Rise and Shine (24 page)

I followed her routine. In the morning we had mango and papaya, then swam down to the beach and back. There was a double kayak, and we took it along the coast to a mangrove grove, looking for the crocodiles the fishermen had sworn took shelter there. There was lobster salad for lunch, and a couple of hours of reading in the shade when the sun was at its most brutal. In the late afternoon, Meghan again swam for an hour and I treaded water off the dock or on the narrow strip of sand at the beach while some of the children stripped out of their putty-colored school uniforms and washed themselves. At night, as we had that first night, we had dinner and lay on the chaises, talking. I talked a lot about my work, about the women in my parenting class, about Delon and Annette, about the building collapse and the refugees it had left behind for us to solace. “You should be really proud of what you do,” Meghan said softly, and then she cleared her throat and said, “I am really proud of what you do.” All these years later and it was just as it had been when I was a girl; my heart inflated with her approbation. The only difference was that when I was younger, when she said my essay was good or my dress was pretty, I thought she was saying so as a kindness. This time I realized she was speaking the truth.

“I should have done more of this kind of stuff in the city,” she said the third night, our stomachs filled with goat curry. “Gone out to lunch with you, had a facial, maybe a bikini wax. Forty-seven years old and I’ve never had a bikini wax.”

“You don’t want a bikini wax,” I said. “I had one once and it was like having your eyelashes ripped out.”

“Yow. That’s a vivid image. Okay, no waxing. How about a pedicure?”

“Meghan, you did all that stuff.”

“No, not the way I’m talking about. Having lunch with the CEO of a publishing company, having a facial once a week to get rid of all the on-air crap in my skin and having it wedged in between a lunch speech and a dinner party—that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about living at non-warp speed. Like this.”

“This is good. Do you want to snorkel tomorrow?”

“Yeah, let’s snorkel. That’s not what I meant, though.” She reached across the small space between us as we lay on the lounges and took my hand. “I mean just lying around talking about stuff. When’s the last time we did this?”

“We never did this.”

“Ah, no, that’s not true.”

“Sure it is. Warp speed and all that.”

“What about when we were kids?”

“You always went to bed later than I did. I was asleep by the time you came to bed. You studied a lot harder than I did. Look at what I’m reading.” I held up the battered old hardcover I’d found on a bedroom shelf.
“A Tale of Two Cities.”

“Which we had to read in freshman English.”

“Yeah, I didn’t read it. I read the first chapter and the last chapter, and the paper you wrote on it.”

“You get an A?”

“I didn’t plagiarize it. I just got a sense of the thing from it. I got a B. I always got a B.”

Meghan sighed. “Another obsession that seems incredibly inane at the moment.”

“You know when we did this? We did it once. The morning you did the Gregor story.”

“Jesus. The Gregor story.”

The Gregor story is the linchpin of any profile of Meghan. She was working as a summer intern at the network affiliate in Boston and I was working as a waitress at a tourist trap by Faneuil Hall. She was twenty-one and I was seventeen. Evan was living with us, too, taking a summer class at Harvard in macroeconomics. There was a pullout couch in the living room where I slept. “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” I would hear Meghan saying sometimes from the bedroom, when the two of them still had that kind of sex. It was the first time they’d had a double bed for the purpose instead of a college dorm twin.

“She called me once, a couple of years ago. Vanessa Gregor.”

“I know. You told me. They’re divorced, right?”

“Long time ago. I think they got divorced pretty soon after the fire.”

Meghan was out having drinks, after work, late, with a young producer, who’d fallen in love with her, and two camera guys. They were at one of those small neighborhood places in an area where row houses were now called brownstones and the old plumbers and longshoremen were being supplanted by young publishing honchos and associates at law firms. They were all sitting at the front window when they saw flames leap from the third-floor window of a small house wreathed in scaffolding across the street. A man and woman were standing on the sidewalk screaming.

When Meghan had climbed under the covers of the sofa bed with me that morning, she’d still smelled like smoke. “At first I just wanted to help them,” she said. “The woman had on this flimsy nightgown. You could see right through it. So I gave her the sweatshirt Al had in his trunk.” Through the woman’s screams and the sound of sirens growing louder, Meghan made out that the couple had six-month-old triplets. “The very first night! The first night!” the mother kept screaming. The first night in their own nursery on the top floor instead of their parents’ room a floor below. Two boys and a girl. Three years of treatments. All the miscarriages. The firefighters tried and were pushed back by the flames. The husband had to be given oxygen in the ambulance, but the wife just kept talking. Her name was Vanessa.

Everything about life is so mysterious. If only the electricians had used a more experienced guy to wire the room instead of the apprentice. If only the smoke detectors had been in the right place instead of a corner of the stairwell where the air stayed deceptively clear. If only the weekend anchor who was dispatched to do the story had not had a flat tire and arrived after the eleven o’clock broadcast had already begun. If only the camera guy had not had an early assignment and so had his equipment in the car.

“I think it’s a pretty big story,” Meghan had whispered in my ear.

“This is what true tragedy looks like,” she began. Her voice was quavering. Her forehead was shiny from the heat, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. There was a smudge of soot near the neck of her white T-shirt. Somehow it made the whole thing more compelling. Three children had died, three children whose parents had gone through years, tears, tens of thousands of dollars to have them. They put Meghan on the late news, but the story was also on the network morning show next day. Vanessa Gregor would not speak with anyone but Meghan. She stayed with the story and was hired the next year. She went network when she was twenty-four. That was her calling card: the story in which she looked like she was in it, instead of outside it.

She had known that morning, waiting for Evan to wake so she could tell him, too. She had been up all night, but she was more awake, more alive, than I had ever seen her. “I felt so bad for them,” she said over and over, but then she would describe how she had written a kind of script for herself on a receipt she’d found in her pit of a purse, how she had decided not to put on lipstick, how the executive producer had decided they were cutting it close and had no choice but to let her do it, especially since the police lines had gone up. None of the other reporters could get close; because of the way Vanessa talked to Meghan, the way Meghan put her arm around Vanessa’s shoulder, the police assumed she was a friend and left her alone. The camera guy shot her inside the police barricades. It made her seem so much closer to the story than anyone else.

“She’s remarried,” Meghan said. “They never had kids. I never asked, but I figure she just couldn’t handle it. She sent me a crib quilt when Leo was born.” Meghan was on the air up until she went into labor, and as she got bigger and bigger, the shots of her got tighter and tighter. She used to joke that in her ninth month she’d be just a mouth saying, “I’m Meghan Fitzmaurice.”

“God, the Gregor story. I haven’t thought about that in years,” I said.

“Neither had I until I got here. But one night at dinner when I was still at the Cove, someone was talking about how she met her husband in the First Class lounge at LAX because her flight was delayed. It was one of those what-if stories, you know, if the flight had gone her life would have been completely different, his life would have been completely different, you know the deal. And all I could think of was all the things that came together on the Gregor story. Ed having his camera, Jill having the flat tire, the fire starting when it did, me eating at that place, I can’t remember the name of it, it closed about a year later. And suddenly there I was.” She tightened her hand around mine and squeezed. “And suddenly here I am.” She smiled.

“Do you think you were so pissed at Greenstreet because of the Gregor story at some subliminal level—you know, because of the kids and the infertility and the surrogate? Or do you think it was all because of what had happened the day before with Evan?”

Meghan smiled again and shook her head. “Nah, I think it was only slightly about the Evan thing, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the Gregor triplets. I wish it was that interesting. It was just the truth. I looked at Ben Greenstreet and I listened to him and I said to myself, This guy is a fucking asshole, something I’ve said to myself a million times before. The difference this time is that I said it out loud. I did the unthinkable. I told the truth on national television. That’s what I’m getting killed for. Because if we told the truth, what the hell would happen? If we said, Nice to see you, Stan, but, jeez, this book is boring? If we said, I see you have a new movie and a new husband, isn’t that interesting considering you can’t act and you’re a lesbian?”

“Now that’s a show I would watch.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Someone wrote a column saying that, that guy from
The Washington Post,
the contrarian one? He said that you only said what any reasonable person wanted to say.”

“Yeah, that and a MetroCard will get me on the subway.”

“Maybe there are lots of people who think that.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m cooked, Bridge. I told the truth, and I don’t think I can stop. I think it’s just going to keep tumbling out of my mouth, like the frogs did in that fairy tale.” She looked over at me and smiled. “Tell the truth at a Manhattan book party? Tell the truth at a network press conference? Tell the truth sitting at dinner between two of the richest, most powerful, most boring men on earth? It’s not that I can’t do television. I can’t do New York. I’m not even sure I can handle Montego Bay.”

Yet in deference to me, two days later she arranged for Derek to take us to town, to Negril. I knew she hadn’t been there, had gone only to the outdoor market at a little town about ten miles from the house. I knew it was a mistake as soon as we began to drive through the outskirts of town. It had once been a hippie haven, and it was still trying to hold up its end. The streets were lined with small shops and outdoor kiosks selling tie-dyed shirts, coconut shell bongs, and those knitted hats with Rasta dreads attached that American tourists find so amusing and love to wear for photographs. There were groups of sleepy young men at the street corners dressed like their counterparts in the Bronx—baggy shorts that fell below their knees, elaborate sneakers, the kinds of sleeveless T-shirts Leo and his friends casually called “wife beaters.”

Derek was wearing dark dress slacks snugly belted, a pair of woven leather shoes, and a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a muted pattern ironed so professionally that it looked brand-new, although there was a hint of fraying around the back of the collar. That was all I could see of him through most of the ride, but you could read his back like a billboard as we drove on Negril’s main street. Over the course of a few minutes, his neck grew longer and stiffer, his shoulders squarer, his chin higher. His disapproval filled the car, competing with my own chagrin. I did not know what Meghan was feeling. She was staring out the window.

We drifted down the street past a pink guesthouse with a ceiling fan whirring in its dim interior to an outdoor café with an enormous sign for Ting and a smaller one for the woman who was running for prime minister. A store sold hand-carved objects, fish and fishermen and women with baskets on their heads. To satisfy outsiders, Jamaica seemed to have conflated itself with all the other Caribbean islands and parts of Africa. There was steel-drum music on an old boom box and caftans of kente cloth. The woman who owned the place followed us around, picking up first one thing, then another: “Very pretty, this. That, too, everyone likes to bring that back home.” I noticed that she seemed to be talking mainly to me. Did she recognize in Meghan’s mahogany skin and ropy muscles the look of someone who had come to visit and then to stay? We drifted down to what looked like a bargain store catering to locals, and Meghan bought a package of boys’ white T-shirts, size small, and some black rubber flip-flops.

On a side street we sat outside and had coffee and some scones. “At least they’re not playing Bob Marley,” Meghan said wearily, scraping back her damp hair with her fingers. “If I were a performer in this country, I’d hate that guy. It’s all they play, everywhere. ‘No Woman No Cry’—it’s not even that good a song. It’s the functional equivalent of Americans playing nothing but Elvis all the time.”

“It’s the functional equivalent of those cheesy stores in Times Square playing ‘New York, New York’ all the time. Which is exactly what they do. When Derek passed us on the road the other day, I think he was listening to country western music.”

Two sunburned couples shambled by us, carrying beach bags and boogie boards, looking either pissed off or hungover or both, which is so often the case. A man sat down at the next table wearing khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. All beach vacations are the same vacation. He ordered coffee and then opened a copy of
The New York Times.
It was shocking, like seeing a celebrity on the street. A phenomenon with which I was most familiar.

“What’s happening in the world?” Meghan murmured.

The man looked at the front page. “The president’s poll numbers are down. The Chinese are acquiring Wal-Mart. The Yankees are in a slump. There’s no money left in the airline pension funds.”

“Same old same old,” Meghan said. “Except for the Wal-Mart thing. You made that one up.”