Rise and Shine (4 page)

“It’s past my bedtime,” she said as she stepped to the podium, cradling the obelisk. And everyone laughed. Everyone knew that while the rest of Manhattan is watching the late news, Meghan is in bed, that in the empty hour just before dawn, when the streets are almost clean of cars and only the windows of insomniacs burn silver in the darkness, Meghan is in a black car on the way to the studio.

“I wish my son, Leo, was here tonight, but he is spending three weeks in Spain, perfecting his skills in a language I don’t even understand. He is making himself more cosmopolitan, more educated, more a citizen of the world than his parents are.” She looked down at Evan and smiled slightly, to include him, but he was looking at his hands in his lap, threading his fingers together tightly. I smiled back at her.

“That’s what every Manhattan mother wants for her children. Mothers rich and poor, black and white, Christian and Muslim, uptown in Harlem and downtown in Tribeca. We want our children to do better than we have done. We know that our families are the most important things we have or do.”

And she was off. I don’t remember all of the rest. I’ve heard a fair number of Meghan’s speeches, and I still can’t quite understand how it is that she can make a small bit of alliteration, the repetition of a phrase, a pause and a tightening of the lips and a raised voice evoke the same sort of emotion that music does. It amazes me.

“What we all want for our kids,” she said at the end, “is for them to rise and shine.” Oh, such a smoothy, I wanted to say cynically, to close with the name of her own show. But it was perfect. She stepped back, and they all stood up. Evan had tears in his eyes.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think, in retrospect, that it was a night of great moment or triumph, although in the coming weeks a photograph of Meghan on that night, in that slender glittering fall of fabric, holding the plinth of crystal to her heart, would appear in the papers over and over again. In many ways it was a typical night of a sort that happened perhaps eight or ten times a year. Afterward I stood to one side as people asked her to sign their programs. It never varies, what they say: I never miss the show. You’re prettier in person. You gave an amazing speech. For Linda. For Jennifer. For Bob. For Steve. I stood to the side and held the blue box. In the car on the way home, Meghan handed me the obelisk, and I rewrapped it. It didn’t feel like the end of anything.

“That wasn’t a really terrible one, was it?” Meghan asked Evan, her head thrown back against the seat.

“It was fine,” he said.

“You were great,” I said.

“You’re quiet,” she said to Evan, who was looking out the window at the shadowed walks of Central Park.

“I’m just tired,” he said without turning his head. I could see his face reflected in the glass. He looked exhausted, maybe even ill.

“Ev?” I said.

“Bridge?” he replied. We’ve known each other a long time, Evan and I. Meghan tucked her hand through the crook of his arm. His bony fingers began to play a tattoo on the leg of his tuxedo pants. But still he kept his head turned away.

“We’ll be in the Caribbean in a week,” Meghan said. “A week of no calls and no meetings and no snow. A week of reading and tennis and snorkeling.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“I wish Leo could come. He gets back from Barcelona and goes right up to Amherst to work on some big English paper. His life is as crazy as ours.”

“His life is great,” I said, still looking at the back of Evan’s head. His hair had gotten thin on top. I hadn’t really noticed it before.

I tripped over the curb on the way to my apartment building, fumbled for my key in my clutch bag. “Bridge,” Meghan called, leaning forward. “Bridget!”

“What?”

“Paillettes.”

“What?”

“The things on the dress. That’s what they’re called. Not sequins. Paillettes.”

“How did you finally remember?” I asked.

She shook her head. Meghan describes her hair color as auburn. She hates it when anyone says it’s red. Her hair is red. So is mine. “I had someone at the office look it up. P-A-I-L-L-E-T-T-E-S.” And as if they heard their names called, the sparkling circles undulated as she leaned forward, Northern lights in the backseat of a Town Car.

“Accepted and acknowledged,” I called as I unlocked the door.

“It was like the end of an era,” I said several days later to Irving as footage of Meghan in the dress ran over and over on the news.

“Get a grip, kid,” he replied. “We’re not talking World War Two here.”

B
AD NEWS COMES
to you in strange ways in New York. Before a friend can tell you about the lump she found, you’ve run into a friend of a friend at the pharmacy, and you already know about the suspicious mammogram and the exploratory surgery. Before someone has gotten to your name in the Rolodex to tell you he’s leaving the rat race to spend more time with the kids, you’ve overheard gleeful associates talking at the next table about how he was canned, his office cleaned out in less than an hour. You see the hook and ladder and learn of the fire, the yellow tape and know about the murder.

I got my bad news at the home of the nicest rich people in New York, Kate and Sam Borows. They had written a city restaurant guide that made them wealthy, and in the process they had become the best sorts of philanthropists, with not a hint of “get out the ball gown” self-congratulation. When I’d first met them through my sister, they’d lived in the same building they live in now, in a spacious apartment that had become an enormous one as they’d annexed a studio and two one-bedrooms on either side and a three-bedroom apartment above. When I’d gone to work for WOW, Kate had done some variation on the wish-there-was-something-I-could-do lament, and I’d told her she could come up to the Bronx a couple days a week and teach nutrition and cooking. It had been five years, and she’d placed at least fifty women in good jobs in restaurants and caterers, and she never mentioned it in interviews unless we wanted her to thump for WOW for our own purposes.

“Bridget,” she said when I walked in on Monday evening and struggled out of my coat for the catering guy–cum-actor. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I told you last Saturday night that I was coming,” I said as I handed her a bottle of red wine, which she handed off along with my coat.

“Oh, my God,” she said, hugging me, and then the elevator was back, emptying directly into her foyer as the elevators of the wealthy do, so that no one will be subjected to the shared space of the hallway, the smells of strange cooking, the sight of strangers with their keys in the locks. Six other guests tumbled from the mahogany-paneled car, laughing and handing over coats and proffering wine. I found myself stuck in the foyer with a real estate agent who was making the sale of a duplex on Park Avenue sound like curing cancer. I’d gotten into trouble the year before with a woman like this, who had asked about my work and crooned, “I wish there was something I could do personally.” “Write a check,” I’d replied. In my defense, it had been a long hot day in an office that had bad air-conditioning, and one of the women in my work-study program had been shot by her ex-boyfriend. I still caught hell from my sister, who had heard through the Manhattan tom-toms that I had offended the sister-in-law of the managing partner of one of the city’s largest law firms. New York is the biggest little small town in America. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Believe me: having your purse snatched is nothing compared with being mugged by Manhattan manners over rare tuna on toast rounds.

I moved into the living room, toward a waiter with wineglasses on a silver tray. “Wow—you’re here,” said Sam Borows, with the signature kiss on both cheeks that I guess you learn at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn.

“Why is everyone so shocked that I showed up at a dinner I was invited to?” I asked, and suddenly there was the answer in front of me, a spindly man with too-long hair who was grinning at Sam like a madman and performing a good-gossip monologue, the linchpin of any successful cocktail hour in New York.

“One of the great days of television,” he said without preamble. “We’ll be talking about this one for years to come. On the way up one of the guys was saying the network is spinning it like crazy. The question is whether there’s any spin that can make this go away.” A woman had appeared at his elbow. “It was like watching a car wreck,” she said. “I mean, I was on the treadmill and my mouth fell open. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it, and I was watching
Live and in Color
when what’s-his-name started to slur his words talking to Yasir Arafat.”

“What’s-his-name was formerly Burt Chester,” said the man, “and he currently runs a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont. And insists in every interview that he’s happier now. Right. Sure. Happier. My ass.”

“Shrimp?” said a waiter, and as we all fell silent and poked the toothpicks into fancy little lemon halves while we chewed, I could hear conversations all around us that were clearly on the same subject: Did you see it? How bad was it? What’s the spin? This sort of knowledge deficit was the inevitable effect of working triage in the Bronx while most of Manhattan was going to the same restaurants, forwarding confidential e-mails, talking on the phone. I’d walked into one dinner without knowing that the president had been impeached, and another without knowing the mayor had called a press conference to introduce his fiancée, which came as quite a surprise to his wife. My usual day at the office was too full of lost public assistance checks, arson fires, black eyes, trips to family court, foster care placements, and calls from the cops to keep up with breaking news. Catching up on the conversation was a constant part of dinner party attendance for me. Except that Sam Borows had never kept his arm around my waist before, although by the end of any number of evenings men I’d known far less well had done so.

“You going to the Cape soon?” he asked the man and woman, who had the indefinable body English that told you immediately they were husband and wife of long standing.

“Oh, come on, you’re going to try and change the subject here? I know you’re her friends, Sam, but this is the only game in town.” The man looked out over the jagged vista of the Manhattan skyline, black, gray, silver, and the occasional faint flickering blue light that marked a large-screen television in a skyscraper living room. “Look at that. The greatest city on earth, and I bet there’s only one conversation topic going on anywhere in it.”

“Not just in New York,” said his wife.

“Sure, L.A. and Chicago and South Dakota. All anyone cares about at this moment—”

“Jack—”

“—is why Meghan Fitzmaurice self-destructed on the air in front of about twenty million people this morning.”

Sam’s arm tightened, and Jack raised his glass. “Rise and shine,” he said, and his wife laughed and clinked his with hers. “And let’s all hope there’s another bookstore available in Montpelier.”

“Tuna tartare?” said a waiter.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said and I walked toward Kate, took her by the hand, and pulled her down the hall and into the pantry. As I left the living room, I heard the man standing with Sam ask loudly, “Who is that woman?” I didn’t hear Sam’s reply, but I didn’t have to. He would have said the words I’d heard so many times that I might as well set them to music, needlepoint them on a pillow, have them engraved on a headstone. He’d have said, “That’s Meghan Fitzmaurice’s sister.”

“What happened?” I asked Kate, backing her up against a wall of stainless steel bun warmers. “What does everyone but me know about Meghan?”

“Oh, Bridget,” she breathed and placed her palm against my cheek.

Kate Borows is a good friend, to me and to Meghan. She ignored her guests to talk to me in the kitchen, and she told me that she would rearrange her table settings so I wouldn’t have to stay. “You don’t look like you’d be able to stomach osso buco tonight,” she said, and I shuddered. I wanted tea and ice cream, ice cream and tea and TV. “That jerk Ben Greenstreet,” Kate said savagely as she called one of the cater waiters to get my coat. And I knew as she said it that out in the living room, and all over town, people were saying something else: That bitch Meghan Fitzmaurice.

Of course it was on morning television, the town square of public voyeurism, that the two of them had collided. Ben Greenstreet was the scandal du jour, one of the crunchy-granola child-men who had joined the billionaire ranks with the rise of the California computer culture. His favorite word was
dude,
his hair was never cut, and he was worth roughly five billion if you counted his stake in an arena football team he’d named the Live Wires. Every year at the stockholders’ meeting he sang a Dylan song to the assembled, and he had once done the final leg of the Ironman triathlon naked, allegedly because of a chafing problem. He spent most of his time making money and what was left over telling people that he lived outside the system, dude, it was just his way. His last name was a gift to tabloid writers and late-night hosts alike.

Proving that marriage is the great enduring mystery of human relations, Greenstreet had been married since college to a woman named Dixie Cohen, one of those whip-smart women in a black pantsuit who sail up the corporate ladder as though filled with helium. Dixie was the CFO of the third biggest computer manufacturer in the world, and somewhere along the line she and Ben had suddenly realized that they had a nine-bedroom house, a five-bedroom apartment, a three-bedroom boat, and no one to put in the beds. They had forgotten to have children.

It was the kind of thing that happened a lot in their circle of friends. In my sister’s circle, too. Meghan knew so many women who had gone right from fertility treatments to perimenopause that in an apartment in her building there was now a support group for mothers of adopted Chinese babies, including classes on the history of Confucian thought and the making of dim sum. I guess if you’re a Chinese girl living in a triplex with a Rothko over the fireplace, it’s important to be able to remember your roots.

The Greenstreet-Cohens had gone a different route, hiring a surrogate mother whose eggs were harvested and fertilized with Ben’s sperm. Two successfully implanted, a boy and a girl, and all would have been well in the world in which the couple traveled in Pacific Heights, which is like the East Side of Manhattan only with chillier mornings and steeper streets, except that Ben, who is a vegan, insisted on visiting the surrogate with some regularity to keep tabs on her prenatal diet.