The one thing you couldn’t take away from Dale Barsamian was his looks. Time would do that sooner or later, but at least for the moment, his looks were there for everyone to enjoy, and for the most part, everyone did.
As Jane watched him walk into the cocktail lounge of the Boylston Hotel, she thought: Thank God I’m not married to him any longer. Handsome, sure of himself, oozing poised masculinity, Dale loosened his tie as he laughed with the maitre d’, and you could practically hear people sighing on all sides. Woe to any woman married to a man who was as effortlessly charming and seductive as Dale. If someone wasn’t snarling at you for having snagged him, they were being nice to you in an effort to get closer to him. Men, women, it didn’t matter. Just Caroline just wasn’t up to this kind of rogue. Seeing him across the room, Jane was reminded of all the comforts of being married to a man like Thomas, someone solid and reliable, attractive but unexceptional, someone you could trust to be utterly steadfast, even when you didn’t want him to be.
She hadn’t seen Dale in more than six months, and she honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone with him. It might even have been the warm January day of their divorce. After all the papers had been signed and she and he were officially free of each other, they’d gone to a diner near the courthouse and had a friendly, greasy lunch. They didn’t mention the past or indulge in embarrassingly sloppy nostalgia. Instead, they talked about their plans in an open, effortless way that was completely without ulterior motives or hidden agendas—and therefore without precedent in the history of their relationship. They’d sat in their cramped booth for hours, and by the time they got up, a new weather system had blown in; the sky had gone gray and snow was falling. Out on the sidewalk with fat papery flakes floating past them, Dale had put his arms around her and kissed her goodbye. The next thing either of them knew, they were making out in an alley, leaning against a rusty Dumpster, their bodies pressed together, their shoulders covered with snow. Jane had finally let herself cry in front of him. “I’m not going to miss you,” she’d said, her words slurred with emotion. “Janey,” he’d whispered in her ear, “I’m going to miss you.”
Now, all the doubts she’d had about this meeting melted away as she watched him make his entrance; she should have planned a get-together as soon as she felt the first stirrings of seriously icy discontent with Thomas. One look at Dale’s craggy face and she was ready to rush back to her husband and smother him with affection, just for being his lovable, unlovely self.
The Boylston was one of the city’s older hotels, but it had a convenient location and recently had become officially hip. Some ten-year-old entrepreneur had purchased it and turned the first three floors into a full-service day spa and health club where you could wallow in every form of self-improvement and body detoxification on the market. Salt rubs, high colonics, laser peels, sweatboxes—you name it. The entire health spa movement, with its mania for scrubbing the body, inside and out, was just a high-priced form of self-mutilation. The only thing left to implement was a treatment to gut the body completely and replace all those nasty internal organs with flax seeds soaked in perfumed almond oil. Self-improvement had become a matter of self-annihilation. Relaxation had become a competitive sport and inner peace a commodity.
But before you had the toxins drained from your liver, you could come to this cool pink cocktail lounge, smoke cigars, and drink yourself into a hazy stupor. Every itty-bitty table was equipped with a long-stemmed goblet with its own pink fish, swimming around in dizzying, pointless circles. Jane was sure it was meant to be soothing, and probably it was unless you had the misfortune of empathizing with the fish and seeing the whole going-nowhere tableau as a perfect metaphor for your life.
Dale spotted her and waved, all modesty and apology. He was nearly half an hour late. She’d expected him to be late because he always was, and, hoping to give him a taste of his own medicine, she herself had arrived twenty minutes after the time they’d agreed upon. Obviously, she hadn’t waited long enough.
He approached the table flashing a toothy, lopsided grin and held up his hands as if blocking a punch. “Before you get started on me, it couldn’t be helped. There was an explosion down on Atlantic Avenue and that whole end of the city is in shambles. Three people were killed.”
How convenient and how like him to come up with the kind of excuse that exonerated him and made you feel like a heartless scoundrel for having the audacity to care that he was late. “I’m sure I’ll read about it in the papers,” she said. “Anyway, I was held up myself. I got here two minutes ago.”
“Oh good. Now I don’t feel so guilty.” He bent down and gave her a swift, sexless kiss on the mouth. Out in the real world—away from this flattering artificial light and cool maybe-marble floor—it was a hot afternoon. Dale was wearing a brown suit. As he straightened up, the scent of his warm body gasped out of his loosened collar, and Jane was enveloped in its acrid perfume, a blend of cedar, sweat, and Ivory soap that stirred memories of eroticism and anger. He examined her through squinted eyes, and then delivered his assessment. “You know something, Janey? You look spectacular. When did you start letting your hair grow out?”
“Third grade,” she said. If he was beginning to flatter her already, there was a good chance Caroline had broken down and told him what this was all about. In that case, the best tactic was to let him think she was warming up to him, and then go for the jugular when he was least expecting it. The advantage of dealing with vain, self-confident men like Dale was that they couldn’t imagine anyone being two steps ahead of them and so were always vulnerable. Although he didn’t look vulnerable. The suit brought out his tan and the light in his amber-colored eyes. You couldn’t blame the man for dressing so well, but you certainly could resent him for always knowing exactly what piece of clothing would bring out his best features, especially if you had no instinct for clothes and accessories yourself and were therefore at the mercy of every avaricious salesclerk in the world with an advanced degree in fatuous flattery. To kill time this afternoon, she’d gone into a little jewelry shop on Newbury Street and bought a much too expensive pair of jade green earrings which the salesgirl had described as a great color and style for her. But as she was coming into the hotel, she caught a glimpse of herself in a wall-sized mirror. She saw freakishly big plastic triangles in a garish shade of lime with a graying head attached. She’d slipped them off and tossed them into her bag. Dale was good on details and would know immediately that they were brand-new and the purchase of them was somehow connected to seeing him.
The key to Dale’s beauty was his ugliness. His face combined the worst elements of his father and his Irish mother, a punk’s crooked nose, a fat mouth that was too large for his square, lean face, and those droopy Armenian eyes, all topped off by a thick brush of blue-black hair that refused to be tamed. Any one feature by itself was appalling, but they fell together in a way that made him look like a carefully sculpted ideal of rugged magnificence, not pretty, not perfect, just irresistible. Even his perfectly ordinary height worked to his advantage; taller men looked gawky and clumsy standing next to solid, compact Dale.
“I don’t know what everyone sees in him,” a friend of Jane’s had once told her. “He looks like a prick to me.” Which was, of course, exactly what he looked like to everyone else.
He was from one of those nondescript suburbs somewhere west of Boston—a shopping mall with a few cul-de-saced neighborhoods arranged around it. His father had died young, leaving Dale the head of a household of adoring women—two sisters and a flirtatious mother. He’d worked his way through Harvard, smoothing out his Boston accent so he’d be presentable and respected among Boston’s Brahmin banking and business establishment. His real stroke of genius had been cultivating an aura of polite coarseness that made other men desperate for his approval, hoping, Jane supposed, that being liked by him would mean they were more like him. Jane had never understood why people didn’t immediately spot the calculation behind his manner; it was too natural and unaffected to be real.
“You look pretty spectacular yourself,” Jane said. “Just in case no one’s told you in the last three minutes.”
“I look like crap,” he said. “Do you realize I’ve started sprouting hair in my ears?”
“It’s the talk of the town. We’re thinking about doing a segment on it next week.”
Dale sat at the table sideways, one arm flung over the back of his chair, a friendly grin on his fat lips. He touched the rim of the water goblet and the fish swam to his side of the glass and gazed out at him adoringly.
“I saw the show when your friend Rosemary Boyle was on. I didn’t realize poor old Charlie had died that way.”
“It was horrible,” Jane said, because you had to say it was horrible, even if you weren’t so sure. “He was alone in Maine on a fishing trip, not that he fished. Rosemary was devastated.”
Dale pushed the tiny aquarium to one side of the table, rested his elbow in the middle, and leaned toward her. “Between you and me, don’t you think the whole thing is a little funny? I got a little spooked listening to her. To be honest, I started wondering if maybe she had something to do with it.”
Jane laughed, as if he couldn’t have meant the comment as anything other than a joke. “Talk about a vivid imagination,” she said. Those were the words Thomas had used when she ran the exact same theory past him as soon as she heard about Charlie’s conveniently lonely death.
Dale shrugged and sat back in his chair. “I’m not serious. But remember that weekend they came to visit us on Nantucket? She had him eating lobster every meal and was drowning his food in butter. She was running out to buy him cigarettes every five minutes.”
Jane frowned. For the two nights Rosemary and Charlie visited, Jane and Dale lay curled up in bed, trying to muffle fits of hysterical laughter as they discussed what looked like Rosemary’s attempt to induce a heart attack. She and Dale always got along best when there was someone else nearby to act as buffer, especially if it was someone neither of them liked. They had had good times, there was no point in trying to deny it, but anyone could have a good time if they let themselves get caught up in laughter and romantic outings that distract you from your basic unhappiness and incompatibility.
“I was thinking about having a Scotch on the rocks,” Dale said. “Join me?”
It was 3:30 and there was no taping this afternoon, and in every practical sense, she’d finished working shortly after her morning coffee. She hadn’t had a drink at this time of day for years, possibly not since those languid summer afternoons she and Dale had spent on Nantucket the first two years they were married. These days she got a headache about half an hour after a few modest sips of liquor, went straight from the anticipation of the drink to the hangover, with no moment of release in between. But she knew that if she sat there nursing a coffee while Dale slugged back a Johnnie Walker, she’d feel like one of those priggish suburban mothers she despised. So when the waitress came over—a gaunt, pale girl with a boy’s haircut; French, if you bought the accent—she decided to go for broke and ordered a martini.
“And would you mind taking the fish,” Jane said.
“Oh. You don’t find it relaxing?”
“I’d prefer something edible,” Jane said.
Dale watched the girl’s candlestick legs as she clicked away. “How’s little Jerry?” he asked.
“Jerry’s delightful,” Jane said. Once, when he was three years old, Jane had made the mistake of calling her son Jerry. “My name is Gerald!” he’d screamed at her. “Gerald!” Fearing a major scene, neither Jane nor Thomas had made the mistake again. “He’s been nothing but pleasure from the beginning. We got lucky with him.”
“It’s not luck, he just takes after you. How old is he? Five, six? I suppose he’s into basketball.”
What was that supposed to mean? “He’s all caught up in gymnastics,” she said. “We take him to lessons every week. The teacher thinks he’s ready for the advanced class, but I don’t want him getting competitive.”
Gerald’s doctor claimed the two of them were making progress, although it wasn’t clear to Jane how they were progressing or in what area. Gerald was still surly, haughty, and frequently hostile to Jane, Thomas, and his grandmother. School had begun last week and it looked as if they were getting ready for the same round of problems they’d been having with him since the first day of day care. He wasn’t a sociable boy, didn’t get along with his peers, and scoffed at almost everything the teacher said. At the end of the third day of classes, the teacher had called up Jane and told her Gerald had mocked her during a drawing lesson and had complained that he’d given up playing with crayons years ago. “I’d prefer to work with pastels,” he’d said. Where had he even heard the word? He was unusually bright for his age and astonishingly self-possessed, assets Jane supposed she should have been grateful for but which, in Gerald, seemed more like social liabilities.
“Is he on the parallel bars, all that?”
“Possibly,” she said. Thinking about Dr. Garitty made her feel as if she’d talked herself into a corner, and she lost interest in elaborating on this gymnastics fiction. If she was going to brag, she should have bragged about his brains or his cooking skills, something real. In the end, it didn’t matter what Dale thought.
The waitress came and set down their drinks. She batted her big, mascaraed eyes at Dale, playing up the gamine act. Hopefully the woman he was currently seeing was at least a couple of decades older than this one, someone who knew what she was getting into but was too old to care. “Anything else?” she lisped.
“Privacy,” Jane said.
Dale clinked her glass. The first sip of her drink burned through her body and sent a warm flush to her cheeks. Maybe if she just gave in to the effects instead of trying to fight them, she’d avoid the instant headache. She was afraid of alcohol. This was the result of having grown up with high-functioning drunks for parents and was, she had to confess, the only long-term ill effect she could point to. She sometimes wondered why she harbored so much resentment toward her parents’ drinking when they’d been successful and, in a sloppy, inconsistent way, cheerful. Initially, the resentment had to do with the fact that both parents had died of alcohol-related illnesses shortly after Jane graduated college, but after a few years of tending to her mother-in-law, she saw that there were worse things you could do to your children than die young.
“Do you watch our show regularly?” Jane asked.
“If I’m home at that time, which isn’t very often. Caroline watches. It was just luck I caught Rosemary.”
“What do you think of it, in general?”
“I don’t know how you keep it so consistent.”
“Ah. In other words, same old thing over and over?”
“That’s not what I meant.” He rattled his ice and stared off across the room, pulling his thick black eyebrows together. Jane tapped her glass, waiting for the qualification. “Although, to be honest, I have wondered how much longer you’re planning to stay with it.”
Here we go, she thought. “Funny, I wouldn’t have imagined you spend a lot of time thinking about my career plans.”
“I’ve always been interested in your career, you know that.”
When they first met, Jane had been on the staff of a local weekly, writing news and features. Dale had been the one who encouraged her to get into TV and even provided the connection that got her her first job. (Harvard was basically a four-year networking seminar.) She’d earned her current position through hard work, but she knew she hadn’t been aggressive enough about developing another project, something of her own, something that moved her career forward a few notches before Dinner Conversation was finally euthanatized. She resented Dale for bringing it up, almost as much as she resented Thomas for not taking her career worries more seriously. But she couldn’t let him wound her so easily.
“I’ve been working on a big project for a while now,” she said. “I don’t know if anything’s going to come of it, but it’s looking good.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” He stirred his ice cubes, an excuse to draw attention to an expensive wristwatch. “What are the details?”
She wanted to think he was pumping her for information so he could catch her in a lie, but the way he asked, the way he leaned almost imperceptibly toward her across the tiny table, made her think it wasn’t that at all, it was much worse: it was genuine interest. Any entrepreneurial endeavor got his blood pounding and he’d always encouraged her to be imaginative.
Just her luck that after all those years of Thomas encouraging her to relax and take time off, someone was finally grilling her about career advancement when she had nothing to display for show-and-tell. She’d let herself drift, had allowed herself to get distracted by motherhood. That had its own amazing rewards, but they weren’t ones people like Dale—people who desperately wanted a child themselves but couldn’t have one—would appreciate. She’d drifted further by convincing Thomas they needed a bigger house, with more space, and had ended up with a white elephant with endless space for hosting Sarah and all kinds of friends and relatives she’d rather not host. They should have bought an apartment on Beacon Hill. It wouldn’t have been that much more expensive and they would have been within walking distance of Symphony Hall and theaters and museums, places that might have inspired her. What a grotesque miscalculation to think that they were doing the right thing for Gerald by moving to Brookline where they could have that most useless of American obsessions, a yard. Gerald hated the outdoors. Two minutes of direct sunlight and he broke out in bright, stinging rashes. As for sports, he sneered at all of them and had asked Thomas to take down the basketball net the previous owners had left because he hated looking at it from the window of his third-floor “apartment.” Now they had a half acre of overgrown grass, flower beds gone to seed and weed, and bushes they couldn’t identify covering up most of their windows. Thomas occasionally spent a Saturday morning shoving around a squeaky lawnmower, a practice that almost always produced a strained lower back and a circle of hacked up grass that looked as if a field animal had been chewing on it.
Never mind any of it. She wasn’t about to let Dale get the best of her, make her feel bad about her own life when the entire purpose of this meeting was to make him feel bad about his. She smiled at him and finished off the rest of the martini. Yesterday, Caroline had faxed her a detailed outline of Desmond Sullivan’s Lewis Westerly biography, and she’d scanned it into her computer and retyped bits of it so she could pass it along to Thomas as her own work. This morning, she’d read a couple of chapters, thinking she might find a topic for a dinner conversation and be able to use Desmond Sullivan as a guest.
“I’ve put together a proposal for a series of biographical documentaries,” she said, amazed by the conviction in her own voice. “One-hour pieces, probably a series of six, although that depends on how successful it is. It easily could be expanded.”
“Biographies.” Dale nodded. “I thought cable had that all sewn up—Lifetime, A&E, no?”
Now he was showing his true colors, knocking down her work before she’d even explained it. “This is something that hasn’t been done before. An entire series on lost or forgotten American artists—writers, performers, painters.”
“Ah. The forgotten genius angle,” he said. “That’s always popular.”
“The forgotten geniuses have all been remembered. People are sick of them. This is much more interesting and much more commercial. The whole culture is drifting away from geniuses and exceptional people who only make the rest of us feel inadequate. My series is about the true cultural influences: forgotten mediocrities.”
Dale looked puzzled. He paused for a moment and said, “Who, for example?”
“Have you ever heard of a writer named Lewis Westerly? He wrote brilliantly so-so novels.”
“The name sounds familiar.”
Oh good, Jane thought, he’s lying. She had him. She motioned for the waitress and ordered them another round of drinks. Jane was wearing a linen jacket, a boxy sand-colored thing that she’d never really liked but had thrown over her silk blouse this morning because she knew it would make her feel less exposed to her ex-husband’s scrutiny. Now that he seemed so impressed with her project, she didn’t care what he thought of her figure, which, after all, wasn’t that much different from what it had been fifteen years ago when Dale had been so enthusiastic about it. Unlike the vast majority of heterosexual men she’d met, Dale actually liked women, and so wasn’t repulsed by female fleshiness. Anyway, people generally take your lead in reacting to your appearance. Two thirds of Dale’s attractiveness had to do with his narcissistic appreciation of himself. She slipped off the jacket, rested the back of her head against the banquette, and began free-associating, creating a brilliant plan right there while the silly, pretty fishes swam in circles in the goblets at the tables all around them.
By the time both were on a third drink, the bar was more crowded, mostly with pompous, well-scrubbed young men with pink skin, no matter their race, and the boisterous good cheer that indicated a serious lack of life experience. Recent college grads working at Fidelity or Bank of Boston, so low down the corporate ladder they were still chummy with each other. Poor things, thinking that careers were ruled by logic and love was ruled by the heart. Thank God optimism like that dried up with age.
She’d laid out a whole theory behind her proposal for Dale, he’d bought it, told her it sounded wonderful, and in truth, it did. And why not? So what if she’d stumbled upon it at the last second, it was a hell of a lot more original than yet another fifteen-part series about the goddamned Monroe Doctrine or Westward Expansion, one of those showcases for someone’s research skills and lack of imagination, the kinds of things people were so busy praising they didn’t have time to watch. She’d arrange a meeting with Desmond Sullivan and pick his brains about it. Like most academics she knew, he could probably be bought out of academia with a few subway tokens and the promise of meeting a few third-rate TV personalities. The whole afternoon had been remarkably productive. So much so she’d forgotten why she was here until Dale brought it up himself.
“Tell me something, Janey,” he said, leaning on the table, cupping his face in his hand and gazing at her with the limp focus she recognized as his stock look of seduction. “Why did you call me up and arrange this little meeting? After all this time?”
“Millennial fever,” she said.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Neither do I,” she said, “but I’ve heard it’s contagious. I hope you realize you’re making eyes at me.”
“If I am, it’s completely unconscious.”
She mimicked his body language, chin in her hands, her face inches from his. “Puberty,” she said, “was the last uncalculated move you made.”
“Oh really? I thought it was falling in love with you.”
“If you’d fallen in love with me, you never would have married me.”
“You’re so full of theories, Janey, you should have your own Web site. Why did I marry you?”
“How else were you going to have extramarital affairs?”
One of the big pink boys on the other side of the room dropped a cigar on the nearly marble floor and there was a stir of activity and laughter. Dale sat back in his seat and looked away from her, troubled now, and ran his hand through the dark brush of his hair. He had lovely, large hands, and Jane had always suspected he went for regular manicures. There was no other way to explain those perfectly shaped, shiny fingernails. “I have a suspicion,” he said, “just a suspicion, Caroline’s been talking to you. Am I right?”
“Caroline and I have friends in common. We were in a book group together before she married you, and we’ve been friends since. Why wouldn’t she be talking to me?”
“I mean about me. She thinks I’m having an affair. And believe it or not, Janey, I’m innocent.”
“I believe it not.”
“I promise you.”
“Oh. That’s different.”
“All right. There is someone I’ve been seeing, but it isn’t like that. We’ve had dinner, we’ve gone for walks in the middle of the day, I’ve called her from the phone booth at the supermarket, but that’s it. I don’t want to fuck up my life again, Janey. I don’t want to fuck up my marriage. I did that once and I’ve lived to regret it.”
This outpouring sounded so heartfelt, she didn’t know how to respond. The bitter envy she felt at learning that he just might have been faithful to Caroline all these years was tempered by his admission of regret over the mess he’d made of their marriage. “Well,” she said, perhaps too quietly. “So have I. Regretted your fucking things up.”
He put his heavy warm hand over hers, and she couldn’t help looking down and admiring those pearly fingernails and his big fat wedding band. “Tell Caroline not to worry. I’m not going to fuck up our marriage. Janey,” he said, and she looked up into his eyes. “You can help, you know. You can help me through this. That’s why I agreed to meet you here today. I knew what this was all about.”
She felt a certain amount of sympathy for poor old Dale, who at this moment looked ridiculous. She’d always liked him best when he’d just made a fool of himself or had the flu. “I don’t know how you expect me to stop you from sleeping with this girl.”
“She’s thirty-five. She’s married. Her husband’s a friend of mine. Tell me what’s wrong with me?”
“You’re a hopeless romantic and a shit. It’s a deadly combination. You’re over forty and getting restless. And your mick mother spoiled her darling prince rotten.” She reached up and ran her hand down his rough face. Definitely showing the signs of too much sun. In five years, he’d look like luggage, the expensive kind, but old. She gave his face a sharp little slap.
He took her hand in his and pressed her palm to his lips. He murmured something into her hand, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then he looked up at her and whispered, “You know me better than anyone.”
“That’s why I divorced you.”
“You know how much I’ve missed you, don’t you?”
“How much?”
He placed her hand against his chest, and through the thin, cool cotton of his shirt, she could feel the thump of his heart. “This much,” he said.
She had to laugh. What else could you do? It was much too late in their lives for this kind of giddy flirting and already the afternoon had been much too long. She could see the reflected glare of the late sun, golden and vulgar, in a mirror near the entrance of the lounge. How could I possibly have spent six years buried under the weight of this louse? she thought.
But the truth was, she’d begun to feel a little golden and vulgar herself, and she was suddenly struck by the realization that he meant it, that somewhere in his heart, amidst the gridlock of self-absorption and sexual obsession, he did miss her. She felt something flare up inside her, not lust, but recklessness and power. If I were drunk and stupid and young and spiteful enough, she thought, something truly regrettable might happen here.
“Janey?” he said, so softly she could barely hear him. “Tell me the truth. You’ve missed me, haven’t you?”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Maybe a little, when I’m especially full of self-loathing.”
“Will you see me again, later in the week?”
“For what? What possible reason could you have for wanting to meet me?”
“To talk. Who else am I going to talk to?”
“They have these wonderful things called shrinks,” she said, “people who sit in little rooms and do nothing but listen to other people talk. You pay them by the hour so they’re not allowed to participate or pass judgment. They’re listed in the Yellow Pages under EARS.” But as she said it, she was wondering how many of her carefully arranged plans she’d have to cancel to meet with him at whatever time and whatever place he wanted.