Three Balconies (6 page)

“Well. . . . coming from Russia . . .”

“I realize that . . . different culture . . . It's all very reasonable . . . Except that she pronounced the word ‘teep.' Call it xenophobic if you like, but I could never have an affair with someone who says ‘teep.' By the time she got it right, I'd be off in another direction.

“Besides,” he said, almost as an afterthought, “what if my wife found out? . . . .”

“What if she did?”

“That's my fear, you see. That she would immediately lose fifty pounds and run off with one of those befuddled third World diplomats that she counsels at the UN.”

“And then?”

“And then?” he said, brought up short for the moment. “And then I wouldn't
have
her.”

She glanced at the clock. He did as well and saw that the session was drawing to a close.

“Look,” he said, rushing now to meet the deadline, “I can get through very nicely. It's pleasant enough in bed. I don't claim to have any ferocious drive these days. It's not as if I'm lusting after skinny blondes in garter belts. She's an awfully good friend and
tremendously loyal. I know, I know, it sounds like I'm describing a dog. But she's a remarkable person. How many men have that? What I'm getting at is that this is not a sad story.”

“What is it that you want?”

“
I want my wife back
,” he said, surprised at the ferocity of his response. “I didn't bargain for mumus and waddling and expansion pants and having to cringe when some lard-assed tub of an individual comes hoving into view at a screening –
blimping
into view – and I'm forced to introduce her as my wife.”

The woman absorbed this last as if it were a blow and then got up from her chair.

“I don't think I can go on like this,” she said.

“You felt confident that you could.”

“I was wrong. Clearly, it's impossible to treat someone . . .”

“When there's a dual connection,” he said, finishing the thought. “I know.”

They looked at each other in silence. He was the first to speak.

“What do we do?”

“Go on, I guess. We do love each other.”

“We do,” he said, putting his arms around her, the bulk of her and pressing her to him with all his strength. “Oh God, do we ever.”

IT WAS A DARK TIME FOR DUGAN. Though he was hale, if not hearty, at sixty-two, his friends were dropping like flies. First to go had been O'Shea who had found the strains of a divorce to be unbearable and waded into a pond in Patchogue, never again to surface. Next came Taggert, a trumpet player who had been hospitalized with frail lungs, then quickly released when he set a record for blowing up pulmonary balloons. Yet soon after, he expired all the same – in a commercial hotel, surrounded by weeping jazz musicians. No sooner had Dugan recovered from this loss than he received word that Lieberman, his long-time editor, had keeled over at his desk, as if he had grown weary of reading introspective first novels. Lieberman had been Dugan's age, almost to the day, and had appeared to be strong as an ox. Brilliant at shoring up defective manuscripts, he had imposed a clever structure on Dugan's complex study of nineteenth-century Balkan cabals. The loss was a grievous one to Dugan who could not help but think – it's getting closer.

Perhaps it was a cycle. He had heard that such losses came in threes. But that theory was blasted out of the water when he received a call from his psychiatrist's wife saying that Dr. Werner had been taken by pneumonia – and as a result, Dugan's Wednesday afternoon session had been canceled. Dugan expressed his condolences – no finer man had ever walked the earth, etc – but in truth, he was angry at Werner. At their last session, the doctor had produced a reference work of distinguished historians that failed to list Dugan's name. Thoughtlessly, and perhaps because of his advancing years, Werner, in referring to Dugan's work, had used the term “intermediate.” Dugan was crushed. At the end of the
hour, he had raced to the library and searched out reference books in which his name
was
listed – but now he would never get to brandish them at Werner. The widow gave Dugan the name of another man he could see, but although Dugan dutifully scribbled down the phone number, he knew he would never use it. Werner was the second psychiatrist who had dropped dead on him; he had lost faith in the profession.

Dugan hoped for a let-up in the parade of grim developments, but none came. Soon after, he was notified by fax that Smiley, the owner of his favorite saloon, had died in the back room of the popular watering place. In this case, the news came as no surprise. Not only was Smiley a heavy drinker, there was also a drug habit that was supposed to be a secret but that everyone in the world knew about. In Dugan's dwindling circle, the concern was not so much for poor Smiley – but whether the saloon could function without him. And before Dugan knew what hit him, he lost his accountant, who was barely fifty – although he did smoke a great many cigars. Dugan had given some thought to firing Esposito – who never really understood the peculiarities of artists – but fortunately the accountant died before Dugan could let him go.

He looked on with dismay as friend after friend bit the dust. And if that wasn't bad enough, even his enemies started to go under. Chief among them was Toileau who had accused him in print of shoddy research on his massive Bismarck biography – an attack so vicious and unfair it took Dugan a decade to regain his confidence. He had hated Toileau – how could he not? – but the man was, after all, a contemporary – and it was only small consolation that the nit-picking critic was safely in his grave.

Despite the circling ring of doom, Dugan saw no other course than to press on. After all, wasn't his favorite hero Marshall Joseph Joffre, whose answer to every battlefield situation, no matter how dire, was “J'attaque.”

Dugan lived in the country where he had carefully surrounded himself with youth – a wife who was twenty years his junior, an adopted son of twelve, and young dogs. In truth, his wife
took fourteen kinds of pills to make sure her disposition was cheery. But his son excelled in ice hockey and could lift Dugan off the ground. Dugan was not particularly hypochondriacal, although an occasional twinge in his chest got him nervous. But to be on the safe side, he wolfed down fresh vegetables and made sure not to eat anything he enjoyed too much. His one exception was the large pair of greasy egg rolls he treated himself to on his occasional forays into Manhattan. The hell with it, he told himself, as he took a seat at the bar of
Ho's
. I've got to have something.

At the moment, he was working on a DeGaulle biography (the youthful DeGaulle, of course). It troubled him that Lieberman hadn't trained a skilled underling to take over as Dugan's editor. But he forged ahead all the same. His routine was to lose himself in the book for two weeks, then come up for air with a drive to the city and lunch with a friend. But even his surviving friends weren't setting the world on fire. His choice of lunch companions included Burke, a poet who had been fitted up with a pig's bladder, Karen Armstrong, a brilliant copywriter whose leg had been chopped off to stem a circulatory ailment, and Ellis, the healthiest of them all, a jade collector who wore a pacemaker and had a penile implant. Another candidate was Grebs, his former attorney, who had been in and out of mental institutions. In this case, he could imagine the repartee: “They've suggested volts, Dugan. How shall I instruct them?”

His friends were all fine, upstanding individuals, each one a credit to his or her profession – but Dugan lacked the courage to meet them for lunch. Considering the circumstances, how could he be expected to concentrate on food. So on his trips to the city, he ate alone, checked a few bookstores and drove home in cowardice.

An argument could be made that the condition of his friends had nothing to do with Dugan – there were healthy people all over the place. A case in point was his brother Kevin, the picture of wood-cutting vigor in far-off Maine. But Dugan didn't buy the argument. The numbers were against him. The wagons were circling. Even Kevin had begun to send him childhood
mementoes, explaining that at sixty-five, it was time to “pare down his life a bit.”

Dugan's one consolation was that of all the friends he had lost, there wasn't one who had a claim on his heart – someone he could call in the middle of the night for a discussion of his darkest fears – of death, for example. Could he survive the loss of such an individual? And then one day he found out, when he learned that Enzo Cavalucci had lost a secret and uncomplaining battle with Mehlman's Syndrome, something new, a spin-off of Alzheimer's. (Cavalucci had once joked that it was unwise to catch a disease that had someone's name attached to it.) When Dugan received the news from Cavalucci's mistress, he wept into the phone without shame. And when Cavalucci's widow called later to confirm, he wept again. He had loved his friend, but hadn't realized to what extent – until it was too late. A rival historian, Cavalucci had enjoyed far greater eminence than Dugan and had even sold his Boer War trilogy to the movies. Cavalucci had gotten rich, but such was Dugan's love for the man that he hadn't begrudged him a dime. At a troubled time of his life, Dugan had set out with a lead pipe to kill his first wife's lover; it was Cavalucci who had gently stayed his hand, saying “You don't want to do that.” Actually, Dugan did want to do it, but that wasn't the point. Cavalucci had rescued him from a potential shitstorm. On another occasion, sensing Dugan was in financial difficulty, Cavalucci had wired him $l0,000, along with a note saying there was no rush to pay it back. And if he needed another ten, that could be arranged, too. Dugan barely slept until he had settled the debt, but he never forgot his friend's kindness. And when Dugan's Bismarck bio had been raked over the coals, it was Cavalucci who stood up bravely at a gathering of historians and recited selections from the work – focusing on the ones that had suffered the greatest abuse. Cavalucci lived in St. Louis. The two men rarely saw each other, but they spoke regularly on the phone, each conversation picking up seamlessly from the last. Of late, Dugan had noticed a tendency on Cavalucci's part to lose his
focus on the phone, but he attributed that to a preoccupation with his planned Cardinal Richelieu masterwork.

In the weeks that followed Cavalucci's passing, Dugan was inconsolable, and could think of nothing else. Acquaintances were one thing – but the loss of this wise and friendly bear of a man – a rock he could always cling to – was more than he could stand. Dugan's wife, an independent woman who dabbled in the sale of waterfront property, barely noticed his extended grief. For the time being, Dugan slept in the guest room, which she didn't notice either. His son trailed him around, hoping his father's melancholy would pass, then gave up and went outdoors to jump up and down on a lonely trampoline. Work was no longer Dugan's salvation. How was he supposed to get excited about DeGaulle's childhood? He sat at his desk, mindlessly reciting the phone number of his boyhood apartment in Jackson Heights, reflecting on his parents, his brothers and sisters, all of them gone except Kevin who was making preparations to join them.

One day, unaccountably, his spirits came awake. Momentarily cheerful, he reached into his pocket to pay for gas at a service station and pulled out an expensive goatskin credit card holder – a gift from Cavalucci. The sight of it put him right back where he started. At the fish store, the following morning, a woman he barely knew gave him an update on her husband's condition in a nursing home. “Mel's incontinent,” she shouted across the shellfish counter. He returned home with his flounder fillets in time to receive a call from the representative of a family of blind Hispanics who had all been fired from their basket-weaving jobs on the eve of Thanksgiving. Before the man could ask for financial assistance, Dugan, to his everlasting shame, shouted into the phone.

“I can't take any more of this. Speak to my wife.”

On that note, he packed an over-the-shoulder carry-all bag with pajamas, underwear, toiletries and a Helmuth Von Moltke memoir he planned to finish reading, no matter what. Then he drove to the hospital, although in truth, it was so close to his house that he could have walked. Of late, his wife had hinted that she'd
had her fill of small town intrigue and wouldn't mind moving back to the city. Normally, Dugan gave in to her every whim. But on this occasion, he stalled and failed to list the house with a broker. He loved his spacious Colonial which was in such sharp contrast to the cramped apartment he had lived in as a boy. Also, he enjoyed the proximity of the hospital. In the winter months particularly, when the chic vacationers were partying in the city, he had the facility virtually to himself.

Dugan took a seat in the waiting room and was alone, except for a bartender who had suffered a clamming injury on his day off. When Dugan's name was called, he flashed a Fast-Track card and was whisked right through to a preliminary examining room where a nurse silently recorded his temperature and blood pressure.

As luck would have it, the doctor on call was Alvin Murdoch, Dugan's own physician, who had recently moved to the community, quickly attracting a strong following among the locals. Murdoch had once stopped Dugan outside the post office and gotten him to sign a petition having to do with encroaching health providers. It probably made sense, but Dugan felt he had been bullied into putting his name on it and had mistrusted Murdoch ever since. But the doctor had a reputation for thoroughness and it was difficult to get an appointment with him – so Dugan stayed on as a patient.

Murdoch checked the nurse's findings, then called up the results of Dugan's recent physical on the computer. He made some notes, then crossed his legs daintily, folded his hands on his knees and flashed the boyish smile that everyone except Dugan had found engaging.