John Jackman sighed.
Just then the door behind Tiffany Shattuck’s desk opened. As always, Julianne Corbett seemed to Gregor to be less a person than an advertisement for Max Factor. She was wearing enormous gold earrings made of nesting circles of hammered metal. Her eyes had been made up to look like wings.
“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “Mr. Jackman.” She turned to Tiffany Shattuck. “Do you think you could get me a printout of that health care thing from Holland and send a copy to Mort Elstain in Bethlehem? I promised him I’d do it last week and I just haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Okay,” Tiffany said.
Julianne Corbett made a face at Modern Bride magazine. “Why don’t the two of you come in here,” she said, looking straight at Gregor Demarkian. “Tiffany can get us all some coffee and we can be comfortable.”
Gregor followed John around Tiffany Shattuck’s desk to the door Julianne Corbett was holding open. He went through into her private office expecting some kind of revelation of the woman’s character, or at least a significant change from the faceless blandness of the waiting room. He got neither. Julianne Corbett’s private office was eerily reminiscent of a bad room in a second-rate motel. Even the carpet looked like the kind of thing that belonged outside near a wading pool, installed instead of tiles because it was less likely that someone could slip on it.
Gregor sat down in one of the Danish modern chairs. Julianne Corbett’s desk was empty except for a single photograph in a frame. Gregor leaned forward and turned the photograph around. It was the picture of six young women arranged in a living-room-like setting that looked like it might be the common room of a college dormitory. Most of the young women were unrecognizable. One of them was definitely Karla Parrish.
“Are you in this photograph?” Gregor asked Julianne Corbett.
Ms. Corbett shrugged. “I suppose that depends on the sense you mean that. Sometimes I think I didn’t really come into existence until I was practically forty. Until then I was nothing but a bundle of neuroses. Karla’s in that picture though. Did you recognize her?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I did. She seems remarkably unchanged from a picture that must be—how many years old?”
“Oh, more than twenty-five. I hate counting these days, but that was taken at Jewett House at Vassar College in 1967, I think. We were all juniors then.”
“Then you are in this picture?” Gregor asked.
Julianne Corbett waved it away. “I haven’t kept up with those people the way I should have. We all just sort of drifted apart after graduation. Karla too, of course. It had been years since I’d seen her.”
“You’ll be glad to hear that the word from the hospital is better than expected,” John Jackman said. “She is expected to come out of it. Eventually.”
“But ‘eventually’ could be years from now,” Julianne Corbett said.
“I’m afraid so.” Jackman shrugged. “The doctor I talked to kept saying he was getting very good signs. Whatever that means.”
Gregor picked up the photograph again. “You must have been in some kind of contact with her,” he said. “You arranged this reception in her honor. You knew she was coming to Philadelphia.”
“Actually, it was Tiffany who found out that Karla was coming to Philadelphia,” the congresswoman said. “She keeps up with things like that. She’s a very good assistant, really, in spite of the hair and the name and the brides’ magazines. Not that Tiffany is in any danger of becoming a bride anytime soon. I hadn’t even known that Karla was famous for being a photographer.”
“She had a bunch of pictures in the Sunday Times Magazine,” Jackman put in helpfully. “And she had lots and lots in Vanity Fair. Don’t ask me why Vanity Fair wanted to publish a lot of photographs of starving Rwandans.”
“It’s compassion as a consumption item,” Julianne Corbett said wryly. “You have to bleed for the wretched of the earth or your new Ralph Laurens won’t be the right color red.”
“When did you decide to give this reception for Karla Parrish?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, immediately after I knew she was coming,” Julianne Corbett replied, “except, it was like I told you, it was all Tiffany’s idea. Karla was asked to speak at Penn, did you know that?”
“Yes,” John Jackman said.
“Well,” Julianne Corbett said, “we thought it would be a good idea, you know, good for me in terms of the publicity, good for me because I’d get a chance to see an old friend, and good for Karla too, because it would introduce her to some important people locally. I don’t care what kind of famous photographer Karla has turned into. She’s still the same old Karla. Socially awkward. Not a thing to say for herself.”