My Father's Wives (13 page)

“That’s right. He went inside and I stayed in the car, and right away the driver said to me: ‘I’m not feeling so well.’ To this day, I don’t know why he waited for your father to get out of the car to say that.
Then he started throwing up onto the empty seat next to him. It was unbearable; there was no way to stay in the car. It was a rainy day but I got out and stood on the sidewalk and waited. Then the driver put down his window and said to me: ‘I radioed for another car, he’ll be here in ten minutes.’ And he drove away! The speech was in the back of the car! What was I going to do?”

I nodded. “So you went inside.”

“I didn’t have any choice. I tried to get Percy’s attention without anyone seeing me, but that wasn’t possible. He was completely surrounded by people, as usual. And before he saw me, your mother did.”

I knew what happened next. “My mother told Percy she wanted a divorce, right there in front of all those people he was talking to.”

“I couldn’t blame her,” Christine said. “It was her son’s birthday party.”

“Did they have an understanding?” I asked. “Did she accept it so long as he kept it away from her?”

“I honestly don’t know. You’d have to ask her. That wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about back then. Maybe it is now. In any event, by the time we got back outside the new car was there. It took us to the UN. Your father delivered his speech from memory and it was perfect.”

I thought about that for a moment. “He got thrown out of his son’s birthday party, his wife said she wanted a divorce . . .”

“And an hour later he delivered a speech to the entire world from memory as though nothing had happened. I told you he was amazing. I would never have wanted to play poker against your father, that’s for sure.”

The image of Claire in our driveway popped into my head. She was flipping through the mail, greeting me with no visible shock when I surprised her with the kids. For the second time, I felt a chill. “What happened after the speech?” I asked.

“We got back in the car to go to the airport. I was a wreck. But your father was very quiet. He would hardly talk at all. Finally, I asked him what was going through his mind. He said he was crushed, because
the only dream he’d ever had in his life was to be president, and now there was no chance of that.”

I put both hands to my face. My skin felt dry. “So, what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that after humiliating my mother at her son’s birthday party, his primary concern was his political future.”

Christine looked sad. “That is what I’m telling you, yes.”

“Did he ever express any regret or concern about me?”

“Yes, he did.”

“But his first thought was that now he’d never be president.”

“Yes, it was. I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I don’t see much point in lying to you about all this unless you want me to.”

I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “He meant what he said that day, too. His turn in the party would have come next, but he decided not to run.”

“Because of what happened with my mother?”

“I have always thought so. It would have been a scandal.”

I leaned back in my chair. “I don’t have any idea how to feel about this,” I said. “I assume I should feel insulted and hurt, or at least sad. But mostly I just feel numb.”

Christine looked at me with pity. “Your father was a complicated man. He never wanted to hurt anyone, but he didn’t give much thought to anything except for how it affected him.”

“As time went on, did he show much regret about me?”

She just patted my hand again, which I took as the answer to the question.

AFTER I PAID THE
check we walked back to her building. The wind had died down so it was warmer, but not much. We didn’t speak during the entire walk. I was trying to decide what I had learned, and I wasn’t certain it was anything at all. I was wondering if I was like my
father, in any way, and thinking I probably was not. Maybe Claire was. Maybe she was more like Percy than I would ever be.

When we arrived back at the revolving door I looked into Christine’s eyes. “Can I ask one last question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did the two of you split up?”

She snorted sarcastically. “He moved on,” she said. “At first he told me I made him feel young. Then he met
her
and told me
she
made him feel young.”

“So he wanted to feel young?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I always thought it was an excuse, but I guess he might have meant it.” Christine leaned in and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. “It was lovely meeting you,” she said. “I enjoyed our conversation. You seem like a very nice young man. Whatever it is you’re looking for, I hope you find it.”

She went in through the revolving door and I watched her slowly walk away until she disappeared behind another door. It felt colder again, now that she’d gone. I tugged my collar up over my throat. Then the same doorman was standing beside me.

“Anything else I can help you with?” he asked.

“I need to get to O’Hare,” I said.

He had a whistle on a string around his neck. He put it to his lips and blew two shrill blasts. I looked up the block and saw a Yellow cab pulling away from the curb and inching toward us. I took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and handed it to the doorman as the taxi came to a stop.

“Thanks, my friend,” I said as he opened the door for me. “Keep on smiling.”

IT WAS A SIGN,
I thought, when my flight to LaGuardia was delayed and there was another to JFK a few gates away, and on the way I encountered one headed for Denver. Aspen was the next stop on my list, and suddenly the idea of going home first was the one that didn’t seem sensible. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t any plans, or a ticket to
board, or that my wife and my life were expecting me. I had discovered the magic of lying, like a drug, addictive if you let it be; so easy to be where you wished and do what you wished when you removed the shackles of truth.

I texted excuses to Claire (conference in Dallas) and Bruce (more clients in Chicago), then I rushed to the counter to beg the ill-informed attendant to please allow me to switch planes on account of an unspecified family emergency. She looked me up and down twice; I could see the wheels turning in her mind.
No way a guy in a suit this expensive is making up a story
. She switched my ticket without a word, even preserved my first-class status. I stared gratefully into her brown eyes. “Bless you,” I said.

I had to kill three hours in the Denver airport before my flight to Aspen. I went to the lounge, sat in a quiet corner, drank coffee and watched my hands tremble. It was the lying that was getting to me. I’m not cut out for it. I kept imagining myself stricken in some way, hospitalized or killed, and Claire being informed, and before the first tears had rolled off her cheeks she was looking up in confusion and saying: “Wait, he was
where
?”

I put down the coffee, turned my palm toward me, and studied it closely. The zigzagging lines were deeper than they used to be. Turning the hand over I found my knuckles disobligingly red, the veins blue. The hands of an older man.

Get over it,
I told myself.
You can’t plan your life around what will happen if the plane crashes. And if it does, at that point it becomes someone else’s problem
. The voice I was hearing belonged to my father. Whenever I gave myself a pep talk, it was his voice I heard.

In any event, the plane didn’t crash. It landed bumpily just as night was falling in the mountains. The darkness spread slowly as I rode a taxi into town, where I took a room in the Hyatt Grand Aspen, at the base of Aspen Mountain. I had been to Aspen once before, as a boy, but remembered little more than the abject stillness. Now the serenity was palpable, in the air and the casual smiles on faces in the street. As
a New Yorker it is my nature to distrust an unprovoked smile, the assumption being it must be born of insanity or ulterior motive, but in Aspen the smiles seemed to come easy.

I hung my suit in the closet, splashed water on my face, and ventured into the cool night, which smelled of freshly mown grass and a distant campfire. I strolled through town with no destination and no goal, stopping before nearly every storefront, admiring a leather saddle, a luxurious fur, a painting of a woman in a white dress on a beach. Two things occurred to me: that I was hungry, and that there aren’t many things better in life than a walk when you don’t have anywhere to go.

Above the bar in a restaurant called L’Osteria they were showing a basketball game, the Knicks in the playoffs. I ordered a bowl of pasta and a glass of white wine and watched the game. The people in the restaurant all seemed to know each other, but not in an exclusionary way; I was sure I would be welcome to join any group. I didn’t wish to sit with any of them, content with my basketball, but it felt good to know that I could.

The altitude struck just as I was finishing a third beer. It was only nine o’clock local time but I felt as though I hadn’t slept in a week. I left a generous tip and stumbled climbing down from the bar stool. I waved a friendly good night to the waiter and bartender and some of the diners who had shown me such imaginary hospitality. The fresh air perked me up, and I realized I hadn’t once looked at my phone since I’d arrived.

Sixty-one e-mails, seemed about right. Just one text.
Getting into bed. Please message me when you get there safe and sound. Miss, miss, miss and love, love, love. C

I took the deepest breath I could muster, taking inventory of all my organs. Nowhere inside could I find a place that felt guilty. A beautiful woman was writing me sweet words while I was atop a mountain a thousand miles from where she thought I’d be reading them, yet it triggered no emotion in me whatsoever. As I walked slowly back to the hotel, delighting in the night air, I wasn’t sure if that constituted progress or a sure sign of the beginning of my demise.

ALCOHOL AND ALTITUDE DO
not mix. I slept hard but badly and awoke thirsty, head aching. It was just before six when I pulled open the blinds. When the sunlight flooded the room my aches instantly disappeared, replaced by a powerful surge of energy. The mountain just outside the window beckoned, lush and green. I stumbled out to the street in rumpled gym clothes, looking for breakfast. Behind the counter at Paradise Bakery I found a curvaceous young blonde, no more than twenty, with a warm smile and a steel rod embedded in her tongue. “Top of the morning!” she said. Her gleeful expression and youthful innocence stood in stark contrast to her piercing.

“That
must
have hurt,” I said.

“It did,” she replied, her eyes widening, “but it was soooo worth it.”

Something inside me stirred. “I need coffee,” I said, “badly.”

“I only make it well,” she said. “If you want it served badly you’ll have to go somewhere else.”

“What else do you serve well? I’m starving.”

She glanced at the chalkboard above her head. “Everything is fresh,” she said. “Egg and cheese on a bagel?”

“Sounds terrific.”

She spun on her heel and disappeared into the rear, emerging a moment later with a bagel in one hand and a giant knife in the other. “You can come around back and help yourself to the coffee if you like,” she said. “We don’t open until seven.”

I looked at my watch. “That’s a half hour. I’m sorry if I’m causing you any trouble.”

She stopped midslice and stared hard into my eyes. “Do I look troubled?”

“You do not.”

“So, get some coffee.”

I selected the largest of the three cups and filled it to the rim with black coffee, rich in color and texture. “This is wonderful,” I said after a first sip. “It smells better than any coffee I can ever remember.”

“It’s the altitude,” she said. “Everything smells better in the mountains. Where are you in from?”

“Is it that obvious I’m not local?”

She just laughed.

“New York,” I said.

“Me too.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “What part?”

“Upper west,” she said. “Parents split when I was six, mom moved to New Rochelle. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I came out here the week after I graduated high school.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Well, I’m legal, if that’s what you mean,” she said with mischievous eyes.

Behind her, the microwave issued a ding to announce the readiness of my eggs.

“It isn’t,” I said. “I swear.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “But I’m nineteen, either way.”

We stood in silence as she completed my sandwich and wrapped it in wax paper. I sipped the black coffee. Then she came from behind the counter to hand me my breakfast, staring directly into my face, and it was as though there was no air in the room, nothing separating us at all. I was sure if I took a single step toward her there would be no stopping us. I didn’t, of course, because I am a married man and I don’t do that sort of thing, even when naked supermodels are pulling me into a bathtub. I didn’t with Shell and now I didn’t again. But I thought about it this time, much more than I had thought about it before. “I didn’t get your name,” I said, coughing gently to clear my throat.

“Amanda.”

“I’m Jon.”

“Hi, Jon.”

“Hi.”

There was a pounding then, directly in my ears, and for a moment I thought it was inside my head but actually it was someone behind me, knocking on the glass. Amanda waved at whoever it was, and just like that the mood was broken. I dropped a twenty-dollar bill onto the counter and went to the door. “Thank you very much,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”

“I’m here until two.” She smiled sweetly this time, enough to make me wonder if I had imagined it all. But then I saw the rod in her tongue, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t.

THE ADDRESS I HAD
for Elizabeth was on Red Mountain, which the hotel told me was a lengthy walk, so I rented a bike. On the way, I was told, I would pass Smuggler Mountain, where many of the locals get their morning exercise: a jaunty, healthy climb, described by the concierge as “a heck of a lot better than spending a half hour on a treadmill.”