Rachel Jackson was sitting outside at Galliano’s in the Village, with Lila and Mary Louise. They’d met for lunch at one-thirty and had been sitting there ever since. It was nearly four now. They’d had wine with lunch and then coffee and then, when they decided they had no place they needed to be, more wine.
“Okay, that’s the third bottle,” Mary Louise said as the waiter refilled their glasses and took the empty away. “I just want to know how much wine it’s going to take for Lila to give us the deets on her wild weekend in Maine.”
“More than three bottles,” Lila said. “You might have to throw in a couple shots of tequila and a Percocet.”
“Oh, come on,” Mary Louise pleaded.
Rachel sipped the wine and watched the two of them. They had spent the morning tying up loose ends for the upcoming Fashion for A Cure auction event at MOMA and they were all a little giddy with accomplishment. That and three bottles of Prosecco.
“Whatever would you like to know?” Lila asked.
“Everything,” Mary Louise said. “Tell us about the food, the hotel, the view. While you’re at it, you might mention the mystery man you went with. Any little details—height, weight, hair color. The size of his penis.”
“The view was spectacular,” Lila offered.
“We still talking about his penis?” Mary Louise asked.
“We never were.”
Rachel put her glass on the table. Since they had arrived the sun had moved across the sky to hide behind the high-rises to the west and now they were cast in shade. It was a cool day. She wished she’d brought a sweater.
“You could start by telling us the guy’s name,” she suggested.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Lila said.
“Why not?” Mary Louise asked. “Is he a spy?”
“No.”
“Then why not?”
Lila took a drink and smiled. “Because you might tell his wife.”
Mary Louise looked over at Rachel. “I fucking knew it! Didn’t I tell you?”
“You did,” Rachel said.
“Okay,” Mary Louise said. “Now we’re going to have to guess who it is. We know it’s somebody we know because you just said that we might tell his wife. We couldn’t do that if we didn’t know her, right?” She hesitated, thinking. “Okay, this is going to require more wine.”
She waved across the courtyard, trying to get the waiter’s attention. As he made his way over, Rachel’s phone rang. She looked at the display and answered.
“Hi, honey.”
“I’m standing outside the school and he’s not here.”
“Again?” Rachel looked at her watch and glanced at the other two, now flirting with the waiter, who was gay and therefore somewhat immune to their lewd suggestions. “Listen, I’m tied up in a meeting, the charity auction. Give him a few minutes and then call your father. He’s finished taping by now.”
She heard the little girl sigh. “Okay.”
“Love you,” Rachel said and hung up.
“Eric suggests we switch to the Australian red,” Lila said. “What do you think?”
“He’s never failed us yet,” Rachel said.
Michael was waiting for Sam in the bar of the Empire Hotel, at a table by the windows. He was sipping red wine, his drink of preference, and reading something on his tablet. He wore a plaid shirt and tan khakis. What a writer looked like these days, Sam thought as he walked across the room. Whatever happened to real writers—the whiskey drinkers, the barroom brawlers, the skirt-chasers? They had vanished, gone with antenna television and the full-sized sedan. If somebody got drunk and took a swing at Michael Ewen, he’d burst into tears and speed-dial his fucking therapist.
Sam sat down and nodded to Walter, standing quietly a few feet away, who nodded back and went to the bar. Walter was the last of his breed, a black man of indeterminate years who knew that his job was to deliver three fingers of single malt scotch, along with a dish of pistachios, and not attempt to strike up a conversation about the Knicks or the Mets or the situation in Afghanistan. He and Sam were not equals, in a way that had nothing to do with race. Neither were they buddies. In paying an exorbitant amount of money for three ounces of liquor, Sam was fundamentally Walter’s boss. Walter understood that dynamic, even if his younger co-workers did not.
“How was the show?” Michael asked. He’d turned the tablet off and set it aside.
Sam took a moment before replying. “Forgettable.”
“Okay.” Michael had a sip of wine and touched his lips with his fingertips after drinking. He was sporting the beginnings of a wispy blonde mustache and a couple drops of wine clung to it. “Did you get the draft?”
Sam’s phone rang before he could reply. He pulled it from his pocket, looked at the display. “Hey, Nessa.”
“He’s not here…again,” the little girl on the line said.
Sam looked at his watch. “It’s only a few minutes past. Give him another five. Did you call your mother?”
“She told me to call you. She’s at a meeting someplace.”
“Give him another five and call me back if he doesn’t show.”
“This sucks.”
Sam hung up and looked at Michael. “My daughter’s driver. All he has to do is drive her to school in the morning and pick her up in the afternoon, tasks that seem to be beyond his range of capabilities. I hope his resume is up-to-date.”
“How old is she now?” Michael asked. “Vanessa, right?”
“She’s ten.”
“A ten-year-old,” Michael said. His son was about to turn five. “What’s that like?”
Sam, watching the approaching Walter, shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I can’t talk to her. What the hell am I going to talk to a ten-year-old about? She talks to her mother, when she’s around. She talks to the nanny. Maybe when she’s twenty, she and I can have a conversation. What were you saying?”
“The draft.”
Sam took a drink of scotch and reached for a handful of nuts before answering. “It’s still not where it needs to be in terms of his philosophy.”
“You mean his political philosophy?”
“I don’t know that we can differentiate between how he felt personally and politically,” Sam said. “One leaches into the other. I’ll say it again—Jackson was the first president to understand Manifest Destiny. He was the first to know that it required ruthlessness, a take-no-prisoners, fuck-the-consequences attitude. And that’s not coming through in my book. All I’m seeing is some backwoods cracker who fought a few Indians and got elected president. This needs to be a political book, how it relates to what’s happening today. Do you think that any of these pissants on the left today would do what Andrew Jackson did? Do you see them booting the Cherokees out of the Carolinas? Christ, they’d be down there weaving baskets alongside them.”
“Nicole likes this draft,” Michael said tentatively.
“Nicole?”
“Your editor,” Michael reminded him.
Sam had a drink and set the glass down. “Nicole couldn’t edit a fucking grocery list.” He opened some pistachios, allowing the hulls to fall on the table. “The books until now have echoed my political viewpoints. The Lincoln book, the Jefferson book, all of them. This one is going to be no different. I wouldn’t do this otherwise. I wouldn’t put my name on the dust jacket otherwise. You’ve been with me from the start and you know that.”
Michael drank more wine, glancing at the tablet as he did. Sam could see he had an urge to turn it on, to go in to see what he had missed on Twitter or Facebook in the last five minutes. He was like a fucking teenager.
“How do we connect him somehow to Manifest Destiny? The term never existed until after he left office.”
“The idea existed!” Sam exploded. “Because of Jackson. Why don’t you get that? You and that dim-bulb Nicole? When he crushed the Seminoles in Florida, you don’t think that was Manifest Destiny? When he wiped out the Creeks? He didn’t need the fucking term.”
Michael looked around the bar. Several people were watching, drawn by Sam’s outburst. They didn’t pay a lot of attention, though, or display any alarm; presumably most of them would have recognized him.
“I’ll take another pass at it,” Michael said.
“Do that.”
“Do you want to talk to Nicole about this?”
“Why would I want to talk to Nicole?”
“See if she’s on board?”
“Nicole has been acknowledged as editor of my last five books, all of which made it to the bestseller list,” Sam said. “Her contributions to those books have been virtually non-existent yet she’s received praise for them. Trust me, Nicole’s on board. I can call her up and tell her to kiss my ass if that makes you feel better.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“That would not make me feel better.”
Sam’s driver dropped him off as the black limo was pulling up to the brownstone. Vanessa got out and started up the walkway.
“Hey kid,” Sam said.
“Hey.” She kept walking, up the steps and into the house.
Sam slapped the rear fender of the limo as it started to pull away, stopping it. Sam walked around the car as the driver, Sean, powered the window down.
“Late again, are we?” Sam asked.
“The car was in for brakes,” Sean said. “I told the guys—hey I need it by three-thirty at the latest. These guys don’t listen. What do they care?”
“Brakes. Last time it was tires.”
“Gotta keep it up,” Sean said. “The agency—they’re safety first over there. Good thing for the customer if you ask me.”
“I am asking you.” Sam knelt down, closer to Sean’s level. “Last driver we had wasn’t late once in two years. So what’s your problem, pal? You a boozer, crackhead, unable to tell time, what is it?”
“No sir,” Sean said. “None of those.”
“I think I can smell beer on your breath, son,” Sam said. “Under the Tic Tacs. Were you wetting your whistle this afternoon?”
“No sir. Like I said, the brakes were getting done. I can give you the number of the garage if you want. Hopefully they’d tell the truth.”
“It’s Sean, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You born here?”
“Here?”
“In this country? Were you born here?”
“Yeah, I was born here.”
“But your people are Irish,” Sam said and he didn’t wait for a reply. “So you’ve got alcoholism in your family. Right?”
“I wouldn’t say that. No sir.”
Sam straightened. “You’ve got the simplest job in the world. Just do it.”