Oregon Hill (18 page)

She shows up at nine-twenty, and I wave her back to my booth.

I ask her if she’s eating enough, and she tells me I need to exercise more “and kick the nicotine.” I badly need a smoke right now, but I’ll have to wait until I’m on the street again. Might have time for one last cigarette before I get to the office. Maybe a blindfold, too.

I’m struck again with how beautiful my daughter is. I suppress the urge to tell her this, because it tends to embarrass her. I also suppress the urge to ask her why the hell she has a tattoo on her right bicep. I never understand that, even with other people’s daughters. A tattoo on a pretty girl is like a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

She tells me she’s written a story for her creative writing class, and I tell her I’d love to read it. She says maybe sometime, which doesn’t sound like any time soon.

When I see her glance at her watch, I ask her about her mother, and she says she’s fine.

Jeanette’s always fine.

We met at VCU. The campus has changed so much that most of the touchstones of our courtship are not there to haunt me anymore.

We had a blind date on April Fool’s Day. She’d been stood up the night before, and I was happily playing the field, horny as a goat at nineteen. She was from eastern Henrico, not half a mile from where Peggy grew up, and it made us think we had some kind of mystical link. We’d joke about how we might be cousins.

We actually did have an amazing amount in common—liked the same books, movies and music, for the most part. For the first time in my young life, I could just sit and talk with a girl for hours. Don’t get me wrong, the sex was good, too, and we were doing it almost from the start. But I didn’t want her to turn into a pizza at midnight. We cuddled.

We didn’t date exclusively until we were seniors, but we both knew where it was all headed, even if her family wasn’t thrilled with me. I always suspected it was racial. They knew all about Peggy Black. There’s little enough going on out there that scandals among the families who never leave are passed along from generation to generation, part of the oral tradition.

I imagined the Stones sitting around pondering the possibility of an ebony grandchild. They needn’t have worried. Poor Artie Lee. His imprint has all but disappeared. About all he gave me was a good tan and a big nose. Andi, she’s all Stone.

Or maybe they thought I’d turn into Peggy, who had to get spectacularly shitfaced, out of sheer nerves, I suspected, whenever she was in a social setting with the Stones.

Or maybe they just saw what a train wreck marrying me was going to be.

Jeanette majored in sociology and wanted to save the world, which I thought was cool. She thought I wanted to save the world, too, I guess. I never told her I went into newspapering not because of any altruistic motives, but because I just flat out liked it. The thrill of the chase was what hooked me, not the effects of exposing bad deeds.

We got married in 1982, as soon as we graduated. It was all good for four years, what seems now like a long time. So many memories were packed into those first married years, before we stopped “putting it off” and Jeanette had Andi.

With Jeanette at home with the baby, I had more time on my hands and she had less. I found it was easier to spend extra hours at the paper than be a parent.

Up to that time, other than one brief slip, I’d been faithful.

Chandler Holmquist came to us straight out of Harvard. We usually didn’t hire them that young, but she was good. She’d been a top editor at the
Crimson
, and nobody figured she’d be around Richmond very long.

She had long, straight hair, so blonde it hurt your eyes. She had perky little tits and a nice, firm ass, and they put her under me, so to speak. I had been covering the legislature for three years, and for a brief moment, I knew more than Chandler Holmquist did.

I was not unhandsome at that age, and I wore the same pants size I’d worn in college.

Soon, Chandler and I were sleeping together, although sleeping was a euphemism. She was, I discovered, more insatiable in bed than I was, which at that time was going some. I’d come home at three
A
.
M
. with some kind of bullshit story I didn’t even have to tell, because Jeanette was already asleep, unless she had to get up and feed Andi.

Did I feel guilty? Yeah, but Mr. Johnson almost always won out.

The worst, before the absolute worst? I called home on Jeanette’s birthday to tell her I was going to be a couple of hours late because I was working on a big story. She had to cancel dinner reservations. While I was talking to her, Chandler Holmquist was straddling me, naked and grinning like a possum.

The absolute worst, of course, was when I left. Jeanette is smarter than I am, and she knew the basics of what was going on, had even confronted me when Chandler and I were seen at an after-hours club. I promised to do better.

I was convinced, and I think Chandler Holmquist was, too, that this was some kind of kismet bullshit. I’d mention Jeanette and Andi, and Chandler would brush her hair back, run her hand up my leg and tell me we were meant to be.

Jeanette and I only had one raging argument—about Chandler, of course—and when I stormed out, she didn’t stop me. The look on Jeanette’s face that day won’t ever leave me. If she had fallen on the floor and begged me to stay, I probably would have, because all along I wanted to have it both ways. But, to her credit, she didn’t.

After the separation turned into divorce, Chandler and I both felt that the only thing to do was get married. Otherwise, it wasn’t Romeo and Juliet. It was fucking.

Which it was. It took us about a year to figure that out, and another year to get divorced. She got a job at the
Boston Globe
and moved back to the land of her people, to the great relief of her high-born parents, whom I saw exactly three times.

Jackson has never had much good advice, but in that thin volume, what he told me when he knew I was marrying Chandler certainly has a prominent place.

“Willie,” he told me, after we’d drunk enough to be honest, “the even-numbered marriages, they never work out.”

Since Jackson himself has never married, I didn’t give him the credence he deserved.

Chandler and I didn’t speak for a year or so after the divorce; and then she called one day, and we were civil, but then we always were. Even the note she left me the day she took off was civil. And I was civil enough not to call her in Massachusetts, and call her a conniving bitch who had helped me ruin my life.

We talked and then emailed back and forth for a while, but then it just kind of died. The Christmas card—excuse me, season’s greetings card, in case I might have become a Jew or Buddhist since last December—I got this year had no personal message, just a photo of her, her second husband (even numbers seem to work with her) and their three kids in Vail or Aspen or some damn where. I don’t send cards anymore.

I told myself I wanted to do right by Andi, but I never did. I’d get her on weekends, and Chandler would usually find somewhere else to be. Whenever Jeanette wanted one of the weekends back, I was only too eager to forfeit Andi’s company.

Jeanette and I had talked about having two or three kids, me hoping there’d be a boy in there somewhere to whom I could impart the manly Hill arts of my youth. I had blown up an entire family before it really got started.

Mostly, I’d blown myself up, as it turned out. Jeanette—by the time I would have spent the rest of my life on a bed of nails to get her back—was being courted by a decent, devoted, hardworking man.

Once, after I was on my way to Divorce No. 2, I told Jeanette that she’d been the love of my life, which was true, but I tried to say it in a jokey kind of way, trying to keep it light.

Jeanette frowned, then leaned toward me. We were standing inside her front door, and I’d just returned Andi, who would have been about five then. I thought we were going to kiss, I mean really kiss. But then, as I moved forward, she slid to one side and gave a peck on the cheek.

“We had a great time, most of the time,” she said. It was forgiveness, but it was goodbye, too, to any chance of putting all the pieces together. She and Glenn would be married in a year.

Andi has a couple of stepbrothers, eight and ten years younger, whom she adores.

I’ve always loved my daughter, swear to God, but as she got older, I liked her more and more. It’s a little too late, though, when you weren’t there for first words and toilet training.

We’ve been through some stuff. She hit a stretch in her midteens when we wondered if she’d ever see twenty. I remember the night that Jeanette, Glenn and I sat in the waiting room at MCV while Andi had her stomach pumped. I think she was fourteen. But she’s coming around, I think. Part of that willfulness is a strong backbone, a certainty that she knows what she’s doing and won’t be swayed. She knows she’s going to turn out all right. I just hope her certainty has some basis in reality.

If there is a day of reckoning, the only mitigating evidence I have to offer is this: I insisted from the start that I’d pay for Andi’s college education. It probably isn’t necessary. Glenn is a successful contractor who was smart enough to get into commercial work when he saw that the housing bubble was going to burst all over us, and he and Jeanette are comfortable. But they do have the two boys, too.

More than once over the years, Jeanette has tried to let me off the hook, but I’ve been putting that money aside, every paycheck, for almost eighteen years now. Had big arguments with Chandler and Kate over it.

Give me a chance at redemption, I told Kate the last time it came up. Everybody gets a chance to do at least one thing right.

Andi tells me that she has a dog, actually one that she and someone named Keith take turns taking care of. I know not to blurt out, “Who’s Keith?” In the androgynous world in which she lives, he could be a gay friend or some guy who’s shagging her every night. Best not to know, at this point. OK, I hope he’s gay.

She surprises me by thanking me for paying for her tuition and fees and a few other things.

I give her my standard line.

“Least I can do, considering.”

She picks up her napkin and wipes her mouth, then looks at me. It startles me, somehow. She doesn’t often look at me straight on, I realize, maybe afraid of what she might see.

“I’ll make you proud of me someday,” she says. “I swear I will.”

I clear my throat and tell her that I’ll try to make her proud of me, too. It’s about as close as we’ll come, probably, to really sitting down and having it out about what a chump I was.

One sign of being a grown-up, I’ve come to think, is forgiving your parents. It took me until I was in my thirties to have a sense of humor about Peggy. I think Andi is getting there faster, something I don’t deserve.

I pay the bill. She knows the waitress, both part of the network out there. When I try to leave three dollars to cover our nineteen-dollar tab, she tells me not to be a cheapskate. I leave another buck, looking to her for approval. She nods her head and smiles.

I watch her walk away, toward VCU, while I head toward my uncertain fate in the managing editor’s office.

I think, as she disappears around the corner, about Isabel Ducharme. One year, Kate and I went to Tuscany. This one town, San Gimignano, had a torture museum with all the medieval nightmare apparatuses, many of them with a disturbing sexual undertone. There was nothing there bad enough for the man who cut off an eighteen-year-old girl’s head and mailed it to her father. I wonder how Philippe Ducharme, whatever kind of man he might be, can bear it. I have an urge to speak with him.