The Matchmaker (19 page)

E
lizabeth Jennings invited him for dinner at the Straight Wharf.

Clen said, “I have to tell you, Elizabeth, I’m not really one for the Nantucket restaurant scene.”

Elizabeth said, “Not a worry. Come to my house instead. Seven o’clock tomorrow night.”

She hung up without giving him a chance to say no.

He brought a six-pack of Singha beer, which he had miraculously been able to find at Hatch’s. This was the beer that he and Mingus and Elizabeth had drunk in Bangkok and Saigon years and years earlier.

Clendenin knocked on Elizabeth’s front door, feeling like an ass. What was he
doing
here? This felt like an exercise in pointless nostalgia.

She shrieked with joy at the sight of him. She appeared to be three sheets to the wind already. She shrieked again with the presentation of the beer. “Singha?” she said. “Am I really seeing this? Did you have it flown in? And it’s icy cold. Do you remember how good an icy cold Singha used to taste after running around in that godforsaken heat? You’re a genius!”

Elizabeth was wearing a seafoam-green cocktail dress with tiny sequins and her feet were bare. Elizabeth was an attractive woman—the cinnamon-colored hair, the long nails, the perfume—and Clen had never been able to shake a vision of her climbing out of the swimming pool at the resort in Nha Trang. That red bikini. But there had always been a desperate edge to Elizabeth, a part of her that was trying too hard—and then, too, she wasn’t Dabney.

On her deck a table was set for two, and candles burned in hurricane lamps. But first Elizabeth poured him a Glenfiddich and they gazed at the Sound below.

This was a date, Clen realized. She had asked him there on a date. He hadn’t considered this before. He supposed he had thought there would be other people there or that she’d asked him out of kindness or boredom. He was an old friend from another life.

Mingus and Clen had drunk like crazy at La Caravelle in Saigon, then piled onto a motorbike, which they’d crashed in front of the Reunification Palace. Mingus and Clen had drunk like crazy at the Majestic, and at the Continental as well. What did Clen remember specifically? Rattan ceiling fans, Singapore slings, peanut shells on the floor; he and Mingus used to smoke unfiltered Luckys, lighting one from the next. The cigarettes had killed Mingus, lung cancer at fifty-two.

Mingus had returned to the States when he was diagnosed. He had died in Washington; Clen hadn’t made it back for the funeral. He had, however, sent a long letter to Elizabeth, which was less sympathy than a prose poem of memories: Bangkok, Singapore, Mandalay, Rangoon, Siem Reap, Saigon, Hanoi, Hoi An—and the weeklong vacation in Nha Trang. They had stayed at a five-star resort that Elizabeth paid for. She had insisted that Clen come along, although he’d felt odd about crashing their romantic getaway. It had been a slice of heaven, though, and he had needed it—the infinity pool, the endless chilled bottles of Domaines Ott, a certain spicy green-papaya salad delivered right to his umbrella. There had been one night when Mingus retired early and Clen and Elizabeth had drifted from the dinner table to a spot in the sand. They were both quite drunk, Clen able to do little more than gaze at the moon’s reflection on the South China Sea. Something had happened, she had said something or he had, and Elizabeth had brought her face very close to his. He had thought
kiss
; it was impossible not to. That red bikini. But he had backed away, stood up, brushed himself off. She had said, “Was I wrong? I’ve seen you looking at me.”

Was she wrong? No, not wrong. This was before Clen had met Mi Linh, and he was lonely. He
had
been looking at Elizabeth, all week long. But he was not a man to betray his one true friend, and so he had bowed to her, then gone to bed.

Now, Elizabeth asked him a question, but Clen didn’t hear what it was. Something with the word
east
.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“Do you miss the East?”

“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know. Sometimes. Certain things. The food in Thailand, the monks in Cambodia, the hotel bars in Vietnam. But not really. Not as much as I thought I would. How about you?”

She cupped her chin. “It was a time in my life that I cherish,” she said. “But it’s over. I’ll never go back. Will you?”

“Only if Singapore calls,” Clen said. But then he realized that he was so attached to Dabney that even if a job did materialize in Singapore, he would turn it down. He would not leave her again.

Dinner was served by caterers. Other men might have been impressed, but it just made Clen sad. To be invited over for dinner and then have the meal cooked by other people?

And to make matters worse, it was grilled sirloin. Clen stared at his plate helplessly. He couldn’t cut a steak. And this was one of the reasons why he didn’t accept invitations out. He lifted his fork and tried a bite of potato gratin, then set his fork down with a
ching
!

“Oh my goodness,” Elizabeth said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t…think.”

“It’s okay,” Clen said. “It’s fine.”

Elizabeth looked around for one of the catering staff, but the three of them were sequestered in the kitchen. Elizabeth stood. “Here, let me cut it for you.”

Clen grimaced. It was mortifying for them both, Elizabeth cutting his steak, like he was a child.

Elizabeth said, “I don’t think I ever got the lowdown on that.”

“On that?” Clen repeated.

“Your arm,” she said. “What happened?”

Khmer Rouge,
he thought.
Machete. Boring story.

But to alleviate the humiliation of the moment, he told her the truth. He had been writing a story about girls being bought in the countryside and sold into prostitution in Bangkok. He had a source, a woman all of thirty years old whose thirteen-year-old daughter had disappeared, and was purportedly working on Khao San Road. Clen had gone to all the reputable brothels and requested the girl—Bet, her name was. Bet had light skin and freckles, her grandfather had been an Irishman named O’Brien, and because of her unusual coloring, people remembered her. Clen had been led further and further into the underbelly of the city. Girls, younger and younger, were produced until Clen was offered the services of a girl who couldn’t have been more than nine years old. He told Elizabeth it was like his spirit was a dry twig that just snapped in half. He picked the girl up and tried to carry her out of the establishment. She started screaming. She didn’t want to go with Clen. She didn’t know him, she didn’t realize he was trying to save her, and he didn’t have the language skills to reassure her. He knew the Thai word for police,
tarwc,
but that served only to terrify her further.

Clen didn’t make it fifty yards down the alley before the girl was taken from him by the goons of the establishment. The goons were smaller than Clen—every man in Southeast Asia was smaller—but there were four or five of them and they all seemed to be trained in nine martial arts. They beat Clen to a pulp, and they broke his arm in four places, one a compound fracture through the skin, and the only way the doctors at the hospital he eventually landed in knew how to deal with it was by amputation just below the shoulder.

Clen pushed away his plate. It was a story that killed the appetite.

Elizabeth was breathless. “Oh,” she said. She reached across the table to take his right hand.

“And is that why you left?”

“That was one reason,” Clen said. “I also realized I was never going to get assigned to the Singapore desk.” He reclaimed his hand. “I pissed off the wrong person when I was there covering the caning story.”

“Who?” Elizabeth said.

“Jack Elitsky.”

“I knew Jack,” Elizabeth said. “Mingus helped him out once, with a thing, can’t remember what now, it’s like it all evaporated once I came back.”

“Jack is fine,” Clen said. “I was a pompous ass. I’ve always had a problem with authority.”

“Rebellious,” Elizabeth said.

“Something like that,” Clen said.

There was an awkward moment at the door when they said goodbye. Clen had hurried the evening along to this point, refusing dessert and port and another scotch, wanting only to get home and text Dabney. He hadn’t heard from her since the Fourth, when he had summarily ignored her after the scuffle with the economist. But now Clen ached for her.

Quick peck on the cheek,
he thought.
Thank you for dinner.

Elizabeth leaned against the closed front door, blocking his way. She gazed up at him through her cinnamon bangs, a siren’s look; it must have worked with other men.

She said, “At my party on the Fourth…when you were in the living room with the Beeches…? What was going on? Was there a fight? I didn’t even realize you
knew
the Beeches.”

“I don’t,” he said. Then he self-edited. “Well, I don’t know the professor. Dabney and I dated in high school.”

“
Did
you?” Elizabeth said. “That’s interesting.”

“I don’t know how interesting it is,” Clen said quickly. The last thing he needed was Elizabeth believing that anything between him and Dabney was “interesting.” “It was aeons ago. Ancient history.”

“I saw her a few days ago at our Chamber board meeting,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t think she looks well. Her skin is quite sallow, and she’s so thin. It looks like a case of hep C to me, though I’m no doctor.”

Dabney had told Clen that she’d almost fainted. She had said that the room was a hundred degrees and she’d been so anxious about the meeting that she’d skipped lunch. But, with Elizabeth’s words, Clen realized that Dabney
did
look sallow—her skin had a lemony tinge—and she was quite thin. The other day, he had been able to count the individual knobs of her spine. He doubted that she had anything close to as serious as hepatitis C, but he would gently suggest that she go see a doctor.

He cleared his throat. “Thank you for dinner.” He bent in for Elizabeth’s cheek, but she reached up with both hands and met him full on the lips.

Clen pulled back. Elizabeth’s expression was one of instant mortification, reminiscent of that other, long-ago night on the South China Sea.
Oh shit,
he thought
.
Had he led her to believe this was what he wanted? Had she assumed he would be receptive now that Mingus was dead?

“Elizabeth,” he said.

She opened the door. “Thank you for coming,” she said, recovering. Ever the proper hostess. “It was a lovely evening.”

“Lovely,” he said, and he all but ran across the moonlit grass.

M
iranda Gilbert and her fiancé, Dr. Christian Bartelby, were due to visit for the weekend, as they had the past three summers. But a few days before their arrival, Miranda called to say that Christian couldn’t make it. He had to work at the hospital.

“And I’m sure you don’t want just me by myself,” Miranda said.

“Of course we do,” Dabney said. She said this just to be polite. In reality, having Miranda cancel would be for the best. Dabney needed to tell Box about Clendenin and she could hardly do so while they had a house guest.

“Wonderful!” Miranda said.
“I was facing the rather dreary prospect of going to the cinema alone, or spending too much money on Newbury Street. I’ll keep my flight, then.”

When Dabney hung up, she was filled with surprising relief. She was off the hook.

She didn’t want to tell Box about Clendenin. It would be too awful.

The lives we lead.

Miranda arrived on Friday afternoon, only a few minutes before Box flew in from Washington, so they all piled into Dabney’s Impala and headed to the house together. Dabney hadn’t informed Box that Dr. Bartelby was a no-show, and she could tell that he was thrown off by Miranda’s appearing alone. Miranda picked up on this, and the whole way home she thanked Dabney profusely for allowing her to come anyway. Boston was a cauldron this time of year, she said, as Box well knew.

Box said, “Mmmmm, yes.”

Once at the house, Miranda gushed to Dabney about how lovely the guest room was. Finer than the Four Seasons, she said. Miranda was a tall woman with strawberry-blond hair and porcelain skin and green eyes, her nose perhaps a bit sharp for true beauty. She wore a pale pink cotton sundress and a pair of flat sandals with complicated straps. Her hair was frizzy from the humidity, and her personality was warmer and far looser than Dabney remembered from previous summers. She seemed almost
silly—
but was that possible? Then Dabney realized that not only was Miranda’s sundress pink, her aura was as well. She emitted a color like that of New Dawn climbing roses on their finest day.

Miranda was pink.

Box?

Miranda Gilbert and Box, a perfect match? Dabney had always been a tiny bit jealous of Miranda, but she had never thought…there had never been any indication during Miranda’s previous visits…but of course Dr. Christian Bartelby had always been with her before…he had caused interference…Dabney hadn’t seen it.

Okay,
Dabney thought.
Wow.

“I’ll let you settle in,” Dabney said. “Can I bring you a drink? A glass of Shiraz? A gin and tonic?”

“Oh, a gin and tonic would be lovely!” Miranda said. She flopped back onto the bed. “I have to say, Dabney, this is a slice of heaven. I look forward to this weekend every year. But Christian…well, he’s quite wrapped up with his patients. He just wasn’t able to get the time off.”

Dabney nodded. “I’ll be right back with your cocktail.”

Dinner was rib-eye steaks and marinated farm vegetables on the grill, a large green salad, some good rolls, and a lot of Shiraz. Dabney set the table outside and encouraged Box and Miranda to sit and talk while Dabney got everything ready.

“Do you need any help?” Miranda asked.

“I’m a bit of a control freak,” Dabney said.

Box let a beat of silence pass. “Confirmed,” he said.

Laughter.

Dabney lingered in the kitchen. She kept peering out the kitchen window. Pink? Miranda pink, Box emitting nothing, nada. If he had an aura, it was the color of air. Because Dabney was there, causing interference.

She excused herself right after the last bite of sabayon with fresh, wild strawberries. She had not hurried per se—how could she
hurry
through homemade sabayon and tiny, delectable wild strawberries? However, as soon as she was finished, Dabney stood and cleared, saying to Miranda, who was about to protest, “You stay and enjoy. I
am
a control freak.”

Dabney then carried the dessert dishes to the kitchen and popped out to the patio one more time to replenish their Shiraz. Box and Miranda were deep in conversation about Milton Friedman, a particularly favorite topic, as the famous economist was the subject of Miranda’s thesis. Dabney didn’t think either of them had noticed her. Their glasses might have been magically filled by fairies.

This was a good thing, she thought. This was, very possibly, the solution to all her problems.

And yet, of course, it was perturbing. Was Dabney really just going to
pass off
her husband of twenty-four years? Miranda was emitting a glow like a peony in full bloom—pinker than pink: she was in love with Box,
besotted,
and Dabney felt that he deserved this. Dabney had adored Box and respected him and even desired him, but had she ever been besotted?

Dabney watched them from the kitchen window as she rinsed dishes and felt a pang—not of jealousy over Box, per se, though it was a feeling that could not be ignored. She had been having a lot of these lately—urges, she supposed. Lovesick.

She texted Clen.
Now?

By the time she had the dishes in the rack, there was a response.
Yes, please get here five minutes ago.

Dabney exhaled. Could she leave the house undetected? She thought she could. She would say she was going up to bed. Box and Miranda might stay awake for another hour or two talking about Friedman, then Tobin, then Larry Summers. Once they got to talking about Larry Summers, there would be no stopping them. Dabney would go see Clen for five minutes and scoot right home.

She poked her head out the back door. “I’m going up. Do you need anything else?”

Box emptied the contents of the bottle of wine into Miranda’s glass and held it up for Dabney. “Do we have another?”

“We do!” she said brightly. Box’s cheeks were florid the way they tended to get after a couple of glasses of wine, but he was not emitting an aura. Probably because Dabney was there. Of course! She had to leave them alone. A wave of dizziness overcame her and she steadied herself against the counter. She was not only engaging in awful, illicit behavior, she was hoping that other people would engage in it as well, so that she might feel less guilty.

Dabney hurried to open another bottle of the Shiraz.

Her escape was almost too easy. She slipped out the front door and into the Impala.

As Dabney headed around the rotary, she spotted Agnes’s Prius a quarter circle away. Had Agnes seen
her
?
The damn Impala was impossible to miss. Agnes had been so suspicious lately, Dabney could imagine her zipping around the rotary in hot pursuit of her mother. She would have to abort her mission.

But Agnes must have been daydreaming, or on the phone with CJ, because she exited the rotary and headed toward home. Dabney stepped on it.

“I had a date with Elizabeth Jennings,” Clen said.

Dabney felt a stabbing pain in her gut. Her internal organs felt like they were being sliced up by sharp, shining knives.

“A date?”

“She asked me for dinner. I assumed there would be other people, but it was just the two of us.”

Dabney and Clen were lying on top of his expensive sheets, naked. The long kiss Dabney had come for had gotten away from them both, even though Dabney had told Clen she didn’t have much time.

Had
Agnes seen her? Dabney wondered. Would Agnes barge in on Box and Miranda at an inopportune moment and say,
I just saw Mom driving around the rotary. Where was she going?

This worry was diminished by the thought of Clen and Elizabeth Jennings alone at dinner.

“So how was it?” Dabney croaked.

“She served me a steak,” Clen said. “And I couldn’t cut it.”

Dabney winced. “Ouch,” she said. “How was the conversation?”

“There was some reminiscing about the good old days of fish sauce and Asian toilets. She asked about my arm.”

“Did you tell her the truth?”

“Yes.”

Dabney exhaled through her nose. The pain in her gut was enough to make her cry out. She pictured ten Japanese hibachi chefs fileting her.

“That’s pretty intimate,” Dabney said. “Did it get any more intimate than that?”

“She tried to kiss me,” Clen said.

Oh, God, no. Dabney emitted a moan and curled up in the fetal position, which served only to intensify her pain. She started to cry. She was going to lose everybody and everything. She recalled thirty years earlier, seeing Clen with Jocelyn at the Yale-Harvard tailgate, Jocelyn’s hands buried deep in Clen’s thick hair.

Clen wrapped his arm around her. “Don’t cry, Cupe. I didn’t kiss her back. I was very rude, pushed her away and left.” He nuzzled the back of Dabney’s neck. “I have to live with the thought of you sleeping next to the economist every night, you know.”

“I know,” Dabney bleated.

“But there isn’t another woman in the world for me,” Clen said. “There just isn’t. I only see you.”

The house was dark when Dabney pulled up, and she was filled with relief. She hadn’t wanted to leave Clen, especially after hearing about the date with Elizabeth Jennings.
Anyone
but
Elizabeth Jennings,
Dabney thought. She wasn’t sure why the aversion; Elizabeth was silly and harmless—but then Dabney admitted that Elizabeth was neither silly nor harmless. She was strong-willed and opinionated at the Chamber meetings; of all the board members, Elizabeth was the only one Dabney felt she had to impress. It was her money, maybe, or her pedigree. And Elizabeth and Clen shared memories of a different world, one Dabney couldn’t even begin to imagine. Elizabeth would lasso Clen, move him to Washington, introduce him to people. He would end up writing for the
Post.
He would escort Elizabeth to the Kennedy Center and inaugural balls; he would teach a class at Georgetown and drink at the National Press Club. He would be changed.

Dabney had stayed much longer at Clen’s house than she’d meant to, allowing him to reassure her, waiting for the knife pain in her gut to diminish so that she could get to her feet.

Before she left, Clen had said, “You seem to be dropping a lot of weight, Cupe. Have you thought of seeing a doctor?”

Dabney gasped involuntarily. “A doctor?”

“You’re very thin,” he said. “Damn near skeletal. And your skin is turning a funny color. And you said you nearly fainted in the boardroom. I’m just worried about you.”

Dabney pasted a smile on her face, which felt like a picture hung crookedly. “Lovesick,” she said.

“I hear you saying that. But, Cupe—”

Dabney kissed him goodbye and scurried to her car.

At home, Dabney eased open the front door, which wasn’t a door anyone in the house ever used. When she stepped in, she cried out in surprise.

Box was standing before her, blocking the stairs.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“What?”

“The truth, Dabney.”

“I went for a drive with the top down,” she said. “I needed air.”

“A drive?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t stop anywhere?” he asked. “You didn’t see anyone?”

She had sort of been telling the truth up until that moment.

She said, “I have horrible pain, Box. I’m still not feeling well.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re not answering my question. Did you stop anywhere? Did you see anyone?”

Dabney couldn’t tell him the truth, but neither could she lie. She said, “I can’t believe you’re asking me this. I can’t believe you
care.
You haven’t paid attention to me in
years,
Box. And now all of a sudden you care where I’ve
been,
if I
stopped,
if I
saw
anyone?”

“You’re my wife,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“Tell me the truth!”

Tell him the truth,
she thought. He was asking for it. He deserved it.

“I was driving,” she said. “Driving around the island. Driving makes me feel better.”

“That is a load of crap!” he shouted. “Something is going on and I want to know what it is!” He slammed the door shut and the whole house shuddered. And yet Dabney was relieved that the front door was now shut because, from the corner of her eye, she had just seen a light go on across the street at the Roseman house. What on earth would York and Dolly Roseman make of the screaming coming from the Beech household, where two of the most civilized people they knew lived? Would they even believe it? No, they would think there was something horribly wrong. They would call the police.

“I don’t feel well,” Dabney said. “The antibiotics didn’t help, and I thought it was a wheat allergy, but—”

“You need to go to the doctor,” Box said.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“A real doctor,” Box said. “In Boston.”

“Okay.” Dabney hoped that if she agreed to this, he would let her off the hook.

“And another thing,” Box said. “When I was talking to that philistine Hughes at Elizabeth’s party, he said the two of you had bumped into each other on Main Street. You had a conversation with the man and didn’t tell me. But that isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is that you told him I was in Washington consulting with the president!”

Oh dear God,
she thought. Now was the time. She just had to say it. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“He’s a journalist, and by all accounts, a bloodthirsty, ruthless wolf. I don’t want my involvement with the administration reported to the
Times
or the
Journal,
or anywhere else!”

“Of course not, darling,” Dabney said. “Clen would never—”

“We don’t know
what
he would never do.”

“He would never turn anything I told him into a
news story,
” Dabney said. “That I can assure you.”

“I didn’t realize you had forgiven him so wholeheartedly,” Box said. “I didn’t realize you two were on such chummy terms.”

“We aren’t on ‘chummy terms,’” Dabney said.

“Don’t lie to me!” Box screamed. He had spittle on his lower lip and his glasses had slipped to the edge of his nose; they looked in danger of dropping to the floor. He had officially become someone else.