True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  Now, all the doubts she’d had about this meeting melted away as she watched him make his entrance; she should have planned a get-together as soon as she felt the first stirrings of seriously icy discontent with Thomas. One look at Dale’s craggy face and she was ready to rush back to her husband and smother him with affection, just for being his lovable, unlovely self.

  The Boylston was one of the city’s older hotels, but it had a convenient location and recently had become officially hip. Some ten-year-old entrepreneur had purchased it and turned the first three floors into a full-service day spa and health club where you could wallow in every form of self-improvement and body detoxification on the market. Salt rubs, high colonics, laser peels, sweatboxes—you name it. The entire health spa movement, with its mania for scrubbing the body, inside and out, was just a high-priced form of self-mutilation. The only thing left to implement was a treatment to gut the body completely and replace all those nasty internal organs with flax seeds soaked in perfumed almond oil. Self-improvement had become a matter of self-annihilation. Relaxation had become a competitive sport and inner peace a commodity.

  But before you had the toxins drained from your liver, you could come to this cool pink cocktail lounge, smoke cigars, and drink yourself into a hazy stupor. Every itty-bitty table was equipped with a long-stemmed goblet with its own pink fish, swimming around in dizzying, pointless circles. Jane was sure it was meant to be soothing, and probably it was unless you had the misfortune of empathizing with the fish and seeing the whole going-nowhere tableau as a perfect metaphor for your life.

  Dale spotted her and waved, all modesty and apology. He was nearly half an hour late. She’d expected him to be late because he always was, and, hoping to give him a taste of his own medicine, she herself had arrived twenty minutes after the time they’d agreed upon. Obviously, she hadn’t waited long enough.

  He approached the table flashing a toothy, lopsided grin and held up his hands as if blocking a punch. “Before you get started on me, it couldn’t be helped. There was an explosion down on Atlantic Avenue and that whole end of the city is in shambles. Three people were killed.”

  How convenient and how like him to come up with the kind of excuse that exonerated him and made you feel like a heartless scoundrel for having the audacity to care that he was late. “I’m sure I’ll read about it in the papers,” she said. “Anyway, I was held up myself. I got here two minutes ago.”

  “Oh good. Now I don’t feel so guilty.” He bent down and gave her a swift, sexless kiss on the mouth. Out in the real world—away from this flattering artificial light and cool maybe-marble floor—it was a hot afternoon. Dale was wearing a brown suit. As he straightened up, the scent of his warm body gasped out of his loosened collar, and Jane was enveloped in its acrid perfume, a blend of cedar, sweat, and Ivory soap that stirred memories of eroticism and anger. He examined her through squinted eyes, and then delivered his assessment. “You know something, Janey? You look spectacular. When did you start letting your hair grow out?”

  “Third grade,” she said. If he was beginning to flatter her already, there was a good chance Caroline had broken down and told him what this was all about. In that case, the best tactic was to let him think she was warming up to him, and then go for the jugular when he was least expecting it. The advantage of dealing with vain, self-confident men like Dale was that they couldn’t imagine anyone being two steps ahead of them and so were always vulnerable. Although he didn’t look vulnerable. The suit brought out his tan and the light in his amber-colored eyes. You couldn’t blame the man for dressing so well, but you certainly could resent him for always knowing exactly what piece of clothing would bring out his best features, especially if you had no instinct for clothes and accessories yourself and were therefore at the mercy of every avaricious salesclerk in the world with an advanced degree in fatuous flattery. To kill time this afternoon, she’d gone into a little jewelry shop on Newbury Street and bought a much too expensive pair of jade green earrings which the salesgirl had described as a great color and style for her. But as she was coming into the hotel, she caught a glimpse of herself in a wall-sized mirror. She saw freakishly big plastic triangles in a garish shade of lime with a graying head attached. She’d slipped them off and tossed them into her bag. Dale was good on details and would know immediately that they were brand-new and the purchase of them was somehow connected to seeing him.

  The key to Dale’s beauty was his ugliness. His face combined the worst elements of his father and his Irish mother, a punk’s crooked nose, a fat mouth that was too large for his square, lean face, and those droopy Armenian eyes, all topped off by a thick brush of blue-black hair that refused to be tamed. Any one feature by itself was appalling, but they fell together in a way that made him look like a carefully sculpted ideal of rugged magnificence, not pretty, not perfect, just irresistible. Even his perfectly ordinary height worked to his advantage; taller men looked gawky and clumsy standing next to solid, compact Dale.

  “I don’t know what everyone sees in him,” a friend of Jane’s had once told her. “He looks like a prick to me.” Which was, of course, exactly what he looked like to everyone else.

  He was from one of those nondescript suburbs somewhere west of Boston—a shopping mall with a few cul-de-saced neighborhoods arranged around it. His father had died young, leaving Dale the head of a household of adoring women—two sisters and a flirtatious mother. He’d worked his way through Harvard, smoothing out his Boston accent so he’d be presentable and respected among Boston’s Brahmin banking and business establishment. His real stroke of genius had been cultivating an aura of polite coarseness that made other men desperate for his approval, hoping, Jane supposed, that being liked by him would mean they were more like him. Jane had never understood why people didn’t immediately spot the calculation behind his manner; it was too natural and unaffected to be real.

  “You look pretty spectacular yourself,” Jane said. “Just in case no one’s told you in the last three minutes.”

  “I look like crap,” he said. “Do you realize I’ve started sprouting hair in my ears?”

  “It’s the talk of the town. We’re thinking about doing a segment on it next week.”

  Dale sat at the table sideways, one arm flung over the back of his chair, a friendly grin on his fat lips. He touched the rim of the water goblet and the fish swam to his side of the glass and gazed out at him adoringly.

  “I saw the show when your friend Rosemary Boyle was on. I didn’t realize poor old Charlie had died that way.”

  “It was horrible,” Jane said, because you had to say it was horrible, even if you weren’t so sure. “He was alone in Maine on a fishing trip, not that he fished. Rosemary was devastated.”

  Dale pushed the tiny aquarium to one side of the table, rested his elbow in the middle, and leaned toward her. “Between you and me, don’t you think the whole thing is a little funny? I got a little spooked listening to her. To be honest, I started wondering if maybe she had something to do with it.”

  Jane laughed, as if he couldn’t have meant the comment as anything other than a joke. “Talk about a vivid imagination,” she said. Those were the words Thomas had used when she ran the exact same theory past him as soon as she heard about Charlie’s conveniently lonely death.

  Dale shrugged and sat back in his chair. “I’m not serious. But remember that weekend they came to visit us on Nantucket? She had him eating lobster every meal and was drowning his food in butter. She was running out to buy him cigarettes every five minutes.”

  Jane frowned. For the two nights Rosemary and Charlie visited, Jane and Dale lay curled up in bed, trying to muffle fits of hysterical laughter as they discussed what looked like Rosemary’s attempt to induce a heart attack. She and Dale always got along best when there was someone else nearby to act as buffer, especially if it was someone neither of them liked. They had had good times, there was no point in trying to deny it, but anyone could have a good time if they let th
emselves get caught up in laughter and romantic outings that distract you from your basic unhappiness and incompatibility.

  “I was thinking about having a Scotch on the rocks,” Dale said. “Join me?”

  It was 3:30 and there was no taping this afternoon, and in every practical sense, she’d finished working shortly after her morning coffee. She hadn’t had a drink at this time of day for years, possibly not since those languid summer afternoons she and Dale had spent on Nantucket the first two years they were married. These days she got a headache about half an hour after a few modest sips of liquor, went straight from the anticipation of the drink to the hangover, with no moment of release in between. But she knew that if she sat there nursing a coffee while Dale slugged back a Johnnie Walker, she’d feel like one of those priggish suburban mothers she despised. So when the waitress came over—a gaunt, pale girl with a boy’s haircut; French, if you bought the accent—she decided to go for broke and ordered a martini.

  “And would you mind taking the fish,” Jane said.

  “Oh. You don’t find it relaxing?”

  “I’d prefer something edible,” Jane said.

  Dale watched the girl’s candlestick legs as she clicked away. “How’s little Jerry?” he asked.

  “Jerry’s delightful,” Jane said. Once, when he was three years old, Jane had made the mistake of calling her son Jerry. “My name is Gerald!” he’d screamed at her. “Gerald!” Fearing a major scene, neither Jane nor Thomas had made the mistake again. “He’s been nothing but pleasure from the beginning. We got lucky with him.”

  “It’s not luck, he just takes after you. How old is he? Five, six? I suppose he’s into basketball.”

  What was that supposed to mean? “He’s all caught up in gymnastics,” she said. “We take him to lessons every week. The teacher thinks he’s ready for the advanced class, but I don’t want him getting competitive.”

  Gerald’s doctor claimed the two of them were making progress, although it wasn’t clear to Jane how they were progressing or in what area. Gerald was still surly, haughty, and frequently hostile to Jane, Thomas, and his grandmother. School had begun last week and it looked as if they were getting ready for the same round of problems they’d been having with him since the first day of day care. He wasn’t a sociable boy, didn’t get along with his peers, and scoffed at almost everything the teacher said. At the end of the third day of classes, the teacher had called up Jane and told her Gerald had mocked her during a drawing lesson and had complained that he’d given up playing with crayons years ago. “I’d prefer to work with pastels,” he’d said. Where had he even heard the word? He was unusually bright for his age and astonishingly self-possessed, assets Jane supposed she should have been grateful for but which, in Gerald, seemed more like social liabilities.

  “Is he on the parallel bars, all that?”

  “Possibly,” she said. Thinking about Dr. Garitty made her feel as if she’d talked herself into a corner, and she lost interest in elaborating on this gymnastics fiction. If she was going to brag, she should have bragged about his brains or his cooking skills, something real. In the end, it didn’t matter what Dale thought.

  The waitress came and set down their drinks. She batted her big, mascaraed eyes at Dale, playing up the gamine act. Hopefully the woman he was currently seeing was at least a couple of decades older than this one, someone who knew what she was getting into but was too old to care. “Anything else?” she lisped.

  “Privacy,” Jane said.

  Dale clinked her glass. The first sip of her drink burned through her body and sent a warm flush to her cheeks. Maybe if she just gave in to the effects instead of trying to fight them, she’d avoid the instant headache. She was afraid of alcohol. This was the result of having grown up with high-functioning drunks for parents and was, she had to confess, the only long-term ill effect she could point to. She sometimes wondered why she harbored so much resentment toward her parents’ drinking when they’d been successful and, in a sloppy, inconsistent way, cheerful. Initially, the resentment had to do with the fact that both parents had died of alcohol-related illnesses shortly after Jane graduated college, but after a few years of tending to her mother-in-law, she saw that there were worse things you could do to your children than die young.

  “Do you watch our show regularly?” Jane asked.

  “If I’m home at that time, which isn’t very often. Caroline watches. It was just luck I caught Rosemary.”

  “What do you think of it, in general?”

  “I don’t know how you keep it so consistent.”

  “Ah. In other words, same old thing over and over?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He rattled his ice and stared off across the room, pulling his thick black eyebrows together. Jane tapped her glass, waiting for the qualification. “Although, to be honest, I have wondered how much longer you’re planning to stay with it.”

  Here we go, she thought. “Funny, I wouldn’t have imagined you spend a lot of time thinking about my career plans.”

  “I’ve always been interested in your career, you know that.”

  When they first met, Jane had been on the staff of a local weekly, writing news and features. Dale had been the one who encouraged her to get into TV and even provided the connection that got her her first job. (Harvard was basically a four-year networking seminar.) She’d earned her current position through hard work, but she knew she hadn’t been aggressive enough about developing another project, something of her own, something that moved her career forward a few notches before Dinner Conversation was finally euthanatized. She resented Dale for bringing it up, almost as much as she resented Thomas for not taking her career worries more seriously. But she couldn’t let him wound her so easily.

  “I’ve been working on a big project for a while now,” she said. “I don’t know if anything’s going to come of it, but it’s looking good.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” He stirred his ice cubes, an excuse to draw attention to an expensive wristwatch. “What are the details?”

  She wanted to think he was pumping her for information so he could catch her in a lie, but the way he asked, the way he leaned almost imperceptibly toward her across the tiny table, made her think it wasn’t that at all, it was much worse: it was genuine interest. Any entrepreneurial endeavor got his blood pounding and he’d always encouraged her to be imaginative.

  Just her luck that after all those years of Thomas encouraging her to relax and take time off, someone was finally grilling her about career advancement when she had nothing to display for show-and-tell. She’d let herself drift, had allowed herself to get distracted by motherhood. That had its own amazing rewards, but they weren’t ones people like Dale—people who desperately wanted a child themselves but couldn’t have one—would appreciate. She’d drifted further by convincing Thomas they needed a bigger house, with more space, and had ended up with a white elephant with endless space for hosting Sarah and all kinds of friends and relatives she’d rather not host. They should have bought an apartment on Beacon Hill. It wouldn’t have been that much more expensive and they would have been within walking distance of Symphony Hall and theaters and museums, places that might have inspired her. What a grotesque miscalculation to think that they were doing the right thing for Gerald by moving to Brookline where they could have that most useless of American obsessions, a yard. Gerald hated the outdoors. Two minutes of direct sunlight and he broke out in bright, stinging rashes. As for sports, he sneered at all of them and had asked Thomas to take down the basketball net the previous owners had left because he hated looking at it from the window of his third-floor “apartment.” Now they had a half acre of overgrown grass, flower beds gone to seed and weed, and bushes they couldn’t identify covering up most of their windows. Thomas occasionally spent a Saturday morning shoving around a squeaky lawnmower, a practice that almost always produced a strained lower back and a circle of hacked up grass that looked as if a field animal had been chewing on it
.

  Never mind any of it. She wasn’t about to let Dale get the best of her, make her feel bad about her own life when the entire purpose of this meeting was to make him feel bad about his. She smiled at him and finished off the rest of the martini. Yesterday, Caroline had faxed her a detailed outline of Desmond Sullivan’s Lewis Westerly biography, and she’d scanned it into her computer and retyped bits of it so she could pass it along to Thomas as her own work. This morning, she’d read a couple of chapters, thinking she might find a topic for a dinner conversation and be able to use Desmond Sullivan as a guest.

  “I’ve put together a proposal for a series of biographical documentaries,” she said, amazed by the conviction in her own voice. “One-hour pieces, probably a series of six, although that depends on how successful it is. It easily could be expanded.”

  “Biographies.” Dale nodded. “I thought cable had that all sewn up—Lifetime, A&E, no?”

  Now he was showing his true colors, knocking down her work before she’d even explained it. “This is something that hasn’t been done before. An entire series on lost or forgotten American artists—writers, performers, painters.”

  “Ah. The forgotten genius angle,” he said. “That’s always popular.”

  “The forgotten geniuses have all been remembered. People are sick of them. This is much more interesting and much more commercial. The whole culture is drifting away from geniuses and exceptional people who only make the rest of us feel inadequate. My series is about the true cultural influences: forgotten mediocrities.”