Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (24 page)

“Can you give me the year and registration number, please? I’d like to add those to the BOLO.”

She gave him the information he wanted. There was a long silence on the line. Then she said, “Tell me, Mr. Bloom. Are you looking for a frightened young girl on the run...or a murderess?”

“I don’t know yet, Mrs. McKinney,” he said, and sighed again. “All I know is that she’s taken off. I guess she’ll have to tell us why when we find her.”

“Thank you,” Veronica said.

“Let’s hope that’s soon,” Bloom said.

The phone rang early the next morning. Veronica was still in the shower. I was in the bedroom knotting my tie. The air-conditioned temperature in the house was seventy-two degrees. But the thermometer outside the bedroom window read eighty-four, and this was still only eight o’clock in the morning. I picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” I said.

“Dad? It’s me.”

“Joanna, hi,” I said.

“Mom said you wanted me to call. The bus’ll be here in a minute, so we’ll have to make this fast.”

“Honey, I wanted to ask you about this wedding—”

“Daisy’s mother, you mean?”

“Yes. Mom says you want to go to it—”

“She shouldn’t have told you that.”

“That isn’t the point. If you
want
to go...”

“I haven’t seen Daisy in it must be six or seven months. Why would I want to go watch her mother get married? I don’t even remember what her mother
looks
like.”

“Well, it wouldn’t just be
watching
someone get married, Joanna. I’m sure you’re invited to the reception as well—”

“Sure, lots of grown-ups getting drunk,” Joanna said.

“I’m sure there’ll be some people your own age, too. People you and Daisy know.”

“You trying to get rid of me or something?” Joanna asked, and I could visualize her grinning on the other end of the line.

“I’m trying to be fair, honey. If you really want to go...”

Veronica came out of the bathroom, naked and drying herself with a huge blue bath towel.

“Is it Bloom?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Is Dale there with you?” Joanna asked.

I felt suddenly embarrassed, as though Joanna and I were hooked up on one of those science-fiction television-phones where we could see each other while we talked, and where she could also see Veronica standing just outside the bathroom door, drying herself.

“No, she isn’t,” I said.

“Then who was that?”

“One of the cleaning women.”

“I thought they came on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Joanna said, puzzled. “Isn’t this Wednesday? I keep losing track of what day it is, all those damn papers Mrs. Carpenter keeps assigning. Dad, don’t sweat the wedding, okay? I’d rather be with
you
, really.
Anyway, Daisy Robinson’s a pain. She used to tell me I cheated at jacks, remember?”

“I remember. So what’s your decision, honey? Do you
want
to go or not?”

“Of
course
not. What time will you pick me up Friday?”

“Five-thirty?”

“Terrif. I gotta go, Roadrunner’s honking the horn. See you Friday, I love you, Dad.”

“Love you too, honey,” I said, but she was already gone.

I put the receiver back on the cradle. Veronica was watching me from the bathroom door.

“Your daughter?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this her weekend with you?”

“This one, and the next one too.”

She nodded and went back into the bathroom to hang up the towel. She came out again a moment later, went to the chair where she’d thrown her clothes last night, picked up a pair of white nylon panties, and stepped into them.

“Will I be meeting her?” she asked.

I went back to the mirror and started knotting my tie all over again.

“Matthew?”

“I’m thinking,” I said.

“Is there that much to think about?”

“I haven’t yet told her about Dale.”

“Your former lady friend,” Veronica said, and picked up the white shorts. “Who left you for...what’d you say his name was? Jim?” Jim.

“Hardly ever brings me pretty flowers. Do you know that song? Or was it before your time?” She stepped into the shorts.
She zipped them up the back. “That’s right, you grew up with the Beatles, didn’t you?” she said.

“I was already in law school when the Beatles came along.”

“Who, then? Elvis?”

“
And
the Everly Brothers,
and
Danny and the Juniors,
and
...”

“Never heard of them,” she said, and pulled her T-shirt over her head. “I keep giving away my age, don’t I? Are you finished with that mirror? Never mind, I’ll use the one in the bathroom.” She picked up her handbag and carried it into the bathroom with her. I could see her at the mirror over the sink, brushing her lids with a blue that was a shade darker than her eyes.

“Why’d you tell her I was the cleaning lady?” she asked.

I had not enjoyed lying to Joanna. I liked to believe that our father-daughter relationship was built on mutual trust. But I hadn’t seen any way of telling her, at eight o’clock in the morning, that the female voice she’d heard in the background belonged to a woman she didn’t know, a woman she’d immediately realize I’d spent the night with. On Joanna’s block, in Joanna’s entire adolescent neighborhood, Dale was the woman I was supposed to be spending my nights with.

“She caught me by surprise,” I said.

“So naturally you said I was the cleaning lady. It’s a shame I don’t do windows or floors.”

“Well, I just didn’t know
what
to tell her.”

“Maybe you should have tried the truth.”

“Not on the phone.”

“Of course not.”

“She’s very fond of Dale.”

“Of course she is. How old
is
Dale, anyway, did you tell me? At my age, it’s so difficult to remember things.”

“Thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two, how nice,” she said, an edge of saccharine bitchiness to her voice. “They must have been like sisters to each other.”

I watched her as she applied lipstick to her mouth. She was the only woman I’d ever met who could look so radiantly beautiful in the morning. She didn’t need eye shadow, she didn’t need liner, she didn’t need lipstick or blush. All she needed was that gloriously naked face with its spatter of freckles across the bridge of the nose. She saw me watching her in the mirror. She winked broadly, and then came out of the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror over the dresser, where the light was better. She tucked a stray wisp of blonde hair behind her ear. She dabbed with a tissue at a tiny smear of lipstick near the corner of her mouth.

“You could have told her I was
me
,” she said softly, still studying herself in the mirror. “I
am
me, you know.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said, and smiled.

“I thought maybe you thought I was the cleaning lady,” she said, and smiled back at me in the mirror. She turned and leaned against the dresser. “Will I be seeing you this weekend?” she asked.

“After I break the news to her.”

“The news,” she repeated.

“About Dale.”

“Oh, the breakup.”

“Yes.”

“For a moment I thought you meant the news about
me
.”

“I’ll do that in person. When you meet her.”

“
Will
I be meeting her, Matthew?”

“Of course you will.”

“Of course I will. When?”

“I’ll have to call you,” I said. “Let me see how it goes with Joanna.”

“After you tell her about Dale, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Could be traumatic, I suppose.”

“Well, she’s very fond of her.”

“I’m sure. When do you think that might be, Matthew?”

“I’m not following you.”

“Sorry. You said you’d have to call me. You said you wanted to see how it went with—”

“Oh. Well, I don’t
know
, actually. We’ll have to play it by ear. I’ll call you as soon—”

“I have a better idea,” she said. “Call me a taxi instead.
Now
, okay?”

I looked at her.

“Blue Cab or Yellow,” she said, “either one’ll take me out to the ranch.”

“I was planning to drive you out,” I said.

“I wouldn’t
dream
of troubling you,” she said. “I’m sure you have a lot of work to do this morning. You’ll probably want to prepare a brief on how best to break the news to your—”

“What
is
this, Veronica?”

“You tell me.”

“What are you so
angry
about all of a sudden?”

“What makes you think I’m angry? And who says it’s all of a sudden? You tell your daughter I’m your cleaning lady, you tell
me
you’re not sure you can see me this weekend—”

“This is only Wednesday, why are you worrying about the weekend? We’ve got tonight, we’ve got—”

“That’s what
you
think.”

“Well, haven’t we?”

She put her hands on her hips. She looked me dead in the eye. Her own eyes looked virtually colorless in the wash of light that streamed through the window. When she spoke, her voice was very low.

“The weekend depends on how Joanna reacts to this devastating news, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“This awesome news. This shattering—”

“Veronica, you can’t expect me to tell her it’s over with Dale and then just spring—”

“Just spring Grandma on her, right?”

“I think we can drop the ‘Grandma’ routine, don’t you? I don’t find it funny anymore.”

“Neither does Grandma. If this precious love affair of yours—”

“Veronica, you’re totally misconstruing—”

“—was so
memorable
, so goddamn
unique
that announcing its demise will cause earthquakes in Southern California...”

“For Christ’s sake, we sound
married
! All I said—”

“All you
said
, Matthew, was that you want to put me on
hold
. Well, I’m afraid that isn’t good enough. I spent too many years married to a man who kept me waiting on the other end of the line while he was off frolicking in Denver or Dallas or—look, the hell with it, let’s just forget it, okay?
You
spend the weekend worrying about
your
daughter, and
I’ll
spend the weekend worrying about
mine
. Roses are red, and violets are blue, so fuck it.”

She picked up her sandals.

“Don’t bother about a taxi,” she said, “I’ll
walk
home.”

Barefooted, the sandals dangling from her hand by their straps, she walked nonetheless with great dignity out of my bedroom and out of my house.

Like a damn fool, I let her go.

Harry Loomis called me at two o’clock that afternoon. I did not feel like talking to Harry Loomis. I did not feel like talking to
anybody
. All morning long, listening to the various clients with whom I’d had appointments, I kept losing track of the conversations. One woman—who was there to see me about petitioning for a variance that would allow her to build an eight-foot-high wall around her property—actually said, “Mr. Hope, only my psychiatrist doesn’t listen the way you don’t listen,” and stomped out of my office. Another client, who knew me somewhat better, said, “Matthew? Big night last night?” When I blinked at him, he said, “Maybe we ought to save this for another time, huh?” We’d been discussing an outlay of $1,600,000 for prime shorefront property; I could understand his ardent desire for me to get all the details straight. I tried to snap back. I tried to listen. I made notes. When he left the office, I realized that without the notes I wouldn’t have been able to remember a word of our conversation. I took at least a dozen calls, doodling while I listened—women in profile, women with short pale hair, always the good profile, the left one. At lunch with a pair of attorneys to whom we’d farmed out a malpractice suit, I listened halfheartedly while one of them told a gynecologist joke. They were specialists in malpractice suits, these two. All their jokes had to do with the medical profession.

A woman goes to see a gynecologist.