“Kenny, it’s a madhouse here,” she was saying. “Just check your book and tell me if noon works for you. You’re beautiful. Goodbye.”
Peta did the introductions, Daphne Jaffe to Jens, Jens to Daphne Jaffe, a tongue-twisterish introduction, but Peta brought it off with her usual aplomb.
“Nice to meet you,” Daphne said.
Jens said, “You already met me. At the BigIf Christmas party. I got your husband in the Secret Santa draw. I’m the one who gave him the case of Glucola.”
“Yes of course,” said Daphne.
“Don’t mind my husband, Daph,” Peta said. “Just go through the binder. I’ll be back.”
Peta took Jens into the corridor. She said evenly, “This is a surprise. Why aren’t you at work?”
“Meredith gave me the day off.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I think it’s her idea of a peace offering,” said Jens.
“Hope you locked your desk. I don’t trust that wench one bit.”
“Meredith’s okay — we had a long talk. Let’s get a cup of coffee, Pet. Better yet, let’s get two — one for each of us.”
It was an old Jens joke. He’d used it on their first, fourth, and eighth dates.
“Let me deal with Daphne,” Peta said. “She’s due any day now and she’s renting presently. Hang out in the conference room. It’ll be a couple minutes.”
Noel Moss was in the conference room with his lobbyists, discussing what sounded like the overthrow of Cuba, so Jens waited in the corridor, looking at the noble oil portraits of the Mosses on the wall, Grampa, Noel’s uncles and his father, five portraits in a line, middle-class conquistadores, storms on their foreheads, lightning in their eyes, pork chops on their minds. Jens had come to tell Peta that everything was going to be all right now. He felt it in his chest as he waited in the hall, new health and peace. He would get back to work and finish Monster Todd, the school shooter whom other kids could hunt through the halls.
Daphne Jaffe, showing great quickness for a woman of her size, left Peta’s office, nodded at the secretaries and at Jens, and went out the door.
Peta stood behind her desk, doing seven things at once, making notes on Daphne’s nascent househunt, pressing speed-dial B (Lauren Czoll’s cell phone), kicking off her pumps, shouting around the corner to Claus, looking through her tote bag for the number of Anthony Bordique, the carpentry contractor, finding instead a dented can of seltzer. She opened the seltzer. Much shaken from her travels, it burst like a grenade, spraying seltzer on her lap. She left a message: “Shit!”—for the seltzer—“Oh hey, Lauren. It’s Peta, honey, listen, I’ve found the perfect house. It’s everything you’re looking for, Greek Revival, sea views, a gazebo, humidor with net access. They have several offers, so we’ve got to shake a leg. I’m trying to organize a showing at noon. Page me when you get this, okay bye.”
Claus came around the corner, dressed like a kommando, big black roll-neck sweater, polished boots and black cargo pants, bearing Peta’s rolodex. They called Anthony Bordique, the old carpenter, on the speakerphone. Bordique was on a rush job for Moss Properties.
“What’s the status?” Peta asked.
“We’re getting there,” said Anthony Bordique, talking over the sounds of table saws and nail guns, a gazebo with a sea view going up in record time.
“I have a call in to the client now,” said Peta. “Tell me you’ll be done by noon.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Anthony Bordique, “but it won’t be dry, the stain. Don’t let her touch it, whatever you do.”
“I’ll handle it,” said Peta.
As Peta talked gazebo with Anthony Bordique, Jens walked around her new and spacious office, Peta’s reward for dealing with the madness at the Dental Building. Jens remembered when Peta was a junior broker for Noel Moss, camping in a cubicle, flogging unattractive fixer-uppers and vacant bodegas in North Portsmouth. He would come into town after an all-nighter at BigIf, or a double back-to-backer, forty hours at a terminal, writing rivers, moons, and monsters. He’d call Peta from a pay phone and say, “Let’s go somewhere.” They would sneak back to The Bluffs in the era before Kai, spend an hour in the bed in the afternoon. Later, as Peta climbed the ladder as a realtor, it was harder for her to slip away without a reason, so Jens would call Moss Properties posing as a client, doing funny voices, doing accents, using code names (Mr. Twillis was a favorite name), setting up an appointment to see a house. She would meet him at the listing (empty for a showing, Peta had the keys). They made love, made the bed, often without speaking, kissed and dressed and separated, Peta going back to Moss, Jens returning to his code. The houses grew bigger over time. They went to bed in palaces, almost, and this was how Jens knew that his wife was a success.
Peta finished with the carpenter. “Try Lauren at the fight gym,” she told Claus. “I think she had a three-round bout against Chappie Xing this morning. Jens and I are going out for coffee. Beep me if you need me.”
“Ya,” said Claus. He marched back to his desk.
Peta was pulling on her raincoat, patting her hips to make sure she had her beeper.
“I think I’m getting close,” she said.
Jens said, “Close to what?”
“To closing, babe, what else? Tell you what: if I get Lauren to commit, we’ll find a sitter and go out for a steak. I’ll wear that tight dress with the zipper up the armpit, the one that makes me look like a bargirl in Hong Kong.”
“Yes,” said Jens. He knew the dress.
He followed his wife out the door and into Market Square.
19
From the window of her room at the inn, Vi looked down on Market Square to the south and east. Vi was showered from the jog and semidressed. She wore a plain blue skirt, a red longjohn top, and a level three kevlar vest, standard-issue body armor for the agents on the ropes. The vest hung from her shoulders like a smock, white nylon velcro straps loose at her sides. Vi scratched her cheekbone absently, watching a crowd take shape below, people streaming up the alleys and the sidewalks, converging on the square from ten directions.
Bobbie was sitting on the bed in pantyhose and camisole. She said, “Can I ask you something, Vi?”
“Sure,” said Vi. “Help me with the vest.”
Vi and Bobbie always dressed each other on the road, Vi first because she kept her gear in better order.
Bobbie stood behind Vi, cinching the vest tight. The vest was slate gray and smelled like damp putty. Vi hated the smell.
Bobbie said, “Too tight?”
If they wore the armor loose, it rubbed them raw all day. They wore it very tight.
Vi said it was good. She wiggled in the vest, getting it to sit right.
Bobbie said, “You ever have like — premonitions?”
Vi was buttoning her blouse over the vest. “Sure,” she said.
“Really?”
“Sure — like once I was hiking with my dad. We were in the Whites, coming down Jim Liberty, and through the trees I saw these dry white boulders in a streambed, and I knew that I had seen this exact thing before.”
Bobbie said, “That’s déjà vu. Premonition’s different. Déjà vu is when you see the past, premonition is the future.”
“How do you know?”
“What do you mean, how do I know? That’s the definition, look it up.”
“But how do you know which one you’re having? If I see white boulders in a streambed, does it mean that I was once there, or that I will be someday?”