The Nominee

Twenty-Three

WE WERE AT A FAIR one night, Elizabeth and me, at one of those traveling summer carnivals with the Round-Up and the Twister that comes through the town in Maine where we rented a beachside cottage for a couple of weeks in August.

It wasn’t late, maybe 8:30 or nine, but the sun had set and the sky was dark and the blinking, flashing fluorescent lights from the rides and the games and the fried dough stands gave me the sense that we had drifted far into the night, deep into another world, one, that I wasn’t so sure I liked. I don’t like carnivals in much the same way that I don’t like clowns, because even as an overly analytical kid, I always suspected that the heavy makeup and the painted smiles and the bulbous noses hid something that was interminably sad, something that needed to be concealed. The reporter in me always wanted to get behind the façade.

Specifically, I didn’t like this particular carnival because of the line of smiling, stuffed cats that were mocking my every throw, which didn’t come cheap at three for $2. You knock two down, you win a prize. Knock three down, win a massive stuffed animal, the kind your wife or girlfriend carries around in a show of pride for her man, the hunter, if only as a goof. I wanted one, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that I hadn’t hit a single goddamned cat, each of my throws bristling through what seemed like their excessively furry trunks. My pockets were already twenty dollars lighter for my failure.

“I thought you told me you pitched a no hitter in Little League. Isn’t that supposed to mean you have good aim.” That was Elizabeth, forgetting her role as the fawning girlfriend, at least in public.

I glared at her. She was standing beside me pulling fistfuls of pale blue cotton candy off a long pole. Her face, especially her nose, was tan from the sun. Her hair, air-dried after a day at the beach, was kinky and somewhat disheveled, meaning sexy. She had on my favorite jeans, which I found completely, sometimes embarrassingly irresistible.

“The fucking game is rigged.”

The barker heard me and exclaimed in mock shock, “My boy, these carnival games are more tightly regulated than the International Olympics. Have the lady take a throw.”

Elizabeth casually picked up a baseball and flung it toward the cats, wildly by my analysis, but not by theirs. She hit one smack in the face, causing it to tumble backward.

“This is hard,” she said, looking at me sidelong.

The barker handed her another ball. Another throw, another cat.

“You throw like a girl,” I said, even though she didn’t.

“You throw like a moron.”

Behind me, a kid began wailing, and when I spun around, I saw his taffy apple fall from his small hand and onto the matted grass. He was crying so hard he barely noticed that he wasn’t holding it anymore.

Elizabeth took aim and fired. Three throws, three cats. The laughing, the sobbing, the triumph, the despair. I don’t know if a man’s life could get much worse than that very moment.

She strutted back and forth in front of the stand looking for just the right stuffed animal, her fingers on her beautiful lips and those world famous jeans making her ass look like it sprouted from somewhere up around her shoulders. The kid behind us kept crying, and I began gazing around for his parents or brothers and sisters, but no one came forward.

Finally, I knelt down beside him and said in a voice similar to the way I talk to Baker, “Are you okay.”

He was about five, I’ll guess, a towhead with a bowl haircut and big brown eyes that were filled with tears. He was crying so frantically that he could barely speak, so he looked at me desperately and said only, “Grampy.”

“Grampy. Your grandfather?”

He nodded, his crying slowing down slightly.

“Are you looking for him?”

He nodded again.

“We’ll find him,” I said. “What’s your name.”

“Jack,” he said.

“No it’s not. That’s my name.”

Out of nowhere, he smiled at me, a shy little smile, but a smile nonetheless. He said, going along with the gag in that way little kids do, “No it’s not.”

“Honest.” I was about to show him my license, but then didn’t know if he could read.

Elizabeth returned with an enormous purple dinosaur under her arm, no doubt the most ridiculous animal she could find because she fully expected me to lug it around.

“He’s lost,” I said, nodding down at him.

She knelt in front of him, brushed the tears off his cheeks, and said, “Everyone who’s lost even for a moment gets a free stuffed dinosaur.”

He looked at the dinosaur, then at me, rolled his eyes and said, “No sir, but I’ll take it.” And he did.

I put him up on my shoulders, on Elizabeth’s advice, and he scouted around for his grandfather, even calling out, “Grampy, Grampy.”

From behind us, someone frantically yelled, “Jack!” Instinctively, I whirled around and found myself staring at an old man in a Red Sox cap, a flannel shirt, and a pair of loose jeans, Wranglers, I think. Never seen him before, but the kid on my shoulders had. He kicked and yelled, “Grampy,” and I pried him off and placed him back on the ground.

The embarrassed grandfather mentioned something about a Port-a-Potty and a disobedient kid, thanked us profusely and was on his way, his hand tightly wrapped around young Jack’s.

Later, on the way out of the carnival, the noise and the rainbow of lights behind us and the serene dark of the parking lot ahead, Elizabeth locked her arm inside mine and put her head on my shoulder in that way she does when she’s descending from a sugar high. The girl eats like your typical adolescent boy and has the body of a supermodel to disprove it. Other women hate her for it. Not me. Anyway, she’s leaning on me hard as we walked, looking straight ahead, and she asked, “Hey, Pedro Martinez, do you want to have a kid?”

She knew the answer to that already. She knew about my trip to the hospital, all my expectations, all my dreams, left in the morgue on what will always be the worst day of my life, the shadows of which will linger forever.

I replied, “In time.”

“Would now be ‘In time?’”

I pulled away, stopped walking, and stared at her front-on. I placed a hand on each of her shoulders and asked, “Isnow the time?”

She didn’t immediately reply.

I felt a lump in my throat. I felt my eyes start to well up. She stared back at me, serious, her hair all wispy and the perfect curves of her face drawn tight around her mouth. She nodded and said, “It might be. I’m late.”

“I love you.”

“Are you ready? We’re not even married yet. We both said we wanted to hold off for another year or two.”

I embraced her in the parking lot of the Goose Rocks Civic Association Carnival, the lights and the noise pulsing in the distance, and she folded perfectly into my arms like she had a hundred times before.

Maybe this is exactly what I needed to step out from my own past — a wife, a baby, a family of my own. Never for a single second would Katherine ever leave my mind, but she’d understand, she’d know, that at some point in my life, I had to move on.

Then I picked Elizabeth up for no real reason, calling out, almost singing out, “We’re going to have a baby,” as I cradled her in my arms. “A baby, right here, ours, always.” And I nudged her stomach with my nose.

She smiled, finally, and seconds after, the smile turned into a full throttle laugh, despite the sugar hangover.

I put her down and she embraced me, her long, slender arms folding over my shoulders. She stood on the tips of her toes so she was eye to eye and pressed her mouth hard against mine, passionately, pulled it back a wafer and said, “I love you too.”

She pressed her lips against mine yet again and mumbled while we kissed, “Never means never, right?”

Four days later, I sat at work arguing with Vinny Mongillo about whether Geraldo Rivera now counted as a mainstream journalist (Mongillo said yes; I believed no). The phone rang. It was Elizabeth on the other end.

“Well, reprieve,” she said, trying to sound upbeat, but her voice tinged with some disappointment.

“Oh,” I replied, unable to hide my own regret.

There was silence between us, until I said, “How about we meet at home in an hour to try and make one?”

She laughed, but it was shallow, almost — and I hate to say this — polite. “Now would decidedly not be the time for that,” she said.

A month later, our relationship, for all practical and impractical purposes, was over.

I bring all this up because I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time over the last few months wondering what would have happened if she had been pregnant and not just late, what would have become of us if we had an adorable baby girl some eight months after that carnival, and not just continued in a relationship where the past overwhelmed any prospects for the future.

I honestly don’t know, but I do know this. I know that she wouldn’t have shot out at me — and I don’t throw around that word loosely anymore — as she did that April day, quite literally grabbing my arm as I walked out of the Ritz-Carlton from my meeting with Terry Campbell. She wouldn’t have had to.

“Jack,” she said, her hands on my wrist and an ambitious spring breeze blowing through her brown hair, “I need you for about five minutes. This is business, and this is something you’re going to want to know.”

The cops, I noticed, made absolutely no move to help me. They were my bodyguards. For my mental health, I was apparently on my own.

“Five minutes. Go ahead.”

We were standing on the sidewalk of Newbury Street, probably not the best place for me to be hanging out these days. For the uninitiated, it’s Boston’s version of Rodeo Drive or Worth Avenue, with block after upscale block of glitzy boutiques and high-priced chain stores like Armani and Zegna that offer free valet parking. I used to figure, hey, the twelve dollars I save on my car, that’s half the cost of a nice necktie. Ends up, it doesn’t work like that. Put it this way: If my sniper didn’t kill me on this street, the prices eventually would.

The wind blew and the temperature was only what a polar bear would call warm and Kevin and Gerry stood watching from a discreet distance as another unmarked cruiser with two more cops idled at the curb, smoke blowing from the tailpipe into the glassy air.

For the record, Elizabeth was wearing clingy black pants that hugged her thin hips and then fanned out to her ankles, along with a slim matching black jacket. She had on familiar emerald earrings — familiar because I had given them to her after she broke a story that got the Boston school superintendent fired about a year back. She looked, to recycle a word, gorgeous, but it’s important not to dwell on such things.

“It’s Fitzgerald,” she said. “Jack, I know you love him, I know all he’s done for you, but there’s something funny going on. My editors want a story, something meatier than the Scene and Heard stuff on Tuesday. I’m putting it together now, and just want to make sure I don’t cold-cock you with this one, too.” She paused and added, “Jack, he’s a problem.”

I stood there dumbfounded, a compound word I’ve never quite understood. How do you find being dumb? It’s not clear, not simple, not like doghouse or corkscrew.

“It’s jealousy, Elizabeth. You’re jealous. Your editors are jealous. Your whole pathetic little newspaper is jealous. People read Fitzgerald. They like him. They trust him. And that pisses you all off to no end.”

She shook her head. “I could get fired for telling you this, but I was doing a retrospective on the Codman Square riots, ten years after. You know, the police shooting. Anyway, I was following some leads from some of his stories at the time, and the people he was quoting, the witnesses, don’t exist. They never existed.”

I said, “People come and go, especially in the inner city. They may have been illegal immigrants or transients or whatever. But they were there. He’s the best in the city. Maybe the best in any city.”

She gave me a frustrated look. “You’re impossible, Jack. I gave you fair warning. I thought I owed you at least that much after today. It’s not good for theRecord. The publisher is dead. There’s a bloodbath for control. And one of its star reporters is a liar — in print.”

I shrugged. The wintry wind was blowing across the Common, through the Public Garden and up onto Newbury Street, making this conversation even less pleasant than it would have been, which says a lot. “Do what you have to do,” I told her. “But Robert Fitzgerald is no fabricator.”

“Well,” she said defiantly. “I warned you.” And with that, she turned and began walking away.

I watched a Mercedes convertible motor past. The college-aged kid driving it had the roof down even though it wasn’t even approaching 50 degrees. Then I watched that confident gait of hers, the sway of her shoulders, the swivel of her beautiful hips, the swish of her pant legs. She was trying to help me. The look on her face was a look I knew too well, a caring look, a loving look. I should have called out to her. I should have said thank you. I should have asked if she wanted to get together later to talk about all of life crashing down on me like wreckage from a darkened sky.

Instead, I said nothing. I turned away, walked to the idling car and got inside. There was work to be done, and not much time to do it.