was eternally insipid about him had instantly returned to his flushed face; he was again as vapid as he’d ever been. Being fired by Wharton was like being slapped by a tentative hand in the dark.
“When I get back from Wisconsin, we can work out what you owe me,” was all Wallingford told them.
“Please clear out your office and your dressing room before you go,” Mary said. This was standard procedure, but it irritated him.
They sent someone from security to help him pack up his things and to carry the boxes down to a limo. No one came to say good-bye to him, which was also standard procedure, although if Angie had been working that Sunday night, she probably would have.
Wallingford was back in his apartment when Mrs. Clausen called. He hadn’t seen his piece at the Ramada Plaza, but Doris had watched the whole story.
“Are you still coming?” she asked.
“Yes, and I can stay as long as you want me to,” Patrick told her. “I just got fired.”
“That’s very interesting,” Mrs. Clausen commented. “Have a safe flight.”
This time he had a Chicago connection, which got him into his hotel room in Green Bay in time to see the evening telecast from New York. He wasn’t surprised that Mary Shanahan was the new anchor. Once again Wallingford had to admire her. She wasn’t pregnant, but Mary had wound up with at least one of the babies she wanted.
“Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us,” Mary began cheerfully. “Good night, Patrick, wherever you are!”
There was in her voice something both perky and consoling. Her manner reminded Wallingford of that time in his apartment when he’d been unable to get it up and she’d sympathized by saying, “Poor penis.” As he’d understood only belatedly, Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.
It was a good thing he was getting out of the business. He wasn’t smart enough to be in it anymore. Maybe he’d never been smart enough.
And what an evening it was for news! Naturally no survivors had been found. The mourning for the victims on EgyptAir 990 had just begun. There was the footage of the usual calamity-driven crowd that had gathered on a gray Nantucket beach—the “body-spotters,” Mary had once called them. The “death-watchers,”
which was Wharton’s term for them, were warmly dressed.
That close-up from the deck of a Merchant Marine Academy ship—the pile of passengers’ belongings retrieved from the Atlantic—must have been Wharton’s work. After floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, train wrecks, plane crashes, school shootings, or other massacres, Wharton always chose the shots of articles of clothing, especially the shoes. And of course there were children’s toys; dismembered dolls and wet teddy bears were among Wharton’s favorite disaster items.
Fortunately for the all-news network, the first vessel to arrive at the crash site was a Merchant Marine Academy training ship with seventeen cadets aboard. These young novices at sea were great for the human- interest angle—they were about the age of college upperclassmen. There they were in the spreading pool of jet fuel with the fragments of the plane’s wreckage, plus people’s shopping bags and body parts, bobbing to the oily surface around them. All of them wore gloves as they plucked this and that from the sea. Their expressions were what Sabina termed
“priceless.”
Mary milked her end lines for all they were worth. “The big questions remain unanswered,” Ms. Shanahan said crisply. She was wearing a suit Patrick had never seen before, something navy blue. The jacket was strategically opened, as were the top two buttons of her pale-blue blouse, which closely resembled a man’s dress shirt, only silkier. This would become her signature costume, Wallingford supposed.
“Was the crash of the Egyptian jetliner an act of terrorism, a mechanical failure, or pilot error?” Mary pointedly asked.
I would have reversed the order, Patrick thought—clearly “an act of terrorism”
should have come last.
In the last shot, the camera was not on Mary but on the grieving families in the lobby of the Ramada Plaza; the camera singled out small groups among them as Mary Shanahan’s voice-over concluded, “So many people want to know.” All in all, the ratings would be good; Wallingford knew that Wharton would be happy, not that Wharton would know how to express his happiness.
When Mrs. Clausen called, Patrick had just stepped out of the shower.
“Wear something warm,” she warned him. To Wallingford’s surprise, she was calling from the lobby. There would be time for him to see little Otto in the morning, Doris said. Right now it was time to go to the game; he should hurry up and get dressed. Therefore, not knowing what to expect, he did. It seemed too soon to leave for the game, but maybe Mrs. Clausen liked to get there early. When Wallingford left his hotel room and took the elevator to the lobby to meet her, his sense of pride was only slightly hurt that not one of his colleagues in the media had tracked him down and asked him what Mary Shanahan had meant when she’d announced, to millions, “Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us.”
There’d doubtless been calls to the network already; Wallingford could only wonder how Wharton was handling it, or maybe they had put Sabina in charge. They didn’t like to say they’d fired someone—they didn’t like to admit that someone had quit, either. They usually found some bullshit way to say it, so that no one knew exactly what had happened.
Mrs. Clausen had seen the telecast. She asked Patrick: “Is that the Mary who isn’t pregnant?”
“That’s her.”
“I thought so.”
Doris was wearing her old Green Bay Packers parka, the one she’d been wearing when Wallingford first met her. Mrs. Clausen was not wearing its hood as she drove the car, but Patrick could imagine her small, pretty face peering out from it like the face of a child. And she had on jeans and running shoes, which was how she’d dressed that night when the police informed her that her husband was dead. She was probably wearing her old Packers sweatshirt, too, although Wallingford couldn’t see what was under her parka.
Mrs. Clausen was a good driver. She never once looked at Patrick—she just talked about the game. “With a couple of four-two teams, anything can happen,” she explained. “We’ve lost the last three in a row on Monday night. I don’t believe what they say. It doesn’t matter that Seattle hasn’t played a Monday-night game in seven years, or that there’s a bunch of Seahawks who’ve never played at Lambeau Field before. Their coach knows Lambeau—he knows our quarterback, too.”
The Green Bay quarterback would be Brett Favre. Wallingford had read a paper (just the sports pages) on the plane. That’s how he’d learned who Mike Holmgren was—formerly the Packers’ coach, now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. The game was a homecoming for Holmgren, who’d been very popular in Green Bay.
“Favre will be trying too hard. We can count on that,” Doris told Patrick. As she spoke, the passing headlights flashed on and off her face, which remained in profile to him.
He kept staring at her—he’d never missed anyone so much. He would have liked to think she’d worn these old clothes for him, but he knew the clothes were just her game uniform. When she’d seduced him in Dr. Zajac’s office, she must have had no idea what she was wearing, and she probably had no memory of the order in which she’d taken off her clothes. Wallingford would never forget the clothes and the order.
They drove west out of downtown Green Bay, which didn’t have much of a downtown to speak of—nothing but bars and churches and a haggard-looking riverside mall. There weren’t many buildings over three stories high; and the one hill of note, which hugged the river with its ships loading and unloading—until the bay froze in December—was a huge coal stack. It was a virtual mountain of coal.
“I would not want to be Mike Holmgren, coming back here with his four-two Seattle Seahawks,” Wallingford ventured. (It was a version of something he’d read in the sports pages.)
“You sound like you’ve been reading the newspapers or watching TV,” Mrs. Clausen said. “Holmgren knows the Packers better than the Packers know themselves. And Seattle’s got a good defense. We haven’t been scoring a lot of points against good defenses this year.”
“Oh.” Wallingford decided to shut up about the game. He changed the subject.
“I’ve missed you and little Otto.”
Mrs. Clausen just smiled. She knew exactly where she was going. There was a special parking sticker on her car; she was waved into a lane with no other cars in it, from which she entered a reserved area of the parking lot.
