“You brought a shopping bag to the Waldorf?” I said.
“Oh, Miss Smarty, that shopping bag is full of good stuff! You got lipstick, nail polish, a copy of Cosmo magazine, a nice T-shirt, maybe a little small for me but nice, some kind of candy bar—”
“Protein bar,” said one of the other women.
“Whatever. I still didn’t get to the bottom.”
“You’re supposed to take your goody bag on the way out,” I said.
“Look at all these people! You think they have enough bags for all these people? No way! And with my luck I get outta here, someone goes, Oh, no, sorry, Tequila, we got no candy bars for you—”
“Protein bars,” the woman repeated.
“You look at the color of the lipstick?” I asked. “Because usually the cosmetic companies give them whatever they can’t sell, and you wind up with some coral stuff, the kind of stuff grandmothers wear.”
“It’s actually a nice subtle pink, Bridget,” Alison said. “She showed me.”
“I got it on,” said Tequila.
“You’re right, it’s a nice color. What did you say to my sister coming in, Al? It was the most fun she’s had all night.”
“I told her that joke about the nun and the rooster.”
Tequila laughed. She has a kind of he-he creaky door laugh. “That’s a filthy joke,” she said.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and by the wide-eyed, slightly openmouthed look of every woman at the table, I knew who it was. “There’s nothing I like better than a filthy joke,” said Meghan, wrapping her arm around my waist.
“It’s the birthday girl,” Alison said.
“The bride,” Tequila said.
“I guess this is sort of bridal, isn’t it?” Meghan looked down at herself. “That’s probably what it was meant to be, the perfect dress for a third wedding.” Meghan’s hand rested on my hip; Alison had one of my hands in hers. A finger poked insistently into my hip. I hadn’t been felt up so much since eighth grade.
The finger belonged to a small girl in a flowered dress holding an autograph book. She looked up as I turned and shook her head. Not you. At least she was direct. I elbowed Meghan. She bent from the waist so she and the little girl were face-to-face. “What’s your name?” she said, and she signed accordingly: “To Kirby. You rock! XOXO Meghan Fitzmaurice.” It was Meghan’s newest autograph salutation. “Please, Mom, stop, you’re killing me,” Leo had said, but it was short and snappy and made Meghan seem hip. It had at least a year before the statute would run and she would move on to something else.
There was a ruckus at the door directly behind us, a cavalcade of men in black suits with lapel pins. Behind them came a balding man with a bad comb-over and a tux with too-wide lapels. He was carrying a plaque in one hand and fussing with the hair with the other. His face when he saw Meghan was like an acting improv exercise: displeasure, fear, followed by feigned joy and then long-rehearsed warmth.
“Meghan! My favorite morning host! And the country’s, too!”
“Hello, Mr. Mayor. How was the ribbon cutting at the Armory?”
“God, she’s good,” I murmured to myself. I shouldn’t drink at these events. Meghan never does.
“You know my schedule better than I do. Probably the president’s better than the Secret Service.”
“The president is at Camp David this weekend, actually, with the British prime minister.”
“What did I say? Did I call it, ladies? This lady knows everything about everything.”
“Picture!” said the official photographer, and Meghan and I pulled Tequila into a shot with the mayor, who was hustled afterward to the front of the room by his security detail. If Tequila finally killed her youngest child’s father, a course of action all of us at WOW would support, that photograph would wind up on the front of the tabloids.
“He’s got to do something about that hair right now!” Tequila said.
“He’s ridiculous,” Meghan said. “I did an interview with him during the campaign that left him looking like a fool in six minutes, and he doesn’t even have the balls to hold a grudge. I’d respect him a whole lot more if he’d just cut me dead when he sees me. Instead it’s all, Oh, Meghan, great to see you.”
“Smarmy,” said Tequila.
“Unctuous,” Meghan agreed.
“Get the dictionary,” said Alison. “Here come the vocabulary words.”
“She means the man is one kiss-ass mayor,” said Tequila.
“Exactly,” said Meghan.
“You going to keep the lipstick from your goody bag?”
“I don’t know,” said Meghan. “Is it one of those really bad colors? It’s not easy for redheads, finding good lipstick colors.”
“You never even take the goody bag,” I said.
“I might if the lipstick was a good color.”
Tequila narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “I’m wearing it right now,” she said, “and I’m thinking it’s too pink for a redheaded girl like yourself.”
The waitstaff eddied around us, crying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” like some breed of urban bird. The dessert was something pink in a chocolate cup with raspberries and the obligatory sprig of mint. The chocolate cup was the official emblem of charity dinners.
“Meghan, thank you so much for getting me those tickets last month,” Alison said, lifting her spoon.
“Oh, no problem. I was happy to do it. Oh, God, I almost forgot, I have to go to the ladies’ room, that’s why I came back here in the first place. And to see you girls, of course. Bridget, come with me. I’m on in about ten minutes and I don’t want to be at the podium thinking I have to pee.”
“What’d I get her tickets for?” she muttered as we picked our way through the ballroom foyer.
“No idea.”
“Oh. Okay, great.”
Ladies’ rooms are a nightmare for us. This one was not so bad. Only one woman reared back from the sink and cried, “It’s you!” Sometimes they say “It’s you” and sometimes they say “You’re Meghan Fitzmaurice.” Either way they seem to feel that Meghan needs to be told who she is. Mostly they seem stunned by the three-dimensionality of her: in the park, in the restaurant, in the toilet stall.
“If I didn’t wash my hands, it would wind up in the columns,” she said.
“You went back to see some of the clients,” Ann Jensen cooed when we returned, threading our way around table after table. It was like doing the wave: table 43 stares, then table 28, then 11, then the single digits.
“I know them,” Meghan said. “They’re friends of mine.”
“So gracious. So gracious.”
And she was. The mayor declared it Manhattan Mothers Day, the executive director of Manhattan Mothers introduced the film clip, Ann Jensen announced that the dinner take was close to two million dollars, and then she presented Manhattan Mother of the Year to Meghan. It was a crystal obelisk from Tiffany. Someday an archaeologist is going to be investigating ancient cultures and find blue box after blue box filled with crystal objects in Bubble Wrap with the name Meghan Fitzmaurice engraved at their bases. And he will wonder what in the world they were for. As did we.
“It’s past my bedtime,” she said as she stepped to the podium, cradling the obelisk. And everyone laughed. Everyone knew that while the rest of Manhattan is watching the late news, Meghan is in bed, that in the empty hour just before dawn, when the streets are almost clean of cars and only the windows of insomniacs burn silver in the darkness, Meghan is in a black car on the way to the studio.
“I wish my son, Leo, was here tonight, but he is spending three weeks in Spain, perfecting his skills in a language I don’t even understand. He is making himself more cosmopolitan, more educated, more a citizen of the world than his parents are.” She looked down at Evan and smiled slightly, to include him, but he was looking at his hands in his lap, threading his fingers together tightly. I smiled back at her.
“That’s what every Manhattan mother wants for her children. Mot
hers rich and poor, black and white, Christian and Muslim, uptown in Harlem and downtown in Tribeca. We want our children to do better than we have done. We know that our families are the most important things we have or do.”
And she was off. I don’t remember all of the rest. I’ve heard a fair number of Meghan’s speeches, and I still can’t quite understand how it is that she can make a small bit of alliteration, the repetition of a phrase, a pause and a tightening of the lips and a raised voice evoke the same sort of emotion that music does. It amazes me.
“What we all want for our kids,” she said at the end, “is for them to rise and shine.” Oh, such a smoothy, I wanted to say cynically, to close with the name of her own show. But it was perfect. She stepped back, and they all stood up. Evan had tears in his eyes.
I wouldn’t want anyone to think, in retrospect, that it was a night of great moment or triumph, although in the coming weeks a photograph of Meghan on that night, in that slender glittering fall of fabric, holding the plinth of crystal to her heart, would appear in the papers over and over again. In many ways it was a typical night of a sort that happened perhaps eight or ten times a year. Afterward I stood to one side as people asked her to sign their programs. It never varies, what they say: I never miss the show. You’re prettier in person. You gave an amazing speech. For Linda. For Jennifer. For Bob. For Steve. I stood to the side and held the blue box. In the car on the way home, Meghan handed me the obelisk, and I rewrapped it. It didn’t feel like the end of anything.
“That wasn’t a really terrible one, was it?” Meghan asked Evan, her head thrown back against the seat.
“It was fine,” he said.
“You were great,” I said.
“You’re quiet,” she said to Evan, who was looking out the window at the shadowed walks of Central Park.
“I’m just tired,” he said without turning his head. I could see his face reflected in the glass. He looked exhausted, maybe even ill.
“Ev?” I said.
“Bridge?” he replied. We’ve known each other a long time, Evan and I. Meghan tucked her hand through the crook of his arm. His bony fingers began to play a tattoo on the leg of his tuxedo pants. But still he kept his head turned away.
“We’ll be in the Caribbean in a week,” Meghan said. “A week of no calls and no meetings and no snow. A week of reading and tennis and snorkeling.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“I wish Leo could come. He gets back from Barcelona and goes right up to Amherst to work on some big English paper. His life is as crazy as ours.”
“His life is great,” I said, still looking at the back of Evan’s head. His hair had gotten thin on top. I hadn’t really noticed it before.
I tripped over the curb on the way to my apartment building, fumbled for my key in my clutch bag. “Bridge,” Meghan called, leaning forward. “Bridget!”
“What?”
“Paillettes.”
“What?”
“The things on the dress. That’s what they’re called. Not sequins. Paillettes.”
“How did you finally remember?” I asked.
She shook her head. Meghan describes her hair color as auburn. She hates it when anyone says it’s red. Her hair is red. So is mine. “I had someone at the office look it up. P-A-I-L-L-E-T-T-E-S.” And as if they heard their names called, the sparkling circles undulated as she leaned forward, Northern lights in the backseat of a Town Car.
“Accepted and acknowledged,” I called as I unlocked the door.
“It was like the end of an era,” I said several days later to Irving as footage of Meghan in the dress ran over and over on the news.
“Get a grip, kid,” he replied. “We’re not talking World War Two here.”
BAD NEWS COMES to you in strange ways in New York. Before a friend can tell you about the lump she found, you’ve run into a friend of a friend at the pharmacy, and you already know about the suspicious mammogram and the exploratory surgery. Before someone has gotten to your name in the Rolodex to tell you he’s leaving the rat race to spend more time with the kids, you’ve overheard gleeful associates talking at the next table about how he was canned, his office cleaned out in less than an hour. You see the hook and ladder and learn of the fire, the yellow tape and know about the murder.
I got my bad news at the home of the nicest rich people in New York, Kate and Sam Borows. They had written a city restaurant guide that made them wealthy, and in the process they had become the best sorts of philanthropists, with not a hint of “get out the ball gown” self-congratulation. When I’d first met them through my sister, they’d lived in the same building they live in now, in a spacious apartment that had become an enormous one as they’d annexed a studio and two one-bedrooms on either side and a three-bedroom apartment above. When I’d gone to work for WOW, Kate had done some variation on the wish-there-was-something-I-could-do lament, and I’d told her she could come up to the Bronx a couple days a week and teach nutrition and cooking. It had been five years, and she’d placed at least fifty women in good jobs in restaurants and caterers, and she never mentioned it in interviews unless we wanted her to thump for WOW for our own purposes.
“Bridget,” she said when I walked in on Monday evening and struggled out of my coat for the catering guy–cum-actor. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I told you last Saturday night that I was coming,” I said as I handed her a bottle of red wine, which she handed off along with my coat.
“Oh, my God,” she said, hugging me, and then the elevator was back, emptying directly into her foyer as the elevators of the wealthy do, so that no one will be subjected to the shared space of the hallway, the smells of strange cooking, the sight of strangers with their keys in the locks. Six other guests tumbled from the mahogany-paneled car, laughing and handing over coats and proffering wine. I found myself stuck in the foyer with a real estate agent who was making the sale of a duplex on Park Avenue sound like curing cancer. I’d gotten into trouble the year before with a woman like this, who had asked about my work and crooned, “I wish there was something I could do personally.” “Write a check,” I’d replied. In my defense, it had been a long hot day in an office that had bad air-conditioning, and one of the women in my work-study program had been shot by her ex-boyfriend. I still caught hell from my sister, who had heard through the Manhattan tom-toms that I had offended the sister-in-law of the managing partner of one of the city’s largest law firms. New York is the biggest little small town in America. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Believe me: having your purse snatched is nothing compared with being mugged by Manhattan manners over rare tuna on toast rounds.
I moved into the living room, toward a waiter with wineglasses on a silver tray. “Wow—you’re here,” said Sam Borows, with the signature kiss on both cheeks that I guess you learn at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn.
“Why is everyone so shocked that I showed up at a dinner I was invited to?” I asked, and suddenly there was the answer in front of me, a spindly man with too-long hair who was grinning at Sam like a madman and performing a good-gossip monologue, the linchpin of any successful cocktail hour in New York.
“One of the great days of television,” he said without preamble. “We’ll be talking about this one for years to come. On the way up one of the guys was saying the network is spinning it like crazy. The question is whether there’s any spin that can make this go away.” A woman had appeared at his elbow. “It was like watching a car wreck,” she said. “I mean, I was on the treadmill and my mouth fell open. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it, and I was watching Live and in Color when what’s-his-name started to slur his words talking to Yasir Arafat.”
“What’s-his-name was formerly Burt Chester,” said the man, “and he currently runs a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont. And insists in every interview that he’s happier now. Right. Sure. Happier. My ass.”
“Shrimp?” said a waiter, and as we all fell silent and poked the toothpi
cks into fancy little lemon halves while we chewed, I could hear conversations all around us that were clearly on the same subject: Did you see it? How bad was it? What’s the spin? This sort of knowledge deficit was the inevitable effect of working triage in the Bronx while most of Manhattan was going to the same restaurants, forwarding confidential e-mails, talking on the phone. I’d walked into one dinner without knowing that the president had been impeached, and another without knowing the mayor had called a press conference to introduce his fiancée, which came as quite a surprise to his wife. My usual day at the office was too full of lost public assistance checks, arson fires, black eyes, trips to family court, foster care placements, and calls from the cops to keep up with breaking news. Catching up on the conversation was a constant part of dinner party attendance for me. Except that Sam Borows had never kept his arm around my waist before, although by the end of any number of evenings men I’d known far less well had done so.
“You going to the Cape soon?” he asked the man and woman, who had the indefinable body English that told you immediately they were husband and wife of long standing.
“Oh, come on, you’re going to try and change the subject here? I know you’re her friends, Sam, but this is the only game in town.” The man looked out over the jagged vista of the Manhattan skyline, black, gray, silver, and the occasional faint flickering blue light that marked a large-screen television in a skyscraper living room. “Look at that. The greatest city on earth, and I bet there’s only one conversation topic going on anywhere in it.”