The Rothman Scandal (35 page)

“Breast,” he said. “It's savage breast.”

“Don't talk dirty,” she said. But it wasn't very funny.

Once more, the little car inched forward, then stopped again. More motorists were pulling off the roadway now, with radiators aboil, as the sun beat down through a leaden sky.

He was stroking the steering column of the car now, and saying, “Good little Scarlett. You're not going to heat up on Daddy, are you? You wouldn't do that to Daddy, would you?”

The Mozart concerto ended to thundering applause, and the radio commentator had begun his scholarly dissertation on the composition's history and importance to the world of music. Alex played with the dial, trying to find something as pretty as the Mozart, but all she located were hard rock stations, and a woman interviewing an author who had written a book about French cathedral cities.

“And how would you describe a groin vault, Winston?” the woman interviewer asked.

“More dirty talk,” Alex said, twisting the dial.

“See if you can find a traffic report,” he said. “See if you can find out how much more of this we've got to face.”

She tried, but failed, and flipped the radio off.

After a while, she said, “Look, what if we get off at the next exit, and try to make our way down to the Southern State? A lot of people swear by the Southern State.”

“The Southern State is always
worse,
” he said angrily. “Besides, have you noticed any exit signs lately? I sure as hell haven't.”

She said nothing. When he was in a mood like this, she knew that the best policy was silence.

The car jerked sharply forward for a few feet, then stopped abruptly, and there was a sloshing sound from behind their seats. Mel turned in his seat to look and cried out, “Oh, Christ! Cronkite's tipped over his water dish! He can't sit out in this heat without any water! Cronkite will
die!
”

She did not point out that it was the driver's lurching acceleration of the car that caused the water dish to overturn, not anything that Cronkite did. Instead, she suggested, “Would it be cooler for him if we put the top back up?”

“No! It's always hotter with the top up!”

Once again she said nothing.

“We've got to be coming up to the scene of the accident soon,” he said, though there was no evidence along the clogged expressway to support this assertion, and the mood between them now was thoroughly sour.

“Goddammit, find me a traffic report on the radio,” he said.

“Find it yourself,” she said. “It's your fucking radio. It's your fucking house in the Hamptons we're going to.”

He turned to her. “You wanna go back?” he yelled. “All right, Goddammit, we'll turn around and go fucking back if that's what you want to do!” But, of course, reversing direction in the middle of a traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway was out of the question, and Mel merely wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand, and added, “Shit!”

“Why are we quarreling?” she asked quietly. “I thought this weekend was for relaxing, having fun, not worrying about anything.”

“Goddammit, I am
not quarreling!
You're the one who's being a pain in the ass!”

All at once there were tears in her eyes. She opened the glove compartment and groped inside. “Do you have any Kleenex in here?” she whispered.

“Now what's the matter?”

“Nothing … my sinuses … this heat … this air …” The red scarf was hot against the back of her neck, and she untied it to fluff up her hair.

“Now what are you going to do? Blow your nose in that scarf? That happens to be a Hermès scarf, and I happen to have bought it for you! Do you know how much that scarf cost me? Three hundred and fifty dollars!”

She hurled the scarf out the window.

“What the hell—?” The car was not moving, and Mel shifted into park, opened the door, and got out and crossed in front of the car to retrieve the scarf from where it lay on the highway, beneath the door on the passenger side. As he returned with the scarf, she remembered that she had chosen it that morning because he had given it to her, and because it matched the color of his car.

“What the hell's eating you, Alex?” he asked, as he climbed back into the car. “What the hell's eating you?” He placed the scarf almost tenderly in her lap. Then he said, “I'm sorry, darling. It's just this Goddamn traffic.”

She felt two tears stream down her cheeks. “No. It was that Goddamn woman,” she said.

“What Goddamn woman?”

You see? she told herself. He's already forgotten. “The woman in the tollbooth! If she hadn't kept gabbing with you, we'd be way past this accident, or whatever it is that's causing this mess up ahead.”

“Aw, don't blame that stupid old bag,” he said.

But she knew that it was more than Marsha Bernice Apfelbaum who was causing the tears. It was also Herbert, and Joel, and Otto, and Henry Coker, and Mark Rinsky, and Fiona Fenton, and Mona Potter, and the fiasco that her beautiful party had turned into, and even the people in the runabout who had been swallowed by the East River in front of her eyes, and everything else.
Every big shot in town is going to be after you now, Lexy
, Lucille Withers had told her, and she had a lunch date with Rodney McCulloch on Monday, and he was certainly after her for something. But she had taken over
Mode
when she was in her twenties, and now she was in her forties, and she all at once felt too old to move on to anything new.

Mel handed her his hanky. “Here, give your nose a good blow,” he said. “I'm really sorry, darling. I really am. I didn't mean to yell at you. I love you, Alex.”

“Well,” she said, accepting his handkerchief, “I guess that's nice to know.” She blew her nose noisily, and the car inched forward again.

Love, she thought. Love came in such a variety of sizes, shapes, and flavors. No two loves were alike. And, since love did not occur all that often in one's life, it was important to examine each specimen very carefully.

She and Mel Jorgenson didn't live together in the conventional sense, though some people assumed they did. True, he often spent the night at 10 Gracie Square, and kept some of his clothes and toilet articles there, and she often spent weekends with him at Sagaponack, and kept some of her things out there. They had often talked seriously about marriage. But it wasn't the idea of getting married that gave them pause. It was the idea of
being
married. Being married entailed so much sacrifice, so much compromise. Alex knew that she was independent-minded, headstrong, stubborn, and had a quick temper. She knew she had a low flashpoint. Throwing his silk scarf out the window, for instance, had been a childish thing to do, and she had been immediately ashamed of herself for doing it. People who were married shouldn't behave like that.

And both of them, they often reminded each other, had been badly bruised by marriage—Alex by Steven's unhappy death, and Mel by that rancorous, well-publicized divorce. He was only permitted, by court decree, to visit his two children on certain court-specified Saturday afternoons and holidays and, under those rigidly imposed restrictions, he often said he would rather not see his children at all, would rather let them pass out of his life altogether, and relegate them to some previous, all-but-forgotten existence. Or best-forgotten existence, because who could really forget the bitterness of all that?

And, she sometimes wondered, did a man like Mel really want to be married to a woman who came home from an office every night with a briefcase filled with manuscripts to read, page proofs to correct, headers to rewrite, designer sketches to study, composite photos from modeling agents to pore through, advertising and circulation figures to compare against the competition?

Perhaps, in the end, he would be better off settling for one of those blondely beautiful, nubile, sexually artful, Hostess Twinkie types. Or a sleek, rich, postdebutante type who dabbled in helping her rich friends decorate their apartments—not a mature, forty-six-year-old widowed career woman, past childbearing years, with a grown son. Perhaps he should settle for something saucy and twisty with cute little boobs that were of just the size to be cupped in a man's two hands—something just the opposite of his first wife, the one he called The Mouse.

Some mouse. She turned out to be The Mouse That Roared when it came to the divorce. She demanded, and got, twenty thousand a month in alimony, plus child support and tuition, plus custody of the children, plus the court-ordered stipulation that he could spend no more than four hours with each child during any visitation period, plus the house, plus the car, plus the furniture, plus the paintings, the books, the silver, the china, the Steuben glass, the orientals, and the Saint Bernard. Plus, plus, plus. So much for mice.

Yes, in the end, he would probably opt for a noncareer-type wife. Steven was different. Steven had needed a strong woman, a woman who would take his hand and help lead him along the way. Mel needed a woman who would find the traffic report on the radio when he wanted it. Mel needed …

Suddenly she guessed why he was in a foul mood. If she hadn't had her appointment with Henry Coker that morning, they could have left for the Island at least two hours earlier, and missed all this. It wasn't the woman in the tollbooth's fault. It was her career again, interfering with his life. He was still scowling through the windshield at the congestion of traffic ahead of them.

“I'm sorry,” she said quickly. “I've been acting like a bitch. Forgive me?”

“I'm just worried that the car will overheat. Then we'll really be stuck.”

“I know.”

“And Cronkite really needs his water in this heat.”

“Of course he does. We'll get his bowl refilled first chance we get. I could use something cold to drink myself.”

“Look,” he said in a let's-get-down-to-business tone of voice. “It's now three thirty. We're still in—what do you call this neighborhood, anyway? Rego Park? We're still in Rego Park. The Van Zuylens want us at seven. What would you say if—I mean if we ever get out of this, and this jam-up's got to end
some
where, doesn't it? What if we go straight to Southampton, and to the Van Zuylens', without stopping at Sagaponack? It'd save us twenty minutes in each direction if we did it that way.”

“Like this?” she said, fingering her shirt. “In jeans, and one of Joel's old shirts?”

“It's a beach party,” he said. “Very casual. Swimsuits. T-shirts. Bare feet.”

She started to say that, after the long, hot drive, she would be looking forward to a bath, but she said nothing. Then, as though he had read her thoughts, he said, “You could take a dip in the pool when you get there. Maggie always keeps her dressing rooms stocked with suits. All sizes.”

“As a matter of fact, I tossed an extra suit in my bag.”

“Besides, I thought that whatever the editor-in-chief of
Mode
wore, it automatically became a fashion statement.”

“Co-editor-in-chief of
Mode,
” she said.

“Now remember. We promised.”

“What would you do with Cronkite?” she asked him. “Take him to the party? Remember that Maggie has a real thing about dogs.”

“He could stay in the car, as long as we leave the windows partway open and he has his water dish. I'd check on him every hour or so.”

“Well, we'll see.”

“There'll be parkers at the party. They'll check on Cronkite, too, for a ten-buck tip.”

Now, all at once, they seemed to be approaching the scene of what was causing the massive traffic tie-up. “My God!” he cried. “Will you look at that? Do you be
lieve
this?”

They had both expected an accident of colossal magnitude—dozens of automobiles piled up together or overturned, police cars with rotating bubble lights, fire engines, ambulances, sirens, roadside flares, lanes blocked off with orange cones. Instead, what they saw was a blue Toyota up on the median divider with a very obviously flat left-rear tire. Two dismayed-looking women—one older, one younger—stood outside the beached vehicle, and the younger woman was holding a baby in her arms. The baby was howling and waving its tiny clenched fists, obviously wanting its bottle. They appeared to be grandmother, mother, and three-month-old.

“So this was
it!
” Mel wailed, slamming the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. “Traffic slowed down for hours, so people could rubberneck two women
with a flat tire!
Of course nobody'd offer to help them. Think I should stop? I can change a tire in five minutes, if they've got a spare.”

“Oh, darling, do you think so?” she said. “I mean, if word got out that Mel Jorgenson was changing a tire in the middle of the Long Island Expressway, you'd have people stopping for autographs. You'd have traffic backed up from here to New Jersey.”

“Maybe you're right. But I'm gonna do
some
thing.” He picked up his car phone and began punching numbers into the handset. Already, as the scene of the disaster fell behind them, traffic was beginning to resume its normal speed.

“Hello, Al?” he said, and she realized he was calling a garage he used. “Al, it's Mel Jorgenson—I'm out here on the L.I.E. about—yeah, I see an exit sign now—I'm a mile west of the Grand Avenue exit, Rego Park. There's a couple of women with a flat tire on the median, blue Toyota. Will you get somebody out here as fast as you can to take care of them? Yeah, give it everything you got—your siren, your flashing lights—and put it on my bill.”

Now they were just speeding along. With the top down, and the wind blowing in her hair, Alex retied the red silk scarf, pulling her hair back in a tight ponytail again. They passed Jones Beach without delay—the beach crowd was beginning to leave by now, heading back in the opposite direction toward the city—and Alex felt her buoyant mood returning. All the problems that the city held for her were receding farther and farther behind her, and she could smell the ocean.