“Something else, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, the mystery girlfriend. You couldn’t make it up.”
Charlie rears back. “What? You’re behind the curve, sweetheart. Mystery’s been solved.”
“What?”
“Yeah, things are moving pretty fast. Someone squealed, apparently, about an hour ago. On Twitter. Of course. And now it’s everywhere.”
“Oh.” She takes a sip from her glass. “So who’s the little charmer?”
Charlie catches the barman’s eye and orders a drink. He turns back. “Who is it? Well, her name is Meredith Vaughan. Seems she’s married to some much older-”
Ellen’s jaw drops.
Charlie looks at her. “What?”
“Meredith Vaughan?”
“Yeah.”
“Holy shit.”
She slides off the stool, simultaneously grabbing her phone from the bar.
“What? Ellen. Jesus.”
“Give me two minutes, Charlie.”
She heads for the door, moving quickly, phone held up in front of her, looking for Jimmy Gilroy’s number.
Outside, there is a warmth in the late-afternoon air, a sort of thickening.
“Hi, Ellen.”
She feels excited.
“Have you heard?”
“Meredith? Yeah. It’s just unbelievable. The whole thing has ignited. I’m online right now, and one of the questions people are asking is, who is James Vaughan? It’s like… it’s…”
“Like Christmas has come early.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got to resubmit the book to publishers, Jimmy.” She watches an MTA bus glide by. “Do you still have an agent?”
“No, but-”
“I’ll talk to mine.”
“Thanks. I just want to do some edits, a few days, and then-”
“Yeah, let the momentum build. This story isn’t going away anytime soon.”
Jimmy laughs. “You know what, Ellen, I’m supposed to be heading out to work in a few minutes, but how am I going to get through this shift without cracking something open, and preferably a bottle of champagne?”
“Uh-uh, you save that for when I’m there.”
She tells him about the Frank Bishop development. They discuss the overlap, and how it might mean they could end up working on the same story again.
“For our sins,” Jimmy says.
“Yeah.”
“Fine by me, though.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Ellen looks around. “Okay, Irish, you get your edits done, I’ll talk to my agent tomorrow, and we’ll meet up early next week.”
She puts her phone away, breathes in a lungful of Amsterdam, and heads back inside.
It’s four thirty when he wakes definitively. Doesn’t mean he’s going to get up, but he certainly won’t be going back to sleep. That last little passage of dreamtime was enough to seal that deal-him and LBJ in a corridor somewhere, Johnson blocking the way, won’t let him get by, exhorting, cajoling, breathing in his face. “I’m tellin’ ya, son…”
The reality was quite different, though, because Vaughan famously clashed with LBJ-had the temerity to defy the man-and then went to work for Barry Goldwater.
It was in the summer of ’64.
Famously?
If that isn’t a relative term.
Now that he’s sufficiently awake, yesterday comes flooding back to him in all its horror. First, the screaming, mostly from Meredith, who was all defensive and passive-aggressive, trying to say it didn’t mean anything, which if he hadn’t been in such physical pain by that point he would have laughed at. And then the dramatics, the bag packing and the flight from the apartment, ostensibly to save his “feelings,” but in reality because she knew damn well that if she stayed here, she’d end up-once the cat was out of the bag-becoming a virtual prisoner in the building. And it wasn’t long before said cat was out of the bag and roaming free, claws out. It was a few hours at most.
Sometime late in the afternoon his phone started ringing, and it didn’t stop.
He refused to take any calls.
He also resisted turning on the TV for a while, but he eventually gave in. What he saw unfolding before him on the screen, and later on his computer in the study, was deeply traumatizing. He had never experienced anything like it before.
It was his ultimate nightmare.
Exposure.
Every mention of the word Vaughan felt like a stab wound. Every photo they showed-and they were mostly from the archives-felt like a laceration. As the evening progressed, he also felt sicker and weaker. This was, presumably, the effect of his withdrawal from the medication, which in turn, presumably, was responsible for the gradual unmasking of his various underlying conditions. After a while, it became hard to tell them apart, these two forms of pain-one imposed from outside, one pulsating from within.
Painkillers helped.
But painkillers only help in the short term. In Vaughan’s experience, they usually ended up killing a lot more than just the pain. He tried Paul Blanford again, without success, so he now pretty much accepts that with all this media stuff going on he hasn’t a hope in hell anymore of continuing with the medication.
He gets up at seven, and slowly makes his way to the bathroom.
It hurts to piss now.
He has a quick, awkward shower, using the handheld unit. He dries himself off and puts his robe back on.
As he’s coming out of the bedroom, he realizes that he’s alone in the apartment.
Mrs. R will be here shortly, as will his doctor. He dismissed his full-time nurse a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t see the point of having her. In the old days he used to employ a permanent domestic staff, but Meredith changed all of that.
Clutching his side, which is really sore now for some reason, he walks along the hallway toward the kitchen.
A few minutes later, as he’s preparing to make coffee, or trying to, he spots the remote control on the counter, and curses it.
He holds out for about thirty seconds.
When he flicks the TV on, the first image he sees, if only for a brief moment, is the exterior of his own apartment building. There are clearly reporters and photographers down there, but Billy the doorman is under strict instructions not to interact with them.
It then cuts back to a studio and another panel of primped and preening morons. Mostly what they seem to be talking about is Meredith and that whole social scene she’s involved in. Despite his vested interest in this, Vaughan quickly grows restive and changes the channel.
But it’s more of the same.
On yet another channel, they’re showing a photo of Vaughan in a white linen suit and a Panama hat, standing next to poor Hank Rundle. They’re in front of an enormous construction site-it must be in the Middle East somewhere, one of their great engineering projects from the early seventies. It’s followed by an even older black-and-white shot of Vaughan’s father, William J., taken at the Stork Club with Lana Turner. After that-Jesus wept-there’s one of his grandfather’s funeral procession on Fifth Avenue from, what, 1938?
Where’d they get their hands on that?
Vaughan’s sense of invasion, of violation almost, is acute. How can this be relevant in any way? How can these people possibly justify this stuff?
That’s why he had to take the steps he did with that young journalist. This thing with Meredith is temporary, and with any luck it’ll blow over and be forgotten, but not a book… not a book with goddamn chapter headings and footnotes…
“Mr. Vaughan.”
He turns around.
It’s Mrs. R. He didn’t hear her coming in.
“Good morning.”