50 (17 page)

Karen arrived on a Sunday evening and was telling him about events of the past two weeks. “The big news, I’m so excited, is that Jerry told me I can design a line of clothing for teenage girls and he’ll manufacture it and put it in the Flash stores. He says since I’m artistically inclined, I can do it. Can you imagine? He’d have his staff make up samples and we’d see how they turned out. He said there could be a whole sportswear line called ‘Karen.’ And I’m going to start right away. I’m supposed to go around to different stores and see what they’re selling and look at what kids are wearing and read the magazines and this isn’t just playing at it. If the line worked out I’d get paid just the way a regular designer who worked for him would. In the meantime I’m going to be sort of a consultant on some new clothing they’re doing and I’ll be going into an office after school. He said he’d give me my own little office to do sketches and read the magazines so it would be professional. Nobody I know does anything like that. None of my friends. I mean, they’re all consumers. But to be the person who thinks it up.
Karen!
Isn’t that the neatest?”

“Yes. I would think it can be very exciting for you.” She spoke to Broeden from Doug’s apartment several times during the next evenings, thrilled about her project. She talked about it at dinner with Doug; she was filling sketchbooks with ideas. Doug could not decide if Broeden was being the greatest guy ever, which Karen evidently thought he was, to give her this opportunity, or if he was finding another way of luring her away from him.

After two weeks, Karen returned to the Broedens, eager to get there.

“I’m really unclear about my feelings,” Doug said to Nancy over dinner at her apartment. “It’s possibly a wonderful chance for a kid. On the other hand, up to now she’s been a serious young artist. He’s going to put her in the fashion field. It’s like he’s commercializing her. Is that patronizing of me?”

“I can’t say.”

“I’m not suggesting she’s going to be a major artist, but before she can even think about it, she’s being deflected into commerce.”

“I suppose if she becomes a brilliant fashion designer, everybody could live with that,” Nancy said with a sharp edge to her voice.

“What is it?”

“What is it? You have children problems. And I say to myself, in a few weeks I’m going to be thirty-six. If I keep going like this I’ll never have an Andy or a Karen of my own. I know I signed up for this. I was going to have the career and that seemed right when I was younger, but the biological clock is ticking and I’ve got this pattern of drifting with men. We’ve been together for six months. And then it will be another six months. It’s not the same six months as when you’re twenty-three. I want to be married and I want to have a baby. And seeing you with your children, it’s not just a baby in the abstract I’d want, but a baby with you. Is this too much for me to say?”

“No.”

“I’m terrified of drifting with you and then breaking up and having to start over again, and eventually it will all be too late. I love you, Doug, and I want to have your baby.”

“I’m very touched—”

“You just said the wrong thing. In my head you say, ‘I love you and I want to have a baby with
you.
’ But you have to think about it. We can’t just go on and on.”

His leg healed sufficiently for him to jog again and he wrote a column on middle-age legs and the unhappy recognition that he needed that form of exercise, however monotonous—the column his contribution to Reynolds’s personal fitness quota. He and Nancy celebrated her 36th birthday at the Four Seasons. They told stories about their families, and about their worst and best birthdays, laughed, and stayed clear of the issue Nancy had raised. In the next weeks Nancy did not bring up marriage or children again, and yet Doug felt the issue, having been introduced, was now part of the relationship.

Bob asked Doug to meet him for lunch in a Japanese restaurant on East Sixteenth Street, far from their usual meeting places. Doug was escorted to a small private dining room secluded by screens. Bob stopped speaking every time the waitress, whose command of English was extremely uncertain, came into the room, and he waited apprehensively until the screen door was closed before resuming.

“Why are we here, Bob? This is the kind of place where you’d pass state secrets.”

“Close. You have to promise me you won’t tell this to anyone. Not Nancy, not Jeannie, not a soul. You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Not anyone.”

“I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

“I’m having an affair.”

“What?”

“It’s one of the most exhilarating and simultaneously depressing things that’s ever happened to me.”

“Of course, depressing.”

“It’s been going on for five months.”

“Five months?”

“At first it was just a flirtation, then a one-night stand, then it developed.”

“Does Sarah know anything about it?”

“It’s against her religion to know anything about it.”

“Bob, who is she, what does she do?”

“Connie Davis. She’s a psychotherapist.”

“Is she aware that you’re married and you have two kids?”

“Of course.”

“Isn’t this against the rules? Don’t they take a kind of Hippocratic oath?”

“I don’t imagine they should sleep with their patients, but she’s a vital, normal single woman living in the twentieth century. Almost the twenty-first,” he added.

“What are you going to do? You have a family.”

“I don’t need that tone of moral superiority from a buddy.”

“What would you like, humor? I can give you humor. How Oscar Levant said affairs were all right, but it’s the two dinners that kill you.”

“I’ve eaten the two dinners.”

“I didn’t mean to be morally superior, if that’s how it sounded. I’m just so surprised. You plotted this marriage.”

“That’s the depressing part. If we break up, Sarah would get sole custody. I can’t do what you did. I’m not that kind of father. And there’s the country house and all those plans for us to spend more time together.”

“So why, Bob?”

“I can’t say for certain. You always have outside temptations when you’re married. It’s like the way we’re supposed to come in contact with viruses all the time, but that sometimes we’re more susceptible than others and we catch something. My marriage got stale and I caught an affair.”

“Taking the American Medical Association position on love.”

“With Connie, at its best it’s been extraordinary. The sex, Doug! I have never experienced such sexual pleasure. Miraculous. Animalism. We’re like beautiful animals.”

Rotund Bob with his little tubby belly talking about his sexual pleasure, Doug could almost laugh but for the man’s sincerity, and for his own experience. It was good with Nancy. Was it miraculous? Had Bob found some level of male sexuality he had never reached?

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, Doug. I love my kids. I still love Sarah in a way. I love Connie. It’s such a mess.”

Suddenly Bob began to cry, his entire body heaving. Doug put his arm around him.

“Okay, now, easy—”

“I don’t want to lose my family. I don’t want to lose Connie. Tell me what I should do.”

“How can I? You and Sarah. If
your
marriage isn’t working—you had it all figured out.”

“I did.”

“Then what do I know? I’m going to be fifty. I’m supposed to know something. I don’t know anything about anything.”

Claiming work as an excuse, he spent a week without seeing Nancy. Over the weekend he wandered through the city, gravitating toward playgrounds, watching children playing, hoping a new truth about marriage and family might reveal itself to him. From the bottom of a closet in his apartment he brought out a cardboard box containing his custodial portion of the family pictures taken during the marriage, Karen and Andy when they were younger, and he shuffled the memories like cards. Beneath the photographs were old picture books nobody had wanted, the children had outgrown them, and out of sentimentality he had claimed them when he and Susan were dividing possessions at the time of the divorce:
Boris and Amos; Goodnight, Moon; In the Night Kitchen.
He thumbed through the worn volumes and realized he practically knew the words by heart.

After nearly two weeks he called Nancy and went to her apartment one evening. When he entered, she held herself away from him, joking, appraising him as if to reacquaint herself with his features. As she served wine, the tension was palpable.

“Nancy, if we start to think about marriage, it’s not only marriage we’re thinking about with us.”

She shook her head as if this was coming on too quickly, she didn’t want this. “I have the feeling this is not the right time for such heavy material. You look tired. I’m tired.”

“We have to deal with this.”

“Do we? Wouldn’t you rather make love? I make you happy, soldier,” she tried to quip, but he proceeded.

“I don’t have a very good record as a husband. I don’t know too many people who do.”

“I move for a postponement. See me in a few months on this.”

“No, you were right. We can’t just drift.”

“To think I brought this on. I am so incompetent.”

“It has to be faced. You’re talking about marriage
and
children, and I have to ask myself if I want that.”

“Why did I let our future get enmeshed in parenthood?”

“It is, though.”

“I didn’t have to present it quite that way. God, if I conducted my professional life like this, I’d be out of business.”

“But you were talking about children. Wasn’t that the idea?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“So I have to decide. Sometimes you read about these men in their fifties and sixties who have older children, starting all over with new wives and babies. But I don’t know what their first marriages were like. I don’t know what kind of fathers they were back then, how many hours they put in, how early they got home, did they buy the children’s shoes, take them to doctors, all those things, or did they just come in for the main course while the wives did the rest? I was there. I spent the time. And because I was there, I know what’s required to do it. And as much as I’d like to say otherwise, I don’t think I can love a child, not that way again, not with all that intensity, and all those hours. And then to go through separating from your children all over—I don’t think I can deal with it. And I don’t have the energy anymore,” he said in a troubled voice.

“I am so stupid. To give you an ultimatum. I can’t believe I handled it this way. Doug, don’t you know you’d make a wonderful father all over again because you are, because you were?”

“Nancy, I just can’t do it again.”

“You would have a wife and child who love you, possibly children loving you. Because you’re terrific. And I am terrific. I am the best thing that could ever happen to you. And we would make it work!”

“There are no guarantees. It’s not always what you had in mind.”

“I was so happy to see you and you came here to say goodbye.”

Her arms were crisscrossed and she held her sides in pain.

“Nancy—”

“No, go home. Go away. I am so stupid. But you’re a fool.”

H
E WAS HOME ALONE
reading, on the radio the plaintive “I Get Along Without You Very Well” was playing, and, finally, it was not Susan he thought of when he heard the song. Without Nancy the texture of his life changed more dramatically than he would have imagined. The Friday-night events were over. The contact with her, speaking to each other during the day, having her there at night, the closeness, the stability—vanished. Whoever said, “A bum decision is better than no decision at all” wasn’t approaching 50 having ended a relationship. He was unable to call anyone and go through the laborious process of beginnings. Sarah Kleinman and Jeannie gave him phone numbers. He didn’t use them.

After three weeks of reading his periodicals at night he accepted a suggestion of Jeannie’s. She told him the West Side Y had a singles club; she had been there a few times with women friends, and he might find someone without going through the rituals of a date. He attended a lecture to be followed by a square dance, the lecture by a professor of sociology at Hunter College on the theme “What Is Marriage?” Twenty unmarried people squirmed in their seats eyeing the “possibles” in the room as the professor, a married woman in her 40s, was selling commitment to an audience eager to get past the lecture and circulate.

Wine was served in paper cups. The younger women in the room and the younger men went to each other like iron filings to magnets. A potbellied man in his 40s chatted with Doug and lost interest in camaraderie when Doug was not a candidate for life insurance. A nearly obese woman in her 30s in a sacklike dress was talking to a man in his 40s, a half head shorter than the woman. The man was wearing a blue tweed jacket with lime-green slacks. She looked over at Doug a few times, smiled, and in politeness he smiled back. The folding chairs were moved away and the social director, an energetic little woman of about 60, called out, “Grab your partners!” She played a square-dance number on the phonograph. Doug, the heavyset woman, the potbellied man, and the man in the green slacks were watching the others dance. “Come, meet. You’re not here to meet?” the social director said, pulling the outsiders into the circle. Doug danced, holding hands with the heavyset woman. After a few spirited turns around the floor, perspiring heavily on her face and under her arms, she took his hand and led him to the side, where she poured herself a cup of wine.

“I never saw you here before.”

“My first time.”

“I’m Donna.”

“Doug.”

“Doug, let me ask you a personal question. Suppose you went to a dance and a woman saw you across the room and she liked you. She saw you were different. She was in personnel and was a good judge of people. And she said to you that the other men were losers but she liked you and she wanted to take you home and screw. Screw like you haven’t screwed in your life. Screw until every drop of you was drained from you and you were so limp you thought you could never screw again, until she aroused you with her tongue all around your penis. What would you say to that?”