True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  “You got the copy of Desmond’s book I sent up?” Jane asked.

  David pointed them toward a couple of chairs in front of his desk and took a cursory glance around the office. “Ummm . . .”

  “Maybe Chloe forgot to send it up. I’ll have her get on it this afternoon.”

  Desmond didn’t believe a word of it, and there was something in the annoyed way David was pursing his small mouth and stroking his goatee that suggested he didn’t buy it either.

  “The book is practically a classic,” Jane said. “One of the most important biographies of the last decade. Wouldn’t you say, Desmond?”

  She’d warned him not to contradict her, but surely she didn’t expect him to back her up on this one. “That might be overstating it just a bit.”

  David had his hands in front of his mouth now and he was impatiently tapping his fingertips together. He glanced at his watch, signaling that the introductory chitchat was over, and said, “So what are we discussing today?”

  Jane took a folder out of her briefcase and opened it on her lap. She leafed through the pages. From his seat beside her, Desmond could see the pages were mostly half-finished lists and old news clippings. Either she’d taken the wrong folder with her or hadn’t prepared for this meeting. But if she was thrown off, she didn’t let it stop her. “Let’s say I told you I wanted to propose a series of six fifty-minute biographical documentaries of American artists from assorted fields—literature, music, dance, and so on,” she said. “What would your first question be?”

  “Who,” David stated flatly.

  “Right. And if I told you: Hemingway, Sinatra, Isadora Duncan, your reaction would be?”

  He picked up a paper clip and started to unwind it. “Been there.”

  “I completely agree. How about Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Fred Astaire?”

  “Been there.” The paper clip was now a straight piece of metal he was twirling impatiently between his stubby fingers.

  “Steinbeck, Tony Bennett, Gene Kelly.”

  David frowned but said nothing. The office turned quiet and through the window Desmond could hear a great sigh as a truck passed on Soldiers Field Road. Desmond wanted to leap out of his chair and scream “Get on with it.” He made what he hoped was a discreet swipe at the sweat trickling down his forehead. Jane lifted a sheet of paper from the folder. At the top she’d written: “Goals For June” and underneath that, a half-finished sentence in illegible script. As if reading from the sheet, she said, “What if I said, Lewis Westerly? What if I said Pauline Anderton? What if I said Terry Benson?”

  Terry Benson?

  “I’d have no idea who you were talking about.” David’s voice had the same bored tone it had had earlier, but he’d stopped twirling the paper clip. “I’d assume you were talking about some forgotten American geniuses. Is that where we’re going here?”

  “Not quite.” Jane inched forward on her chair. “I see it this way, David: people are tired of hearing about the extraordinary. They don’t watch television for edification, they watch it to feel better about themselves. How else do you explain talk shows and court TV and the cop things with the pathetic bare-chested junkies handcuffed and shoved into cruisers?”

  Desmond could hear Jane turning the crank on her peculiar mediocrity argument. He disagreed with the small portion of this argument he understood and saw it as a highly unlikely selling point. And right now, sitting across from David, watching the paper clip in his hand and feeling sweat trickling down his back, he felt very much like a salesman. “We’re talking about geniuses of a different sort,” Desmond said. “We’re talking about artists whose genius is found in the honesty of their art. People are turning to real-life talk and court shows, as Jane said, because it’s honest, even if it is ugly. So much mass-produced, commercially viable art is synthetic and dishonest, you can’t be sure of a point of view or a true emotion. Pauline Anderton, the singer Jane just mentioned, wasn’t a perfect performer, but when you listen to her, you hear something true.”

  “Even if it is ugly,” Jane added.

  “And these are the people we’ll be profiling,” Desmond added. “The artists of truth.”

  David was fiddling with the paper clip, and Desmond could sense this meeting would be over in another ten minutes, at best. Desmond gave a quick summary of Pauline Anderton’s career, making note of a few of the highlights he found more interesting and then, when he sensed that David wasn’t quite convinced, dragging out the old standbys of alcoholism, her husband’s cancer, and a mild gambling addiction.

  “And this would tie in with Desmond’s upcoming book,” Jane said, “which we could easily use for fund-raising purposes.”

  David tossed down the paper clip, a sure sign that he’d heard enough. “I see what you’re getting at here,” David said, “but here’s the problem: we can’t do a bio series on people whose life stories are told every other week on Lifetime, but we also can’t do a series on some drunken housewife with a ten-minute career. Even if her story is interesting, who’s going to turn on the show to bother to find out?”

  “You’re not seeing the potential in this,” Jane said. “You do promos, you get Desmond on some radio shows to talk about her, make a teaser showing her doing a header off the stage. People will be riveted.”

  “Still, they never heard of her.”

  David pushed back his chair and an alarm went off in Desmond’s head and he saw himself falling down a long dark staircase. “Anderton,” he said, “may not be a household name, but look who she palled around with: Judy Garland, Mel Tormé, Frank Sinatra.”

  David’s chair rolled back toward his desk. “Sinatra?”

  “I’ve been in touch with Liza Minnelli, who’s more than willing to consider doing the narration.”

  “Really? You think you could get her to appear on film?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Jane said. “You said she’s been helpful all along, didn’t you, Desmond?”

  What amazed Desmond was that it had happened so effortlessly, this lapse into complete fabrication. Although he had to say, there was some grain of truth in it: Anderton did talk about Garland and had recorded some of Mel Tormé’s songs. Not true, but to quote Jane, true enough. At least for the moment.

  Ten

  The Spin Cycle

  1.

  Gerald was sitting at the table in the kitchen, grudgingly drinking his breakfast glass of milk. His pediatrician had told Jane that many children dislike milk. Go to the supermarket, he’d advised her, and look at all the products designed to disguise the buttery flavor of milk and its white viscosity. Sure enough, there were shelves of the stuff—powders and syrups and granules. So why did she take Gerald’s feeling of revulsion toward milk so personally, as if it were a subconscious rejection of her? She insisted he drink a glass of milk each morning for his bones and his teeth, but the real reason she made sure he choked it all down was that she wanted this daily reassurance of his acceptance.

  Thomas was driving Gerald to school in half an hour, and he still hadn’t returned from his morning jog. It worried her that he was being so consistent about jogging. As far as she could tell, he’d missed only two days in the past two weeks, and there hadn’t been much improvement in the weather. She had managed to talk him into going out in the mornings when it was cool, although he still ended his runs pink and sweating.

  “Did you finish your milk, sweetie?”

  “Lyuuuck!” He shuddered, and handed her his empty glass.

  She set a plate of toast in front of him and sat down at the table with her coffee. Gerald’s hair was beginning to grow in, which made him look less like a convict, but it was at that awkward middle stage of growth: spiky bristles sticking out all over. “What are you doing in school today?” she asked.

  “Something stupid and babyish probably.”

  Oh, Gerald, she wanted to tell him, I hope you don’t talk like that in front of your classmates. He had only one friend in school that she knew of, an eight-
year-old girl named after the city in which her parents had met: Plattsburgh. He sometimes went to her house to give her cooking lessons. Last week, her mother had called Jane to complain that Gerald was condescending to Plattsburgh and creating “self-esteem issues.” As if her name wasn’t a guarantee of that. If only she knew how to talk about any of this without hurting his feelings. He took a bite of his toast, chewed for a few seconds, and then let his mouth drop open. A lump of masticated bread plopped onto his plate.

  “Gerald! What was that?”

  He held up his toast. “What’s this?”

  He was making it sound as if she’d just tried to poison him, an effective tone to take since her conscience wasn’t clear. “It’s your toast, my dear, what do you think?”

  “What’s on it?”

  “Listen, mister, we ran out of butter and I haven’t had a chance to go shopping, so I used margarine. Which happens to be good for you.” That was unlikely, seeing as everything, including breathing, was unhealthy.

  “I hate it! You know I hate it!”

  “Gerald, sweetie, I will go shopping today and I will get you some butter. Sweet, unsalted, not in quarters but in a one-pound block, just the way you like it. All right?”

  “That doesn’t do me much good this morning.”

  Where had he learned to talk like this? What gremlin crawled up the stairs to his third-floor “apartment” each night and gave tutorials in sarcasm and bullying? If only she had the option of blaming it all on TV, life would be easier. But Gerald had almost no interest in television, aside from the occasional cooking show. And what was the right thing to do now? Punish him? Run down to the store on the corner and buy some butter? Get to work at the churn? She picked up his plate and put it into the sink, ran water over it and turned on the disposal. “I can offer you cereal, banana, or peanut butter sandwich.”

  “Lyuck, lyuck, lyuuuuck.”

  Thomas walked in the back door, mopping his face with his T-shirt.

  “Morning, boys and girls. What’s the racket in here?”

  Jane watched as Gerald looked from one parent to the other, made a mental calculation of some kind, and said, “Nothing. I wasn’t hungry, that’s all.”

  It was a clear-cut case of divide and conquer, but she wasn’t going to enter into the fray by further explanation. It was better to allow herself the luxury of believing it just didn’t matter.

  “Is that so?” Thomas asked. “Well, maybe if we have time, and you decide you are hungry, we can stop on the way to school and pick you up a bagel. How does that sound?”

  Gerald shrugged. “I’d prefer a muffin.”

  Thomas chugged down a big glass of water. “We’ll see about that,” he said, mild but in control. His skin looked firmer, and that girdle of fat that clung to his waist was definitely shrinking. Perhaps he’d changed his diet as well, in subtle ways she wouldn’t necessarily notice—smaller portions, skipping lunches. People like Thomas, thinkers who ordinarily didn’t register on exercise as a part of daily life, didn’t take up jogging all of a sudden unless something was troubling them, unless they felt they needed to spruce themselves up.

  “How come you’re so wet?” Gerald asked.

  “I’ve been running in the heat. And when you get hot, your body perspires, and the water on your skin evaporates and cools you down.”

  “Do you like running?”

  Thomas cocked his head. “Do I like it? You know, I hadn’t thought of it in that way. I was viewing it more as a daily trip to the dentist. Although now that you mention it, I am beginning to enjoy it. It gives me more patience. It’s helped me put some things in perspective.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Little things,” he said. “I hope they’re little. Now you better get ready or we’ll have to skip the muffin.”

  Little things. He could be talking about students, the ever-grating English Department, a paper he was trying to finish on The Confidence-Man. And yet the weary tone of his voice suggested it was something more personal. She owed it to him to tell him that she was seeing Dr. Berman again. It was a simple, matter-of-fact way to start opening up to her husband. She could even report on what she was discussing with Berman, since she hadn’t opened up to the good doctor very much.

  Gerald turned as he was leaving the kitchen. “Why do we have to go to New Hampshire? I hate New Hampshire.”

  Thomas knelt on the floor in front of him and said, “We’ve been asked by some very nice people, and it would be rude to say no, and there’s a beautiful lake, and even though you don’t realize it yet, you’re going to have a good time.”

  “I hate water.”

  Thomas chuckled and gave him a gentle nudge toward the hallway. When they could hear him stomping up the stairs, he grabbed a banana and said, “I have to run. I have to take Sarah for her checkup later this morning. What do you have on today?”

  “Too much to remember.” He came and kissed her on the forehead, and as he was leaving, she said, “Thomas, I wish you hadn’t told Caroline we’d go to the lake.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  His back was to her, but there was something unsettling in the way he’d asked, almost as if he was testing her, or possibly trying to trip her up. From the moment they’d met, she’d been careful never to mention Dale in ways that would make Thomas think she had any good feelings for him lingering on the edges of her subconscious. It wasn’t exactly a struggle, since she wasn’t aware of any lingering good feelings.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It might be awkward.”

  “There’ll be lots of family and friends floating around. I think it will be fine. It will be good for Gerald.”

  “He hates New Hampshire.”

  “He’s never been, Jody. By the way, I was on the deck and overheard some of the toast discussion. Don’t take it all so seriously. He’s only six.”

  2.

  When she got out of her appointment with Dr. Berman, she felt worse than she’d felt in weeks. What she’d wanted to discuss with him was her inability to tell Thomas she was back in therapy, but the more she thought about it and the harder she tried to find a way to bring it up, the more impossible it seemed. It was the kind of thing she should have mentioned immediately, in the first or second session; telling it now, after months of twice-weekly meetings, would probably make Berman think she was acting out or resisting treatment. She gave up the idea and rambled on in a monotone about how abandoned she’d felt when her parents had died. That was always good to kill time, and it was the kind of topic that seemed to please Berman. It was probably useful, in a therapeutic sense, even though she was almost certain she’d worked through all that material years ago. And yet, driving back to her office, she felt so frustrated, she called Desmond from her cell phone and asked him if he’d like to meet her later in the day for coffee. He’d love to, he told her. He said it in such a heartfelt, relieved voice, it was obvious he was lonely, sitting around that grim room reading student papers and listening to Pauline Anderton. She felt such a flush of sympathy for him, she decided to go all out and suggested they meet at the Ritz.

  It was late afternoon when she walked into the golden lounge on the second floor of the hotel. She scanned the room and realized that she was probably underdressed, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She’d been to tea at the Ritz one other time and had left wondering if all the ladies in pearls and boiled wool jackets weren’t paid actors, hired to sit politely nibbling on their sandwiches and straining their tea. Desmond was sitting at a table in the corner, smoothing down the pink tablecloth with his hand. He stood and grinned when he spotted her, but as she was making her way toward him, she saw an expectant look on his face, his eyes a little more wide open than usual, something hopeful in the grin. She’d made a mistake in suggesting this place. Why invite someone to the Ritz unless you had some good news to announce, something to celebrate? Why not meet at any boring coffeehouse unless you were going to report that the station had okayed your p
roposal and was coming up with the money?

  “You’re looking pretty lovely,” he said. He held out a chair for her.

  “Too bad. I was hoping I was underdressed.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. You look perfect.”

  You could always count on a gay man to flatter you. And when one did, she usually ended up feeling only halfway complimented. The myth about their superior taste made no sense to her, but experience had taught her it was frequently true. You couldn’t discount the praise, but given a moment to think it over, she invariably felt a sputter of disappointment. It was like drinking nonalcoholic beer—tastes like the real thing, but where’s the buzz? He was wearing a tie and a sports jacket, which probably meant he’d called ahead to find out if there was a dress code. He looked handsome in a slightly disheveled way, and she was so grateful for his flattery—or half compliment or whatever—she practically delivered a panegyric on his outfit.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, “but I appreciate it.”

  The room was filled with proper Boston ladies, the same cast or identical stand-ins she’d seen here last time, and a few young couples, one nestled together on a love seat feeding each other cookies. Desmond nodded toward a corner where a woman dressed in pale purple was playing a harp. “We should either be much older or in love with each other.”

  “Let’s just be voyeurs,” she said. “It always sounds to me as if harpists are playing Debussy. Which is odd because I have no idea what Debussy sounds like.”

  “Not like this. Unless I’m mistaken, she’s doing a medley of Rodgers and Hart.”

  She wasn’t about to admit she couldn’t name a single song she was absolutely certain had been written by that particular team. Basically, she lumped the whole of the American songbook under the “show tunes” umbrella. “Thomas would know the composer immediately, along with the date it was written and who first recorded it. He’s full of information.” She thought this over for a moment. “And wisdom, too.”