How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (37 page)

“I'm summarizing like ten minutes of back and forth. I'm interpreting.”

“You told him you were involved with somebody else, right? We agreed that Rob's our cover story.”

“He knows Rob's not straight. I mean, come on, Tom.”

“What did you say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to get rid of him.”

“I can do that.”

“Does he have anything solid?”

“He claims he has a source for us getting caught in the shower in Manchester.”

“Then why doesn't he just go with it?”

“He may.”

“You really think he likes you enough to kill the story?”

“It's possible. He wants to come over here and cook dinner for me tonight. What do you want me to do?”

“I don't know, I have to think about this. Let me talk to Rob.”

“You're going to talk to Rob about this,” I say, incredulous. “I don't want to know what Rob thinks, Tom. I don't
care
what Rob thinks. I want to know what you think. I want to know what you want me to do.”

“Shit, Rob's at the door and I'm late for the VFW.”

“What do you want me to do about Mr. Below the Beltway?”

“I don't know. You're going to have to handle this one, honey.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“It just means you should do whatever you think is best.”

“You mean whatever I
have
to do.”

“I have tremendous faith in you, darlin'. I love you. I know I can count on you.”

Up until that moment, I'm still hoping. But the way he says he knows he can count on me—that tone of voice, that public speaking inflection he uses in his speeches—it broke my heart. Even the way he said “darlin'” was stage southern. It wasn't an endearment so much as an imitation of an endearment.

“Alison, honey, I gotta get going. I'll call you later.”

He was walking out the door. I couldn't help trying to picture that room, even though it would look pretty much like all the other hotel rooms along the campaign trail, like one of the many rooms I snuck into in Fran-conia or Nashua, in Cedar Falls or Gastonia—those rooms that conveniently seemed to have no personality and no history, with a vinyl-covered ice bucket flanked by two cellophane-wrapped plastic glasses—without ever really wondering too much about all the people who had been there before us, about what had happened in these rooms. Maybe every room deserves its own bronze plaque, if we only knew. I would never see that room at the Hampton Inn in Dubuque, but I couldn't help wondering if he would remember it, out of all the hundreds of hotel rooms that year, as the place where he traded his soulmate for something he loved more.

2008

The March

Corrine had agreed to meet Washington and Veronica at the diner on Fifty-second Street, a place they'd come for hamburgers on Saturday or brunch on Sunday when they were living in the neighborhood back in the eighties. It had been more than a decade since she'd set foot there, and the glazed apple pies and coconut cakes under their plastic domes seemed like museum displays from the distant era of her lost youth. But now it was jammed with cops—she hadn't seen this many uniforms since her days at the soup kitchen downtown, feeding cops and firefighters and san men and the steelworkers who had come together in the smoking ruins. She'd gotten to know several cops then, but the cohort here today seemed less benign, their faces tight, closed and bolted against fraternization. That moment of solidarity, of strangers comforting one another in the streets, of stockbrokers hugging firemen and waving to cops, had already faded into history. The citizens of the metropolis were changed, though less tangibly than they might have imagined or hoped back in the time of anthrax and missing-person posters. They had, most of them, been given a glimpse of their best selves, and told themselves they wouldn't forget, or go back to the old selfish, closed-in ways. But then they'd gone back to work and the rubble had been carted away and the stock market had recovered. You woke up one morning not thinking about that terrible day, not remembering it had happened until perhaps seeing the tattered remains of an old poster on your way to lunch. And it felt good not to think about it all the damn time.

She stepped outside to wait. Already, at ten-thirty, the street was jammed with people bundled against the cold and carrying signs.
ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
. A little kid holding one that said
WAR IS TERROR
and his sister in a red snowsuit with her own sign:
DRAFT
THE BUSH TWINS
. Russell had stayed home with the kids, who were working on a play for her birthday. While he shared Corrine's feelings about the imminent war, Russell was not a joiner. “I don't march,” he'd said earlier that morning, showing the same kind of contrarian pride he sometimes brought to his traditional refrain of “I don't dance.”

Looking south down the sidewalk for Washington and Veronica, she felt her chest tighten as she picked out a familiar figure—the loose, loping stride beneath the camel polo coat, the flopping sandy forelock, a garment bag hanging on his shoulder like a vestigial wing. She waited, paralyzed at his approach, and watched the changes ring on his unguarded visage as he recognized her, the rapid modulation from shock to wistful chagrin that preceded his public Isn't-this-a-pleasant-surprise mien.

“I might've known you'd be here,” he said as he kissed her cheek.

“Actually, I was just thinking about you,” she said, a statement that to her ears sounded false in its implication of surprising coincidence; it would have been true on almost any given day, despite the fact that they hadn't seen each other in more than a year—not since that snowy night in the plaza outside the New York State Theater when they'd both been on their way to see
The Nutcracker
with their respective families. By now he had occupied more time in her thoughts than he had in the flesh. They'd exchanged e-mails and he had called from Tennessee and left a message five months ago, on September 11.

“I mean, I was thinking about those days downtown, at the soup kitchen. This whole thing …” She waved her arm to indicate the milling crowd with their signs. “For me, it all kind of loops back to that time. The demonstration—the war.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “At least that's the question, isn't it? They'd have us believe that what happened back then justifies their war.” He sighed. “I didn't know this was happening, actually. The march, I mean. I was just on my way to the airport and I kind of waded into this thing. I was staying up the street at a friend's place.” He pointed behind him, as if to lend credence to the claim. “We sold the apartment as part of the separation agreement.”

She tried not to react to this last phrase, the confirmation that he'd parted from his wife.

“You're heading back to Tennessee?”

He nodded. “Ashley's really settled in—she's going to a girls’ school in Nashville and seems to love it.”

“That's good.”

“Your kids?”

“They're fine. They're great.” It seemed important to emphasize their well-being, since the children, after all, had probably been the fatal obstacles to their romance.

“How's your mom?” It felt as if she was staging these remarks for the benefit of unseen observers, but she didn't know how to break out of the formulae of polite conversation.

“Well, that's the other thing,” he said. “Not so good. She's been ill. Cancer.”

“Oh my God, Luke. I'm so sorry.”

“It's been rough, but the prognosis is somewhat encouraging.”

“She must be glad to have you there.”

He shrugged and pushed his hair off his forehead—a gesture so familiar, it made her feel faint. “Making up for lost time.”

“Good for you. Are you working?” He'd been between things back when they were working downtown at the soup kitchen together, trying to decide what to do with the second half of his life.

“I'm running a little fund.”

“What about the book?”

“Oh God, I'd almost forgotten about that. Maybe someday. And you? What about the screenplay?”

She told him about the actor who'd optioned it, without adding that the option had just expired the week before.

“That's great. I'll be watching for it at the Cool Springs Multiplex.”

The strained formality of this exchange was exhausting her. She had been ready to change her life for him, and for the last year she'd been struggling to convince herself they'd done the right thing.

For better or worse, the arrival of Washington and Veronica rescued them from the peril of intimate revelation. Corrine made the introductions, realizing as she did so that they'd been present outside the theater the night when their affair had effectively ended. Seeing her with her husband and children had awakened his conscience, and dampened his ardor. He'd told her later that he couldn't bear to be the reason for her breaking up her family.

“Sorry we're late,” Veronica said. “Traffic on the Hutch. Then we had to find parking.”

“The perils of the suburban couple,” Washington said, still embarrassed at being yet another commuter—that, too, a result of the attack. They'd started looking at houses in Connecticut the week after.

“You look great,” Veronica said to Corrine.

“So do you.”

“I'd better get on out of here and try to find a cab,” Luke said.

She didn't want him to leave; as awkward as this public posturing might be, she'd hoped they might find a few more minutes to talk. Suddenly she was afraid they'd never see each other again.

They stood for a moment on the sidewalk, the bitter cold infiltrating the soles of her shoes, uncertain of the form their parting should take.

He leaned over and kissed her cheek, the brush of his unruly forelock across her face excruciatingly familiar. If she'd had any doubt about his state of mind these last few minutes, she saw now that he was as miserable as she was. He managed a rueful smile before turning away and walking west. She watched as he slowly disappeared into the flow of the converging marchers.

“What's with all the fucking heat?” Washington said, nodding as four cops exited the coffee shop. Sullen, wide-bodied white guys girdled with hardware, pulling up their pants and avoiding eye contact with the civilians, they exuded the grim camaraderie of an army in enemy territory.

Corrine shook her head. Nothing seemed real to her right now, her resolve evaporating along with an animating sense of indignation about the war soon to take place six thousand miles away.

“I don't like the look of this shit,” he said. “Maybe you should make your own damn sign:
MY SISTER MARRIED A COP
.”

For a moment she didn't know what he was talking about; then she realized it was true. Her sister
had
married a cop, another improbable result of that improbable time.

It was reassuring being a part of a crowd, surrendering to its volition. They merged with the throng flowing east toward Second, marching beside a sign that said
FREEZING MY ASS OFF FOR PEACE
. The air was cold enough to show their breath as they pressed forward, trying to see up ahead. The Roosevelt Island tramway rose up in the distance. Corrine got clunked by a
CHILDREN AGAINST WAR
sign being carried by a little girl right behind her. Maybe it would have been good, she thought, for the kids to see this.

Luke had been stricken at the sight of her twins outside the theater that night. She'd seen it in his eyes. At that moment she'd known this chance encounter had doomed them, though they'd struggled to recover from it for several days of agonized discussions. It wasn't rational really, since he'd known from the beginning about her family. In fact, the plan had been to tell their spouses after Christmas.

When they finally reached Second Avenue, the march turned north, although their destination, the UN, was some ten blocks south and east.

Washington was jumping in the air, trying to get a look ahead. “Why the fuck are we going uptown?” he said.

“They've blocked Second,” a kid in a tasseled ski hat explained. “We have to go north and circle back down.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Corrine said.

“It makes lots of sense,” Washington said, “if they're trying to keep us away from the UN.”

At times the sound of car horns was deafening. The marchers overflowed the sidewalks, filling in the gaps between vehicles like mortar, blocking the traffic aimed in the opposite direction. This was now completely unreal.

A voice from a megaphone was directing them to proceed north.

“They're trying to scatter us,” said the man beside her, whose
EMPTY WARHEADS
sign featured caricature heads of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, each one of them open, the crowns of the skulls rising on hinges.

“I like your sign,” she said.

“They're trying to keep us from getting there, the bastards.”

“Is this fucked-up or what?” Washington said.

Veronica said, “I'm glad we didn't bring the kids.”

“Hey, it would've been educational,” Washington said. “A lesson in the trampling of our motherfucking constitutional right of assembly.”

“Why are they doing this?”

“A Republican governor and mayor sucking up to our president is what's going on,” Washington said.

Corrine and Veronica fell into step behind him, having barely spoken in two or three months.

Veronica squeezed her glove. “How are you?”

“Fine. The kids are great.”

“And you two?”

“Well, Russell took me to Bouley last night for Valentine's.” She wondered where, and with whom, Luke had been last night—if there was someone in his life now, a question she'd been afraid to ask: a childhood sweetheart, some southern girl with pouffed-up hair and a syrupy accent.

“Washington cooked his famous Szechuan chicken and we opened a bottle of sparkling cider.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It sounds boring. But boring is better than all-nighters and strange panties, I guess. I don't know, I hate the commute and I miss the city, and those stay-at-home moms are just clones. I can't make up my mind which scares me more—the possibility that my kids won't be accepted by their peers or the possibility that they'll grow up just like them.”

Corrine, meanwhile, was wondering if Luke was happy, and if she wanted him to be. Yes, of course she did. Only she wanted him to think of her and to wonder sometimes, as she did, whether they had really done the right thing after all.

At Sixty-third Street they were greeted by a phalanx of cops, a line of barricades blocking the street. A red-faced policeman with a crescent scar on his cheek pointed his billy club north.

“What's the point of pushing us uptown?” Corrine asked him.

“Just keep moving,” he said.

The next street, when they reached it, was also blocked off.

“Hey, man,” Washington said, “we live on this block.”

“We need ID,” the cop said.

“Officer, I don't understand,” Corrine said. “We're not trying to cause any trouble. We're just exercising our constitutional right of assembly and free speech.”

“Just keep moving.”

Washington took her arm and eased her away from the barricade.

“Why are they doing this?” she demanded. “Why are they
being
like this? They don't act this way at the Saint Patrick's Day parade.”

“Exactly,” Washington said, his hand still on her arm.

“Even if they're enforcing some ridiculous order,” Veronica said, “they could at least be civil.”

The faces of these cops reminded Corrine of the old pictures of Selma and Birmingham.

“It's an outrage, that's what it is.” The speaker was a Waspy middle-aged blonde with a black velvet hair band and a three-quarter-length mink. A bit of an anomaly in this crowd, she put Corrine in mind of an older version of Luke's ex, Sasha, whose picture she occasionally saw in the party pages of magazines.

Up ahead, the crowd was chanting raggedly, the chorus moving fitfully down the column, picked up by the marchers and passed along before it spluttered and died as they reached Sixty-fifth Street, which was also blocked off.

“This is ridiculous,” Corrine said.

“It's all part of the plan,” Washington replied.

“What plan?”

An old guy who was wearing a camo jacket and had long gray hair and a beard was shouting to her over the din. “They don't want us anywhere near the UN, or the cameras.”

“Who doesn't? This is America. This is New York, for God's sake. Who ordered this? The police commissioner? Our squeaky mayor? That asshole in the White House?” The injustice of it infuriated her. The idea that the attack on the city was being used to justify this dubious war was outrage enough.

Glancing up ahead, she could see a huge globe borne aloft by the crowd. About ten feet in diameter, it appeared to be made out of soft fabric.