He did not say it, but Clark Edwards said “Thank you” nonetheless.
The perspiration running down Jende’s back dried off. “Thank you so much, sir, for understanding,” he said. “I was not sleeping well. Not knowing what to do. I am glad I can make both you and Mrs. Edwards happy.”
“Of course.”
“I was so afraid I would lose my job if I did not do the right thing.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Your job is secure. You’ve been excellent. Continue doing as I ask you to do, and you won’t have to worry about anything.”
Both men were silent again as the car crawled through the midtown madness of tourist shoppers and harried commuters and street vendors and city buses and tour buses and yellow cabs and black cars and children in strollers and messengers on bikes, and too much of everything.
“Sir,” Jende said, “is Mrs. Edwards doing well?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. Why?”
“It looked to me, sir, as if—”
Clark’s phone buzzed and he picked it up. “Did you talk to Cindy?” he said to the person on the line. “Great … I think she’s putting you guys at the Mandarin Oriental, not sure why … No, it’s fine, if that’s what everyone prefers.” He listened for a while and then laughed. “Sounds like Mom,” he said. “And Dad’s visit to New York is never complete without a Central Park walk … Yeah, I’ll make sure Jende is available to pick everyone up from the airport … Me, too, I’m excited; it’s going to be great … I can’t remember the last time, either. Maybe the year Mighty and Keila were born and no one was in the mood to deal with the holiday crowd with babies? … Don’t worry about bringing anything, and tell Mom not to. Cindy and June are taking care of everything. They’ve got their menu down … I don’t think they need help; they’ve been doing it for years … Oh, okay … Go ahead then. I didn’t know you’d already suggested it to her. I’m glad everyone’s on the same page … Listen, Cec, I’ve got to go … Sounds good.
“Sorry about that,” Clark said to Jende after hanging up. “We’re very excited about being together in New York for the first time in so many years.”
“I understand the excitement, sir.”
“You were saying something about Cindy?”
“Yes, sir,” Jende replied. “I was just saying, sir, I don’t know if it is the right thing for me to say, but it looked to me like she has lost some weight, so I just wanted to make sure that she is fine. I will be glad to do whatever is needed if she is not well and … if you need me to help around the house, sir.”
“That won’t be necessary, but thank you. She’s doing very well.”
“I am glad to hear that, sir, because I was a bit worried—”
“The recession is hard on us all, but she’s doing good.”
“By the grace of God, sir, we will all be okay soon.”
Clark picked up the Wall Street Journal lying next to him. After a few minutes of reading it, he lifted up his head and looked at Jende. “You should tell her that she lost weight,” he said. “She’ll be glad to hear that.”
Jende smiled. “Maybe I will, sir,” he replied. “Mrs. Edwards is a good woman.”
“Yeah,” Clark said, returning to his newspaper. “She’s a good woman.”
Thirty-two
TWICE A DAY, DURING HIS LUNCH BREAK AND BEFORE PARKING THE CAR FOR the day, he wrote down everything he thought Cindy would love to read: benign information, banal rundowns. He provided details that were far from necessary; included times, locations, and names that served no purpose; added descriptions of people whose actions and behaviors contributed nothing to the narrative. This was his first chance to write something on a daily basis since his student days at National Comprehensive, so he took the opportunity to employ phrases and expressions he hadn’t found a way to use in everyday conversation; throw in words he’d learned from reading the dictionary he’d owned since secondary school; display sentences and tenses he’d picked up from the newspaper and which he hoped would be proof to the madam that he was thinking carefully as he wrote.
On a Tuesday afternoon, he wrote:
Pick Mr. Edwards up at 7:05, but the slow traffic discombobulated Mr. Edwards because he has meeting at 7:45. Drop Mr. Edwards at work at 7:42. Before when we were still in the car, he call his new secretary (I continue to forget her name) and tell her he was going to be late. When I drop him in front of the office, a black woman wearing a suit is outside. It looks like she just comes out of a car too. I see her and Mr. Edwards say hi to one another and then walk into the office together. I have seen this woman before. My brain cells fire around all day and I remember where I saw her. She used to work at Lehman too. It is 2:30 now and I have not seen Mr. Edwards because he demarcate this whole time to be in the office.
On a Friday evening, after driving Clark from the Chelsea Hotel to the office, he wrote:
At 4:00 Mr. Edwards and I leave Washington, D.C. He gets plenty of phone call but nothing sounds chary and fishy. Everything sounds like work. Someone who he says this to, another person who he says that to. Different work things. I do not talk to him all the way back for fear of uttering disturbances to him. When we return to the city, it is after 8:00. I drive him to his gym. He gets out of the gym at 10:00 and then I drive him to work.
As often as he could, he put the gym in place of the Chelsea Hotel, but in the weeks when Clark went to the hotel more than twice, he concocted other reasons, something novel every week. One evening, fearing that Cindy might have tried to reach Clark while he was in the hotel, he wrote about being stuck in bad traffic in the Holland Tunnel, which has “staggeringly deficient phone reception.” Another time he wrote that Clark had to hurry to a meeting, “so he jumped quickly into a yellow taxi when I was on my way back from picking up Mighty so I have no way that is indisputably solid to know where he was going to or who he was seeing. But I am unequivocal in my believe that he was going to a very crucial meeting.”
He carried the blue notebook with him at all working hours, and presented it to Cindy every morning so she could read it on her way to work. Sometimes she appeared to read every detail, nodding and referencing previous pages. Always, she gave it back to him with no comment besides a quick thanks and a reminder to keep writing.
“I will continue writing, madam,” he always said as he held the door open for her to step out of the car. “Have a great day, madam.”
And her days did seem to be getting great, right from around when he began submitting the entries to her.
Phone calls with her friends were no longer peppered with teary whispers about “what he’s doing to me” and doubts about “how much longer I can go on like this.” She was laughing a little more, and by the time Jende gave her three weeks’ worth of entries, she was laughing a lot more, and louder. Her looks did not return to where they’d been the year before (her skin, though still supple-looking, had lost some of its glow, and her collarbones were sticking out even higher), and she did not stop talking about Vince, worrying that he hadn’t responded to her email in three days, but she found reasons to smile, like the fact that June and Mike had reconciled, and she and Mighty and Clark were going to St. Barths for Christmas. It should be a wonderful time, she told her friends, and Jende fervently wished so, too, because after months of hearing her groan and sigh, and watching her rest her head against the window with her hand on her cheek and her eyes on the blissful world outside, shake her head, and dejectedly say, whatever, Clark, do whatever you want; after seeing too much of the persistent pain she concealed so splendidly when she wasn’t around her family and closest friends, he very badly wanted the madam to have a wonderful time.