Thief of Words (4 page)
“Well,” Annie muttered as she reached for the little blue tube of concealer, “that’s why God put Estée Lauder on the earth.”
Most days it took Annie twenty minutes from the time she rolled out of bed until she was out the door. This morning, Wednesday morning, Annie was still playing Barbie doll with herself forty-five minutes after she’d put on the concealer.
She stood backwards to her bedroom mirror, holding a small mirror before her eyes. She wanted to see if her butt looked big in a pair of charcoal linen pants. On her bed lay three other pairs of pants and two skirts, all of which had failed the butt test.
She knew she was being stupid. Just pick something, she told herself. You’ll be sitting down; he won’t even see your butt. Suppose he did, though? And suppose he was really as terrific as Laura had said and she showed up in something that announced, “I have saddlebags.”
With her eyes still focused on the small mirror, Annie took two steps to see how the pants moved when she did. Okay, so she was being stupid, the truth was she was having fun. She’d never been on a blind date before, and now that she’d broken the journalist barrier, she was getting more excited about the notion.
“Looks like Richard Dreyfuss or Steven Spielberg,” Laura had said. Well, that’s promising, she thought, I’ve had a crush on Richard Dreyfuss since
The Goodbye Girl.
The playful tone of Jack DePaul’s e-mails was promising, too. She liked that he wanted to be surprised when they met. “Why have preconceptions?” he’d written. It was a good beginning.
Then it struck her—this really was a beginning. Wednesday, May 29: the first day of the Dating Journalists Era, Part Deux. No one knew where it would lead. The lunch could be horrible— nowadays, Richard Dreyfuss looked like a paunchy sofa salesman (and there was that
People
magazine story about his rehab). It could be wonderful—she pictured Dreyfuss walking toward the
Close Encounters
spaceship. Either way, some kind of relationship was going to start today. And if it didn’t, apparently there was a whole newsroom of men to think about.
She smoothed down the sides of her charcoal pants and brushed back her hair with her fingers. She thought about her relationships past. How less than a year after she left the
Commercial-Appeal
in disgrace, she’d met Thomas Harrington Boxer III, or “Trip” (for triple), eventually her husband, eventually her ex.
She’d felt like damaged goods, and Trip, six feet of steadiness and solidity, seemed like someone she could hang on to through every storm. Someone who would stay. Unlike her father, Milt Hollerman. Unlike Andrew Binder.
It took her years to realize Trip was never there to leave.
At first she thought he was the opposite of her father. She called it the Anti-Milt theory. Trip seemed to be everything her father wasn’t—responsible, loving, caring, hearing. But it turned out that Trip out-Milted Milt, right down to hearing loss.
Whereas Milt Hollerman had lost his hearing ducking mortar shells in World War II, Trip’s diminished auricularity resulted from too much skeet shooting and duck hunting as a boy. And what Annie had mistaken for steadiness turned out to be a deep coldness that made her father’s inept attempts at affection seem inspired. Annie’s mother called Trip “the Cardboard Box.”
To add insult to injury, Trip was even cheaper than her father, though Milt had an excuse—he could never make a living. Trip, on the other hand, had been a highly paid lawyer before he retired at age forty-six to live off what he called his “welfare checks,” the $400,000 he received annually from the family’s pharmaceutical business.
Despite his wealth, he always frowned when Annie came back from Sutton Place Gourmet with a bag full of cardamom seeds to put in their morning coffee. “I admit it tastes better,” Trip would say, “but at two dollars an ounce, I just don’t think it’s worth it. That’s almost a hundred dollars a year if we use two seeds a day.”
Their marriage got sick and died long before it arrived at the emergency room. On a mild fall Saturday morning when Annie picked up the phone to make a call and instead heard Trip arranging a tryst with their neighbor across the street, she realized she didn’t care. She wasn’t angry, sad, or even hurt. She felt nothing but the sudden urge to buy as many cardamom seeds as she could find.
When Trip went to meet his paramour, Annie went to Sutton Place Gourmet. With their Platinum Visa, she charged $347—the largest sale of cardamom seeds ever, the salesgirl told her. She drove back to their Bethesda home, packed three suitcases, and left one of the four large plastic bags from Sutton Place on their kitchen counter with the following note: “Trip, here’s something to remember me by, Annie.”
That’d been two years ago. She was pushing forty-five now, and her hormones were shouting “Last chance” so loud, all her body wanted to do was procreate. But other than the energy analyst, there hadn’t been anyone around to make Mother Nature think she was trying. And Mother Nature wanted her to try again. Maybe this Jack DePaul would be the answer. Or maybe he’d be an arrogant jerk or maybe he’d be boyishly charming or…
The possibilities were limitless.
A
t 12:15 that Wednesday afternoon, Jack DePaul parked his maroon Pathfinder in the empty parking lot of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Inside, there was no one by the entrance to Donna’s with fiery hair, just a guy wearing a blue-and-white seersucker and a bad combover.
The last time Jack had been on a blind date was in high school. Thirty-five years later and he was still feeling nervous and goofy. He took a deep breath and told himself to relax. To kill time he went to the museum store. He circumnavigated the handcrafted earrings and painted silk scarves and found himself by the art books.
Thinking about hair, Jack picked up a twenty-pound coffee-table book called
The Pre-Raphaelites
and began thumbing through. Dante Rossetti’s women were there, in abundance. Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris, Alexa Wilding— all those models (and wives and lovers) Rossetti had turned into pouty icons of pseudo-medievalism. One hundred and fifty years later they were still sexy, with their fog-fed complexions and their great waterfalls of hair cascading down in colors of copper, wheat, and polished heartwood. Rossetti and his earnest band of young Victorian rebels had gotten it just right—the sleepy, sensuous look of passion about to be uncaged.
Jack looked at Lizzie Siddal as Dante’s Beatrice. Her ecstasy did not appear religious. Wavy locks of sunset hair spilled down her shoulders like lava. If this Hollerman woman looks anything like Elizabeth Siddal, Jack thought, I’ll give Laura my next three paychecks. Hell, make it the next ten paychecks.
He checked his watch: 12:20. He was starting to turn back to the Pre-Raphaelites when something caught his eye. By the front of the store, looking at the racks of arty postcards, stood a woman with her back to him. She wore a black linen jacket and loose charcoal pants. A green suede bag was slung over her shoulder. Flowing down to the middle of her back were curls the color of chestnut, if the chestnut was lit by a summer sun at, say, 7:30 in the evening.
She pulled a card from one of the racks. Just as it began to seep into Jack’s brain that she might be Annie, she walked off in the direction of Donna’s. Jack rushed to the card racks and peeked around the corner. The woman was leaning on the hostess stand. Jack still couldn’t see her face. She was turned toward the restaurant and the sculpture garden beyond the tables.
He stepped back into the store, out of sight, and looked into a small mirror with a wildly colored Haitian frame. He never thought it would happen to him, all that white hair. But then again, he never thought any of it would happen to him. That his marriage would shatter and fall. That the image of a long white shirt on a tall brunette would keep fluttering through his imagination like a nightmare bird. That he would live half a century and come up dry, the years behind looking more and more passionless in the rearview mirror. Nothing to paint a picture about.
With a shake of his head, Jack banished the memories. He slung his jacket over his shoulder, rolled up his sleeves a couple of turns, and loosened his tie. He thought of the once-and-future Lizzie Siddal. The wave of self-pity ebbed away; in its place, he was surprised to discover, came a fluttery feeling in his chest. He briefly flashed to junior high and Carol Davidson’s gap-toothed smile. To hell with age, he said to himself. Then he walked toward the woman who, from the back, looked as if she’d just stepped out of a Rossetti painting.
“If you’re not Annie Hollerman, this will be very embarrassing,” said Jack.
The woman turned. She wasn’t Pre-Raphaelite. She didn’t have the bee-stung lips, the dreamy British curves. This woman had bones. Good, strong bones from the old country. Her cheeks slanted slightly up and out; there was peasant stock in her, and exotic fragments of the far steppes. The wild red hair framed the lightest of olive complexions. Pre-Raphaelite by way of Minsk.
“So. You must be Mr. Dreyfuss,” said Annie. “Are there storm clouds over Lisbon?”
Jack grinned. “Not anymore.”
B
y the time the coffee came, Jack had scored at least 100 points. He’d lost one when he was abrupt with the host, who didn’t have the outside patio table he’d reserved, and another when he dropped some
farfalloni con fungi
on his tie. Actually, the fungi bumble was funny. And Annie would’ve been the last person to fault someone for messiness. Besides, he’d spilled it because of her. Call it 100–1.
Laura deserved some points, too. She’d been right about the funny, smart, and brash part. But she forgot to mention how Jack DePaul’s bottom teeth were in a cute jumble with the middle one tucked slightly behind.
When Laura had told Annie she thought Jack was around fifty, that had sounded old. She’d never dated anyone out of his forties before, and she’d worried that Jack DePaul would look like someone’s grandfather.
Jack DePaul looked like no one’s grandfather. Yes, his hair was gray and he had well-worn eyes, but he also carried himself with a tight, coiled energy. And even though he wore baggy pleated pants, she could see the outlines of what she knew must be a great rear, just as Laura had said.
As the waiter poured their coffee, the words “What you need, Annie Hollerman, is a man with a good ass” rang through her mind.
“Something funny?” Jack said.
Annie hesitated, then she pictured Trip’s scrunched face and heard his familiar critical words: “You’re just like a ten-year-old, always blurting out whatever’s on your mind.”
So she said, “Yes.”
“Okay,” Jack said, “I give, what’s so funny?”
Annie remembered how Trip carefully measured every syllable he spoke. Then she gave Jack a sweet smile and said, “Laura’s first words to me about you were, ‘What you need, Annie Hollerman, is a man with a good ass.’ ”
That’s when Jack had fumbled the
farfalloni con fungi.
B
y the time the coffee came, Annie had put up so many points that the scoreboard was broken. It wasn’t just the cool hair or the way her slim body skimmed against her loose clothes that attracted Jack. Annie turned out to be as smart and bold as Laura had told him.
Lunch had been easy and fun from the start. Jack felt as if they’d jumped onto an inner tube and were shooting merrily down a snowy slope together.
Just after being seated, Jack opened the menu, peered at Annie over the top of it, and said, “So, who’s Annie Hollerman, and why does Laura Goodbread think she’s so great?”
Annie didn’t miss a beat. Without even looking up from the menu she replied, “Because Laura refuses to pee outdoors and won’t take her daughter camping. So I do it for her.”
“I bet there’s more to it than that,” he pressed her. “Laura told me
Publishers Weekly
thinks you’re a big deal. And you
are
Eda Royal’s agent.”
Annie made a little shrug.
“So it’s true,” Jack said. “If it weren’t for you,
Confessions of a She-Devil
wouldn’t have been on the
Times
best-seller list for eight zillion weeks.”
“Only four zillion.”
“I see. So your agency specializes in hacks?” said Jack, insulting her before they’d even had a chance to order.
Annie straightened up in her chair; her mouth began to form a little O of surprise before she realized Jack was smiling. He could see her relax.
“You could say so,” she said, glancing back down at the lunch entrees on the menu. “I’ve signed three of your friends from the
Star-News.
”
Now it was Jack’s turn. Oh.
“And by the way, Mr. DePaul, tell me again: Who’s your agent? And which house is it that publishes your books?”
“Ouch!” said Jack, pulling an imaginary arrow from his chest. “Okay, Annie, I guess the gloves are off.”
T
wo strangers meet over lunch. Nothing revolutionary about that. It’s as common as a traffic jam. In this case, the strangers were a man and a woman. They were single; they were searching; they were wary, but wanting; they had opened the windows, if not the doors, to themselves; they had grave doubts about romance, but believed in it anyway.
What Jack and Annie brought with them to lunch was not uncommon: broken marriages, haunting mistakes, roads not taken. But they also brought assuredness. When you’re twenty-five you know what you want; when you’re forty-five you know what you need.
When Jack and Annie met, the possibilities flickered and flared, as hard to follow, at first, as fireflies. But these two strangers had come with a cautious hope. It was just possible they might catch lightning in a jar.
The first course of lunch—nervous badinage—was quickly consumed and Jack and Annie moved on to more substantial fare.
Annie went first, giving Jack the résumé version of her life, carefully editing out her years at the
Charlotte Commercial-Appeal
: graduated from the University of Colorado (“I majored mostly in hiking”); worked in a bookstore; met Thomas Harrington Boxer III, aka “Trip” (“My mother still curses the day she fixed us up”); moved to Washington; met Trip’s friend, power agent Greg Leeland; became Leeland’s assistant; married Trip (“I was forty-five minutes late to my own wedding—that should have told me
something
”); started the Hollerman Literary Agency; bought a big house in Bethesda; divorced Trip; lost the big house in Bethesda; moved to Dupont Circle.