A Changed Man (21 page)

He wishes Bonnie weren’t surprised. He doesn’t know how he knows. He just does. He knew it when it was a
Jeopardy
clue, when he was staying at Raymond’s. The thought of Raymond settles around him like a poisonous fog rising from the pharaoh’s tomb. As always, he expects to see Raymond around the next corner. Which proves that Vincent’s insane. It’s unlikely that Raymond would have forked over hundreds of bucks to attend the World Brotherhood Watch benefit dinner. And yet there’s a precedent for it. John Wilkes Booth—who, ARM claims, was a Jew—bought a theater ticket.

The roar of the party, coming out to meet them, reminds Vincent of the archers yelling in samurai films as the arrows wing out of the fortress. But this isn’t a battle. They’re letting down the drawbridge, pulling back the golden rope and cheering him into their castle. He’s the VIP guest with a seat at the head table, the white knight who gets to stand up and toast the king.

Bonnie takes his arm as they wade into the crowd. Her grip registers halfway between a friendly squeeze and a headlock. Following Bonnie around the room is like some schizo square dance, kiss kiss, chat chat, say a few words, spin off to the next group. Bonnie knows everyone, or almost everyone. Not the peasants who read the
Times
and called up and bought one ticket, but the ones who sprung for whole tables, the ones who might give serious money. She has to, it’s her job. It puts food not only in her kids’ mouths but in the mouths of innocent children tortured by evil dictators.

Vincent moves when Bonnie does, then pauses, nods, smiles. Mumbles hello. No one can hear a word. There’s a band, four guys in dashikis singing and hopping up and down as if the floor is a hot griddle. No one’s listening to them, they’re just jacking up the noise. It doesn’t matter what you do in this room full of people pretending to be laughing and talking. Once Vincent figures that out, he can relax and check out his surroundings.

The party is being held on the vast stone patio of an Egyptian temple. It’s like being outdoors, but better. No weather, perfect lighting. One side of the room is a glass wall through which the sparkly illuminated trees in the park outside seem no more real than the clay ones in those dollhouses for the dead. In front of him is a reflecting pool, its floor thickly sprinkled with coins, perhaps a hint to the guests that money is about to be dislodged from their pockets.

Watching Bonnie is like watching a slalom champ who knows exactly when to turn, when to coast, when to switch direction. A special hug for everyone with a purse or checkbook. Bonnie guides Vincent up onto the platform near the temple itself, where—thank you, Jesus!—the drinks and the food are set out on tables. Vincent helps himself to a postage stamp of rare roast beef on a cracker, and then, with a longing look at the vodka, picks up a glass of white wine. For support he fingers the Vicodin in the fold of his pocket.

He braces himself for the disapproving glance from Bonnie, who begged him not to drink until after his speech. But a glass of wine isn’t
drinking,
and anyway, Bonnie seems to have forgotten him as she crosses the room to whisper into the ear of some important old fart. Sorry. Vincent can’t follow her there. Let’s take a peek at the sculpture.

Presiding over this end of the pool is a row of giant cat women carved from polished black granite. Vincent remembers a scene from the original
Cat People
: the shadow of a maddened feline stalks a woman in a deserted swimming pool. But despite her sternness, her grim unfocused stare, this cat goddess seems so kindly that Vincent wants to crawl into her lap. What is it about these statues that keeps making him want to curl up inside them?

Pressing his back against the wall, Vincent watches the crowd, waiting to feel uncomfortable because he doesn’t know anyone. But in fact it’s strangely soothing, like being at the beach, as if the sea of people were an actual sea. He tries to hear the crowd noise as the roar of the ocean, to feel it rushing over him like a salt wind on his face.

But wait. He
knows
that woman. Long black curls, short black dress. Cute body. He’d know if she worked in the office. Could she be a temp? Or someone from his old life? Now she spots him too, and smiles, and heads straight for him, which gives him a minute, two minutes at most, to shake out his memory banks.

The woman puts out her hand and says, “I’m Colette Martinez. From the
New York Times.
I interviewed you. Remember?”

“Right,” says Vincent. “Lois Lane.” It was Bonnie who called her that.

“What does that make
you?
” Lois has had a couple of drinks, a couple up on Vincent. “Superman?”

“You come here often?” Vincent says.

Colette laughs. “I get in free.” The fact that, in this crowd of thousand-dollar-a-platers, neither of them have laid out a penny sets off a small electric charge between them.

“I saw what you wrote about us,” Vincent says.

“Sorry,” Colette says. “I fought for five hundred words. I had to cut it. Something else was happening that day—”

“Don’t be sorry,” says Vincent. “
Something
worked. Look around. The place is packed. Anyway, I wasn’t that crazy about having my picture in the paper.”

“Why not? Everyone always wants to be in the
Times.
”

“Shy, I guess.” Vincent’s not in the mood to explain about Raymond wanting him dead.

Colette snags two glasses of wine off a waiter’s tray, and, surprised to find his own glass empty, Vincent takes one from her. She’s not going anywhere. She’s given up mingling for Vincent. It’s sexy, their leaning against the wall, side by side, as if they’re watching a movie.

“Are you nervous?” Colette says.

“About what?”

“About giving a speech tonight.”

Vincent does a body check: brain, heart, stomach. At the moment, not a flutter. Why
isn’t
he more nervous? For one thing, he and Bonnie have figured out approximately what he’s going to say. They agreed it might be better to delete the part about the rave, though he’ll end with the feeling he had on the Ex, of loving everyone and everything, wanting to embrace all God’s children. Naturally, he won’t mention the Ex. And he’ll explain that the light shone on him slowly, a little more each day, like a beam of winter sunlight crossing the floor. He can’t recall if he or Bonnie came up with that beam of winter sun.

Working with Bonnie has certainly made him more confident than he’d felt walking into Brotherhood Watch that first day and spitting out that ridiculous tongue twister: I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me. He’s glad Bonnie doesn’t seem to remember, glad she didn’t ask him to say something like that tonight.

Another waiter swoops down on them, this time with a tray of food. Eggy mush in pie-crust cups. He and Colette each pop one.

“Micro-quiche,” Colette says. “It’s amazing you’re not nervous. I mean, I don’t imagine you get up and talk in front of crowds like this every night.”

“And your point is?” Fuck her. Is she trying to
make
him nervous?

“Plus I wouldn’t imagine that these are exactly your people,” says Colette.

Double fuck her. “Actually, I wouldn’t imagine they’re
your
people either.”

Colette smiles sweetly up at him. “My father is the former governor of Puerto Rico.”

You wouldn’t expect a statement like that to work like a sexual come-on. But it’s funny, how the most unlikely phrase can suddenly make it clear that he and Miss Governor-of-Puerto-Rico’s-daughter could work something out, if they wanted.

Except that now, from across the room, Vincent sees Bonnie searching for him. Her face has that naked, terrified look you see on mothers yelling for lost toddlers. Does she think he’s gotten stage fright and skipped? Doesn’t she know him better than that? Vincent lets her sweat a minute before he catches her eye and saves her.

Bonnie stands on tiptoe and waves. But as she comes closer and sees he’s with Colette, her expression changes from relief to…what? Who knows what she’s registering on her female antennae. If Bonnie were anyone else, Vincent would swear that she looked jealous.

Bonnie can’t find Vincent anywhere. She searches the party, avoiding eye contact with people she should be chatting up, ignoring the sympathetic or irritated expressions of strangers who sense her panic. It’s how she felt when the boys were little and they’d wander off in the supermarket. She used to imagine the grisly scenarios—the voice on the PA system, driving home without them—in such detail that sometimes she’d burst into tears when she finally found Danny and Max in the breakfast-cereal aisle.

That first day Vincent showed up at Brotherhood Watch, Meyer warned her he might disappear. Since then, she’s worked so hard, given so much of herself. Even so, if he vanishes now, it won’t matter how much she’s done. It will still be her fault. Vincent
has
to be here.

Her day has been tough enough. First the
New York
magazine photographer canceled, then changed his mind, and she’d had to double-check to make sure there were going to be a few semi-celebrities present and willing to pose with Meyer. Which is Roberta’s job. Bonnie called twice to confirm with the city councilman’s wife. Welcome to Fundraisingland. Is
this
what Meyer meant by kicking things up to a higher level? Besides which, she dreads going to the Met, where it requires an effort not to think about being there with her father.

She’d made herself stay focused on the Iranian cartoonist, released from jail
this morning
—who could ask for better timing?—and presently en route to Paris with his wife and children. Another life saved by Brotherhood Watch. It’s the least Bonnie can do to make a couple of phone calls and now nearly faint because she can’t find Vincent.

When she finally spots him over by the wall, she relaxes, then tenses again. Vincent’s holding a wineglass. Bonnie asked him not to drink. He’s talking to Colette Martinez, the
Times
journalist who wasted their time and wrote one dinky paragraph. Why isn’t she out doing her job, working the crowd, reporting?

If Bonnie didn’t know better, she’d think that they were flirting. The former skinhead, the Latina reporter, both reasonably attractive. They make a handsome couple. Why wouldn’t Colette flirt with him? Because Bonnie hasn’t. For Vincent to live with her and the boys has meant ignoring the fact that Bonnie is a woman and Vincent is a man. A fact he’s probably never noticed. Why would he? Bonnie’s a middle-aged divorced mother of two—half a lifetime beyond whatever Vincent and the young woman from the
Times
may, or may not, be involved in. It knocks the wind right out of her. Bonnie can hardly stand it.

But why is Bonnie tormenting herself? Forty-one isn’t ancient. Every day, women older than she is marry and have kids. Anyway, Bonnie reminds herself, her annoyance has nothing to do with whatever’s transpiring between Vincent and the reporter. It’s what a coach might feel if he saw his star athlete chatting up some girl right before a game. A player needs to concentrate. Anything else is distraction.

In twenty minutes, half an hour, depending on how long people take to find their tables and how long Meyer speaks, Vincent will have to get up and tell this terrifying crowd how he was converted from ARM to Brotherhood Watch. Bonnie has spoken to groups of donors, at conferences and board meetings. But she’d find this one difficult. How brave Vincent was to agree.

She and Roberta decided to schedule the speeches during dinner, instead of at the more usual time—before dessert—on the chance that some guests might have another engagement. And also (Bonnie’s secret reason) because she thought that Vincent might be a more persuasive speaker before he’d had a chance to loosen up and enjoy the evening. But why is she worried about Vincent? He should be worried about
her.
The last time someone drank too much, it was Bonnie, at Meyer’s. Vincent
is
worried about her. She sensed it earlier this evening. How tenderly they have begun to monitor each other’s substance intake.

Bonnie needs to get Vincent and Meyer and start them moving toward their table. So why should she find it humiliating to bear down on Vincent and Colette and break up their tête-à-tête, like some prudish chaperone prying apart a prom couple humping on the dance floor?

Colette is wearing a tiny black dress, a square yard of sexy perfection, sculptural in its stylish neatness and obscene in its suggestion of how rapidly it could be shed. What made Bonnie think that she could get away with the gown she wore to Danny’s bar mitzvah, a clingy outfit that’s bunched in unflattering creases across her spreading hips?

“Colette,” she says. “How nice to see you. I loved your little piece in the
Times.
”

“Sorry about the littleness,” Colette says. That she can afford to be gracious has something to do with the fact that she’s standing close to Vincent, and Bonnie isn’t.

Bonnie turns to Vincent. “Showtime!” she says, stiffly.

“Wish me luck,” Vincent tells Colette.

“Break a leg,” she says.

“See you later,” Vincent tells her.

“Nice to see you,” repeats Bonnie. She takes Vincent’s arm. It’s shockingly pleasurable to feel a male bicep beneath a tuxedo. She practically drags Vincent along as she sets off in search of Meyer.

Spotting Irene, Bonnie takes a roundabout path to avoid her. Irene will be all over them, staking her territorial claim to the young man whose change of heart has made him the star of the evening. He’s her boy. She sat next to him once at her apartment.

Vincent lets Bonnie lead him. This is her world, her work. Moved by his faith in her, Bonnie takes a brief but heartfelt vow not to let him down.

He says, “Don’t say I never did anything for the foundation. I sweet-talked that Rican chick from the
New York Times
for a good half hour and then you came over and blew all my hard work.
Little
article. Great.”