Blessing in Disguise (59 page)

“Anyway, it’s a good thing you’re not taken, because there’s a certain someone here who’s
dying
to meet you. ...” Lila was chattering away, heading into the crush.

Grace felt short of breath, like when she was about to give a speech at a writers’ conference. But this time what she had to brace herself against was the possibility that she might actually
like
the guy. If Lila was so high on him, he’d be interesting at the very least. An artist probably. Most likely the lean and intense kind—long on charm, short on cash.

What am I even doing here? I don’t want to meet this person. I don’t feel like making small talk or pretending I’m interested in someone who’ll probably bore me stiff.

I want to be home in bed, watching an old tearjerker on TV and crying my eyes out. ...

But, hey, they say you’re supposed to
force
yourself out of the house whether you feel like it or not. Getting back into circulation, she thought, had to be like recuperating from a stroke. You needed to learn all over again how to move your lips, speak correctly, move about like a normal person. It’d been so long since she’d been out with any man but Jack. ...

Jack.

She stood frozen, looking out over the tiny, packed living room of Lila’s East Village walk-up. Screw this. She was going home. Lila would understand. She would tell her the truth, that she needed to ...

What?

... grieve.

Yes, that was it. She
needed
to let herself fall apart—and not just a little bit, but all the way—or how would she ever be able to start putting herself back together?

But before she could take flight, Lila was tugging on her arm, dragging her into the throng. She felt someone step on her toe, and a wet glass brush against her back, where the low-cut black dress she now regretted choosing left it bare.

Another thing that was wet and cold nudged at her hand, and she looked down to see Lila’s gray-muzzled old Lab, Pookey, grinning up at her.

“Hey, Pook, you having a good time?” Grace patted his sleek head.

“You must be Grace.”

A warm hand rescued hers from being licked by Pookey’s insatiable tongue, and Grace looked up into a pair of friendly brown eyes. He was older than she’d expected, around forty, his short beard tweedy with gray, and his brown hair receding a bit. He looked more Italian than Irish. And not
too
good-looking. Like Al Pacino on a bad day ... or Danny Aiello on a
good
day.

“How did you know it was me?” she asked.

“Easy. A fellow dog-lover.”

Lila stepped in with a laugh, saying, “Here I am, at the tail end, as usual. Grace, this is Kevin. Kevin Feeley.”

Grace fought the urge to smile. Even so, she couldn’t help thinking,
Feeley? You must be good with your hands.

Then, feeling embarrassed, awkward, she found herself staring down at the hand that somehow had yet to detach itself from hers. A good hand, wide and thick, but not too blunt. Long fingers. Like Jack’s.

Grace drew away, and felt her face growing warm.

“What do you want to drink? No, don’t tell me. Club soda with a slice of lemon, right? Bo-ring.” She could hear Lila speaking, but the voice sounded faint, as if her friend were at the other end of the room. Out of the corner of her eye, Grace watched Lila, glittering like a tinsel star, edge past her, moving in the direction of the bar.

When she looked back at Kevin Feeley, he was down on his haunches, scrubbing Pookey’s ears while Pookey licked his face. An artist? Probably not. He looked more like a rancher in a Gainesburger commercial, Grace thought. Faded Levi’s, scuffed leather boots, a pressed cotton shirt.

“Looks like Lila’s got competition,” she said. “Pookey seems really attached to you.”

“She is. I’m her doctor.” He tipped a smile up at her.

“Her
what?”

“I’m a veterinarian. Didn’t Lila tell you?”

“I’m sure she must have, but I probably got it mixed up.” But Grace knew Lila all too well. Lila’s cockeyed strategy had probably been to get her thinking her blind date was going to be some kind of deadbeat wannabe-sculptor ... then spring this nice, down-to-earth guy on her.

“I’m allergic.” Grace said the first dumb thing that popped into her mind.

“To vets?” His smile widened.

Now she was really blushing. “I meant dogs. That’s why I don’t have one. Besides making my eyes water and my nose run, they give me hives.” She found herself absently scratching her elbow, and forced herself to stop. “Sometimes even Lila gives me a rash. All that dog hair—everything she wears is covered in it. Her closet ought to be registered with the American Kennel Club.”

Kevin laughed. He had a good laugh, she thought—deep and rich without being falsely hearty. “I hope I don’t have the same effect on you. Would you like to try dancing with me?”

Grace glanced around. “Here? It’s a little crowded, don’t you think?”

“We could try the fire escape. It won’t be much good for dancing, but it’ll be cooler at least.”

Grace shrugged, which he clearly interpreted as a yes, because now she was being gently but firmly steered over to the open front window. Climbing up over the sill, she saw that other couples had had the same idea. Lila’s friend Vyrle, whose hair was even shorter and wilder than Lila’s, huddled with a Hispanic man Grace didn’t recognize. And over by the ladder, wasn’t that Doug, Grace’s head groomer, in a clinch with his boyfriend?

“It’s reassuring, isn’t it? I think we’re the most conventional-looking couple here,” Kevin murmured against her hair.

“Why reassuring?”

“I’m used to being the square peg,” he told her. “Coming home from the clinic at the end of the day, smelling like something you wouldn’t let in your back door, I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be better off with a desk job.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“Guess I must be addicted to it. Either that or I’m just plain crazy.” He chuckled.

She found herself nodding. “I know what you mean. Writing seems that way to me sometimes. Lately, though, I can’t complain.”

“Lila told me all about you. But she didn’t have to—who
doesn’t
know about your book?”

As he chatted on about the good reviews he’d read of
Honor Above All,
she found her thoughts turning to Jack. God, she missed him. He’d have his arm around her now, and would be pulling her in close, making her glow.

“Lila was right.”

She became aware that Kevin had spoken. “About what?” Grace struggled to bring him into focus.

“She said you were my type.” He gave a self-conscious little smile.

Grace didn’t say anything. There was nothing she
could
say. Because, if he’d looked into her face at that moment, this nice, nice man, he’d have seen the tears in her eyes, and he’d wonder why. Oh, this was bad, far worse than what she’d anticipated—one more aspiring artist or actor she could write off in a minute. But here was a man a woman could fall in love with. And that’s what hurt—knowing that she couldn’t. That it would be a long, long time before she could feel the kind of love she’d known with Jack.

She thought of what Hannah had said this afternoon:
You and Dad are blowing it.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. And if tonight was any indication, it wouldn’t be the last.

“Do you mind if we go back inside?” she asked.
I’m dying ... I’m dying out here, wanting you to be Jack. And knowing you never can be,
she wanted to tell him, but all she said was, “I’m a little chilly. And, anyway, I really can’t stay. ...”

Frankfurt, Germany

October 1992

“Mendelssohn Strasse,
dreiundvierzig,”
Jack told the driver.

As the taxi pulled away from the airport curb, Jack wondered, as he did every October upon arriving in Frankfurt, about how odd it was that back home he had to ride around in rackety seat-sprung Yellow Cabs, and in Germany, which had
lost
the Big One, the cabbies all drove sleek, immaculate Mercedes.

As he sped along the autobahn, his thoughts turned to tonight’s party—Hank Carroll had one every year to fête an author whose book was being published in a lot of languages. And at this one, Hank’s centerpiece would be Grace Truscott.

Grace.
Jack felt his stomach knot. All that caviar and champagne they’d been shoving at him in first class, which he should have declined.

No, it wasn’t all that rich food. It was
her.

After nine and a half months the need to see her, touch her, was as undiminished, goddamnit, as the eternal flame burning on her father’s grave in Arlington Cemetery. He had to stop feeling this way. What was the point?

Jack forced himself to push Grace from his mind. Clothilde Grandy—she was his real business here this year. The septuagenarian had pulled out all the stops with her
roman à clef
about her years as a cabaret singer
cum
Resistance operative in the dissolute atmosphere of Nazi-occupied Paris. And that was
before
she eloped to America with Patton’s top aide. The Bertelsmann offer was low, but who could expect the Germans to be keen on a Nazi story? In Italy, though, Rizzoli was still bidding against Mondadori. And now that he’d gotten Clothilde to agree to return to France and do publicity, Hachette and Les Presses de la Cité would probably kill each other for the book, which was going to make for some great fun.

Except, right now, after his long night flight, what he wanted was to get to his
Pension
and climb into bed. He wondered if Frau Strutz had picked up a few more words of English yet ... or if she’d gotten a little more mellow about the under-sink hot-water heater that her American guests usually forgot to shut off. He considered—as he did every year—the possibility of booking into one of the deluxe hotels, the Intercontinental or the Park. But the Spartan accommodations at Pension Strutz were more than compensated for by its closeness to the fairgrounds, and the price, sixty dollars a night, instead of four hundred.

Besides, despite her carping, he’d probably miss the old lady. And who else would do his laundry overnight, and at no charge? Twenty years, one week every October, he’d been coming to Frau Strutz—longer than he’d been married to Natalie.

Funny, Jack thought, how lately he was always thinking about numbers in terms of weeks, months, years. And now he found himself adding up the time that he’d been apart from Grace. Nine months, two weeks, to be exact.

Hell, I ought to be patting myself on the back.
With
Honor Above All
showing sales of over four hundred thousand, hadn’t he pulled Cadogan out of deep water and salvaged his own position in the bargain?

But as a lover? A man?

Jack felt a wrenching in his gut, a heat spreading through him.

Knowing he was going to see her,
be
with her—in exactly ten and a half hours—wasn’t helping. Tonight he’d need more than a cummerbund and mother-of-pearl studs to keep himself fastened in place.

He’d need a goddamn anesthetic.

Jack gazed out the window at the rectangular high-rises jutting up beyond the flat green farmland skimming past. He wondered about this city before the war. He’d been told how charming it had been back then, before half of it had been bombed to rubble. Well, there were still the cobbled streets of old Sachsenhausen, but that was for tourists mostly—a kind of Disney World for those who liked munching on pig’s knuckles and guzzling ale in quaint beer halls. On the whole, the Frankfurt he knew was mostly towering glass façades, an unlovely monument to German commerce and human resilience ... as well as a reminder that what’s lost and gone cannot be brought back.

As if he needed reminding. Seeing Grace wherever he turned. On
Oprah,
in
Newsweek
and
People,
at her publishing party, and in D.C. at the ABA. And last week’s marketing dog-and-pony show for the forthcoming paperback, with only ten feet of polished red mahogany table-top separating them ...

What had happened to his worrying that he was too old for her? A voice at the back of his mind kept nagging:
Is it really too late? What if she feels the same as you?

You know she doesn’t, he told himself, not anymore. Anyway, you were the one who ended it.

The taxi now was cruising along Friedrich-Ebert Anlage. Jack could see the
Messe
on his right—a sprawl of modern white-stone-and-glass buildings, which would soon be teeming with publishers, agents, editors, from more than fifty countries around the world. Book lovers in their roles as businesspeople rushing about to find buyers in Finnish and French, or to acquire rights for their companies, get a jump on the new “hot” books—like Clothilde Grandy’s, he hoped. Strung overhead across the avenue were banners trumpeting various books, authors, and publishers, as well as one in German simply welcoming the conventioneers.

Stopping in bumper-to-bumper traffic, he found himself thinking of Benjamin. How much had Ben had to fork over to wangle himself a room at the Park hotel? The kid had been livid when Jack told him Cadogan wasn’t footing the bill. If Pension Strutz was good enough for
him.
Jack had tried to explain, then it was good enough for the troops. For a minute, Ben had looked as if he was going to lose it ... but then he’d backed down, and had agreed to pay for it himself. God knew who he was trying to impress.

He rubbed a hand over his face. Sleep, that’s all he needed. A few hours, and he’d be okay, back on track.

His taxi had turned down a residential street, and now it was pulling into the driveway of a slightly rundown stucco, brick-trimmed mansion partially shaded by trees—a late-nineteenth-century building, fortunate to have escaped the Allied bombs, since then chopped up into flats.

After climbing to the third floor, he buzzed and was let in. Frau Strutz, a tall, broad-hipped matron, her gray hair worn in a blunt bob, greeted him with the same military correctness with which she had been welcoming him for the past twenty years. She showed him to his room, with its bay window overlooking the front lawn and sidewalk beyond—large, Spartan, furnished with a double bed, sink, and Formica armoire. But the bed—ah!—it was covered with a cloud-soft goosedown duvet, and sheets so clean and white and starched-looking they appeared to crackle.