Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Helen was, naturally, thinking of her husband, who had not long ago been on the front page of the New York Post , and whose name a man like Harvey would surely recognize in an instant. In Harvey’s world this association with the public realm might even have advanced Helen’s case; still, she just didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She shook her head.

“Not at present,” she said.

“Not at present?” He laughed. “I like you. What about at past, then?”

Helen smiled shyly. “Well, if you want to go back a ways, I actually went to junior high with Hamilton Barth.”

She was worried he would laugh at her, at the pathetic tenuousness of this connection, but he did not. Any point of contact with someone as famous as Hamilton Barth was worth cultivating, and respecting. His eyes grew wide. “No kidding,” he said. “Where was this?”

“In a little town in northern New York,” said Helen, “where we both grew up.” “Little town” didn’t begin to describe it. They sat in the same Catholic school classroom every year from kindergarten through the eighth grade; Helen’s family moved from Malloy to Watertown the following year, but Hamilton made it through only two and a half years of high school anyway before dropping out and heading south to the city, and then west to L.A., to become an actor. Was there any hint, back then, of the deep, tortured, mercurially tempered, disarmingly handsome movie star he would later become? No, there was not, unless you counted the fact that he was short, as the great male movie stars tended to be for some reason, distilled and without excess, like bonsai trees. They weren’t close friends back then, but they knew a lot about each other, because you knew a lot about everybody your age in a town that small; and if you wanted to get technical, it had gone a little further than that. The two of them were once paired off in a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, one Saturday night in the vacant apartment over Erin White’s parents’ garage. Even though Helen had to bend her knees slightly to kiss him, Hamilton was — and she probably would have remembered this just as vividly even had he not gone on to become a brooding object of desire all over the world — a fantastic kisser, relaxed and confident and patient, and she remembered her shock and curiosity about whom he’d been practicing with, even during the kiss itself. He tried to get under her skirt, just as they all did, but she only had to knock his hand away one time, which struck her as gentlemanly, almost romantic. “You have nice lips” was what he had said to her after; again, not much, except when considered in relation to the soulless things other eighth-grade boys usually had to say to you after you pushed their hands out from under your skirt. She and Hamilton were never alone together after that night, though, and four months later Helen’s father announced that they were moving. She’d stayed in touch for a few years with a couple of the old Malloy girls who were still in touch with Hamilton when he started to get famous, but she’d never laid eyes on him again, at least not without buying a ticket like everybody else. She’d made out with Hamilton Barth: it was a story Helen told only her closest friends, not because it was so private but because she worried how lame it would make her sound, this seven-minute brush with greatness from a quarter of a century ago. She certainly wasn’t going to trot it out for Harvey, whom she’d known for all of half an hour.

“How about that,” Harvey said softly. “Are you still friends with him?”

“No,” Helen said. “I mean, it’s not that we’re not friends, or that we stopped being friends. I hope he’d still remember me fondly, if he ever even thinks about the old days at all, but we haven’t been in contact for a very long time.”

Harvey’s ardor cooled visibly. “Well, in all honesty, he’d be kind of a big fish for a little operation like ours anyway. So, Helen, here’s the skinny, as we used to say around here. I’ve really enjoyed meeting you, and in all honesty I think you could learn to do this job just fine over time; but I have two more people coming in today who actually know how to do the job already. One of them used to be at Rogers and Cowan, for Pete’s sake. So I really wish I could help you, but honestly, at this moment it doesn’t look too good.”

“I understand,” said Helen as she rose, and in fact she did understand. She saw how she looked — earnest, naïve, unremarkable — to this sweet older man, and to the whole world of prospective employers at large. He edged around his desk and escorted her to the door, still brushing at crumbs on his torso. “Thank you for your time,” Helen said. “That’s a sharp tie, by the way. A present from your wife?”

He looked down at it, as if he’d forgotten he had it on, and smiled. “Yes it was,” he said. “That was our last birthday together. Of mine, I mean. She passed away that summer.”

Here she was feeling so comfortable around him, Helen reflected two hours later on the train home, that she’d forgotten the cardinal virtue of knowing when to keep one’s idiot mouth shut. He still wore the ring, though, which was interesting, and excused her mistake a little bit, but did not excuse her opening up a subject like that when she knew nothing at all about him. No wonder the professional world seemed so closed to someone like her. The fourth interview had been so mortifying she was already having trouble remembering it. She was back in the house and in casual clothes ten minutes before Sara got home from school.

The two of them ate dinner together, at opposite ends of the table. A chicken breast with a ham-and-cheese roll-up under the skin, some yellow rice and string beans. Sara had always hated eating dinner with her parents, and took no pains to disguise it. Like all of her contemporaries, she was restless when not doing at least two things at once, and the thought of eating — just eating, without the TV or her iPod on, without a phone in hand, without a book to read — struck her as not just wasteful but sentimental. She talked to her mother easily enough when the atmosphere was more relaxed and spontaneous, but at the table it felt quaint and enforced, all the more so now that the conceit that they were a Normal Family, one that Sat Down To Dinner Together, had been debunked forever. Nothing provoked a teenager like the whiff of hypocrisy.

“What did you do today?” Helen asked tentatively.

Sara shrugged. “Same old,” she said. “Class, lunch, class, soccer.”

“Weren’t you going to Sophia’s house after, to study?” Sara shrugged, which could have meant any number of things, but some of those things were so potentially heartbreaking — when seventh grade had ended, and everything was still outwardly normal, Sophia was Sara’s best friend — that Helen didn’t have the heart to pursue it any further. “How was soccer?” she said instead.

Sara scowled. “The coach is so unfair,” she said.

She was developing an acne problem already, just a few months after turning thirteen. One of the many revelations of adoption: whatever had happened to you at the age your daughter was now, good or bad, whatever changes you went through, early or late — it was irrelevant, it was of no value to anyone. Even the fact that Sara and her mother were of different races somehow hadn’t prepared Helen for the shock of her own uselessness in that regard. There were no genetic predictors. You were as surprised by what she became as she was.

On Thursday Helen was filling out some parental-consent forms for school and watching CNN with the sound down, in case anything major happened somewhere in the world, when the phone rang. “Helen, it’s Harvey Aaron,” she heard. “Listen, I am very pleased to tell you that for various reasons those two other guys didn’t work out and so I’d like to offer you the job here, if you’re still available, that is. Probably rude of me just to assume that you’re still available. I’m sorry for that. So are you?”