“Airlifting two-by-fours doesn’t impress.”
“It does them, the social creatures. They take their cues from one another. That means outrageous things, sometimes. That can also mean big donations. One person gives; others follow. A lot of money is raised for charity that way.” She turned away from the window. “This can be my chance to make something positive out of my father’s wealth and connections.” She smiled at me with those weary, beautiful eyes. “How about a movie, a week from tomorrow night?”
“And dinner.”
“At our trattoria,” she added, smiling. It was where I’d proposed, after so very few dates.
Before she got snagged by charitable works, we’d started going back there, first tentatively, then frequently, after our divorce. The reminding was part of the rebuilding.
“All right,” I said, rolling my eyes with exaggerated reluctance, “but don’t expect anything afterward.”
Her laugh was loud then, and genuine. It warmed the room, and my core, where I keep my sense of well-being.
“I must go, schmooze with rich people,” she said. “The buffet is against the far wall.”
“What about Sweetie Fairbairn?”
“I told her you’d be by the food.”
Then she was gone.
Having subsisted on modestly portioned, microwavable meals for too long, I found the buffet with the urgency of a falcon diving for a mouse. The table was twenty-five feet long and filled with the usual caviar, squiggly little pastries stuffed with squiggly little cheeses, veggies, and meats that were not at all usual to me. At the far end, there was a goodly portion of a steer up on its side, attended to by a fellow with a white hat and a long knife. Most exciting of all, nothing on the table appeared to have been painted red to disguise marine origins.
The item in the center of the table, though, gave me pause. It was long, orange, and shaped like a paving brick.
The color was right, the shape perfect. A bizarre thought formed. I gave the table a nudge with my hip, but the thing did not quiver, at least not convincingly.
“Wondering?”
A short blond woman in a black dress and a single strand of small pearls had come up.
I turned. “Yes.”
She picked up a bone china plate-no paper for those digs, high atop the Wilbur Wright-and a linen napkin. “Let me help you,” she said. Her voice had a slight lilt, a trace of something Scandinavian.
She could have been forty, she could have been fifty. She could have been beautiful, or perhaps not. Certainly her makeup had been artfully, and maybe professionally, applied. As she started filling the plate, I noticed faint age spots on her hands, spots that no creams could completely hide.
She filled the plate quickly. At the caviar, she paused, raising an eyebrow.
I thought back to the lasagna I’d eaten, not that many nights earlier, and shook my head. “I’ve had too much seafood lately.”
She nodded and continued adding to the plate. She finished at the end of the table, when the white-hatted man laid a large slice of rare roast beef over the mound on the plate, as though trying to hide an embarrassment of too much food with a blanket.
“You deliberately avoided that?” I asked, pointing at the brick on the table’s center.
She smiled and nudged the table with her hip as she’d seen me do. Again, I could not tell if the yellow-orange thing had quivered.
“It’s getting old,” she said, sighing. “A connoisseur?”
“I know certain delights.” I shrugged modestly. “No one else seems to be interested in it, though.”
“They don’t know what it is. I set it out every time, but no one takes.”
“Same brick?”
“I’m afraid it’s lost some of its suppleness; it no longer jiggles.”
“Velveeta,” I said.
“Velveeta,” she confirmed.
With that, I felt as though I’d liked her forever.
She carried my mounded plate past a man standing at the head of a short hallway. He, too, wore a square suit, like the guard who’d ridden up in the elevator.
She opened a door, and I followed her in. The room was small, no bigger than the one I had in college, and decorated about as well. A laptop computer sat on a beat-up wood desk backed against a wall. Above the desk, a huge corkboard held a large calendar that was penciled in with dozens of appointments, and a worn picture postcard of a covered bridge that had octagonal windows.
Next to the desk, a metal typing table held an old red IBM Selectric typewriter. A row of high beige filing cabinets ran along an adjacent wall.
I’d seen crummier-looking home offices, but not many.
She motioned me to a worn wood armchair that creaked when I sat down. After handing me my plate, she went to sit at the desk, in an ultramodern black mesh chair that appeared to be the only expensive furnishing in the room.
“Welcome to Shangri-La, Mr. Elstrom.”
“It does feel quite comfortable,” I agreed.
“I can think in here.”
“I do my thinking on my roof,” I said, as though that made sense.
“Eat, Mr. Elstrom,” she said. “Amanda told me you like to eat.”
The beef blanket was tender enough to cut with my fork. For sure it had never developed muscle swimming in the sea.
I chewed, and waited to chit and chat.
“You’re still very close to Amanda,” she said.
“You heard this from Amanda?”
“Not in so many words.”
I looked up from a particularly interesting little piece of cheese. “I like to think we’re still close, yes.”
“Sometimes you appear in the newspapers.”
Amanda wouldn’t have told her that. Sweetie Fairbairn had done research.
“I try to avoid publicity.” I chewed faster, to clear my mouth. Our small talk, even mitigated by fine nibbles, was presenting the potential to turn nasty.
“I’m considering making a rather sizable contribution to an effort she’s leading,” she said.
It was as Amanda had said. Sweetie Fairbairn wanted to make sure I had no way of getting at any of the money Amanda raised.
“We never did share checkbooks, Ms. Fairbairn. Anyway, we’re divorced.”
“I don’t wish to offend, but I must be careful.”
“I understand.”
“Are you really an understanding man, Mr. Elstrom?”
“Unfortunately, I’ve demanded to be understood more than I’ve learned to understand,” I said. It was one of the things I thought about, up on my roof.
She smiled faintly and stood up. “Thank you for coming,” she said. She’d satisfied herself about me in record time.
We went out into the hall. She aimed for a cluster of glittering people. I moved toward the window where Amanda and I had stood a few moments earlier.
I watched Amanda’s reflection in the glass. She was engrossed in conversation with one very thin woman and two distinguished-looking, silver-haired men. She looked happier than I’d seen her in months, and seemed to especially enjoy the witty asides of one of the distinguished men.
I tried to concentrate on the drama of the view she and I had enjoyed just a few minutes before, but the picture out the window had been changed by the superimposition of Amanda’s reflection on the glass. Chicago no longer sparkled. It looked like a cold, hard town, a place of dark shadows and too bright lights-the kind of place where a guy could lose his girl, or a clown could go off a roof, and nobody would much mind.
My appetite was gone. I set my plate on an end table, and left Sweetie Fairbairn’s penthouse as quietly as if I were sneaking away with a pocket full of silverware.
The same guard who’d ridden up with me was waiting when I got out of the elevator. Across the lobby, outside the glass door, someone’s black limousine had pulled up under the canopy.
It prompted an inspiration.
“Tim Duggan around?” I asked the guard.
“Somewhere,” he said.