Blessing in Disguise (61 page)

Ben stepped forward, staggering a bit and grabbing hold of a twisted length of PVC pipe. Jack realized he was more than just pleasantly lit. Kid was flat-out drunk.

“We’ll talk about it when you’re sober.” Jack heard the stern note in his voice, and wished, for once, that he were less civilized—he’d like to pull Ben up by the scruff of his neck and shake some sense into him.

But now Benjamin was swinging around to face him, his arm linked to the crooked pipe as if in some cartoonish parody of a do-si-do, his eyes glittering in the narrow band of light now falling across it. “Get off it, will you, Dad? I’m not your whipping boy anymore.”

“Ben, you’ve already caused enough damage for one night. Don’t say anything else you’re going to regret.”

“The way I look at it, this conversation is way overdue.” Ben’s voice dropped to a low rasp.

“Maybe, Ben, maybe. But not now.” Jack felt as if he’d stepped outside of himself, and was seeing himself through another, more critical pair of eyes—a man who had screwed up as a father, let his children down in some obscure way, and was now paying the price. “You’re drunk ... and you’re starting to piss me off. Like I said, we’ll talk tomorrow.” He started back inside, but Benjamin lunged forward and grabbed hold of his sleeve, jerking him so hard that Jack nearly lost his balance.

“Not tomorrow—
now.”
Benjamin’s handsome face in the grainy light was a twisted mask.

“Ben, you’re acting like a spoiled three-year-old. Now, grow up. I don’t need this, and neither do you.”

Jack, feeling both sorrow and disgust welling up in him, gazed at his son, swaying on his feet as he straddled the courtyard’s old frost-heaved bricks like a punch-drunk boxer who doesn’t know when to quit.

“What
I
need,” Ben said, “is a father who gives a shit, instead of one who treats me like I’m just the new kid in the mailroom. Come to think of it, that’s how I’ve
always
felt, even when I was a kid—more like your goddamn employee than your son.”

“Go back to your hotel, Ben, sleep it off.”

He started to turn away, but Ben’s swollen eyes narrowed as he caught sight of something, or someone, beyond Jack’s shoulder. Jack saw her then, framed in the wedge of pale light slanting from the kitchen doorway.

“Grace,” he said softly.

She glanced warily from him to Ben.

He started to walk toward her, but was frozen by a sudden noise behind him. It was Ben—sobbing in harsh, ugly gulps.
His son.
And, in spite of himself, he felt torn.

Jack yearned to go with Grace, to leave Ben to wallow in his misery. But even as he willed himself to move forward, he found his feet remaining firmly planted on the uneven bricks. And now, as if it were the courtyard itself that was slowly rotating, he found himself turning ... turning back toward the son his head urged him to ignore but his heart could not.

“Jack ...” he heard her call, but her voice seemed to be coming from a distance, just another voice from the party inside.

Grace stared at Jack in disbelief. She’d heard enough of Ben’s nasty accusations to know that Jack didn’t need
any
excuse to walk away. Yet he was hesitating. He’d asked her to meet him, gotten her hopes up, and now ...

Nothing’s changed. When push comes to shove, he’ll always put his kid’s demands
—
however childish or unwarranted
—
before me.

Even so, she felt herself lingering, almost afraid to breathe, for fear of crushing what little was left of her hope.

“Jack,”
she beckoned once again, more urgently this time.

“I can’t,” he groaned. “Not now.”

Jack turned his head to explain, to ask her if he could meet her later at her hotel, but she was gone, vanished like a moth from the lighted doorway.

His gaze was drawn back to his weeping son. Ben moaned, covering his face with his hands, and sinking to his knees.

“Dad, I’m ... s-sorry.” Ben’s voice was hollow and muffled, like someone at the bottom of a deep well crying for help. “Please ... oh, God, please don’t hate me. I need you. I need you to ...”

Jack thought:
I could still go after her. It’s probably not too late.

He hesitated a moment longer, then leaned down and grasped Ben’s shoulder, pulling him gently to his feet. In the dingy gray moonlight, his son’s face, as it turned up to meet his gaze, was a raw wound.

“Okay, okay ...” He spoke roughly, his voice seizing in his throat as he crushed his son in his arms. “I’m here, Ben. I’m here.”

Grace, as she took her seat, noted that the first-class compartment was only about a third full. What a relief. If the whole plane was like this, maybe she’d even be able to relax once they were in the air. It probably went against every law of aerodynamics, but to her it was simple—fewer passengers meant less ballast to weight the plane down during takeoff. After that, the only thing capable of holding aloft tons of steel and engine and cargo, she felt sure, was ... magic.

The same magic that right now was keeping her from falling apart.

I’ll be okay,
she told herself.
And in an hour or so. I’ll be in Paris ... far enough away from Jack.
Four days of wallowing in Old World luxury at the Lancaster, just off the Champs-Elysées, and she’d get Jack out of her head once and for all.

Yeah, sure
—
like Ingrid forgot about Bogie in
Casablanca.

But it had been
over
for nine months. This new longing was just temporary. Like one of those acid flashbacks she’d heard about from ex-hippies who’d done LSD in the sixties.

She forced herself to count her blessings. Chris, her baby, her son, was really coming into his own. Now that he was president of his computer club, with more than just Petie Scully downstairs to hang out with—kids in and out of the loft at all hours, stomping about in their high-tops like a basketball team in training, leaving their jackets, bookbags, Walkmans tossed over her furniture—he probably hadn’t even noticed that she hadn’t called this morning.

And Nola, she had to remember to send her a postcard from Paris. Grace thought about the night before she’d left for Frankfurt, Nola at her loft with Tasha and Dani, helping Chris build a complicated-looking model of a medieval fortress out of popsicle sticks. Then Chris smearing Elmer’s glue over his fingers and, when it had dried, sending the girls into squeals of delighted horror with his macabre trick of peeling it off as if it were skin. It still made her smile.

And soon she’d be in Paris, being wined and dined by Hachette, getting interviewed by
Le Figaro
and
Paris Match.
Treating herself each morning to a
grande crème
and a basket of warm brioches and croissants in the Lancaster’s intimate, jewellike breakfast room.

“You
will
have a good time in Paris, a
great
time,” she hissed to herself between clenched teeth.

Grace looked up, and caught one of the flight attendants eyeing her.

But the stewardess, a blond version of Mario Thomas in
That Girl,
merely asked, “Ma’am, can I get you something to drink—an orange juice, some champagne?”

Oh, wasn’t first class wonderful! They stuffed you with so much food and booze that, even if the plane
did
happen to go down in flames, you probably wouldn’t notice.

“Champagne, please,” Grace said. Normally she didn’t drink on airplanes, but if she didn’t do something to numb herself against this perfectly ridiculous and unwarranted misery she couldn’t seem to shake, she could see herself bursting into tears somewhere over Luxembourg.

What would Lila do in my place?
She’d get up and find an airphone and dial Jack’s hotel. Then she’d tell Jack precisely what she thought of him. That any man stupid enough to let her slip through his fingers not once but
twice
deserved to spend the rest of his life deprived of her. She’d ... Oh, but this was absurd. Lila wasn’t the one sitting here. And the thought of having to deal with the unfamiliar German telephone codes, only to end up struggling in her virtually nonexistent German to communicate with whoever answered, felt like far more than she could handle.

She drank her champagne in two long gulps. But it hardly helped.

She thought of the summer before last, her clumsily tripping on a subway grate and breaking her toe. And Jack, up in the country with Hannah, despite Grace’s protests, driving all the way back to New York, in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain.

But where was he when she
really
needed him?

“You’re a fool, Jack Gold,” she muttered. This time the glance that Marlo-the-stewardess shot her was downright suspicious. Grace merely signaled with her empty glass that she was ready for a refill.

But he
had
tried phoning her at her hotel. This morning she’d had a message from the front desk, saying
urgent.
She’d almost caved in and called him ... but something stopped her. Why start things up again with Jack just when she’d finally begun to adjust to life without him?

Adjust? Is that what you call this?

Grace saw she was clutching the arm rests, and made herself drop her hands to her lap. But her mounting sense of doom wasn’t subsiding. She felt like thumbing the call button, summoning help, but for what? And who, really, could comfort her?

Now the engines were roaring to life, and she heard the stewardess, over the PA system, instruct the passengers to fasten their seatbelts.

Grace looked down and saw that hers was already tightly fastened, but she couldn’t remember having buckled it. Come to think of it, she couldn’t remember why she had ever thought it would be a good idea to fly to Paris in the first place.

The plane had just begun to pull away from the gate when the throbbing of the engines suddenly died.

Damn,
she thought.
Now I’ll be stuck here for the next two hours while mechanics tinker with a loose wire in the wing flaps or something.

Grace glanced out her window, and saw an orange maintenance vehicle speeding toward them across the tarmac. God, it must be some kind of emergency. A bomb threat? Germany was full of terrorists.

She felt a jolt of adrenaline, and sat up straighter, ignoring the cold seatbelt buckle biting into her middle. There, see, she did care—she wasn’t ready to cash in her chips. Maybe there was some hope.

She glanced around at the other passengers, who appeared not the least bit concerned. What did they think, that paying three times more for first class automatically protected you from disaster? That, if anything bad happened, only those peons back in coach would suffer?

Only the skinny blond stewardess looked ruffled. No, more as if she were ... annoyed. Well, at least she wasn’t panicking. Usually, they only got annoyed when it was ...

“Excuse me, but is this seat taken?”

... some VIP running behind schedule with enough clout to get the plane to pull back at the very last second.

Grace looked up, startled, but it was a moment before the face that had appeared above her swam into view. Even so, she would have known that voice anywhere.

“Jack!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, then dropped it to her lap and whispered, “You scared the hell out of me. What are you doing here?”

“Same as you. Flying to Paris.”

He looked as if he’d run all the way from the
Messe,
his curly graying hair more rumpled than usual and his forehead shiny with sweat. She felt giddy from all the champagne ... or was it just seeing Jack? Suddenly she didn’t care if he’d hijacked the damn plane, she was just so glad he was here.

“But how did you know ... ?” She stopped before she could make a fool of herself. Was it just a coincidence that they both happened to be going to Paris at the same time?

“I did my homework.” He winked.

“But, Jack, how on
earth
did you manage it?”

“Friends in high places. Plus, I can be incredibly pushy.” He grinned as he folded his long frame into the seat beside her. “I called your hotel, and they told me you’d checked out. I think it was the concierge who’d noticed from your luggage that you were flying Lufthansa. And by the time I’d gotten Frau Strutz’s son-in-law at Lufthansa to comb through the passenger lists on all of today’s flights to Paris, I’d almost run out of time to grab this one.”

The engines started up again, and the jet picked up speed as they taxied onto the runway. The blond stewardess was smiling her
That Girl
smile as she took Jack’s coat, as if trying to figure out whether she’d seen his face on TV or in the newspapers.

“How did you know I was going to Paris?” Grace finished what she’d started to ask a minute ago.

“Just a hunch.” He tapped his temple.

“A pretty big one, if you ask me.”

“Actually, it was Lila,” he confessed. “I called her last night, when I couldn’t get through to you. She told me you were going to Paris.”

“So you just assumed I wouldn’t mind if you tagged along?” She found herself glaring at Jack, anger rising in her.

“Do
you?” His eyes were no longer blue, they were gray, the color of battleships and barbed wire.

“Stop this, Jack,” she said.

Jack kept his eyes on her, burning into her, like those of a lawyer cross-examining a difficult witness.

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t have to. If it mattered so much to you, why didn’t you follow me last night?” Her anger was growing, and it felt good, canceling out the falsely glinting happiness of a moment ago.

“Grace,” he said hoarsely. Just that, her name.

Damnit, if he didn’t stop this, she
was
going to cry after all.

“Can’t we just let it go?” she asked softly. “Like we’ve been doing?”

“No,” Jack said. “Not unless it’s over.”

“It
is
over.”

“Who says?”

“You did, remember? And I went along.” She briefly closed her eyes, struggling for control. “Jack, I think we’ve both said more than enough. I think it’s time to just bury it, go on with our lives.” She was saying the words, yes, and they sounded fine, good, brave. But did she mean them?