Four-hundred dollars in her purse and a day free of Mr. Cosgrove, her boss at the public relations agency, an egomaniacal twit who was always broadly hinting that she should go with him on one of his business trips east.
And on top of that, she would soon be seeing her old buddy Mitch Carrey.
Life was beautiful. Life was good.
Nicole
In the daylight hours, the jazz clubs and the art galleries and the odd little shops of Lincoln Park lost some of their nocturnal allure. A wild wailing sax sounded better carried on the wings of neon than on the gritty breezes of daytime. And crumbling brick facades had no romance to offer even the dullest of tourists.
Nicole followed her mother to a restaurant called The Left Banke, the intentional misspelling too clever by half. Good student Nicole knew that the original Left Bank in Paris, home to the cubists and the impressionists, not to mention Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, had probably been pretentious but at least had spared its tourists coy restaurant names.
Mom was driving the four-year-old Buick. The last time she’d gone off, she’d been forced to sell the Mercedes-Benz station wagon to make house payments. Nicole never told her father any of these things. She got tired of his sanctimony. Her mother suffered enough. At the meetings Nicole attended a few years ago, she learned that she was probably what the social workers called an enabler; i.e., she helped her mother keep up her habit. But what was the choice? What would happen to her mother if Nicole didn’t help her? Easy enough for them to say let your mother hit bottom and find her own way back up. But what if the bottom was death? How could Nicole live with herself? She had tried everything to get her mother to stop. A year ago, she’d even cut her own wrists and been rushed to the hospital and put in the psychiatric clinic for three days of observation. Now, she was working on her own last, desperate plan, a way to force her mother to turn herself back into rehab and this time— Oh please God, please God, let it work for her this time — start on a life without cocaine. But first she had to find one thing out...
Her mother didn’t get out of the Buick.
Just sat inside as the light rain started.
Slick new cars disgorged slick new people running in their Armani suits through the rain, laughing and swearing as they reached the canopied entrance.
And her mother just sat inside the Buick.
He drove an old red MG, the steering column on the right side. He wore a tweed jacket in honor of the MG. He even had a pipe stuck jauntily in the corner of his mouth. He looked like a soap opera’s impression of a sensitive British novelist: dark, shaggy hair, and an angular face handsome but with a hint of cruelty in the eyes and mouth. He parked next to her mother and then quickly got of out the MG and hopped into the driver’s side of the Buick.
Kate
“You look tired, Mrs. Sanders,” Mitch said when he got in the Buick and looked over at her.
“I have a pusher who calls me ‘Mrs. Sanders,’ ” Kate said, a touch of desperation in your voice. “Is my life fucked up or what?”
“You know,” Mitch said, “this makes the third time I’ve had to warn you. And right now, with the rain and all, I’m in a pissy enough mood to just open this door and walk back to my car and not sell you anything at all.”
“Oh, God,” Kate said, genuinely scared. “I forgot. I used the P word, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.”
And he had indeed warned her before. About the P word. P for Pusher. He’d explained his circumstances. What he was: Mitchell Aaron Carey. What he hoped to be, with his looks and all, was an actor. And he’d tried hard for several years, too. All the humiliating auditions. All the even more humiliating little jobs around the various theaters (he’d actually scrubbed toilets at the Astor one weekend). Now he was just taking it easy. Doing “favors” for upscale people afraid of or put off by the usual array of street people who dealt drugs. How many pushers could give you twenty minutes on Aristotle’s theory of drama? How many pushers had ever had a two-line part in a Woody Allen picture? How many pushers had Chagall prints hanging on their walls? He was no pusher. He was just an actor temporarily between gigs making a little jack on the side, and being very, very civilized about it.
“God, I’m sorry. I really am.”
He smiled. “I guess I really don’t feel like going back out into the rain right now.”
“I brought the money.”
“You’re kind’ve strung out, huh?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
He was torturing her a little for having called him a pusher. “You thinking of maybe doing a line right here?”
“You wouldn’t mind?”
He smiled again. “You’re a good looking woman, Kate.”
“Thank you.” But it wasn’t compliments she wanted. It was the stuff.
“In fact, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”
“You have?”
“Yeah,” he said, and reached in the pocket of his stylish leather car coat. He took the stuff out and showed it to her. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about you quite a bit lately.”
Nicole
She followed him home. Watched him park. Watched him go up to his apartment. Then went into the vestibule and checked his name on the mailbox. The only male name on the four mailboxes.
She didn’t feel quite ready for it yet. Tomorrow. She’d sleep on it. Sleep on it and think it through and kind of rough out how she’d approach him. Tomorrow was Saturday. No school. Tomorrow would be better.
When she walked in the house, her mother was dusting the living room and actually humming a song.
Nicole got tears in her eyes. This was her mother of long ago, before she’d discovered cocaine at a Los Angeles party ten years ago. She’d been there with her husband, visiting his relatives, and they’d ended up at a party in Malibu and she’d been drunk and up for just about anything — the party showing her just how much of her youth and adventurousness she’d had to give up as the wife of a neurosurgeon and so unbeknownst to Ken she’d tried it — and now she was happy only when she was stoned.
Dusting. And whistling. With the wonderful scent of a pot roast floating out of the kitchen.
She was Mom again. Nicole couldn’t help herself. She flew to her and took her in her arms and suddenly they were both crying without a single word having been said, just holding each other. And then Mom said, “You’re such a good girl, Nicole. And I love you so much.”