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  “Famine food,” Mulvaney said. “When there were no potatoes, they dug mussels out of the shoreline.”

  I wished he'd stop stalling so I could tell him that I was not ready to marry anyone, particularly him.

  “I'm leaving Ronkonkoma,” he said.

  “Mulvaney, did you get a job at the Times?”

  “Nope, a fellowship to go to Northern Ireland.”

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “fellowships come from universities.”

  “Yep, got one from St. John's.”

  I put down my own mussel. What would I do if he asked me to come with him?

  “For how long?”

  “Could be two years. The school's going to pay me to write stories for Newsday. Won't cost the paper a cent.”

  “When?”

  “I'm going next week,” he said. “I hope you'll write to me.”

  I hadn't known you could get food poisoning so quickly, even from shellfish.

  All the men before Mulvaney had either walked out on me or stayed and bored me. Mulvaney had seemed to be staying but I wasn't bored. It had never occurred to me that he might be. That wasn't what the song said.

  “Mulvaney, you are going to Ireland without me?”

  He nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “Saves me the trouble of dumping you.”

  I'd never seen blue eyes turn navy before. A shade darker than even midnight. “In a trillion years would you ever go to Ireland? You don't even want to go to Israel, why would you want to go to Ireland?”

  I'd write but not to him. Writing to Mulvaney would be almost as big a waste of time as attempting to write with Mulvaney around. I could have written a lot more stories if I'd never gone out with him.

  He stood. “Would you ever in a trillion years even consider leaving a job to follow a man? I don't think so. Would you ever quit your job and follow me to another country to watch me write stories?”

  Why did he think I would go just to watch?

  I arrived in the Gloomroom the next day later than usual, as late as I could without risking a full-blown Leisure Suit attack. No way was I going to sit there and wait for Mulvaney to sashay in and start calling every tavern owner in New York who might be harboring an Irish Republican Army fugitive under the sink. Let him sit and wonder where I might be.

  This plan worked for two days. By the time I got to Ronkonkoma, Mulvaney was either out on assignment or AWOL, probably trying to cover Belfast from Manhattan.

  On the third day, Leisure Suit called me at home, insisting that I needed to start coming in earlier. “But not today,” he said. In a rare break from tradition, he asked me to start my day on my actual beat instead of in Ronkonkoma.

  A Huntington woman had been arrested after shooting her husband. Unfortunately, she didn't kill him.

  “Go do the neighborhood!” he commanded. “Come in and dump notes to Mulvaney. You're going out with him, right?”

  I put on the first thing I spotted in my huge, empty walk-in closet, a pair of jeans. So what if Mulvaney had told me it was those jeans that drove him over the brink and into the shul. Putting them on was merely coincidence, and it didn't matter, anyway. Now nothing would come between me and my Calvins.

  “Story any good?” Mulvaney asked as I walked toward his desk.

  “The neighbor's taste in men is marginally better than my own,” I said, trying not to be swallowed up by blue. I faced the wall but could feel him surveying the jeans.

  “Keep your fucking eyes to yourself,” I said.

  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” he asked me very quietly.

  As he typed the quotes I dictated, Mulvaney told me that the cops shared our suspicion that Amalia Sanchez might not have been who she said she was.

  “So what else is new?”

  He typed more and asked me if I could help his father get an apartment in a middle-income housing project in Rockaway. The elder Mulvaney had just traded his third wife for the reliable comfort of his barstool at Pier 92, and he'd spotted a government-subsidized building he liked close by.

  I couldn't believe Mulvaney was asking me this.

  I also couldn't believe that there were three women in the world who would actually marry a Mulvaney.

  “Steingut is the landlord. He owes you,” Mulvaney said, as if he himself didn't. “It would be a good way to let him make it up to you.”

  “Your father has a barstool,” I said. “Why does he need an apartment, too?”

  Those were the last words I spoke to Jim Mulvaney before he left for Belfast.

  I'd forgotten about the mussels, forgotten Rosemary Clooney was there that night, too. This is the peril in writing a book about your husband. Writing is remembering.

  CHAPTER 16

  Thanks for the Memories

  Mulvaney sent me a postcard from the Giant's Causeway, an enormous Northern Irish glacial formation. It had been months since he'd left me to cover a minor ethnic dispute that had been raging for about eight hundred years with no solution in sight.

  “Write back,” Claire urged. “And be nice.”

  I mailed him a photograph of Mount Rushmore:

  Dear Mulvaney:

  Here in America, we use our rocks to make heads. You, I imagine, use yours to fill them.

  Sincerely,

  Barbara Fischkin

  All winter I had tried not to read the stories Mulvaney filed from Northern Ireland. I did, though, read other people's stories. I read books about the place, too, and hated myself for all of it. I was sure that those historic troubles only begat more troubles.

  In February the New York Times Sunday Magazine published a tale about Belfast family life by a reporter who lived with her children near Hampstead Heath in northern London. Minutes after my mother saw it, she suffered a gall bladder attack of epic proportions.

  I brought her home from the hospital but she refused to stay in bed and kept asking me how I managed to get dumped by Mulvaney before she had a chance to convert him. My father was no help and Queen Asta made me sneeze. After two long days I needed a break. “I have to go meet a source,” I told my mother.

  At the liquor store on Utica Avenue, a red-brick hovel with a pink neon sign on its marquee, I went into the small phone booth, closed the folding wooden doors, and took a deep breath. I called Claire but she wasn't home, so I opened my “beatbook,” to see if I really could find a source to meet. Leisure Suit, who should have been a dead kindergarten teacher, checked our beatbooks regularly. “Fischkin,” he'd told me, “you need more categories.”

  I turned to my latest category: “More Likely to Have a Story Than the Usual Huntington Stiff,” and called Gary Ackerman, a Huntington source who lived in Queens, which explained how he'd made it into that particular section.

  He was also a congressman.

  “Meet me at Pier 92,” he said.

  I gulped. “It's not in your district.”

  “It's my favorite bar.” The congressman, I knew, was not a drinker. “I like their steaks,” he explained.

  • •

  Gary Ackerman lived in Jamaica Estates, Mario Cuomo's old neighborhood, and represented a constituency that stretched from northern Queens to the eastern edge of Huntington and included struggling Dominican immigrants, the last of Long Island's old-money Gold Coasters, and everyone in between. In lieu of trying to make all the members of that hodgepodge happy, Ackerman had joined the Foreign Legion, or the congressional equivalent, the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

  Which was why I needed to talk to him or, at the least,humor him. The congressman had deployed his Washington staff to do for me what Mulvaney hadn't, locate the alleged Nicaraguans. If Amalia and the bookstore owner—or even the dog—had committed any really terrific political crimes, it would make the best kind of Huntington story, one that threatened to deflate property values. It might also be my ticket out of Newsday to a paper that actually covered Manhattan.

  But if I went to Pier 92, I might go nuts first.

  I spe
d over the Gil Hodges bridge into Rockaway, throwing back gin from a bottle in a paper bag and thanking the Jewish God for not shutting down the only liquor store in my parents' section of Flatbush-Midwood-Flatlands. All they'd had at their house was last Passover's Manischewitz, and it was almost spring again. I looked up at the bridge's thick lattice ironwork and then out onto Jamaica Bay and wondered how cold I'd be if I jumped. Just my luck, someone would probably save me. The Rockaway Peninsula was an uneven conglomeration of oceanfront communities, some litter-strewn, others sparkling, but all of them civic-minded in their own way. Dan Tubridy himself had periodically saved drowning middle-aged miscreants and troubled adolescents. I didn't know, though, if he had any experience jumping into the bay to rescue lovelorn, gin-soaked newspaper reporters.

  I vowed not to think about going to Pier 92 with Mulvaney during our own Year of Living Dangerously on and around Long Island. This was the post-Mulvaney period of my life. Soon I wouldn't even be calling it that. Besides, there was no law against developing my own bar to hang out in, even if it was in Rockaway.

  I did have a source who was a regular.

  And I did not hold it against the Real Mulvaney that he had an idiot for a son.

  On the rickety dock that served as the outdoor vestibule, a large man wearing green Bermuda shorts in the winter chill, topped with a white shirt and orange suspenders—the colors of the Irish flag—pounced from the swinging kitchen doors to my right. He looked as pleased as a gorilla might if he'd burned down the Bronx Zoo.

  “Danny!” I said, and hugged him.

  “Welcome back to the finest establishment on the Rockaway Peninsula!” He smiled through his generous red beard and gave me the once-over. I remembered the first time he did that. It was a message to Mulvaney, a signal of approval.

  “Did we like South Dakota?” he asked.

  The dock was chilly. “South Dakota?”

  “Home of Mount Rushmore.”

  How could I have forgotten that there were no secrets in Mulvaneyland?

  “I cut the picture out of an encyclopedia,” I said. “He send you postcards, too?”

  Dan Tubridy smiled wide. “Nah, I'm only the guy who begged St. John's to pay him to write stories for Newsday. Why would I get a postcard?”

  If your father's bartender got you a newspaper job, why not a university grant, too?

  Inside, Pier 92 was even more glorious than before, newly paneled in soft cedar, the color of first dawn. Behind the polished bar a large picture window looked out on the bay and the bridge that crossed it. The sky was clear and the World Trade Center stood in the distance. Beyond the window was the deck, which now had a movable canopy that looked suspiciously like some Irishman's idea of a chuppah.

  Who would have a Jewish wedding at an Irish bar in Rockaway?

  Gary Ackerman stood at the bar, eating a steak and french fries and wearing his customary white carnation. Sitting on a stool next to him, nursing a martini, was a man who looked like a Mulvaney who had aged well.

  The Real Mulvaney.

  Ackerman kissed me. “We're working on the Sandinistas,” he promised. “But it would be better if Newsday sent you to Managua.”

  I considered, not for the first time, the likelihood of that happening out of Ronkonkoma.

  “I used to go out with your son,” I said to the Real Mulvaney, hoping he'd like the joke.

  “Used to?”

  Ackerman shook his head at me and asked the bartender for a doggie bag. “If I want to witness strife, I can go to a Third World country.” He kissed me goodbye, put his unfinished meal, plate and all, in the bag, and hurried out the door.

  I ordered a gin and tonic. Mulvaney's father said he still needed a place to live.

  “Tell me something,” I asked. “If your buddy is a congressman, why do you need me to ask a former assemblyman to get you an apartment?”

  “Specialization,” explained the father. “You are familiar with Gary's expertise in foreign affairs?”

  I nodded.

  “And you've probably guessed my son will someday need help getting out of a foreign prison.”

  I imagined Mulvaney locked up in a faraway hellhole, which improved my mood.

  “So why waste that chit on an apartment?”

  I said I would call Stanley Steingut.

  The Real Mulvaney. More real than his son? The thought made me shudder.

  Driving back on Flatbush Avenue, I reached for the bag on the floor and took another slug of gin. I had to be honest with myself. I was never getting to Manhattan. Even if the city papers would hire me, I didn't want to go to any of them. I wasn't a Times type, never had been, and the Daily News was, now, almost as bad as the Post. Then there was Newsday, a pretty good paper that refused to write about Manhattan. Newsday covered foreign countries better than Times Square, even if its international operation was run out of Garden City by a potbellied editor who wore a safari suit instead of one made for leisure.

  As much as I hated to give politicians credit for anything, Gary Ackerman had a point. I needed to find a way to convince Newsday to send me out of the country.

  Did I think I could do this without the help of Mulvaney?

  Or his father's bartender?

  You bet I did.

  As I remember more, I consider dumping this project. I wonder why I ever thought it would work.

  Mulvaney, though, continues to have a great time standing over me while I write. He says when I'm finished I can do a sequel.

  “And another after that. All we ever need is the next story.”

  The last thing I want to be is my husband's serial biographer.

  He has a problem, though.

  Not enough sex.

  “I thought you said I didn't have to write that?”

  Sex not required. The oldest line in the world.

  “This book just isn't hot enough,” Mulvaney says.

  “Maybe later,” I murmur.

  Women have their own lines.

  CHAPTER 17

  Chaim Who?

  My mother still liked to call me at work.

  “I love Paris in the springtime,” she crooned, off-key. “And spring is almost over.”

  True. And I was still in Ronkonkoma.

  Leisure Suit appeared at my desk, shot a rubber band in my face, and skipped off. He'd been gone for days at a Message Pending Conference for newspaper editors. But they'd let him come back, proof that new technology could be unreliable.

  “Mother, I'm on deadline.” I hung up and went back to my story about a Huntington lawyers' club that wouldn't let women join.

  She called back. “Our flight's in two days.”

  What was she talking about?

  “You always said you wanted to see Paris.”

  I must have neglected to mention that I did not want to see it with her.

  “Your father won't come with me. The doctor says I can't travel alone.”

  I hung up for a second time.

  The phone rang. “Asta's booked in a kennel.”

  This was serious.

  “Paris?” I said. “The only place you've ever wanted to go is Israel.”

  “I found cousins from Felshtin in Paris.”

  “I thought they only went to Brooklyn and Argentina?”

  “These are the Bolsheviks. And soon they will all be dead.”

  Leisure Suit stood, spread his arms wide, and gazed up at the rotting ceiling, as if he expected my story to fall like manna from heaven.

  And I preferred this to the Louvre?

  “Mother,” I said. “I'll go.”

  She stood in the terminal waving my ticket and pointing furiously at the clock. I had not been on time for anything since I'd moved to Long Island. My mother's head—she shook that now, too—was adorned with a pink turban. This, I hoped, was nothing worse than her latest fashion statement. Healthy people had stopped wearing those in the sixties.

  “I have carry-on,” I told her. I could buy more clothes in Paris. Ever
ything else was in my knapsack.

  My mother eyed it suspiciously.

  “I even have a sweater,” I said.

  “I hope it's a heavy one.” My mother believed that unseasonable cold waves threatened the very survival of the human race.

  She lifted her own orange and green tote and loped three strides like an aboriginal cartoon character, stopped, took a breath, adjusted her turban, checked my whereabouts, and loped again. I jogged behind her, reassured. She might not be a prima ballerina but she was as vigorous as any woman her age, if not more so. At the Air France gate she took her place behind a noisy American couple who blamed each other for being late. Didn't anyone have a good romance anymore?

  We sat in silence as the plane took off. My mother read an in-flight magazine article on Samuel Beckett, who lived in Paris. Well, they did have Theater of the Absurd in common. Finished, she reclined her seat, put her own multicolored sweater over her shoulders, closed her eyes, and snored gently.

  At the Ground Round, just hours earlier, Claire and I had chugged Long Island Iced Teas, a new drink which I was convinced they made by mixing a shot from every bottle in the house. Claire had just been named the Second Female Assistant Editor in Ronkonkoma, a dubious honor but one that, she'd insisted, required a celebration. As we drank, we stared at the fake Tiffany lamps and discussed whether French movies overrated the romantic proclivities of French men.

  “I'll find out,” I had promised her.

  In return Claire promised me that she would make up a good excuse to tell Leisure Suit, who did not know I was leaving the country, not to mention Suffolk County. I hadn't even been able to get the accountants to go for this one.

  “Get very drunk,” she'd advised, ordering another round. “So you can forget this for a few days—and ignore your mother.” It occurred to me that I needed to drink even more now than I had when Mulvaney was around, like an old Irish fishwife left on her own.