Deadly Beloved(18)

Somebody was trying to open the door to the outer office. Julianne shucked off her blouse and her skirt, grabbed her pink-and-white-striped terry-cloth bathrobe from the hook on the back of the powder room door, and hurried out to let Tiffany in. She hesitated only a moment, wondering if it might be somebody else, and then opened up without calling out. Tiffany was standing there, her hand raised to knock. Her hair hung to her waist and her skirt was cut up at least three quarters of the way to the cleft in her legs. She looked like the cover of the latest Playboy-goes-to-college edition, except that she was wearing a crucifix and a miraculous medal that hung into her cleavage from gold chains around her neck.

“Oh, God,” she said, seeing Julianne in the bathrobe. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“I got splashed by a bus on my way back from the library,” Julianne said. “I got mud all over me. I thought it would take less time if I came back here.”

“Do you need me to get you something? Clothes from your apartment?”

“I’m fine. I’ve got everything. Don’t I have some kind of appointment at quarter after two?”

“Right.” Tiffany scratched her head. “The people from the Steel Council. They gave us a lot of money for the campaign.”

“I thought I had some health care people. Pennsylvanians for a Single Payer System. Something like that.”

“Pennsylvanians for Health Care Reform,” Tiffany said. “That’s not until four. You have the Girls Club people before that. About the day-at-the-office thing. The role models.”

Julianne went back to the powder room. The skirt and blouse she had shucked off were lying on the floor. She wadded them into a ball and stuffed them into her big canvas bag. Her canvas bags were like Bella Abzug’s hats. They had become a media trademark. Tiffany had followed her to the door. Julianne got the bright red dress with its big splotches of flowers off the hanger over the radiator and started to put it on.

“One of the things about not having been particularly attractive as a teenager,” Julianne said judiciously, “is that you aren’t unduly worried about the depredations of middle age. Did anything exciting happen while I was out?”

“Not exciting, exactly,” Tiffany said. “I did the clippings.”

“And?”

“There was a paragraph about you in a piece in The New Yorker about women being elected to Congress. There was a paragraph about you in a piece in Boston magazine too, but it was just a reference, because you did all that work with the Environmental Jobs Council last year. I think they’re trying to start the same kind of thing in Massachusetts.”

“That’s nice.”

“It was a slow day, really. Not like during the election, when you were in the papers every day. I think I kind of miss it.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, I suppose it must have been horrible for you,” Tiffany said, “being followed around like that. But for the rest of us, it was neat. It was like being connected to a celebrity. I mean, you are a celebrity.”

“I’m a congresswoman. It’s not the same thing.”

“During the election I could go into bars and if I said I worked for you, fifteen guys wanted to take me home. I’m not kidding. I never do that well usually. Most of the time, guys in bars go for the tall types. The model-actress types. They don’t want secretaries.”

“You could try not going to bars.”

“You can’t find men if you don’t go to bars,” Tiffany said. “You don’t know what it’s like out there. It’s terrible, really. There aren’t enough men to go around. And all the men there just want to get laid.”

There was nothing she could do about her hair, Julianne decided. Usually she wore it up, teased and colored and wrapped until it looked half fake, but today it was limp and colorless and it was going to stay that way. Julianne went through the drawers of the vanity until she found a bright red scarf. She twirled it into a band and tied it around her head. She reminded herself of one of those sweater-girl publicity stills from the forties, except that her face was far too heavy and far too lined. She rummaged in her canvas bag again and came up with a pair of long, dangling earrings. They were turquoise and silver and constructed of hundreds of tiny pieces, each meant to swing and sound in the wind.

“There,” Julianne said.

“There was something else,” Tiffany told her. “In the clippings. Not about you.”

“Not about me?”

“It was about that friend of yours. At least, I think she’s a friend of yours. One of those women in that picture you keep on your desk.”