Amanda Bright @ Home (31 page)

“That’s just what I mean. You don’t take anything I say seriously.”

“Look, I really don’t want to argue.”

“Besides, why do you need sleep?” Now her mother looked at her directly. “Why on earth are you so tired? I’m more than twenty years older than you are, I’ve spent the whole afternoon walking around the city, and I’m not collapsing from fatigue. What have you done today that justifies your being so exhausted?”

“I don’t need
justification
for being tired,” Amanda retorted, against her better judgment. “I’m just tired. It’s not like you’ve been with two little kids all day.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. I was a wife and mother long before you were, and not only could I manage that but a hell of a lot of other things as well.”

“Yeah, I know,” Amanda said, unable to disguise her irritation any longer. “Your generation was tougher than mine. I’ve heard all this.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. We
were
tougher. As women we faced barriers you can’t even imagine. We ripped them down for you. And now you take all that freedom for granted—or waste it. Look at you! Look at all the choices you have.”

“Not so many at the moment.”

“That’s ridiculous. You just refuse to see them. You just refuse to
take
them. Instead—”

“Instead what?” They were glaring at each other now. “Well, what? Go on, say it.”

“Instead you choose to do nothing with your life.” Her mother’s face was thrust into defiance, as if daring Amanda to contradict her. Amanda felt pushed beyond endurance.

“I
am
doing something with my life,” Amanda said at last, her voice barely rising above a whisper.
“This”
—she waved her hand to indicate her home and all it contained—“is not
nothing
. It is
something
.

“And it is more than you ever gave me.”

Her mother, trembling, returned her attention to her book.

Chapter Nineteen

“DIAPER DUTY.”

This was how Bob characterized his new assignment at the Justice department. His boss phrased it somewhat differently: Bob was being transferred to an important investigation into anticompetitive action by the Cuddly Wuddly Diaper Company.

“It’s big, Bob, it’s big,” Sussman assured Bob. “Look what you’ve got: false claims about absorbency. Attempts to force supermarket chains in poor neighborhoods to carry only the Cuddly Wuddly brand—you can imagine the financial repercussions for struggling single mothers. And there’s even an environmental side. Cuddly Wuddly commercials claim the diapers are manufactured from one hundred percent recycled paper products, unlike those of their competitors. Total crap, if you’ll excuse the pun. Obviously, some of this investigation overlaps with the FTC—you’ll be working with their people, too.

“Of course, it wasn’t an easy assignment for me to get for you, not that I wasn’t delighted to push for it. I gave you the highest recommendation. Really, I think this is a tremendous opportunity for you.”

It was an early-September evening, and Amanda and Bob were sitting on a bench outside an ice cream parlor on Connecticut Avenue.

“Are you sure it’s that bad?” Amanda asked. “From Frank’s description, it does sound important. We use Cuddlies, although I won’t anymore.”

“Maybe it’s important, but it’s not the same. It’s a comedown, there’s no getting around it. And all my expertise is in the high-tech industry. It seems a shame to waste it.”

“But what else can you do?”

“There are people who would be willing to pay for my expertise. Hochmayer, maybe Chasen. There are plenty of others, too.”

“You’d leave government then.” Amanda said this with less shock than she once would have.

“I’d certainly consider it.” Bob bit into the side of his cone. “Hell, there’s nothing really to keep me at Justice—”

“Except principle.”

“Yeah, right.” He took another bite. “We saw where that got me.”

“You don’t think Frank was motivated by principle? There was—there
is
—merit to the Megabyte case.”

“Sure there is. We wouldn’t have acted on nothing. And I’m sure the DOJ will come up with something. But loath as I am to admit it, I think there’s some truth to Frith’s complaint that the investigation was politically motivated. I mean, I’ve been pushing this case for two years. Why did they suddenly pick it up? You start thinking it through—Hochmayer’s and Chasen’s donations to the party, their friendship with the president, Senator Benson’s campaign debt … A lot of Frith’s competitors live in Benson’s state. And Frith has managed to make himself unpopular with practically everyone in Washington.

“I don’t know. Maybe, like the cynics say, it
is
just about payoff. And if it’s just about payoff, why aren’t I at least being paid off in the private sector where I could make some real money?”

“Because you
are
principled.”

“Yeah—but maybe I need some new principles.”

Autumn came upon Washington as it always does, in the guise of summer. September was indistinguishable from August; the heat, if anything, was worse. The arrival of fall was evident only in the suddenly purposeful stride of the government workers whose bosses had streamed back into town for the return of Congress.

For Amanda, though, the change of season was dramatic. In the space of three months, her entire personal landscape had been bulldozed and replanted. Gone were the familiar hedges and old trees and mossy stepping-stones. In their place was a field of fresh, overturned soil in which thin, tethered saplings and sparse shoots of grass struggled against opportunistic weeds of doubt. Her whole life seemed as yet an unrealized vision, as mysterious and unknowable as the baby growing within her.

Amanda was keenly aware that Bob, too, was trying hard to adjust. There are certain types of notoriety in Washington that command not even a single-line obituary in the collective political memory: Bob had been obscure—then notorious—and now almost as quickly forgotten. Perhaps Mike Frith’s denunciation of Bob in his Senate testimony might qualify him for a footnote in some future scholarly text, but among the people to whom the case mattered in the here and now, “Bob Clarke” was already a figure of little more significance than the fly that one afternoon briefly disrupted the composure of the Judiciary committee chairman by landing on his nose. In the antitrust division of the Justice building, manila files were passed along, nameplates on offices were switched, and a new Bob took over the old Bob’s desk and chair. For Amanda, however, the scandal left lingering, if perverse, benefits. On the children’s first day back at school, Amanda ran into Dr. Koenig in the hall. Amanda, who had failed to take Ben to a therapist over the summer, was ready with an excuse but to her amazement, Dr. Koenig did not even raise the issue. Instead she greeted Amanda with an ingratiating smile. “What an exciting summer you had!” and then—“I’ve heard Jim Hochmayer is an extraordinary man—quite the philanthropist!”

Bob, meanwhile, discharged his duties with all the passion of a postal clerk. Rather than race out the door in the mornings, he leisurely read the newspaper and took a second and sometimes third cup of coffee; it was Amanda, not he, who shouted at the children to hurry up with their shoes. When Bob returned home again, he would brush aside Amanda’s questions about what he had done that day and instead insist upon hearing about her ordeal with the plumber, the confusion at carpool, the funny thing Ben or Sophie had said. It was as if he were seeking comfort in those aspects of their lives that had survived unchanged, and this interest was in some ways more worrisome to Amanda than his arrogant indifference at the height of the Megabyte case. When she occasionally asked whether there were any “new leads” on the job front, Bob would evade this question as well. Only once did he let slip that Hochmayer and Chasen no longer returned his calls; the upside was that Sherwood J. Pressman no longer did, either.

Gradually the trees tinted gold, and the wind carried the first whiffs of autumn—smokiness, chill, dying things. Amanda’s waistline thickened around the nutshell of her growing baby. She had not heard from her friend Susie since their last meeting at the coffee shop. From a small item at the bottom of a television column, Amanda learned that Susie’s show had been canceled. A few days later “The Ear” reported that “Luscious pundette Susie Morris is moving to Los Angeles to pursue other options.” The item lewdly implied that those options were not entirely related to her career. Some weeks afterward Amanda glimpsed Susie at a bank machine. Amanda was in her car, waiting for a light to change. Susie stepped aside to tuck her wallet into her purse. The autumn sun glinted off her hair and for a moment she reminded Amanda of a maiden in an Old Master’s canvas, if an Old Master had ever painted
Woman Making a Withdrawal on a Street Corner
. Amanda felt a rush of forgiveness. She wanted to roll down her car window and shout to Susie. But why? Maybe it was not forgiveness but that universal impulse to rescue beauty—to save it from its curses and in doing so, to feel superior to it. Susie would not appreciate her pity, nor would she see Amanda’s forgiveness as anything but her due. The window remained closed. A second later, Susie vanished into a cab.

Amanda saw little more of her mothers’ group friends. She attended only one of their gatherings that fall, at Patricia’s house in Chevy Chase.

Patricia’s sour, mistrustful housekeeper led Amanda downstairs to the playroom. The formal rooms with their dusted tables and arranged cushions were evidently reserved for grander company; Amanda wondered why Patricia did not take the added precaution of erecting velvet ropes.

The playroom, however, was pleasant enough. Sliding-glass doors led to a garden and a pool covered, at this time of year, by a green tarpaulin. The children romped outside in the leaves, and Ben and Sophie dashed to join them.

Patricia offered Amanda her cheek to brush with her lips, but her eyes nervously followed Ben’s progress into the yard. “Just watch that Ben doesn’t climb on the
Winged Victory
.”

Patricia’s stone statue, which she described as “an authentic Beaux-Arts study” of the famous piece in the Louvre, had been shipped from a Paris flea market the previous spring. Patricia felt its deteriorated condition lent “a tragic, ruined” quality to her otherwise flat lawn, and her pride in it had inspired her to collect other pieces, including a scaled-down cast of Rodin’s
Thinker
and a doleful concrete bunny (“Meredith picked that one—she has quite a good eye”).

The other mothers greeted Amanda somewhat more warmly. Christine lounged upon a sofa with her legs extended to show off new suede boots.

“How’s Bob doing?”

“Fine, thanks.” Amanda refused a glass of wine.

“We want to hear all about it,” Kim said excitedly. “I can’t believe I was away when you made ‘The Ear.’ ”

“There’s really not much to tell. It’s over now.”

“But you had
Jim Hochmayer
to dinner!”

“He was seeing a friend of mine. That’s over, too. Patricia, would you mind if I got myself some water?”

“Go ahead. There are glasses above the sink.”

“You have to tell us
everything,
Amanda.”

“I had Bob and Amanda over during the Senate hearings,” Christine boasted, stroking one of her boots.

Amanda spent longer than she might have letting the tap water run cold. It was the first time she had ever possessed a story that piqued the mothers’ interest, but she could not bring herself to share it. She knew this was a violation of mothers’ group rules—the foremost being that you must share all personal information, no matter how private or trivial, and that of your husband and neighbors as well. It was not only that Amanda was reluctant to revisit the story, although she was, or to reveal Bob’s changed position at the DOJ—a fact that had mercifully gone unreported. It was, rather, that she had developed an aversion to exposing any aspect of her life to these women. Why this should have overcome her now Amanda couldn’t say; she only knew that for the first two months of the school year, she had avoided their company. She had not at first consciously intended to do so. But when she heard on her answering machine an invitation from Kim to attend their first postsummer gathering, Amanda created an excuse. Something else got in the way of the second meeting—and the third.

Amanda reseated herself with her glass of water.

“How was Portugal?” she asked Patricia.

“I can barely remember, so much has been going on. Too hot, I think.”

“Amanda,”
Ellen coaxed. “Don’t be modest. We won’t accuse you of name-dropping. Tell us about Jim Hochmayer.”

“He’s—an interesting man.”

“Don’t push her,” Christine said. “A good hostess doesn’t gossip about the people who come to her house.” She gave Amanda a chummy smile as if to suggest that in return for this protection Amanda would tell her everything later. “Let’s move on. What
I’d
like to know, Amanda, is what’s the inside dope on the Megabyte case. There hasn’t been much in the news lately. And since I own stock …”

“So do I,” said Patricia, in a way that hinted she would blame Amanda for any further devaluation.

“That’s because there hasn’t been much going on, I guess. I think they’re still trying to get more companies to come forward against Megabyte. But as you know—” Amanda was not sure whether to reveal what she was going to say next, but the anticipation of the other mothers was too keen. “Bob’s no longer on the case.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Oh, I thought I’d told you all this,” Amanda said lightly. “Frank Sussman promoted him to an antitrust case in another division. I think he was so pleased by Bob’s work on Megabyte …”

Ellen and Kim nodded credulously, but she could see that Christine and Patricia were buying none of it. Amanda sensed, in that instant, that she had lost the protection of her friend.

“I suppose that’s the problem with working for the government,” Patricia said, examining her nails. “The pay is low, and they’re always shuffling you around.”