Valley of Ashes (16 page)

D
ean and I were upstairs in our bedroom several days later, getting ready for a business dinner now that the babysitter had finally arrived. Well,
I
was getting ready. Dean had already been primping for an hour while I fed the girls their dinner.

“Who else is coming tonight?” I asked.

“Lots of visiting Japanese, Renfrew, most of the VPs, Bittler,” he said.

“Bittler couldn’t be out for a
few
more days with that concussion?”

He didn’t answer, busy rifling through his ties.

“Who else?” I asked.

He selected a tie, draped it around his neck. “Cary’s driving Setsuko.”

“Again?”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” He leaned in front of me, commandeering the mirror to deal with his tie.

“Let me do that,” I said, turning toward him. “I mean twice in one week? Doesn’t Setsuko have a car?”

“I think so.”

I knotted the tie. “So, what’re they, dating?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Now that I’d perfected his tie’s dimple, Dean looked over my head at the mirror again and started smoothing his hair back with both
palms, then raised his chin and waggled his face side-to-side to check the closeness of his shave.

I turned back toward the bureau to reach for my freshly re-strung pearls. “
Why
is that ridiculous?”

I watched him roll his eyes in the mirror.

“Nice tie by the way,” I said, trying to hook the clasp on my pearls at the back of my neck. “You get that in New Orleans?”

Dean leaned down to pick up his loafers off the bedroom floor. “Where’s the shoe polish?”

“Linen closet,” I said. “Third shelf from the top.”

Where it always fucking is. But don’t worry about me, I can fasten these by myself.

I pulled the pearls around, the clasp’s ends to the front.

Everything felt hollow, slipping away from me.

Had I changed, somehow? Was this discomfort with Dean my fault?

Maybe I was just so exhausted I was imagining all of it. Maybe we were fine.

I tried to remember the last time he’d seemed truly happy in my company, and all I could think of was the way he’d grinned at me the morning after our girls had been born, walking toward me across my crowded maternity-ward room at New York Hospital.

I leaned forward until my forehead rested on the edge of the old white bureau.

Don’t fucking cry, you don’t have time to do your makeup all over again.

Well, hey. At least I’d finally remembered to pick up my pearls from the jeweler.

I looked like shit, but they were real.

So I had
that
going for me.

“You look great,” I said, after Dean and I had given our last instructions to the babysitter.

“Thanks,” he said, pushing past me through the front door and across our porch, out toward the car.

I stood on the threshold transfixed, one hand raised to my throat.

Really? “You look nice yourself, dear,” was too much to fucking ask?

“For God’s sake, we’re already late picking the guy up at the Boulderado,” said my husband, scowling back at me across our car’s roof.

“What guy?”

“Mr. Tanaka. From Tokyo. What the hell’s
wrong
with you?”

Okay then: As a couple, we were officially, totally, utterly fucked.

Dean always drove like some ancient cranky elderly lady in a vicious girdle: constipated velocity with a perpetual smolder of road rage. He’d only brake at the last possible moment, as though any obstacle with the goddamn gall to thwart his progress deserved the squealed-rubber threat of imminent retribution.

I smiled at the visiting business dignitary in the rearview mirror. Mr. Tanaka was directly behind Dean—the seat I’d’ve paid good money for, especially winding up Boulder Canyon’s switchbacks with my petulant spouse at the wheel—but Japanese politesse supposedly dictated that only the
untermensch
rode shotgun. A category that of course included wives.

“We will see beers, in this mountain?” asked Mr. Tanaka.

“
So
many beers,” I reassured him, smiling. “Microbrews, Budweiser… Kirin and Ichiban…”

Dean downshifted as the incline of Boulder Canyon grew steeper. Swear to God, he could’ve made a Bentley drive like a tractor.

Mr. Tanaka shook his head and said, “
Beers
,” raising his hands up like claws and growling at me.

“Oh.
Bears
.”

He growled again, nodding. “Many bears?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Also elk, and moose.”

The skin between his eyebrows crinkled. “Moose?”

“Antlers?” I said. “Very big animal?”

The poor guy looked really confused.

I turned toward the backseat and raised my hands to either side of my head, thumbs touching just above each ear with my fingers splayed out wide as they could go.

Chin raised, I bellowed “
Mooooose
,” in the lowest range I could manage.

“Ah!” said our passenger, making finger-antlers himself. “Bullwinkle!”

“Bullwinkle!” Dean agreed, raising a hand of his own to the side of his head, while I grinned and nodded at our passenger like an overmedicated psychotic clown.

“This is going to be the longest business dinner
ever
,” I confided to my husband, through clenched teeth.

“Alcohol will help,” said Dean, waggling his one-handed antler once more before dropping it to regrip the steering wheel. “Preferably several martinis.”

Our passenger was busy peering out the window now, searching the canyon for Moose and Squirrel.

“I think that sounds like a really bad idea,” I said, for Dean’s ears only. “I mean, the poor guy just flew into Denver from Tokyo yesterday, and we’re driving him up
another
four thousand feet to this restaurant, right?”

Dean punched the brakes halfway through a particularly tight turn in the darkening canyon.

Idiot. You accelerate
out
of a curve.

I gripped the dashboard. “It would be highly irresponsible to let him have half a wine cooler, much less pound straight gin.”

“He’s a prospective
client
. Basic Asian business etiquette requires that we encourage him to puke repeatedly.”

I figured it would be lousy for business were said honored guest to check out permanently, à la high-altitude Hendrix, but I kept that observation to myself.

And martinis would help
me
, as long as I didn’t get hammered enough to trot out the only Japanese phrase I knew:
Tayo agay detekoy
.

My first stepfather had been ordered to memorize that circa February 1945, during his third Pacific tour with the United States Marine Corps.

It meant, “Come out of the cave with your hands up.”

We hooked a right at Nederland—8,233 feet above sea level—and barreled along the spine of the Front Range for a few more miles. The engine sputtered, trying to gain purchase on the high thin air, and our passenger chuffed and panted like the Little Engine That Could in Lamaze class.

Dean turned into a narrow dirt lane still banked with waist-high snow. I caught Mr. Tanaka’s eyes in the rearview, white showing all the way around his irises as he ratcheted up toward sheer stranded-goldfish panic.

“Look,” I said, pointing out the right-side corner of the windshield, “baby beers!”

Two fat little furry cubs lolloped and tumbled through fresh powder, crossing a pine-ringed glade.

“So wonderful,” said Mr. Tanaka, grinning as Dean slowed the car to a crawl.

The sun was low behind us, tipping the snow’s meringue peaks pink and gold amidst long pools of cobalt shadow.

The mother bear padded into view behind her furry twins, glancing our way before she loped ahead to chase them toward invisibility, beyond the trees. When her children were safely away she stood on her hind feet and stared at us.

Dean took my hand.

“A good mother,” he said. “Like you, Bunny.”

He squeezed my fingers and then let go, the car doing a little shimmy beneath us when he stomped on the gas.

Maybe we’re okay, after all.

A
fter another mile or so of jouncing along the dirt road, we pulled up in front of a low-slung wooden lodge. Dean set the emergency brake and pulled the keys from the ignition.

I swung my door open and got out.

There was a small rounded lake to our right, its shore hemmed all the way around with the last few yards of winter ice, inner edges thin and clear as windowpane glass.

Dean and Mr. Tanaka trudged toward the lodge’s front doors, their dress shoes sinking into powdery snow, making it squeak with each step’s compression.

I followed along behind them, tipping my ex–hippie kid’s spiritual hat to Arlo Guthrie when I saw the A
LICE
’
S
R
ESTAURANT
sign just inside the vestibule.

The dining room was all gray stone and golden wood, dimly lit by a tall fireplace and antler chandeliers. My husband’s colleagues raised a jolly forest of arms and cocktail glasses in welcome, around a long table across the room. Dean and our passenger were cajoled toward two empty seats at its far end.

Setsuko helped Mr. Tanaka’s silver-haired boss rise from his chair at the table’s head as they approached, inaugurating a quadrille of bows, handshakes, and ceremonial business card exchanges and appreciation.

I’d been stranded mid-carpet like the Farmer-in-the-dell’s cheese, hi-ho the fucking derry-o.

When the backslapping salesfellow-well-met rampart of blue serge and gray flannel finally simmered down a little, Cary caught my eye and pointed out the unoccupied seat beside him.

This would put me between him and Bittler, whose little moon of a face was already brick red with Scotch and resentment, behind his stupid mustache.

Cary pulled the empty chair out for me.

I gave him the usual cheek-peck hello, whispering, “What crawled up your boss’s ass
this
time?”

“His chair’s closest to the door,” he whispered back, “huge Japanese seating-order diss.”

I cocked him a
Dude, you are
so
going to owe me for this
eyebrow.

“Absolutely,” said Cary at regular volume. “And what can I get you to drink?”

“A great big martini glass of ice-cold gin,” I said, tucking my skirt smooth as he slid the chair in beneath me. “One olive. Have the vermouth send it a brief poignant telegram of regret. From Havana. Or possibly Gstaad.”

Bittler didn’t register my presence, just continued glowering down into a glass of something expensively single malt–looking, his sense of ignominy distending that fat scarlet lower lip into a budgie’s-perch pout.

Yeah, nice to see you, too, asshole. Took me all night Sunday to get your blood out of my shirt.

Cary resumed his seat beside me. He raised one finger, and a waiter appeared instantaneously.

“Didn’t think I’d see
you
here tonight, Margaret,” said Bittler, raising his cocktail glass vaguely in my direction.

I really, really wanted to open my response with the word “
Heil
.”

“Mr.
Butler
,” I replied instead. “Always a pleasure.”

Yeah, and it’s too bad I didn’t kick you in the balls while you were unconscious on my lawn, you skeevy little dick
.

Setsuko had been deployed to the guest of honor’s left at the power end of the table, her translation skills no doubt making her functional as well as decorative.

I watched her pour beer into Mr. Tanaka’s boss’s glass, then Dean’s. She used two hands, as though the bottle were far too heavy for her.

Dean raised his glass in a toast and Mr. Boss clinked his own against it, saying something that made Setsuko lift a hand to her mouth to hide her teeth while she giggled.

The gesture struck me as far less coy, in this setting.

She was essential to the proceedings but nobody looked her in the eye, especially not the visiting dignitaries. Sure, they looked
at
her, but in an offhand, sniggering way, as though she were some sort of party favor.

Hey, I was no stranger to gender power-game bullshit, but I’d played mere checkers, by comparison. This was chess. Setsuko earned her place at the table by pretending—exquisitely, convincingly—to know full well she didn’t, being female, deserve one.

I couldn’t imagine having to be that
on
all the time, not least at work.

And the woman’s offered to babysit for you, Madeline. Show a little solidarity.

Bittler, meanwhile, glared at Dean while fingering the NRA “Golden Eagle” pin piercing his lapel.

The waiter rematerialized, depositing my blessed martini before me in the nick of time.

Bittler dropped his chair back down, planted his elbows firmly on the tablecloth, and cleared his throat so loudly that all heads around the table swiveled toward him.

“So,” he said, tapping a fingernail against his glass, “Bill Clinton’s walking around the White House lawn with a new puppy under his arm.”

The underling straight across from me egged him on with a fawningly anticipatory chuckle.