The Ladies' Man (6 page)

“Rhyme or Reason? Dog at a Dance?”

Dina shrugs: Sorry.

“First Night?”

“I've heard of that,” she says.

“Probably the phrase rather than my play. Most big cities have a First Night celebration.”

Dina asks what it's about.

“Renaissance Weekend—New Year's Eve with the Clintons on Hilton Head.”

“Comedy?”

“I hope so.”

“Still running?”

He shakes his head, then looks as if he would like to add something, but is holding back.

“What?”

“You may have heard of it because it won an Obie.”

Dina realizes now that Byron Sprock is successful, at least on the East Coast, where writers can be celebrities, and fame can result from endeavors other than feature films and television. “Wow,” she says. “That's fantastic!”

They are standing on the sidewalk, watching the Miata being hooked up for towing. She asks what brings him to the West Coast, but then adds, “Let me guess. They're making a movie out of one of your plays?”

“Close enough.”

“Which play?”

“
First Night
—but it won't happen.”

“But you came all this way.”

“They flew me out first class, and leased me a car.”

Dina says, “I used to act.”

“I'm not shocked to hear that.”

“Just commercials.”

The tow-truck driver offers Dina a clipboard and a pen. She scribbles her name in three places. Byron suggests she read what she has signed.

“It says you pay if the insurance doesn't,” says the man.

“Fine,” says Dina.

“I'll walk you home,” says Byron, and leads her to the crosswalk a block north, which makes Dina think he is both chivalrous and safe.

Nash watches TV in his gray-green bedroom at the Copley Plaza, king of his remote control. At home he has picture-in-picture, allowing him to monitor two sporting events at once, but here he is limited to a solo view of the Celtics at Vancouver. He orders room service at midnight—a turkey club and a decaf—and calls Newport Beach. Dina doesn't pick up. He leaves a message that says, neutrally and erroneously, “I made it. I'm staying at a hotel called the Plaza,” with no number offered, and no clue to his state of mind. “Take care, Deenie,” he adds after a pause. When she plays it back at one
A.M.
, Pacific time, she knows he won't be back.

C
ynthia, despite her birthday vow to love, honor, and accept herself, wakes up Friday morning thinking about a diet. She stays in bed past the strictly observed seven
A.M.
rising, and clicks on the
Today
show. Usually the sight of Matt Lauer creates a mild yearning for the male warmth he lavishes on his costars, but this morning Cynthia says to the screen, “I met someone yesterday.”

A few sentences into the news, Cynthia speaks again. “I actually had sex with him.” She thinks of whom she could try these rehearsed sentences out on; considers her mother, who in her widowhood has begun to date a restaurateur and confide embarrassing personal details to Cynthia; one sister in Tenafly and the other in West Orange, and two best girlfriends, all of whom will still be asleep at five after seven. She gets out of bed, takes a shower, then rubs her Persian-lilac-scented oil onto her skin with more motivation and appreciation than usual. She vows to get a pedicure the next free hour she carves out of her life, and to apply the Dead Sea mud pack that her friend Suzanne brought her back from the Holy Land.

Cynthia walks between bath and bedroom without a robe and stands brazenly before a grinning Matt Lauer. A slight chill reminds her that she is naked, and of Nash's gusto the night before. He'd been rather intent on undressing her, especially on releasing her breasts and nuzzling them noisily, almost comically, as if he'd
seen it done that way, but in an impersonal manner that left Cynthia somewhat alone and above the commotion. If she were being perfectly honest with herself, she would acknowledge that Nash's seduction talents were principally in his salesmanship. Their lovemaking seemed to be between Nash and her physical equipment, but she is willing to excuse his shortcomings as shyness and as an orientation. It was she who interrupted his pleasure to coax him off the couch and into the bedroom, away from the picture window and the imagined binoculars of passing sailors. He barely undressed, only freeing that of his which was necessary. He had a condom handy, in his shaving kit, in his carry-on. Intercourse seemed to be the goal, with ejaculation the signal that they were finished. Afterward, he lay next to her, checking his watch, less grave and attentive than he'd been while campaigning for the privilege.

“Do you need to leave?” she asked.

Nash said, “That matter I told you about.”

“Adele.”

“Right.”

“At this hour?”

“She's a night owl,” he said.

“How would you know that?” asked Cynthia, then immediately regretted her wifely tone.

“I'll go by her place, and if the lights are on, I'll knock.”

Cynthia slipped out of bed and took from her bottom drawer a flimsy black peignoir that she'd never worn, a joke floozy gift at her fiftieth that still had its tags. Nash sat up, seeming to revive as she fastened the one satin rosebud at the neck, and the peignoir covered nothing.

“Wow,” he said. “Now
that's
my idea of a bathrobe.”

Cynthia looked down. “I think it's supposed to be worn over something.”

Without any thought to the promise it held, Nash said, “I hope you wear it every time I come over.”

Cynthia seized this as testimony to his good intentions. “Do you want to stay here tonight? I mean, after you square things with Adele? You could come back here instead of a hotel.”

“Thanks. But I couldn't impose.”

“I leave before eight,” she said. “You'd have the whole apartment to yourself.”

“Thanks just the same. But I'd hate to be the kind of guy who'd take you up on that.”

Cynthia stood still, posing, pretending that the peignoir was not a costume and not ridiculous. “Is there any such thing as a hotel room with a piano?” she asked.

Nash answered by lowering the blanket to expose himself, proud and unself-conscious, showing Cynthia that ten minutes after intercourse his penis could do tricks.

She murmured, “I find that remarkable.”

Nash stroked himself with one hand and reached out for Cynthia with the other. His eyes went soft and his face grew solemn—the old, sweetly anxious appeal he had kicked off at dinner and clinched on the couch.

“Really?” said Cynthia. “So soon?”

Nash hesitated, appeared to rethink the impulse, then pulled the blanket back over himself. “Times like this I forget I'm not a teenager,” he said sweetly.

What he was actually remembering was Adele—at twenty-three, her cap of dark red hair and lips that were painted brighter than the fashion, the kind of debutante good looks that he thinks may have aged well. It wasn't loyalty or guilt that changed his course, but pragmatism: Should Adele be home, unmarried, and receptive, he'd need something in reserve.

If Lois seems overly interested in Harvey Nash's return, and agitated, she is. At the time of his disappearance, Lois was twenty-one, and believed from phone flirtations and compliments, and from stares that lasted a few seconds longer than was polite, that something reciprocal was going on in Harvey's capacious heart. Feelings for her, she thinks, contributed to his flight—a theory that gave Harvey unearned credit for being an honorable young man who would deprive himself of love altogether rather than betray and disappoint Adele. In fact, Harvey did engage Lois whenever she intercepted him in the front foyer or answered the phone, but Lois didn't know that his flirtations were automatic and meaningless.

For a year or two, Lois secretly expected that Harvey would send for her, or send a signal, and they'd hatch a plot where she would visit a college friend in California, and then she'd announce to the family that she'd bumped into Harvey Nash on a neutral site, completely by accident and coincidence. She would say that they had agreed to meet so she could interrogate him and satisfy the family's curiosity once and for all, and now, inexplicably, the most astonishing thing had happened: She and the enemy had fallen in love.

Harvey, of course, made no attempt to contact Lois, overtly or surreptitiously. She wrote to him once, just after her divorce, after seeing his credit on a box in a video store. Her note did not mention Adele; it was in fact lighthearted and friendly, and said she might be traveling to California. She wrote a short paragraph about her marriage and divorce—a coded sexual message: I'm the Dobbin who's slept with a man and might like to again. She mailed it to the reinvented Nash Harvey in care of Paramount Pictures, but never heard back. She assumes it never reached him.

The old theory about Lois, pre–Unspeakable Act, is that she could have had any number of boyfriends and marriage proposals, but she wouldn't march down the aisle ahead of Adele. Her sisters and her brother still call her “Lovely Lois” whenever they are in the mood—prompted by a particularly unglamorous, late-sleeping dishevelment at the breakfast table—because of a caption that ran more than thirty years before in the Brookline
Chronicle
, showing Lois modeling a wedding gown in the grand finale of a charity fashion show. “Lovely Lois Dobbin, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. George Dobbin, is resplendent in tulle over crepe de chine from R. H. Stearns.” Lois has a disdainful, superior, ironic expression that some longtime friends from high school still haven't mastered.

Now Lois wants to sit on Adele's bed and discuss the possible reasons for Harvey Nash's return, but Adele has closed her eyes, feigning exhaustion, and has sent her sister away. In fact, Adele is wide awake. She hears the elated Lois invade Kathleen's room, wake her with a hushed outburst, deliver the astounding news: Harvey Nash is back.

Adele knows Kathleen, the famous softie, and hears her gasp, a room away, with shock and foolish optimism. She is the family romantic
and mother. She meal-plans and files coupons, and even though the other sisters help, Kathleen is the acknowledged head of the kitchen. She has sponges for washing dishes (pink or yellow) and others for wiping counters (blue or green), which are sterilized nightly in the dishwasher, a system her sisters are supposed to follow but can't get right. Recent press attention to salmonella and other illness-causing bacteria has proved that she is not germ crazy, merely careful. Soon, Kathleen will knock gently on Adele's door and ask if she's okay, and if she'd like to talk. Adele will pretend she's answering from a deep sleep, not because she doesn't want to relieve Kathleen of some anxiety, but because she doesn't want to see eager Lois at her elbow, trying to look sympathetic while she is actually thrilled.

When the talk stops, and both sisters have gone back to bed, Adele gets up. She joins Richard in the den, where he's watching the Celtics on the West Coast with their mother's last afghan, sewn together and fringed by Kathleen, pulled up to his chin. “What's the plan?” she asks.