IT HAD BEEN two months since I had seen Lauren. Possibly I had started to get used to the idea, though I wouldn’t press it. Then, two nights before, she was on the phone. She wanted to see me. Dinner Tuesday night? It felt funny making a date with your wife. She picked the place, so I figured the choice of weapons was mine. I had splashed on some Tuscany and worn my gray suit. There wasn’t much to be done about the face.
The 99 was a notch above the plastic-roof joints, with okay food and atmosphere if you caught it when the place wasn’t packed with the office crowd. I was early. I’m always early. As bad habits go, it’s not the worst. A private ticket without a little paranoia doesn’t last. I parked on a corner stool at the bar where I could see the door. The bartendress was thirty-something, with a smile full of shiny wire. I told her a Molson. It used to be you would see dental hardware only on kids; these days it turned up everywhere. The soul finally having proven imperfectable, we concentrated on the body now. I had news for us.
Being early was a mistake this time, as it only gave me a chance to worry about what changes two months might have brought. It was more than a year since Lauren had started to tell me we should split. When my counter-proposal began to sound like a recording, I said why didn’t she stay in the house; it would be easier for me to crash at my office for a while. But as the nights passed, the couch in my waiting room wasn’t getting any softer, and the recording only got scratchy from use. Ten months ago I bit the rent on an apartment over in the east end of town. I didn’t quit trying to change Lauren’s mind.
“Drinking alone?”
I had missed her coming in. I didn’t miss anything else as I bumbled to my feet and took in the newly crimped ash-blond hair, her tan, and the trimness the flower-print Belle France dress could only emphasize. As I bent to kiss her she tipped her face just enough so it caught her on the pert angle of her jaw. Charles of the Ritz hit me like a truck pulling out of Memory Lane.
“How are you, Alex? You look okay.”
“Not as okay as you.”
She had not put her slim little purse on the bar yet and was taking me in with momentary appraisal in her cool, woodsmoke gray eyes.
“Shall we get a table?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m starved.”
I was still feasting on this woman who for a lot of years had been my wife, when a busboy poured water clinking into goblets and asked if we’d care for a cocktail. I looked at Lauren. “Chablis?”
“Cutty and soda,” she told him, and in just the way she said it my stomach went tight and my appetite dwindled. I ordered another beer.
There were things you knew about people, the little dance steps you fell into with them which got comfortable. When one or the other partner changed steps, suddenly there were dislocations all down the line. Scotch was a new step.
The early-evening light coming through the latticed window illuminated half of Lauren’s face. She wore thirty-eight well, like a suit of custom-fit clothes. She sparkled the way lots of women years younger couldn’t, the way, in my eyes, she always had and always would. But something had changed. I sensed it.
After the drinks came and the waiter took our orders, filling his own young eyes with the way Lauren looked, we did the ritual with the glasses, but they were out of key. Lauren snapped open the little purse and found a deck of those women’s cigarettes that are as long as an eye pencil, and fitted one in her lips. Clumsily I scratched a restaurant match.
“The rest of the population is giving up and you start?”
She whiffed smoke to one side. “The habit is under control. I end up throwing away half the pack each week because they go stale.” Not that it was any of my business, she added without saying it.
I kept it light and we played a little catch-up. Life, work, the mutual and separate friends, the neighborhood. I remembered and told her happy birthday, which was coming up. That struck a spark. She offered her tanned, slender fingers. “You didn’t see my birthstone ring.”
It was hard to miss a ruby the size of a tail light, but I had. Shamus Rasmussen. “It’s great,” I said.
The food came and Lauren went at it with zest while I picked at mine like a parakeet. I knew now what I had been hoping for from this, and I’d been wrong. Being wrong makes me defensive, which turns up my smart-ass setting. “Your name gets linked with a certain dry cleaning magnate’s lately,” I said. “Is that a habit you’ve got under control too?”
Her eyes went a little stony. “Are you working?”
“Personal curiosity.”
“You can ask, but I don’t have to answer.”
I attempted a smile. “We’re in an old episode of Family Feud, right? Richard Dawson is going to walk in any minute, all puckered up for a kiss.”
Her headshake told me I was being childish. I gnawed food and didn’t taste a thing. “I don’t hear your name on the grapevine,” Lauren said neutrally. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“I’m married.”
She lifted her shoulders. “That could be a problem. You’re thinner.”
“The running. Thin is always in.”
“Don’t get too thin.”
“Is that concern I detect?”
“Guilt maybe. Over bailing out the way I did,” she said, and for a moment we had slipped into honesty. “My timing wasn’t so great. I know that.”
I gave her a few seconds to squeeze in more, but she didn’t. She stubbed the cigarette into the glass ashtray, where it looked oddly forlorn, alone in the tray with a delicate rim of lipstick on one end. Nothing from lips that pretty should die alone. I leaned closer. “The door swings back the other way,” I said, hearing the note of hope in my voice and not ashamed of it.
“That’s why I called you,” she said.
I felt my heart lift.
“I wanted you to find out first from me,” she said, “not around town or in a gossip column. Joel has asked me to marry him, Alex. I want the divorce.”
It was like fingers speared into the solar plexus. It is the most helpless feeling there is: you lie there buckled over, fish-eyed and gasping, waiting for the finishing blow.
Lauren looked around, and the waiter glided over. “Same, please,” she said. The kid nodded and glanced my way. Seeing the green tinge maybe, he vanished before I could shake my head.
“Why didn’t you just order a Molotov and throw that?” I said.
She gazed out at the sparse traffic on 133, and the sunlight loved her face, like the waiter did, like I did, like Joel Castle must. “What did you expect, Alex?” she asked, turning back.
“Time?”
“Dammit, time ran out. I was ready for both of us to leave here, to go someplace new and start over. You insisted on staying.”
“There is no place new in a situation like that.”
“Isn’t there a point where you put your cards down and just walk away, regardless of what’s on the table?”
“Not when it’s your name that’s being dragged through the ashes,” I said.
She sighed. “So I’ll always admire you for sticking and trying to clear it. But maybe you should’ve done it another way, not sitting around in a little office with dust motes spinning in the air and waiting for business to find its way up the stairs. You got shafted, that’s the way it is. Everyone gets shafted sooner or later. You pull the shaft out and get the bleeding stopped and you go on. I was ready to do that if we went someplace else. You think it was any easier for me reading what the papers were saying about you, knowing what people were thinking? The ‘for worse’ and ‘for poorer’ clauses work all right in the beginning, but there’s got to be an upward curve.”
“Like in the dry cleaning business,” I said, being stupid again.
“Like in life. And what’s wrong with having money? What have you got against Joel anyway?”
“I know him.”
“And I don’t?”
“You know his cleaned-up incarnation. I knew him before, when he was Joey Costello, spending his old man’s dough and not being a very good person. But that’s not—”
“So I accept who he is now. Love can change people.”
“Love is just a four-letter word,” I said. “Like ‘rich.’”
As a credit to her intelligence she sipped her drink and ignored that. But I couldn’t. I said, “Okay, he’s got good taste, but it doesn’t work for Charlie Tuna, why should it work for him? Just because he gives you things and has money, doesn’t make it right.”
“It’s righter than you sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. What’s pride worth?”
“If you gotta ask…”
She shook her head, truly pained. “Honest to God. I don’t know you anymore. What about respect? That’s the trouble with you, you respect nothing but some abstraction, some idea of honor that’s been wronged.”
“Forget about that,” I said. “What happened to the couple who were going to stand by each other?” I had taken her hand in mine, but she drew it away, not roughly or abruptly, just away.
“They changed, Alex. People do. Think about that.”
She opened her bag, tossed the cigarettes in, took out a wallet and laid some bills on the table. I waved the money away. “Lauren, what if we—”
She cut me off by rising. “I have to leave,” she said and hurried for the door.
I signaled the waiter, who did not come running for me.