Say You're Sorry (21 page)

“It was a good plan,” he said. “It was. It was solid.” As he said the words, he was back in a dark parking garage in the middle of the night reliving the subterfuge, the fright, the cloak and dagger silliness of it all. And the sweat. Jesus, how long had he lived in his own stink? “It just didn’t work.”

“Because of those damned tapes,” she hissed. “My God! Those tapes!”

“They were bad,” he agreed. “Very bad.”

She closed her eyes. “They killed us. Dick was so stupid. Those goddamn tapes. After that, well…” She shook her head. “There was nothing we could do, was there? Didn’t matter how many times you met with Woodward, that son of a bitch, what you told him, who you sacrificed. Deep Throat!” She hooted suddenly, her face merry with laughter. “Dick was offended by that, you know. As much as by the leak, he was offended by the image. For all of his language, he’s such a prude.”

She laughed again, and he could see, just for a moment, the fun-loving girl she’d once been. But he had to correct her on one point. “We weren’t a leak,” he said. “We were a counteroffensive.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “we thought so. I did, anyway. I thought for the longest time the mess was all their fault. The plumbers, the Cubans, Haldeman, all of them out of control, acting on their own. I thought Dick was above all that, that he didn’t know.” She knocked back the last of her drink and reached for the crystal decanter of bourbon which Manolo had left on the silver tray. “What was I thinking? How could Dick not have known where every single body was buried?” She poured herself two fingers, three. “And to think that he did nothing to protect us. That he recorded it all. Was he mad?”

The visitor shook his head silently. He had no answers. He never had.

“No,” Pat Nixon said. “Dick wasn’t crazy. At least, not in the way you think. He made those tapes to prove to himself that he was president.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. So he could listen to them in the privacy of his study and know that he was really the president of the United States.”

“Surely—” he began, but Pat Nixon cut him off.

“You don’t think I’m going to let you get away with this, do you?” She was suddenly standing again, turning toward the huge plate glass window with her drink.

On the other side of the glass, the gardener in the scruffy clothes unbent from the white geraniums he’d been tending. In his arms he held a very ugly automatic weapon.

From behind him, three other men—tall, broad-shouldered, with the short haircuts of the Secret Service—appeared, all armed. They stood still as statues, their weaponry shining in the late afternoon California sun. It was much too pretty a day to die, the visitor thought.

“I always knew,” Pat said, “that this day would come. That one afternoon I’d be sitting here reading, minding what little business of my own I have left, and you would call and ask to come visiting. With your hand out.”

“My hand is not out,” he said. “You’ve misread me.”

She leaned forward. “Do not screw with me. Don’t even try. I’ve been screwed over by much bigger men than you.” She may have been a schoolteacher back in Whittier, but this day, she spoke like a general.

“I assure you—”

“Do not assure me. Do not lie to me. And most of all, do not threaten me.”

He nodded, very slightly, not wanting to alarm the armed men on the other side of the glass. “It seems to me that you’re the one doing the threatening.”

“No. I am simply telling you the way things are. These men are loyal to me. I have told them a story about you that they believe because they want to believe it. Because they want to think that they are on the right side. That there is a right side. And that their lives make sense. These years. Watergate. The whole thing has been such a goddamned mess. It would be good for them, a catharsis, don’t you see, if they could kill someone. To take slow and deliberate aim and kill someone. Do you know what I mean?”

He nodded slowly. Yes, he did. He knew exactly what she meant. He had often thought the same thing. How satisfying it would be to string someone up. The Roman arena idea she had, that was precisely the ticket. A public execution, a bloodletting in the open air, that’s what they needed so they could begin to forget about the waste and the ruin and the stupidity. Then they could begin to see a little daylight. To feel better about themselves.

But, in the absence of that he’d thought, a little money might be nice. After all, things had gotten rough. A little silver in his palm…

He could see now that he’d been wrong.

Pat Nixon watched him nod and said, “Good. That’s good. Now, here’s what you do. You will pick yourself up and you will go away and you will never ever again in your lifetime bother any of us again. For if you do, do not misunderstand or underestimate what I’m saying to you, they,” she turned and smiled through the glass at the men, still at ready-alert, “will track you down and eat you. Do you understand what I’m saying? Eat you.”

“I understand,” he said. And then, very slowly, very carefully, his hands out from his sides to show that he was unarmed, that he meant no harm, no, not really, he was innocent as a babe, the visitor backed out of the room. Then he turned and ran as hard as he could.

Pat Nixon offered the Secret Service men a small smile and a nod that, in lieu of blood, they accepted. Then they saluted sharply and withdrew.

Whereupon Pat Nixon returned to her chair, freshened her drink, and picked up her book, a Taylor Caldwell novel of international intrigue, of plots and counterplots and conspiracies. Once more the silence enveloped the many rooms of the rambling house. Deep deep inside somewhere, in a dim quarter, Richard Milhous Nixon pored over his papers, hashed and rehashed, twisted and turned, and stewed. Pat Nixon had never visited that room, nor would she ever. Back in her bright, flowered perch above the sea, Pat Nixon found the page where she’d left off reading and resumed the story of imaginary people running, running, running. She settled into her chair and reached for her glass, secure in the knowledge that, at long last, her own running was done.

If You Can’t Take the Heat

Jane Millman stood at her kitchen counter dicing water chestnuts and peanuts. Along with creamy chunks of cooked taro, they would serve as toppings for the tapioca pudding with coconut cream she’d already prepared. The dessert, as popular in Thailand as apple pie was to Americans, was a dish Jane had learned the previous year.

Before.
That was how Jane thought of everything back then.
Before.

Now Jane wiped her chopping board clean and donned a pair of rubber gloves to chop raw taro root. It had been a long time since she’d done much more than microwave a TV dinner or heat a bowl of soup.

As Jane worked her chef’s knife up and down, she realized how much she’d missed cooking. The pleasures of kitchen tasks. Pungent flavors. Now she was ready for it all again, especially Thai food, a longtime favorite, with its balance of hot, sour, sweet, bitter, and salt. The cuisine held many surprises for the Western palate, such as the way sugar added to a hot and sour sauce mellowed and married the other ingredients.

Jane thought families were like that too. People combined with the sweetness of love became an entity even better than its individual parts. The Magnificent Millmans were, for sure: Max, her beloved husband, and their precious girls, Frannie and Hope. When she was ten, Frannie had composed a family song.

Max, Jane, Frannie, and Hope

You don’t like us, you’re a dope

We rock, we roll, we boogie too

Just about nothing we can’t do

Magnificent Millmans,

One in a jillions

Boop-boop-e-doop. Boop-boop-e-do.

At that memory, a wave of anguish lapped up and over Jane’s shoulders, threatening to knock her to her knees. All grief was terrible, but this past year had been so much harder than anything she’d ever imagined. Her mother’s death had been devastating, but this…

At first Jane thought she simply couldn’t bear it, that surely she would die, that a heart could not continue to beat under the weight of so much pain. Then, one day, she realized that she’d gone an entire hour without despair. Then two. And so it went, but even yet, fifteen months since Before, there were moments like this. Then the tide of anguish would recede; Jane would continue.

And so, Jane finished chopping the raw taro and slid it with the knife’s edge into a small bowl of Chinese scarlet, then washed her rubber gloves under the tap. She lined up all the bowls on her kitchen counter: a half-dozen cups of tapioca, three small blue bowls for the other condiments, the scarlet for the raw taro.

Jane was ready for her guest. She settled onto a stool at her kitchen counter. She could hardly wait.

*

Looking back, Jane thought, it all began that May afternoon, fifteen months earlier, a Saturday, when Natalie stopped by for coffee. Though it was hard to know. Human relationships are so complex, the ribbons of events so intertwined, others’ hearts and minds so unknown (even if those hearts once beat beneath your own) that it’s difficult to point your finger and say, There, then, that’s the place and time my life began to unravel.

But it would do, that coffee.

Natalie, who had long lived across the street and a couple of doors down, had knocked at Jane’s back door.

“Come on in!” Jane said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“You’re sure I’m not interrupting?” Natalie gave a nod to the food spread across the kitchen counter: garlic, green onion, cilantro, lemongrass, and a small bonfire of Thai chillies, tiny prik kee noo.

“No, no, I’ve got plenty of time. Nobody’s coming till seven. Did I tell you I was taking a Thai cooking class?”

“Really? I love Thai food. Especially the hot stuff.” Natalie plopped on a stool at Jane’s counter where Max usually sat. A pair of the reading glasses he bought by the score marked his spot as clearly as a place card. Natalie picked up a bit of chilli along with a sprig of cilantro.

“Watch it!” Jane warned. The tiny peppers were incendiary.

But Natalie had already popped the pepper in her mouth, and a look of bliss transfigured her round face. “Yum. You know I’ve always been crazy for hot.” Then, casually, she asked, “So, who’s your company?”

“Max’s brother, Ed, and his wife, Jean. The guys have some family business to sort out.” Jane heard herself explaining more than she needed to. She felt guilty about not seeing Natalie more often. It had been a while since they’d had her over for dinner.

Not that Jane didn’t like Natalie. Her intelligence and quick wit had always amused Jane, though her tongue had grown rather sharper since her divorce. But Natalie was a friend, a buddy, a neighbor she could count on, and Jane’s elder daughter, Frannie, and Natalie’s daughter, Megan, who was away at college now, had been off-and-on-again chums since they were tots.

Jane knew it was difficult for Natalie, being all alone now—particularly in this neighborhood. Their tree-bowered street in the Rockridge section of Oakland, just south of the Berkeley line, was like a throwback to the fifties. Every old house was large and well kept, every yard was neat, and everyone was married, with children—and very caught up with their families.

Of course, after the divorce Natalie could have sold her house and moved across the bay to San Francisco. But she hadn’t wanted to move in Megan’s senior year, and, anyway, she did most of her work from home.

Natalie wrote a column, five days a week, for a San Francisco newspaper, about anything and everything that struck her fancy. Pretty glamorous, thought Jane, who’d been a do-gooder all her life, starting with her rabble-rousing days at UC Berkeley. She’d become a welfare caseworker, and now she was the chief administrator of Oakland’s child care services. An admirable profession, perhaps, but hardly as jazzy as Natalie’s.

Natalie nibbled another bit of hot, then reached for a plate of brownies Jane had made for her ever-hungry teenagers. “May I?”

“Help yourself. There’s plenty.”

Natalie laughed. “Gotta keep up my weight.”

Natalie was a wonderful-looking woman, with an impish face and dark curly hair marked with a blaze of white, but she had put on more than a little poundage since Jack’s desertion. She was forever nibbling, taking a bite of this or that. More than once Jane had heard Natalie’s justification: “You know what Catherine Deneuve said. At a certain age, a woman can have her face or she can have her figure, but not both.”

Jane wondered about that. At forty-six, she was only a year younger than Natalie, but so far had refused to give up the good fight against middle-age spread. She liked working out and visited her gym regularly. On the other hand, she did have more wrinkles than Natalie. Maybe there was something to keeping those cheeks plumped.

Also, Jane told herself, Natalie’s job kept her young. Researching her column gave her entree to all kinds of worlds.

Jane said, “I loved that series you wrote last week on bumper stickers. It was so funny.
Imagine using your turn signals.
It’s just amazing how you can take one little thing like that and spin it and spin it. I don’t know how you do that.”

“Yep, that’s me.” Natalie broke a second brownie in half. “Natalie, the Queen of Trivia.”

“No, no, I think it’s wonderful, what you do.”

Natalie shrugged. “I guess. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is sometimes to come up with something to write about.”