The Unfolding, page 32
“Intimidated? What about impressed?” the Big Guy says. “It’s not about the building, which is, by the way, deeply historic; it’s about ideas and a way of life. One day your generation will be in charge. Tony and I and our friends are desperately trying to make sure it’s all still there for you when you’re ready.”
“Is it in danger?” Meghan asks.
There is a long pause.
“You saw what happened in Phoenix,” the Big Guy says. “Grown men and women in tears. Yes, Meghan, it is in danger.”
Another pause.
“In other parts of the country people were crying for a different reason,” Meghan says.
“History takes the long view.”
When they get back to the hotel, Chris from the front desk pulls them aside. “I’m sorry about yesterday.”
“What about yesterday?” the Big Guy asks.
“Intruding on you. Hotels are a place people come expecting privacy. But at the moment we have some extra people with us.”
“What kind of ‘extra people’?” the Big Guy asks.
“Secret Service,” Chris whispers. “Next week the Obamas are coming and they’re getting prepared.”
The Big Guy nods.
“I’m not supposed to say anything, but your suite is one of the ones they’ll be using, so it’s being ‘monitored.’ Anyway, I’d like to make it up to you.”
“And move us to an ‘unmonitored’ room?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have anything available, but I was thinking I could arrange for you to have dinner.”
“We’re fine,” the Big Guy says. “Thank you.”
The Big Guy and Meghan walk to the elevator. “That’s rich, isn’t it?” he says. “Our room is being monitored. I wonder if that means it’s bugged.”
“It just means that the two men in suits staying in the room next door aren’t a couple.”
“Are there men in suits next door?”
Meghan nods yes. “Does that mean I’m sleeping in the bed that the incoming president will be sleeping in?”
“No,” the Big Guy says. “I’m sleeping in the bed of the future president and you are in the children’s room or the mother-in-law’s room. It’s my understanding that she goes everywhere with them; for me, that would have been a deal breaker.”
“Would the mother-in-law be right next door to the president?”
“Probably not if the marriage is to survive. Most likely you’re in the girls’ room. Ironic, isn’t it? I tried to get Godzich to extend my stay, but they had no rooms available. Once you go back to school, I’m going to be bunking at my club for a while.”
“I wonder if they’ll have presidential M&M’s on their pillows at night?” Meghan asks.
The Big Guy shrugs. “Some things remain a mystery.”
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Hay-Adams Hotel
Washington, DC
11:30 a.m.
In the morning, the Big Guy has meetings, so he arranges for someone to take Meghan shopping at a local mall. Meghan bows out of the shopping trip and calls the taxi company. She asks if Mr. Tooth can pick her up and take her to school. She wants to see Ranger.
Mr. Tooth picks her up at the hotel. “Lady Girl, I took the call because I wanted to be sure you’re okay. I don’t think you can go on campus if you want to graduate with honors and without being charged with trespassing. School is closed.”
“I miss Ranger.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“If we can’t go to school, can we go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?” It was the first thing that popped into her head; she had no idea why except that she thought it might mean something to Mr. Tooth given that he’s a veteran.
“What did you do for the holiday?” she asks.
“Me? Not a heck of a lot. I don’t remember if I told you, but I live with my sister and her family. They have a really nice place, almost like a farm, and I have a little apartment attached to the house.”
“The mother-in-law suite?”
He laughs. “That’s what they call it, or called it until I moved in. Were you with your folks?” he asks.
“Yep,” she says. “But something happened.”
He glances at her in the rearview mirror.
“My mother drinks,” Meghan says. “That’s not the surprise. Remember when I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving? Well, that was because she went to rehab. But she came home for Christmas because there was something she needed to tell me—part of the reason why she drinks.”
Mr. Tooth makes a noise as if to say, Uh-huh or Tell me more.
“It turns out that my mother is not my mother. My father is my father but my mother was a dental hygienist.” She takes a deep breath. “Turns out the idea of a perfect family is like the idea of the American dream—it’s all a fantasy, a story we tell ourselves so we can feel good.”
“Lady Girl, that sounds rough.”
“There’s more,” she says.
Meanwhile, Mr. Tooth has missed the turn for Arlington National Cemetery and is going around in circles.
“They had a kid before me—and it died.”
“That’s truly sad,” Mr. Tooth says, going around the circle twice before he can exit gracefully.
“I wonder if my mother really tried hard, if she really took care of it; she’s not what you’d call warm.”
“You could assume she did her best, most mothers do. Did they say what was wrong with the baby?”
“They didn’t tell me the exact diagnosis. ‘Never had a chance,’ my father said. The way he told it, my mother wouldn’t give up and insisted they take the baby and try everything. He said it tore them apart and that’s why he started seeing the dental hygienist.”
“People take comfort where they can find it,” Mr. Tooth says, finally getting on the right road.
“If I hadn’t already written my college essays, I wouldn’t be able to now. I’ve lost all sense of who I am.”
“Well, you could tell this story.”
“And you know my godfather—Tony.”
“The guy who works at the White House?”
“Turns out he’s gay and no one ever told me. I’ve known him my whole life. You’d think someone would have told me. It’s like all this stuff is just falling out of everyone and all I want to do is push it back in.”
“I’m not sure you’re looking for advice,” Mr. Tooth says. “But I’d say, don’t resist. The energy that it takes to try to stuff something back into the box is enormous. Let it out; give it air. If you make space for it, it lightens up and goes from being like a stone tied around your leg to floating like a balloon. If you can give it space, you’ll become less attached; the more you cling—the worse it gets.”
“And on New Year’s Day I’m supposed to go meet my biological mother,” Meghan says. “We’re going to meet her in the morning because her husband sleeps late. I assume that means she’s not going to wake him early and say, ‘Happy New Year, and by the way, I’m just going to pop out and meet my former lover and my former child.’ ” She stops. “Honestly, I don’t know what to think about anything anymore.”
“Yes, you do,” Mr. Tooth says.
She shakes her head.
“My bet is that you’re afraid of what you’re already thinking.” He catches her eye in the rearview mirror. “It’s easier to believe what others want us to believe, to go with the flow. But it’s important to think for yourself. Not everyone can do it. Most people are following along. Personally, I find that scary. But you’re not that person. Don’t resist who you are. If anything, all that you’ve told me in the last few months makes the case for you to step into a new, bigger pair of shoes—this is your life, Lady Girl.”
“I feel so alone. Like I don’t belong to anyone anymore.”
“You belong.”
“I don’t.”
“You belong to yourself. As a young woman, that needs to be your strongest allegiance. God, self, and country. Those are my three.” He shows her his tattoo, Pro Deo et Patria—For God and Country.
“How do you know all this?”
“Just because I drive a cab doesn’t mean I’m a dummy. I read all the time. And Pro Deo et Patria happens to be the motto of my old high school, Archbishop Carroll.” A moment of silence passes. “It’s my job,” he says. “I drive all kinds of people; I have to be able to talk to them. Having an opinion is part of being a citizen. Like I was saying, you can just be a follower or you can make up your own mind. Take the lead.” He pauses. “When you think of meeting this woman—is there something you want from her?”
“I don’t know. I guess I wonder if she ever thought about me? If she every regretted giving me away?”
“Will you ask her?”
Meghan shrugs. “I don’t know. It seems kind of personal. Am I supposed to leave my old family and now be part of her family? I don’t think my mother wants me anymore, and I bet this woman has a life of her own and wasn’t expecting me to just show up out of the blue.”
Mr. Tooth sighs. “Invent yourself—make your own history. You’re not tied to what your parents said or did. A lot of people blame others for what happens to them, but mostly it wasn’t done on purpose or with malice. It happened. That’s how I think of it. Shit happens. Don’t use it as a weapon against yourself. Shit happens. The end. I didn’t set out to become a toothless cabdriver, but—shit happens.” Mr. Tooth is in the parking lot at Arlington National Cemetery. He pauses the meter. “Are you going to go in?” he asks.
“I’d go if you wanted to go.”
“No, Lady Girl, unfortunately I can’t go with you. I can’t leave the car.”
“Not a problem. I don’t really want to go in; I just wanted to talk to you.”
He smiles. In the rearview mirror, she can see where all his teeth are missing. He drives her back to the hotel. When he pulls up out front and stops the meter, she meets his glance in the mirror, that’s how they look at each other—always in the rearview mirror.
“Any advice?” she asks him. “Parting words?”
“Yeah,” Mr. Tooth says. “Don’t be afraid of anyone. I heard the singer Lou Reed say it once in an interview. Never be afraid of anyone.”
“Who is Lou Reed?”
Mr. Tooth hums a little bit of “Walk on the Wild Side.”
“Oh yeah. I heard that one in a commercial for a motorcycle.”
“Honda Scooters.” Mr. Tooth sings the chorus again. “Listen, Lady Girl, I was serious when I said that shit happens and that you have to find your own way forward. It was nice of you to invite me to see the tomb with you—but there’s something you never noticed . . .”
“Like what?”
“I’ve got no legs.”
Meghan leans over and looks in the front seat and sees that Mr. Tooth is wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, but the legs of his jeans are empty. His steering wheel has special hand controls.
“Lost them in the war?” she asks.
“Nope,” he says. “Got hit by a bus; never saw it coming.”
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The Hay-Adams Hotel
Washington, DC
3:00 a.m.
Alone. He hasn’t been without Charlotte on New Year’s Eve in twenty-five years. Grief catches him off guard.
No one has died; he keeps reminding himself of that fact, but there has been a rupture, a rift, a schism, a fissure, a breach that is of his own making. Estrangement. Disloyal. Unfaithful. Adultery. Lamentation. Tribulation. Sorrow. Heartache.
Awake at three a.m., he reaches for the datebook that he carries with him everywhere. “Unfathomable,” he writes on December 31, 2008.
He looks back through the year.
January 21: An alarm, a signal. Subprime. A word that people should have paid more attention to. The stock market plunged. A headline he clipped from The New York Times is pasted on the next page: “Stocks Plunge Worldwide on Fears of a U.S. Recession.”
March 19: Gamma ray burst. GRB 080319B—the brightest event EVER in the universe. Another signal. These are explosions in distant galaxies, electromagnetic events.
April 21: London—Bionic eyes are implanted into two patients—eyesight to the blind!
May 12: Sichuan, China, a 7.9 earthquake—the most people killed in a single event in China since the 1931 flood along the Yangtze River.
May 25: Charlotte’s birthday. He’s scrawled, “Charlotte! On Mars.” What it means is that it’s her birthday and he shouldn’t forget—and that NASA’s unmanned Phoenix spacecraft is the first to land in the northern polar region of Mars.
September 20: Terrorist attack, Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan—he used to own a piece of Marriott.
November 3: Meghan flies home.
November 4: Election Day! Fucked.
So it goes, notations, felt-tip pen scribbles of history, what catches his eye, what links him to the rest of the world.
Four a.m. on the day before New Year’s Day. He is trying to distract himself but can’t. He has only once in his life felt such heartache.
Only Charlotte was with him that time. Instead of the death of their child binding them, they became like magnetic poles—broken souls repelling each other.
Charlotte turned to drinking and he turned to Irene. In retrospect, he wishes Charlotte had turned to someone else. But maybe men are less comforting than a Manhattan—or a martini, a cosmopolitan, a gimlet, a Vesper, a White Lady, gin, a gin fizz, a Sazerac, a daiquiri, a Bloody Mary, a mai tai, or the Last Word—gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice. Or vodka, vodka, vodka.
He didn’t stop her. In the beginning, desperate for her to feel better, he encouraged her. He drank all of the above right alongside her, but it didn’t matter; his companionship was not equal to her grief.
When Meghan was little, they moved to a beautiful house in Connecticut with a long banister that he made a show of sliding down a few times a year. Charlotte said his “mounting the rail” reminded her of a character in John Cheever’s story “O Youth and Beauty!”—a man obsessed with his lost youth who in the end is shot dead by his wife. That’s the part that stuck with him; he reminds Charlotte of a man whose wife “got him in midair.”
They also had an apartment in the city. The Big Guy felt it was incumbent on him to get Charlotte back into the world. “This baby will be fine,” he insisted. He took Charlotte into town sometimes for days in a row while a nanny stayed with Meghan. He thought it was good for Charlotte to be distracted, to do the things they used to do, to have a drink or two and let it go. It was almost a dare to prove that she could let down her guard, not be vigilant, and that Meghan would survive. He didn’t realize that it also impeded Charlotte’s attachment—a problem that was already complex.
Meghan charmed Charlotte but it wasn’t easy. Charlotte was scared of her and angry. They didn’t spend time together until Meghan was about eight months old. Charlotte broke her ankle in a riding accident and was stuck at home. With the two of them sharing the same nanny-nurse, Charlotte began to notice Meghan.
Charlotte would call him at the office to say, “She smiled at me. She sat up all by herself. She crawled over and pulled at my skirt.” Meghan at eight months, nine months, ten months was doing things that the other baby had never done.
He wakes up too early on the morning of New Year’s Eve and his first thought is to get on a plane and go home. He wants to call Charlotte in Palm Springs and tell her to come back to the house. He needs his life to return to normal.
He calls Tony. “I need a plan.”
Tony says nothing.
“Can you hear me? I need a plan.”
“The Plan,” Tony says slowly.
“No. I need a plan for tonight. I’m going nuts here, climbing the walls. It’s New Year’s Eve; Charlotte is gone, and I’ve got Meghan with me and zippo to do.”
There is a pause.
“Where are you?” the Big Guy asks.
“Camp David,” Tony says.
“No privacy?”
“Correct. Let me make a few calls and get back to you,” Tony says. “I’m sure we can find something suitable.”
The Big Guy goes into the living room; Meghan is already up and drinking leftover hot chocolate from the day before.
“You got mail,” she says, pointing to a large envelope that someone has slipped under the door.
It’s from Chris, the hotel manager. “You turned me down for dinner, you don’t partake of breakfast, but will you and your daughter be our guests tonight for a 1920s dance party? We’ll be doing the Lindy Hop till dawn. All-you-can-eat buffet, endless champagne, and a special dessert cart that you can roll back to your room.”
“It sounds horrible,” the Big Guy says.
“I like the idea of the dessert cart we can bring back to the room,” Meghan says. “I love dessert carts, so many choices: éclairs, napoleons, fresh whipped cream, pudding, strawberry shortcake, profiteroles, a principessa.”
“I don’t know that one—the principessa.”
“Yes, you do; the last one we had was marzipan and lemon custard. Every country has a princess cake.”
The Big Guy laughs. “Are we feeding you enough?”
“I’m not hungry,” she says, “I’m anxious. When I’m anxious, I dream of sweets.”
“We’re gonna do something. Tony is on it. He’ll find us a party for tonight.”
They’ve been at the hotel for five nights and have done it all: shopping, ice-skating (he watched; she skated), museums (the East Wing and the Smithsonian), the National Archives, the Kennedy Center, The Nutcracker (they both slept).
At this point they are killing time, and with eighteen hours to spare on the 2008 clock, they’ve come up dry.
