The Ladies' Man (30 page)

“I'm sorry,” says the mother.

“I came here to talk to Kathleen because she knows the louse in question.”

“In his youth,” says Kathleen.

“He was engaged to her sister, who I would love to sit down with someday.” She takes a mannerly sip from her mug. “But that'll take time, I'm sure. And distance.”

The Perlmutters exchange glances. The daughter says, “We can come back. Really. We don't want to intrude.”

“Don't be silly,” says Kathleen. “It's a store. I want you to intrude.”

“I have to apologize for being so pathetic today,” says Cynthia. “I'm going to come back at a more convenient time.” She turns to the Perlmutters. “I don't even recognize myself. Ask Kathleen: I have an M.B.A. and I have my own business.” She pats her hips. “I don't have pockets or I'd give you one of my cards.”

“We should run,” says the daughter.

“Do you work?” Cynthia asks.

“I'm taking the summer off before the wedding,” says the bride-to-be.

“It's a full-time undertaking for both of us,” says her mother.

“Then it should be a spectacular event,” says Cynthia. “If I don't see you before that, have a beautiful wedding and a wonderful life. I mean that, for both of you.”

“And we hope things work out for you,” says the daughter.

“Sweet,” says Cynthia. Before the door closes behind them, she turns back to Kathleen. “What I really came to ask you about is Olive Boudreaux.”

Kathleen wants to shove the big, immovable, hideously attired Cynthia out the door and beg the Perlmutters to stay. She finds her voice and hisses, “You just kicked my best customers out of my store.”

“Oh,” says Cynthia. She looks over her shoulder. “Well, they'll be back. Women like that shop full-time.”

“This is how I make my living. I buy expensive things wholesale and, if I'm lucky, I sell them retail. I'm not here to discuss tenants with other tenants.”

Cynthia brightens. “You mean Olive?”

“Whom I barely know.”

“Has Lorenz ever said anything to you that would indicate—”

Kathleen stops her with a raised hand. “I don't know her except as an occasional customer. You can ask Lorenz whatever you like, but he has a policy of not gossiping about the residents. I'm sorry things didn't work out with Harvey—”

“I kicked him out! I was being strong and true to myself and loving myself and having self-respect and all that shit, and now I'm having second thoughts.”

Kathleen decides she needs help. Cynthia hasn't taken one hint; hasn't apologized for homesteading in the store or hindering commerce. Accordingly, she waves to Lorenz across the lace café curtains, and in thirty seconds he is there. He tips his hat to Cynthia, then turns to Kathleen. “Miss Dobbin? You called?”

“Yoo-hoo, Lorenz: This is me, the hostess of the party you brought Kathleen to. You can knock off the act, unless I've got it all wrong.”

“No,” says Lorenz. “You haven't.”

“Is it the class thing? She owns the shop and you guard the castle?”

“It's the privacy thing,” says Kathleen. “We don't think everyone in Harbor Arms has to know our business.”

Lorenz asks Cynthia if she's taking a sick day.

“Tell him,” says Cynthia. “It's fine if he knows.”

Kathleen says, “Harvey left.”

Cynthia relocates to the striped stool that serves the bra bar. “I threw him out! Do you believe it? I, who haven't had a date since Dukakis was governor.
I
threw
him
out because he flirted with Olive Boudreaux. I was hurt. Furious, actually. I let that rule the day.”

Kathleen has rarely heard so honest an advertisement for a disastrous social life. She is stuck with lugubrious and inappropriate Cynthia, clashing with the salmon-and-olive-striped satin stool, rambling and confessing. The famously empathic Kathleen feels nothing for Cynthia's plight. She'd taken Harvey Nash in—she who owns waterfront real estate; she who usually had a
Wall Street Journal
tucked between her arm and her rib cage—had made a foolish decision based on an airplane flirtation, and is now looking for sympathy and sisterhood.

“I wish I could rewind the whole stupid evening and do it over with no Olive Boudreaux, no jealousy, no
opportunity
for jealousy. No big scene.”

“It's probably for the best,” says Kathleen.

“What is?”

“That Nash showed his true colors relatively early in the affair.”

“You know what shocks me? How I'm taking this. Like a teenager.”

“You were in love with him,” says Lorenz.

She turns to Kathleen. “I know you think I'm pitiful and that I had to be a dope to fall in love with him in the first place, but he's not the same man who walked out on your sister. I knew what I was getting into. He confided it all—Adele, the girlfriend in California with the emotionally disturbed kids, his addiction to temptation. But he'd been working on that, and he'd been honest with me. ‘It's
not pretty,' he said. ‘It's not a flattering portrait.' ‘I'm a complicated man. I don't make women happy.' ”

“That's for sure,” says Kathleen.

“I'm going back upstairs,” she says. “I know I've been laughable, but I'm going to pull myself together.”

“It's fine,” says Kathleen.

“You're nice to say that,” says Cynthia, “considering your history with him. Not that I'm putting myself in the same boat with Adele, because I don't think that was ever consummated.”

Kathleen catches Lorenz's eye and they smile. “I think you're right,” she says. “We Dobbin sisters are slow.”

Cynthia says, “Sorry about the rich ladies.”

“They'll come back,” says Kathleen. “The wedding's not till September.”

“I'm going on a shopping spree here,” says Cynthia. “Not today—don't worry. But soon. I'm going to spend as much as the Perlmutters would have so you won't feel cheated.”

“That's not necessary,” says Kathleen. “Especially since you told me you'd gone overboard … you know … the teddies.”

Cynthia shouts, “Look at her blush! It's adorable.”

“I agree,” says Lorenz.

“You know what? I'm taking you two to dinner, absolutely.”

“Sorry,” says Kathleen. “We can't.”

“Are you working?”

Lorenz says, “I have the night off, but we have plans.”

“Together?”

He nods. Kathleen says, “Kind of firm plans.”

“Tickets?”

They both say, “No, but—”

“I want to treat you to a fabulous dinner. I mean it. Someplace great. To apologize and to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” says Kathleen.

“You two. Love at Harbor Arms that's not ruining anyone else's life in the process.”

“It's not the least bit necessary,” says Kathleen, “especially if it's because of the Perlmutters.”

“It's for me,” says Cynthia. She repeats: “Someplace really special,

Biba or Hamersley's or Aujourd'hui. We could eat early so you could get on with your plans.”

Lorenz says to Kathleen, “Y'know how many times I've put people in taxis and said to the driver, ‘Biba,' or ‘Hamersley's Bistro' or ‘Aujourd'hui'? Hundreds of times.”

“I'd love it!” says Cynthia. “Just what the doctor ordered. Otherwise I'm going to be eating a Lean Cuisine stuffed pepper and feeling sorry for myself.”

“I suppose if it was early …” says Lorenz.

“Five-thirty!” says Cynthia.

“I'm here till six,” says Kathleen.

“Nothing will change,” says Lorenz. “We'll pick up our plans from there.”

“I hope so,” says Kathleen. She smiles. “I like to think I'm flexible.”

“And patient,” says Lorenz.

“I'll go upstairs and use my powers of persuasion with the maître d's in question,” says Cynthia.

“I was going to go home first and shower,” says Kathleen. “I guess I could close up a little early.”

“Six-thirty? Seven?” asks Cynthia.

“I can make six,” says Kathleen. “I'll close up at four.”

“Aren't we spontaneous?” says Cynthia. “Aren't we just like three characters in a Fitzgerald novel moving from tragedy to dinner to—what?—a drunken party at someone's estate with Chinese lanterns?”

“I suppose we are,” says Kathleen.

A
s Nash explains to Lois across State House place mats: He is entering his monk's phase. The Duck House is the perfect place for a guy to renounce his creature comforts and worldly goods for a couple of days. With no television and barely a phone, he'll meditate and lie low. Also, absolutely no socializing with the opposite sex. He is Brother Nash until further notice. Why? Because he has inadvertently hurt several good women, and though he doubts he can change his spots overnight, he's going on hiatus.

Lois smooths the black jersey sleeves of her dress and confides that she sought exactly the same thing when her marriage broke up—a cloistered existence and celibacy, which may have contributed to her rush to move back in with her sisters.

“I don't want to pry, but is it really a case of what you see is what you get over there?”

“As far as …?”

“Their love lives.”

“I suspect it is.” She raises her eyebrows. “Unfortunately for them.”

“Here's what I can't figure out: How do they get along, as in, What's their outlet? Aren't they—I don't know how to say this any less crudely—love-starved?”

Lois murmurs, “One wonders.”

“I'm asking because I don't have any sisters and I missed the
boat on communes and coed dorms. I don't know how women respond when they haven't had a date in a decade.”

“That's not literally true.”

“I'm not talking about dinner and a movie. I mean lovers.”

Lois counts on her fingers. “First of all, I wasn't home every night to monitor my sisters' social lives, and don't forget I was married for almost a year. Second of all, they could have been conducting serious relationships discreetly. Third of all …”

Nash's attention has wandered. Someone new is on tonight: “Babette” her tag says. No beauty. Nice eyes but a bump in her nose. No tits whatsoever, but unexpectedly good legs—smooth and shiny as if they've been waxed. He wonders if Babette will think Lois is his date. Or his wife. Maybe she'd be interested enough to ask the other girls and they'd say, “He's single. The coast is clear. He's a composer, you know.” Nash catches her eye and grinds his two fists end on end. Immediately, Babette brings a multicolored pepper mill to the table.

“Say when,” she says.

“Don't stop.”

The waitress smiles ruefully.

“You wouldn't leave it here, would you? And come back for it tomorrow?”

“You'll be just fine,” says Babette. “Ma'am?”

Lois declines with a raised hand. “Do you know her?” she asks after Babette leaves.

Nash confides that during his sojourn at Harbor Arms, he dropped by in the morning, read the paper here, nursed a cup of coffee—free refills—and sometimes had an early lunch. This gal was new, though.

“And where did you usually have dinner?”

“At home. My roommate cooked.”

“Do you mean Cynthia?”

“Cynthia John. My accountant.”

He can see from the set of her eyes that Lois is drafting a sticky follow-up question that will require a creative answer.

Finally she asks, “It's unusual for a woman to invite a client into her home, don't you think? You could have been a serial killer.”

He smiles. “But I wasn't, was I? I was quite harmless.”

“Is that what Cynthia would say?”

“Cynthia … right now—you're right. She would say ‘toxic.' ”

“Because she thought you and she had a personal relationship, correct? In addition to your professional one?”

Nash leans back against the booth and exhales loudly.

“Too hard a question?”

“I'm trying to gauge what I can say in front of you.”

“Because you think I'm spying for my sisters?”

“Because I came back to Boston so I could take a good hard look at myself, starting with your sister. I thought we'd shoot the breeze, reminisce a little, then something I said almost killed her, quite literally. I'm trying not to deliver any more verbal letter bombs.”

“In other words, you need her blessing to move on. You'll never make a relationship work without that. That's why things didn't work with Cynthia.”

Nash hasn't given Adele much thought at all in the intervening thirty years, so he doubts whether she's the one responsible for his protracted bachelorhood. But maybe Lois is right. Maybe there's guilt beneath the surface, goading him, driving him, stunting him. Maybe he's more sensitive than he knew; maybe it
is
Adele's fault. “Adele's blessing?” he asks. “Or will any Dobbin do?”