[19]

Patty-Cake: A brief history, 1977–81

In February 1977, Rowan Burke met Patricia Heathrow. Jimmy Carter was president and Becca was seven years old. In another two months, she’d turn eight. In August, she’d be struck by lightning.

With barely a tap at the doorjamb, Patricia Heathrow bustled into Rowan’s cramped office in Venable Hall. She was brusque, reminding him on that February day of his wife, Mary, when they’d first met at UNC. She was beautiful, as Mary had been, as Mary still was, but this was a trait Rowan now rarely recognized in his wife.

Sitting across from Rowan, Patricia dug into her briefcase, muttering to herself about the ridiculous drive, the traffic on I-85, how they ought to double her salary. She plucked a handful of folders from the case and centered them on his desk, on top of the stack of tests he needed to grade.

Without introducing herself, she said, “Mr. Jones is interested in the formula on paper. Very interested, but we’ll need you to meet with the chemistry board.” She leaned back in the chair and, stretching her arms above her head, said, “Is there a good place to eat around here?”

He’d spoken to this woman on the phone. They’d arranged to meet at two o’clock. It was now twelve-fifty. He said, “You’re Patricia.” Extending his hand across the desk, he said, “Rowan Burke. It’s a pleasure.”

“Patty,” she said. “That’s not a contract.” She pointed to the stack of colored folders. “It’s a proposal. Something to consider and what we’ll expect in your presentation to the board.” Rising from the chair, she said, “I’m famished. Have you eaten?”

He had in fact eaten in the cafeteria across from Venable, but he lied. This was important.

He told her that they could walk, but she insisted on driving because of the cold. When they reached her car, she plucked a parking ticket from the windshield, then unlocked the Cadillac El Dorado and flung the blue ticket into the backseat, where it settled on a stack of multicolored folders—much like the stack left on his desk.

On that first meeting, Rowan thought mostly of the fortune he could make if Atkins and Thames bought his additive, if they hired him as a consultant. He thought about the cars he would buy, the yacht, the vacations, the life that he deserved. He thought about Dean Thompson, that pompous bore; about Mark Cusemeo, Texas hick. Rowan’s family was a founding family. The Burkes built the school, the town, the history that was packaged and sold in Carolina blue sweatshirts and flags, and he was passed up for tenure. He was snubbed by the lot of them. His mother had shaken her head at his marriage, at his career choice, at his untenured position, at his disregard for and lack of wealth. “What do you expect?” she’d said. “You were given every opportunity. All that you could want, and look what you did with it!” His mother was dead now for two years, yet he could see her pointing that bony finger—her manicured nails. She’d been right on every count.

At the red light Patty asked which way and Rowan told her to take a right. Since they were driving, he’d take her out to Lucia’s on Airport Road. It was a new restaurant in a new strip mall where Rowan still remembered the Matteo Farm: horses and cattle grazing. He remembered frozen days like today, riding his bicycle past the farm to school, the patches of grass crunching beneath his tires. Now the farm was a paved strip mall with a dry cleaner, a pet store, a doctor’s office, and Lucia’s, a mediocre Italian restaurant run by Germans, and here, in this dive where he felt certain the food would be undercooked or overcooked or just plain bad, he wouldn’t have to worry about running into Dean Thompson, Caleb Smook, Mark Cusemeo, or anyone else from the department who’d ask questions.

Inside Lucia’s, after squinting at her plastic water glass with its scratched Coca-Cola logo and pushing it to the far edge of the table, Patty ordered a Greek salad, no olives, extra onion, dressing on the side, and a plate of spaghetti. “I want it al dente,” she said, “extra mushroom, light on the marinara.”

“Mushroom?” the waiter asked.

“Lots.”

Sitting across from her, Rowan thought briefly of what it might be like to sleep with Patricia Heathrow. Patty. The waiter reached for her menu, and she said, “I’ll keep it.” A pimply-faced twenty-something, he rolled his eyes and tucked Rowan’s menu under his arm. Patty studied her menu. “Maybe I should have ordered garlic bread. Have you had their veal?”

“It comes with it,” Rowan said.

“Veal?”

“No.” He stifled a laugh. “Garlic bread.”

There were few women he met who didn’t cause sex to cross his mind. He didn’t like fat women (not that Patricia was fat); he never had, but even with the fat ones, he sometimes imagined what it would be like. Had Patty not been his ticket to Atkins and Thames, he might have thought more about a tryst, a one-nighter or a two-weeker, but he would not risk this opportunity.

She drummed her red nails on the table. “I like Chapel Hill. I don’t like this song.” The jukebox played Kiss’s “I want to rock and roll all night and party everyday.”

Rowan laughed. “My daughter does.”

“How old?”

“Seven and a half.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. How old are you?”

“Guess.” He twirled the saltshaker in a circle beneath his pointer finger.

“Forty-five.”

“You’re funny.”

“Thirty?”

“Close. Thirty-two.”

Patty told him that she was twenty-three, that she’d graduated top of her class from Vanderbilt. She was a goal setter. A go-getter. A success. She planned to retire by forty. Rowan sipped his Pepsi and decided he had no sexual interest in this woman. She tried too hard. She talked too much about herself. She was too determined and too arrogant. She dug back into her briefcase and retrieved a compact. “I’m fucking exhausted,” she said, pressing at the skin beneath her eyes. “The price we pay for success.”

Smiling across the table at her, at her sheer arrogance, at the price he had to pay if he wanted a contract with Atkins and Thames, Rowan thought, You are a baby. You’re twenty-three. You don’t know anything. He couldn’t know then that she was just as determined in her romantic endeavors as she was in her corporate pursuits. He couldn’t know then that she would follow him to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in another four years to meet his wife and daughter.

At lunch during their first meeting, only one decision was made: they would never eat at Lucia’s again. Patty poked at a mushroom with her fork. She twirled a knot of fat white noodles onto the tines and then dropped the fork, pushing the half-eaten plate of pasta to where the dirty water glass had been. “It’s like Franco-American spaghetti.”

“You liked the garlic bread.”

“I was starving.”

He picked up the marinara-blotted check. “So when exactly will I present the additive to the board?”

She shrugged and said, “Things are still up in the air. Read the proposal. That’s why I brought it. That’s why Dottie Jackson typed it up and put it in the pretty colored folders.” She drummed her nails again.

After their mediocre lunch, Patricia Heathrow drove Rowan back to Venable Hall. In the car, he stewed. He didn’t like anyone condescending to him; he didn’t want to work with this woman, but he said, “I’m sorry lunch wasn’t so good.”

“No, it wasn’t so good.” She pulled up to the curb. “Call me after you read the proposal. I’m at the Carolina Inn. The number’s in the red folder.”

Walking down the cobblestone path to the side door leading upstairs to his closet of an office, Rowan felt disappointed. For the first time since he’d spoken with Dr. Glover at Atkins and Thames six months earlier, he thought, This isn’t going to work. That woman is a bitch. He pulled his wool coat tighter across his chest, stuffed one gloved hand into his pocket, and thought, They aren’t going to give a shit about my additive. There won’t be a patent. It won’t work. He turned and waved goodbye to Patricia Heathrow, who hadn’t driven away, who appeared to be rifling through her oversized briefcase in her overpriced American car. She didn’t wave back. He pushed the side door open and trudged up the back steps. There won’t be a contract. There won’t be anything. He had a feeling. He had a department meeting at four-thirty. He sat at his desk and picked up a few of the “pretty” colored folders. He never again wanted to grade another freshman chemistry exam or attend another faculty meeting. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a palm-sized mirror—checking his own eyes for wrinkles. Who did that woman think she was? She planned to retire by age forty? He had eight more years until he’d turn forty, and he planned to retire by then too. He pushed the desk drawer shut, tucked the pretty colored folders under his arm, and carried them home. He didn’t have time for department meetings. Maybe he was sick.

Two days later, Rowan met Patricia at the bar of the Carolina Inn on Franklin Street to discuss his upcoming presentation to the board. He phoned her that morning, and she said things were no longer so “up in the air.” She said, “This is such a done deal, Rowan. It’s entirely win-win.”

They met at a back table closest to the veranda. Rowan ordered a martini and said, “Did you know the university actually owns this inn? My grandfather went to school with the man who built it.” He looked around admiringly, proud of his heritage.

“I didn’t know that.” She rifled through a small sequined handbag. “Be back. Bathroom.” She was always rifling. Rowan watched her speak to one of the waiters. She was sleek and long. As she laughed, he noticed her wide-collared blouse open at the neck, her olive skin glistening where her collarbone protruded. Her silk pants sweeping the tops of her feet. Swishing back and forth. When she sat back down, he said, “This is a beautiful hotel.”

Patty sipped her martini. “So, your grandfather built this place?”

“He knew John Sprunt Hill, the man who built it. They went to UNC together. In 1935, John gave it to the university.”

“Big gift.”

After her third martini, after flirting with their waiter (who was barely twenty-one), Patty condescended to Rowan. She told him the particulars of the presentation, adding, “Don’t slouch. Don’t talk money,” as if he would, and then, clutching the edge of the white tablecloth with her long nails, like eight perfect drops of strawberry candies, she said, “Upstairs. I have to show you something.”

On the way to her suite, she leaned against him in the elevator. “Once we get the patent it’ll revolutionize sales.” Dropping her head back onto his shoulder, she smiled.

What should he think? What was she doing? She’s flirting with me, and I like it. I like her mouth. I like her mouth when it’s shut.

Walking down the corridor, Rowan’s feet sank into the deep red carpeting. But he had a conscience. He had a sense that he shouldn’t be doing this. He thought about sweet innocent Millie—only two years younger than Patty. He thought about Mary. He’d lost all zest for that woman.

Once inside the suite, Patricia picked up two brown-wrapped chocolate chip cookies from the chest of drawers. “Complimentary cookies.” She dropped onto the queen-sized bed with her cookie.

Patty’s suite was elegant. Atkins and Thames had spared no expense. Rowan loved this place. He always had. If he could, he’d take up permanent residence in the Carolina Inn, with its antebellum plantation house decorum, the antiques, the intricately patterned wallpaper in deep reds, beiges, and forest greens. He walked toward the window, his eyes fixed on the moss green drapes. The moon full through the upper-right pane.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“Is what what?”

“Is that what you had to show me? A cookie?”

She stood and kissed his cheek, her breath smelling of dark chocolate, and handed him the other unwrapped cookie. She said, “Don’t you like cookies?” She put his hands on her hips. “Come on—you like cookies.”

He said, “I’m married,” and thought of Millie. Those pink lips. How her thighs gripped like a vise around his waist.

“I didn’t ask if you were married. I asked about the cookie.” He walked backward away from the window and she walked toward him. Catching up, she pinned the backs of his knees to the bed’s edge, giving him a small kiss—a taste of chocolate. He kissed back. In addition to chocolate, she smelled like jasmine. If he let go, if his knees wobbled, if he fell back—and all it would take was a nudge—then he’d surrender. He liked cookies. She put her right hand on the back of his thigh and he dropped to the bed. It was quiet now. Rowan metaphorically waved his white flag.

Perched on his elbows, he watched her untie one of his shoes and then the other. Those strawberry-candied hands. He watched the way she intentionally swung her hair from shoulder to shoulder, the way she licked her lips. She pulled off his socks and draped them over his shoes, which she’d set side by side, laces tucked. Everything this woman did was deliberate.

She straddled him on the bed. A strand of her blond hair stuck to his bottom lip. He said again, “I’m married.”

She said, “I like that.”

It turned out that Patty was right about Rowan’s additive, about his contribution to Atkins and Thames. (Patty was seldom wrong.) Within three months, papers were signed. Their deal was legal. Rowan sat across from Franklin Thames himself, the old white-haired man smoking a cigar, offering Rowan a menthol smoke from his gold-plated cigarette case—an antique from the 1930s.

“I don’t smoke cigarettes.”

The old man laughed. He leaned forward and pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket.

Rowan slipped the cigar into his jacket. “I’ll save it for later.”

The two men were alone, Thames having excused the other members of the board. He said, “Just between you and me and Rick and the other chemists …” He laughed again. A jolly old man. A rich old man. “… your additive is going to double our sales. Rick says it’s entirely tasteless. No one will know the formula’s changed. Hell, no one knows the formula.” The old man puffed his cigar and leaned back. “No one will ever again be a ‘part-time sometimes’ smoker.”

“Good news for us.”

“You have no idea how good.”

But Rowan knew. The zeroes on the first check issued to him by Franklin Thames were evidence of his additive’s contribution. No more sometimes smokers, those smokers the board of Atkins and Thames dubbed “dabblers.” Those smokers unwilling to commit. With Rowan’s additive, no more dabblers.

Rowan never smoked cigarettes. He found them vile. Sitting in the board room that warm May day across from Franklin Thames, Rowan convinced himself that he was doing nothing wrong. People had always smoked and would always smoke. The fact that his additive, the QR66 formula, tripled the effects of the already addictive chemicals in the Atkins and Thames cigarette, all twelve flavor combinations, was irrelevant. No one put a gun to anyone’s head and forced him or her to smoke. Besides, Atkins and Thames funded elementary school reading initiatives, after-school and preschool programs for at-risk children, Santa Families, cancer research, and canned-food drives for church-sponsored homeless shelters. Atkins and Thames did more good than harm.

Three months later, in August, the same month that Becca was struck by lightning, Patty Heathrow left a note on Rowan’s desk:

Rowan slipped it into the front pocket of his denim jacket, which he tossed on the ottoman before hurrying upstairs to dress for dinner.

There was nothing incriminating in those lines, so he would forget the note that his wife would find two days later, that she would stash in her jewelry box because she’d never heard of this Patty and this Patty had addressed this note to “Rowe,” not Professor Burke or Mr. Burke or Rowan.

By the time tall, lean Patty with the golden pixie hair extended her hand to Mary in Barnacle Bob’s, Rowan’s musings of a one-nighter or a two-weeker, these trysts that were an impossibility in his mind four years ago, had grown into a full-blown affair, a perfect affair because to his thinking there was no risk.

When he and Patty met over the years, whether it was in Chapel Hill or in Richmond, she showed no interest in clinging to him or belonging to him. She wanted nothing from him. When he suggested more time together to appease her, and because he felt guilty about the affair with Millie, she said, “We spend enough time together. Do you want me to stop liking you?”

In February 1979, two years after the affair with Patty began, as Becca finished her first successfully landed round-off cartwheel in gymnastics, Rowan sat across from Patty in the Paris Steak house in Richmond, Virginia. His mother-in-law was dead a week then. Outside the restaurant, a mean February wind blew, and through their booth window Rowan watched the wind sweep and swirl a cellophane cigarette wrapper. Even inside, where a fire roared, the wind chilled Rowan. He didn’t like death. No one did, he knew, but he didn’t like the three days he’d endured listening to his daughter question the existence of God and spirits, listening to his wife rant about apologies she was owed from the dead. It made him uncomfortable. He raised his coffee cup. “It’s been two years this month.”

Patty shrugged and looked back at the newspaper in front of her. “Let’s not make it a big deal.” He’d bought her a gold locket for their anniversary, and he felt for the jewelry box in his pocket.

She said, “If you bought me something, I don’t want it. I like to pick things out myself.”

“Got it.” He left the locket in his pocket and felt stupid thinking that this affair between them required such gestures. He looked out the window again, at the dark expanse of parking lot and the tiny white cigarette butts dotting the paved landscape. Cigarette butts were now his bread and butter.

Against his better judgment, Rowan was falling hard for Patty, because she asked nothing of him.

Two months later, after Mary caught him in bed with Millie, he told Patty what happened.

“You’re screwing the babysitter in your wife’s bed!”

“Normally we meet in the garage.”

“That’s sick, Rowe. Something’s wrong with you.” They were in bed at the Madison Hotel, and Patty pulled the comforter up under her arms. “Is Mary going to divorce you?” She didn’t wait for him to respond. “Your wife’s either stupid or insane.” Patty fluffed her pillow and rolled onto her side, facing away from him. “Or both.”

“I’m sleeping in the garage.”

She rolled over and faced him. “Alone, I hope.”

He laughed.

“Does Rebecca know?”

“I don’t think so.”

They lay in silence that morning, Patty staring down at the bunched-up comforter tucked around Rowan’s waist. Rowan stared at her draped figure. He said, “Mary’s stupid and insane.”

“You like them young.”

“Are you jealous?” He kissed her forehead. “I like you, Patty-Cake.”

“I feel bad for your daughter.”

“Becca’s fine. Don’t talk about my kid.”

Despite his initial feelings about Patricia Heathrow—mainly that she was a bitch—he never perceived her as a threat to his family or his career. She seemed unmoved, unaffected by his affairs. Her only concern regarding his family (when she showed any concern at all) was for his daughter, the “odd” girl she saw haloed in snapshots. She occasionally joked, “You could sell Rebecca to the circus.” In her announcer’s voice she said, “Introducing … Lightning Girl.”

They were lovers and nothing more. In Rowan’s mind, they had an understanding. Without expectation, there would be no scene. No tears. No disappointment, but on one occasion, when they’d planned to meet at Poe’s Pub on a Saturday night before he drove back to Chapel Hill, this understanding was blurred for Rowan.

Patty didn’t show up.

She didn’t telephone the pub with an explanation, and he imagined the worst, the most dramatic tragedy. He sat at the bar until well past eleven, with the regulars crowding him in their coarse denim and greasy leather, the smoke from their cigarettes coating his new Ralph Lauren sweater, and he pictured Patty dead on a road somewhere. He saw her tumbling across the pavement like Jessica Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice, her blond hair pink with blood, her lean arms and legs splayed across the double white lines. He was worried and told himself to stop imagining the worst. He phoned her six times that night, but because of their understanding, their no-strings-attached rule, he didn’t go to her apartment.

Patty called his hotel the next morning to say she’d had a bad headache. Maybe it was her tooth, but she hadn’t felt well. She was sorry.

He said, “I called you. Why didn’t you call Poe’s?”

“I had a headache.”

“I was worried.”

Again with the headache story.

Patty was no ditzy blonde. She never missed a beat. She was the epitome of common sense and organization. Headache or not, she would have had the wherewithal to phone, but he let it go. He’d see her again, but not for a while. He’d let things cool down. He’d spend some time with Becca. Maybe she’d like to come to Richmond with him: a father-daughter getaway. He’d ask.

For four years, Rowan didn’t know he was being played like the snare drum that Patty Heathrow had played in high school. He didn’t know that by the time she was in the eleventh grade, Patty rarely missed a beat or dropped a drumstick. Not her. Not his Patty-Cake. She won first place in regionals with her flam paradiddle-diddle and her perfect fifteen-stroke roll. She learned to play the snare in the sixth grade. She played thumbs down, and it took four years before she won her first competition. She had practiced her sixteenth notes on a pillow to build up speed in her left hand before switching to wood, before touching the sticks to the drum. She was meticulous and disciplined. She knew how to play to win. You don’t rush things. Rowan didn’t even know she was a percussionist, let alone that he was being brilliantly played. Sitting in Barnacle Bob’s, watching Patty shake his wife’s hand, he was anxious to talk to Patty alone. Rowan knew this was no coincidence. He thought he knew what Patty was doing, what she was trying to do, but then he thought that he never knew what Patty-Cake was doing, and that made him want her all the more.