This was hardly the reaction he’d anticipated when he went out last night and bought a copy of Rosemary’s slim, successful memoir. There was that absurdly bad title, for one thing, and for another, there was chilly, churlish Rosemary herself. He’d been expecting one of those self-serving, pity-me tomes, full of trumped-up anguish and insulting jabs aimed at everyone who had the misfortune of crossing the author’s path. What he found instead was a love story and one of the more moving love stories he’d read in years. Although billed as a memoir of widowhood, it was really a portrait of a complicated and loving marriage. More pages were devoted to the living Charlie than to the corpse of the title, and Rosemary herself came off as a fiercely independent woman who also managed to be an unapologetically devoted wife. More to the point, she came off as a person with something of importance to say on the subject of love.
He kept waiting for Jane to make an appearance in the book, but the closest to a mention he was able to find was reference to a friend named “Karla” (quote marks Rosemary’s) who lived in Detroit and had made a second marriage to a loutish man for money and security after divorcing a handsome skirt chaser. This was in a chapter called “The Other Widows,” a list of friends and relatives who’d lost their husbands, not to death, but to lovers, divorce, or, in one case, disappearance. “The world rallies around them, touched as they are by the glamour of abandonment and betrayal, rather than the stench of death.” That was one way of looking at it.
He checked his watch. It was almost nine o’clock. He had no idea what Rosemary’s social life was like, but it was a Saturday night and therefore unlikely she’d be asleep, assuming she hadn’t drunk herself into a stupor. And even if she had, he didn’t object to the thought of rousing her. Earlier in the evening, he and Russell had had one of their most distressing conversations yet, and surprisingly, he found himself longing to talk about it with Rosemary.
In the middle of a desultory exchange of news items—Roger Lovell this, Melanie that—Russell had mentioned that the person who’d been subletting his studio apartment in the Lower East Side for the past five years had called him to say she was moving out of the city. A job in Houston, poor thing. “You shouldn’t have any trouble finding someone,” Desmond had said. “No,” Russell said, “assuming I decide to look for someone.” Ah. And did that mean he was thinking of finally giving the place up? “Those are two of the three available options,” Russell had said.
Desmond hadn’t thought about this enigmatic statement until after they’d hung up. Replaying the conversation in his head, the only third option he could think of was that Russell would keep the place and not sublet it or, to narrow it down even further, move back in himself. If it was supposed to be a threat, it wasn’t a very credible one. For one thing, the place was so tiny, it wouldn’t accommodate Russell’s collection of cocktail shakers, let alone the rest of his life. But why raise it as a possibility, even obliquely, unless the thought had crossed his mind? Twice in the past five years, there had a been a change in tenant in the apartment, and twice Russell had made noises about giving the place up. The sublet racket he was running, like most housing situations in the city, was technically illegal, and the only way he could justify keeping his name on the lease was by keeping the rent a mere $50 above what he paid. Desmond had always encouraged him to hang on to the place. You never knew when it might come in handy for some friend who suddenly found himself homeless or some elderly relative who was sick of the suburbs and thought Avenue C might be a nice change of pace. Desmond often found an image of the tiny, dark apartment floating into his mind when he and Russell were having an especially vituperative argument or when he was feeling closed in by Russell’s stuff, both the physical and the emotional kind. He’d frequently imagined suggesting to Russell that he think about moving back into the studio, but he’d never imagined Russell coming up with the idea on his own. He’d redialed the New York number to ask Russell for clarification, but there was no answer, so instead he lay on his bed and wept his way through the final pages of Dead Husband.
Too bad if Rosemary was asleep or passed out; part of the price of fame was taking calls from troubled fans. She answered her phone with an unpromising rasp. “Friend or foe?” she demanded.
“Neither, I’m afraid,” Desmond said. “Friend of a friend is the best I can do.”
“Ah, Mr. Sullivan. Friend of many friends it seems.” She coughed and cleared her throat.
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“Not yet. What can I help you with?”
“I was wondering if you’d like to meet me somewhere for a drink.”
She sighed deeply and with what sounded like genuine dismay. “I doubt it’s as simple as all that. What’s your ulterior motive?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it an ulterior motive. I wanted to talk to you about Dead Husband.”
“Oh, Christ. I was hoping for something a little more challenging. I’ll tell you what: if you bring a bottle of inexpensive red wine, I’ll let you in. That way we get to have our drinks and I don’t have to change out of my jammies.”
As he was creeping down the staircase, Loretta called, “Where you headed, Mr. Sullivan?”
“Out,” he said. He was officially done with filling in Loretta and Henry on every detail of his life. The final straw had come when they’d grilled him about Brian Cody, about his dark good looks, his exceptionally fashionable wardrobe, all in a way that Desmond found insulting, as if they were amazed that someone who looked like Brian would be visiting someone who looked like him.
It was a mild night, remarkable (or frightening, he wasn’t sure which) for early November in Boston, and as he walked along Marlborough Street, he could hear the music and laughter of dinner parties spilling from open windows. Someone in a house somewhere behind him was playing Chopin on a piano, not well, but with halting tenderness. It was an etude, one of those melancholy Chopin etudes full of rivers and flickering light and longing. Boris had studied this piece last year, and Desmond and Russell had lain in bed together listening to him struggle through it night after night for more than a month until finally he could play it from beginning to end without stopping, gliding over his own mistakes as deftly as a skier absorbing bumps on an uneven slope. Desmond hadn’t been able to figure out why he had found Boris’s gawky performance so touching, but now, listening to this other, slightly more accomplished pianist, he heard the elusive ghost of the piece as it was intended to be played and heard the performer reaching for it, fingers outstretched, inching close but not quite taking hold. You could hear the longing in the performer as clearly as you could hear it in the music itself. He and Russell had been reaching toward something, too, but it seemed as if they’d missed it and he had no idea how to get back on track. Perhaps Rosemary, unlikely expert that she appeared to be, could tell him how to do it.
2.
She lived in a narrow brownstone one block from the river. The immense buildings of BU loomed above her street, making it feel both protected and closed in by the institution, the way much of Boston felt protected and closed in by its many universities. She buzzed him in, and he climbed the staircase to the second floor, the polished wood of the banister and walls gleaming from the reflected light of a brass chandelier. He knocked, and from somewhere inside, he heard her call out, “It’s unlocked.”
He entered into a long, dark hallway, and followed the light into the living room. There, seated on a cluttered red sofa, was a hugely fat yellow cat. It looked at Desmond as disdainfully as Rosemary had the first time he’d met her, slowly roused itself, and, with a sullen backward glance, disappeared through an arched doorway. “Take a seat,” Rosemary shouted.
Easier said than done, Desmond thought. Most of the furniture in the round, candlelit room was covered with newspapers and books spread open. Not quite what he’d expected, given Rosemary’s meticulous appearance, but he brushed some cat hair from the overstuffed sofa and sat. There was a bay of curved windows opposite him, and thr
ough them he could see a towering wall of scattered lights in what appeared to be a building of classrooms. It was as if an ocean liner were parked outside. An open copy of his Lewis Westerly biography was sticking out from under the sofa, and embarrassed by the sight of it—it was open to page 107—he tapped it out of sight with his foot.
Rosemary emerged from the kitchen with a wineglass in one hand, waving lightly at the air around her head with the other. “Fucking toaster oven burns every fucking thing I put in it. I was trying to play the hostess and defrost some cheese things the previous tenant left in the freezer and look what happens.” Desmond stood, but she motioned him back into his seat. She had on a man’s red silk bathrobe and a pair of red velvet slippers. Her hair was loosed from its usual tight bun and fell around her shoulders, dark and sleek. “I’m sorry about the mess,” she said. “I haven’t had many visitors here so I’ve let the place go completely to hell. It’s been quite thrilling to watch the deterioration. Next I suppose I’ll leave out containers of rotting food and dirty undies. It came furnished, so I had to mark my territory somehow.”
Desmond handed her a bottle of wine. “I didn’t give you much notice.”
“I hate people who do; they tell you they’re coming next Tuesday meaning you damn well better have the place presentable and something edible in the fridge. I prefer these last-minute arrangements. Someone calls you up with despair in his voice and demands to be seen right away. You light a few candles in the hopes they’ll hide a multitude of sins.”
“Did I have despair in my voice?”
“That’s how I interpreted it. Why else would I have invited you over?”
She took a sip from her wineglass, handed it to him, and headed back to the kitchen with his bottle. He wasn’t sure if this was his drink or if he’d been assigned the task of holding it for her, but when she reappeared a few minutes later, she was drinking from a glass so full she had to sip carefully. She sat at the opposite end of the sofa, one leg tucked under her. “Your wine is much better than mine,” she said. “You don’t mind finishing up that stuff, do you?”
He was insulted by the request but flattered by her honesty. “I guess not,” he said.
Rosemary frowned, as if she was disappointed by his answer, proof that she wasn’t dealing with a worthy opponent. She threw an arm across the back of the sofa, and the red silk robe slid open. Desmond could see the curve of one pale breast and the dark edge of her nipple. She was watching him over the rim of her wineglass, and flustered, he turned to the window. The lit-up building offered some dull conversational inspiration. “How are your classes going?” he asked.
“Oh, please. You don’t really think I’m the kind of person who sits around my apartment wondering how my classes are going, do you? I put in my time, they send me my paychecks; as for the children . . .” She shrugged.
“And yet,” he said, “I suspect you’re a good teacher.”
“Of course I am, albeit in a monstrous Miss Jean Brodie sort of way. I get personal with them immediately, talk endlessly about myself, and ask all kinds of inappropriate questions about their sex lives. I don’t know what they learn, but at least everyone stays awake, which is more than someone like Thomas Miller can claim.”
Or Sybil Gale or any number of the professors Desmond had taught with, each of whom claimed to care more about his students than Rosemary. What if she turned out to be the truly devoted teacher and they turned out to be self-absorbed academics who couldn’t read the pulse of the students sitting and snoozing in front of them? Still, every harsh word out of her mouth made the sad, thoughtful narrator of Dead Husband seem more like a fictional creation. He looked at her warily and said, “How much of what you say should I believe?”
“I’d suggest taking the all-or-nothing approach. It’s so much more relaxing than having to engage your mind and judge every word out of my mouth. Plus, as you can tell, I’m ever so slightly drunk.” She gazed out the window, and then turned back to him with a mournful droop in her eyes. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her pale, naked face, eyebrows carefully plucked into thin lines, looked like an unfinished portrait. With her hair loosed from its bun, the skin on her face was less taut, more carelessly draped around the bones of her cheeks.
Desmond found his eyes wandering back to her exposed breast and thought that if he could do so without there being any consequences, he’d like to reach in and cup it, feel the softness and weight of it in his hand. She seemed to be trying, with a mixture of derision and depression, to seduce him into making this kind of overture, although from his point of view, it wouldn’t be an overture but the whole symphony. She caught him staring again and said, “Are you looking at my tits with desire or envy?”
“Just looking.”
“I should blush, but I don’t know how.” She stretched back on the sofa, basking in his discomfort, and said, “Just so we can get this out of the way, what is it you wanted to say about that book?”
“I wanted to tell you how much I liked it. I hated coming to the end, and, to be honest, I was deeply moved by the way you talked about love. And more specifically, about your marriage.”
“Did you weep?”
“Yes. More than once.”
She frowned and lifted her wineglass to her mouth. “People are always telling me they wept reading it. It makes me think there’s something wrong with me for not shedding a single tear while writing it. Since we’re both in the scribbling game, I’ll let you in on a secret: I think one of the great tragedies of our time is the way people insist upon being ironic about everything. Look at me; I’m practically drowning in the stuff. I have to undercut everything I say with irony, and in addition to being time-consuming, it’s emotionally exhausting. And worse than that, the huddled masses in this country have equated irony with its lesser cousin, sarcasm, mostly thanks to good old television. So when I sat down to write the book, I decided to hell with irony, let’s try something new here; let’s get really sophisticated and go for heartfelt sincerity and big-time earnest.
“There were several hundred thousand ways I could have written about that relationship, since my feelings about it and about Charlie himself shifted by the minute through all those endless years of our marriage. And believe me, they were endless, each and every one of the fifteen. So I thought, okay, let’s just pick an attitude and stick with it. And then it hit me: true love. Why not? Give the people what they want. Out with irony, in with love. And boy oh boy, did it ever work. If you don’t believe me, call my accountant.”
She got up from the sofa, and he followed her into the kitchen, a small, spotless room that looked as if she rarely entered it. There was still a thin layer of smoke from the toaster oven hovering in the air near the ceiling. Desmond opened the window a crack to let in a warm breeze, and watched as the smoke dispersed. Rosemary poured herself more wine, but when Desmond held out his own glass, she dumped in a mere splash.
“Can’t you do a little better than that?” he asked.
She pouted, but filled up the glass, and for the first time, Desmond felt a flicker of approval from her. He was still reeling from her description of her book, a confession of complete cynicism as far as he could tell, but delivered in a confusingly earnest tone. When they returned to the living room, he went and stood at the windows, gazing out at the wall of lights, while she repositioned herself on the sofa. The big yellow cat stalked back into the room and gave Desmond another disgruntled look, as if to say, “Still here?”
“I didn’t figure you for a cat person,” Desmond said.
The cat sprang up to her lap and she began running her hand down its back in long, languid strokes. “I love my pussy,” she said. “Fuddy and I have been together a long time.”
Desmond watched the performance for a few more minutes. When she dropped her guard, stopped insulting you and lapping at her wine, she looked remarkably vulnerable, especially tonight, dressed in that red robe, her hair falling around her shoulders. He decided to take a chance at pr
ovoking more insults and said, “You know, Rosemary, I don’t believe what you just told me about your book. I don’t believe you calculated the whole thing, cooked up a scheme with your accountant. I think you wrote it from your gut.”
Rosemary pushed the cat off her lap and brushed clumps of fur from her robe. “A romantic. That’s charming. Not to me, but to a lot of people. The book is full of truths, Desmond, truths of the human heart. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t have responded to it as you did. And the desk in my bedroom wouldn’t be stacked to the ceiling with mail from readers wounded by love and death and the rancid bore of daily living. Is the book completely honest about my relationship with Charlie? Only he and I know, and neither one of us is talking.”
She raised her thin, carefully plucked eyebrows, as if to say, Any more questions? He ought to invite her into his Creative Nonfiction class, have her give a lecture on this very point. Really, she should be the one teaching it. His students seemed to have grasped half of what she was saying—the withering dismissal of honesty as a concept with any relevance—and then done her one better by tossing truth into the trash heap as well.
“I had a very interesting call from Jane about an hour ago,” she said, “just after you called me.”
The tone in her voice suggested she had some tragic piece of news she couldn’t wait to report. Desmond moved away from the window and cleared off a chair opposite her. “Everything all right?”
“In the long run, yes. In the short term, a big stir. Joyce . . .”—she flicked her hand—“whatever her name is . . . Cody, I suppose, finally decided to go into labor, and guess where Brian was?”
“I have no idea,” Desmond said, probably too eagerly. At least not at my place, he thought.
“No one does, that’s just it. In any case, not at home. Thomas Miller ended up rushing her off to the hospital and poor Jane was calling all the likely suspects, trying to locate her brother. I have a feeling you might have a message from her on your machine, although I assured her you were headed in this direction for a visit.”
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