The driver turned a corner in Georgetown and suddenly we were there, the shabby side entrance to a two-story building of broken mortared bricks and weathered paint-chipped wood. In front, two steps down from street level, the solid door to the restaurant gleamed with a hard black varnish. There was no menu, nothing pasted inside a glass enclosure to tell an interested passerby what was served or at what price; there was no telephone number someone might call. The name itself, five words in French, was enough to give it the impression of a place too expensive to just drop in. Climbing the back wooden stairs, surrounded by the mongrel scent of a dozen different dishes, rapid-fire muffled shouted voices, beaten pots and pans, lent a different perspective to what privilege really meant. The splintered stairs creaked beneath my feet; the hand railing, attached to posts with nails that in a century of weather had rusted and worked themselves loose, wobbled at my touch. Under the broken glass of a dented outdoor lamp, a screen door hung at a crooked angle from a broken hinge. A hand from inside pushed it open. His heavy-knuckled hand still on the door, a Secret Service agent, dressed in a tightly buttoned suit, nodded silently toward another door less than three steps away. Another agent stood next to it, his hands clasped in front of him, his feet spread shoulder width apart. I reached for the doorknob, but his hand was there first. I entered a private dining room, and the door behind me shut.
There were eight small tables in the room, each of them covered with a white linen tablecloth. Only one was set. In the far corner, the light slanted through shutters closed three-quarters tight, across a pair of hands that rested on the table. In the shadows, Joanna sat watching as I came toward her.
“Hello, Joseph Antonelli.”
The teasing laughter in her voice brought me back to what she had been, when I first knew her, that summer in New York, that summer when I almost fell in love with her and maybe really had. She was still quite beautiful, not as she had been before, but with that look that usually comes only with breeding and wealth: that look of youthful beauty that has faded but not disappeared. Her looks had always depended on something subtle, something you did not notice so much when she was young. It was the way she held herself—a little distant, a little aloof—the easy way she moved; but beyond everything else, it was the way she looked at you: as if she knew everything there was to know about you and liked everything she knew. I sat down at the table with the vague wish that I had never left New York.
Joanna offered me her hand. “I’m afraid I made something of a fool of myself last week. I hope you can forgive me.”
Her voice was more measured, more controlled—the sweet fullness of it was gone; measured, controlled— the way, I tried to remind myself, it had to be when every word that came out of her mouth was taken down, transcribed, given a meaning that if she was not careful might not have been her intent. Her voice was drier, more circumspect; the eager enthusiasm of it had vanished, gone. Measured, controlled, a distant empty echo of something lost; a pale imitation of the voice I had loved and that, for a few brief months, had played over and over again in my young and foolish mind.
“There’s nothing to forgive. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
With her back perfectly straight, she leaned forward, her elbows on the table. Her chin rested lightly on her folded hands. Her eyes glittered with rueful malice.
“A woman my age can be forgiven a lot of things, perhaps even getting a little drunk. But to stumble into a room where you know you’ll find the boy with whom you were once madly, desperately, in love—not only drunk but without makeup—is worse than unforgivable; it’s stupid.” Joanna paused, then added: “But I couldn’t wait to see you. Strange the way we think. All those years, and suddenly I can’t stand to wait another night.”
She reached across the table and squeezed my wrist. A strange, bittersweet smile flickered candle-like over her lips. I covered her hand with my own and smiled back. A door opened behind us. Her hand slipped away. Moving like a shadow, silent and without effort, a waiter brought a bottle of wine, filled our glasses and left.
“You never married, did you?” she asked, watching me over the glass she raised to her mouth. I waited while she drank and, because I knew she knew the answer, waited for what she wanted to say next. “I suppose I’m not surprised, though I don’t quite know why. Maybe it was that girl you told me about—the one you were so much in love with, the one in Oregon, the one you wanted to marry.” She thought a moment. “Jennifer. That was her name, wasn’t it? Jennifer. Whatever happened to her?”
We had not seen each other in years, but however much we had changed, the memory we had of each other had not. It gave us, I think, a sense of safety, a sense that we could talk to each other as if instead of years since our last meeting, only a few days had passed. And so I told her the truth, or as much of it as I could bear. I told her that Jennifer and I were going to get married, and that something had happened and that now she was gone forever, lost in a place no one could find her, trapped inside a mind that had shut off the lights and closed down for good.
“I used to go see her; I don’t anymore. She didn’t know who I was; she never will. It’s one of the reasons I left Portland; one of the reasons I stayed in San Francisco: I don’t feel quite so much guilt.”
Joanna did not ask me to explain. It’s impossible to live past forty and not know what it means to feel guilty about things over which you have no control. It is a fact of existence, as tangible, as real, as hunger or thirst or carnal desire: this vague, troubling suspicion that never quite goes away, that there must have been something we could have done to change things, something we were too stupid or too selfish, too caught up in our own ambitions, to find out. And so we try to run away, try to put what distance we can between ourselves and the memory of things that can never be changed at all.
“But you married,” I said, turning us away from things too unbearable to expect, or to want, anyone to share.
She leaned closer, searching my eyes. She was about to speak when the door opened again. A second waiter, older than the first, with gray wire-bent hair and thin, sharp-edged shoulders, entered the room. He never once raised his eyes, never once looked at either one of us, as he served a Caesar salad first to Joanna, then to me. The silence was inscrutable, profound. Joanna watched him until he had finished, and then followed him with her eyes until the door whispered shut behind him. As if the waiter had been a chimera, a figment of her own imagination, and the food had always been there, waiting on her pleasure, she lifted her fork and turned to me with a pleasant smile.
“This is my favorite restaurant,” she announced without enthusiasm. “Not as good as the ones I like in New York.” She took a bite of the salad and with her eyes passed a judgment of partial approval. She took another bite, put down the fork, and gently pushed aside the gold-embossed plate.
“You weren’t surprised I married? Or you weren’t surprised I married Thomas?”
It caught me off guard. I tried to remember what I had thought about it at the time, but all I could really remember was that I had not heard about their marriage until after it happened. I think I must have read about it in the papers.
“You didn’t come to the wedding.” She said it as a simple statement of fact; but from the way she turned her head, looking at me now from a watchful angle, there was more to it than that. “Thomas said you wouldn’t come.” She was still watching me in that intensely interested way. “He didn’t know if it was because of him—or me.”
She was waiting for something: some response, some reply; but I didn’t know what it was.
“Thomas said you wouldn’t come; he said it was better not to invite you: you wouldn’t feel you had to make some excuse.”
Her expression changed. A lost, wistful look settled in her eyes. She stared at me, bravely, in defiance of her own lost control, determined to say what she wanted to say.
“Why couldn’t you have stayed in New York—come back to New York after law school? Why would that have been so bad?”
I wanted to tell her the truth, or what after all the things that had happened seemed like the truth; because, after all, there was nothing to judge it against: no hard, incontrovertible fact—nothing more than the futile thought of what might have been.
“Why couldn’t you have lived in New York?” Her voice echoed quietly in the silence of the room and in the silence of the long journey we had in our separate ways both traveled.
“I wish I had,” I answered honestly, or as honestly as I knew how.
I leaned against the cane-backed chair, gazing down at the carpeted floor. It was as if we had gone through our lives in some parallel fashion: I still had the feeling that she had always been out of my reach, beyond my grasp, a woman who lived in a world I could never really know.
“I thought about it a lot the first few years after that summer. I’d remember what it was like, what it felt like, that summer in New York; and I’d wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t left, if I’d finished law school and gone back to work in that Wall Street firm.” Raising my eyes, I looked at her looking at me, and for a while I remembered how things had been. “I started thinking about it again when I knew I was coming to New York, when I thought I was going to see you.”
I lowered my eyes and bent forward, my arm on the table, trying to think of how to say what I thought was true and wished was not. It was too late; it had always been too late. That was the truth of it. I knew that, and yet, there was something, a kind of second knowledge, a doubt that cast a shadow over the bright shining certainty in which I had once buried the past, a sense that perhaps I had been wrong after all.
“But how would I have ever fit in there?” I asked, glancing up. “I was a kid from Oregon. My father was a doctor, a GP; we were never poor, but we were never rich. You didn’t want to leave New York, not just because you loved the city, but because you owned it, were part of it, had always been a part of it. You were always going to wind up with someone else, someone from your own background and class. I think it was inevitable that it was going to be Thomas Browning. I should have seen it at the time, the way the two of you always looked after each other, that you would end up married to him.”
With a deft movement of her hand, Joanna wiped away a single tear. She waited with a blank expression while a third waiter led in two others, one of whom removed the salad plates while the other arranged new silverware around new plates. The two left immediately after they had completed their tasks; the third one, with a worried smile, spooned out portions, pausing with an upturned glance to see when he should stop. Joanna would not look at him. She nodded once, briefly; and then, walking backward the first few steps, he was gone. As if she had been holding it all the while, she let out her breath.
“I hate being who I am,” said Joanna with a poisonous glance directed, not at me, but at the world of intruders she could not manage to keep away.
She had not looked at anyone who had come into the room while they were looking at her. I wondered if it was a way she had of protecting herself against the constant violation of prying, eager eyes. She tossed her head back and with a helpless look apologized, not for what she had said, but for the circumstances under which she was forced to live her life. She turned toward the cream-colored shutters on the window a little ahead of where she sat. With a tentative motion, she reached forward, adjusting them to let in more light.
“The weather here is awful,” she said, stealing a glance outside. “Hot, humid, debilitating: It drains you of energy, makes everything slow down. It’s why southerners talk so slow; why they drink so much: The sheer effort of speech brings on the thirst.” She laughed softly and with a certain pleasure at her own affected drawl. The laughter lingered for a while in her eyes and then slowly, reluctantly, faded away.
“I would have married you—if you had asked.” She raised her head to forestall any interruption. “And if you didn’t want to live in New York, I would have gone wherever you wanted. But you never asked me; you never asked me to go with you. So I asked you to come back to New York because that’s where I was, where I lived, where—if you had been there—we could have been the way we had been that summer, that summer in New York.”
She had not touched anything on her plate. She shoved it aside and picked up her glass.
“And I think it was my fault: for not telling you how I felt; for just imagining that you must have understood that the reason I talked that way—about New York—was because I thought that if you loved it too, you’d come back and wouldn’t go somewhere I couldn’t be.”
It is the habit of unhappiness to rewrite our lives and from a different beginning come to a different ending. We cling to the past and what it could have been: what we wanted, or thought we wanted, before we were taught by a broken heart that our own good intentions have little effect on the way things are.
Joanna held up her head. Her eyes were bright, eager, wistful.
“My father was devastated when we broke up. He…”
“Your father: Is he… ?”
“He died three years ago. My mother died a year before. He was fine for a while, not depressed. He put up a good front: He never showed his emotions—or almost never. His generation was like that. In my whole life I never once heard him raise his voice. If he disapproved of something you’d done, he would just look at you, not speaking a word; and you’d know how disappointed he was in you and you’d swear to yourself you’d never let that happen again.” Pausing, she looked away, shaking her head at the memory of what had happened. “I never saw him look more disappointed than the day I told him you were going back to Harvard and wouldn’t be coming back to New York. Unless it was the day I told him I was going to become Thomas Browning’s wife.”
She had placed her hands on the table. She examined them with a strange, intense fascination.
“I used to have lovely hands,” she said, spreading apart her fingers. With a scornful expression she pulled her hands off the table and buried them out of sight in her lap. Sitting at an angle, she stared quietly out the shuttered glass, thinking back.
“My father was terribly disappointed,” she said presently. “He didn’t want me to marry Thomas; he wanted me to marry you.” A smile edged its way along the corner of her lower lip. “He told me about that conversation he had with you, that afternoon in the park. That wasn’t like him; that wasn’t like him at all—which made the fact that he did it make me love him even more. He thought the world of you: In his own way I think he loved you as much as I did. He did not love Thomas. He respected him, admired him in a way; but you were the one he could have thought of—did think of—as a son.”
I could hear her father’s voice; I could see him sitting on the park bench next to me, telling me his fear.
“He thought he might turn out too much like his grandfather—old Zachary Stern,” I said.
Joanna’s eyes did not move from the window. She sat there with that look of rigid elegance, the smile that had crawled across her mouth now bitter, filled with unconcealed contempt.
“My father was always a shrewd judge of men.” She kept staring out the window, lapsed into a silence that became drowsy and immense.
“Thomas is using you. You know that, don’t you?” she asked presently, moving her head in a level arc until her eyes, inquisitive and relentless, met mine. “He didn’t ask you to come to New York for that dinner—he did not agree to speak at that dinner—for old times’ sake. He might have done it because he wanted to use you to make a point—I read what he said about you. He meant it, too. That is what he thinks about the lawyer—the kind of lawyer—you’ve become. But that wasn’t the reason. He brought you here, to Washington, and it wasn’t because he wanted you to have the chance to see me. I wanted to see you in New York. He had his office schedule me for some idiotic event somewhere else.”
She laughed a little, a mild rebuke to her own intensity; an apology for appearing to act as if she could demand explanations, or anything else, from me.
“Isn’t that a wonderfully convenient power to have? Anytime you don’t want your wife around, schedule her to go off somewhere and give a speech? I’m always being told what to do and where I have to be. Even today, instead of being able to take all the time I want, they’re whisking me off somewhere after lunch.”
Joanna started to take a drink. Aware that I was watching her, she put down the glass. She seemed to watch herself with a kind of brooding irony as she pushed the tips of three fingers against the base of the glass, sliding it at least metaphorically beyond her reach.
“It’s Annie, it’s always Annie,” she remarked with a tired, discouraged look in her eyes. She kept staring at the tips of her fingernails, stretched toward the glass. Her mouth twisted into a knot; her chin, rigid and tense, began to tremble. With a slight shudder, she took a long slow breath and then let it go.
“She wasn’t what you thought she was,” said Joanna. She put her hand back in her lap and moved away from the window. She sat directly in front of me, her head slightly inclined, speaking calmly, quietly, completely self-assured. She told me things about herself, and about Thomas Browning, that changed what I remembered into something new and made me wonder how much of the rest of what I thought might also be wrong.
“Thomas and I were more like brother and sister. We were children when we met. His mother—Penelope Stern—was beautiful, vapid and vain. His father, Warren Browning, was almost as bad: weak, vacillating, handsome as the devil and more charming than that. They used to remind me of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: polished, polite, all dressed up in their expensive clothes; people you could imagine complimenting each other on how they looked while they were stealing a sidelong glimpse of themselves in the nearest mirror. It was everything: the clothes, the jewelry, the perfect good manners; and between them, not a thought in their heads. They traveled everywhere; they knew everyone: They were too busy to worry about anything except the next party, the next place they had to go, and of course about themselves. They would have left Thomas in the care of a nanny while they traveled around the world; but they didn’t have to: Zachary Stern took care of all that.
“I came from a wealthy, privileged background. I know that. But my parents wanted me to have a normal life, to be like other kids. I think they must have succeeded, because when I first met Thomas Browning I thought he was a freak. He was twelve years old, with a pudgy face and pudgy little hands, and he talked to me like I was the hired help, ordering me about, telling me what to do. I ignored him, and when he kept it up, I laughed at him; and when he still didn’t stop, I left him standing there while I walked into the room where my father was meeting with Zachary Stern and told him that if he left me in that room a minute longer I was going to slap that awful boy’s face.
“We became friends, and the more I learned about the way he was treated, the way he was raised—the expectations, the demands, the way his whole life was being planned for him in advance—the more I tried to help, to show him that there was another world out there, that he didn’t have to become what his grandfather or anyone else thought he should be.”
Joanna tossed her head and then, at the memory of something distasteful, wrinkled her nose. “It was already too late, of course.”
“Too late? He was still just a boy!”
“A boy shaped in the mold of Zachary Stern himself! He had not been to school; he had not made any friends—and he never would.”
“Never would?”
“How could he, after a private education provided by a dozen different experts paid small fortunes for their time. He had the mind of someone twice his age and the emotions of a spoiled, willful child. There was never anyone to resist, to fight back, to insist on getting their own way when the only way they could get it was if Thomas did not get his. All the rough edges that get knocked off on the playgrounds, that get smoothed away in the civilized competition of the classroom—he never had any of that.”
“But he wasn’t like that when I knew him. There wasn’t any of that kind of arrogance, that kind of selfish attitude toward things. He was probably the least self-absorbed person I knew.”
She gave me an odd look, but appeared to concede the point.
“Yes, later… on the surface at least. But didn’t you notice how he always seemed to be looking at things from the outside? Sitting there with that amiable smile, talking quietly—or more likely just listening—and all the time watching, watching the way other people behaved, as if he were a stranger trying to learn the customs of a place he had never been.”
Joanna shook her head, angry with herself that she was not getting it quite right. “It wasn’t arrogance; it was more than that. He did not go around bragging that he was one day going to run the world, or at least the ‘largest industrial organization’ the world had ever seen. That was just a fact, a terrific, overwhelming fact no one would let him ignore. And that is what Zachary Stern never understood: that what would have been the dream of any other man’s ambition—what had been the dream of his own ambition—was where his grandson’s ambition began.”
Joanna looked at me with a kind of puzzled, questioning intensity, searching my eyes to see if she had explained it properly, to see if I understood.
“It was like being born into a religion—being born Catholic, for instance. It’s who you are; it’s what you start with; it’s the way you look at the world. Thomas, Thomas Browning, grandson of Zachary Stern, was for all practical purposes born believing that the company —that astonishing industrial organization—was his. Don’t you see the incredible irony? Zachary Stern, a man my father truly hated, had spent his entire life building that company, destroying anything and anyone who got in his way, so he could leave it in the hands of someone whose only thought when he got it would be: ‘What next?’
“They say that certain traits skip a generation. Thomas is every bit as ambitious as Zachary Stern ever was. Zachary Stern wanted to found an industrial empire; I think Thomas wanted to be president from the first day he realized it was the only way he could escape the shadow of his grandfather. That was one of the reasons why I tried to stop him from getting involved with that girl, Annie Malreaux.”
Joanna repeated what she had said before, determined for some reason to convince me that I had been wrong, as if it still made some difference what anyone thought.
“She wasn’t what you thought she was. She wasn’t what she seemed: all poetry and verse, different from the rest of us because she appeared to float on the surface of things, refusing to take seriously what others thought important. Thomas thought it was real, that the only thing she did not like about him was his position, his wealth; that she thought those things were obstacles to being who you really were and living free.” Joanna gave me a knowing, cynical look. “She said she came to Harvard because she thought it would be interesting to learn a little about the law. That was a matter of convenience, that dismissive attitude she had. It gave her a certain protection against having to face up to the fact that while she was good enough to get into Harvard, she might not be good enough to be among the very best. It’s what some people do, isn’t it? If you can’t win, disparage the game. So she lived this little lie of hers, playing the part of the ethereal free spirit floating above the common run of ambition, deriding with a superior smile the prevalent materialism, while the whole time what she really wanted was to marry Thomas Browning and find herself suddenly quite rich.”
“Do you really think so?” I asked quickly, wondering if she could possibly be right. It was hard for me to think of Annie as anything like as calculating as Joanna had thought. “Perhaps you were just being protective, given the way you felt about him then,” I suggested.
Joanna gave me a strange look, as if I had forgotten my place. Too late to hide the irritation, she tried to cover it with a thoughtful smile.
“Perhaps I was. One thing I know for certain is that it would have been better if he had run off with her and found out for himself whether she was everything he thought she was.” With a bitter glance she shook her head. “More than anything, I wish she hadn’t died. What happened that day changed everything. It’s why I married Thomas; it’s why he married me: because she died that day. She was gone—so were you. He married me, but he’s never gotten over her. And now we get to live it all over again; and worse yet, so do you. It isn’t fair! It isn’t right! It was an accident, but there isn’t anything these people won’t do.” She looked at me with a kind of pleading intensity, as if she wanted me to understand something she did not quite understand herself. I thought that at any moment she might burst into tears.
“I told him what these people—Walker and the rest of them—were like. I told him they only wanted to use him for the election and that after that it didn’t matter what they promised: They wouldn’t do anything they said. He could have stayed in the Senate, but he’s so mesmerized by the presidency he couldn’t stop himself. And now this! Someone is charged with murder, and he’s tricked you into taking the case.”
“Tricked me? What do you mean?”
“If you ever loved me, please—please promise me that you won’t do this, that you won’t be involved in this trial.”
“But I am involved: I’m Jimmy Haviland’s lawyer.”
“Find someone else to do it. Make some excuse. You don’t understand!”
“What don’t I understand?” She did not answer; she kept staring at me, a frantic look in her eyes.
“What don’t I understand?” I repeated, mystified by the sudden urgent sense that something terrible was about to happen and that I should have known what it was.
The door suddenly swung open. The Secret Service agent let her know it was time to go. Quickly gathering herself, Joanna got to her feet. She stood next to me for a moment, saying nothing. Then she put her hand on the side of my face and forced a smile.
“I would have married you, if you had asked, that summer in New York.”
I started to say something. She put her hand on my lips.
“No, don’t. I don’t want to change the way I remember it. I want to keep believing that you would have asked me to marry you if you had thought I’d ever leave New York.”
Then she was gone.