“Ahm, what did you ask me?” she said.
“Where and when tomorrow?”
“When are you arriving?”
“Probably tomorrow afternoon,” I said.
“Why don’t we meet in front of Jay’s condo building?” She got out of the car.
I climbed out, too, as she took another small bag from the trunk and closed it, gave me the keys.
“Jay’s building?”
“That’s where I’ll be lying low. He gave me a key, the password, the alarm code.”
“Okay,” I said. “What time?”
“Six.”
“Six it is.”
“Great. It’s a date.” She turned toward the doors. “Oh, I almost forgot, we have another date.”
“We do?”
She smiled, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder. “Yeah. Jay made me promise. April first. Fail-Safe.”
“Fail-Safe,” I said as the temperature of my body dropped twenty degrees in the sweltering heat.
She nodded, her eyes crinkling against the sun. “He said if anything happened to him, I was supposed to keep you company this year. Hot dogs and Budweiser and Henry Fonda. Isn’t that the tradition?”
“That’s the tradition,” I said.
“Well, then it’s set. A done deal.”
“If Jay said so,” I said.
“He made me promise.” She smiled and gave me a little wave as the electronic doors opened behind her. “So it’s a date?”
“It’s a date,” I said, giving her my own little wave in return, beaming my best smile.
“See you tomorrow.” She walked into the airport, and I watched through the glass as her ass swayed gently as she passed through a crowd of frat boys, and then turned down a corridor and disappeared.
The frat boys were still watching the space she’d occupied for all of three seconds as if it were blessed by God, and I was doing the same.
Get a good look, guys, I thought. That’s as close to flawless as some of you will ever encounter. Never, probably, was there a creature created who could match her spirit of relentless near-perfection.
Desiree. Even her name stirred the heart.
I stood by the car, smiling from ear to ear, probably looking like a complete idiot, when a baggage porter stopped in front of me and said, “You okay, man?”
“Fine,” I said.
“You lose something?”
I shook my head. “Found something.”
“Well, good for you,” he said and walked off.
Good for me. Yes. Bad for Desiree.
You were so, so close, lady. And then you blew it. Blew it big time.
PART THREE
FAIL-SAFE
32
About a year after I finished my apprenticeship with Jay Becker, he got kicked out of his own apartment by a Cuban flamenco dancer named Esmeralda Vasquez. Esmeralda had been traveling with the road company of The Threepenny Opera when she met Jay her second night in town. Three weeks into the run of the show, she was pretty much living with him, though Jay didn’t think of it that way. Unfortunately for him, Esmeralda did, which is why she was probably so irate when she caught Jay in bed with another dancer from the same show. Esmeralda got her hands on a knife, and Jay got his hand on his doorknob and he and the other dancer got the hell out of Dodge for the night.
The dancer went back to the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, and Jay came knocking on my door.
“You pissed off a Cuban flamenco dancer?” I said.
“It would appear so,” he said, placing a case of Beck’s in my fridge and a bottle of Chivas on my counter.
“Was this wise?”
“It would appear not.”
“Was this, perhaps, even stupid?”
“Are you going to rag on me all night or are you going to be a good lad and show me where you keep your chips?”
So we ended up sitting on my couch in the living room, drinking his Beck’s and Chivas and talking about near castrations at the hands of women scorned, bad breakups, jealous boyfriends and husbands, and several similar topics that wouldn’t have seemed half so funny if it weren’t for the booze and the company.
And then, just as the conversation was running dry, we looked up and noticed the beginning credits to Fail-Safe on my TV.
“Shit,” Jay said. “Turn it up.”
I did.
“Who directed this?” Jay said.
“Lumet.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“I thought it was Frankenheimer.”
“Frankenheimer did Seven Days in May,” I said.
“You’re right. God, I love this movie.”
So for the next two hours we sat, rapt, as President of the United States Henry Fonda clenched his jaw against a coldly crisp black-and-white world gone mad, and a computer foul-up caused the U.S. attack squadron to pass the fail-safe point and bomb Moscow, and then poor Hank Fonda had to clench his jaw some more and order the bombing of New York City to placate the Russians and avoid a full-scale nuclear war.
After it was over, we argued about which was better—Fail-Safe or Dr. Strangelove. I said it was no contest; Strangelove was a masterpiece and Stanley Kubrick was a genius. Jay said I was too artsy. I said he was too literal. He said Henry Fonda was the greatest actor in the history of cinema. I assured him he was drunk.
“If only they’d had some sort of supersecret code word to call those bombers back.” He settled back into the couch, eyelids at half-mast, beer in one hand, glass of Chivas in the other.
“‘Supersecret code word’?” I laughed.
He turned his head. “No, really. Say ol’ President Fonda had just spoken to each squadron pilot privately, gave them each a secret word only he and they knew. Then he could have called them back after they crossed the fail-safe line.”
“But, Jay,” I said, “that’s the point—he couldn’t call anyone back. They’d been trained to think any communication was a Russian trick after they passed fail-safe.”
“Still…”
We sat there watching Out of the Past, which had followed on the heels of Fail-Safe. Another terrific black-and-white movie on Channel 38, back when 38 was cool. At some point Jay went and used the bathroom, then came back from the kitchen with two more beers.
“If I ever want to send you a message,” he said, his tongue thick with liquor, “that’s our code.”
“What?” I said.
“Fail-safe,” he said.
“I’m watching Out of the Past now, Jay. Fail-Safe was a half hour ago. New York is blown to smithereens. Get over it.”