The Side of the Angels (4 page)

Betsey, as the pop psychology crowd would say, “grounded” Johnny. I didn't think this sounded like a good thing.

“I can't go shoe shopping this afternoon, Johnny,” Louise said, sounding more fractious than I'd ever heard her.

“How about tonight?” He began beating a tattoo on the back of one of Louise's overstuffed rose-velvet client chairs, a sure sign that he was anxious. Johnny isn't normally fidgety.

“I do have a life,” Louise said.

“Sure, but you told me yesterday that Hub is on the road. You know how I feel about shoe stores. I hate those guys with the foot measurers.”

“You're thirty-one years old,” said Louise.

“No guy should have to go shopping alone,” said Johnny. “We get panicky. I'll buy the first pair that fits and they'll be all wrong.”

“Fine,” said Louise. “But I'm not making dinner afterward.”

She would, though. She'd end up broiling a steak and frying potatoes while Johnny hung around the kitchen imitating every salesman and customer they'd encountered that night to make her laugh. Did anyone but me think it was odd that the woman Johnny turned to for companionship, reassurance, and truly excellent fried potatoes was an entirely different woman from the one he was marrying?

It irked me, Johnny's unspoken assumption that Louise was at his disposal. Louise was just as good-looking for a woman as Johnny was for a man. Male clients fell for her in droves, though she would never have dated one of them. In her eyes, that would have constituted malpractice. There's something soft and endearing about Louise: her profusion of baby-fine, dark-golden curls, her round chin and cheeks and elbows, her very slight plumpness. Louise has the pretty pastel tints, mild blue eyes, and long spidery lashes of an eighteenth-century miniature. Her upper lip curves upward ever so slightly in the middle, giving her an impressionable air that endears her to men.

And Johnny saw none of it. Johnny's image of Louise was fifteen years out of date. As a teenager, Louise had been overweight by twenty pounds, which made all the difference on her small frame. Used to his plump cousin with her acne-ridden, squeaky-voiced suitors, Johnny hadn't seemed to notice when, a little later than her contemporaries, Louise came into her own. Her metabolism stabilized, her fashion sense crystallized, and she let her hair grow out from the butch layered cuts that hairdressers inflict on chubby women with the excuse that short lengths “draw attention to the face.”

Louise's metamorphosis only slightly improved her taste in men, unfortunately. She was currently dating a guy named Hubbard Wentworth Gruber III, otherwise known as Hub, a trust fund brat of thirty
or so who sang in a semi-successful folk group that would never make it to the big time because no one in it was hungry enough, but had enough of a groupie following to keep going. Distasteful as Hub was to me, with his ostentatious vegetarianism and false artistic suffering, I was happy that Louise no longer put up with the dismissive, critical types who had been the abiding theme of her love life until she “grew into her looks,” as my mother liked to say.

Johnny ridiculed Hub with a fierceness that should have told him something about himself. There he and Louise were, perfectly right for each other, right in
front
of each other, and still apart. It was like watching a yellow jacket trying to get out an open window, bumbling all over the windowpane, knocking into every corner of the sill, always just missing the route to the open air.

Johnny was still hanging around when I left, going through Louise's desk drawers for a postage stamp, singing “Don't Cry for Me, Argentina” in a smarmy falsetto to make Louise laugh. As she walked me to the door, Louise tucked the last two brownies, carefully wrapped in green cellophane, into my briefcase. That was what you had to love about Louise. In the midst of proffering spiritual consolation, she still remembered to send you off with baked goods.

“Make Johnny take you out to dinner,” I said to her as I hugged her good-bye.

“He's playing pickup basketball at nine.”

“No, he isn't. Not now. Get him to cancel. It's the least he can do for dragging you out shopping.”

Louise hated shopping of any traditional sort. Noise and crowds and stacks of bright shiny merchandise overwhelmed her. Her favorite stores had names like “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” and featured soothing mandolin tapes playing in the background, a smell of patchouli in the air, and odd ethnic apparel hand-loomed by gallant peasant artisans from Tibet, Peru, or Nepal.

“Johnny,” I called back to him, “you
are
buying Louise a meal after this shoe expedition.”

“Glad to,” said Johnny, and grinned at Louise. “There's a new
rooftop bar in Adams-Morgan where they have free tango lessons and half-price tapas after ten
P.M.
Want to tango, Louise?”

“No.”

“Fox-trot at the Chantilly Ballroom?”

“No, thanks.”

“Go waltzing at the senior center?”

He grabbed her by the waist and began twirling her around the room. Louise had taught Johnny how to waltz for some debutante cotillion he'd been invited to, the spring of his freshman year in college. I watched them circling together, laughing and treading on each other's feet, and remembered Louise at nineteen, patiently counting out the box step with Johnny in my parents' living room five nights in a row so that he wouldn't embarrass himself at the dance with another girl, the girl who counted that particular week or month. The girl whose name he probably couldn't even remember now, though I was sure Louise would.

Sometimes it seems to me that, for every happy couple fate brings together just in the nick of time, there are five other pairs who miss each other by inches or miles. Do human beings just not want to be happy, deep down, or is it that we snatch at the easiest, most comfortable happiness, not the hard-won kind? And who was I, I thought as I ran down Louise's stairs, to aim that question at anyone but my sorry self?

B
Y SHEER LUCK
I found a cabby who drove with furious energy, cutting in and out of the narrow inbound lanes on Rock Creek Parkway, then hurling us across to Independence Avenue and through the clogged side streets. I was early, and of course there was no sign of Ron, who, after hurrying me through my lunch, would arrive at the stroke of two.

Entering the headquarters of the International Union of Toilers and Wage Laborers always plunged me into depression. If the Toilers' coffers were as fat as the right wing portrayed them to be, it certainly didn't show in their national offices. Erected in the 1970s—that Dark Age of architecture—the building was a brick-and-glass pentagon tinted the brown of watery coffee. Its twelve floors overlooked a desolate inner courtyard in which no one ever lingered. A few years ago, due to shoddy construction, stray bricks had begun to fall off the outside walls of the building, narrowly missing students from Georgetown Law who were trudging down F Street. A wire mesh cage had been set up to catch any falling masonry until the problem could be permanently fixed. Structural repairs, of course, would have cost almost as much as it had taken to build the place originally, and the mesh was still there, giving the whole building the look of some odd artistic “happening,” as when that guy out West wrapped an entire island in white sheets.

These infrastructure difficulties had put a crimp in the Toilers' budget that was apparent in the office decor, which hadn't been spruced up with so much as a philodendron in the three years that Ron and I had had the account. The walls were hung with Eastern European paintings picked up by the Toilers' recently deceased president,
Frank De Rosa, during his years of undercover missions to dissident unions in former Soviet bloc countries. These depressing works depicted sad-looking Yugoslavs playing cards in smoky bars, and Ukrainian villages under a bruised-looking sky. There were a few abstracts too: a gouache of angry eggplant-colored triangles whirling and snarling, and a black-and-white etching of what seemed to be either a spiderweb or a net.

In an attempt to cheer things up, a cut-rate decorator had at one time installed purple and orange rugs on all the floors open to public view. The rugs had acquired rips and tears that tripped the unwary, and were now halfheartedly patched with silver duct tape that was grubby and peeling at the edges.

I asked Phyllis, the receptionist, if I could use the small phone perched on a spindly fiberglass table in the lobby. Although the phone is meant for guests' convenience, Phyllis delights in telling people it's off-limits.

“Is Ronnie boy coming by, too?” she asked me.

“He's late already.”

Phyllis snorted. She expected no man to be dependable. At fifty-one she had buried three husbands, and thus had a dark view of life. Oddly enough, this robust pessimism didn't repulse potential suitors. Phyllis might have been full of negative energy, but at least it was energy. She enthusiastically attended art openings, charity walks, community theater, and family weddings no matter how distant. She'd been on an inland-passage cruise in Alaska, an archaeological dig in Egypt, and a kayaking expedition down the Columbia River.

Phyllis dressed with the refined good taste she deemed suitable for a receptionist at a classy, mob-free union like the Toilers, but her vitality couldn't be confined in the conservative career separates she bought at the mall. Her henna-red curls stood up exuberantly from her forehead, her cloisonné earrings from her weekend in San Francisco swung wildly, her silver fake-Navajo bracelets purchased on her trip to the Grand Canyon jangled, and the bright pink nails, which she got done once a week at Darla's House of Manicures, drummed impatiently when she was still for even a minute.

Uncharitable coworkers claimed that Phyllis wore her three hapless
spouses to death, but I thought the explanation was simpler. Opposites attract, and Phyllis drew quiet, spiritless men who could be dragged along, men who'd been divorced by first wives who found them hopelessly boring, or who'd been left at loose ends by the death of a saintly mother. Such men, by their very nature, are probably doomed to a fairly early demise. At least with Phyllis, they got to live life to its vicarious fullest before retiring exhausted to their heavenly reward.

Phyllis liked me for some reason, perhaps because she had little use for Ron and enjoyed watching me push him around. She'd once said to me, “We redheads have to stick together, even if I bought my color and you were born with yours.”

“He's in one of his moods today,” Phyllis said.

“He” was Weingould, the Toilers' director of organizing, a man so constitutionally nervous he should have worked in a library, not as chief of a bunch of unruly union agitators, as Weingould's organizing reps liked to be called.

If Weingould was jumpy it would not be an easy meeting. I sighed, and dialed my mother's number. I had a few things to say to her.

“Hello,” came the faint, wispy voice my mother thinks is ladylike on the phone.

“Mother” (she thought “Mother” was more upper-class than the Bostonian “Ma,” though none of us could stick to it), “Mother, why did you pressure Louise into trying to sign me up? You ruined the only free hour I have today.”

“Hold on a minute, let me turn down my story.”

I could feel my mother gathering her forces at the other end of the line. She would be folding laundry, wearing the sensible black gabardine stretch pants, long thick sweater, and black Keds she considered suitable home attire, and watching
All My Children
(her “story”) with a childlike intensity. My mother would never be seen in trousers in public, with the exception of the grocery store, but they were practical for the thousand tasks she found to do in a three-bedroom house in which only one person lived. The bulky sweater was for two reasons.
She didn't think women over fifty-five should “show off” their figures (although my mother still had the tiny waist and lovely legs of her youth) and she kept the heat down to sixty-three degrees until January.

My father had been able to leave my mother comfortably off, thanks to the success of the business she had bullied him into starting. But she acted as though she still had to watch every penny, another trait she had in common with Louise. When I urged her to relax her stringency a little, she'd sigh and say, “I would, but I worry about you kids. You're not married yet, and Michael isn't going to marry, I suppose.”

“You suppose? Ma, Michael is gay. He may marry, but it won't be a woman. And I'm not suffering for cash.”

My mother would go on as if I hadn't spoken. “And who knows how many Joey's going to have before Maggie Ann is finished? I'll save my money.”

Maggie's easy pregnancy and short labor with her first child had been a great disappointment to my mother, who would have liked a fresh obstetrical trauma to swap with her friends in the Ladies Sodality at St. Ignatius parish. The tale of her thirty hours in labor with me was a little stale, after all, even the part where the priest gave her extreme unction and she said to him, “Father, I don't care about myself. Just ask God to save this baby!”

Now my mother said, with wounded innocence, “I didn't pressure your cousin into anything. We were talking about you, very casually, and the subject just happened to come up.”

In other words, she had summoned her niece to the house for tea and some of her awful soda bread and had blackmailed Louise into doing the will of a poor, frail widow who only wanted to see her daughter well settled before she died.

“Ma, you know I'm not in the market for a husband right now.”

Phyllis was openly eavesdropping. When not answering the phone, she was supposed to type or file, but she ignored the office manager's attempts to turn her into anything but a receptionist. “If I wanted to be a secretary, I'd be a secretary,” she would say. “I like working with people, even if most of them are jerks.”