JENNIFER THOUGHT she recognized the voice that called up from the lobby the next evening. “FedEx. An overnight letter for Jennifer Pegan.”
“Who’s it from?”
She listened to paper shuffling. “O’Connell, from West Hollywood, California. Signature required.”
Jennifer remembered the note that Padraig was to sign and return. She buzzed the messenger into the building, then waited idly until her doorbell rang. “FedEx,” the voice repeated when she asked. She looked through the peephole and saw an express envelope blocking her view of the person. She hooked the chain and unlocked the deadbolt. Padraig’s face appeared in the crack of the door.
“I’m not sure whether I give you the package first or you have to sign first,” he said. “So I’ll give you the clipboard and keep the package, and then we can swap when you’re finished signing.”
Despite herself, Jennifer had to laugh. Who but Padraig would deliver an overnight package personally? She closed the door and unlocked the chain. He burst into the room with his familiar joyous gait. He had staged a miraculous recovery from the whipped dog that had dragged his tail in on his last visit.
“Are you crazy …” she started to ask, but then she answered her own question. “Yes, of course you are. Why would there be any doubt?”
“I need only a moment of your time,” he said, handing her
the envelope. She kept her eyes on him as she tore it open. On top was the loan note, duly signed and notarized. Below it was a publicity photo of Padraig, posed in the blazer and golf shirt generally worn by his international spy character. He had signed it, “To my favorite ex-wife, with love, Padraig.”
“I had a few hundred of these made up,” he explained. “Ex-wives are an important faction in my fan club.”
“I won’t have the check until tomorrow,” she said, still standing in her foyer. She had made no gesture to invite him inside.
“Then I’ll wait until tomorrow. Okay with you if I sleep here?”
“Not a chance,” she answered.
“I didn’t mean in your bed. Just a pillow and the use of one of your sofas.”
“That’s what I thought you meant when I said there wasn’t a chance.”
“Well, perhaps a cup of tea then. That’s substandard hospitality even for ex-husbands.”
Jennifer smiled. “Okay, tea. Or if you’d rather a nip of your Scotch …”
“God, but you’re clairvoyant! You can see to the bottom of my soul.”
“The bottle is right where you left it, so you can fix it yourself,” Jennifer said. Then she added, “And by the way, Padraig, you don’t have any soul.”
He returned from her bar with two drinks over ice.
“None for me,” Jennifer said forcefully.
He looked disappointed. Then he said, “Well, we’ll just have to make lemonade out of the lemons.” He poured her drink into his and set the empty glass back on the bar. As he was crossing to join her in the living room, he noticed the familiar document still waiting on the desk where he had signed it. He went to it and flipped through to the signature page. The line for her signature was still blank.
“You really ought to sign this,” he told her. “Unless, of course, you’d like to reconsider.”
“I’m saving it for the divorce party,” she answered. “We’re going to have champagne and a cake.”
He tasted his drink, nodded his approval, then took a bigger sip. “Would you like me to jump out of the cake?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve already hired a skunk.”
“Ouch!” Padraig winced. “You’ve left powder burns and bloodstains. But, I truly have been something of a …” He paused, grasping for the right word.
“Prick,” Jennifer suggested.
He nodded vigorously. “Yes, exactly the word I was looking for.” But then he set down his glass. “On a less humiliating note, I came all this way not to hurry your check but simply to thank you in person. The truth is that I was going down for the third time with your sister’s foot planted firmly on the top of my head. I had no place to turn. And of all the people who might have helped me, you were the last one I expected to hear from.”
Jennifer nodded. “You’re welcome,” she answered.
He sipped again, giving drink to his courage. “As I have said often to others and tried to tell you, you are the very best person who has ever entered my life. And, ironically, the one I treated most unfairly. I’m going to wait until the critics see my film, and if they give it the reviews I think it will deserve, I’m going to dedicate it to you. That won’t repay my debt, which is far larger than the amount written on this note. But it will be public acknowledgment that I’ve been an awful … what was the word?”
“Prick,” Jennifer supplied.
“Yes, yes. Of course.” He downed the drink. “So, I’ll see you tomorrow. Where and when do you suggest?”
She thought for a moment, knowing that she didn’t want him walking into her office. That would kick off a new round of rumors, and new pressures to bear. “Here, tomorrow morning at eleven.”
“Eleven it shall be.” He was already on his way to the door. But he stopped just before she closed it behind him. “Oh, if
you’re planning lunch, could we dispense with the dessert? I’ve had quite enough sweets for a while.”
She laughed, and was still laughing when she heard the elevator going down.
Catherine and Peter tried to convince Jennifer not to support Padraig. Peter’s argument was the all too familiar charge that Padraig had tried to kill her. “I don’t know how he made the arrangements from the States, or how he switched the attempt from Ireland to Italy,” he admitted. “But he was the one with the motive, and he was the one with the opportunity.”
Catherine made the case that he had betrayed Jennifer for the money from Pegasus. “It was a simple test. What did he want? You, or an unlimited bankroll for his new career? He snapped at the money. He nearly bit my fingers off to get it. And when I couldn’t raise any more for him, he dropped me just the way he dropped you.”
But Jennifer wasn’t listening. She had heard it all and put her own interpretation on events. For years she had lived in the shadow of her sister. Then Padraig had come along and bathed her in light. Someone had tried to kill him. Maybe a Hollywood rival. Maybe her mentor, who didn’t want to lose his control over her. Possibly even her jealous sister. It was Peter who had built up the evidence to make Padraig look guilty. And when that didn’t split her from her husband, it was Catherine who lured him away.
Certainly Padraig had betrayed her. That was something she still wasn’t able to forgive. But the betrayal wasn’t his idea. That had been engineered by Peter’s charges and Catherine’s money. He had failed her, but stronger men than he would have collapsed under less temptation.
The money she was lending him? Of course she understood that it wasn’t just a financial investment. She was spending it to keep his dream alive, and hoping that, in the process, she might keep her own dreams alive as well. As soon as the bank
messenger delivered the check from her personal account, she canceled her meetings and took the subway downtown.
Padraig was a few minutes late, pleading the difficulties of getting a taxi. He accepted a cup of coffee, sat with his knees crossed, and told her about the phone calls he had made after leaving her the day before. An Academy Award—winning composer had agreed to do an original score using traditional Irish instruments. A special-effects guru had taken on the task of extending the panoramic scene that had been cut short by the helicopter incident. He had succeeded in hiring “the best film editor in the business.” When Jennifer handed him the check, he never looked at the amount. “This makes it all possible,” he said as he folded it into his shirt pocket. “You’ve saved my life.”
“Use it well,” Jennifer said, referring to the money.
“Up until now I’ve used it poorly,” Padraig answered, referring to his life. “Carelessly might be a better word. Or maybe I should say selfishly. I’d like to turn things around.” Then he added, with a hint of sadness, “With you I would have had a chance.”
She decided to answer him. “I had a chance with you, too. Our whirlwind marriage was good for me. I felt I was really beginning to live.”
Padraig raised his eyes. “Oh, I wish you hadn’t said that. It makes what I destroyed even more beautiful, and that makes my sin that much blacker.”
He finished his coffee, stood slowly, and reached out for her hand. “We both know I don’t deserve your kindness, but you’ve given me that anyway. Maybe someday you’ll extend your forgiveness, which I deserve even less.”
“I still haven’t signed the divorce papers,” Jennifer said, as if that were the answer to his question.
“Sign them, darlin’, so you’ll be rid of me. Then you can get back to your life.”
“There isn’t really that much to get back to,” Jennifer told him.
They stood in silence, staring at each other, each waiting to hear words that neither could manage to speak. It was Padraig
who finally broke through. “Jennifer, if I thought there was any chance for us, any chance at all, I’d be on my knees.”
She managed a thin smile. “You’re not the kind of man who looks good on his knees.”
Padraig gestured at the divorce papers. “If you haven’t signed those by the time I finish the picture, I’ll take it as encouragement.”
“I can always sign the damn papers,” she answered.
He phoned her when he got back to Hollywood, then began phoning her every evening to report on the day’s work, “just to keep you informed of the status of your investment,” as he put it. “You should hear the music,” he began one evening. “A tin whistle and a flat drum. The whistle is searching for a new beginning, and the drum is counting out the years. It’s a frail moment of hope despite the weight of time grinding the people into dust.” He spent nearly an hour talking continuously about musical motifs and their fit into his story line. He hummed and tapped the rhythm on the telephone handset while Jennifer listened quietly. “Are you still there, darlin’?” he finally asked.
“I’m still here.”
“Well then, I must be boring you to tears or driving you to madness with my singing. So I’ll run along. Talk to you soon!”
“You should see the helicopter shots,” he began on another call. “They’ve worked miracles with their computers. They take a bit of footage of the lad running through the shell bursts, and they turn it around so you see it from another angle. Or they mate the boy to the background of another sequence. And just like that, you’ve got magnificent footage that we never shot, or locations that we never visited.”
One night he asked her to come out to California. “We’ve got the editing and the special effects coming together, and we’re adding in the music. It’s something I can’t describe. You have to see it for yourself, darlin’. There’s no way that I can tell you about it.”
She hesitated, but turned down the invitation. The decision she had to make about her future was hers and hers alone. If she
met Padraig on his turf, it might become his decision. She couldn’t let that happen to her.
When she hung up, she thought of the divorce papers, still unread and unsigned. Her attorneys called two or three times a week to see if they were ready for the court. “Is there something wrong with it? Anything that you don’t understand?” Henry Harris kept prompting. She always told them no, then endured a moment of silence that seemed to be asking her why, if everything was in order, she hadn’t signed. And there were the daily calls from her sister and frequent comments by Peter, always referring to “the danger to Pegasus” of leaving Padraig’s status undefined. “We need either the marital agreement or the divorce,” they kept telling her. “You’ve got to do something.”
But she had decided not to sign. Not yet, at any rate. So she might as well return the document to her lawyer. But she didn’t see it on the desk, and when she searched the drawers, it wasn’t there. She went through her bedroom, where she often read late into the night. Maybe she had brought it to bed. She still couldn’t find it. Then she went through the files in her office. There was no trace of the agreement.
“Well, technically,” the lawyer explained, “we’re back to square one. Naturally, we have copies, but that’s the only one that O’Connell signed. So it’s out of your hands. We need to get Padraig’s agreement all over again.”
“What good would it be to anyone?” Jennifer questioned. She didn’t usually misplace things, and she was always careful about papers that she put out in the trash. She suspected theft.
The lawyer shrugged. “Your husband, of course, would want to get his hands on it if he was thinking about changing his mind.”
“Padraig’s in California,” she answered.
“Is there anyone else who might want to stop the divorce from going through?”
She could think of no one.
“Or someone who might want to make the divorce official? Forge your signature or get you to sign it unintentionally with
a lot of routine papers?” Her thoughts went instantly to Peter and Catherine. But she dismissed the idea. That wouldn’t do them any good as long as she was around to deny her signature.