Another Thing to Fall (2 page)

But Tess had painstakingly rationalized her way into trouble, which, she decided later, is pretty much how everyone gets into trouble, one small rationalization at a time. She wanted to row, yet she felt obligated to listen to her boyfriend on a local radio show, promoting the Oktoberfest lineup at her father’s bar. Besides, he planned to play some songs by Brave Combo, a nuclear polka band that Tess quite liked. She would row a path that was familiar to her, and trust the coxswains for the fours and eights to watch her back, a courtesy offered to all scullers.

It did not occur to Tess to row a little later, or skip the workout altogether. The rowing season traditionally ended after Thanksgiving, a mere month away. She had to take advantage of every waning day, especially now that Baltimore was in its full autumnal glory. If aliens had landed in Baltimore on this particular October morning, they would have concluded that it was the most perfect city on the globe they were about to conquer, truly the Charm City it claimed to be. The trees were tinged with gold and scarlet, the breeze was light, the sky was slowly deepening into the kind of brilliant blue that reminded Tess that she once knew the word
cerulean,
if only because it had been on the vocabulary lists for the SATs.

She set out for Fort McHenry, at the distant tip of Locust Point, rationalizing every stroke of the way: She knew the route so well, it was so early, the sun not even up. She had beaten the other rowers to the water, arriving in darkness and pushing off from the dock at first light. She wouldn’t wear the headphones on the way back. She just needed to hear Crow on WTMD, listen to him play a few snippets of Brave Combo, then she would turn off the Walkman and—

That’s when the police boat, bullhorn blaring, crossed into her line of vision and came charging toward her. By the time she registered everything that was happening — the approaching boat, the screams and shouts coming from all directions, the fact that someone was very keen that she stop or change course — the motorboat had stopped, setting up an enormous, choppy wake that was going to hit her sideways. Tess, trying frantically to slow and steady her scull, had a bona fide moment of prescience. Granted, her vision extended only two or three seconds into the future, but it was uncannily exact: She was going to go ass over teakettle into the Patapsco, a body of water that even conquering aliens from a water-deprived planet would find less than desirable. She closed her eyes and shut her mouth as tightly as possible, grateful she had no cuts or scratches into which microbes could swim.

At least the water held some leftover summer warmth. She broke the surface quickly, orienting herself by locating the star-shaped fort just to the north, then the wide channel into the bay to the east of the fort, toward which her vessel was now drifting. “Get my shell,” she spluttered to the police boat, whose occupants stared back at her, blank faced. “My shell! My scull! MY GODDAMN BOAT.” Comprehension dawning, the cops reached out and steadied her orphaned scull alongside the starboard side of their boat. Tess began to swim toward them, but a second motorboat cut her off.

A man sat in the stern of this one, his face obscured by a baseball cap, his arms crossed over a fleece vest emblazoned with a curious logo,
MANN OF STEEL
. He continued to hug his arms close to his chest, a modern-day Washington crossing the Delaware, even as two young people put down their clipboards and reached out to Tess, boosting her into the boat.

“Congratulations,” said the male of the pair. “You just ruined a shot that we’ve been trying to get for three days.”

Tess glanced around, taking in everything her back had failed to see. This usually quiet strip around Fort McHenry was ringed with boats. There was an outer periphery of police launches, set up to protect an inner circle, which included this boat and another nearby, with what appeared to be a mounted camera and another fleece-jacketed man. There were people onshore, too, and some part of Tess’s mind registered that this was odd, given that Fort McHenry didn’t open its gates to the public until 9 A.M. Farther up the fort’s grassy slopes, she could see large white trailers and vans, some of them with blue writing that she could just make out: HADDAD’S RENTALS. She squeezed her ponytail and tried to wring some water from her T-shirt, but the standing man frowned, as if it were bad form to introduce water into a boat.

“The sun’s up now,” said the young woman who had helped Tess into the boat, her tone dire, as if this daily fact of life, the sun rising, was the most horrible thing imaginable. “We lost all the rose tones you wanted.”

The doubly stern man threw his Natty Boh cap down in the boat, revealing a headful of brown curls, at which he literally tore. He was younger than Tess had realized, not much older than she, no more than thirty-five. “Three days,” he said. “Three days of trying to get this shot and some
stupid
rower has to come along at the exact wrong moment—”

“Tess Monaghan,” she said, offering a damp, sticky hand. He didn’t take it. “And I’m sorry about the accident, but
you
almost killed
me
.”

“No offense,” said Natty Boh, “but that might have been cheaper for us in the long run.”

Are you sure you want to wait for your clothes to go through the wash?” asked the girl from the boat, the brunette with the clipboard. “We could dress you from the underwear up with things in the wardrobe trailer. What are you? Size twelve? Fourteen?”

Tess was seldom nonplussed, but she found this offer — and eerily on-target assessment of her size, which was usually a twelve, but had been known to flirt with fourteen after a Goldenberg Peanut Chew fling — disorienting to say the least.
Surreal
was an overused word in Tess’s experience, but it suited the events of the morning so far. Now that she was on land, her Hollywood rescuers were behaving more like captors, making sure she was never out of their sight. Were they worried about a lawsuit? She covered her confusion by bending down and toweling her hair, checking to see if it still carried a whiff of river water beneath the green apple scent of the shampoo. They had been kind enough to let her shower in one of the trailers, which they kept calling bangers, much to Tess’s confusion. Was the jargon some sort of sexual allusion? There also had been mention of a honey wagon and repeated offers to bring her something from craft services, but she wasn’t sure what that meant. Macramé?

“No, I’ll wait, if you don’t mind,” she said. “My Under Armour tights and jog bra will dry really fast, even on a low-heat cycle, and I don’t mind if the T-shirt is a little damp.”

“Everything we have is
clean,
” the young woman said, her tone huffy, as if she were personally offended by Tess’s refusal of laundered-but-possibly-used underwear. “And we’d put you in modern clothes, from the present-day sequences, not the nineteenth-century stuff.” Again, that cool appraising look, unnerving in an otherwise sweet-faced young woman, not even twenty-five by Tess’s estimation. “You probably wouldn’t fit into those, anyway. They’re quite small.”

Tess cinched the belt of the bathrobe they had loaned her. The garment was Pepto-Bismol pink and made of a fluffy chenillelike material that seemed to expand the longer she wore it, so she felt quite lost and shapeless within it. Still, she did have a waist and a respectably solid body somewhere inside this pink mass.

The man in the Natty Boh cap, who had been on his cell phone almost constantly since they arrived at the trailer —
banger
— suddenly barked: “Arrange for her clothes to go to the nearest coin laundry, Greer.” Then, to Tess, picking up a conversation that he had started perhaps twenty minutes earlier, during one of the lulls between phone calls: “You see the irony, right? During the Civil War, Francis Scott Key’s descendant was held as a prisoner here, in the very fort where Key was kept when he wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

“Well, Key was on a British ship, stationed in the harbor. But I guess I—”

“Key was on a ship?” He looked dubious. “Greer, check that out, will you? I think we have a reference to it in one-oh-three. We may have to save that with looping.”

His girl Friday dutifully jotted some notes on her clipboard. “Should I use the Internet or—”

“Just check it out. And do something about her clothes, okay?” Greer scurried away, even as Tess marveled at the man’s ability to switch from bossy-brittle to seductive-supplicant and back again without missing a beat. She wondered if he ever got confused, used the imperious tone on those he was trying to impress, then spoke beguilingly to those he meant to dominate. “On the boat or on the shore, it’s the larger irony that concerns me. ‘Everything connects,’ like it says in
Howards End
.”

Tess didn’t have the heart to tell him that the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s novel was
only
connect. Everyone made mistakes. She just wished the man would stop trying so hard to impress her and perhaps do something as rudimentary as introduce himself.

Mr. Natty Boh’s cell phone rang for what Tess estimated was the seventy-fifth time since they had left the boat. The ring tone was the
brrrrrrring-brrrrrrring
of an old-fashioned desk phone, something black and solid. It was a ring tone that Tess particularly hated, even more than the one on her friend Whitney’s phone, which played “Ride of the Valkyries.”

“What? WHAT? You’re breaking up, let me go outside.”

Greer returned as soon as her boss left. They seemed determined to keep an eye on Tess at all times, although they had let her shower alone. “I sent your clothes off with the P.A., Brad.”

“P.A.?”

“The production assistant from the boat. And I realized something — I know you.” The rounded
O
sound — knOOOOOOHw — marked her as a native Baltimorean, although one who seemed to be trying to control her
o
s and keep her
r
s where they belonged.

“I don’t think so,” Tess countered.

“I’ve
seen
you,” she insisted, eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared in her apple-cheeked face. “You’ve been in the paper.”

“Oh, well, who hasn’t? I’m sure you’ve ended up in the paper yourself, a time or two. Engagement announcement, perhaps?” The girl wore a simple, pear-shaped diamond on a gold band, and she reached for it instinctively at Tess’s mention, but not with the expected tenderness or pride. She twisted it, so the stone faced inward, the way a woman might wear a ring on public transportation, or in a dangerous neighborhood.

Tess babbled on: “Like Andy Warhol said — in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Actually, he didn’t
say
it, he wrote that, in the notes on a gallery exhibit at the University of Maryland of all places. And most people get it wrong, refer to so-and-so’s fifteen minutes of fame, which isn’t the same, not at all….”

She hoped her prattling might derail the woman’s chain of thought, but this Greer had a pointer’s fixity of purpose.

“You weren’t in the paper in a
normal
way,” Greer said. “It was something odd, kind of notorious.”

“One of my favorite Hitchcock films,” her boss said, returning to the trailer. “Written by Ben Hecht, with uncredited dialogue by Odets.”

“No,
she’s
notorious.” Greer used her clipboard to indicate Tess. “She’s been in the paper.”

“The local paper?” asked Mr. Natty Boh, suddenly all bright interest.

“Yes,” Greer said.

“No,” Tess said. “I mean, not really, not often. I started out as a reporter at the old
Star,
and I’ve worked for the
Beacon-Light
as a consultant, nothing more. Maybe that’s why she thinks I’ve been in the newspaper.”

A lie, but an expedient one, one she assumed would dull the man’s interest. Besides, how could a Hollywood director, assuming he was that, care who had been mentioned in a Baltimore newspaper?

But now he seemed even more focused on impressing her, extending his hand, something he hadn’t done even while she was treading water. “I’m Flip Tumulty.”

“Oh, right, the son of—”

At this near mention of his famous father, Flip’s features seemed to frost over, while Greer clutched her clipboard to her chest, as if to flatten the squeak of a gasp that escaped from her mouth. Tess was forced to correct her course for the second time that morning. “I had assumed you were the director on this project, but you’re a writer, right? Ben Hecht, Odets — those are the kinds of details a writer would know. Now that I think about it, I remember a Shouts and Murmur piece you wrote for the
New Yorker
a few years back. Very droll.”

That puffed him up with pride. “I
am
a writer, but here I’m the executive producer. That’s how it works in television, the writer is the boss. And you’re a rower who reads the
New Yorker
?”

Now it was Tess’s turn to be offended. “Rowing is my hobby, not my profession. Besides, rowers tend to be pretty intelligent.”

“Really? I don’t recall that from my days at Brown.” Oh, how Tess hated that kind of ploy, this seemingly casual mention of an Ivy League education. Shouldn’t the son of Phil Tumulty be a little more confident? Or did having a famous father make him more insecure than the average person?

“Well,
Brown,
” she said, trying to make it sound as if that school’s rowers were famously subpar.

“What do you do, when you’re not rowing or consulting for newspapers?”

It was a question that Tess had come to hate, because the answer prompted either a surfeit of curiosity or the same set of tired jokes, many of them centering on wordplay involving “female dick.” She hesitated, tempted to lie, but the opportunity was lost when Greer blurted out: “She’s a private investigator.
That’s
it. She shot a state senator who happened to be a killer, or something like that.”

“Something like that,” Tess said, almost relieved to see how the details of her life continued to morph and mutate in the public imagination. She had shot a man, once. He wasn’t a politician. If he had been, she probably would have been less haunted by the experience.