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Julian nodded. “Too much.”
Julian was making a name for himself documenting human tragedies, people who were victims of governments, of bureaucracy and neglect. That day, Mitch had stood there next to his mature, experienced, world-traveler son and for the first time felt just slightly lesser in comparison. A strange feeling—chagrin and pride and envy, none of which had any place in a Miami hospital ICU ward when a man they loved was lying ill a dozen feet away—and yet there it was.
“Good that you could get here,” he’d said again.
Before he found the nerve to call Julian a few weeks later, to ask for his help with Lions, he’d tried to anticipate all possible objections. There was Julian’s lack of interest in the subject matter—Hemingway, Julian had declared once during a Thanksgiving dinner at Mitch’s parents’ home, was too depressing. And Faulkner, God, spare him from ever reading Faulkner again! Even back then, as a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old, Julian hadn’t wanted to read about problems, he’d wanted to read about solutions.
Then there was the lack of funds from which to pay Julian very much beyond basic expenses, and his fear that his low-pay offer could be interpreted as disregard for the value of Julian’s skills, given how Mitch had so steadfastly resisted Julian’s photojournalism career choice. In Mitch’s limited experience, Julian was an emotional minefield and, while he didn’t blame him for it—blamed himself, in fact, he also didn’t relish treading there with no detector.
So when Mitch finally did place the call, he did it after two shots of whisky, then rushed through his pitch, making the project sound as appealing as possible, braced for resistance, for disdain. That he’d gotten neither was still difficult to believe.
He was both anxious and eager to see Julian, to spend some quality time with him, as the saying went these days. He was both anxious and eager to get the project underway, to open people’s eyes to the joy and value of literature. But … suppose Lions didn’t ultimately win the interest of PBS. Suppose he invested so much—his time, his money, his ego—only to see the door slammed in his face.
He stood up and went again to the window. There were worse things than rejection, worse things than disappointment. But he’d had enough of both.
A knock on his open door startled him, and as he swiveled toward the door, he stumbled slightly and reached for the bookcase for balance.
“Mitch!”
“I’m fine,” he said, holding off Brenda McCallum with a raised hand. “You surprised me is all.”
“You looked—”
“No, really, I’m fine. See?” He did a few soft-shoe steps on the bright Cuban rug to prove he was not about to end up as her husband had last April, in this very office. Craig McCallum, fellow professor, best friend and biking buddy, had suffered a brain aneurysm and died on Mitch’s small sofa while they’d all waited helplessly for the paramedics to arrive. Today was Mitch’s fifty-first birthday; Craig had been just fifty.
Brenda continued to watch him. “I saw your door was still open. Aren’t you running late?”
“Yes, but they won’t start without me,” he joked, and gathered the books he needed for the morning’s ENG620:The Twentieth-Century Novel. His fifteen graduate students, if they were all in attendance, would be seated around the conference table, most with their noses buried in The Ageof Innocence because they’d failed to read all, or any, of what was to be discussed today. His late arrival would not be troubling.
Brenda was frowning at him. “What’s going on? You look funny.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence.”
“You know what I mean. Odd.”
“Really, nothing at all. Just lost in thought. I’ve been on the phone with a guy in Key West, about how to shoot part of the Lions pilot there at the Home and Museum. I’ll fill you in later.” He squeezed her shoulder and nodded for her to precede him to the door.
She took his hand. “Mitch …”
“Why don’t we get lunch when I’m done?” he said, letting her keep hold for a moment longer. “I’m in the mood for barbecue, how about you?”
In part because he was so distracted, he devised an exercise for his students that would take most of the class period. While they sat in groups of three or four outlining literary elements in the novel and discussing possible intentions, he stood at the podium thinking about Brenda. Things were warming up between them, certainly. If he was ambivalent, well, that was to be expected. She was not only Craig’s widow; she was the head of the English department. As his friend Tony had put it, if Mitch wasn’t careful, Brenda could easily have his balls in a sling.
Better, maybe, to think about Hemingway.
After thirty years of teaching, Mitch knew his ideas about literature weren’t going to change the world. Oh sure, he’d managed to impress his colleagues a time or two or three, he’d won teaching awards, he’d set at least a dozen students on the path to respected literary scholarship. He’d also faced down a handful of annoyed students over the years who demanded to know what the point of it was. Who cared about evaluating whether Hemingway’s prose was more effective than Faulkner’s? What difference did it make that Hemingway had a tough time as a soldier, that even with the respect and awards—a Nobel for literature, for God’s sake, plus the devotion of a forgiving wife (or four), he’d pointed a shotgun at his head and killed himself? What about what was happening to ordinary soldiers now, friends of theirs, in Iraq in the nineties, in Afghanistan and Iraq again today?
He’d nodded his agreement. He’d said, yes, my son feels this way too. There was no convincing some people—or he was not persuasive enough to convince them—that they would find their positions right there in the texts if they just gave the books a chance. Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner—they had it all: passion, romance, existential questions, the human condition imbued in every story. “Give it a chance,” he’d say. “Give me a break,” was the answer he usually got. Or, what Julian had said that day some fourteen years ago: “Get a life. That’s what I’m going to do.”
But what Julian hadn’t understood then was that not everyone was interested in, or equipped to travel, his chosen path, either. Some people were spotlights, some were reflectors. The world needed both. Yes, he’d pushed Julian too hard at the time, he saw that later. He’d been too passionate, too single-minded, hadn’t recognized that Julian was so much like him—and still was. Just not in the ways he had wanted him to be.
Well, he’d mellowed. Which didn’t mean he was any less passionate about literature’s relevance. Literary Lions grew from his urge to demonstrate that relevance in a new way … and, if he was fully honest, demonstrate his own relevance as well. Since Craig’s sudden death, he’d gone around feeling as though he had one foot in the grave. What was his legacy, other than a collection of articles, a couple of books read by approximately fourteen people, two failed marriages, and a strained relationship with his only son? With Lions, he hoped to rectify the past and revise his outlook for the future.
A future that appeared to want Brenda in it in ways he’d hardly imagined.
“Dr Forrester? Dr Forrester?” A student’s voice penetrated, finally.
“Sorry—you caught me daydreaming about, um, spending spring break in Key West,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, I was going to ask if Archer’s mistaken perception of May is a good example of dramatic irony—but I like your new topic better.”
To celebrate Mitch’s fifty-first birthday, he and Brenda joined two other couples at Mez, a new “green” Mexican restaurant Brenda wanted to try. Deirdre and Corbin he’d known since moving to Chapel Hill: she taught human genetics; he taught physics. Mitch met them at a UNC basketball game. The other pair was Tony and Gemma, both college administrators whose friendship stretched back to a time when he was dating Angie, who’d worked with Tony in the recruiting office. The couple’s friendship was one of the few things he’d kept when he and Angie split.
Deirdre raised her margarita and said, “Here’s to Mitch. Good to see you made it another year, and that you’re making it with Brenda—oops, I didn’t mean that like it sounded!”
“To Mitch,” the group echoed.
“To making it,” Tony added.
By the third pitcher of margaritas, their dinner plates were cleared and Mitch was discussing Lions with much less reluctance than usual. According to some in the English department, the idea of such a series was seditious—literature was not video, for crying out loud, and never the twain should meet. Just look at what Hollywood had done to Frankenstein! It hardly mattered that he wasn’t attempting to adapt any of the works. They felt he would be making their world common, and that would never do.
Corbin, however, was all about demystifying the universe, especially when the tequila was doing its work on him. “I think the show’s got serious possibilities,” he said.
Gemma said, “Serious, like, he gets millions of dollars and moves to Hollywood?”
Everyone looked at Mitch, who shook his head. “Not likely.”
Corbin preferred his vision. “It’s happened.”
“To whom?” Brenda scoffed, left eyebrow raised just as it often was during faculty meetings.
“All kinds of people. Just look at all the shows where a chef or a decorator or a geographist—”
Tony snorted. “A geographist? What the hell’s that?”
Deirdre said, “A historicist of places—”
“These experts,” Corbin said, “supposed experts sometimes—attractive, supposed experts, right? These people get a break and then, boom! They’re superstars—like Steve Irwin, for instance. Simon Cowell.” He nodded at Brenda. “It happens.”
Mitch said, “I just want to share some literary love.” Tony clinked his glass to Mitch’s.
“Seriously,” Deirdre said, “you’re wa-a-ay more attractive than Simon. I can see it.”
Brenda shook her head. “That’s not realistic. If he went into it with those kinds of expectations—”
Gemma said, “Somebody refill her glass!”
“No, come on, I’m just trying to be the voice of reason.”
“Who wants reason, for crying out loud?” Gemma stood up, nearly tipping the table. “We want fame, and money!”
The patrons around them cheered.
Corbin, laughing, said, “Okay, okay, but I don’t know that we’re winning the birthday boy enough points to score later, so … how about those Tarheels?”
Talk turned to the team’s recent performance in the ACC basketball tournament, but Mitch’s tipsy mind stayed stuck on Corbin’s last statement. Would he “score” later? Of course he wanted to, even as he was unsure how wise it was to take his revised friendship with the woman who was also his boss—more or less—to that complicated level. She was lovely, and more desirable than he’d let himself acknowledge when Craig was alive. Want was not a question. Neither did it mean, though, that they would—or should—sleep together.
Did she want to?
His questions ceased when he felt her hand on his thigh. His libido took over for his brain, making it much easier for him to later accept the birthday present that she was saying, softly, close to his ear, waited for him when they were through.
Chapter Four (#u16723e4b-046e-5242-b128-b579a8e9c660)
After climbing the jet’s steps and greeting the flight crew Saturday morning, Blue took a seat in the spot she preferred, left side, just in front of the wing. The jet, customized to the most demanding celebrity standards, wasn’t hers. She could not do it, could not transform the numbers on her accounts statement into one of these sleek white and silver aircraft. They’d chartered this Gulfstream G500 for the week, a $65,000 expense. That was far less than the $50 million or so she’d pay to purchase one. How many times could they charter luxury jets before they even approached that figure? She was too tired to do the math, but surely it was many, many times. Buying one seemed wasteful—and imagine what Melody would say if she owned a Gulfstream, when Mel and Jeff still drove a ’95 Chevy pickup.
In a meeting last year, when Jim, her business manager, spoke about capital investments and appreciable assets and tax advantages of ownership, Marcy had said, “Buy one. What else are you going to do with the money?”
“More of what I’m doing already.” An assortment of charitable endeavors selected and implemented by Jim’s partner, who briefed her about them monthly.
After ten years in syndication and almost as many spent watching her finance manager diversify her holdings in a series of double-up ventures, of seeing her net worth mushroom with the energy of an atomic blast, she still could not quite match the numbers to her life. She could not quite believe—even as she inhabited them—what those numbers meant in concrete terms. If she had known things could turn out like this, chartered jets with hand-stitched leather seats and burnished walnut tables; silk twill pants suits and everyday diamond earrings; twenty-eight full-time employees whose houses and cars and designer martinis were bought with paychecks she signed … If she could have forecasted her success the way her old WLVC-TV colleague Carl Newman forecasted the weather, she never would have given up her son.
—Or so she liked to think, when the truth was that she wouldn’t have stepped onto even the first rung of this ladder if she’d had a child. The whole idea of working as a television journalist was about avoiding Harmony BlueKucharski by keeping her attention on anyone, on everyone, else. If she had not given up her son, an uneducated single mother with little support and no prospects is what she would have been. Worse off than her mother at nineteen, the child worse off than the child she’d been.
Yet the doubts persisted. How could she really know what her life with a child would have been like? She had never even tried—but why would she have chosen to try when she’d known that her mother couldn’t help her out? Why get attached to a child whose life you could only ruin? In that hand-to-mouth life there would be no time to love the child properly, and all that would come of it would be a kid who hated her and hated his life, she’d been sure of it.
But what if … what if she had gotten hooked up with the social services she now knew would have given her—them—options? Someone could have directed her, surely would have, if she’d been brave enough to expose her foolishness to someone who, unlike the midwife, had no directed agenda. If she had not been too embarrassed, too proud to go looking for unbiased help.
Well, even if she had, she’d still have been a lower-class single mother whose good intentions simply could not come close to providing what that upper-class adoptive home could. Did. Love by itself was not enough to make everything come out happily, she didn’t care what all those feel-good movies claimed. She’d loved her son—loved him so much that she had sacrificed her relationship with him. It was the right thing to do.
She was pretty sure.
She snapped her seatbelt closed. Stupid conundrum, why couldn’t she let it alone?
Sometimes, when the heartache and guilt overwhelmed her, she pared off a piece for her mother, whose own questionable decisions had led to hers, and for Mitch, because if he’d hung on to her there would have been no other man, no accidental son. Still, the remaining portion was too large to swallow; she could only cover it with a pretty napkin and act as if it didn’t exist.
She would not be able to keep it covered, though, if the ravenous media sniffed it out—which could happen only if one of the few people involved decided to capitalize on it. This was the fear that dogged her in her quiet moments, had been dogging her ever since she’d contracted to do TBRS, the fear that had grown in proportion to her success.
If she’d had that ability to see into her future and to feel the way the guilt, the fear would bind her, she would have announced her history at her first employment interview. I’mnot proud of myself, she might have said, but I may as well tellyou … Except that there had been no benefit to telling; all the benefit lay in keeping the truth of who she was and how she lived out of sight, where it couldn’t affect the way people perceived her. She’d been using the strategy all her life.
The risk now, after having long ago established a child-free bio, was in being outed as a liar and a hypocrite. Her most ardent fans, the ones who watched her every day, who knew her so intimately (they thought), would feel betrayed—and, to paraphrase an old saying, hell hath no fury like a fan scorned. Especially these days, when the Internet gave anyone with access to a computer a giant-size megaphone with which to vent their anger. Others would delight in ridiculing her. Her competition would pounce on the opportunity to knock her out of first place—or worse. The show would suffer, maybe even fail, and then what? Who would she be if she were not Blue?
Only a court order could expose her son’s original birth certificate, and until her son had come of age a little more than three years ago, only his adoptive parents could seek such an order—and if any of them did, she would know about it when it happened. That was the law. She would receive notice, allowing her to protest or protect or defend. Of the few people who knew who she’d become and what she’d done first, none stood to gain anything by saying so. While self-protection was certainly not the reason she’d kept Marcy close all these years, she did rest more easily having her in sight, and happy.
The law that protected her was the same law that protected her son’s identity. Hence her hiring of Branford, whose job it was to find another route to the answer—not so that she could make contact, necessarily; just so she could know. That it was proving so difficult for Branford to find the midwife, the answer-keeper, was sometimes disheartening, sometimes reassuring, depending on which emotional lens she happened to be looking through when she let the thoughts idle in her mind.
She looked out the jet’s window, where six-inch-deep snow glowed pale pink as the sun approached the horizon, delineating the taxiways and runways, which were wet but clear. The day’s first commercial flights were already stacked up down the field, and the steady rumble of morning traffic noise was punctuated every few minutes by the roar of jets lifting off for New York and Minneapolis, St. Louis and San Diego, Raleigh, Denver, Las Vegas, Seattle. One of those jets, full of morning business commuters and eager vacationers, might, in a few hours, be landing in a city close to where her son would be waking up.
She’d played this imaginary game so many times over the years. At first she had imagined a snuggly infant in a soft blue sleeper, held in the arms of a woman who looked out her window upon San Francisco Bay. Then it was a toddler in footed pajamas, and Puget Sound. The parents and the midwife, Meredith, had said West Coast but, over time, Blue realized this was a generic descriptor; the family might as easily be in Sacramento or Olympia or Salt Lake City. And who could say whether they’d moved since then—or whether they’d truly been there to begin with?
Blue would wake up and, as she padded through her Chicago apartment, think of a dark-haired little boy waiting for the school bus with a Power Rangers lunchbox clasped in pudgy fingers. She would open the curtains of her New York City flat, and imagine a gangly boy hauling hockey gear into an ice arena for early morning ice time. She would sit on a stool as a stylist readied her for a VanityFair photo shoot, and see a teenager, hair falling into his eyes, choosing jeans and a Hollister sweater for senior pictures.
This morning she thought of a young man with slender hands and long eyelashes, still asleep in a posh private college dorm. With the life his parents had provided him, the care, the education, he could be at Princeton or Harvard or Notre Dame. In a coincidence too ironic to want to consider, he could this moment be across town at Northwestern University.
Northwestern; where Mitch Forrester had been teaching when she had met him. If her son had been Mitch’s son, if her wishes on Sirius had been granted … well, everything would be different, wouldn’t it? She would still be Harmony Blue Kucharski—or perhaps she’d have taken Mitch’s name; she’d practiced writing it both ways during those few short months when she’d seen her wishes edge tantalizingly close to reality. And instead of touring the Hemingway Home in Key West in front of a camera crew as she would do on Friday, she might have toured it with Mitch, whose aim it had been to become the preeminent Hemingway scholar. Mitch, who in effect had chosen to take refuge from the turmoil in his life with a dead literary idol, rather than a living young woman who idolized him. Well, it was his choice to make; it would be interesting to know if he thought it was the right one.
At the sound of Marcy’s “Good morning,” Blue looked up to see her, puffy-eyed and yawning, as she sat down in the seat opposite Blue. Stephen, so tall that his messy black hair brushed the aircraft’s ceiling, was right behind her. He took the seat across the aisle from Marcy and reached for her hand. Both of them looked sleepy, tousled, as if they’d climbed out of bed and straight into Marcy’s limo. Of limos, black Lincoln Town Cars with full-time drivers, they had four: one each for Blue, Marcy, and Peter, and one kept at large, for ferrying guests.
Blue would have preferred not to witness Marcy and Stephen’s bed-head coziness. But she smiled as though she found them adorable. “Morning. Looks like good weather for travel.”
“Do they have coffee ready?” Stephen asked, stroking one arm of his seat with his free hand. “Nice leather. I’m desperate for some caffeine.”
Marcy was nodding in agreement. “Vanilla-double-espresso-whipped, now that would be fab-u-lous,” she said. She rubbed her face and pulled back her hair. “But, holy Christ, it would be so much easier to just pop a pill.”
Blue flagged the flight attendant who waited in the galley pretending not to stare. “Easier,” Blue agreed, “but not as tasty.”
“Lower calorie, though,” Marcy sighed. “And fast-acting, which I could use. Peter called me at five-fifteen, insisting I log on to YouTube.”
“You—?” Blue started, then she knew. “The bit with Stacey and me, the tears, right?”
Marcy nodded. “It’s viral. You know how it goes. Peter sounded like he could use a tranquilizer.”
“Vultures,” Blue muttered.
The attendant came over and Blue requested coffee while Stephen stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle. He said, “Speaking of pills, last night Marcy was telling me all about the good old days.”
Blue shot Marcy a look of disapproval.
“We were doing tequila teasers,” Marcy said, her half-smile an apology. “A little practice, you know, for Duval Street. I told Stephen how we roomed together in our little house, and maybe got a bit wild a time or two. Nothing serious,” she said. Blue caught her look of assurance and relaxed a little.
“Oh, well, that’s true. We did have a wild time or two.” Or fifty. If she could recall those early months’ adventures she might be able to count them. “You know how kids are when they first leave home.” Naïve. Stubborn. Self-destructive—those were Blue’s personal adjectives. Not that she was about to say so, and Marcy had better not, either.
Stephen, apparently, was chatty in the morning even without the benefit of caffeine. He asked Blue, “So why did you change your name?”
“Do you know what my mother named me?”
“Yeah, Harmony Blue … Kucharski?”
“There you have it,” she said.
It had been years since anyone aside from her mother had brought up the name change, a change made legal so long ago that neither the media nor the public thought to question it. Her given name was not so awful, despite how she’d felt about it when she had to explain it to yet another teacher, principal, classmate. Back then, she’d been embarrassed to admit she’d gotten the name because her mother liked the anemone, harmony blue. Later, during what she and Marcy now referred to as “the recovery period” when she’d set her sights on working at WLVC, they’d agreed it just wasn’t a name for television.
Stephen said, “It’s cool, isn’t it? You’re Harmony and your sister’s Melody. Harmony and Melody. You should’ve been singers, or songwriters.”
“Now why didn’t I ever think of that?”
“Marcy says your mother is a trip.”
“Marcy ought to know.” She took most of Nancy Kucharski’s calls. The two women were as close as blood relatives. Closer, probably: they didn’t share any baggage.
