What I Did for Love (9 page)

It was late now. I had been pacing, barefoot, thinking, praying for a couple of hours and was too wired to sleep. I had pulled off my outside clothes, and was wearing the light at-home loose tunic and pants that doubled as loungers or pajamas. I went into my medicine chest and got a couple of nighttime aspirin, downed them with a huge glass of water, and fell into bed assuming I would just lie awake, but my exhaustion took hold, and I dropped into a sleep filled with Gothic scenes of danger, flashes of faces from the past and the present, a Freudian textbook for any therapist.

It was coming on to the Summer Solstice, June twenty-first, and the nights were getting ever shorter. I had not pulled up the blackout screen on my shades, so the early dawn woke me, still tired from the emotions of last evening and the dream-filled night. My first waking thoughts were of Bredon. Sitting up in my bed I dialed him, only then realizing that such an early call might make him worry about
me.
Sure enough, his voice was anxious, so I quickly assumed a cheerful tone, as though neither of us were at a precipice in our lives.

“I
know
you’re at the office,” I trilled. “You are, aren’t you? Just calling to check on whether you stayed awake.” My tone was light, but I was holding the phone with a death grip.

“Yes, I’m awake.” He gave a low laugh, brief, a tiny interlude in his long hours already spent on the phone.

“Any chance that you’ll get
some
kind of nap today?” My tone remained light, but I wanted to shoo the world from his office, push him onto one of his sofas, cover him with a blanket, and let him sleep. He had done that so often for me when I was a little girl, falling asleep on a sofa in our parents’ house, especially during the long summer afternoons after I had been swimming and running and swimming some more. Oh, Bredon, I thought, how I wish we were all together now, back there, the four of us. I bit my lower lip, taking deep breaths, which he heard.

“Did
you
sleep?” he challenged me.

“Of course I did. I just wanted to call you, even before I’ve had coffee.”

“Ah, so even you can be sleepy in the morning,” he said, teasing me because I usually came awake so totally, the minute my eyes opened.

“What happened with your overnight calls?” I asked, praying that he had had good news.

“The Indonesian group is interested,” he said, his voice stronger. “And I had a long call with a Chinese group. They’ve promised to meet today on my proposal.” I said another silent prayer of thanks and supplication, imploring heaven to let everyone say yes to Bredon’s plan.

My brother hesitated just a beat. “That leaves Rand. He’s coming in from India this morning. I’m going to give it another go, and try to convince him to opt in.” Another almost imperceptible hesitation. “He probably only said yes to meeting me because of you.”

“Then I’m glad we went out,” I said with hard-voiced loyalty, making my brother chuckle. “When will he be there?”

“He’s coming here straight from the airport. No sacrifice, since he’s coming in by private jet.” My brother’s low laugh was sarcastic and bitter and sad. I felt my stomach knot. I realized that Bredon thought I wanted to continue seeing Rand. Unthinkable.

To make my feelings clear to Bredon without mentioning Rand, I used my bossy younger sister voice and said, “When you’re done, call me, okay? Let’s meet for a late lunch. And then you can sleep!” I never mentioned Rand, as though his time with Bredon was simply an inconvenience in my schedule.

Bredon made an “ooh, I’m sorry” sound, and said, “Dray, I can’t. Sorry, kiddo. I told Rand that we would have a luncheon meeting, because his plane will arrive about eleven and he’ll be in the city around lunch time. But I’ll call you after, okay? We’ll have dinner…”

“No, Bro,” I said teasingly, and I should have won an Oscar just for this morning’s acting. “After you have your meeting with him, please, please, go home and sleep!”

“Okay, okay,” he said comically, getting into the spirit of my teasing. Then that brief hesitation again. He did not want to interfere if I wanted to see Rand. I knew it, felt it.

“If you wake up by seven tonight, call me and we’ll have a quick dinner,” I said. “Otherwise, just call me when your meeting
is over, and tell me how it went, and we’ll have breakfast tomorrow. Okay?” I hoped that my cheery plans answered his unspoken question about my seeing Rand. But Bredon knew Rand.

“He’s going to want to see you, Dray, no matter what. It was pretty clear that he was taken with you.” Bredon’s voice was gentle, a statement. His tone contained no questions and no judgment. But the tone of my answer was drawling sarcasm.

“Yes, well, I’m busy, and maybe my schedule will open up sometime later in the year.” I yawned with no effort, truly tired from the past night, making my brother laugh the way we did when we were all alive and together and enjoying the give-and-take of teasing. I remembered our parents’ delight when Bredon and I had these conversations, and my heart scrunched itself up as I pictured those scenes, their clarity in my mind so sharp, so lovely and so painful. Remembering in this way always made the world feel so empty. For all my “recovery” from the tragedy, my hold on life was an indifferent one. I held on for Bredon’s sake, and I knew there were times that he had only held on for me. I did not want him to wonder at my silence, so I yawned again, a bit noisily, and “oh, sorry, yawn, yawn.”

“Okay, kiddo, talk to you later,” Bredon said, his voice a bit lighter.

“Maybe you can nap before he gets to your office,” I suggested.

“Dangerous. I might be too groggy to function,” he said, all business. But I had put an idea into his head, because he added, “I’ll tell Mrs. Andrews to check on me by ten thirty. And it sounds like you can use some more sleep.”

He had been awake all night and he wanted
me
to sleep. I prayed that my brother would have wild amounts of adrenalin to overcome his own fatigue. I resented that Rand would arrive well-rested, no long security or passport lines for him, his clearance arranged in advance. The private international charter
and corporate jets had luxury full-length beds. Rand would have slept during the final leg of his trip, waking as though he had spent the night at home. Probably, his plane was a family holding, like the building he lived in, and heaven only knew what else.

That day when Robin visited me, before we had to say good-bye again, she whispered like a conspirator that she planned to do all sorts of internet searches on him, and seek out all the gossip about him that she possibly could. I ignored the gossip circuit, and I could not care less about what Rand’s family owned. Right now I only hated the thought that my brother might be exhausted at this critical meeting, and his traitorous deserter of a partner would be full of energy.

Well, I would
will
energy into my brother’s spirit, I would be the witch that men suspected resided in every woman’s soul. And the saint. I would pray like mad to every saint; Saint Teresa, who withstood all kinds of illness and maintained her sense of humor, her irony, her mystical arc to heaven, reforming the Carmelites in the process. Balance, sanity, tolerance, wondrous love, a perfect saint to intercede for Bredon. And I would ask Saint Anthony, the miracle finder, that Bredon find all the money he needed, and Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, to add his intercession just in case Bredon’s deal was teetering toward disaster. And of course, God, the Great Spirit, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, The Virgin, all the Angels, St. Michael especially, that super Archangel, Bredon’s favorite celestial being. We were Anglicans, very high-church, and one of my classmates, a Methodist, had once said, “You people are no better than the Roman Catholics.” That had sent me into gasping laughter, because Methodists also call themselves Catholics, right in their prayer book, which the girl obviously did not know. And I was laughing because Robin was sputtering in protest, offended on my behalf, saying, “How dare you be so narrow-minded?” Robin, whose family was Jewish, loved my stories about the holy people of the world,
including that Saint Teresa’s family was Jewish. The double irony, of the saint’s character and her background, perfectly suited Robin’s comically wry view of the world.

Morning coffee had not compensated for the night I’d had, and I was tired, unusually so. Generally I was full of energy in the morning hours, but as I read The Times, the sunlight coming onto the window seat of my study alcove warmed me, then lulled me into sleepiness. Thinking I would lie down for a few minutes, since I was still in my bed-and-lounge clothes, I felt the emotional fatigue and the sleep-troubled night overtake me. The world faded to dreams.

It was almost four when I woke up. I had kept all the phones on, and ran to check my cell phone – no message – and then my little back-up cell phone that folded so thinly, took pictures, had a few apps, but best for its phone and its smallness. It was the one I most traveled with, the phone Bredon often called first. No message. Before I could reach it, the heart-attack ring of my land line sounded, a shrill sound I kept meaning to get changed but which served well as a literal wake-up call.

An unnecessary glance at caller ID. “Hello, Bredon.”

“Hi, Dray.” His voice had a studied calm. Things had not gone well.

“What did Rand say?” I was trying not to sound as overwrought as I felt.

“His family was so spooked by the near failure in India, they’re insisting on closing down all investments like our deal, at least for a while. Rand told me that he still was open to the possibilities, but the family’s pressure was pretty intense.”

“So can everything just be put on hold while you do other projects?” I was frantically praying he would say yes, and my stomach curled as he said, “No, not possible. I am going to be flying out later tonight. Kuala Lumpur will be my first stop. You’ll have my full itinerary from Mrs. Andrews, and yes, I’ll sleep on the flight.” I could sense his sad grin. “I should be back
by Sunday night.”

We were not spooked by flying. Bredon and I took jets after our parents’ deaths, and for some reason I never feared that we too would be blown out of the sky. Perhaps I simply did not care. If our parents’ deaths do anything at all, they prepare us for our own mortality. And the danger now was more on the ground than in the air, armies everywhere. Then I thought, well, Kuala Lumpur is not Paris, but no place was truly safe anymore.

These thoughts had gone quickly through my mind. “Can I come?” I asked.

“No, for obvious reasons and reasons that make me too angry to discuss.”

I knew he meant that when men who brought women who were not their wives, it was assumed that the women would be bribes and bonuses. They would sleep with the other men in exchange for a smoother deal. In effect, it was a pimping process, a woman in exchange for money. Bredon had always refused to do that. I wondered if Rand had also always refused. But in any case, no, I would not be going on this trip, nor would Bredon’s girlfriend Ree, whose real name was Ariana Cleves. Like so many of us, she’d had a couple of names conferred on her at her baptism, babies among the rich often named for the maternal line. My mother, for example, was a Drayman. And Bredon was the family name of my father’s mother.

Bredon and Ariana were very private and discreet, often spending weekends at our family lodge far upstate in New York, going by separate small planes out of Teterboro Airport, flying to the little county airport down the road from our lodge. A married couple lived in the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds there. They cleaned and tended the house and land, hiring additional help as needed, to cut trees or do major skilled electrical work or carpentry. Usually, the husband would pick up Bredon and then go back for Ree when her plane landed. The lodge was owned under a corporate name completely different from any of the
family’s publicly known holdings, so it was a true retreat, but far away and requiring time, weather, and flight coordination. With their marriage on hold since our parents’ death, the lodge was their hideaway where they could spend long hours together without public notice or fuss.

Ree was lovely, her character gentle, far gentler than mine. There was no way that Bredon would expose her, beautiful and kind person that she was, to the open leers that she would be sure to receive from the international financial dealers. Supposedly worldly, they retained their narrow moralism, convinced that all Americans are sexually free, which made all American women potential prostitutes. I had no desire to see and be ogled by such men, but I did not want Bredon to feel even more alone than he must have felt now, with this deal so tenuous.

“Can I at least drive with you to the airport? Have coffee with you?”

“I’m keeping this trip very quiet, Dray,” and he did not have to explain why. No rumors should even be whispered, even speculatively, about the unusual enormity of the risk Bredon was taking. He wanted no word anywhere that there might be a problem.

I decided a light approach was needed to counterbalance the hard realities that had us so sober and thoughtful. “All right, Big Bro, do your thing, go and make deals. Knock ‘em dead.” I grinned, for I had used the words he would use when I was a little girl about to appear in a school play or was starting a tennis game.

When we hung up I realized how hungry I was, and how much I had neglected everything, mail, messages, reading, friends. My occasional disappearances from view were thought to be caused by lapses into depression. The assumption that I retreated to grieve was occasionally true, and also served to keep people from asking questions about where I was. On rare
occasions Bredon and I would spend time with a couple of cousins, to gather “family” time in some form. Mostly, I roamed the city’s endlessly changing neighborhoods, the clusters of ethnicities making little cities in the big one. I visited museums, I visited churches. My alone times were to renew myself, and Bredon could always reach me by the little phone whose number only he possessed. My calls from that phone came up as “restricted number,” another of Bredon’s privacy tactics.