Beautiful Day (11 page)

At first, Pauline Tonelli had been just another fifty-something woman who had been
married for decades and was now on the verge of becoming single. Doug had seen hundreds
of such women. He had been hit on—subtly and not so subtly—by clients for the entirety
of his career. Being propositioned was an occupational hazard. Every woman Doug represented
was either sick of her husband or had been summarily ditched by him (often in favor
of someone younger), and most, in both cases, were ready for someone new. Many women
felt Doug should be that man. After all, he was the one now taking care of things.
He was going to get her a good settlement, money, custody, the yacht club membership,
the second home in Beaver Creek. He was going to stand up in court on her behalf and
fight for her honor.

Doug knew other divorce attorneys who took advantage of their clients in this way.
His partner—John Edgar Desvesnes III—Edge, had taken advantage of at least one woman
in this way: his second wife, Nathalie, whom he had fooled around with in the office
before she had even
filed,
then dated, then married, then procreated with (one son, Casey, age fifteen), then
divorced. There were still other attorneys who, it was rumored, were serial screwers-of-clients.
But Doug had never succumbed to the temptation. Why would he? He had Beth.

Pauline had been on a mission. Doug knew that now because she had confessed to it.
She had told him that she had chosen him as her divorce attorney because she knew
he was recently widowed and she wanted to date him. The Tonellis and the Carmichaels
both belonged to Wee Burn Country Club in Darien, although they weren’t well acquainted.
Doug and Arthur had been paired together once for a golf tournament. Pauline and Beth
had met a couple of times side by side at the lipstick mirror in the ladies’ room
during a dinner dance. Doug didn’t remember Pauline from the club. However, she mentioned
their mutual membership at Wee Burn within the first three sentences of their meeting.
She threw out names of friends of his—Whitney Gifford, Johnson McKelvey—and then she
expressed her condolences for his wife (“such a warm, lovely woman”) and hence established
a personal connection and common ground.

She started bringing things to their meetings. First it was a hot latte, then a tin
of homemade blueberry muffins, then a bottle of green chile sauce from a trip she’d
taken to Santa Fe. She touched him during these meetings—she squeezed his arm or patted
him on the shoulder. He could smell her perfume, he admired her legs in heels or her
breasts in a sweater. She said things like “I really wanted to go to the movies this
weekend, but I didn’t want to go alone.”

And Doug thought,
Yeah, me too.
Then he cleared his throat and discussed ways to negotiate with Arthur Tonelli.

On the day that Pauline’s divorce was final, Doug did what he had never agreed to
do with any client before: he went out for drinks. He had planned to say no, just
as he always said no, but something about the circumstances swayed him. It was a Friday
in June, the air was sweet with the promise of summer; the victory in the courtroom
had been a good one. Arthur’s attorney, Richard Ruby, was one of Doug’s most worthy
adversaries, and Doug, for the first time in his career, had beaten Richard Ruby on
nearly every point. Pauline had gotten what she wanted; she had divorced well.

She said, “Shall we celebrate?”

And for the first time in nearly two years, Doug thought another person’s company
might be nice.

“Sure,” he said.

She suggested the Monkey Bar, which was the kind of spot that Doug’s partners always
went to but Doug had never set foot in. He was charmed by Pauline’s confidence. She
knew the maître d’, Thebaud, by name, and he whisked them through the after-work drinks
crowd to a small round table for two, which was partially concealed by a curved banquette
wall. Pauline ordered a bottle of champagne and a plate of gougères. The waiter poured
their champagne, and Doug and Pauline toasted their mutual success.

Pauline smiled. Her face was glowing. Doug knew her to be fifty-four, but at that
moment, she looked like a girl. She said, “I’m so glad that’s over. I can finally
relax.”

Doug let his own deep breath go; he was still experiencing the winded euphoria particular
to conquering his opponent. It was not unlike a good game of squash. Doug thrived
on the competition. He wanted to win. His job was to liberate people from the
stranglehold of an unsatisfactory union. Many times when a divorce was declared final,
his client would spontaneously burst into tears. Some clients saw their divorces as
an ending, not a beginning; they saw their divorces as a failure, not a solution.
It wasn’t Doug’s job to put a value judgment on what was happening, only to legally
facilitate it. But he had to admit that he felt much better about his profession when
he was faced with a client as buoyant as Pauline.

Drinks at the Monkey Bar had been a success. Doug had headed home on the train feeling
nourished by actual human interaction. He had not fallen in love with Pauline, but
he had appreciated the hour drinking champagne and eating golden, cheesy gougères,
admiring the wall murals by Ed Sorel, regarding the well-heeled crowd, and enjoying
the presence of a convivial, attractive woman. He realized, as he and Pauline parted
ways outside the restaurant on Fifty-fourth Street, that he would miss her.

And then the universe had worked its magic. A few weeks later, on the Fourth of July,
Doug had played golf at Wee Burn, and then he’d stayed to swim some laps at the pool,
where he met up with the Drakes, who invited him to join them on the patio for dinner.
Doug had nearly declined—he no longer socialized with any of his and Beth’s couple
friends because he couldn’t abide being a third wheel—but it was a holiday, and if
Doug went home, he was looking at an evening of drinking whiskey and watching a recap
of Wimbledon on TV. And so he stayed and ate dinner with the Drakes and met up with
more friends whom he hadn’t seen since the funeral. These friends all mentioned how
wonderful he looked (he did not look wonderful) and how much they’d missed him (though
what they meant, he suspected, was that they missed Beth), and Doug realized how limited
his life had become.

It was at the end of the night that he’d bumped into Pauline. He was sitting at the
bar finishing a nightcap when she walked through the room with Russell Stern, who
was the president of Wee Burn’s board of directors. Russell Stern was divorced himself;
he’d endured a rather high-profile split from his wife, Charlene, who sang with the
Metropolitan Opera. Doug wondered for a second if Pauline and Russell Stern were dating.
He had to admit, the thought irked him.

Pauline caught sight of Doug at the bar and said to Russell, “You go ahead, Russ,
I’m going to stay for a minute. Thanks for everything.”

Russell eyed Doug and waved, then said to Pauline, “You sure you’re okay getting home?
I can wait, you know.”

“I’m fine,” Pauline said. “Thanks again!”

Russell Stern lingered for a moment, and Doug felt both a surge of macho triumph and
a flicker of worry that, as president of the board, Russell might inflict some kind
of institutional retribution—a raise in Doug’s dues, perhaps, or revocation of Doug’s
front-row parking spot. Then Russell left, and Pauline fluttered over.

She said, “Hey, stranger.”

He had ended up taking her home that night to the house in Silvermine that he had
helped her wrest from Arthur Tonelli’s grip. They had kissed on the front porch, then
in the foyer like a couple of teenagers. Doug had been amazed by his level of arousal.
He hadn’t even allowed himself to think of sex in years. But with Pauline, his body
asserted its natural instincts. He had thought they might do it right then and there
up against the half-moon mail table, or on the stairs—but Pauline stopped him.

He said, “Are you dating Russell Stern?”

She paused for what seemed like a long time. “No,” she said. “We’re old friends.”

“Really?” Doug said. “Because he seemed a little miffed that you came over to talk
to me.”

“Just friends,” Pauline said.

Doug asked Pauline to dinner the following week. He picked a place on the water in
South Norwalk, where neither of them had ever been before. This was important, he
thought, for both of them. They had a fine time, and during the dinner conversation,
it came out that Pauline and Russell had gone to high school together in New Canaan.
They had dated their senior year, Russell a football star and Pauline a cheerleader.
They had stayed together for two more years while Pauline went to Connecticut College
and Russell went to Yale. They had talked of getting
married
.

“Wow,” Doug said.

“Then I met Arthur at the Coast Guard Academy, and Russell met Charlene, and that
was that. Now, we’re just friends.”

As “Layla” ended, Doug went to the counter to pay his bill. In retrospect, he could
see that he had been dazzled by Pauline’s ease out in the world alone; he had been
comfortable with her, and he had been intrigued by her relationship with Russell Stern.
Pauline was nothing at all like Beth, and so Doug was free from feeling like he was
replacing her. Pauline was someone else entirely—a friend, a lover, someone to enjoy.
Doug had never fallen in love with Pauline, he’d never had the sick, loopy, head-over-heels
feeling that he’d had from start to finish with Beth. And that, he saw now, had been
preferable. Pauline wasn’t threatening. She wasn’t going to break his heart. She was
someone to do things with, someone to talk to, someone to hold at night.

The problems had started when he agreed to move into Arthur Tonelli’s house with her.
Why had he ever agreed to that? At the time, the real estate market had been good,
and Doug had been
anxious to get rid of his house. The kids were grown, Beth was dead, the house was
far too big for him alone, it was filled with memories, nearly all of which were excruciatingly
painful, and he didn’t want to take care of the house anymore. And so it had been
wonderful to have another place to go, a place he wasn’t responsible for. But he had
never thought of the Silvermine house as anything but the Tonelli house.

The bigger mystery was why Doug had married Pauline. More than anyone in the world,
Doug knew how dangerous marriage could be. Why not just cohabitate without the messy
business of binding their union? The answer was that Doug was old-fashioned. He was
nearly sixty years old, he had been married to Beth for thirty-five years, he was
used to being a married man. He was comfortable with a ring on his finger and a joint
checking account, and one way of doing things. He was comfortable in a union. The
thought of him and Pauline “living together,” referring to her as “my partner” or
worse still “my girlfriend,” and keeping two memberships at the country club and two
sets of finances (his money, her money, most of which arrived in the form of Arthur
Tonelli’s alimony checks) was absurd to him, bordering on distasteful.

And so he and Pauline had made it official in a very small civil ceremony followed
by a lunch at Le Bernardin.

At the time, Doug could never have imagined the way he felt now. Disenchanted, trapped,
eager for his freedom. He had thought that he would live out his days with Pauline
in comfortable companionship. He had not predicted that his needs and desires would
announce they wanted something more, something different.

When Doug got back to the house, it was only eight o’clock, and the sun was still
up. He would have preferred to wait until dark when he could be sure Pauline was asleep,
but he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t want to drink anything more with the long,
middle-of-the-night drive ahead; he didn’t want to go to the club and get sucked into
inane conversation about Mickelson’s chances at Oak Hill. He didn’t have a single
person he could talk to. In a pinch, he supposed he could call Edge, but Edge lived
in the city, and he had endured so much personal drama of his own that Doug would
feel terrible heaping on more. Plus, Edge wasn’t particularly fond of Pauline, and
so if Doug told Edge he was thinking of leaving Pauline, Edge might give him too much
encouragement. Furthermore, Edge had been distant lately, and increasingly vague about
his own romantic life. He was dating someone, Doug was sure of that. Edge had the
measured calm and patience these days that he only displayed when he was having sex
on a regular basis. But Edge didn’t talk about the girl, whoever she was, and the
one time Doug had asked about the lucky woman who was keeping Edge on an even keel,
Edge had shaken his head and turned away.

Doug had been puzzled by this reaction. He’d said, “Okay, sorry, not up for discussion,
then?”

And Edge had said, “Not up for discussion.”

Doug entered the Tonelli house, afraid of what he might find. But everything appeared
to be normal. The kitchen was quiet and undisturbed; the lamb chops still lay in the
sink. Doug got himself a glass of ice water. His alarm was due to go off at 3 a.m.;
he needed to get to sleep.

He crept up the stairs, feeling spooked by the silence. He had half expected Pauline
to meet him at the front door with a frying pan in her hand. He had expected to hear
her crying.

The door to their bedroom was closed. Doug thought:
Go to the guest room. Sleep for a few hours, then hit the road.
But that was the coward in him speaking. Plus, his suitcase was in the bedroom.

He cracked open the door enough to see rays of the day’s last sunlight striping the
floor. Pauline lay on the bed, still wrapped in her towel. She was awake, staring
at the ceiling, and when she heard him, she turned her head.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. He paused, waiting to see if there was going to be a scene, but she
was quiet. Doug sat on the bed and took off his shoes and socks, unbuttoned his shirt
and slacks, and stuffed them into the dry cleaning bag. He thought briefly of work
and the shitshow Cranbrook case, which was going to trial in the morning. Then he
thought about Nantucket and the house and the 150 guests, his children and grandchildren,
his daughter’s future in-laws, his wife’s cousins. He had a wedding to host, a wedding
his dead wife had planned and he had paid for. He couldn’t let the turmoil of his
personal life get in the way of this weekend. In the hottest moment, as he was climbing
into the car, he had sent Margot a text message that said,
Pauline isn’t coming to the wedding.
Now he regretted sending that message.