philip on Jessica. That alone was reason enough to abort all standing principles and beg for forgiveness. Had Jessica been a friend, a co-worker, or even Tracy, you can be sure that I wouldn't have been the one to give in first. My brother would undoubtedly back me up on that.

As kids, Brad and I used to have these phenomenal staring contests across the dinner table. While my mother would be clearing the dishes and my father heading for the television, the two of us would be engaged in complete eye-to-eye combat. The rules were simple: first one to blink lost. And the results were always the same: I won. Not that that deterred Brad. My younger brother was a stubborn little bastard and kept challenging me night in and night out. What he never caught on to, however, was that I was even more stubborn. Way more. At first our parents didn't mind the contests. Given all the potentially unhealthy ways that sibling rivalry could have played out, they must have considered this one to be pretty harmless. That is until one day they happened to notice that Brad had developed a nervous twitch in his right eye. After that, all staring contests were strictly forbidden.

Late afternoon. Returning from my fun-filled lunch with Sally Devine, I went over messages with Gwen. Nothing urgent. I went inside my office and promptly closed the door behind me. I dialed the number yet again. Two rings.

"This is Jessica," she said.

"Jessica, please don't hang—"

Click!

I slammed the receiver down and cursed. It occurred to me that perhaps I was going about this the wrong way. A new tactic was definitely in order.

* * *

"Red or white?" Tracy asked, greeting me at the door that evening with a bottle in each hand.

"Both," I told her.

"That bad, huh?"

"No, I'm all right, just a lot going on."

"You're working too hard," she said to me. "Go change out of your suit; dinner's ready in five minutes. You're going to be my guinea pig again; I found a new recipe today."

Tracy was always finding new recipes. It might have had something to do with the fact that she owned every cookbook and subscribed to every food magazine on the planet. She didn't have merely one
All
New
Joy of Cooking,
she had two. The reason, she explained, was that one was for making notes and comments in, the other for show. Although I didn't know exactly who she'd be showing the clean copy to, it all seemed to make sense in a weird Tracy-logic kind of way.

I retreated to our bedroom and undressed, opting for a pair of sweatpants and an old Dartmouth "Big Green" T-shirt. Much better. My four years in Hanover were right in the middle of the big debate
 
over whether
 
or not
 
the
 
college should cease using the Indian symbol. While generally indifferent on the issue, I did recognize that Big Green as an alternative wasn't exactly up there with the Crimson Tide or the Blue Devils when it came to the palette of color-based college nicknames. Still, that didn't prevent me from lifting the T-shirt from my sophomore-year roommate. Not that he'd care much nowadays. After graduation he founded a client-server software company and took it public. He could buy the same T-shirt, only with me in it, twenty times over.

When I joined Tracy back in the kitchen, she had chosen red for me. A '93 Castelgiocondo Brunello. (The '90s and '95s were reserved for company.) I took a sip and settled onto a bar stool.

"So how was your day?" I asked.

"Fine," she answered while slicing a cucumber for a salad. "Errands, gym, the usual. Oh, my mom called. She wanted to know if we'd like to get together with her and Daddy this Sunday out at their place for brunch."

I stopped myself. The thought of driving out to Greenwich to spend the afternoon with my in-laws usually had me trying to drum up some excuse — work-related more often than not — as to why I couldn't make it. As it was, though, the chance for a seamless segue was too good for me to pass up.

"Sure, sounds good," I said casually. "Hey, you know, speaking of getting together, it's been a while since we've done that with Connor and Jessica, hasn't it?"

"I don't know, I think so," Tracy said. "Will you get me the Gorgonzola out of the fridge?"

I got up off the stool and walked over to the Sub-Zero. I got her the Gorgonzola. "Tell you what, why don't you call them and see if they're around tomorrow night?" I said.

"Too short notice," replied Tracy. "Besides, I thought just you and me would do something."

"How about Saturday night, then?"

"We've got that party at the Wagmans."

"What about next weekend?"

"Okay, sure," Tracy said with a shrug. "I'll check with Jessica."

And like that, I had employed my new tactic. It was remarkably simple. If I couldn't resume my affair on my own, the least I could do was enlist the help of my wife, right?

Man, was I playing with fire.

Tracy's dinner turned out to be an almond-crusted pork tenderloin with dried cranberry-apple conserve, courtesy of
Cooking Light.
Surprisingly pretty good. Apparently after every recipe in the magazine they listed the calories and other pertinent data for the health conscious, such as fat, protein, and carbohydrates. As we were eating, Tracy delighted in telling me what all the corresponding grams and milligrams were. The ridiculous thing, of course, was that afterward, we proceeded to devour a pint of Haagen-Dazs butter-almond. Passing the container and an oversized spoon back and forth to each other in front of the television, we engaged in no discussion of nutritional information.

* * *

The following night found Tracy and me at Barocco down on Church Street. I liked it because of the food (Italian). Tracy liked it because it attracted a lot of artsy types. Black clothing, rimless eyeglasses, foreign accents. Between people-watching, she filled me in on her day, the bulk of which was spent looking at pictures of potential houses to rent out in the Hamptons. All I really wanted to know was whether or not she had talked to Jessica about having dinner. I didn't want to ask and appear overly anxious, so I waited patiently for her to tell me... and waited… and waited. Finally, while our plates were being cleared, she got around to it.

"Did I tell you that I spoke with Jessica today?" she asked.

"I don't think so."

Tracy started to giggle. She did that when she had good gossip, or "whisper," as she often called it.

"What's so funny?" I asked.