A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal Page A

him. “We went to Veselka. We drank dirty martinis. We kissed, and I suggested we eat dinner sometime. Then you gave me a little lecture on New York City manners and sent me home.”
    Jeremiah thought it over for a moment and I saw his eyes brighten with the distant memory. “The pink dress? The matching gloves?”
    I nodded.
    “The country cook?”
    “The country cook.”
    He sat stunned for a moment. Then he crawled across the bathroom floor and took my face in his hands. “Valerie Vane wasonce that girl? Oh, honey. What a marvelous transformation!” He laughed for a while, holding me. He pushed stray hair behind my ears. He brushed some dust onto my lips, then put a finger in my mouth and rubbed it into my gums.
    “That was me.”
    He climbed on top of me. “Isn’t it romantic, Valerie? Maybe someday we’ll be married and we’ll tell our kids about our first date, how you were a bumpkin from the sticks and I was a fancy-pants socialite and how I converted you.” He cradled my head as he kicked off his loafers. “My very own Eliza Doolittle. My Cinderella. My jewel in the rough. A pea in the mattress.”
    “Yes, kids, your grandmother was once a string of clichés.”
    Jeremiah started unbuttoning his pants. “Maybe I should,” he said. “Maybe I’ll take you down to city hall and make an honest Oregonian out of you.”
    “Jeremiah, stop…”
    “Why? You think I wouldn’t? You think I only want some aristocratic princess? I could. I would marry a girl just like you. A real girl next door.”
    “Come on, Jeremiah. Don’t tease like that. It’s not fair.”
    “I’m serious,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to believe a girl would change for me.” Suddenly, he was full of sentiment. His eyes got moist. He took my hands and pressed them to his chest. “You did, didn’t you? You changed for—for me?”
    What was the right answer? You flatter yourself, Jeremiah, that’s absurd? But the truth, if I was going to admit it, was that I had, sort of. I’d molded myself into someone who could handle a Jeremiah Golden. Then I’d been what he wanted me to be.
    He rolled off me and started to take off his pants. “That is so hot. You’re so lovely,” he said, tugging them off. “You did that for me! Oh, sweetheart. Would you? Would you marry me?” He pushed up my skirt and yanked down my panties.
    “Marry?”
    “Betroth. Wed,” he said, tossing my panties into the tub. “Would you be my wife? Mrs. Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr.?”
    Context, as they say, is everything. I ignored the fact that we were on the bathroom floor, two days into a three-day binge. That girl from East Fifth Street, the one who still believed in fairy tales and Linus Larabees, was there with us, still.
    She took it for a genuine proposal, even though Jeremiah wasn’t exactly on bended knee.
    “Would you?” he asked. “Would you,” with every thrust.
    “Yes,” I cried at last. “Oh, God, Jeremiah. Oh. God. Yes!”

5
An Invitation
    T here’s nothing like the acrid scent of half-brewed coffee and a fresh stack of death faxes to make everything seem normal again.
    When I arrived at my desk in Obits the next morning, I looked for a memo asking me to attend a correction meeting. I didn’t find one. I looked for a note from Jaime saying, “Talk to me.” But it wasn’t there either. The only thing I found was the morning edition, with LaShanniah smiling up at me from under the fold.
    Nine a.m. staccato: fingers clicking keyboard, headset pressed to lips, tone commanding.
    “That was 12:34 a.m.,” said Detective Pinsky.
    “One two three four,” I said. “Confirm. We got D as in daylight, A as in aspirin, B as in blinding, R as in radio, O as in off, W as in water,” I said. “ Ski as in bunny.”
    “Dabrowski. That’s right.”
    “We got middle initial P as in prick.”
    “ P as in pick your poison,” he repeated.
    “Two middle initials?”
    “ O as in operator.”
    One of the clerks dropped a white