True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  When Sybil had disappeared into the crowd, Desmond leaned against the burgundy wall and surveyed the crowd. The guests were friends or acquaintances, former teaching colleagues, magazine editors he’d worked for, and two ex-boyfriends. He felt removed from most of them, as if he’d left town years ago and was viewing his friends from a different city and a different life than the one in which he’d met them. There was a vase of lilies on the table near him, and the sweet funereal stench of them was overpowering, making him feel even more dreamy and lost. It was hard to maintain close friendships when you were in a relationship; it seemed disloyal to discuss the intimate emotional details of your life, and besides, most people—even the ones who loved to gossip in lewd detail about their every anonymous sexual encounter—practically blushed at the particulars of domestic happiness or the mere hint of connubial sexual contentment.

  After scanning the room several times, Desmond was certain his editor hadn’t shown up after all. They’d been having some problems communicating lately, an optimistic way of saying she hadn’t returned a couple of his calls, and he’d been hoping she’d put in an appearance. His biography of Pauline Anderton was significantly overdue. Whenever his editor mentioned this to him, Desmond longed to remind her that, given Anderton’s slide into obscurity, it wasn’t as if anyone was waiting for the book, but that hardly seemed to strengthen his case.

  Several people came over to wish him well, and then quickly cast furtive glances around the room and asked if he knew what was going on. Speculation ran from a death in Velan’s family to the possibility that the hotel chain had fired him. Most of the ideas seemed to boil down to revenge fantasies in which Velan was punished in one way or another for his smug beauty. Desmond couldn’t help but feel a little cheated out of the attention he didn’t want. Velan obviously hadn’t planned the death of one of his relatives to steal his thunder, but it always worked out somehow that he became the center of attention. Velan was standing by the window berating a waiter for chatting with one of the guests (translation: for being twenty-five years old) in a smoldering voice that was halfway between insulting and flirtatious. It was a mystery how Peter put up with this outrageous behavior, most of which seemed to have been learned from the tail end of Joan Crawford’s movie career. Maybe, Desmond thought, true love was an acute form of tolerance.

  Kevin, a friend who was nearly as tall as Desmond, but a good deal fleshier and almost ferociously handsome, came and stood beside him and watched Velan’s performance. Once the tirade had subsided, he said, “It must be awful to have so little impulse control.”

  “I guess,” Desmond said. “Of course it could be wonderful, couldn’t it?” That was what made Velan so irresistible; even if you found him hard to take, you couldn’t help but want a little of his audacity for yourself.

  “We may never know.” Kevin turned and gazed at Desmond with his big green eyes, threatening him with his empathy and his chiseled good looks. “How are you, Desmond?” He asked so pointedly, it was as if he’d asked several times already but hadn’t believed any of the other answers. He was wearing a dark suit and a very soft green tie, all nice, but so inappropriately formal, Desmond assumed he had someplace better to go following this gathering.

  “I’m just fine.”

  “You are? Really? Not worried about leaving town?”

  “It’s only for a few months.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” Kevin said, shaking his long, narrow head and jutting out his jaw in an exaggerated gesture of disapproval. The problem with being as handsome as Kevin was that he looked so good in every light and expression, he always appeared to be posing, even when he was completely sincere. “I couldn’t pack up and leave a lover for four months. I’m too much of a romantic.”

  Desmond said nothing. It was hard to figure out why everyone assumed that a separation was a threat to a couple when the evidence clearly indicates that spending time together is what usually kills a relationship.

  Kevin worked at Smith Barney sixty hours a week and spent much of his free time attending to his aging parents in White Plains. He frequently made pronouncements about how romantic he was but never referred specifically to any romantic attachments. Friends were always trying to fix him up on blind dates, but nothing ever worked out. Desmond suspected that he had a secret life tucked away somewhere, one that revolved around slings and leather masks, or possibly women with penises, but he wasn’t the type you could ask. He was studiously polite and evasive, which made him the perfect person to put beside a grinding bore at a dinner table. Desmond often felt reassured by his stoic diffidence; most of the time you knew more about a person than you cared to know, so Kevin was a refreshing change.

  “I’ll invite Russell out to dinner when you’re gone,” Kevin said. “If that’s all right with you. Keep him out of trouble for you.”

  “I’m sure he’d like that,” Desmond told him, comforted by the thought that Russell, who claimed to find Kevin “scary,” wouldn’t like it at all.

  “Now I think I’m going to try to slip out of here. I have the feeling something’s about to hit the fan and I’d rather not get the suit dirty.”

  “Another party?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call it that.” But of course, being Kevin, he wouldn’t call it whatever it was, either.

  After he’d departed, Desmond gazed across the room at Russell standing by the window, delivering an animated monologue to two bald, bearded men. Desmond could tell from his gestures and facial expressions that he was talking about his secondhand store, a bottomless source of material for anecdotes replete with characters he could mimic and merchandise he could describe in loving detail. Watching him run through his routine, Desmond felt unaccountably lonely. I wish he’d come stand beside me, he thought, and then he saw Russell excuse himself and cross the room. Maybe love was a form of telepathy. Desmond was always trying to find a chewable-vitamin-sized definition of love, one that justified the energy he’d invested in his relationship with Russell while reassuring himself that, in the blink of a jaundiced eye, he could live happily without it.

  “You got a lot of attention over there, sweetheart,” Desmond said, putting his arm around him. “Which story were you telling them?”

  “The one about the $85 lunch box.”

  “I like that one. Did you put in the joke I gave you?”

  “I was about to when you called me over.”

  “I didn’t call you over.”

  “No? Well, it doesn’t matter. Have you noticed that Peter isn’t here?”

  Desmond had noticed, but he’d assumed he was avoiding Velan’s bad mood by hiding in the kitchen. Like a lot of people married to alcoholics, Peter spent vast amounts of time cooking and had become an expert chef.

  “Apparently not. And rumor has it the bedroom door is closed. I think you should investigate.”

  Desmond liked opening bedroom doors, but at the moment, he didn’t want to be separated from Russell. “Only if you come with me.”

  “One person looks concerned, two would look prurient. I’ll keep watch out here.”

  “Maybe it’s something as simple as an upset stomach.”

  “Possibly. But if it is, a lot of your friends here are going to be very disappointed.”

  3.

  Desmond knocked lightly on the bedroom door. From inside, he could hear only the hum and rattle of an air conditioner and the distant sizzle of running water. “Peter?” When there was no response, he gave the door a noncommittal push.

  It was a small room that looked out to an air shaft, but it had been given the movie set treatment made famous by Velan’s hotel chain: an immense painting over the bed, long white sheets covering the windows, a few garish pieces of asymmetrical Italian furniture, all designed to trick the eye into zeroing in on individual corners of the room and thus missing the claustrophobic whole. There was a leather suitcase open on the bed. Desmond peered into it at the carefully packed shirts and pants, thinking for one loopy second that it had s
omething to do with his own departure. Then the door to the bathroom swung open and Peter emerged, drying his hands on a big green towel. He was a heavy man who carried himself with calm self-confidence, the kind of man you’d call in an emergency, hoping Velan didn’t pick up the phone. He had on a pair of khaki pants and a black T-shirt with a pad of graying hair sticking out of the neckline. He smiled wanly at Desmond, as if he’d been expecting him, and tossed the towel onto the bed.

  “Going somewhere?” Desmond asked cheerfully.

  “I’m afraid so.” His voice was thick.

  It was then that Desmond noticed he was unshaven and that his eyes were a bright, nearly alarming shade of red. Desmond felt the smile melt off his own face. “Peter,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  “Velan’s asked me to get out.” Peter sat in one of the dark purple chairs and let his head fall into his hands. The chair, shaped more or less like a cupped hand, was far too whimsical a setting for this display of raw emotion. Suddenly, all the bright, pretty furnishings, the sound of the party in the other room, even the faint smell of Velan’s sandalwood aftershave seemed inappropriate and poignant.

  Desmond took a seat on the edge of the bed, his knees practically touching Peter’s. Of all the people here tonight, it was Peter he respected the most. It took integrity to put up with the likes of Velan, and Peter got too little credit for that. Although almost everyone who knew them acknowledged that Peter was the more likable and sympathetic of the two men, the kinder and the more intelligent, Velan was still considered the catch, the one who’d been hooked by lucky and—it had to be, what other explanation was there for the loyalty of someone like Velan?—massively endowed Peter. Velan made frequent, humorless jokes about replacing Peter, which Desmond had taken to be verbal aphrodisiacs. But now, it had happened.

  “I’m sorry this had to play itself out this afternoon, Desmond, just in time to ruin your party.”

  “Please, don’t even mention that. It doesn’t matter a bit. What happened?”

  Peter shrugged. “We were talking about this party, about you, come to think of it. About you going away. Velan said something about the possibility of one of you meeting someone else, the kind of cutting remark you’d expect, the kind I’ve come to expect, anyway. You don’t know how awful he can be. No one does. Everyone thinks he’s such a joy to live with, so delightful.”

  Desmond had fallen for this trap before, leaping at the chance to tell a friend—at last—what he really thought of his partner at the first signs of trouble and then discovering a week later that his words had been repeated during a passionate reconciliation, thereby killing two friendships with one truth. “No one’s delightful all the time,” he said.

  “We got talking about fidelity. Velan started going on and on about it, as if there was something bothering him, something he wanted to tell me or ask me. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I just asked him outright.”

  Peter stopped here, at what seemed like the most crucial point. “If he was seeing someone else?” Desmond prompted.

  Peter let his hands hang between his knees. The backs of his hands and his fingers up to the second knuckles were covered in graying hair. Age, Desmond thought, was so unkind. Peter looked at him with a blank expression. “I asked him if he knew I’ve been having an affair.”

  “You?”

  “For the past six months.”

  “Wow! Six months?” It shocked him to think that steady, reliable Peter had been carrying on behind Velan’s back, but there was something undeniably impressive about the fact that he’d been able to keep it secret for so long. “That’s quite a fling.”

  Peter looked out the window and started to rub his throat. “I think it may be more than a fling,” he said. When he looked at Desmond again, he had a pleading expression in his eyes, as if, having made this confession of real emotion, he deserved understanding and sympathy. Who wouldn’t understand cheating on poor impossible Velan? Desmond tried his best to nod sympathetically, but he found a curious kind of uneasiness and perhaps jealousy nipping at him, the way he’d felt last month when he went to Chicago to visit his father and learned that the woman sitting next to him on the plane had paid less than half of what he’d paid for his ticket. He looked away from Peter’s hands, figuring he’d misread the tawdry hairiness of them a moment earlier; virility, not age.

  “But, Peter,” he said, “how did you think Velan was going to react?”

  Peter squinted, pondering the question. “I don’t know. Maybe I imagined that after being faithful to him all these years, I’d have a little room to wriggle.”

  Room to wriggle. That was what everyone wanted these days; not to wriggle out of contracts, vows, and legal obligations, but room to wriggle within them. Have it all, in other words; eat your potato chips without accruing fat grams. Certainly that was what Desmond wanted, but at least he had the good sense to keep quiet about it.

  “So this is the first time you’ve . . . done something like this?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m not saying it’s been easy, but fidelity is a discipline, like everything else. You learn how to adapt. Like giving up cigarettes. When Velan started traveling for work, I found that if I went on a little bender while he was out of town, it relieved the pressure and I didn’t need to fool around.”

  “A bender?”

  “Oh, you know, call a few phone numbers, go to a couple of sex parties, line something up over the Internet. A couple days of debauchery to clear the pipes. I’m sure you’ve done the same thing”

  “Russell doesn’t travel much.”

  “When you travel then.” Peter got up and started to sort a pile of clean laundry on the floor beside the bed. Some of the shirts and underwear he rolled up and tossed back onto the floor in disgust, others he carefully folded and laid in the suitcase. “I’ll bet you’ve got a few things lined up in Boston already.”

  Desmond had spent two weeks negotiating with the Deerforth College housing office, trying to line up an apartment, but clearly this wasn’t what Peter had in mind. He’d agreed to Russell’s request for monogamy only when he had a guarantee that they’d keep that part of their relationship quiet; male couples who advertise their monogamy are usually tossed into the eunuch category and end up getting invited to dinner parties where people discuss dogs. Perhaps he’d misled Peter somewhere along the line about his own faithfulness to Russell, but probably not intentionally. As for Boston, he assumed the promise of monogamy would begin to grow fuzzy, like a radio signal, outside a hundred-mile radius of the broadcasting tower, but he’d barely had time to put together his courses, never mind organize a sex life. Admitting any of this in light of Peter’s six months of extramarital bliss would sound too much like defeat. “Well, I’ve got some plans,” he said vaguely. “A few things, you know . . . lined up.”

  “Exactly. It wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t.”

  “Exactly.”

  Peter finished packing the clothes, clicked shut the snaps on the leather suitcase, and set it beside the closet door where a fully loaded duffel bag was already waiting. He was making a temporary move to the extra bedroom of a recently divorced colleague at his law firm. It was a bad moment to be out pounding the Manhattan sidewalks in search of an apartment, but he’d manage. He was motivated, refreshed; he felt younger somehow.

  He sat back in the hand-shaped chair, leaned forward, and said, “Is there anything you want to ask me, Desmond?”

  It was an odd question, the kind of thing a veteran cancer patient might ask someone who’d recently been diagnosed. In fact, there were lots of things Desmond wanted to ask, but he was afraid most of the questions would sound voyeuristic: Where did you meet? How old is he? How did you find the time? Probably Peter just wanted what most people in his situation wanted—an excuse to speak his mistress’s name aloud. “Who is this . . . person?” Best not to assume anything.

  “His name’s Sandy,” Peter said proudly. “You don’t know him.” And then, draping his ar
ms over the back of the chair, he began to rhapsodize about a stockbroker he’d met on the subway.

  Three

  Drinks with Dale

  1.

  The one thing you couldn’t take away from Dale Barsamian was his looks. Time would do that sooner or later, but at least for the moment, his looks were there for everyone to enjoy, and for the most part, everyone did.

  As Jane watched him walk into the cocktail lounge of the Boylston Hotel, she thought: Thank God I’m not married to him any longer. Handsome, sure of himself, oozing poised masculinity, Dale loosened his tie as he laughed with the maitre d’, and you could practically hear people sighing on all sides. Woe to any woman married to a man who was as effortlessly charming and seductive as Dale. If someone wasn’t snarling at you for having snagged him, they were being nice to you in an effort to get closer to him. Men, women, it didn’t matter. Just Caroline just wasn’t up to this kind of rogue. Seeing him across the room, Jane was reminded of all the comforts of being married to a man like Thomas, someone solid and reliable, attractive but unexceptional, someone you could trust to be utterly steadfast, even when you didn’t want him to be.

  She hadn’t seen Dale in more than six months, and she honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone with him. It might even have been the warm January day of their divorce. After all the papers had been signed and she and he were officially free of each other, they’d gone to a diner near the courthouse and had a friendly, greasy lunch. They didn’t mention the past or indulge in embarrassingly sloppy nostalgia. Instead, they talked about their plans in an open, effortless way that was completely without ulterior motives or hidden agendas—and therefore without precedent in the history of their relationship. They’d sat in their cramped booth for hours, and by the time they got up, a new weather system had blown in; the sky had gone gray and snow was falling. Out on the sidewalk with fat papery flakes floating past them, Dale had put his arms around her and kissed her goodbye. The next thing either of them knew, they were making out in an alley, leaning against a rusty Dumpster, their bodies pressed together, their shoulders covered with snow. Jane had finally let herself cry in front of him. “I’m not going to miss you,” she’d said, her words slurred with emotion. “Janey,” he’d whispered in her ear, “I’m going to miss you.”