Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“You lost a lot when you took this job, Cullen. Any regrets?”

Ferguson started at the question, but the Scotch loosened his tongue. “I guess. My wife didn’t want to move from the West Coast, especially to northeastern Ohio,” he said, laughing and a little embarrassed at having blurted that out. “Taking this job ended my marriage, but, hey, it wasn’t in good shape anyway. The move here was an excuse to cut it off. It would have happened one way or another, one day or another.”

“But it still isn’t easy?”

Ferguson took a last pull on his drink and took his glass back to Greenwood’s private bar. “No, it isn’t easy,” he said. “I wish Anne were here, especially now. The last twenty-four hours I’ve had a strong urge to pick up the phone and call her. My problem is I don’t know whether I miss her that much or I just need somebody right now. I can’t bring myself to prowl the bars to find, well, whatever you find in places like that.” He splashed about an ounce of Scotch over his remaining ice, swirled it, and drained it in one swallow.

“You need a little extemporaneous fun,” Greenwood said. “I’ve got to be out of town tomorrow on a personal matter, but I’ll be back on Sunday. Come on over about mid-afternoon. I’ll get Pam to call some nonthreatening friends, and we’ll swim in the heated pool and barbecue, and generally raise the kind of hell that will make both of us feel better.”

“I don’t think anything’s gonna make me feel better about the last two days, G.T. On the other hand, a swim in your pool would give me a chance to drown myself.”

“Hey,” Greenwood laughed, “every party needs a floor show.”

It was nearly 1:00 A.M. when Steve Pace unwound enough to go to bed. He picked up his sport coat from where he’d tossed it on the sofa, doused the lights, and wandered into the bedroom.

When he hung up his jacket, he saw a small bulge in the side pocket. He reached in and found the metal ball he’d picked up on the field at Dulles. In their rush to leave, he’d forgotten to ask Mike about it. Damn. If it was evidence, it should be back at Dulles, not in his bedroom.

Pace dropped the ball in an old souvenir ashtray on top of his bureau and told himself he’d figure out what to do with it in the morning.

“This is AP Network News. I’m Frank Greshhold—”

Pace hit the snooze alarm on the clock radio. He didn’t want to sleep for another ten minutes, but it was the quickest way to turn off the noise and keep from waking Kathy.

Then he remembered… Kathy wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there in a year.

He only dreamed of her.

He toyed with the notion of turning on the radio again. He wanted to hear what the world was being told about the ConPac accident, but that would mean sacrificing the hazy remnants of his dream. And acknowledging the reality of her absence.

He smiled, remembering how she used to react to the alarm. She would say something that sounded like “hummblebumpf” and turn over, away from the world’s intrusion on her sleep. She had to be the hardest person on the planet to get out of bed in the morning.

He spent a few more minutes lying beside the memories of her, of his first solid union in the years since the divorce initiated by his wife, Joan.

The marriage had lasted six years and produced one child, Melissa, who’d had no full-time father since the day after her third birthday, when he’d walked away from their house in San Diego. He visited during the separation, and later, after the divorce, and they did the things fathers and daughters are supposed to do. But it was difficult for Melissa, who couldn’t fathom why the father she adored had left. And he couldn’t tell her. Adult marital pressures, terms like “growing apart” and “diverging interests,” were things a child couldn’t understand. All Melissa knew was the pain of separation, and it angered her. Because it hurt his daughter so deeply, it was agony for Pace.

For almost a decade, he left them pretty much alone, conning himself with the notion he was doing it for his daughter. But the truth was he was doing it for himself, and he knew it. He phoned on special occasions and listened to his child become a young woman, but he didn’t see Melissa again until her thirteenth birthday two years ago, when he flew back to San Diego at Joan’s suggestion. She told him Melissa’s anger was gone, replaced by a curiosity about a father whose face she remembered only dimly.

He’d been nervous, but he went. It was wonderful. He and Melissa took walks on the beach and sat on the rocks, where the pounding surf sprayed them with foam and cleansed their relationship. Pace was amazed at the adult concepts his teenage daughter grasped, and at how Joan had done nothing to poison the girl’s memory of him. Indeed, Joan had given Melissa a sense that her father was a good man, and the end of their marriage came not out of a lack of love but in the void of common interests. Except for their daughter.

So exhilarated was Pace that when his ex-wife invited him to stay the night, he had, and they talked the next morning of starting over. That was impossible, but they shared positive emotions, and Melissa sensed it. She had come to visit him the previous year and was returning in a week, during her spring break.

Pace worried that she still harbored hope of a reconciliation between her parents. He ached to renew his relationship with Kathy McGovern. He didn’t know how his daughter would react to that. When she came the year before, she knew Kathy only as her father’s friend. If she saw Kathy with him again thirteen months later, she would understand the relationship went beyond friendship.

Pace knew his feelings for Kathy went deeper than a momentary obsession growing from his anxiety over her grief. But what would he answer if she asked why, if he loved her, he’d let a year go by without calling? He’d been busy, but that excuse didn’t wash. The fact was, he’d been afraid of falling in love with Kathy, afraid she would put the job to which she was so dedicated ahead of him. And that would be cruel irony, since his dedication to his job was the sacrificial altar that had claimed his marriage and several relationships since. The odd hours, the weekends of work, the plans canceled at the last minute—all these had created too much pressure and tension.

Joan once accused him of loving his work more than his family, and he was unable to convince her otherwise. If it weren’t true, Joan insisted, he could change. But his job was something he couldn’t change. Neither Joan nor the women who came later could or would accept that those demands came with him—his baggage—and as long as he remained a journalist, it would be so.

Kathy never complained about his odd hours or the sudden, unexpected demands on his time as he never complained of hers. Yet those demands conspired to keep them apart, to load her down with Senate business on days he could get away early, or to toss a late-breaking story in his lap on evenings she was free. So they gave up.

They hadn’t discussed it. There was no mutual conclusion that they didn’t have enough hours in their days to share. He just stopped calling her as she stopped calling him. What a waste.

Pace slid from beneath the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt generally crummy. Too much booze and a restless night left him less than rested. He rolled his head around a few times to loosen up, but that only created a dull headache.

You’re wonderful. A mere two days into one of the biggest stories of your life, and you start drinking like you’re on a month’s vacation. Five aspirin, a cold shower, and four cups of black coffee might bring you back to workable status.