Laura knew she’d just made a huge mistake.
“Honey, honey,” she said quietly, interrupting Dolly’s game of Twenty Questions. “I haven’t given Box an answer yet.”
Dolly didn’t seem to know what to do with this information. Evidently it had never occurred to her that someone—at least anyone with her mental faculties intact—might actually debate a marriage proposal from Box Barnes.
“It’s just a lot to think about,” Laura said, relaying how Box had caught her off-guard on the roof the night of the party, and how she had concerns about their future, her work, all of it. “When I get married I want to make sure I do it once, and that I do it with the man I know will make me happy, and I will make happy, for the rest of my life. Is that so unreasonable? It’s the biggest decision I am ever going to make. I want to feel completely sure about it.”
Dolly seemed to be trying to actually consider this, though it still appeared to completely baffle her. “How did he take your . . . delay?”
“He understands. I’m doing this as much for him as I am for me.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s all that matters, you silly goose!”
There was something to be envied in that sort of simplicity of conviction. Laura wanted to believe that love was all that mattered. But her own parents’ marriage—a slow, steady descent into a chilly garden-party partnership—told her otherwise. She leaned forward in the back seat. “It’s here on the right, driver,” she said, as the cab slowly pulled to a stop.
Dolly had asked to come to Christopher Welsh’s reading for one reason, Laura knew—she was as curious as Laura was to meet an actual author. Dolly admitted she would have much preferred meeting Grace Metalious, the housewife who had written the spicy novel about Peyton Place, but circumstances being what they were, she’d settle for the writer who had captured Laura’s attention.
Laura had come for a slightly different reason. She admired Welsh’s stories, yes, but more than that she loved how he threaded them together, into one interconnecting narrative that leapt off the page. Deep down she knew there was another reason she’d come. She’d wondered if Pete would be here.
The back of MacDougal Books & Letters had been arranged with a small podium and three small rows of folding chairs. There were about half a dozen people already here; Laura recognized two of them as beats from the San Remo. Connie was at the front, hurrying back and forth between the podium and a side table, where he’d set up a coffeepot and pitchers of cider, soda, and iced tea, along with a tray of sad-looking cookies. His rear left shirttail had come undone from his trousers, and his brow line showed nervous beads of perspiration.
“Why, hello!” he said warmly as Laura approached. He gave her a warm hug as Laura reintroduced Dolly.
Connie filled Laura in on the Village gossip and his own recent adventures, including his recent auction bid on a letter from Jane Appleton Pierce, wife of President Franklin. “Did you know that her eleven-year-old son was killed in a train accident two months before the inauguration? Horrible. She spent the entire four years of the administration in mourning. Draped the entire White House in black.”
“And people think Mamie has it tough,” Dolly said.
Laura chuckled. “Who thinks Mamie has it tough?”
Connie was about to issue a comment when he spied someone over her shoulder walking in. “Ah! Our guest of honor has arrived.”
Laura turned.
Pete.
It took only a few seconds for all of the pieces to tumble into perfect, interlocking place. The banter at the San Remo the day she’d first walked in during the summer, her putting his own book on the bar. The probing of her opinion of it that day in Atlantic City. His insistence that she was a writer if she believed she was a writer, his experiment of making her close her eyes and describe the scene on the Steel Pier . . . It all made perfect sense now—why she had been so torn, why she had started to fall for him. He’d understood her from a perspective no one else could.
“Hmmm,” Dolly was saying in her ear. “He’s cute, in a sort of lunch-pail kind of way.”
Laura couldn’t speak. Her gaze was fixed on Pete, who was shrugging off his pea coat and laughing with Connie. For the briefest of seconds their eyes met, his stare empty, impenetrable. She wanted to walk out but knew she couldn’t. He’d already scored the element of surprise. “C’mon, let’s sit down,” she said.
Following Connie’s introduction, Pete gave some brief background on his new novel-in-progress, Wonderland, an allegory of Alice in Wonderland about “a young girl trying to find herself in the big city,” and before he shared a word of it, Laura knew instinctively that it was about her. Or at minimum a version of her. For fifteen minutes the cozy audience sat rapt in the back of the bookstore listening to his lively storytelling, relaying a passage about the heroine as she found herself torn between two very different men who were in some ways nothing like Pete and Box, but who were also very clearly Pete and Box. His eyes occasionally grazed her sightline in the back row but never lingered. Connie stood to the side, beaming like a proud papa.
After the reading and a few questions from the audience, Connie stepped to the front. “We invite you all to stay and enjoy some refreshments with us and to meet Christopher. Copies of Chris’s first collection of short stories are available for purchase and signing.”
“I’m actually glad I came,” Dolly was saying, sliding an arm into her coat. “Can I borrow his book from you?”
“No,” Laura blurted out. “Sorry. I mean, the whole point of coming to a reading is to support the author. You should buy a copy, get him to sign it.”
Dolly did, seemingly thrilled to be chatting with a real live author as he scrawled a dedication. Laura remained glued in her chair, unable or perhaps simply unwilling to move, hoping to make him feel as uncomfortable as she did. The more she rolled around his deception the angrier she became, both at him and also Connie, who had clearly known that she had been dating Christopher Welsh the entire time and never bothered to say a word.
To her surprise, Pete broke free from a conversation with three young men, walked over, and wordlessly sank down onto the chair next to her. They sat in silence for a full thirty seconds, both looking ahead at the leftover crowd still mingling by the refreshments. To the right, Connie erupted into laughter with a middle-aged couple. Evidently he’d moved on from discussing Jane Pierce’s mourning.
“I know you’re angry,” he said quietly, still staring ahead. “But it’s not what you think.”
“How could you possibly know what I think?” The words came out in a hiss, and she scolded herself for it.
He exhaled wearily. “I wanted you to get to know me, the real me, not some guy on a printed page. I was going to tell you. Actually, I had planned on telling you the night I read about you and Box Barnes in the paper. It just didn’t seem to matter after that.”
Laura shook her head. “It would have mattered. It does matter.”
“Why? Because I would have been a more worthy competitor for your affections if you’d known I was a published writer?”
“Don’t you dare try to play the victim here. The secret you’ve kept is far bigger and far more meaningful than the one I did.”
“That’s open to question.”
She laughed derisively. “I love the new stuff. Very creative. Wherever did you get the idea?”
“She’s not you.”
“You could have fooled me. Oh, wait. You did.”
“Believe it or not, you’re not the only girl to ever come to New York to try and find out who she is. Yes, there are elements of you. I would never deny that. But there are elements of a lot of other people, too. That’s what novels are: They’re amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.”
“Please don’t lecture me like I am some freshman sitting in your writing seminar.”
&n
bsp; “I’m sorry. You may be angry with me for not telling you who I was. But you seem to be conveniently forgetting that you left out a rather important detail of who you were. I risked my heart on you and lost. Can you honestly say you did the same?”
She remained silent. She wanted to hold her anger but instead found her fury slowly dissipating, like the air out of a flattening tire. Why couldn’t she stay mad at him? “‘Christopher Welsh’?”
“Christopher is my middle name. Welsh is my grandmother’s maiden name. I didn’t think anyone would take ‘Pete Kelly’ seriously as a literary figure.”
Her laugh was laced with something bitter. “That’s funny. I did.” She stood up, grabbed her coat. “Well, at least you got what you wanted from me, right?” she said. “An unvarnished review of your work. And lucky for you, it was a rave. Delivered without agenda.”
“That isn’t what I wanted from you,” he said, rising. “And you know it.”
She looked away, digging into her handbag to retrieve her copy of Will the Girl and Other Stories. “Here,” she said, handing him a pen. “Sign it.”
He hesitated but then took the pen and, leaning the book against the back of a folding chair, jotted down the inscription and handed it back to her with the pen. She took both, casually dropped them into her bag, and, coat over her arm, walked silently out of the shop, Dolly scurrying from across the room to catch up.
Later that night, alone and locked in the security of the hall bathroom, she extracted the book and opened it to the dedication page. To Laura, it read. One of the city’s finest new writers. He’d signed it simply, CW.
She didn’t know why she was crying.
TWENTY-THREE
No matter how many times she entered it, Dolly never lost her sense of awe at the sheer majesty of Central Park. To her it was like its own city within a city, or perhaps more of a kingdom, the kind of place where there should be a castle in the middle, complete with a moat and a drawbridge and a turret soaring to the clouds with a pretty lady fair peeking from the window.
Jack had called and asked to meet, told her he needed to talk to her about something, and had suggested the park. Her initial reaction had been panic—He’s going to tell me something awful—but the more she thought about it, the more she’d been able to convince herself otherwise.
The last few weeks had been, in a word, heaven. Since her brazen overture to him in the subway, it seemed like he had come alive, at least in the romantic sense, affectionate and flirtatious and even occasionally earthy. It was as if someone had cut him free of a self-imposed restraint, and he seemed to relish her in a way he hadn’t before, in her kisses and her touch and her fingers through his bristly hair. She’d switched on a light somewhere inside him, and she couldn’t fathom that he’d ever want to return to darkness. Thank God, she’d ignored all of that advice in Cosmopolitan about the virtues of patience and coy, ladylike aloofness.
A police car sat idling up ahead, and she quickly dashed toward it, stooping down in front of the passenger side-view mirror to check her hair, hat, and lipstick. She gave the cop behind the wheel a casual wave of thanks. He smiled, tipping his finger to his hat.
They’d agreed to meet on a bench near the Great Lawn, and as Dolly took a seat, smoothing her beige wool coat underneath her and daintily crossing her ankles behind her, she hoped she hadn’t gotten the location wrong. Central Park was lovely, but it was also enormous—843 acres enormous. You could spend days inside it and not find one another.
A few minutes later, he walked up. And she knew.
His face was slack, pallid, his jawline too rigid. His hands were shoved deeply into the pockets of his trench, and even as he issued a gentle “Hi” as he approached, it wasn’t enough to diffuse what his body language was not simply telling but screaming. She felt the pit of her stomach twist into a knot so painful she almost cried out, as her mind pleaded that what she was about to hear would not be what she was about to hear.
He sat down on the bench next to her, looking out at a group of children playing.
She searched his profile for something, anything to allay her exploding fear. A few months. A few wonderful, intoxicating months when she’d been smart enough to hold back, to stay guarded, to perhaps keep an illusion going for her girlfriends but always telling herself the truth inside, to protect, to make sure she didn’t believe her own publicity, to make sure that she never took her focus off of her duty, which was to protect the heart she had already subjected to too much disappointment through poor judgment and bad luck and needy craving. Then the night in the subway had happened, and she’d let go because she was so very tired of not letting go. The jury verdict had come in and she’d been declared loved, and she’d basked in it, submerged herself in it, drowned in it. It was finally her turn. And now it was over before it had ever really started. Laura got a proposal, and she got what she always got: The excuses varied, but the delivery was always startlingly constant. He would tell her what a great girl she was, how she was going to find the right guy to appreciate her, how he was messed up or unfocused or whatever excuse guys accessed to open the escape hatch and parachute out, and then he would kiss her chastely and walk away, exhaling a mental Well, that’s done as he wound his way through Central Park to the rest of his life, never once looking back at the scorched earth he’d left behind.
He glanced over. “You look nice.”
Dolly closed her eyes, forced herself to breathe.
“Thanks for meeting me,” he began, more of a stammer than statement, and for a second she wondered if she should just stand up and walk away first—some shred of dignity in the closing act. But the little voice inside her head said, Don’t jump to conclusions and Maybe he’s just tired and Hear him out and all of the other trite things the mind conjures in its fey efforts to overtake the raw truth of the heart, and in her hesitation she sentenced herself to the entire awful scene. She would spend the foreseeable future going over every second of every date they’d ever had, going all the way back to that first eye contact across the restaurant, looking for the clues she’d missed that would have told her that she hadn’t had any true happiness at all, and beating herself to a pulp for the wrong comment she’d made this night or the wrong dress she’d worn that day, and asking herself, over and over and over, how he could have seen emptiness where she saw blossoming love.
The November chill seeped into her bones, and she began to shiver. Jack reached out for her gloved hand. “Dolly, you know, you are one of the most special girls I’ve ever—”
“Stop.” She looked directly into his eyes, hunting for reprieve and failing. “I don’t think I can take the whole speech, Jack. Correct me if I am wrong—please, please, correct me if I’m wrong, because I have never, ever in my life wanted to be wrong as much as I do right now—but you’re ending things, am I right?”
He looked back at her but couldn’t hold her stare. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a yes-or-no question, Jack. Are you or aren’t you?”
He shook his head. “I can’t . . . It’s . . . It’s my fault. All my fault. Believe me, I know that, and I feel more horrible about it than you could ever know. I really liked you. Like you. I just . . . I had no right to let things get this far when I knew I wasn’t . . .”
“What? Wasn’t what?”
He sighed, threw his head into his hands. “Available.”
She sat paralyzed. She wondered if she would ever be able to move again. Years from now they would find her, a skeleton in a plain cloth coat and hat, tethered to this park bench like a haunted house attraction. “You’re married,” she whispered, through the catch in her voice.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Engaged, then?”
“No.”
“Well, then, how serious is it? I don’t understand. You said you’re not available. Who is this girl—”
“Dolly, there is no other girl, I swear.” He squared up and tried to regain his co
mposure, as if he were delivering a presentation in front of a boardroom of clients and had forgotten his storyboards. Her eyes traveled wildly around his face, trying to unearth clues in every tic and movement. “It’s just so complicated. I should have never let it get this far—”
“Stop saying that! Don’t treat me like I’m some sort of bad mistake you’re going to regret for the rest of your life.” Tears began streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t understand any of this. Are you . . . are you”—she fought to spit the word out—“queer?”
He spun around, horrified. “Of course not!” A couple walking by glanced over, embarrassed to witness the dramatics. Jack popped up off the bench, once again shoved his hands into his coat pockets. “I know I owe you a better explanation,” he said. “I do. I consider myself an honorable man, and yet I am standing here acting dishonorably. I regret it, bitterly. And I accept that this is all of my own doing. You’re blameless. I apologize, deeply, for hurting you, for leading you on. You were just such a . . .” He trailed off.
She reached out to grab his sleeve. “Jack, please. Let’s go somewhere, get a cup of coffee, talk about this. You’re not making any sense. I know you care for me. I know it. A girl can tell when a guy is real. You’re real.”
He leaned down and delivered the kiss she’d known was coming all along. “I am so sorry, Dolly. Truly sorry. I hope one day you can find it in your heart to forgive me. But I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
She sat, still as a statue, until she could be certain that he had rounded the park path out of view and earshot. And then she collapsed, suddenly and violently, into tears for the next hour and a half, darkness engulfing Central Park and the lonely form of the sobbing girl within it.
He was going to kill her.
Opening her compact in the ladies’ room, it crossed Vivian’s mind that not only had she almost been murdered, but that once again she was right back where she’d started, in the very same ladies’ room she had retched in the day Act had shown up for his reference. She pressed the powder puff into the beige makeup and slowly began applying it to her swollen cheek. The welt, red and purple speckled with yellow, sent pain scorching through her face as the pad made contact, and she winced. She’d have to endure it. She couldn’t sell cigarettes with a huge bruise on her face. Luckily she had the long-sleeved dress on tonight. No one would see her arm.
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