After driving through heavy traffic for ten minutes, Desmond’s back was plastered to the seat with sweat. Anticipating the heat, he’d worn a sleeveless T-shirt and hung his brand-new dress shirt (sale price $112) on a hook in the back seat. It was important to make a good first impression on Jane, his last best hope for professional redemption, and impossible to do so with a sweatdampened shirt clinging to your nipples.
Jane and Thomas lived in a shady enclave in Brookline. The streets were quiet, cool, overhung with towering maple trees and sycamores; he felt as if he’d entered a gated community even though the main shopping street was a mere two blocks away. The houses were enormous, ranging in architectural style from Tudor to Bauhaus, all filtered through a Marie Antoinette fever dream of gracious living. But that wasn’t fair either; there was some overlay of New England discretion—or was it Puritanical shame?—in the neighborhood. All the immense houses were practically blushing with modesty, peeking up over a carefully sculpted privacy hedge, or revealing just enough of themselves through a screen of pine trees to let you know the essence of what you were missing. The Miller-Cody manse was at the loop end of a cul-de-sac. By the standards of this neighborhood, their house looked almost shabby-—a generous Queen Anne Victorian with a turret, a wraparound porch, and a lot of lacy ornamentation skirting the eaves, all of it in need of a fresh coat of paint. Unlike its neighbors, it was fully exposed to the street with only a hint of unkempt lawn separating it from the sidewalk.
He parked just beyond the driveway, took off his T-shirt, and wiped down his back with it. He slipped on the dress shirt standing on the street and gazing up at the house.
Jane answered the door, talking into a cordless phone she had cradled against her neck. It was the same woman he’d seen the week before, dressed in the same creamy blouse and colorful Bakelite necklace. She motioned him into the house and made a gesture of annoyance toward the phone. Her voice had the tone of husky, almost bullying self-confidence which he’d heard her use on the street and which he found inexplicably reassuring. Desmond didn’t want to appear to be listening, but there wasn’t much to look at in the front hallway: a chair, a brass coat rack, and a little table with letters on it.
“I know what you mean,” Jane said, “but I haven’t had a chance to talk it over with Thomas. He might have plans. No, no nothing like that, it’s just that Thomas has allergies. And Gerald is so . . . urban.” She looked at Desmond and shrugged, apologizing for something, although he didn’t know what. “Well, I’ll get back to you after we’ve had a chance to talk it over. You’ll never guess who just walked in. Desmond Sullivan. Yes, that one. I’m trying to get him on board this project I told you about. I will.”
She switched off the phone and tossed it onto the chair by the door. “My ex-husband’s current wife,” she told Desmond. “She wants me to tell you she loved your book.” She reached back to lift her hair off her neck and then stopped with her elbow pointed out, as if a thought had just occurred to her. “If you were me,” she said, “would you go away for a weekend with your ex-husband and his new wife?”
It struck Desmond as a peculiarly personal question, especially since they hadn’t even exchanged names. He supposed she was being ironic, but there was something sincere in her wistful expression and the way she was standing with her hand clutching at her hair. “Not just the two of them and you?” he asked.
“No!” She dropped her hair. “I didn’t give that impression, did I?”
“No, no. Just making sure.” He tried to imagine how Russell would respond; Russell generally had more success in social situations that required irreverent spontaneity, while he fared better in situations in which silence could be interpreted as discretion. He opted for the simple truth. “I suppose I’d have to go,” he said. “Just to prove to myself and to him that he didn’t matter to me one way or the other anymore.”
She seemed to consider this point. Desmond handed her a bottle of wine. She glanced at the label and tossed it onto the chair with the phone.
“There’s a good chance this dinner is going to be a fiasco, so don’t judge me by it. I invited too many people. I’m not doing the cooking so at least the food should be edible. My recommendation is to ride with it and have a good time. I’d love to meet with you next week and discuss my ideas for a series of biographies I’m putting together. I’ve set up a meeting with an executive producer to try to get some seed money. He and I have worked together so long now, it might be useful to bring you into it, to give some weight and freshness to the proposal. Assuming you’re interested in getting involved?”
“I could be.”
“That’s great.” She took a small appointment book from a drawer in the table in the hall and scanned through the empty pages. “Is next Thursday all right? Around 3:30?”
“That sounds . . . fine,” Desmond said. He’d been anticipating the standard business of introductions and facile compliments about the house, but these were clearly beside the point, as if, unbeknownst to him, he and Jane had been friends and business partners for years. And something in her blunt, amiable manner did make him feel he could dispense with all of his usual wariness and get right to the risky business of being friends with her. The phone rang again. Jane looked at it for a moment. “It’s probably just my brother calling with an idiotic excuse for being late. He’s supposedly coming to dinner, but his wife is twelve months pregnant, so you never know.”
She was several inches shorter than Desmond, but she had a way of holding her chin up and at a slight angle so that she appeared to be looking down at him, not with condescension, he decided, but as if she were lining up her defenses in case there was an attack at some later point in the evening. Several buttons of her blouse were undone, exposing a surprising amount of cleavage, making it obvious that she genuinely liked her ample body. Forty, Desmond guessed, and determined to be happy about it.
She nodded toward the back of the house, inviting him to follow her. “Don’t mind the mess,” she said. “Gerald is six. Although hopelessly tidy, come to think of it.” She had on a pair of white, low-heeled sandals that clacked against her soles as she walked. They didn’t exactly go with the rest of her outfit but drew attention to her slim, shapely legs. Beautiful ankles, Desmond thought, although that wasn’t the kind of thing he was used to noticing on anyone.
“So, briefly,” Desmond said, “what is your idea about the series?”
“I’ve been trying to put together a series of biographies for years now, but I never found a theme to make it all cohere. When I was reading the Westerly biography, it struck me that it was a mistake to focus on the greats in history when the mediocrities on the edges tell us so much more about the culture. I’m thinking in that direction. Westerly might be a good place to start, unless you’re working on someone even more marginal at the moment.” They were passing through a front parlor, a thin room filled, in a desultory way, with new sofas and chairs in light shades of brown. Neither pretty nor ugly, the furniture was so aggressively bland and self-effacing it was almost invisible. Desmond had the distinct impression no one ever used the room. “You are working on another biography, aren’t you?”
“I’m very close to finished,” Desmond said. “A singer named Pauline Anderton.”
“Oh good, another one I’ve never heard of. I hope she had a shameful secret tucked away in some closet.”
“I was hoping that, too, but I’ve finished most of the research and I think she told all of her shameful secrets to anyone who’d listen.”
“Well, maybe we can tweak things a bit,” Jane said.
They’d come to a narrow, wainscoted hallway off the kitchen. Two young men wearing blue jeans and chef’s aprons were standing at the kitchen counter chopping vegetables and talking in low voices. When they spotted Jane, they looked up and smiled, slightly embarrassed and intimidated. They had on baseball caps with the brims turned backward. A plump, oddly large child was standing on a chair, using a canvas pastry bag to decorate the top of a cake. “The little one is mine,” Jane said. “Gerald, care to say hello to our dinner guest?”
The boy looked up from his work, red-faced and angry, and said, “I nearly spoiled the whole thing, Jane. Is that what you want?”
Desmond recoiled at the voice, a bizarrely adult growl, dripping with resentment and a surprisingly well-developed sense of irony. The kid had Thomas’s coloring and a bloated version of his shape. His hair was close-cropped, almost as if his head had been shaved, making his face look perfectly round.
Jane was not the least bit put off; if anything, she seemed eager to encourage him and engage in a test of wills. “As I remember it,” she said, “I merely asked if you wanted to say hello. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
“Hello,” he mocked and went back to his work.
“Difficult age,” Jane said. “He usually has hair, but lice or fleas or something were going around his school. I’d be worried about getting them, but he isn’t one of those touchy-feely kids.”
Helen was splayed out on the kitchen floor, her eyes trained on the caterers.
“He must be happy to have Helen around.”
“He’s not a dog person, either.”
She had her hand on a screen door leading out to a porch, and as she was about to push it open, Desmond said: “I saw you walking Helen along Newbury Street last week.”
Without turning around, she said: “Really? You recognized the dog?”
“Yes.”
“Was I alone?”
“No,” Desmond said. “You weren’t.”
Jane held the door open, blocking his way with her arm, and smiled at him. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but I was afraid you were going to be one of those dashing men with slicked-back hair. Light up the dinner party and then head off for an assignation before dessert. I’m so glad you’re not.”
He knew he should have been insulted on at least three different levels even though—or perhaps because—her appraisal of what he wasn’t was so accurate, but he found himself pleased that she approved of him, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. “I tend to make the worst of what I’ve got,” he said.
“That’s a very becoming trait in a man,” she said, “as long as you’re not married to him.”
She led Desmond out to a wide, unpainted deck that still smelled of fresh cedar. The land behind the house dropped off precipitously, creating the illusion that the deck was floating off the back of the house. There was a stand of trees somewhere at the edge of the lawn, and rising above it was the skyline of Boston, glittering through the haze of the sticky twilight. A long table was set for dinner, and beside it, in a black wrought iron chair, a woman was gazing at the city and sipping from a wineglass. Although she must have heard them approach—Jane’s sandals slapped against the new boards—she sat turned away, as if she were deep in thought or hard of hearing. Or more likely, Desmond thought as he took in her appearance, striving to make a dramatic entrance, even though they were the ones entering. Her dark hair was gathered in a tight little knob that sat on the crown of her head and added length to what was already an exceptionally long and graceful neck.
“It’s a great view,” Desmond said. In fact, he was tired of views by now and longed for a filthy air shaft every once in a while, but it was the kind of view that demanded comment.
“If only it were a great city,” the woman in the chair said.
Jane introduced her as Rosemary Boyle, “the writer.” He had a dim memory of having heard the name and said, “Ah,” in a tone he hoped suggested impressed recognition.
“Rosemary and I have been friends since college,” Jane said.
“More or less,” Rosemary added cryptically.
“Rosemary’s here to teach at BU and hating every minute of it.”
“Not every.” Rosemary seemed to be leaving open the possibility that this could be one of the exceptions, providing you kept her properly entertained.
Jane strolled back into the house. Desmond looked down at the lawn, the carriage house, and back at the skyline, grabbing at easy observations that might lead somewhere. Everything he said was answered with an enigmatic comment that was clipped enough to sound unkind without being specific enough to be insulting. She was the physical opposite of Jane, a meticulously slim woman with two pencil slashes for eyebrows and a dark purple bow of a mouth. Everything about her was so tight and smooth, she looked as if she’d been zipped into her pale skin. She was holding her wineglass in a limp-wristed grasp that suggested debilitating ennui. As the evening wore on, it became obvious to Desmond that she’d decided that appearing to be completely uninterested in almost everything somehow made her more interesting, probably a manifestation of low self-esteem, but an irritating one. She ran her eyes up and down Desmond, then turned away, leaving him feeling as if he’d been given an exam and had flunked with flying colors.
“Jane tells me you’re teaching out at Deerforth with Thomas. I suppose it’s hideous.”
Desmond felt a pang of sympathy for his colleague, not to mention himself. “As a matter of fact, the campus is gorgeous,” he said.
“Yes. That’s what I meant.”
Professional jealousy, Desmond assumed. The Boston University campus appeared to be made up of subway stops and traffic lights with a few Burger Kings thrown in for atmosphere.
“It’s been great having Thomas out there to help me settle in. He’s extremely kind.”
Rosemary shrugged. “It’s easy to be kind when you’re as depressed as he is.”
He was tempted to follow her down this path until they were taking open swipes at each other, but in addition to the fact that he was getting a little long in the tooth for this kind of boxing match, he couldn’t be entirely sure she wouldn’t report back to Jane on her opinion of him, and he didn’t want to sour what looked like a promising relationship. It was always hard to judge female friendships, which, in most cases, turned out to involve a good deal more intimacy and exchange of information than most marriages. It was usually safest to assume you were talking to a small discussion group, even when you were one on one. “So,” he said, “how many books is it you have in print . . . now.” The “now” was tossed in at the last minute as a way of suggesting that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep up with her output. Hopefully she wasn’t unpublished.
“The three collections of poetry, the book of stories, and of course, Dead Husband.”
Of course. He had heard of her, had heard her interviewed more than once on National Public Radio, although he never would have connected this cool, austere woman with the widow he’d heard on air, heartbroken and elegiac, her voice practically melting with melancholy and regret.
“Congratulations on all your success.”
She toasted herself with her wineglass. “If I’d known the memoir was going to do so well, I would have written one years ago.”
Desmond nodded. Surely she had to wait for her husband to die, although maybe there were other deaths she could have exploited: Dead Mother, Dead Sister, Dead Dog. Come to think of it, it probably wasn’t too late for her to turn the whole thing into a lucrative cottage industry.
“Is your book still in print?”
He nodded, feeling a gesture was less of a lie than saying yes would have been. “I’m sure Jane’s mentioned her ideas about her and me working together.”
Rosemary drank down the rest of her wine and dismissed the possibility. “Jane and her ideas,” she said.
A few minutes later, Thomas walked around the side of the house and down the sloping lawn holding on to Gerald’s hand. The heavy humidity—everything was sweating, from the glasses to the furniture to the vegetable chips—seemed to have drained the color out of the sky and the trees, and the two figures looked like blurry cutouts on the overgrown grass. The row of low lanterns lining the pathway down to the carriage house below blinked on, and Thomas turned and waved up to Desmond and Rosemary with the kind of overdone enthusiasm that Desmond always found slightly embarrassing.
“I’ll be right up,” he called. “Gerald’s going to help his grandmother sign on to the Internet. Aren’t you?” He swung Gerald’s arm, but the boy didn’t turn around or speak. “Do you two need anything up there?”
“Common interests would help,” Rosemary said.
Thomas laughed at this and walked on. The lanterns were making eerie, poignant shadows on the lawn and magnifying the difference in height between father and child. Thomas was stooped slightly, obviously talking in a low, gentle voice to his son as they made their gradual descent. The sight of the two of them plodding along in the dim light stirred in Desmond a faint, jumbled longing—for a child, he assumed, although it wasn’t quite that clear. Russell occasionally mentioned the possibility of trying to adopt but Desmond had never taken the talk all that seriously, assuming it was Russell’s metaphoric way to express his disappointment that dogs weren’t allowed in their building. Still, he felt a lugubrious nostalgia for something he knew he’d never have, and wanting to include himself in this blurry twilit vignette, he called out, “Have fun, Gerald,” in a voice that was itself a little blurry.
The child stopped abruptly, turned, and said, “I intend to,” with the same disconcerting sarcasm he’d used in the kitchen.
“I’ll bet Thomas is a wonderful father,” Desmond said, a bit shaken. “You can tell he loves his son.”
“Can you think of a better excuse for staying with Jane?” Rosemary said.
Jane’s brother and sister-in-law arrived moments after the plates had been brought out to the table. Jane got up to answer the doorbell, and a few minutes later an immensely pregnant woman in a summer sundress printed with colorful Adirondack chairs tottered out to the back deck. She was short and small-boned, and she appeared to be balancing her stomach in front of her as if it were a tray of drinks she was about to serve to the guests. She had a Peter Pan haircut and a smile so broad it seemed to swallow up all her other features. There was something in her smile and her otherwise hesitant demeanor that struck Desmond as almost morbidly apologetic, begging forgiveness—not for being late, but for showing up at all. Thomas kissed her rather tenderly on the forehead and turned her around by the shoulders to show her off to the rest of the table. “Doesn’t Joyce look radiant? ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be’ . . . well, not nearly as radiant as you.”
“As long as no one bursts forth at the table,” Rosemary said.
Thomas fussed over Joyce’s chair, the bald top of his head shining in the candlelight when he bent over. Shortly before the caterers brought out the plates of food, Jane had carried out a mismatched assortment of candles, everything from absurdly thin tapers in glass holders to fat scented tubes that reminded Desmond of caféteria-sized cans of beans. She’d set them down on the table and the porch railing, and the light was restful and somehow cool, despite the increasingly thick humidity. Desmond hadn’t been able to shake Rosemary’s comment about Thomas being depressed, but his kindness toward Joyce struck him as simple generosity.
“Any day now?” Desmond asked her.
Joyce was awkwardly trying to inch her chair closer to the table. “Two more months,” she apologized, turning down her mouth.
Rosemary made a muffled grunt and went back to her wine.
As Jane and her brother crossed the deck, Desmond could hear them bickering—with practiced annoyance, not real anger—about Aunt Somebody, whom he apparently didn’t phone often enough.
“I call her when I can,” the brother said. He attempted to sit in Jane’s seat but she pointed him toward the chair opposite Desmond.
“Well, you’d better start calling her when you can’t.” She looked around her plate and chair for her napkin, but came up with nothing. “She doesn’t even know when the baby is due.”
“November,” Rosemary announced. She obviously had no intention to eat, and passed her napkin across the table to Jane. “Although I’m fully prepared to assist with the delivery if someone miscalculated.”
Brian was several years younger than Jane, and Desmond found himself distracted by his handsome, silent presence on the opposite side of the table. He was recognizably Jane’s brother, but it looked as if the family features had been tested on her before being perfected for him. He was pale and gaunt, not in an unhealthy way, but as if he was troubled by profound doubt—a man of the cloth who’d devoted his life to God and then, when it was too late to switch professions, discovered he was an agnostic. His dark hair was cut in flawlessly clean lines above his ears and up around his temples. Vain, Desmond thought, taking in the gray silk shirt and the perfectly knotted green tie. Here was a man who knew how to wear clothes; Desmond’s expensive efforts at dressing up for Jane’s sake had apparently failed miserably. Brian was an architect, which perhaps explained the affected haircut and some element of fastidiousness in his erect posture.
Joyce was a children’s book editor at one of the few remaining publishing houses in Boston. A perfect profession for her, Desmond thought, listening to her talk about an illustrated book for five-year-olds she’d just bought that day. As with a lot of people who work with or for children, there was something childlike about Joyce: her colorful, little-girl dress, her short, little-boy haircut. Rosemary was staring at Joyce as if she were trying to remember who she was. When Joyce finished describing her book purchase and apologizing for going into such detail about it (“I guess it’s not really all that interesting”), Rosemary said, “Did your publishing house bid on Dead Husband?”
Joyce looked momentarily distressed and glanced toward Brian for help. He, however, had barely looked in her direction since they’d sat down. She confessed she had no idea: the children’s editors didn’t have much connection with the adult division. “They probably couldn’t have afforded it,” she apologized.
“Too bad,” Rosemary said, making it clear the loss was not hers.
The food was what food was these days: a meeting of the UN in the middle of a large dinner plate with a dusting of something green around the edges. Jane complained that this was the last time she’d use the catering school since everything they’d ever served ended up looking and tasting the same, with variations only in the inedible parts of the meal: the elaborate garnish or the plate itself. None of which, Desmond noted, prevented her from eating with immoderate enthusiasm. She leaned forward slightly as she ate, her colorful beads swinging out from her chest.
“I think it’s delicious,” Thomas said. “Are you enjoying it, Joyce?”
“Very much. Too much. I’ve gained forty pounds. Fortunately, it’s all baby.”
“Not all,” Brian said, making eye contact with no one.
Jane had apparently been waiting for just this opening. “I suppose we get to critique your body next?”
“Oh let’s,” Rosemary said. She’d pushed her chair back from the table as the food was brought out, and, for the last ten minutes or so, had been gazing at Brian with flirtatious boredom. So far, she hadn’t even bothered to pick up her fork, concentrating all of her energy on the wine. But rather than loosening her up as it did most people, it seemed to be making everything on her body tighter. It looked to Desmond as if someone were slowly twisting her bun of hair, reeling in her skin, narrowing her eyes, and sharpening her gaze.
“I’m fascinated by how threatened men become when women actually eat enough to sustain themselves or, God forbid, gain a pound,” Jane said. “It tells you something about their true feelings toward women. I don’t include Thomas. I gained eighty pounds when I was pregnant with Gerald, and he loved it.”
“She looked like a butterscotch pudding,” Thomas said.
“I hope that’s not what we’re having for dessert,” Rosemary said.
“We’re having cake,” Jane said, and then added quietly, “courtesy of Gerald.”
Grudgingly, it seemed to Desmond, Jane brought up a restaurant Brian was helping to design. She mentioned it in a general way without asking him about it directly, as if she were giving him an opportunity to contribute to the conversation, should he desire to do so. “Is that the one Dale owns?” Rosemary asked, drawing out the name in a demeaning way.
“Jane’s ex,” Thomas translated for Desmond.
“Not owner,” Brian said. “He’s one of a dozen investors. They’re treated like anonymous blood donors; drain a few pints of plasma out of them, hand them a cookie, and send them on their way.” He dusted off the front of his shirt. “Surprisingly enough, he’s not the worst of them.”
“I never liked Dale,” Rosemary said. “I tried to warn you against him, Jane. I told you it would end badly.”
Jane filled her glass from a sweating pitcher of water with lemon slices floating on top. “You did, but I thought it was because you wanted him for yourself.”
“No one has Dale for herself, that’s the whole point.”
Desmond had the strong impression that Dale was the man he’d seen on Newbury Street the other day. Jane was sitting back in her chair nursing the cold water and fingering the neckline of her blouse. He looked toward Thomas to see how he was reacting to all this, but he was sitting with his elbow on his knee and his head propped up in his hand, listening to something Joyce was telling him about book sales in a quiet voice. This was probably the look of glazed sympathy he had when listening to students discuss their final papers. But on second glance, he wasn’t glazed at all. There was something about the way he was hunching his broad shoulders and covering up his chin and mouth with his long fingers that made Desmond think he was trying to shrink himself down to Joyce’s size, the way you might if you were talking to a small child you didn’t want to frighten. My God, Desmond thought with a shock of recognition and more than a little amusement, he’s completely infatuated.
By the time the cake was brought out, the air had grown uncomfortably still and heavy. The Boston skyline was now barely visible through the haze; the lights rose up from the streets and buildings surrounding the whole baking city in a sick orange halo. The cake was not the aesthetic masterpiece Desmond had been expecting; the creamy flowers around its rim were sloppily done and unevenly spaced, facts that Desmond found comforting somehow, given Gerald’s age. While she was cutting through a row of pink flowers with an absurdly long knife, Jane told the assembled crowd that she and Desmond had a meeting with an executive producer at WGTB next week to discuss their project, a series of biographical documentaries. “Tell us about your new book,” she said. “It’s going to be part of the series, although we’re not sure where it will fit.”
The whole evening had been leading up to this moment, but now that it had arrived, Desmond wasn’t sure he was up to the challenge. The shirt he’d cared for so meticulously was damp with sweat and his face felt flushed. He’d had perhaps one glass of wine too many, and on top of all that, he found himself oddly uncomfortable with handsome, wry Brian sitting across the table from him. He stalled for a few minutes by exclaiming over the cake and drinking a tall glass of water, then started off slowly, explaining that he was working on a biography. “Of Pauline Anderton,” he said.
There was a long moment of silence which Rosemary broke by saying, “I give up.”
“I’ll bet Thomas knows,” Jane said. She wiped the knife on a damp napkin and cut off another slice. “Thomas has an encyclopedic mind.” It wasn’t the first complimentary thing she’d said about her husband this evening—she’d complimented him quite often—but this, like all the others, sounded emotionally neutral, as if she were describing the reliability of a favorite automobile, not the attributes of a man she was married to.
Thomas mulled this over, his lips pursed, ready, it seemed, to blow out a candle. “I believe she was a singer,” he said. “And I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say she was known for falling off the stage, most notoriously at Carnegie Hall toward the end of her career.”
“Oh goody,” Rosemary said, “a tragic drunk.”
Over the years, Desmond had grown used to the fact that most people had either never heard of Pauline Anderton or mis-remembered her in an outrageously unflattering way. Falling off stages, driving a Cadillac through a plate glass window, even, in one case, murdering a backup singer. Whatever defensiveness he’d once felt on her behalf had faded long ago. He patiently explained that while she had collapsed on stage several times late in her career, Anderton had never sung at Carnegie Hall.
“Too bad,” Jane said. “There probably would have been great footage.”
As Desmond was describing her early triumphs in Florida, her discovery by Walter Winchell, he felt something or someone pressing against his leg. He cleared his throat and sat up a little, but there it was again, a steady, gentle pressure that was definitely not accidental. He looked to the far end of the deck; Helen was prostrate near the railing, gazing at the skyline mournfully. So much for that possibility. The dinner table was narrow, not really suitable for six people, and earlier in the evening, he’d felt his knees brush briefly against someone’s leg several times without thinking anything of it. He glanced over at Brian, but he was staring off into the middle distance as he had been doing for the bulk of the meal.
“I think my mother might have listened to her,” Thomas said. “She could even have some of her records stashed away somewhere, here or in Beth’s house or that friend’s cottage she goes to in June.”
“The elderly have become one of the few remaining nomadic tribes on the planet,” Rosemary said. “It’s an interesting phenomenon. Someone should do a book on it.”
Jane pointed a finger. “Give it a whack, Rose. You could call it The Living Dead.”
It didn’t seem likely that Brian would be playing footsie with him under the table, his pregnant wife on one side and disapproving sister on the other, but even the possibility, however remote, made Desmond feel lightly, carelessly aroused. What was it Jane had said, Ride with it and try to have a good time? What was the point in drinking too much and risking blowing your career if you weren’t going to indulge in a bit of inebriated recklessness? He pushed back against the leg with a gentle rocking motion.
“She asked you if she’s still living,” Thomas said.
Desmond looked down to the other end of the table where Joyce was leaning toward him, apparently fascinated by Anderton’s life story. He pulled his leg back, felt himself blush, and said, “No. No, she died almost ten years ago. Just outside Boston.”
“I can certainly understand coming here to die,” Rosemary said. “It’s coming here to live that I don’t understand.”
After coffee had been served, Desmond asked for directions to the bathroom. The kitchen was clean and dark and smelled of a citrusy detergent, and the dishwasher was churning. The caterers might not have been the best cooks in the world, but they’d left the place spotless. Earlier in the day, Desmond had gone into a shop on Newbury Street that sold alternative remedies for an amazing variety of problems. He’d walked past the place dozens of times, vowing never to enter despite a fascination with the shelves of pill bottles and the scrubbed, lab-coated clerks. When he finally broke down and went in this afternoon, he’d been delighted to see that in addition to selling treatments for everything from broken bones to cancer, Healthy Living sold tablets and capsules and tinctures for Uneasiness, Insecurity, and Confusion, exactly the sorts of ills he was trying to cure. When he asked the clerk if she had anything to heighten mental clarity, she’d shown him a bottle of tiny white pills which, she assured him, had been used for centuries in Turkey. (Everything in the store seemed to have been tested in places like Romania, Albania, or a remote mountainous country known for its appalling health care.) He felt quite certain she would have been equally unruffled by a request for something to help finish your biography of Pauline Anderton. It was time for his evening dose. He opened a cabinet over the stove, but instead of glasses he saw an elaborate display of cake decorating utensils, pastry bags and assorted nipples, food coloring, and tiny spatulas. Gerald’s, no doubt. He decided to forgo the water and started chewing up a handful of pills. You can’t OD on them, the clerk had assured him, an admission of ineffectiveness if ever he’d heard one.
He’d been directed to a lavatory off the kitchen, a small room at the end of a long hallway that had obviously been a closet in the not so distant past. There was no window, but when he turned on the light, an exhaust fan in the corner of one wall came on with a whir. He pissed into the toilet loudly, chuckling over the possibility that Brian had been rubbing his leg. Clearly Brian was one of those narcissistic heterosexual men who liked to shove himself on you just so he could go home and reassure himself that someone had made a pass at him. If Desmond had tried to push it any further, Brian would undoubtedly hide behind Joyce with indignant contempt. And yet, Desmond felt his cock thickening in his hand as he mulled over the whole incident, and he gave it a few bemused tugs as he finished up. There had been a loud rumble of thunder earlier, so the dinner party would probably break up within the next ten minutes. He looked at himself in the mirror as he washed his hands. Not the light-up-the-dinner-party type, but, if Brian’s taste was any indication, not hopeless, either.
When he opened the door, Brian was standing in the narrow wainscoted passageway a few feet from the door. He was leaning against a counter with his arms folded across his chest and his fingers wrapped around his biceps. He was smirking attractively, and Desmond felt embarrassed, as if seeing someone about whom he’d had a powerfully erotic dream.
“Sorry I kept you waiting,” Desmond said.
Brian shrugged. “It takes as long as it takes.”
“Right.” He had his legs thrust out into the passageway so Desmond couldn’t get by him without elaborate contortions. “Cozy little bathroom,” he said. “Did you design it?”
Brian laughed at this. “No one designed it. Jane stuck a toilet and a sink in a closet. She has as much aesthetic sense as a field mouse.”
“I gather you two aren’t very close.”
“Not in age, looks, politics, religion, or hair color. Otherwise, we’re like twins.”
There was something so unbecoming in his languid tone and the attempt to boost himself up by running down Jane, Desmond felt the erotic charge of the moment dissipate into annoyance. He motioned toward the hallway with his chin, indicating he wanted to get by.
Brian pulled in his legs but reached out and fingered the collar of Desmond’s shirt. “Nice material,” he said.
“Cotton.”
“Oh.” He dropped the collar and brushed it back into place, pushed himself away from the counter with his hands, and went into the bathroom. Before he closed the door, he said, “My office is in Cambridge. Give me a call sometime, Desmond. I’ll give you a tour of the stately homes of New England.”
Christ, Desmond thought, what a lot of nervy bullshit that was, with his wife sitting out on the deck, seconds away from going into labor. He hated this type of cad on principle, marrying for security and acceptance while running around with men on the side. He adjusted himself in his pants and started walking toward the kitchen. When he looked up, he saw Gerald standing at the end of the passageway glaring at him. He had a large tub of ice cream tucked under one arm and a dripping spoon in his hand. When their eyes met, Gerald stepped back into the shadows. Desmond stopped for a second and felt the blood rush from his face. Then he reassured himself the child was only six, probably hadn’t seen anything, and wouldn’t understand what had been going on even if he had.
In the kitchen, Gerald was standing near the sink wearing a hard little pout.
“Good ice cream?” Desmond asked, keeping his tone as cheerful as possible. When the child said nothing, Desmond tried again. “What flavor is it?”
“I’m not supposed to eat ice cream before bed,” Gerald announced. Something in his deep voice and the tone made it sound like a proclamation of his moral superiority.
Desmond winked at Gerald and said: “I won’t tell anyone. It’ll be our secret.”
“I’m not supposed to keep secrets with strangers,” Gerald stated, as if Desmond had proposed something unwholesome.
“No, of course not. Good idea. Well, you sleep tight.”
Before Desmond had a chance to make it out of the kitchen, Gerald said, “I saw you talking to Uncle Brian.”
Desmond stopped and turned. “I’m sure you did,” he said. “He’s a nice man, your Uncle Brian.”
“He doesn’t like me,” Gerald said. “He called me fatty and told Jane she should put me on a diet.”
“Oh. Well that wasn’t very nice.” In the dim kitchen light, Gerald looked a good deal smaller and more pathetic than he had a few minutes earlier. A sad kid more than anything, clumsy, shorn, and wearing a striped jersey that was stained with melted ice cream. Desmond went over to him and squatted down until he was Gerald’s height. “I think you’re the nice one, not your uncle. Do you want me to help you put away the ice cream?”
Gerald scooped out a heaping spoonful and then said quietly, “Yes, please.”
Difficult age, Jane had said. Difficult mother-son relationship might be more to the point. Still, he could feel Gerald glaring at his back as he walked out to the porch and a loud clap of thunder rattled the windows.