Anderton claimed to hate going on the road and leaving her husband, Michael, her daughter, and her goldfish. “My family is the most important part of my life,” she said during an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. “Aside from the booze. And I don’t trust Michael with the fish.”
From Cry Me a River:
The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan
The record dropped onto the turntable, and within seconds, the noise of the traffic on West End Avenue and the sound of the piano student practicing in a neighboring apartment and the deep rumble of a jet making its final approach toward La Guardia were drowned out by Pauline Anderton’s big, grainy voice belting out the opening bars of “The Man I Love.”
Desmond Sullivan sat back in his chair, the unfinished manuscript of his biography of Pauline Anderton spread out on the desk before him. That’s singing, he thought. Not great singing—technically speaking, not even good singing—but sincere, unadulterated, and emotionally wrenching. There were no safety nets here, no studio filters or electronic tricks, just a beating heart, exposed nerves, and a tremendous amount of oxygen. “Some day he’ll come a LOOOOONG.” Every note Anderton sang went through your body, even when, clearly, it was the wrong note. Leave precision to brain surgeons and airplane mechanics; he’d take a singer willing to plow through a song with heartfelt inaccuracy any day.
He leaned his elbows on his desk, put his head in his hands, and stared out the bedroom window and across the air shaft. In less than a week he was headed to Boston for a four-month-long teaching job at Deerforth College. The offer had come through a mere three weeks ago, an indication that he wasn’t the school’s first choice and probably wasn’t their second or third choice either. Well, guess what? Teaching hadn’t been his first choice. He needed a salary and an airtight excuse for leaving New York for a little while, and Deerforth College was providing him with both. If the offer, with its aura of last-minute desperation, had been an insult, he’d thrown it right back in their faces by accepting it. With a little money and a little time away from Russell, he could finally fit all the pieces of this new book together and send it off to his publisher.
The song was approaching the bridge, the weakest part of Anderton’s rocky performance. The pretentious way she pronounced Tuesday (“Ta-Youse-Day”) always made Desmond cringe. One of Anderton’s managers had tried to refine her diction by sending her to elocution lessons, and the result was this occasional lapse in honesty, especially when she’d been drinking before a show or a recording session.
Russell walked into the bedroom, his head cocked as if listening for a cue. He pushed his round yellow glasses against his nose and then, doing a nearly flawless imitation of Anderton, sang along with the record: “Maybe Ta-Youse-Day will be my good Na-Youse day.” He left the room, laughing merrily at his own performance.
Depending on your mood, Russell’s ability to mimic people could be an entertaining party trick or the emotional equivalent of psoriasis. This afternoon, it was a perfect example of why Desmond had to leave New York in order to figure out exactly what was missing from the book he’d been writing and researching for nearly four years. It wasn’t that Russell was unsupportive of Desmond’s project. It was hard to imagine how anyone could be more supportive. Russell owned a secondhand store on the Lower East Side. In scavenging for merchandise at yard sales and thrift shops, he’d unearthed: several records Desmond had given up hope of ever finding; a rare program from one of Anderton’s rare performances at The Sands in the early 1960s; and a scrapbook of clippings kept by some obsessed fan that spanned the entire course of Anderton’s career, from discovery by Walter Winchell to slide into obscurity fifteen years later. He was always willing to discuss Anderton or listen while Desmond trod the same ground over and over, trying to figure out what crucial piece of information or insight he was missing. The problem was that after nearly five years of cohabitation, Desmond was finding it increasingly difficult to make clear distinctions between his own thoughts about Anderton—along with everything else—and Russell’s. Who had been the first to pick up on this grating quirk of pronunciation? He couldn’t say for sure, nor could he say for sure why it mattered to him so much that he know, especially if it turned out he had picked up on it first.
Love was a strange, exhausting bit of human business. Based on the evidence of literature, torch songs, and the tattered fragments of his own experience, Desmond had come to the conclusion that all the beauty and wonder of the thing was wrapped up in the longing for it and the heartbreak after its demise. You couldn’t say the same about much else in life. The pleasures of chocolate, coffee, and gambling, for example, were in the tasting and the doing.
The song was building to its climax, the orchestra swelling in the background. But instead of ending with the display of lung power you might expect, Anderton surprised the listener—here was her genius—by singing the final lines with a wistful, dissipated whisper. “I’m waiting for the man I love.” It was enough to make you weep, assuming you’d had a few drinks and were melancholy with loneliness and longing instead of happily partnered off.
Desmond got up and shut off the record player. Russell was lying on the red velvet sofa in the living room, his head on one arm, his bare feet sunk into one of the cushions. His eyeglasses were resting on his forehead, and he had a book, a massive history of the Middle Ages he’d been reading for several days, spread open on his stomach. Russell Abrams came from a family of fire-breathing academics: an economist father who spent half his life delivering lectures in countries Desmond had never heard of and a child psychologist mother who’d written an infamous book arguing that play was the construct of frivolous adults and a complete waste of time. They lived in the Berkeley hills where Russell and his sister had grown up. Russell had rebelled against their intellectual snobbery by moving to New York and teaching art to special needs children in the public school system. Four years ago, he’d retired from teaching so that he and a friend could open the secondhand shop on the Lower East Side, an even more hostile gesture to his parents. Desmond, who’d initially taken Russell’s anti-intellectual palaver at face value, had never escaped feeling betrayed by him for reading so eclectically and ravenously. All those tomes Russell foraged through on a weekly basis—dense volumes of history, art, and science, and last year all of Trollope—lay around the apartment like reminders of his own literary inadequacies. This was one of the challenges of being in a long-term relationship; sustaining necessary delusions about yourself when someone was always there to witness your limitations and exaggerations and malign you with the truth about yourself.
“I’ve been thinking,” Russell said. “For your next book, you should write something that has a little more in it than a biography.”
Desmond gave Russell’s body a gentle push and lay beside him, their noses practically touching. The air conditioner in the window opposite them was blowing a chilly breeze in the general vicinity of their legs. “What more is there than the story of a whole life, sweetheart?”
“Less, for one thing. Less childhood and youth and old age, the whole dirge of time and the river. Lives are so unfocused and open to interpretation. I think you might do better with something clean and simple.”
“For example?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A murder, that’s always good. You’ve got a background in law, so you’d be a natural.”
Desmond was about to point out that this was basically criticism bordering on dismissal of the work he’d already done and a perhaps unconscious criticism of Desmond’s intellectual abilities. But since he was about to leave town, it didn’t seem worth the bother. He took Russell’s yellow glasses off his forehead and put them on the end table, then reached his hands around and cupped his ass. Imminent departure had increased Desmond’s libido, the way hunger is stoked by plans for a diet. Not that Desmond was necessarily planning a diet.
With the record player turned off, they once again could hear the neighbor in an apartment behind them practicing the piano. In the past three years, Desmond and Russell had listened to this mystery person advance from scales and five-finger folk tunes to Chopin etudes and jazz standards. Today he was playing in such a stop-and-start fashion, Desmond couldn’t decipher a melodic line. Maybe more Gershwin. They called the enigmatic piano student Boris and had imagined an entire life for him, one which usually mirrored their own moods and emotions. “Boris sounds a little depressed,” Russell would say when he was feeling down. Desmond already missed Boris. The tangled muddle of Russell’s dark hair was crushed against the arm of the sofa. In the sunlight pouring in the window, he looked overheated and handsome. Someone should write a torch song about this, Desmond thought, letting go of Russell’s behind and running a hand through his hair, this fleeting moment of exquisite tenderness that flares up once in a while to interrupt the long periods of jealousy, restlessness, submerged resentment, and boredom.
“If you hear of any worthwhile murders, keep me in mind. Are you devastated by the thought of me leaving?”
“Yes.” He pressed his cheek against Desmond’s. “But I won’t give you the satisfaction of saying so.”
“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t either.” The truth was, Desmond probably would have made more of a fuss if Russell had been the one leaving; of the two of them, Russell was the more trusting and, despite being three years younger, was, in his own way, more mature. Lately, Desmond had begun to worry that more trust was basically the same thing as less interest.
He slid his hands under Russell’s T-shirt and up along the taut damp skin of his back. Russell was thirty-six, and although the skin around his eyes had started to wrinkle, his body still had the compact tightness of a man who hadn’t yet bumped into the crisis of midlife. Aside from wearing his dark hair almost to his shoulders, Russell never displayed any vanity, which was, as far as Desmond was concerned, an indication of self-confidence about his looks that was the same thing as vanity. He had large brown eyes that were beautiful but nearsighted and made him look a good deal more vulnerable than he really was, and a narrow, dimpled chin. Desmond had his assets and he knew it, but he’d always felt awkwardly tall and skinny. Earlier in the summer when he and Russell were in a Wal-Mart in New Jersey looking for an air conditioner, someone had stopped him and said: “Excuse me, do you work here?” a comment that continued to echo in his brain like a reproach for a lack of physical grace and intellectual authority.
“I hope you’re not trying to get something amorous going here,” Russell said. He held his arm behind Desmond’s head so he could read his watch. “We have to be at the party—at your party—in an hour.”
“All the better.” After living together for five years, having limited time to fuck was an aphrodisiac, while long, uninterrupted hours lying naked in bed tended to produce conversations about Madeleine Albright. He moved his body against Russell’s. “We don’t live here,” he fantasized. “We’re guests in someone’s apartment, sleeping on their sofa, and they’ll be home in ten minutes.”
Russell closed his eyes, a sign he was beginning to respond. A faint smile came to his lips as he adjusted the scenario to suit himself. “You’d better hurry up,” he said. “Your wife’s my best friend, and I don’t want her coming in and catching us.”
Desmond kicked off his shoes and unbuckled his pants, feeling a mixture of relief, excitement, and jealousy at the thought that he was being written out of the movie now playing in Russell’s head.
It had been planned as a going-away party for Desmond, but shortly after arriving at their friends’ apartment in Chelsea, Desmond sensed that something was wrong. They were met at the door by Velan, one of the two hosts. Velan and Peter had been a couple for sixteen years, far longer than almost anyone at this gathering had known either of them. Velan was the younger of the two men, an Indian beauty who had about him an aura of Dietrich-like haughty glamour, despite the thinning hair and little pouch of drooping chin. Like a lot of pretty boys who were still pretty but hadn’t been boys for at least twenty-five years, Velan had a sluggishly leering attitude, intended, Desmond assumed, to trick you into thinking you’d just made a pass at him. Over the years, Desmond had made a number of passes at him, not because he was attracted but because it seemed like the polite thing to do. You wanted to be polite toward Velan, to court and appease him, because, like hollandaise sauce, he tended to curdle without warning.
“Ah, the guest of honor,” Velan said languidly and then stood with his chin raised, waiting to be kissed. His black eyes were colder than usual, the first sign that something was amiss, although perhaps nothing more serious than an uncharacteristic bout of sobriety.
“Sorry we’re a little late,” Desmond said. “I’ve been trying to get things organized for the move.” Aside from a few boxes of Important Books he’d been meaning to finish for a decade or more—The Making of Americans, The Man Without Qualities, Forever Amber, among others—he hadn’t started to pack yet, mostly out of consideration for Russell. Lovers and pets get anxious at the sight of suitcases, and Desmond was afraid that his own preparations either would provoke a spell of heartfelt whimpering (making him feel like a louse) or would not (making him feel unappreciated).
“I’ll bet you two were hoping to make an ‘entrance.’ The guests of honor, all dressed up—sort of. Don’t apologize to me. It was Peter’s idea to have this.” Velan spit out his lover’s name as if it were a rancid peanut. “Russell’s looking flushed, Desmond. Is that the heat or did you do something to him in the cab?”
“We took the subway,” Desmond said. “Where is Peter?”
“Somewhere,” Velan said. “If you find him, don’t bother telling me.”
As they were walking down the hallway, Russell yanked off his eyeglasses and polished them on his shirt. “What was all that about?”
“Vintage Velan,” Desmond said, trying to shrug off his blunt disdain for the party. After all, it hadn’t been Desmond’s idea to have this party and he’d even tried to discourage Peter when he first brought it up. Desmond hated going-away parties, almost as much as he hated birthday parties; it was embarrassing to be applauded for leaving town for a few months or for having been born, as if these were great personal accomplishments. “You can’t pay too much attention to anything he says.”
Velan was in charge of publicity for an intimidatingly trendy chain of Manhattan hotels. He drank too much, a prerequisite for his job, he maintained, and frequently made bitter, scathing comments you were supposed to appreciate as examples of his wit. It was Peter, a dour, portly lawyer, Desmond had originally befriended, but he and Velan had been together so long, it was impossible to think of either of them as entirely separate people.
“Unfortunately,” Russell said, adjusting his glasses against his face, “you can’t ignore what he says either. Not when he’s wearing all that aftershave.”
About thirty men and women, most of whom Desmond recognized, were crowded into the long, narrow living room, all holding glasses of wine and politely grabbing sticks of chicken satay from the waiter’s tray. There was background music set at an appropriately low volume—poor Billie Holiday, Desmond thought, whose art had cost her so much pain and so many painkillers, now reduced to aural wallpaper for these kinds of gatherings—and the massive air conditioner in the front window had taken the bite out of August’s most recent heat wave. It was after six, and the temperature outside was still hovering in the low nineties. Calm and cool though the apartment was, there was something slightly tentative in the way people were laughing and talking, as if a piece of bad news had started circulating moments before Desmond and Russell had arrived. There was a disappointingly controlled murmur when Desmond entered—guest of honor, indeed; the only thing worse than being undeservedly applauded was not being applauded at all—and only a few people raised a glass toward him and then stood apprehensively, waiting, it seemed, for the sound of the other shoe hitting the floor. Sybil Gale, a former teaching colleague from Fordham, rushed up to him and grabbed his arm.
“I was afraid you weren’t going to show,” she said. “Hi, Russell.”
In private, Sybil had let Desmond know she wasn’t especially fond of Russell, had even hinted that she found him shallow. Desmond had mounted a full defense of Russell, but Sybil’s admission had secretly thrilled him and had endeared her to him; everyone else, even old friends who should have known better, were so enamored of his charming lover, he often felt like a grumpy tag-along. He wanted his friends to accept his partner, but actually liking him was beyond the call of duty. Sybil’s loyalty to Desmond, more than any interests or attitudes they had in common, made her feel like one of his most intimate friends.
“Is something going on here we should know about?” Russell asked.
“Well, yes, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Sybil had spent her childhood in Rhodesia and spoke in a clipped, breathless way that made her, at times, sound indignant.
“And the answer?” Desmond said.
She took a drink from a recklessly wide wineglass and shrugged. “No one knows, but we’re all assuming the worst, even though we have no idea what that could be. Oh look, Russell,” she said, “someone over by the window is waving at you.”
One of Desmond’s ex-boyfriends was beckoning Russell with his index finger. He was an attractive set designer with slicked-back blond hair who was always pawing at Russell—a cheap way of getting my attention, Desmond had convinced himself.
“He must be upset you’re leaving,” Sybil said, watching Russell make his way through groups of friends tossing promises of dinner invitations in his wake, setting up Russell as a victim of Desmond’s ruthless abandonment. “One imagines him drifting aimlessly without you.”
“Do you mean cruising?”
“Interesting you leapt to that association, but no, I mean wandering, unsure how to spend his time, drifting.” And then, as if delivering the key to understanding a completely obscure sonnet, she said: “You’re his anchor.”
It amazed Desmond that this kind of criticism of Russell, which he knew to be not only incorrect, but precisely incorrect, could still make him feel better about himself. Russell was eager, energetic, and so unfamiliar with aimlessness, he didn’t even recognize it in other people. Thank God. No doubt Sybil, who was dazzlingly astute and insightful about literature but always snatched at the most obvious conclusions when it came to flesh-and-blood people, was making assumptions based on the fact that Russell was a good four inches shorter than Desmond. As for the anchor comment, Desmond would take it as a compliment, even if anchor was just another way to describe a weight around your neck.
“I’m only leaving for one semester,” Desmond said. “I’ll be buried in students and he’ll be buried in his work and then I’ll be home. He’ll barely know I’ve gone.”
“Will you get some time to work on your book?”
“I’m hoping to squeeze in a few minutes once or twice a week, but I probably won’t get even that.”
Sybil nodded sympathetically and swirled her wine. She was a lean, fervid woman with pale eyebrows and pale thin hair she cut in a close-cropped style that made her look as if she were wearing a bathing cap. She had the sculpted beauty and adroitly undernourished body of an aging fashion model, but looking at the haircut and the pastel blue eye shadow (a signature of some kind), and an out-of season, nubby green pullover, you had to conclude that she objected to her own good looks on moral grounds. She’d been teaching in the English Department at Fordham for ten years, had been given tenure one month after an especially ugly divorce, and her devotion to her students was so unswerving it filled Desmond with a mixture of admiration, awe, and pity. She was an extraordinarily gifted and generous teacher, he thought, but surely she ought to have something better to do with her time. As a teacher, he always felt like a fraud in front of Sybil. He’d done a minimal amount of preparation for the two journalism courses he’d been hired to teach at Deerforth—he’d taught similar classes in and around Manhattan eight times—and had given serious consideration to passing out a trumped-up, dauntingly demanding syllabus the first class in the hopes of getting a handful of students to drop out. Pauline Anderton had spent her final days in a suburb of Boston, and Desmond was planning to arrange his schedule so he’d be able to spend the bulk of his time going over his notes and soaking up atmosphere.
“A lot can happen in one semester,” Sybil said, but it wasn’t clear from her tone if she meant it hopefully or as a warning. “I told you to look up Thomas Miller, didn’t I?”
“You did. I have it written down somewhere,” Desmond said.
“I haven’t talked to him in years, but I always admired him in graduate school. I imagine he’d remember me. He was a big bore but terribly sweet, and he didn’t push himself on you the way most bores do. I don’t mind boring people as long as they’re not self-confident along with it. I heard he married a TV producer or something. I suppose that can’t be very significant in a town like Boston.”
“I suppose not. I’ll look him up if I have the time. Maybe his wife can get me an insignificant job in TV.”
Sybil lowered her blue eyelids as she sipped. “There’s a grim thought,” she said. “I think I’ll circulate for a few minutes and see if anyone knows what the problem is here.”
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.”
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 something 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.”
“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 arms over the back of the chair, he began to rhapsodize about a stockbroker he’d met on the subway.