He parked just beyond the driveway, took off his T-shirt, and wiped down his back with it. He slipped on the dress shirt standing on the street and gazing up at the house.
Jane answered the door, talking into a cordless phone she had cradled against her neck. It was the same woman he’d seen the week before, dressed in the same creamy blouse and colorful Bakelite necklace. She motioned him into the house and made a gesture of annoyance toward the phone. Her voice had the tone of husky, almost bullying self-confidence which he’d heard her use on the street and which he found inexplicably reassuring. Desmond didn’t want to appear to be listening, but there wasn’t much to look at in the front hallway: a chair, a brass coat rack, and a little table with letters on it.
“I know what you mean,” Jane said, “but I haven’t had a chance to talk it over with Thomas. He might have plans. No, no nothing like that, it’s just that Thomas has allergies. And Gerald is so . . . urban.” She looked at Desmond and shrugged, apologizing for something, although he didn’t know what. “Well, I’ll get back to you after we’ve had a chance to talk it over. You’ll never guess who just walked in. Desmond Sullivan. Yes, that one. I’m trying to get him on board this project I told you about. I will.”
She switched off the phone and tossed it onto the chair by the door. “My ex-husband’s current wife,” she told Desmond. “She wants me to tell you she loved your book.” She reached back to lift her hair off her neck and then stopped with her elbow pointed out, as if a thought had just occurred to her. “If you were me,” she said, “would you go away for a weekend with your ex-husband and his new wife?”
It struck Desmond as a peculiarly personal question, especially since they hadn’t even exchanged names. He supposed she was being ironic, but there was something sincere in her wistful expression and the way she was standing with her hand clutching at her hair. “Not just the two of them and you?” he asked.
“No!” She dropped her hair. “I didn’t give that impression, did I?”
“No, no. Just making sure.” He tried to imagine how Russell would respond; Russell generally had more success in social situations that required irreverent spontaneity, while he fared better in situations in which silence could be interpreted as discretion. He opted for the simple truth. “I suppose I’d have to go,” he said. “Just to prove to myself and to him that he didn’t matter to me one way or the other anymore.”
She seemed to consider this point. Desmond handed her a bottle of wine. She glanced at the label and tossed it onto the chair with the phone.
“There’s a good chance this dinner is going to be a fiasco, so don’t judge me by it. I invited too many people. I’m not doing the cooking so at least the food should be edible. My recommendation is to ride with it and have a good time. I’d love to meet with you next week and discuss my ideas for a series of biographies I’m putting together. I’ve set up a meeting with an executive producer to try to get some seed money. He and I have worked together so long now, it might be useful to bring you into it, to give some weight and freshness to the proposal. Assuming you’re interested in getting involved?”
“I could be.”
“That’s great.” She took a small appointment book from a drawer in the table in the hall and scanned through the empty pages. “Is next Thursday all right? Around 3:30?”
“That sounds . . . fine,” Desmond said. He’d been anticipating the standard business of introductions and facile compliments about the house, but these were clearly beside the point, as if, unbeknownst to him, he and Jane had been friends and business partners for years. And something in her blunt, amiable manner did make him feel he could dispense with all of his usual wariness and get right to the risky business of being friends with her. The phone rang again. Jane looked at it for a moment. “It’s probably just my brother calling with an idiotic excuse for being late. He’s supposedly coming to dinner, but his wife is twelve months pregnant, so you never know.”
She was several inches shorter than Desmond, but she had a way of holding her chin up and at a slight angle so that she appeared to be looking down at him, not with condescension, he decided, but as if she were lining up her defenses in case there was an attack at some later point in the evening. Several buttons of her blouse were undone, exposing a surprising amount of cleavage, making it obvious that she genuinely liked her ample body. Forty, Desmond guessed, and determined to be happy about it.
She nodded toward the back of the house, inviting him to follow her. “Don’t mind the mess,” she said. “Gerald is six. Although hopelessly tidy, come to think of it.” She had on a pair of white, low-heeled sandals that clacked against her soles as she walked. They didn’t exactly go with the rest of her outfit but drew attention to her slim, shapely legs. Beautiful ankles, Desmond thought, although that wasn’t the kind of thing he was used to noticing on anyone.
“So, briefly,” Desmond said, “what is your idea about the series?”
“I’ve been trying to put together a series of biographies for years now, but I never found a theme to make it all cohere. When I was reading the Westerly biography, it struck me that it was a mistake to focus on the greats in history when the mediocrities on the edges tell us so much more about the culture. I’m thinking in that direction. Westerly might be a good place to start, unless you’re working on someone even more marginal at the moment.” They were passing through a front parlor, a thin room filled, in a desultory way, with new sofas and chairs in light shades of brown. Neither pretty nor ugly, the furniture was so aggressively bland and self-effacing it was almost invisible. Desmond had the distinct impression no one ever used the room. “You are working on another biography, aren’t you?”
“I’m very close to finished,” Desmond said. “A singer named Pauline Anderton.”
“Oh good, another one I’ve never heard of. I hope she had a shameful secret tucked away in some closet.”
“I was hoping that, too, but I’ve finished most of the research and I think she told all of her shameful secrets to anyone who’d listen.”
“Well, maybe we can tweak things a bit,” Jane said.
They’d come to a narrow, wainscoted hallway off the kitchen. Two young men wearing blue jeans and chef’s aprons were standing at the kitchen counter chopping vegetables and talking in low voices. When they spotted Jane, they looked up and smiled, slightly embarrassed and intimidated. They had on baseball caps with the brims turned backward. A plump, oddly large child was standing on a chair, using a canvas pastry bag to decorate the top of a cake. “The little one is mine,” Jane said. “Gerald, care to say hello to our dinner guest?”
The boy looked up from his work, red-faced and angry, and said, “I nearly spoiled the whole thing, Jane. Is that what you want?”
Desmond recoiled at the voice, a bizarrely adult growl, dripping with resentment and a surprisingly well-developed sense of irony. The kid had Thomas’s coloring and a bloated version of his shape. His hair was close-cropped, almost as if his head had been shaved, making his face look perfectly round.
Jane was not the least bit put off; if anything, she seemed eager to encourage him and engage in a test of wills. “As I remember it,” she said, “I merely asked if you wanted to say hello. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
“Hello,” he mocked and went back to his work.
“Difficult age,” Jane said. “He usually has hair, but lice or fleas or something were going around his school. I’d be worried about getting them, but he isn’t one of those touchy-feely kids.”
Helen was splayed out on the kitchen floor, her eyes trained on the caterers.
“He must be happy to have Helen around.”
“He’s not a dog person, either.”
She had her hand on a screen door leading out to a porch, and as she was about to push it open, Desmond said: “I saw you walking Helen along Newbury Street last week.”
Without turning around, she said: “Really? You recognized the dog?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Desmond said. “You weren’t.”
Jane held the door open, blocking his way with her arm, and smiled at him. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but I was afraid you were going to be one of those dashing men with slicked-back hair. Light up the dinner party and then head off for an assignation before dessert. I’m so glad you’re not.”
He knew he should have been insulted on at least three different levels even though—or perhaps because—her appraisal of what he wasn’t was so accurate, but he found himself pleased that she approved of him, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. “I tend to make the worst of what I’ve got,” he said.
“That’s a very becoming trait in a man,” she said, “as long as you’re not married to him.”
2.
She led Desmond out to a wide, unpainted deck that still smelled of fresh cedar. The land behind the house dropped off precipitously, creating the illusion that the deck was floating off the back of the house. There was a stand of trees somewhere at the edge of the lawn, and rising above it was the skyline of Boston, glittering through the haze of the sticky twilight. A long table was set for dinner, and beside it, in a black wrought iron chair, a woman was gazing at the city and sipping from a wineglass. Although she must have heard them approach—Jane’s sandals slapped against the new boards—she sat turned away, as if she were deep in thought or hard of hearing. Or more likely, Desmond thought as he took in her appearance, striving to make a dramatic entrance, even though they were the ones entering. Her dark hair was gathered in a tight little knob that sat on the crown of her head and added length to what was already an exceptionally long and graceful neck.
“It’s a great view,” Desmond said. In fact, he was tired of views by now and longed for a filthy air shaft every once in a while, but it was the kind of view that demanded comment.
“If only it were a great city,” the woman in the chair said.
Jane introduced her as Rosemary Boyle, “the writer.” He had a dim memory of having heard the name and said, “Ah,” in a tone he hoped suggested impressed recognition.
“Rosemary and I have been friends since college,” Jane said.
“More or less,” Rosemary added cryptically.
“Rosemary’s here to teach at BU and hating every minute of it.”
“Not every.” Rosemary seemed to be leaving open the possibility that this could be one of the exceptions, providing you kept her properly entertained.
Jane strolled back into the house. Desmond looked down at the lawn, the carriage house, and back at the skyline, grabbing at easy observations that might lead somewhere. Everything he said was answered with an enigmatic comment that was clipped enough to sound unkind without being specific enough to be insulting. She was the physical opposite of Jane, a meticulously slim woman with two pencil slashes for eyebrows and a dark purple bow of a mouth. Everything about her was so tight and smooth, she looked as if she’d been zipped into her pale skin. She was holding her wineglass in a limp-wristed grasp that suggested debilitating ennui. As the evening wore on, it became obvious to Desmond that she’d decided that appearing to be completely uninterested in almost everything somehow made her more interesting, probably a manifestation of low self-esteem, but an irritating one. She ran her eyes up and down Desmond, then turned away, leaving him feeling as if he’d been given an exam and had flunked with flying colors.
“Jane tells me you’re teaching out at Deerforth with Thomas. I suppose it’s hideous.”
Desmond felt a pang of sympathy for his colleague, not to mention himself. “As a matter of fact, the campus is gorgeous,” he said.
“Yes. That’s what I meant.”
Professional jealousy, Desmond assumed. The Boston University campus appeared to be made up of subway stops and traffic lights with a few Burger Kings thrown in for atmosphere.
“It’s been great having Thomas out there to help me settle in. He’s extremely kind.”
Rosemary shrugged. “It’s easy to be kind when you’re as depressed as he is.”
He was tempted to follow her down this path until they were taking open swipes at each other, but in addition to the fact that he was getting a little long in the tooth for this kind of boxing match, he couldn’t be entirely sure she wouldn’t report back to Jane on her opinion of him, and he didn’t want to sour what looked like a promising relationship. It was always hard to judge female friendships, which, in most cases, turned out to involve a good deal more intimacy and exchange of information than most marriages. It was usually safest to assume you were talking to a small discussion group, even when you were one on one. “So,” he said, “how many books is it you have in print . . . now.” The “now” was tossed in at the last minute as a way of suggesting that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep up with her output. Hopefully she wasn’t unpublished.
“The three collections of poetry, the book of stories, and of course, Dead Husband.”
Of course. He had heard of her, had heard her interviewed more than once on National Public Radio, although he never would have connected this cool, austere woman with the widow he’d heard on air, heartbroken and elegiac, her voice practically melting with melancholy and regret.
“Congratulations on all your success.”
She toasted herself with her wineglass. “If I’d known the memoir was going to do so well, I would have written one years ago.”
Desmond nodded. Surely she had to wait for her husband to die, although maybe there were other deaths she could have exploited: Dead Mother, Dead Sister, Dead Dog. Come to think of it, it probably wasn’t too late for her to turn the whole thing into a lucrative cottage industry.
“Is your book still in print?”
He nodded, feeling a gesture was less of a lie than saying yes would have been. “I’m sure Jane’s mentioned her ideas about her and me working together.”
Rosemary drank down the rest of her wine and dismissed the possibility. “Jane and her ideas,” she said.
A few minutes later, Thomas walked around the side of the house and down the sloping lawn holding on to Gerald’s hand. The heavy humidity—everything was sweating, from the glasses to the furniture to the vegetable chips—seemed to have drained the color out of the sky and the trees, and the two figures looked like blurry cutouts on the overgrown grass. The row of low lanterns lining the pathway down to the carriage house below blinked on, and Thomas turned and waved up to Desmond and Rosemary with the kind of overdone enthusiasm that Desmond always found slightly embarrassing.
“I’ll be right up,” he called. “Gerald’s going to help his grandmother sign on to the Internet. Aren’t you?” He swung Gerald’s arm, but the boy didn’t turn around or speak. “Do you two need anything up there?”
“Common interests would help,” Rosemary said.
Thomas laughed at this and walked on. The lanterns were making eerie, poignant shadows on the lawn and magnifying the difference in height between father and child. Thomas was stooped slightly, obviously talking in a low, gentle voice to his son as they made their gradual descent. The sight of the two of them plodding along in the dim light stirred in Desmond a faint, jumbled longing—for a child, he assumed, although it wasn’t quite that clear. Russell occasionally mentioned the possibility of trying to adopt but Desmond had never taken the talk all that seriously, assuming it was Russell’s metaphoric way to express his disappointment that dogs weren’t allowed in their building. Still, he felt a lugubrious nostalgia for something he knew he’d never have, and wanting to include himself in this blurry twilit vignette, he called out, “Have fun, Gerald,” in a voice that was itself a little blurry.
The child stopped abruptly, turned, and said, “I intend to,” with the same disconcerting sarcasm he’d used in the kitchen.
“I’ll bet Thomas is a wonderful father,” Desmond said, a bit shaken. “You can tell he loves his son.”
“Can you think of a better excuse
for staying with Jane?” Rosemary said.
3.
Jane’s brother and sister-in-law arrived moments after the plates had been brought out to the table. Jane got up to answer the doorbell, and a few minutes later an immensely pregnant woman in a summer sundress printed with colorful Adirondack chairs tottered out to the back deck. She was short and small-boned, and she appeared to be balancing her stomach in front of her as if it were a tray of drinks she was about to serve to the guests. She had a Peter Pan haircut and a smile so broad it seemed to swallow up all her other features. There was something in her smile and her otherwise hesitant demeanor that struck Desmond as almost morbidly apologetic, begging forgiveness—not for being late, but for showing up at all. Thomas kissed her rather tenderly on the forehead and turned her around by the shoulders to show her off to the rest of the table. “Doesn’t Joyce look radiant? ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be’ . . . well, not nearly as radiant as you.”
“As long as no one bursts forth at the table,” Rosemary said.
Thomas fussed over Joyce’s chair, the bald top of his head shining in the candlelight when he bent over. Shortly before the caterers brought out the plates of food, Jane had carried out a mismatched assortment of candles, everything from absurdly thin tapers in glass holders to fat scented tubes that reminded Desmond of caféteria-sized cans of beans. She’d set them down on the table and the porch railing, and the light was restful and somehow cool, despite the increasingly thick humidity. Desmond hadn’t been able to shake Rosemary’s comment about Thomas being depressed, but his kindness toward Joyce struck him as simple generosity.
True Enough Page 13