Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

I came near and said, “Everything okay?” even though everything clearly wasn’t okay.

After a beat she took a hand from her face.

“They don’t know... They don’t know that I’m fighting alongside them, that I’m fighting for them. They don’t know.”

“Not fair.”

“You want to protest someone, go to Kimball Hall. Go to Chappaqua.”

“Maybe they don’t know where Megan lives,” I said, sitting on the couch next to her.

“She’s had some protests in front of her house. We’ve all been targeted. Everyone but Cameron, because he just flits around so much, he doesn’t really have a fixed—” Sukie started shaking. “Oh, God, I think it’s just hitting me.”

“I know.”

“I could have been burned alive. I was totally within range.”

That was true, although I didn’t confirm it. If I hadn’t gotten to the fat man in time, he would have flung flaming gasoline at her.

She said, “I’m — Jesus, is no place safe for me?”

“You’re safe,” I said. Because she was safe, at the moment. I wanted to say, I’ll keep you safe, but I knew I couldn’t promise that.

She turned and put her arms around me, embracing me tightly. “Oh, God,” she said. I could feel her hot breath on my neck. “This whole time I’ve been feeling so alone in this. But now — I don’t know, I don’t feel so alone. It’s like... I guess I feel you’re in it with me.”

She moved her face in close and kissed me on the lips. I was surprised, but I responded. My heart began to thud. She kissed hungrily. I could smell her hair, something lavender and soapy.

There was something so exciting about how carnal she was — that she’d revealed herself to be. It was like she’d been unleashed.

When we were showering together afterward, she said — and I could tell she’d been waiting to say it — “Do you sleep with all your clients?”

I laughed. I thought of my last client, hangdog Mort Vallison.

“Seriously, do you?”

“It’s not billable time, don’t worry.”

She lightly slapped my chest, laughed, and said, “You bill in increments of an hour?”

Then she noticed the ugly scar on my right thigh that started just above the knee and twisted toward my groin. She traced it with a finger — “Can I?” — and said, “I’m guessing there’s a story.”

For a quick moment I thought of what Sean had once said to me. He had been smoking a joint. “We get wounded, and we heal,” he had said. “The wound repairs itself, right? But we’re not the same. We take our scars with us. They make us who we are. And if we can’t accept our scars, we haven’t really healed.”

But to Sukie, I said only, “A couple of bullet wounds and related damage. Happened a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

I quickly recounted the incident in Afghanistan, made it sound as uninteresting as possible. I’m not very enthusiastic about telling war stories. When we were toweling each other off, I said, “You want to get some dinner?”

“Sure.”

“Also, I want to talk to Hayden.”

“Why?”

I’d been thinking of the note that Maggie had scrawled— “HK—>$$$?” Something about Hayden and money, right, but what did it refer to? I said, “I want to rule her out.”

She got dressed in her jeans and a T-shirt and then grabbed her phone and looked at the time. “Knowing Hayden, she’s probably in a rehearsal. Let me text her.”

Her sister texted right back, and we had a date to see her in an hour.

The bar where we were meeting Hayden was located in a brownstone on West Forty-sixth Street, upstairs from a well-known theater watering hole. It had a name but no sign. No phone number. Tourists did not know about this place, and no New York theatergoer would ever find it. You had to know about it. As a result, it was full of famous Broadway types — stars, directors, producers, and so on. And the occasional tech billionaire.

At the top of the stairs the heavy blue curtains parted and I saw a dark bar with black-and-white photos on the wall, of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. But it was otherwise unadorned, undecorated, unchic, which of course made it chic.

Hayden was there, the center of a crowd. She was wearing black jeans and boots and a neatly pressed denim shirt, like she had been the last time I saw her. Branding, I figured. She was pressing cheeks with George Takei, Sandra Oh, B. D. Wong, and a couple of very good-looking actors from the movie Crazy Rich Asians. Maybe they were in her production of Suddenly Last Summer. Or maybe they were invited guests.

She saw us but kept chatting with people for another couple of minutes while we stood and waited. We sat at a table and ordered drinks — there was no cocktail menu. I got a vodka martini, and Sukie got a Negroni. Finally, Hayden came over, said, “Sorry, it’s first preview — wait, what happened to you?” She kissed her older sister. “What the hell happened ?”

“I’ll tell you in a second. You remember Nick, right?”

She smiled perfunctorily at me and said, “You’re the one who’s in the dark arts, right? McKinsey?”

“That’s right. Nick Brown.”

Sukie told her about the brick-throwing and, worse, the guy with the Molotov cocktail. She cried as she relived it. Hayden looked terrified. I could see her realizing that the protests against her family just got real. I knew Hayden lived with her partner, a playwright who was semi-famous for having very long-term writer’s block, in a huge loft in the West Village that looked out over the Hudson River. “Taylor and I have decent security in our building at home,” she said, and then her voice got hushed. “But what if they — decide to target my theaters?”

“Not that I know anything about it, but if it were me, I’d be adding to my personal security detail,” I said.

“I don’t have a security detail. ”

“You might want to think about getting one, for the time being. And you might want to change the name of your production company. But what do I know?”

Sukie excused herself, as we’d previously agreed on, and then Hayden said to me, marveling, “So you took down this Molotov cocktail guy?”

“He was a big target,” I said. “Big fat target. Didn’t require Superman.”

She smiled.

I said, “So let me ask you something. Why aren’t you Scott Rudin? Why aren’t you Jordan Roth? Why aren’t you Fred Zollo?” I named some big, successful Broadway producers whose names I knew from boning up in the last couple of days. People who did what she did but had a lot more success and visibility.

I couldn’t interrogate her, because as far as she was concerned, I was just Sukie’s boyfriend. Instead, I was a little aggressive. Right away, I saw that she wasn’t expecting that. She was expecting deference. But she didn’t wince or snap something back at me. She took a drink of her Scotch.

I thought of that scrawled note on Maggie’s yellow pad: HK—> $$$? Meaning something about Hayden and money, but what?

“I can’t finance all this myself,” she said. “You hit a bit of a tender spot there, Nick.”

“How so?”

“I mean, it’s kind of an unfair comparison. Look at Jordan — and I love the guy, he’s so talented — but we’re talking deep pockets. His father is just a lot more generous than mine is. I kind of feel — well, first-world problems, right? — I mean, the things I’ve identified and had to miss out on! I think of the projects I developed off-Broadway that got taken away from me.” She put her hand on my forearm. “You know, Nick, I would love to be in a position where I don’t have to say no when I want to say yes. To not be constrained. I’m not my brother Paul. I’m not writing imaginary books about imaginary subjects, you know?”