Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“To your genius,” Helen said with a laugh, clinking glasses with him.

“You have brought new life to me too, actually,” Harvey went on. “Because after all, I am the enterprise. The enterprise, c’est moi. What I am saying, in part, is that you look quite stunning all dressed up like that.”

She laughed again, then stopped. “Harvey?” she said. “Are you coming on to me?”

“It’s been a long time,” he said, “but I think so, yes. I have a friend who keeps a suite at the Roosevelt. You probably shouldn’t be driving home to Westchester, after all.”

She put her glass of wine, which was only her second, down on the nearest table and stared at him, flattered and amazed, but mostly disappointed. “You’d do that, Harvey?” she said. “After everything you just said, you’d risk the business by sleeping with an employee?”

He waved grandly. “Business, life, life, business,” he said. “I have no use for people who draw the distinction. It is all one. It should all be one. No?”

There was no real danger in the air. Laying her hand gently on his forearm, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “You’ve revitalized my enterprise too,” she said. “But come on. Let’s not be kids about it. You don’t need to get laid to celebrate every good thing that happens. Anyway, I have a daughter at home, and it’s a school night. Just promise me you’ll go to that suite at the Roosevelt and have a good night’s sleep and I will see you at work tomorrow.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “I shall,” he said. “But if you think this is all just about horniness or euphoria or whatever, it’s not. You are a remarkable, remarkable woman. Joanie would have agreed with me.” Helen, though she hadn’t heard the name before, did not need to ask who Joanie was. Harvey said his farewells to Mr. Chin and his wife and went outside to hail a taxi on Third Avenue to take him up to the Roosevelt. In the cab, though, with the windows rolled all the way down, he was feeling so good, so awake, that he redirected the driver west, toward his office. He picked up his car from the attendant at the underground garage across the street from the Empire State Building and headed out of town toward the house in New Paltz, even though he’d turned off the oil burner and drained the pipes three weeks ago; Joanie had never minded the cold, but since her death he’d closed it up for the winter a little earlier every year. He crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge and left the city. He drove with his window down, listening to the crickets at the stoplights, feeling the invigorating change in the air. On the Taconic he fell asleep and the car sped straight through a turn and down a short embankment, turning over once and landing upright on its tires. He was killed instantly.

THE FOREMAN ON HIS RANCH had called a meeting, just to grab the opportunity to update him on a few things while he was actually there: fencing problems, impending visits from the state D of A and from Immigration, a boundary dispute with the rancher to their south which was complete bullshit but would require hiring a surveyor to make go away. Nothing too far out of the ordinary, just himself and the foreman and two hands whose names he didn’t know, and it had all taken place very informally right there on the hacienda after breakfast. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than forty minutes. Still, it left a bad feeling in him, a rebellious or claustrophobic feeling, which only seemed to tighten its hold inside him as the otherwise empty day went on; he could tell it was the kind of upset that wasn’t going to go away on its own, that he was going to have to take some step to snuff it out. A meeting! On the ranch! What had he bought this place for, if not to get away from the world of meetings? He tried some yoga, and he tried reading some Basho translations his new small press was going to publish, but his concentration was shot, and when the afternoon was half done he got in the truck and raised some dust driving down the long, straight road to the front gate. Something mutinous rose up in him at the thought of the security cameras whose lenses took him in as he approached that gate, even though at some earlier meeting he had signed off on their installation. Near the fencing along the berm, he passed the foreman, whose name, impossibly, was Colt; tall and straight in the saddle, Colt looked down at the truck and touched his hat, and it was possible to be contemptuous and jealous of him at the same time.

Five hundred yards beyond the gate was the crossroads; instead of turning left, toward town and the airstrip, he turned right, where he never went, where he imagined it was all but unmapped and a man could be alone with himself and clear his head. And it was like a moonscape for a while, just the cracked road and the scrub and the mountains, but after about ten miles he saw a sign for a bar; frowning, he decelerated onto the gravel and parked. As it turned out, it was truly a great bar — dark, no TV, nothing but ranch hands and day workers, silent except for the pool table — and he might have settled in for longer, but he hadn’t gotten halfway through the beer that followed his third shot before somebody recognized him. The dumb fucking hick leaned one elbow on the bar and stared right at his face like he was staring at a face on a billboard. “Holy shit,” the hick said. He gave the guy a smile that was like slapping a book shut, threw a twenty on the bar, and got into the truck again. There was still a ways to drive, apparently, in order to get outside of where he was.

With the windows down, the noise and the heat were tremendous, but still he saw and felt his cellphone convulsing across the front seat beside him. He hadn’t even realized he’d brought it along. He thought for a moment about throwing it out the window, but then somebody would find it and figure out who it belonged to, and then that was a shitstorm of a whole other sort. He tucked the phone in his shirt pocket so he wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

In the next bar it started vibrating again, right over his heart. He took it out and flipped it open and looked at the text on the screen: Hamilton? Where R U? It was from someone named Katie, which didn’t ring a bell. He asked the bartender to pour another shot and leave the bottle. They actually still did that out here. They did it in L.A. too, but then at the end of the night some guy came up to you and handed you a bill for a thousand dollars. When the phone went off again — the bar was so quiet you could hear it buzz in his pocket — he answered.

“Hamilton? This is Katie Marcus from Event Horizon — we’re handling the PR for A Time of Mourning ? I don’t know if you remember, but we met on the set at one point?”

“Of course I remember,” Hamilton said. Hollywood was carpeted with young, borderline-attractive, overeager, callow young women like he imagined this Katie to be — on the set, at the studio, in your agent’s office, working at the club or in the restaurant or any other business of any description that you might have reason to go into — and he could not tell one of them from another. But that didn’t mean you shouldn’t conduct yourself like a gentleman.

“Really?” Katie said. “Wow. Well, I’m calling just to remind you that you have that interview with The New York Times this afternoon. You got our reminders about that, right?”

She had such a young voice. They got younger and younger. “Remind me again?” Hamilton said.

“The Times wanted to talk to you for a profile they’re doing of Kevin.” Kevin Ortiz was the director of the last film Hamilton had shot. A movie was over, to him, on the day shooting wrapped and he could fly out to the ranch and slowly slip out of character; it was always a surprise to him when a few months or a year later the whole thing came back to life in the form of something strangers could buy tickets to see, and everyone wanted to talk about it all over again, expecting him to remember it, never knowing how much had gone into the effort to leave it behind in the first place. But Kevin he remembered. Kevin was a brilliant young artist, and a great running buddy. He would not have been at all out of place in this bar. “We told the Times they could have just five minutes on the phone with you, just to talk about what it was like to work with him. I don’t know if you remember, but we cleared this all with you, and you said it was okay, which we really appreciate. It should really help the film out a lot. But if you’ve changed your mind about it, we can—”