Any Place I Hang My Hat Page 9

This was Moira Fitzgerald’s notion of repartee. She prided herself on her reputation for being, in her eyes, curmudgeonly. In my eyes, nasty. I figured her call wasn’t really about the length or placement of the article. For that, she would have screamed at one of the kids working for her, Get on the phone, you dumb fuck, and ask that bitch how long it is! What she probably was after was whether I was going to write about Freddy Carrasco’s drop-in at the fund-raiser without her actually having to bring it up, which of course would clue me in that they were worried about a substantive magazine such as In Depth considering a paternity charge legitimate news.

  “I don’t know. It’s a nice-sized piece.”

  “How nice-sized?”

  “Not enough to make me swagger, not enough to make me apply to U.S. News.”

  The Bowles 2004! website was already up on my screen, so while I waited for her next bon mot, I took a pass on Thom’s Campaign Blog and clicked on Photo Album. Lots of Thom in crowds of college kids, having coffee with AARP types, and hanging with assorted real people—or an ad director’s idea of real people, i.e., guys in caps advertising tractors and women wearing pastel pants and flowered blouses. Thom as Man of the Year in front of various banners, behind podia, seated at annual dinners for environmental, civil liberties, and labor groups, or organizations of African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, Koreans, Filipinos. There was also a despite-his-positions-he’s-no-commie-atheist photograph of Thom, his wife, Jen, and daughters Brooke and April being greeted by their smiley pastor at the Little Creek Presbyterian Church.

  “Can’t you at least give me an idea of the tone of the piece?” Moira asked.

  “The tone?” I double-clicked on the dinky little photo of the Bowleses at church and stared at dark Brooke and blond April, or perhaps dark April and blond Brooke, girls who evoked the lesser Dixie Chicks—except without discernable boobs or talent. No one could claim there was a family resemblance between either of the Bowles girls and Freddy Carrasco. “You know In Depth writes straight,” I told her. “No nasty innuendos, but no adjectives that can possibly be construed as laudatory.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that laudatory is a goddamn adjective. Believe it or not, I may not have gone to prep school, but they taught grammar at Cardinal Spellman High School. Anyway, Amy, as far as tone, you and I both know that even the most, uh, let’s say objective journalist—”

  “You and I both know, Moira, that you haven’t gotten me that meeting you promised with Thom’s Middle East person, to say nothing of that guy with the eye bags who’s supposedly the monetary policy genius. I’ve read all your position papers. My editor is going to want more i-n d-e-p-t-h.” I clicked back to the campaign’s home page and went to Thom: A Short Biography. Naturally, not a word about fathering a child out of wedlock. However, there was a stamp-size picture of Thom Bowles in college, at a Princeton fencing team meet, far more hunky in his white padded gear than in life. With wire mesh mask off and hair sweated flat against his skull, he looked like ... I squinted. Yes! Young Thom Bowles looked like Freddy Carrasco having a pale day.

  “You’ve got that meeting! First thing tomorrow!” Moira promised, doing her best to sound enthusiastic. “I swear! Check your e-mail at seven tonight and you’ll see where to go for the interviews. Or I’ll get you their phone numbers if they can’t physically meet you. Okay?” Enthusiastic was clearly exhausting, and she relapsed into snide. “You know, Amy, in this business, what goes around comes around. It wouldn’t kill you to extend a little fucking courtesy.”

  Bowles’s Middle East woman, the sort of policy expert who gets mocked on Fox News, was a pro-Palestinian, anti-war-in-Iraq Jew who occasionally appeared on PBS shows and who had thick glasses, long gums, and short teeth. She actually was in the Middle East. At midnight I called her in Amman and listened to her declaim for about fifteen minutes while checking for stray eyebrow hairs in my bathroom mirror and jotting down the occasional note on the pad resting on the sink.

  The monetary policy guy with the eye bags, who’d retired from the Federal Reserve to make a fortune in international banking doing something that was, surprisingly, legal, insisted on a power breakfast in a luxe hotel dining room. So at eight a.m., I was in a Versailles-size room with a lot of guys and a few women in business suits sitting at tables with floor-length pale yellow cloths and getting croissant crumbs on their wool-cashmere lapels. I myself took a bite of whole wheat toast. The place had more silver-plated serving pieces—from toast racks to baby pincers for grabbing tiny, scalloped butter balls—than anyplace else in all Christendom and Jewdom. I also noted two other reporters; like me, their presence was given away by their tape recorders as well as their off-the-sale-rack suits.

  “What really concerns the candidate and I,” Matthew (“Feel free to call me Matty”) Schwartz was telling me, “is the possibility of deflation.” Without his eye bags, he might have qualified as cute. With them, two thumbs down. The bags weren’t sagging skin; they were plumpish, as if filled with money. “Now, what is deflation?”

  It was a rhetorical question he did not expect me to answer, but since I’d already stuffed myself with enough scrambled eggs and toast to last me through lunch and possibly dinner, I said, “A sustained decline in prices.”

  “Excellent. I see you’ve come prepared.” Some men talk to a woman’s breasts. Matty was talking to my mouth, and that didn’t exactly take a high school diploma to figure out. He was in his mid-fifties, exceedingly rich, and apparently in the market for a fellating mistress with education enough to appreciate his brilliance. He went on about how Bush’s proposed tax cuts could lead to a tanking economy, which could lead to people holding back on spending as they waited for even lower prices, which could lead ... Actually, it was really interesting, so I relaxed from my I-gotta-get-outta-here position and had another cup of coffee.

  Matty seemed ready to segue into lunch, but at nine-fifteen I told him I had to get to the office and finish my article. And also, I responded, noting the wedding band embedded in his flesh, I didn’t need his driver to take me downtown. The subway was faster. But thanks. “By the way,” I said, “are you a friend of Thom Bowles or just an adviser?”

  “We travel in the same circles, run into each other every once in a while. I’d say friendly rather than friends.” The eyes above Matty’s bags were ice blue, but suddenly they took on a warm glow. He knew I was after something not monetary. Power guys like him, I’d noticed, ultimately lust more for slander than sex.

  Well, the ball was in my court. I’d say something about the Freddy fracas, then he’d lick his lower lip and inquire, Off the record? “Were you at the fund-raiser at the Kleinbergs the night that kid crashed and started claiming he was Thom Bowles’s son?” I asked.

  Okay, no lip lick, though he did caress his chin. “Off the record?” he inquired.

  “Totally,” I assured him.

  “I wasn’t there. But I’ll tell you one thing, Moira Fitzgerald is beside herself.”

  Nothing unusual about that, but I asked: “Is there any substance to the kid’s story?”

  “You’re sure this is off the record?”

  “Positive. Look, you know this isn’t the kind of thing In Depth would print.”

  “The question, my dear, isn’t whether your magazine would actually print it. The question is, if they would print it, would you write it.” I smiled my appreciation at his ethical acuity. “Now, you want to know if there is substance to that rumor?” he went on. “Who knows? I mean, what is Thom supposed to do? Go along with a DNA test to prove a kid with a criminal record is or isn’t his biological child?”

  “Criminal record?” I inquired.

  “That’s what I’m hearing,” Matty said, no doubt from Moira, who had asked him to pass that information along to me.

  “If he’s not the father, why not have the DNA test?”

  “Because,” he replied, too patiently, taking an instant to point to the silver-plated bread dish and murmur “Brioche” to a pass
ing busboy, “that would be acknowledging a candidate’s personal life is fair game. Look where it got Clinton. From the moment that girl on MTV asked him about the sort of undershorts he wore and he didn’t say, I don’t discuss that sort of thing, he was a sitting duck. He drew no boundaries. And Thomas Bowles is too smart and far too refined to get near the mud, much less wallow in it.”

  After turning down Matty’s car again, to say nothing of Matty or his suggestion of a little lunch someplace really nice any weekday except Monday or Friday, I got to the office and called Mary Sloane, a friend from college who was an assistant DA in Manhattan. Naturally, she spent twenty minutes bringing me up to speed on her wedding plans, which included invitations made of rice paper and a cake made by Tatty, to whom I’d introduced her. The cake was to be a garden of viburnum, tulips, and hyacinths to match her bouquet. I acted appropriately enraptured and pondered if it was just bitterness that kept me from getting excited about bouquets and china patterns, the way so many of my single and married friends did. I managed a convivial Nice! a couple of times when she mentioned a cheese course and illusion sleeves for her wedding gown.

  For some reason, wedding gown brought to mind John and La Belleza. I pictured him in a morning suit, her in sleek ivory satin—in a delightful candid shot in Town and Country. From there I got to thinking about a) how I’d never rise above being a financially insecure single mother because I couldn’t imagine life without a kid and b) why I was staring at my screen saver instead of the article I had to finish. Fortunately, Mary called back within ten minutes. “Amy, Fernando Carrasco has a juvenile record. It’s sealed. Even if I wanted to do you more of a favor, I couldn’t,” she said.

  “All right then: Did he serve any time in a whatever? Reformatory? What the hell do you call it?”

  “A juvenile facility. I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Okay,” I said quickly, guessing she might launch into her flower girls and baskets. “I appreciate your trying.”

  “I’m assuming you’re bringing John to the wedding.”

  “Unless he’s in the Falklands making a documentary.” Or in Brazil to meet La B’s parents on their fifty-thousand-acre coffee plantation.

  When at last I was able to say good-bye to Mary, I left a message on Freddy Carrasco’s voice mail: “This is Amy from In Depth. I need to talk to you.”

  Instead of writing, I swiveled back and forth in my chair trying to come up with a way to convince Happy Bob to let me put in something about the Freddy accusation. I mused that it would be cool to write about whether the simple fact of celebrity engenders defamation, though I doubted Happy would buy it. The magazine didn’t do sidebars. But he might accept a couple of paragraphs on accusations about political leaders’ out-of-wedlock offspring, or a précis of campaign dirty tricks since 2000. Or I could pitch him a separate piece, on how we, as a culture, became so publicly devoted to the prurient.

  I finally stopped swiveling because it was making me queasy. Or maybe it was just gastrointestinal war, four cups of coffee versus God knows how many scrambled eggs. Except I had to admit to myself it wasn’t that either. My five terms of a free shrink at Ivey-Rush had given me at least some self-knowledge. The Freddy story of a lost parent was so intriguing to me because it was mine as well.

  Well, about me and my ... At my good-bye session with the shrink, he’d said, “Amy, if ever something’s bothering you, and you can’t figure out what it is, let the first word that comes into your mind be mother. That will probably do it, but if not, you can always go on from there.”

  At college, if you wanted a shrink who wasn’t a demented-looking graduate student, it cost money. So from time to time, whenever I was bummed, I’d taken to free-associating in my dorm room. Out loud. My theory was that articulation itself was salutary, as in talk therapy, as in the rite of confession. Except what I’d do is jump to third person and do my talking on the phone. That way, if my roommate came in or a friend stood outside the door, they’d overhear ... What’s the matter with her? I swear to God, Aunt Linda, I don’t know. I guess she feels that if she doesn’t work until she’s absolutely ready to drop dead with fatigue or on the verge of hysteria ... she’ll fall from grace. No not in a religious sense ... Then I’d get busy pretending to listen and say, Yeah ... You may be right, Aunt Linda ... Maybe deep down she feels—I don’t know—that she could wind up back where she started from. A tsk or a chuckle. And then a quick I wish I could but I have to go.

  I suppose it was no coincidence that I conjured up Aunt Linda during my four years in Cambridge. I could justify my choice of her as imaginary confidant by saying “nonjudgmental” or “benevolent,” words probably not in her vocabulary, but neither would sum her up. Aunt Linda was one of those good-hearted but not overly bright people who, nevertheless, were wise about life. So it was no coincidence either that I picked up the phone, actually dialed her number, and said, “You know, I haven’t seen you or Uncle Sparky for ages. Let me take you out to dinner tonight.”

  “Amy, sweet pea, no taking us out. Come, six, six-thirty, whenever. Sparky just got me one of those new slow cookers and I threw in some lamb cubes. There’s more than enough to go around. I’ll make something nice to go with it. Now listen, I don’t want you bringing anything, except if you see a couple of those nice vine tomatoes. No more than two because they’ll just go to waste. I have a ton of other stuff to put in the salad.”

  Twenty-some-odd years earlier, soon after he became a New York City fireman, Uncle Sparky—Anthony Napolitano—bought my aunt, his new wife, a three-bedroom house a few blocks from the fishing boat docks in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. Like most of its neighbors, the house was modest, a red-on-top, white-on-bottom cube. As I walked from the subway, I could spot it from a block away by the whale weather vane and the slightly pitched roof.

  He’d bought it for her as a birthday surprise. Instead of choking him, as many women might have done, Aunt Linda said, “Oh my God, I love it!” They never moved anywhere else. I’m not sure whether they intended to fill the two other bedrooms with children or if from the beginning they knew they needed no one else and decided to devote the rooms to their hobbies—her needlework, his wood burning. In my apartment, I had their handmade college graduation gifts: her framed crewel design of the Manhattan skyline with Home Sweet Home arcing over the buildings; his eight coasters onto which he’d burned Harvard’s seal, complete with Veritas on the three open books.

  The table was already set when I got there, pale blue dishes on oval placemats that were straw or seagrass—one of those excessively dry, frizzy fibers. My aunt’s blue-plate theory was that there is no food that looks bad on blue. The table stood in the breakfast nook, a tight area with a bay window. It looked out on a birdhouse that hung from a low, scrawny branch of an old oak. For decades the tree had been assaulted by car exhaust from the nearby parkway and the bay’s salt air. The birdhouse had fared better. Modeled after the White House, it was one of Uncle Sparky’s wood-burning masterpieces. Except when it was very windy, the incredibly detailed North Portico faced the kitchen window. True, it was actually a pale brown house with the black detailing of the burning plus a hundred coats of varnish, but it was, nevertheless, a great address for a sparrow. Beyond the bird-house, the narrow backyard was nearly invisible. A shrouded gas barbecue and cushionless aluminum-frame lounge chairs glowed in the ghostly light of the fog.

  “You know,” Aunt Linda said as she sliced the tomatoes I’d brought, “if you got one of these slow cookers, you could go to work and come home to a delicious meal. Save a fortune from all the takeout you working girls live on. Someday, one of you will die from cheap sushi and maybe you’ll all get smart.” Somehow, my father’s sister—to say nothing of Chicky himself—had managed to emerge unscathed from Grandma Lil’s refinement lessons. They might have been raised by a blowsy, gum-cracking dame who wore glitter nail polish. “Like, what did you have for supper last night?”

  “Peanut butter and jelly on whol
e wheat, uh, milk and a cookie.”

  “What kind of cookie?”

  “Chocolate chip.”

  “Carb City, lambie. I’m not saying cut out all carbs—I’m not a fanatic—but you gotta choose. The jelly or the cookie. Not both. You got a cute, athletic little body, but the minute you hit forty, the weight starts piling on. And you’re petite.”

  “Short.”

  “Whatever. God forbid you should look like a beach ball when you’re fifty.”

  As always, indoors or out, rain or shine, my aunt was wearing form-fitting jeans with four-inch heels. That night, her black hair was pulled straight back and held by a leopard-print scrunchie in a ponytail that went halfway down her back. Her black sweater was so predictably tight it looked on the verge of unraveling if she inhaled too deeply. On each wrist, she wore a cuff of hammered copper that echoed her copper man-in-the-moon earrings. My aunt was pretty in the way my father was handsome: a bony Frank Sinatra face and piercing dark eyes softened by an awning of lashes. Her makeup (of the three-differently-colored-stripes-of-eye-shadow school) was flawlessly applied.

  “Anything new with that guy you’re seeing?” She slid the tomatoes off the cutting board into a bowl of dark leaves and a rainbow of chopped-up raw vegetables.

  “Not really.”

  “You speak foreign languages, right?”

  “Spanish and French. And I read a little Latin. But what—”

  “So translate what ‘not really’ means.”

  “It means that the relationship doesn’t seem to be going anyplace. You know, after two years—”

  “That time you brought him here and the two of you went fishing with Sparky? He’s very, very cute. And a nice guy. We both thought so. You could just tell. So what is the ‘not really’ all about?”

  “I guess we’ve got everything going for us except love.”

  “I don’t buy that for two seconds. Every time one of you said something, the other one would look so proud, like Isn’t that, like, the most darlingest thing you ever heard?”