“You know, you’re right.” Sharon swung her left shoulder out and smiled coyly. “Who cares, who the hell are we going to run into in this old town anyway?” Sharon slapped her leg. “Let’s go!”
They pulled onto the Mass. Pike toward Boston, and simply by following signs to the Commons, they surprisingly got to the Ritz without so much as having to stop and ask for directions. This made Dennis proud, and he pulled up in front of the hotel, where the doorman, his double row of golden buttons sparkling, the metallic threads entwined in the ribbon shot through with light at the brow of his wool cap, a look not unlike that of the Russian police, waited for the car to stop.
“Welcome to the Ritz!” he said, opening Sharon’s door, the gold braid appliqué along his sleeve illuminated in the lamplight. “Are you staying with us?”
“Just here for the evening.” Dennis leaned over and winked, nodding to the enormous building, surprisingly modern. “Only a drink tonight.”
“Well, have a lovely time, sir,” the doorman said, taking the car keys in his white gloves, a gleaming button that snapped the glove closed at the white underside of his wrist.
Sharon took a deep breath and rubbed her palms on her thighs, as if she were readying for a jump. “Thank you,” Sharon said, offering her good hand and stepping out of the car.
Even though it was a Saturday night, it was early enough that the lounge was not terribly busy. Sharon pounced on a cozy table with a candle flickering in its center, positioned by the far wall looking out onto the spectacular bar, shining so vibrantly it looked like fractured pieces of moonlight were reflected off its surface.
“Shouldn’t we sit at the bar?” He hoped she would say yes; there was something so wonderful about saddling up to the bar and being greeted by the bartender, whether at Malarkey’s or the Mayflower. The bar was always comforting, and Dennis appreciated that one could be any age or class or color, and still you were seated together, while also being pleasantly separate. Besides, he liked the long, sleek slab of polished wood so sturdy beneath his glass, able to withstand whatever he chose to place heavily upon it.
“But this is such a nice little table, all to ourselves,” Sharon said.
He shrugged and imagined eating dinner at home with Sharon on so many nights, Vanessa out at the library or with her boyfriend, this table meant to sit four at the least. What was so great, so coveted, about just ourselves? “Whatever you want to do,” he said.
“You know what?” Sharon interrupted, standing up. “The bar looks so nice and civilized tonight.” And it did—the black veneer was set off by the dazzling array of liquor bottles and glassware behind it. “You like it up there, so why not?” She smiled at him and walked over to the bar. The year before Ben was born, she had met Dennis for lunch at the Dubliner on the Hill. They hadn’t realized it was St. Patrick’s Day, and due to the crowd and the limits on Dennis’s time, they’d sat at the bar and eaten corned-beef sandwiches and drunk several pints of green beer. It turned out to be one of the more pleasurable meals she and Dennis had shared together, and she remembered being giddy from the beer and the buzzing crowd of congressional staffers and local Irishmen. They’d gone back to Dennis’s office; Sharon had followed him along the long, gray, squeaky hallway, his secretary seated at the very end of it. They’d greeted her and walked into Dennis’s office, where he’d shut the door behind her and kissed her so slowly against the wall. As she climbed onto one of the tall bar chairs, she remembered the slow, soft feel of his tongue that day and the hard Sheetrock against her back, the Freer Gallery just outside his office window.
“Hello,” she said to the bartender, who came forward immediately. He was a young man with dark hair and sweet brown eyes, set a bit too close together. If she’d been in Washington, she would have thought perhaps he was some kind of Carter aide making extra pin money; in New York he’d have been an actor; surely he’d be a ski instructor in Denver; but she had no idea what this made him here in a town like Boston. He was too old to be a college student; perhaps it made him a handsome bartender.
“Hi.” Dennis leaned on his hands and lifted himself onto the seat next to his wife.
“Welcome,” the bartender said. “How are you tonight?”
“Just fine,” Dennis said. “This is our big night out.” He squeezed Sharon’s hand below the bar.
“Well, what can I get you two?”
“What’s good?” Sharon asked.
The handsome bartender smiled, which made Sharon think of politicians. “Everything’s good; our cocktails are famous. But our martinis are infamous.”
Sharon laughed. “I bet you’ve used that once or twice before.”
“Never,” the bartender said, smiling again. He had a dimple in his left cheek.
Several sturdy, frosted cocktail glasses were lined up behind the bar, stacked into a pyramid. “A martini sounds good.” Sharon rubbed her hands together, imagining the clean, cold feel of the drink, a complement to that long-ago kiss. “Doesn’t it, D?”
“Make it two.” Dennis threw up two fingers with his right hand. “Lots of olives in mine.”
“Vodka or gin?”
“Gin,” Dennis said quickly.
“Real martinis are always with gin,” the bartender said. “But people like their vodka.”
“That they do,” Dennis said. There he was again in that dining room of Soviets, shot glasses hitting the wooden table over and over as they plowed their way through bottle after bottle of Stolichnaya. He even ached for the most precarious parts of his pre-embargo job.
“Can you believe this weekend?” Sharon asked. “We’ve barely seen Ben at all.”
Dennis shook his head and put aside his thoughts that in all the years of this war, such measures had never been taken. Never. What would have happened if the Export Admin Act had not been put into effect the year before? This embargo wouldn’t have been able to happen, is what, Dennis thought. “Well, what did we expect? He’s in college. I think we should be happy he’s so busy. He was just terrific at that rally, wasn’t he?” Tonight, Dennis resolved, I will focus on what is here and not what has gone missing. He laughed to hear himself thinking in one of his wife’s LEAP!isms.
Sharon nodded, watching the bartender shake their martinis in his cocktail shaker, polished to such intensity she could see the reflection of the Japanese businessman two seats over, his face distorted in the curved silver. “He was great. Just great.”
“A rally against the Olympic boycott? Only in college.” Dennis shook his head again. Yet he and Ben were on the same page. Cutting off grain, cutting off sport . . . was it terribly reductive to wonder how different the consequences were?
“The Olympics are a big deal!” Sharon started. Then she laughed it off. “Well, you know how I love the Olympics.”
“I do.” Dennis smiled.
After a brief silence, Sharon said, “So we never met the infamous Rachel.”
“Not yet. His first love.” Suddenly Dennis visualized the first girl he’d fallen in love with. Ellen Brown. In many ways his adoration for her had been inspired by meeting Sissy Ford; Ellen too was blond—everywhere—and strewn with pearls, her accent straight off the boat, as in yacht, at Newport. “We’ll meet her if she sticks around long enough,” he said, but he didn’t have a lot of faith in that happening. The martinis showed up, wobbly and perfectly chilled, his with four olives, hers with two.
“I just hope Ben isn’t too upset.” Sharon nodded a thank-you to the bartender. “He seemed like he really liked this one.” She fingered her cocktail napkin, the Ritz lion’s profile stamped in the center.
“Let’s talk about something else. You know what would go well with this?” Dennis brought the martini to his lips.
“What?” Sharon leaned her head down and took a sip from her full glass.
“Pineapple!”
“Ha ha ha.”
“I miss those skewers. Why did you ever stop serving them?”
“God, I don’t know. I thi
nk it was after that awful dog nearly chopped off the Macintyre kid’s head. Do you remember that?”
“Do I ever, my dear, I had to call Barry Brady just in case we got sued. That was before his son lost his mind. That poor family. Barry’s partner says the kid’s still in Psychiatric Institute. I hadn’t realized Vanessa was actually friends with Ed Brady.”
Sharon nodded, sipping from her glass. “This is delicious.” Then, to the bartender: “This martini is magnificent!” She held it out for him to see.
Tonight his wife’s insistence on involving herself with the bartender didn’t annoy Dennis as it often did when they were out to dinner and she’d persist in engaging with the waiter or waitress, discussing anything from the weather to the hormones and chemicals in even the most select cuts of beef. “You served those pineapples years after that. This is tasty, isn’t it?” He fished out an olive and popped it into his mouth, savoring the punch of salt against the smooth, clean gin.
“They weren’t really good friends, I don’t think.”
Dennis looked at her.
“Vanessa and Ed Brady. I don’t think they were good friends.” Sharon took a big sip. “I think it was just boredom.”
He nodded. “Well, what friendship isn’t?” He laughed, then for a moment stopped, caught by his wife, who was so at ease tonight, her eyes glittering, lit by the candles around the room, the flames throwing shadows over the faces turned toward each other by the walls, and the twinkle of the crystal glasses, the many-colored liquors illuminating the back wall. He was even getting used to—appreciating, he might say—her more casual look: dungarees and turtlenecks, her hair down. He missed the way she wore it up when they went out, in a twist, with long, dangling earrings. He could still smell the faintest whiff of her perfume—it was a sharp, bright scent, not sweet at all. And he remembered a dress she wore—a Leonard of Paris dress; black with bright pink and yellow flowers splashed across it—that looked fantastic on her. She was a knockout in that dress, and Dennis realized he hadn’t seen her decked out like that in ages.
They’d once gone out often, and they’d also had lovely, relaxed parties with Sharon’s friends from college, with his colleagues, couples they had met through tennis and even some parents from the kids’ school. Sharon would make fondue or paella, and the party—often bipartisan—would go into the morning. People argued over everything. Vietnam, China, ERA, John Updike, Watergate, Woody Allen. Fighting was how he and his friends talked to one another in those days, and Dennis missed that ease he no longer felt in Washington. He remembered Sharon in a long batik dress, the brown and mustard fabric crossed sexily at the neck and tied at the back, entering the living room with a huge steaming pot—she might as well have been carrying it on her head like an African—and placing it unceremoniously on the coffee table. Everyone ate with plates on their laps and drank wine from juice glasses.
Maybe, he thought, Sharon stopped throwing these bohemian parties when she started catering bashes for everyone else in town. Her parties at home got smaller and more uptight. They moved from sitting Indian-style in the living room to the dining table, draped in linen tablecloths and set with her mother’s wedding china, from listening to Jim Croce to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Dennis had thought, This is what aging is: more and more formality until you’re in a tux in the goddamn grave. But maybe they had also outgrown their friends: some moved when Nixon was re-elected; some became diplomats and went overseas; some never had children and spent their free time traveling or in French cooking class together; a few just grew too exhausting. For the most part their friends were now extensions of their business acquaintances, and who wants to dip bread and gherkins into a hot pot of cheese with people who don’t feel the least bit like family?
When had this all changed? The embassy parties they’d once loved for their little blips of glamour in a fairly frumpy town of government buildings filled with stuffy bureaucrats had become rote. They still went out to make and solidify connections; Sharon looked for clients higher and higher up in the echelons of Washington society, and Dennis was climbing higher into the bureaucracy of the town. What could he say? The closer one got to the president, the more likely one became a political appointee or, even better, a cabinet member. The election did not look so hot for the Dems, and by most accounts it looked as if Reagan would be the Republican nominee. And Reagan’s big thing? Lifting the embargo, of course! After freeing the hostages. What an impossible town it will be with Ronald Reagan in office, thought Dennis as he sipped aggressively at his drink. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought he might secretly vote for Anderson.
“What are you thinking?” Sharon leaned toward her husband. Since the accident, she felt she lacked any powers of seduction she may have once tenuously possessed. She knew she hid beneath her sweaters and her long pants, her hair.
Tonight, though, she felt relaxed, and as close to Dennis as she’d felt in those days before they’d decided to marry, when even the city looked new and clean and blooming. She noticed the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes; other than this, and the little bit of a tummy, he hadn’t really aged much. Most likely, she thought, from all her healthful cooking and the tennis he still played beneath the bubble at Racquet and Health each Saturday. There was no gray to speak of, nothing receding. In some ways this terrified Sharon; she had aged. She knew that she had, and she knew that she would. She was changing all the time; what if Dennis stayed the same?
“I’m thinking you look great,” he said. “I’m thinking about that Leonard dress your mother bought you in Paris. I love that dress, do you still have it?”
“Oh, God, I haven’t thought about that gown in ages. It’s old!” Sharon pushed up her sleeves. She also adored that dress, the way the sleeves were slit up the side, giving the blousy effect of a kimono, and yet the way it was fitted at the waist and hips, tying at just the right place. It always made her feel sensational; why had she stopped wearing it? Fashion, she supposed, and she could no longer carry such a dress, not with this burnt-up arm, she thought, running her fingers over her scar. She still couldn’t really feel with her hand, and touching it with the other produced the strangest ghostly sensation. “I wonder where it is,” she said, picturing her closet, now filled mostly with long batik African shirts and turtleneck sweaters and blue jeans.
Dennis felt riotously happy and ordered them another round of drinks. “To ditching our beloved children,” he said when the second drinks arrived.
Sharon gulped down the rest of the first. “To a great weekend after all!” She held up her glass and resisted her nearly reflexive urge to bring the handsome bartender over so she could find out exactly who he was and how he made such marvelous drinks.
The bar was filling quickly, but Sharon and Dennis hardly noticed. They continued to talk about nothing in particular, about their daily lives, which were inevitably connected—if sometimes chained—to the past: a dining room table regrettably not purchased, a lobster roll at Reds in Wiscasset on the way to Rockport the summer before Ben was born. Their lives were constructed on so many diminutive moments, and not all of them, Sharon noted, had involved their children.
After the third drink, Dennis excused himself from the bar and returned several minutes later. He placed a key on the bar in front of her.
“What’s this?” She laughed. “A key to your heart?”
“No.” Dennis looked at her sheepishly, and she thought not for the first time tonight of that young man she’d turned to see shuffling his feet as she opened the door to her place on Q Street. She had thought, I will take him to bed, and she had felt terribly transgressive, her mother’s warnings hardly registering. Then we will see, she’d thought. “A room with a view.”
“Dennis!” She swatted his hand. “With a view!” She threw her head back just a bit, her hair swishing behind her. “But we already have a room.”
“We are not going to that dismal Marriott over a wretched highway.” Dennis leaned over his wife and, placing his han
d at her nape, kissed the top of her head. Then he sat down in his own seat. “Our bags are still in the car, my dear, and tonight we’re staying at the Ritz.” He told the bartender, when he finally got his attention, “One more round.” To Sharon he said, “I confess, though, I couldn’t drive back to Waltham if you paid me right now, and a room with a view was all they had left.”
Their bags had already been retrieved from the car and carried to the room when they entered, and the curtains were pulled back, leaving in their stead a midnight blue sky and a lit skyline with the white steeple of Park Street Church bisecting the center, pasted over the night. Washington, D.C., is so low to the ground, thought Sharon as she ran to the window, only to trip on the leg of one of the overstuffed chairs crammed into the beautiful but small room. She toppled onto her side and sat up on the plush rug.
“Your arm!” Dennis gasped.
She held it up, laughing hysterically. “Still here.”
Dennis remained by the doorway, shaking his head. “You are such a klutz!” The moonlight cast an eerie light in the room, and for a moment Dennis considered a moon salutation.
Sharon sat on the floor, her legs splayed before her. “I know.” She wiped her eyes and went to lean on the chair for leverage.
Dennis came over and reached down to help her up. “You have to be more careful, Share.”
She groaned more than necessary as she rose to her feet. “I’m getting old!”
“You’re getting clumsier, if that’s possible.” Dennis held on to both of her hands. His thumb traced one of the thick, corded sections of her scar. What if she had gone up in flames? It was not like him to think so catastrophically, but he imagined Sharon in her eighties and falling this way. Really, he thought, she needed to pay more heed to her surroundings.
“Thanks,” she said. The sky opened up behind her, luminous and lovely, an invitation toward any horizon.
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