All That Was Happy (19 page)

“
It’s Beckie,” she said. “I realize
that no man is ever exactly Mr. Right--but this guy was rich, and
handsome--he was even a virgin. But it’s never enough, is it? I’ll
never be allowed to feel good about myself, will I?”

“
Hold please,” the voice
said.

“
Beckie?” Black’s voice, thick with
sleep.

“
Huntington is going to be a priest,”
Beckie said. “Last night, when I accepted his proposal, I had no
idea--now I’ve lost him forever. All I’m left with is his crummy
five million.”

“
Where are you?” Black said.

“
In my room at the Century Plaza,” she
said. “I’m here alone--except for Mr. Boopers, of
course.”

“
It’s 4 o’clock,” Black said. “I don’t
normally do this, but do you jog?”

“
Sorry,” Beckie said.

“
Then put on something you can ride a
bike in while I jog,” Black said. “I’ll be by in forty-five
minutes. I’ll want coffee when I get there. Tell them to make it
fresh ground.”

Beckie hung up the phone and rummaged through
the piles of shopping bags piled on the couch in her sitting
room--yes, the workout clothes she’d requested were there--a nice
pair of Reeboks and some sweats. She ordered coffee from room
service, changed into her sweats and sat before the window,
watching the pre-dawn show begin along Santa Monica Boulevard with
the first gleamings of the ever-increasing headlights which would
transform the lanes into a ribbon of light in another couple of
hours.

There was a knock on the door. The room
service waitperson arrived and artfully arranged the silver carafe
and coffee service on her table by the window, accepted a generous
tip, and left smartly. A moment later, another knock on the door.
Believing it to be room service returning, or perhaps Dr. Black
arriving early, her heart skipped a beat when she saw who it
was--Bernie, his big square face hanging a bit slack, albeit his
upper brow furrowed with tension, looking exhausted, and a bit
drunk, his dark blue suit rumpled, as though it had been slept
in.

“
That’s some shiner,” he said. “Your
boyfriend give that to you?”

Not waiting to be invited in, he simply
pushed past her, walked to the guest bathroom door and twisted the
handle.

“
The door’s locked,” he said. “Somebody
in there? Your new boyfriend, maybe?”

“
My dog’s in there,” she said. “The
door’s locked to keep the cleaning people from annoying
him.”

“
You never liked dogs,” he said. He
flopped on the couch, looking around, adding up the sum of the
existence she’d managed to acquire.

“
Nice suite,” he said. “I haven’t seen
these rooms since the Towel heads took over.”

“
How did you find me here?” she
said.

“
I’ve been having you followed,” he
said. His jacket fell open, revealing his nine-millimeter. Beckie
realized she’d left her own gun in the straw bag across the
room.

“
I could use some of that coffee,” he
said.

She nearly poured him a cup, then, realizing
she’d fallen into shock and was simply moving forward under
automatic pilot, caught hold of herself and moved back towards the
door.

“
Get it yourself,” she said.

“
Why not?” he said, pouring himself a
cup and adding cream and sugar from the service, after which he
helped himself to a miniature brandy from the mini-fridge, which he
uncapped and poured into the steaming brew. “It’s the New
Millennium,” he said. “Not many women do it all anymore--most of
them barely manage to make it to work on time, let alone manage to
keep the house clean. But being a housewife nowadays doesn’t mean
all that much--there’s no exams or previous experience required to
get the job. There’s no way to measure the performance of a
housewife in terms of how fast things get done, or how much of it.
There’s no time clock.”

“
You had me followed?” she said.
“You’ve been spying on me?”

“
I have,” he said. “And I must say it’s
been interesting. I should add that was some stunt you pulled on
Nolene yesterday, the way you walked in and pointed your gun at
her--It made her sick; I had to send her home--she thought she was
a goner. It really freaked her out. Did your boyfriend put you up
to it?”

“
He’s not my boyfriend,” Beckie said.
Her defense of her actions shamed her--she wanted to be screaming
at him, holding open the door and demanding loudly that he leave
and never come back, while at the same time cursing and reviling
him for his evil actions of the past six months and recent days.
But everything was happening as if to someone else. It wasn’t she,
Beckie, who was responding like such a frightened wimp. It was
someone she was dreaming.

“
Boyfriend, toy, whatever,” Bernie
said. “I guess spending all night at a guy’s beach house doesn’t
mean all that much anymore to the women of today--or maybe he
didn’t have what it takes to be your boyfriend?”

“
I’m not sure my lawyer would want us
to be talking together like this,” she said.

“
Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m sure she
wouldn’t. I heard all about your fancy woman lawyer from my
attorney. Apparently your lawyer has quite a reputation on the West
Side. You’re pulling out all the stops, aren’t you--picking a
lawyer so vicious even my pit bull of an attorney is
worried.”

“
This is all just a big game to you,
isn’t it?” Beckie said. “You haven’t given a single thought to what
I must be going through. You’re getting all that sympathy from Ira
and Leah, acting like the poor little hurt husband.”

“
I am the poor little hurt husband,” he
said. “I just spent the last twenty-nine years of my life with a
cold wife who gave me no children. If anybody should be hurt, here,
it’s me.”

“
You’re going to kill me,” she said.
“That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”

Bernie set down his coffee and opened his
jacket further, showing her the gun, it’s polished chrome housing
presenting to her eyes the prospect of the crisp, efficient
delivery of a violent, messy death. “Is that what you think?” he
said. “You think I came here to kill you?”

“
Isn’t it obvious?” Beckie
said.

The light beyond the window was changing to
what would have been the welcome familiarity of the dawn under
normal circumstances, but to Beckie it seemed that the newly
heralded Spring day was a harbinger of evil--the thought that she
might be seeing the light for the last time was terribly sad,
somehow. That her life was going to end soon, here in this hotel
room at the hands of the drunken man she’d been a wife to for
twenty-nine years was almost unbearable emotionally, so much so
that her emotions could not rise, could not play out, could only
whirl, faster and faster at her core, until all that was left was
the spinning of herself--of everything she used to be, was now, and
might have become-- into a smooth, hard ball of fear in the center
of her stomach.

“
You look a little pale,” he said,
rising and taking out his gun.

Chapter
34

“
Don’t be scared,” Bernie said. “I’m
not here to traumatize you--not the way you did yesterday to
Nolene.”

He held the gun away from her and ejected the
clip before racking the slide and ejecting the extra bullet in the
chamber. The gun now empty, he pocketed the clip and spare bullet
before returning the piece to his holster.

“
Why did you do it?” Beckie
said.

“
Do what?” Bernie said.

“
Why did you just hit me with the
divorce out of the blue--why did you try to take everything away
from me?”

“
I blew up,” he said. “I was out of
control for a little while. Everything was too much for me. When I
started seeing Nolene, I discovered a new world of passion I’d
never known before--but you know me--I’m Jewish--I don’t have to
tell you the guilt I was under. And the merger has been murder--we
lost our bank last week and had to take in another one, a big
Japanese bank, the kind your mother should have warned you
about.”

“
You kept it all to yourself,” Beckie
said. “You shut me out.”

“
I shut you out because of Nolene,”
Bernie said. “I was torn in two--she was going to have my baby--she
touched a part of me that was dead and made it alive
again.”

“
We could have worked it out,” Beckie
said. “Maybe we could have still had a child--there’s been so many
advances...I would have tried for you.”

“
I went off the deep end,” Bernie said.
“I wasn’t myself. I guess you might say I was a little out of my
mind. I got in over my head with Nolene and it just snowballed from
there.”

“
But why did you try to destroy me
financially?” Beckie said.

“
I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel bad about
it--but my lawyers told me that was the way I had to go. I was just
following counselor’s orders.”

“
You know, Bernie, I really didn’t need
any of this in my life. Is that what you think I deserved just
because I never bore you any children? I realize now I never knew
you. You were never the angry type--you were always somebody I
could depend on. But suddenly all that changed. It was like you
went through a doorway into another world--it was like I suddenly
no longer existed. When you’d come home at night, it was as though
you really weren’t there.”

“
I’ve been up all night thinking about
us,” Bernie said. “I’ve gone over everything a thousand times. I
know my behavior has been wrong. It’s just that for these past
twenty-nine years, I was carrying the whole world on my shoulders,
trying to solve everybody’s problems all the time, always putting
myself on the back burner--well, I guess I finally cracked. When
Nolene came into my life, I guess I tried to use her to make up for
all that I’d missed. At first, I tried to break it off, but instead
I just kept getting in deeper and deeper. She came to me one day
and said she thought she might be pregnant and at that moment, we
both decided we wanted to have the child.”

“
Is she pregnant?”

“
As it turned out, no,” he said. “It
was just a false alarm.”

“
Do you love her? Do you still want her
to have your baby?”

He walked to the window and stared out at the
city below them.

“
I want us to patch things up,” he
said. “I got caught up in something that was too big for me to
handle, but I’ve never stopped loving you. I’m dropping the
divorce--I want you to come home--I’ll do whatever you
want.”

He turned to her, the tears running down his
face and dripping from the lenses of his thick glasses. He knelt
down, his head bowed, his arms outstretched.

“
I know you don’t love me the way I
love you,” he said. “I know you never will. But I’m reconciled to
that. I know I can never fully make up to you for what I’ve
done--but please let me try. Beckie, I’m begging you--please don’t
throw away our twenty-nine years together. Please take me back. I
want to come home.”

“
We’re not the same two people we
were,” Beckie said. “I’ve changed and so have you.”

“
We can start slow,” he said. “I’m not
saying we have to go right back to playing house together. Perhaps
we’ll just work on being friends again--do you remember what that
felt like? We can take walks on the beach the way we used to.
Perhaps we can even take a holiday together, go to Vegas, or Paris,
or someplace.”

“
What about Nolene?” Beckie
said.

“
I’ve told her everything,” he said.
“She knows I’m trying to work it out with you. She’s upset, but
she’s agreed to bow out quietly if you agree to try and save the
marriage.”

“
That’s big of her,” Beckie
said.

“
Hey, Beckie, it’s me,” Bernie said.
“We’ve been through our share of rough times in the past. We can
get through this. I won’t rush you--you can have your own timetable
to make a decision--that is, unless you don’t love me enough any
more to try. If that’s the case, if you love someone else, then I
need you to tell me.”

Beckie was in a fog, her emotions running
wild and blind in the wake of Bernie’s misguided, off-base attempt
at reconciliation. They’d both been off in left field, he
discovering his passions and she discovering hers, both
encountering a fair amount of guilt and fear in the process until
the whole thing had turned into a nightmare between them. He’d
finally gotten around to the big issue--was there anybody else in
her life? True, the trust between herself and Bernie had dissolved,
but he appeared willing to go to great lengths to try being loving
again--she was boxed in by the pressure of twenty-nine years, by
the enormous power of the feeling that if somebody loved her enough
to humble themselves before her, and if that somebody else happened
to be the man you’d been married to for twenty-nine years, then she
had no choice but to try and attend to the business of repairing
and righting the wrongs.

“
We’re both emotional cripples,” she
said. “If we try again, there are no guarantees.”

“
Then you’ll try?” he said. “There’s
nobody else?”

She walked to the window. The city was awake
now. Any minute, the desk would call and announce Dr. Black’s
arrival. Bernie remained on his knees, his face twisted into a
parody of humiliation and imbalanced desires, the very sincerity of
his actions leaving her wobbly, like a top about to go out of
control.