Capital Gains

Thursday, August 9, 1984

I made an honest mistake. I was going to Boston for a deposition of a key witness in an upcoming trial. After forgetting to wind my fickle alarm clock, waiting for traffic and a long search for parking, I was late, running through the terminal with a briefcase in one hand and a gym bag stuffed with a change of clothes in the other. The doors to gates E and F were a few feet apart, and I saw the last of a line of people going into the door on the right. I joined the line.

If I tried this today, a hundred safeguards would trigger, and an annoyed agent would send me to the gate next door where my scheduled flight was delayed by half an hour. But this was before the right to board a plane was encoded in a QR square on my phone, before paper boarding passes, back when my ticket, printed on multiple pages of flimsy paper with red “carbon” that looked like someone had melted Red Hots on the back of each page, was all I had.

The agent tore off the top page from my ticket. I got on the plane and found an empty seat. I pulled out our list of prepared questions to review it one more time, and I fell asleep. I woke when the wheels hit the runway. A flight attendant announced on the intercom: “Welcome to Washington National.”

Washington National. I was supposed to arrive at Boston Logan. I had probably heard the plane’s destination a dozen times, but my relief that I had made it to the gate, my immersion in preparing for the deposition, and my absolute confidence that I was on the right plane led me to believe that hearing “Washington” instead of “Boston” was the result of indistinct speech on a bad sound system.

A blast of humility hit me as I realized my mistake.

A blast of humidity hit me as I exited the plane. The handrails on the metal stairs were too hot to touch. By the time I had traversed the fifty steps to the terminal, the shirt under my wool sports jacket was soaked with sweat.

I went straight to the ticketing desk where a middle-aged Black woman looked at me above the rims of her glasses.

“I’m supposed to be in Boston.”

She slid the glasses down her nose. “This is Washington National.”

“I know. I just arrived, but my ticket is for Boston.”

I put the rest of my ticket on the desk. She pushed the glasses back up her nose, looked briefly at the ticket then back at me. “Do you think the pilot went to the wrong airport?”

“No. I got on the wrong plane.”

“How did that happen?”

I could feel the frustration contorting my face. “I made a mistake. How can I get to Boston?”

“You could drive. Some people take the train. Or I could see if there’s a flight available.” She pulled the glasses down her nose again. “You’ll have to buy another ticket.”

“Yes, I know. When’s the first available flight.”

The glasses went back up her nose, and she typed with loud clicks. She peered at the screen, typed some more, and peered at the screen again. “Nothing today.”

“Nothing?”

“There are three direct flights, but they’re all booked with wait lists. I’d tell you to try standby, but you don’t really have a chance.”

She typed and peered a few more times. “There’s a flight that leaves at 6:22, stops in Syracuse and gets to Boston Logan at 11:58.”

I looked at the clock behind her. It was 9:15 in the morning.

“Really? That’s the best you can do?”

This time, the glasses came all the way off. “I always do my best.”

“Sorry. You’re being very helpful, but I need to get there by noon.”

“Not possible. Looks like everyone wants to go to Boston today.”

“Why?”

“Probably to get away from this swelter.” She fanned her face with a laminated flight schedule. “The humidity is killing me.”

There was one seat left on the first flight the following morning. I decided that I better take it. She printed a new ticket. I checked it: Friday, August 10 at 7:37. She ran my credit card through the machine. I signed the chit and went to figure out how to recover from my foul-up.

I found a phone booth. After three attempts at entering the sixteen digits of my phone card, I managed to reach the witness’s attorney, Mark Masters.

“I missed my flight.” Without too much detail, I explained what had happened and when I could be in Boston.

“Good. My client had a family emergency and couldn’t make it today. Tomorrow at one works for both of us.”

If I had made it to Boston as planned, I would be pissed when Masters cancelled, but now it felt like a reprieve.

Next I called my secretary. Barbara Adler was my mother’s age, very competent and very protective. She wore her graying hair in the same style as my mother and often wore clothes that looked like they came out of Mom’s closet.

“How did you do that?” she asked when I told her about being in Washington. I was about to lie and say that the plane was diverted when she continued. “You got on the wrong plane, didn’t you? Next time you fly, I’m going with you to make sure you don’t screw up. I hope you’ve learned your lesson.” She even scolded like my mother.

I sent her off to find a hotel in central DC. We arranged for me to call back in a half hour.

I couldn’t admit it to Barbara, but I was happy to have a day off. If things had gone as planned, I would arrive in Boston, rush to our offices there, run the deposition, rush to the airport and return to Minneapolis late. I would work all weekend analyzing what the witness said and preparing for the next two depositions. I hadn’t had a day off since I was assigned to this trial three months earlier. The firm was racking up a lot of billable hours, and I was saving a fortune in deferred recreation.

I was going to make the most of this day. I took a taxi to the Smithsonian American History Museum. I stashed my briefcase and bag in a locker and found a phone booth. Barbara had booked me a hotel that was not too expensive about a mile away.

“Herb is pretty angry,” she said. Herb Haley was my boss, a no-nonsense guy who was convinced that I had been a bad hire and would never make partner. “He says you can pay for your own hotel.”

I explained that the deposition had been postponed, so it was a hotel here or in Boston.

“He’s in one of his moods. I’m not going near him,” she said. “You work it out when you get back.”

I wondered if she’d come with me for that encounter to make sure I didn’t screw up.

Ten years earlier, when I had spent the summer as an intern in Washington, I loved going to the Smithsonian museums. This museum had so much to see that I could hardly make a dent in it in a day. I decided to visit two of my favorite sections – music and inventions – and a featured exhibit looking back at the Watergate scandal.

That summer, I worked with Senator Daniel Inouye on the Watergate Committee. I hadn’t returned to DC since Richard Nixon and I resigned from government service on the same day: August 9, 1974, exactly ten years ago. Since then, Gerald Ford had tried to heal America’s wounds by pardoning Nixon; Jimmy Carter had made us all more familiar with peanut farming; and Ronald Reagan had leveraged his movie career to act presidential, touting trickle-down economics and trying to intimidate the Soviets with the Star Wars weapon system.

Nostalgia carried me first to the Watergate exhibit on the second floor. Inside the door were photos of the eponymous Watergate Hotel and the ransacked offices of the Democratic National Committee. The Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein stared at me from another photo. Those two had hounded me all that summer, trying to get an inside scoop on what was going on behind the scenes.

I watched a video loop of the committee hearings that included Howard Baker’s famous question: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” I caught a glimpse of myself in the background of a couple shots. All those Senators knew me and called me Cliff, especially when they wanted me to get fresh coffee.

“That was a great summer.”

I turned to see a woman about my age standing beside me. Her black hair was tied in a bun. She wore a gray business suit with a white blouse that accentuated her deeply tanned face. Claudia Garcia had hardly changed since the time we spent in the shadows near the Lincoln Memorial on our last night in DC that summer. We had enjoyed a torrid summer love affair, both of us forsaking our college girl- and boyfriends. I had thought about her often since then, wondering what would have happened if we were able to be together. But I returned to Lewis & Clark College, and she returned to Florida. We wrote letters for a few months, but our communication subsided, and I lost track of her.

“Claudia, what are you doing here?”

She gave me a peremptory hug. “I live here now. School starts next week, so I came today to see this exhibit as a last fling.”

“Are you still in school?”

“No, I’m a teacher. What are you doing here?”

I was so happy to see her again that I didn’t want to clutter our reunion with the story of my travel disaster. “I was lost, but now I’m found.”

She smiled, showing her perfect white teeth. She must have had them straightened because I remember my tongue exploring the gap between her front incisors.

We spent two hours in that exhibit. Every picture, every bit of text, every artifact evoked memories of that distant summer. We reminded each other of the stories that filled our time together working in and around the Senate Office Building: concerts on the Mall, our first date to see “The Conversation” with Gene Hackman, parties with the other interns and the young staffers, dinners on the worn Formica table in my boarding house, and the frantic longing we shared in that last week when we knew it was coming to an end.

By the end of those two hours, our hands and shoulders were continuously touching.

Over lunch in the museum’s cafe, we shared the stories of our lives. She had gone back to Florida, married her boyfriend and graduated from law school. Two years ago, she decided that neither her husband nor practicing law were right for her. She moved to DC, took a position teaching history in a private high school in the Maryland suburbs. They signed the divorce decree three months ago.

When I went back to school in ‘74, my summer with Claudia convinced me that it was time to break up with my girlfriend, who had come to the same conclusion while I was away. I went to law school at the University of Minnesota and joined Haley, Howard & Hall after passing the bar exam. I still wanted to be an attorney, but my future with the firm was bleak, especially working for Herb Haley who wanted seventy hours a week from his associates while he spent Wednesday and Friday afternoons on the golf course. I had no time for myself and no time for a relationship. I couldn’t keep on this way.

At the end of lunch, I finally owned up to my travel blunder.

“Maybe it wasn’t an accident,” Claudia said. “Maybe, subconsciously, you wanted to fail because you don’t see any other way out.”

Maybe she was right.

I shared my plan for the afternoon, and she shared her two choices: American Food and Hispanic Culture. We could have gone our separate ways, but neither of us wanted to part. We compromised – Food and Music – and started up the stairs holding hands.

She was still the woman I had loved ten years ago, but more mature and sophisticated. Through that time, an elastic band had connected us, stretching and stretching but never breaking. Somehow I had known she was on the other end, unattainable, but there. Now that we were close again, and her availability was clear, I could feel that band pulling me the last few inches. I didn’t want the day to end. I was sure that if I left her, the band would break along with my heart.

At the end of the day, we had time for the Hispanic Culture exhibit. We left the museum and walked along the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial where a rock band was playing on the steps. We joined the dancing until our shirts were soaked. We ate dinner at the same Italian restaurant that we had enjoyed with the other interns tens of times that summer. I walked her to the Metro station.

“I could buy you a drink at my hotel,” I said, trying desperately to extend our time together.

“I don’t go to hotels with strange men.”

“I’m not a stranger.”

“I didn’t say you were a stranger. I said you were strange. It’s strange how much I want to be with you, and I don’t trust myself.”

We kissed on the platform, ignoring the catcalls from a group of teenage boys. We promised to keep in touch this time. She got on the train. As I watched it disappear into the darkness of the tunnel, the elastic band pulled on my heart.

I didn’t sleep much. I checked the clock by the bed way too often, waiting for my five o’clock wake up call. I relived the day over and over, from the fateful mistake in the Minneapolis airport to the fateful meeting with Claudia. I didn’t believe in Divine intervention, but I thanked the Lord anyway. This was the best day I had had in years.

I got to the HH&H offices in Boston about eleven. We finished the deposition by three and I was back at Logan by four. I had a return flight to Minneapolis at six.

I called Herb and gave him a summary of the deposition.

“Good job,” he said. “You can write this up tomorrow. I want the plan for the next two depositions on my desk Monday morning.”

“No.”

He drew a deep breath. “What do you mean?”

“’No’ is a very common English word. It means I’m not working this weekend. I have other plans.”

“Do those plans include looking for another job?”

“If necessary.”

Herb hung up, probably because if he kept talking he was going to say something that both of us would regret.

I went straight to the ticketing desk where a middle-aged Black woman looked at me above the rims of her glasses. Had the agent followed me from Washington National?

“I need to be in Washington tonight,” I said.

She pushed the glasses up her nose, typed loudly and peered at the screen. “There’s a seat available in First Class on the 5:32 flight. I took it.

I called Claudia and invited her to dinner. When I heard the smile in her voice as she accepted, I felt the elastic band pulling us together.