'I bet you've put away a few scotches.'
'Listen,' he said, trying to sound reasonable. 'I look back now-I look back over all of it. I look back decades. What do I see? Two glowing years. The only two years I was really happy. With you. That's what I want to tell you. It was never better than that.'
'I like Paula,' she told him as she absently rubbed a sponge around the spotted aluminum sink. 'She's a smart girl. Why she married you, I'll never know…'
'Ha ha,' he said, and that's when she knew he really was drunk. She heard him take a drag off of one of his stinking cigarillos. 'I'm the joke of the century. But think about it. Think about me. Remember how in love we were.'
'Wait a minute. Where is Paula?'
Another long cigarillo-drag. 'Your guess is as good as mine.'
That, then, had clarified everything. 'She's walked out on you. And after six years, you're running back to me? You must be seriously drunk, Pat. Or seriously stupid.'
Onstage, a boy in a Superman outfit was delivering a monologue, a heavy lisp making the words hard to decipher. Patrick leaned close: 'He's gonna fly soon. I can see the string attached to his belt.'
'He's not going to fly.'
'If he does, I'll buy him his first martini.'
Patrick's long face and graying three-day beard earned him extra clients at Berg & DeBurgh. They thought that he, unlike his over-the-hill law partners, looked vital. These days, though, with the bruised shade to his weary eyes, he looked more desperate than vital. Paula Chabon, that Lebanese-French bombshell who sold her own line of jewelry at little boutique shops positioned in many world capitals, had moved to Berlin. An ex-lover had wooed her back. More than anything, Patrick wanted to believe he could do the same thing, that he could woo Tina back. He really was pitiful.
Superboy ended his monologue by running around the stage in mock flight, but the cape hung sadly against his back, and Patrick was annoyed that his feet never left the ground. 'Turn on the video,' Tina told him after the obligatory applause.
Patrick tugged a small Sony video camera out of his pocket. When he turned it on, the two-inch screen glowed.
Without thinking, Tina squeezed his knee. 'Here comes Little Miss!'
But the Berkeley Carroll principal came on first, squinting at the card in her hand. 'Please welcome our first grader Stephanie Weaver, as she performs…' The woman frowned, trying to make out the words. 'Poop-ee de sirk, poop-ee de son.'
Titters rippled through the audience. Tina reddened. How could this bitch not have learned how to pronounce it first?
The principal snickered, too. 'My French isn't what it used to be. But, in English, this is, 'Wax Doll, Sawdust Doll,' written by Serge Gainsbourg.'
The crowd duly applauded, and as the principal left the stage Stephanie entered, walking flat but proud to the center. She was, without a doubt, the best dressed of the bunch. Milo had spent a whole weekend with Stephanie in the Village searching retro shops for the proper one-piece dress and tights. Then he'd scoured the Internet, discovering mid-sixties haircuts. Tina had found it all a bit much, and the idea of dressing their child in forty-year-old styles a little pompous-but now, seeing how the washed-out browns of the dress and the striped stockings glowed, just faintly, under the spotlights, and how her bobbed hair hung perfectly straight along the sides…
Beside her, watching their daughter, Patrick was speechless.
There was a click from the speakers, a CD spinning, and then an orchestral melody that grew into a wall of sound with a swift beat. Stephanie began to sing, those French words perfectly formed.
Je suis une poupee de cire,
Une poupee de son
When she couldn't get her daughter in focus, Tina realized she was crying. Milo had been right all along. It was beautiful. She glanced at Patrick gaping at that little screen, muttering, 'Wow.' Maybe this would finally convince him that Milo was A-OK, despite what he'd believed yesterday when he called her office, at Columbia 's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.
'I don't like him.'
'What?' Tina had snapped back, already irritated. 'What did you say?'
' Milo.' She could tell he was slipping into an afternoon buzz, maybe one of his famous five-martini lunches. 'I'm talking about Milo Weaver. I never trusted him, not with you, and certainly not with my daughter.'
'You never even tried to like him.'
'But what do you know about him? He's just some guy you met in Italy, right? Where's he from?'
'You know all this. His parents died. He's from-'
' North Carolina,' Patrick cut in. 'Yeah, yeah. How come he's got no southern accent?'
'He's traveled more than you know.'
'Right. A traveler. And his orphanage-he told me it was the Saint Christopher Home for Boys. That place burned to the ground in 1989. Pretty convenient, don't you think?'
'I think it's pretty convenient you know this stuff, Pat. You've been snooping.'
'I'm allowed to snoop when the welfare of my daughter's at stake.'
Tina tried to purge that conversation from her head, but it kept banging at her as Stephanie sang, her voice carrying crystal-clear through the auditorium. Tina didn't even know what the song meant, but it was gorgeous.
'Look, Pat. I could bitch about how you left me when I was pregnant and needed you most, but I'm not angry about that anymore. The way things ended up… I'm happy. Milo treats us well; he loves Stephanie like his own. Do you understand what I'm saying?'
Stephanie's pitch rose, the music swirling around her. She nearly bellowed the last lines, then fell silent. A final few bars of music, as Stephanie rocked in the same nonchalant dance she'd seen France Gall do in that Eurovision performance Milo tracked down on YouTube. She looked so cool, so hipper-than-thou.
Patrick repeated, 'Wow.'
Tina whistled, standing and shouting, swinging her fist in the air, exhilarated. Some other parents stood and clapped, and Tina didn't care if they were just being polite. She felt giddy all over. Milo really would've loved this.
7
It had been a lousy year and a half for the Company. No one could say exactly where the trail of bad luck had started, which meant that the blame leapfrogged up and down the hierarchy depending on the public mood, pausing to wreak havoc on this or that career. News cameras arrived to witness early retirements and awkward dismissals.
Before moving on, these humiliated unemployed dropped in on Sunday morning television roundtables to spread the blame further. It was the ex-assistant director, a soft-spoken career spook, now exceedingly bitter, who best summed up the general consensus.
' Iraq, of course. First, the president blames us for supplying bad information. He blames us for not killing Osama bin Laden before his big act of public relations. He blames us for uniting both of those failures into a disastrous, unending war, as if we pointed him to Iraq. We defend ourselves with facts-facts, mind you-and suddenly the president's allies in Congress begin to pick us apart. What a coincidence! Special investigation committees. If you spend enough money and look hard enough, all organizations turn up dirty. That, too, is a fact.'
Georgia Republican Harlan Pleasance was the one who really dropped the bomb, back in April 2006. He headed the second special investigation committee, which, based on the results of the first committee the previous month,
