Thief of Words (18 page)
“Not really. Not at first. I think she felt sorry for me. And she appreciated the effort. ‘You were very game,’ she used to say. Eventually, you’re right, something worked. We were married nearly a year later, on her birthday.”
“Oh. Today.”
“Today.”
Annie felt her heart drop, but Fred leaned forward and gave one of the feet propped on his desk a squeeze. “Let’s don’t get too melancholy. Lillian would hate that. It’s also a day of celebration. A celebration of the twenty-seven great years we had.”
“You’re lucky, you have no regrets,” Annie said, thinking of the twelve regretful years she spent with Trip.
“No regrets? Rubbish. I have a thousand regrets. We always wanted to go to Sicily and never did. There’s an artist in town, Linda Pepper; we both liked her work. I kept saying I was going to buy Lillian one of her paintings. It got to be a joke between us, the gift she never got. I never took her to Café Atlantico.”
“But Café Atlantico wasn’t even open when Lillian died,” said Annie.
“I know, Annie. I know.”
The two of them sat silently for a moment, feet up. Then Fred said, “I think your man has the right idea about regrets.”
“My man?” said Annie, a flush creeping up into her face. “Who’s that?”
“You know very well who I mean: the estimable Mr. DePaul. At least I presume he’s estimable. I like how he’s writing away your regrets with his messages. I thought about that this morning over coffee. I was thinking that I wished I had done that for Lillian. Then I thought, maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I should write a memory of Lillian and me on a date at Café Atlantico. She would have loved the tuna tartare on tablespoons.”
Fred got up and stretched his big hands toward the ceiling. “It’s too beautiful a day to be inside any longer,” he said. “I’m going for a walk. There’s a double-shot espresso somewhere nearby with my name on it. Don’t work too long, Punkin.” Then he gave her a sly smile and added, “Or you’ll regret it.”
M
om says I get to be flower girl. But I’m almost thirteen, you know, so couldn’t I be like a junior bridesmaid or something?”
On another day, Annie would have teased Becky about the apple not falling far from the tree. But how could she? A few hours before, she’d been playing the same fantasy.
“Becky, hasn’t your mother given you the Gloria Steinem lecture yet? ‘You can be anything you want to be’?” Annie said. “Go get her for me, okay, sweetie? And tell her I owe her a dozen sticky buns.”
Annie looked into the little black holes on the telephone receiver as she waited for Laura to pick up. She thought about Fred’s farewell and tumbled the word “regret” around for a while. It was a squat, ugly troll of a word that perched like a succubus over the sleeping past. Its silent cry of self-pity echoed forever.
Just a few weeks ago, Annie would have ridden such morbid thoughts to the most painful moments of her life. Once again,
Charlotte Commercial-Appeal
city editor Mark Snowridge would stand by her desk, nervously jangling the change in his pocket, and say, “Molitor’s piece is bullshit, Hollerman. I refuse to run one more column about cutesy license plates. How’s your Metro column coming? We really need it for tomorrow. But it’s gotta be into the desk in the next half hour.” Inevitably, she would answer, “No problem. It’ll be there.” And he would reply, as he always did, “You’re the aces, H. You always come through.” And, as always, she would feel the rising panic and see herself look at the clock, look back at her blank computer screen, and again reach for a folder filled with clippings of columns she’d gathered over the years.
But today she avoided the tour route from hell. Instead, thoughts of echoes and pasts took her to Nepal, where she and Jack had heard the sounds of a tiger and where she had been wrapped up by the shadows of Jack DePaul’s body.
She might have stayed in that rattan room for hours if Laura’s voice hadn’t come through the little black holes Annie was staring at so blankly.
“Annie? You there?”
Annie put the phone to her ear and said hello.
“A dozen sticky buns?” Laura said. “Jeez-louise, this is better than I’d hoped for. Okay, Hollerman, time to talk. Was I right?”
For the next twenty minutes, Annie gave Laura a blow-by-blow description of her night with Jack. “He’s terrific … he’s … he’s … terrific. Did I say he was terrific yet?”
In response, Laura had only one word to say: “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Annie said, “wow is right. But it ended all wrong. When we said good-bye, I was so tongue-tied I sounded like an idiot. I really need to write him something, but I’m not sure what. I can’t decide between honest mush or jaunty irony.”
“Hmmm,” Laura said. “I’ve been out of the game so long it’s like asking Bob Hope to host the MTV Awards. What about honest irony? Forget it, that’s an oxymoron. Jaunty mush?”
Fred’s conversation came back to Annie. “Laura, you’re a genius! Jaunty mush. I’ve got it. Four words. How about, ‘Great night. No regrets’?”
“Perfect. He’ll think you’re a genius. Men don’t believe in morning-after regrets.”
T
hat night, Jack caught a couple of innings of the O’s game on TV, then sat down at the Mac. As he signed on he considered the threesome at lunch. “She’s real,” Matthew had said. Well, he hadn’t raised a fool: Annie’s real, all right. Is she getting someone just as real in return? Do I want her to? Am I afraid to?
The string of question marks would have stretched on longer if his message list hadn’t contained something from ahollerman.
Jack clicked on and read Annie’s four words. “Great night, no regrets.”
He stared at the screen for a while, thinking about how past deceits seem to drag around behind you like Marley’s chains. Oh, fuck it, he said to himself, just write her what you feel. And he did.
Subject: Regrets
Annie,
I came back from One World about two this afternoon. (Matthew says you’re awesome. I agree.) I started to straighten up the living room and while I was putting the pillows back on the couch I found a pair of women’s underwear, a small hair clip, and a little tangle of wavy red hair. It made me laugh out loud. It’s been a long, long time since I had a couch in such disarray and strewn with a woman’s things. I closed my eyes and immediately it was last night, Jennifer Warnes singing, and you were in my mouth. I close my eyes right now and you are in my mouth.
You say ‘no regrets.’ We both know that’s not true. Of course you have regrets. And you wonder: Is he really what he seemed? Is there less or more there than meets the eye? Does he mean any of it? Was I a fool? How will it be when we meet again?
But it may be, and I hope it is, that the regrets are small and time will erase them. And after all, no matter what, we had the night. Electric, pulsating night. And I have the memory of your beautiful vibrating body.
I can’t wait till we’re together again.
Jack
B
efore Jack could take a second sip of coffee on Monday morning, Laura Goodbread was standing by his desk. All five feet ten inches of her loomed over him as he sat with the
Post
propped in his lap.
He slid his glasses down his nose with his index finger and looked up.
“Yes, Ms. Goodbread, is there something I can do for you? By the way, fine job on City That Reads.”
Laura sat down on the edge of his desk and leaned over to Jack. “We’ve got to leave employee-employer land for a moment, okay?”
Jack nodded. We’re going to Annie-land, he thought. No matter, he’d been there all morning himself.
“About Annie.”
Jack nodded again. For an instant, he saw a small redhead in purple silk and white lace. “What about Annie? She’s fabulous. Everything you said. I owe you for this. In fact, it’s going to show up in your evaluation under ‘Works well with editors.’ That’ll be a first.”
“Very funny,” Laura said. “But I’m serious. Don’t do anything stupid. She’s had enough hurt in her life.”
Jack pushed his glasses back up and focused on Laura for a second. “I don’t know what’ll happen. Who does? But I have no intention of hurting her. Why would I? Even a slime-sucking editor like myself can recognize a good thing when he sees it.”
Laura stood and smoothed down her skirt. “Good,” she said. “Now that that’s settled, what’s the word on Houston? Did you get them to spring for the trip? Remember, you owe me.”
“That’s against the rules, Goodbread. You can’t mix personal and professional favors. I’ll keep trying, but I wouldn’t be packing my bags if I were you. ‘Profits are off, the budget’s tight,’ is what I’m getting from the top.”
Laura scowled. “Christ, Jack, that’s total bullshit. We both know it. They’ve got enough money to send an army of editors to that circle-jerk management conference this week, but they can’t come up with four hundred bucks for me to go to Houston? You tell me which the readers would prefer: more smooth-talking editors or a story about a dying girl’s last chance?”
It wouldn’t have been smooth for Jack to tell Laura the truth: that the only thing he’d ever found interesting about the conferences were his nights with Kathleen and that Laura’s dying-girl story was compelling. She’d found a seven-year-old Towson girl with inoperable brain cancer. Her parents had taken out a second mortgage to pay for a trip to Houston so she could be treated by an alternative doctor specializing in pediatric brain cancer. Laura had planned to follow the family, report on the first treatment, investigate the doctor and the patients he’d saved (and lost), then later track the girl’s progress.
“It’s got everything. It could win us a Pulitzer,” Jack had told the editor when he’d tried to get money for the trip.
Not this year, the editor had said. We don’t have it in the budget. “If it were my paper,” Jack said to Laura, whose face was turning a visible red, “I’d send you. It’s a great story. That’s not the issue. I don’t control the money. I wish I did.”
“Yeah, well maybe you can take that up at your conference,” Laura said.
Jack watched her stride away, a printout fluttering to the floor in her angry wake. He knew he was facing a three-day pout, at least. He took the delayed second sip of coffee. It helped. Newspaper people didn’t bleed printer’s ink, they bled caffeine.
He had just turned back to the
Post
when a new shape loomed over his desk. This time it was Arthur Steinberg’s squat five feet seven inches.
“Arthur. My, isn’t this is a pleasant surprise?” Jack’s voice oozed false jollity.
“Not really,” said the ever-dour Steinberg, who had arrived even more rumpled than usual. His tweed jacket lacked a button and his shirtfront was seeded with shreds from a chewed cigar.
“What can I do for you, Arthur?” asked Jack, this time without sarcasm. Arthur never understood newsroom banter anyway. He took it so personally that Jack thought one day a pointed remark would drive him to the top of the Bromo Building with a rifle.
“I’m having trouble with this ‘Thief of Words’ story,” he said. “I haven’t found the names of very many plagiarists.”
“Damn. How many do you have so far?”
“Only fourteen.”
“Fourteen! Jesus, Arthur, that’s plenty. That’s more than enough. Stop already.”
“You sure?”
“Arthur, you’re brilliant as always,” said Jack. “Start calling these guys. If we get only five or six to respond, we’re fine. Look, I’ll be at a conference in New York tomorrow through Saturday. As soon as I’m back in the office next Monday, let’s sit down and go over what you’ve got. Gammerman’s in Pittsburgh right now doing the
Press
interviews. We should be able to wrap things up pretty quickly.”
“Okay,” said Steinberg and slouched away as if he’d just been reprimanded.
Jack watched his disheveled idiot savant head back to his pod. At least that was one story he didn’t have to worry about while he was in New York.
S
o that’s where her underwear had been. She was still chuckling about it Monday morning as she walked into her office with a vente latte in one hand and a bran muffin in the other.
Tucked between the cushions of Jack’s striped sofa.
She pictured his face as he fished them out. She couldn’t find them yesterday morning, but she hadn’t searched his apartment very hard; she liked leaving a piece of herself there. Plus, after a night like that, she liked feeling uncovered, unwrapped, and naughty. So she’d gone home underwearless, a dangerous woman on the loose.
Looking at it from the perspective of a mundane Monday morning, she was embarrassed about her “no regrets” e-mail. Jack had seen right through the macho bluster; he’d been right about every concern. Of course she had regrets. Of course she worried that she had been foolish.
His answer, by contrast, had been sweet and smart (and grew sweeter and smarter the more she compared the two). “It made me laugh out loud. It’s been a long, long time since I had a couch in such disarray and strewn with a woman’s things.”
How long? she wondered. And whose? The pyrotechnic woman? He’d talked about her at their first lunch, but gave no details other than that he should have known enough to stay away.
And when Annie had asked him about her on Saturday night, he’d waved his hand and said, “Ancient history.”
Yesterday, after concocting their four-word opus, Laura had filled her in on what she knew, but it was only speculation. Some turbo-bitch editor in the newsroom named Kathleen Faulkner, who looks like Sigourney Weaver and is married to a guy who works for the power company.
“Like a lineman?” Annie had said.
“Get real,” Laura said. “Like a flack.”
“She works in the newsroom? He sees her every day?” Annie said. “Is this something I should worry about?”
“Annie, Jack asked me to fix him up with someone, remember? That’s got to mean something. But who can tell how men’s minds work? Don’t worry, I’ll find out.”
