Natasha was ten months old when on one otherwise beautiful spring evening her father-Charley's only child-drove the Mercedes into an oncoming car, killing himself, the waitress he had just picked up and the four occupants of the oncoming car. The Maryland State Police lab fixed his blood/alcohol content at 0.43. At the service in the private chapel, the priest clung manfully to the theme: "It is not for us to judge Charley Junior." After the ceremony Charley locked himself in his study with a bottle of bourbon and his checkbook and sat down to write out the final payoffs incidental to his son's short life.
Charley Junior's wife did not attend the funeral owing to a headache. Charley thought of that as he wrote out zeros for the families of the waitress and the people in the other car. She was a coldhearted stunner from hunt country-long on breeding and short on cash-who'd married Charley Junior for his daddy's money, pure and simple. She moved with the baby to New York a few days after the funeral without bothering to inform Charley and his wife. Charley flew into a rage.
"Charley," said Margaret, "you'll do yourself no good if you turn the baby's mother against you."
He had no leverage. He'd given Charley Junior a large sum when he reached twenty-one-unwise, unwise-and now she had that. He went up to New York and saw her and did what he did well, he made a deal with her: she'd receive large monthly trustee fees in return for-letting Charley have the baby on weekends.
One weekend she arrived with bruises. Charley grilled the Mexican nanny. The nanny said she fell. She arrived with bruises another weekend and this time Charley put the nanny through a grilling that wouldn't have been out of place in Nuremberg. In tears the old woman told him: the mother was never there, and when she was she was drunk and when she was drunk she hit the child. Charley called Tasha's mother and told her he was keeping the child.
The FBI showed up at the farm two hours later and it was an ugly scene, the baby screaming and clutching at Charley, Margaret in tears, the Mexican nanny in tears, the FBI-mindful that they were dealing with a friend of the President's-straining to settle the matter without recourse to handcuffs.
A few weeks later the phone rang in the middle of the night, the Mexican nanny. Come quickly, she said. He made it in less than two hours, remarkable, given the distance, the hour and the FAA violations involved. He got past the doorman and pounded on the door. He and the mother screamed at each other through the door until the nanny let him in the service entrance. The baby was bleeding from swollen lips. He picked her up and started for the door. The police, summoned by the doorman, arrested him in the lobby and she charged him with kidnapping. Charley decided he would do his case more good by refusing bail while his lawyers negotiated with his daughter-in-law's lawyers. She dropped the charges. On his release, Charley went to the Yellow Pages and looked under "Investigators-Private" and the first entry he came to was A Security (followed by AA Security and AAA Security-they were hopscotching each other backwards to get the first listing) and the man who answered was Felix Velez, recently forced off the New York police force on a Disability. They met at a coffee shop around the corner.
The next day Tasha's mother was sitting in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel having drinks with a friend when she noticed that everyone was staring at her. She turned and there was Felix, holding a sign above her. It said: "Baby beater." After a dozen incidents-at the theater, on the sidewalk, during (and this was truly embarrassing) a runway show presenting Givenchy's fall line-she called Charley and said all right, let's talk.
3
She forced herself to read the paragraph one more time.
Rox Van Ander and Susie Schwartz are especially fine as a pair of postmodern Brenda Fraziers whose biggest problem in life seems to be where their next gram of cocaine is coming from. The third member of the trio, Natasha Becker, is another matter. Half the time she seems faintly embarrassed by her lines, the other half she spends playing emotional catch-up. You're left wondering if she isn't a member of the technical crew who had wandered down off the catwalk to give acting a try. It's not that she phoned in her part. She faxed it.
She'd gone out early to buy the paper, opened it at the newsstand and burst into tears in front of the Pakistani vendor, who figured someone must have died. She came back and undressed and poured about a half pint of high-viscosity sandalwood bath gel into the tub and stayed there submerged in an amniotic sac of hot suds for nearly two hours. She wrapped herself in the oversize terry and was sitting in the kitchen with her knees drawn up protectively against her chest, hair slicked back, sipping cambric tea.
The stuff about the catwalk should have done it, but no, he had to go back for another bon mot, the tweedy, hyphenated little dwarf. She fantasized him in old age, alone and miserable, all his friends driven away by bon mots, poor, living in an SRO hotel with no medical insurance and itching all over from a chronic skin condition for which there was no-
Tranquilo. Forget it. Forgive your enemies, like Pops says: makes them madder than hell. Next time she ran into E. Fremont-Carter she'd smile like a lady, tell him how much she enjoyed his work and then knee him right in the balls the way Felix taught her.
It dawned on her she hadn't read past the paragraph. He had good things to say about Tim's direction, a few obligatory jabs at Podesta. Nothing more about her fax instrument, thank God, no need to waste mots on a corpse, right? What a disaster. At least there was no show tonight. So what shall we do tonight, Tash? Suicide? Nah. Two things of Stouffer's macaroni and cheese and a quart of A amp; W root beer and get into bed with P. J. O'Rourke, or his new book, anyway. So why hadn't Tim called?
She jogged all the way down to the Battery and back, better than twice her usual daily distance. Tim still hadn't phoned when she got back. Felix called from Virginia. He'd just heard about it. He said he was coming up to New York and locate this E. Fremont-Carter and tear him a new asshole, and the way he said it she knew he would. He got her laughing. Ten minutes later her grandfather called, alerted by Felix. He wanted her to come down today, now, this minute, he'd have the chopper pick her up at the East River heliport. She'd be there in time for supper. Pops. What a piece of work. His solution to everything was-send in the helicopters; America in Vietnam. She cried, not because of what the tweedy dwarf had written, but because she wanted nothing more than to get into a helicopter and fly to the farm and be taken care of, but it would be giving in. "I can't, Pops," she said. "Got to get back on the horse." Her grandfather said he was proud of her and not to pay any mind to the press, they never got it right. She said she'd call tomorrow. She put down the phone, feeling better, and rang Tim.
He said he'd been out to brunch with the new head of Williamstown, who was talking to him about being the Boris Sagal Fellow this summer. "That's great," she said. "That's fantastic." He said it wasn't real money, but Williamstown was Williamstown. He went on about it until there was a pause in the conversation the size of the skating rink at Rockefeller Center and she said, "You want to talk about the weather now?"
That got a little laugh out of him and he said, "Why don't I come over." There was something weird in his voice.
"Yeah," she said, "why don't you."
She de-cocooned out of the terry and put on white stretch pants like thick leotards and a loose black cashmere sweater and her grandmother's pearls, brushed the shine back into her hair and Visine'd the red out of her eyes. She suspected some puffiness remained. So Tim would know she'd been crying. Hell with it. What was he expecting after a review like that-the Ivory soap girl?