Perfect on Paper

by Janet Goss

  “I really never have.”

  I stared dumbfounded at my wall of dog portraits while I digested his statement. “Woof! Woof!” they seemed to be saying. “You’ve scaled new pinnacles of delusion. Woof!”

  Ray finally broke the silence. “Here’s the thing, Dana. By the time I got home that night, I had to admit you were right. You didn’t need to be wasting your time sneaking around with a guy like me. And just because Rhea took off—well, that didn’t necessarily turn me into the right guy for you.”

  I didn’t need to hear him explain why. Even back then, I’d never been able to wholeheartedly embrace the fantasy of a father-aged husband and a sister-aged stepdaughter. “But… you came out of it okay?”

  “I always get by somehow. Listen—whatever you do, don’t blame yourself. If my marriage had been any good in the first place, you and I never would have happened.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “I know I am.”

  I was glad one of us did. Suddenly I realized I’d reverted to my reclining position on the bed. His voice had a sandpapery quality to it, no doubt caused by years of tobacco and alcohol abuse, that had always mesmerized me. That hadn’t changed.

  But it should have by now. Ray was ancient history. And, as he’d just confirmed, we’d had no contact with each other for more than twenty years. I sat up straight, determined to end the conversation on a friendly—but not too friendly—note.

  “So, how are you doing?” he said. “Still painting?”

  “I am.”

  “Got a guy?”

  “I do.”

  “He treating you okay?”

  “He is.”

  “Then I’m glad you asked me to pretend you were dead all these years. But it’s really great to hear from you.”

  “You, too.”

  “Maybe we’ll get together one of these days.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  “Well, until then… take care of yourself, Dana.”

  “You, too.”

  I sat there with the telephone in my hand, unsure whether to laugh, cry, or consume high-calorie foods devoid of nutritional value. Before I could return the phone to its cradle, it rang again.

  “Did you forget something?” I asked Ray, only it wasn’t Ray calling this time. An anguished wail came through the receiver, followed by heartfelt sobbing.

  “Hi, Lark,” I said with a sigh.

  “How did—you know—it was me?” she managed to get out.

  Because I was you, I silently responded. And I’m well aware that there’s nothing like a holiday weekend for wreaking havoc on an extramarital affair. “Were you supposed to be seeing Sandro tonight?” I asked her, triggering a fresh spate of tears.

  “I waited all weekend,” she sniffed. “I had Lean Cuisine for Thanksgiving dinner. But I didn’t even mind, because… Oh, Dana, he promised he’d get away this afternoon, and that was hours ago. He only just now called to cancel.”

  He was never going to get away, I thought but didn’t say. He’s probably eating turkey sandwiches with his in-laws this very second. “I’m sure he tried,” I said. “But—and I know you don’t want to hear this—families always take precedence at times like this.”

  “I know. I’m just so disappointed, that’s all.”

  “I know. But—Lark? I hate to have to say this, but you’d better get used to it. Unless you meet somebody else—”

  “Oh, Dana. I can’t. Besides, Sandro promised to make it up to me. He’s taking me out to dinner tomorrow night!”

  That was quick, I thought to myself. She’s already figured out a way to let him off the hook.

  “Then you can have your Thanksgiving dinner a few days late,” I said, too addled from my conversation with Ray to do anything but humor her. And what would be the point of telling her the truth? I knew from experience she wasn’t ready to hear it. “I’m sure Sandro’s sorry about this afternoon.”

  “Oh, he was. He told me he was devastated.” She’d stopped crying, and I was determined to keep it that way.

  “So… do you think you’ll be okay for the rest of the evening?”

  “I guess.… I have to pick out my outfit for tomorrow’s dinner. Oh—that reminds me. The gallery’s holiday party is the Friday after next, and I’m allowed to bring a Plus One. I was hoping you’d go with me.”

  “I don’t know, Lark.” It had been quite a while since I’d worked there.

  “Please, Dana?”

  Then again, the gallery threw a hell of a party. During the years I’d attended, I’d been consistently impressed by the sheer volume of interesting, attractive people—well, men—in attendance.

  That was when I had an idea. “Is Sandro going?”

  “Yes, but he has to bring his—you know. Her.”

  Perfect, I thought. If Sandro is there with his wife, then I’m going to make sure Sandro’s girlfriend is the belle of the ball. “You know, I’d love to be your Plus One, but I don’t have anything to wear.”

  “Oh, I know. Me, neither.”

  Good. She’d taken the bait. “You really ought to check out the vintage clothing shop downstairs from my apartment. The owner just got in a slew of fifties cocktail dresses.” Including an electric-blue satin Jean Desses number that would keep the spotlight fixed firmly on Lark all evening.

  “Isn’t that store kind of expensive?”

  “I’m sure Vivian would give you a discount.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I do.” Especially if I throw in a Hannah to sweeten the deal. “Why don’t we meet there next Tuesday during your lunch break?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Lark?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Dana. Sandro just texted me from his bathroom to tell me he misses me!”

  “Then I guess you want to text him back,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ll see you at the shop, okay?”

  Dead silence. I could picture her face, illuminated by the glow of her cell phone, as she composed a heartfelt response that Sandro would barely have time to glance at.

  Yeesh, I thought after hanging up. Young girls can be so gullible.

  And so could grown women. I winced, thinking about how Ray’s hang-up calls had been such a comfort to me over the years.

  But if he wasn’t the one calling, who was?

  On a hunch, I punched in the first nine digits of my number, but instead of the final digit of three, I pressed two. A screeching noise on the other end of the line told me I’d reached someone’s fax machine. I tried again, this time changing the three to a four.

  “Lichi Garden. May I take your order?”

  I sighed and returned the handset to its cradle. Maybe those hang-up calls hadn’t been for me after all. Maybe they’d been for General Tso.

  At least one thing was clear: None of them had come from Ray Devine.

  “He has to be lying,” Elinor Ann said, once she’d castigated me for the Billy Moody bus peccadillo, which I’d insisted was no such thing, then listened in gasping amazement after I changed the subject and shared the details of my conversation with Ray. “He had to be the one making those calls.”

  “He sounded pretty truthful to me,” I said, once I’d chastised her for not discussing her agoraphobia with Cal, which she’d insisted she’d take care of any second, then elicited a promise to call after she arrived safely at work on Monday morning.

  “Of course Ray sounded truthful. He’s an accomplished liar. Look how long he was able to convince Rhea nothing was going on between the two of you.”

  “That’s just it. He didn’t convince her. She followed him, remember?”

  “I guess.” She hesitated. “Dana, you’re not going to do anything… stupid, are you?”

  I’d already given the matter some serious consideration. On the one hand, meeting Ray in person could provide some form of closure. And it didn’t seem nearly as risky as it once might have been. No matter how robust he might appear on a billboard, Ray Devine was still i
n his sixties, and no amount of Photoshopping could change that fact.

  On the other hand, he hadn’t sounded all that enthusiastic about getting together. Why would he? Two decades had elapsed, and according to him, no time had been spent dialing my telephone number during either of them.

  I sighed. “We didn’t make any definite plans.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. There’s just one thing I can’t figure out. If Ray wasn’t the one making those calls, who was?”

  “I just told you—people trying to order in Chinese.”

  “Oh, come on. That many people couldn’t possibly be that clumsy. You’re going to have to come up with a better explanation than that.”

  I pondered the question on the way to Hank’s that evening, mentally running through a list of the men I’d dated after breaking it off with Ray. Could it have been the actor?

  Too narcissistic.

  The bartender?

  Too easily distracted.

  The copywriter?

  Too—

  Hmm. Actually, quite a contender.

  My half brother had warned me about his type—adver-groupies, he called them—years earlier. “They’re obsessed with the golden age of Madison Avenue in all its three-martini glory,” Tom-Tom explained. “Dad is like a messiah to them. If one of your dates ever asks if your father’s the ‘Mayo’ in Mayo, Masters, and Moore, do yourself a favor. Lie to him.”

  I remembered wishing I’d heeded his advice when Bert, the copywriter, asked that very question on our first date.

  “Oh my god,” he said. “ ‘Shaving’s for Sissies’! ‘The Lady Will Have a Pabst’! ‘You Won’t Believe Your Thighs’!”

  I winced a little at his recitation of the last slogan, which had always struck me as an awfully sexist way to sell panty hose, even if it had sold quite a few pairs of them. “Yeah, those are all Dad’s.”

  “His agency did the launch for California Airways, right?”

  Speaking of sexist. “I was pretty young at the time.” Six, if memory served. All I could recall was that the stewardesses were called Cali Girls, and they were all blond, and they wore bright yellow micro-minidresses, and my mother seemed to have some kind of grudge against them.

  “I studied that campaign at Pratt! ‘The Right Way to the Left Coast’!”

  “Well, it was, until a brunette sued them for illegal hiring practices,” I said, suddenly remembering how much I’d always disliked the name Bert. The airline had managed to survive hair integration, but not the oil crisis of the mid-seventies. It folded shortly thereafter.

  Bert managed to survive four more dates, at which point his incessant references to advertising royalty and repeated suggestions to take a three-day jaunt down to my parents’ in Florida sufficiently creeped me out. I’d only been seeing him to get over Ray, anyway. Which was bad, but not as bad as pursuing someone because you had a crush on her father.

  Now I wondered: Could Bert Sugarman really be the mystery caller? It seemed even less likely than my Lichi Garden theory.

  But he had gotten in touch a few years after I dumped him, “just to see how I was doing.” Was he still wondering?

  If so, it would be a bigger letdown than discovering your parents were Santa Claus.

  Even though I was carrying only a small purse, my baggage threatened to derail my reunion with Hank. He was waiting for me on the brownstone’s stoop, sipping from a can of beer, when I approached.

  “Want one?” he said, tilting his head toward the six-pack by his side.

  “The lady will have a Pabst.”

  “Huh?”

  Stop it! I screamed at myself inside my head.

  “Never mind.” I reached the top step, put my arms around him, and breathed in his wonderful Hank smell, telling myself that everything was going to be just fine.

  “You sure are a sight for sore eyes,” he said, leaning in to kiss me.

  Hmm, I thought, kissing him back. Sight for sore eyes… Ah. Too bad. Sixteen letters…

  Stop it!!

  “So, what’d you do all weekend?” I asked him.

  “Been workin’ like a mule, that’s what. I must’ve hauled half a ton of drywall up to the second floor yesterday.” He turned to meet my eyes. “How ’bout you? Everything okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Called you a couple times today. The cell phone went right to voice mail. Then when I tried your apartment, the line was busy. Thought there might be some kind of problem.”

  “Not at all.” Unless of course, flirting with barely post-collegiate boys and reliving one’s past with her elderly ex, rather than focusing on one’s age-appropriate boyfriend, constituted a problem. “I accidentally left my cell at Elinor Ann’s,” I explained, reaching for a beer. All of a sudden I was parched.

  I awoke the following morning to the sound of heavy breathing. Dinner was staring at me intently, his head resting on Hank’s vacated side of the bed. He was unbearably cute, as long as I inhaled shallowly through my mouth. His breath smelled like month-old salad.

  “Hold that pose,” I said, groping for my bag on the nightstand. I extracted my camera and took a close-up. It came out a little dark, but would be fine for my purposes. “Do you think you could give me a profile?”

  He obliged by trotting to the window, resting his hooves on the low sill, and looking skyward—a porcine Joan of Arc. A single manhole-sized earring and a few strands of faux pearls would be all I needed to create a breakthrough Hannah. “That’s going to turn out great,” I told him.

  In fact, everything looked like it was going to turn out great. After I’d doused my jitters with beer, Ray, Billy, and Bert, the copywriter, had retreated to the back burner of my mind, and I was finally able to focus on Hank, who looked particularly desirable that evening. A hint of five o’clock shadow had made his eyes appear bluer than usual, and all that drywall hauling had his biceps straining the sleeves of his T-shirt. I’d scooted closer to him on the stoop, but before I could slip my arm around his waist, he stood and offered his hand.

  “So, how ’bout I order in some food for us?” he said. “What sounds good to you?”

  I wasn’t sure about a main course, but I could think of an appetizer that would really hit the spot. “Can we discuss that in, say, forty-five minutes?”

  He grinned. “I reckon I could manage to hold out.” Then he pulled me to my feet and led me inside, down the long hallway and into the little room off the kitchen. We never did get around to ordering in.

  Now I was hungry enough to browse through Dinner’s slop bucket. “Where’s your dad?” I asked him, which apparently sounds exactly like “How about an apple?” to a pig, because he tore through the door and into the kitchen. I pulled on my clothes and followed him, but there was no sign of Hank.

  I opened the canvas flap leading to the front hallway and set off to find him. It’s funny, I thought, wandering through the downstairs rooms. The place doesn’t look much different, and I’ve been coming here for nearly a month.

  But hadn’t Hank told me he’d hauled yesterday’s drywall delivery up to the second floor? Maybe that was where the metamorphosis was taking place. I went up the stairs and poked my head inside the first doorway I came to.

  Surrounded by tools and an electric switch plate, he was leaning against the far wall of the room, engrossed in a volume entitled…

  The Time-Life Big Book of Easy Household Repairs?!!

  He looked up, met my gaze, and slammed the book shut in the manner of a sixth grader caught perusing his mother’s copy of the Kama Sutra.

  “What’s that?” I asked, even though I knew perfectly well what it was: the kind of manual a suburban father might refer to in the event of a recalcitrant dimmer switch. I also knew what it wasn’t: a volume that belonged in the hands of a master electrician. Master electricians were supposed to be capable of rewiring the ceiling of Grand Central Station on expertise alone. With one hand tied behind their backs. Blindfolded.

  “What�
�this?” Hank said.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Aw, heck, this here book’s the greatest. The wiring system in this place is so out of date, I needed an old diagram to get to the bottom of the problem.” He opened the volume to reveal a drawing so basic that the plate screws had little arrows pointing to them with the words “plate screw” printed at the other end.

  “I guess.…”

  He rose to his feet and put his arms around me. “Forgot to say good morning.” I kissed him, and he kissed me back; after a few minutes, I managed to lose sufficient interest in the home repair manual to relegate it to the file cabinet in my mind earmarked for nagging doubts. There it took up residence with folders labeled MYSTERIOUS HANG-UP CALLS; PROPRIETY OF FLIRTING WITH YOUTHFUL CROSSWORD CONSTRUCTORS; LEGALITY OF POSING AS AN OCTOGENARIAN PAINTER FROM MAINE, and others far too numerous to mention.

  “Told you he was a con man,” Elinor Ann said, once I’d arrived home from a late brunch with Hank at Fred and Ethyl’s and told her what I’d seen.

  “Well, it’s possible he needed to refer to a vintage diagram,” I replied, in a tone so dubious, a toddler would have questioned my sincerity.

  “Tell you what. Cal’s pretty handy—let me ask him if he’d ever have to consult a book like that to replace a light switch.” She covered the phone while she called down to the basement, where he was no doubt rebuilding a carburetor or repairing wrought iron with a blowtorch.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked after a few seconds.

  “Nothing—yet. He’s laughing too hard to answer the question. Dana? I hate to ask you this, but… are you absolutely certain Hank Wheeler is who he says he is?”

  I sighed and flopped on the only corner of my bed not covered with sections of the Sunday Times. “I’m not sure about anything anymore, but I hope he is. Especially after last night. And I felt so comfortable at brunch just now, and he’s always so attentive, and—”

  “Dana, can you hang on a sec? Just while I get Eddie some glue for a school project.”

  “Sure.” I reached for the magazine to see who’d constructed this week’s puzzle—not Billy Moody—then turned to the Styles section. An article about the resurgence of bourbon on the first page… animal-print bracelets on three… Christmas windows in Midtown… a vast slew of people younger than me getting married or engaged…