50 (12 page)

“I’m forty-eight. I never said that to a woman before. Of course, I’ve never been forty-eight before.”

“What else? I’ve never been married. I was engaged twice, once in college, once in law school. Both would have been disastrous marriages of people too young. But when you’re young you can get your first marriages out of the way much easier. You get older and your standards go up and your possibilities go down.”

“I’m afraid I know what you mean.”

“I work a lot. Carter, Lynde has about two hundred lawyers. The firm does a pretty fair job on pro bono work, and in the good deed area I do a little more than I should on my own. But I started out more idealistically than I’m becoming, so it helps me to convince myself I’m still slightly pure anyway.”

She lived on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village in a three-room walk-up. In the bedroom was a home-office area, an antique rolltop desk with a computer on a stand nearby. The small living room had a fireplace, a reading chair next to a green-shade floor lamp, books in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the room having the overall feeling of a den. Nancy served tea, and when she stood he rose and took her in his arms and kissed her. He slid his hands along her hips, drawing her close to him, and she pulled away.

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I want it to mean something, at least a little.”

“It will mean a great deal to me,” he said with mock seriousness.

“No, it won’t. Not after one evening together.”

“This is the second.”

“That one drink doesn’t count.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t have if we had the drink standing. We had it sitting.”

“You sound like a lawyer. Another time, Doug, please. I don’t want to rush this, because in the context of not being serious, I love you, too.”

The next time he saw her, Nancy served wine, cheese, and crackers, fresh flowers were in a vase on a coffee table. He was chastened by seeing the flowers. Going out with women had become such a businesslike procedure for him he had begun to forego softening acts, such as bringing flowers himself. The care she had taken, the chilled wine, the cheese, the flowers made him want to go back outside, buy a rose, a Whitman’s Sampler. Does anybody give Whitman’s Samplers anymore?

They decided to go out for a hamburger and he suggested the Blarney. “It really is just a joint.”

“I’ve been to Lutèce.”

They sat in Doug’s booth and talked for a couple of hours.

“We have to check periodically for boring,” he said.

“I think we’re doing fine.”

“Listen, would you like to be my girl? I’ve been looking for a girl. Old-fashioned type of girl, the kind you used to have. Do you know that kind of relationship?”

“I think so. Does that mean we try to be friends? I wouldn’t mind that.”

He stopped the cab a few times on the way to her apartment to run into late-night drugstores, finally locating Whitman’s Samplers.

“This may be two years old, but it’s the thought behind it.”

At her apartment they sipped wine, then he led her into the bedroom. She kissed his eyes when they were making love. He couldn’t remember in his recent experience a gesture of such tenderness. What he had been involved in, evidently, with “recreational sex” was an extended series of athletic performances.

“There you are,” she said after they had lain quietly. “This is me. I wish I had bigger breasts and a smaller nose.”

“Please—”

“The breasts I would never do anything about, although some women have. The nose was fixable. I was in high school and one year all the girls were spending their summer vacations getting nose jobs, the same precious little nose. I was too serious for that, or I thought I was too homely, and wouldn’t it have been doubly terrible if I had the nose done and it still didn’t help? So I never went for the nose. I used to say to myself it would mar my personal honesty. I’m not so sure if I wouldn’t have been better off with less honesty and less nose.”

He placed his hand gently on her face.

“I hope my nose and my breasts are out of the way, as it were. It stands as a definition of a friend, if I could say that to you.”

“You’ve opened it up. We’ve got my bulging middle, my thinning hair, how well hung I am—shall I go on?”

“I say you’re perfect.”

“And I say you are, too.”

On a rainy Sunday night Doug was at home by himself. Nancy was in Washington on business and this was the children’s time with the Broedens. He was reading while listening to a sports call-in program on the radio. He liked to listen to those shows occasionally. This kept him in touch with public taste, and he also enjoyed matching himself against the fans, people who called in and tried to stump listeners and the host with such as Dominic DiMaggio’s lifetime batting average, and what was the name of the third ballplaying DiMaggio. Like Name the Fourth Marx Brother. Doug didn’t know what Dom hit, the other DiMaggio was Vince, also he knew Zeppo Marx. One would have to search for Dom DiMaggio’s batting average, which was not readily available in sports digests and world almanacs. Why did this person care? What was the passion for statistics in sports? He thought that it could be a search for order. In a chaotic universe, if you could quantify circumstances, you were not hurtling meaninglessly through the void. It was worth a column perhaps. Andy called with concern in his voice.

“Dad, Karen’s got a temperature. A hundred and three. Carmen’s out on Long Island and Mom and Jerry are stuck in Boston.”

“I’ll be right over.”

He couldn’t get a cab in the rain and he ran to the building on Central Park West and Sixty-sixth Street. Andy brought him into Karen’s bedroom, the dog following Doug as if he were trying to figure out, What are
you
doing
here?
Doug kissed Karen on the forehead, feeling for her temperature with his lips.

“Not so good, huh, angel?”

“I feel very achy.”

“It’s okay. Anything else, any other symptoms?” he said, looking for rashes, pressing her glands.

“No.”

“Don’t worry. The doctor is in.”

Susan phoned and he spoke to her on a cordless phone.

“Seems to be just a fever. Probably the flu,” he said to Susan. “Has she taken anything yet?” he asked Andy.

“Not yet.”

“I’m going to give her some Tylenol. Do you have any?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “Doug, the storm’s going to have us here all night. We can’t get out.”

“I’ll give her a little ginger ale to sip. And I’ll stay here tonight.”

“I’ll call back in an hour or so.”

He took Karen’s temperature, a shade over 103.

“I’ve seen hundred and threes before. Don’t worry,” he said to Karen.

“You can go back home, Dad. We just didn’t know whether to call you,” she said.

“You did the right thing. I’ll be here tonight.”

He administered the Tylenol, gave her ginger ale, and sat with her and read to her from
The Once and Future King,
which was on her bedstand, staying with her until she had nearly fallen asleep. She was no warmer to his lips.

“You’re going to be fine. Sleep, angel. I’ll be right here.”

Susan called again and he assured her that Karen was not in danger and was resting. She asked how he would sleep, suggesting he use the guest room, where they had a convertible couch with clean linen. A guest room in a city apartment?

“Can I serve you something, a drink or something?” Andy asked in the awkwardness of the situation. He was the host and his father really didn’t belong there.

“I’ll take something if I wish. Thanks.”

Harry came by, squeezing between Doug’s legs.

“We’ve overloaded his circuits tonight,” Doug said.

Andy said goodnight to his father, Doug kissed him on the top of his head, and Andy withdrew to his room. Doug did not follow him in. Somehow, being with them on a night when he was not supposed to be underscored his nonexclusivity. There were men who got to be with their children every night.

He sat on the floor in the hallway outside their rooms and waited for Karen to fall asleep. He checked her, she seemed slightly cooler to him, and sleeping soundly now. Harry was following him, his part-time dog.

“You’ve got it good here, boy,” he said. “There’s no way I could get you an apartment like this.”

He hadn’t taken notice of the apartment when he first entered. He walked through the rooms as a tourist. The living room was probably twenty-five by fifty, nearly as large as his apartment. Adjacent was a separate dining room. The children’s rooms, the maid’s room, Harry’s room, and the kitchen were on one side of the living room-dining area. The den, guest room, entertainment room, two offices, one for Broeden, one for Susan, and the master bedroom were in the other wing. Because of Broeden’s “Flash” he imagined the decor would have been gaudier than it was. The furniture was modern without ostentation, the colors muted, and he saw Susan’s eye in this. There was custom cabinetry in most of the rooms. At New York City prices the work must have cost as much as some people’s homes. And he noted the gadgets, the cordless phone, the large-screen television, the housewide stereo system. The maid had a nineteen-inch television set. Only the dog was without television, and Doug surmised if Harry knew how to ask for it, he could have had one, too.

In Broeden’s office over his desk was an exquisite watercolor that Doug recognized as Karen’s work, a landscape of a marsh, one of the best paintings she had ever done. Doug was distressed. This painting was in Broeden’s office and Doug had never even gotten to look at it. On the wall of the den he came upon a montage of framed photographs, Broeden, Susan, Karen, and Andy together on weekends, on vacations, smiling, mugging for the camera, an intense, ongoing life involving his children, and another man was in his place. The sight filled him with such extreme sadness, he was suddenly nauseous. This is not something I should have seen. Find the missing face in these pictures.

M
EETING THE CHILDREN WAS
due, since Doug had been seeing Nancy for weeks. He decided it should be conducted over ever-reliable Chinese food. They went to Chinatown and he sat nervously while Nancy and the youngsters ran the dinner. Nancy, nervous herself, asked questions, trying to get to know them quickly, as if this might be the one chance she was going to get, and these old pros slowed the pace, asking questions about her. At one point, Andy, noting his father’s tenseness, said, “It’s all right, Dad. We’re relating.”

Also due was the answer to How did I get to be here—single? They were at Doug’s apartment, lying quietly in the dark, and Nancy introduced the subject.

“I was in Washington. My first job. He was a partner in the firm with the house in Georgetown I never got to see, the hostess wife, the two children I never met. It lasted for three years and I was very much in love with him, and one day, it was always one day, he was going to leave his wife. I saw a little humor book once and it said, ‘Waiting for him to leave his wife is the same as waiting for Godot.’ I finally got out of Washington and came to New York and eventually I fell in love again. I was thirty-one. He was forty-four and had never been married. A sculptor, he had a teaching position at Princeton. Commissions, shows, fairly heady stuff. He had a gorgeous loft in SoHo, everything in it he constructed himself, a man of skills, an intellect and flawless, if I had been about nineteen. We made wedding plans now and then, which were like some prospective project he’d get to one day. Three years into the relationship, I was a year into therapy and still waiting for Godot. When I finally came to see he was never going to get married, or at least not to me, we were losing it, and in my fervent way I had invested several years in relationships that ended with warm wishes for my best well-being in the future, with whoever was next. Therapy’s given me some sense of my own passivity in the relationships, having been so ‘butch,’ if you will, professionally that I wanted to just collapse traditionally into the man’s arms, to give you the shorthand on it. But I’d fallen in love a couple of times to people who didn’t marry me, and not getting married is all right in this day and age, except the relationships didn’t last. And now I’m thirty-five.”

“I’m jealous of them both.”

“I should be jealous. You were married.”

“We lived through the height of the anger in the women’s movement, and we were casualties, which is also shorthand. I didn’t do enough to keep us together. I’ve thought that with an entirely different set of outside circumstances the marriage might have lasted, but that’s probably not true. Because Susan ultimately married a much more high-powered and financially successful man than I was or will ever be.”

“We don’t know—”

“We know. I’m not thirty-five and we know. As far as the time since the divorce, I’ve been in a few ball games. Not many went into the late innings.”

“What inning would you say we’re in?”

“I’m not sure, but I know we’re past the first.”

Tony Rosselli surfaced speaking on the phone in an excited voice. “Doug, you’ve got to meet me at the bowling alley at Forty-first and Eighth some morning this week. When can you do it, tomorrow, the next day?”

“Let me guess. The world’s tallest midget championship bowler.”

“This is big, Doug. Colossal.”

“I’ll meet you before I go to work, eight
A.M.
Thursday.”

“This is so big I can barely speak.”

Doug entered the bowling alley. Rosselli was wearing a shiny green suit, pacing. On the floor in front of him were two shoe boxes with holes punched in them.

“In the history of sports,” Rosselli said, making his presentation, “there have only been a couple of kinds of racing for betting. Horse racing. Dog racing. Both of them require big outdoor settings, big investments of capital. I introduce you to a new concept. You ready?”

“I’m breathless.”

Rosselli removed the cover of each box, reached down and produced the participants.

“Turtle racing!”

He walked to the top of an alley and placed two turtles on the surface. They did not move, their heads and extremities pulled within their shells.

“You have to give them a minute to adjust,” Rosselli explained, setting food out in front of them.