True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  “Let’s just tell her the truth,” Thomas had suggested.

  “The truth” was Thomas’s solution for everything, which pretty much described her husband’s optimistic, kindhearted, and open view of the world.

  Facial—12:30 on the Appointments list was code for her own shrink. Not that she felt any shame about that either, but if Thomas got wind of the fact that she’d started seeing Dr. Berman again, he’d probably ask why, in that wounded way of his, and she might have to explain that for the past year she’d felt a thin crust of boredom forming over the top of their marriage. Or, to be more accurate, she’d begun to feel the thin crust of boredom that had always been over the top of their marriage thickening while she swam in the cold waters below trying to find a hole or an air pocket so she could catch her breath. She wasn’t ready to talk openly about that with Dr. Berman, let alone with Thomas. After three months of twice-weekly sessions, she’d gone as far as explaining to the doctor her fears that her career was at a standstill, something she presented as neurotic insecurity, even though she had ample evidence it was true. Discussion of marital concerns would have to wait until she felt more solidly in control of them.

  Finish reading Westerly biography. This referred to a book by someone named Desmond Sullivan, a soon-to-be colleague of Thomas’s. She’d agreed to read and summarize it for her husband weeks ago. Thomas was too busy preparing his courses to read it himself, and too earnest to simply compliment the author with nebulous praise and then drop it. She’d had most of August, but thus far she hadn’t done more than scan the index to find references to people who interested her more than the subject himself. The author would be showing up at Deerforth College any day now, and she’d written this little note to herself so Thomas would find it and be reassured that it was only minutes before she completed the tome and gave him her book report.

  Up at the top of the Bills To Pay list was Pay Roofer. That stumped her. If she had to guess, she’d say it referred to some petty indulgence she wasn’t interested in admitting to. Unless it meant that the person who’d reflashed their chimney six months ago still hadn’t been paid. On a separate list, she made a note to look into that one.

  When her direct line rang, she pushed the papers to the back of her desk and, assuming it was Rosemary Boyle calling about the show, grabbed the receiver on the first ring. But it wasn’t Rosemary. It was Caroline Wade. Or, as Jane had come to think of her, Just Caroline.

  “Hi, Jane, it’s just me.”

  Jane appreciated self-deprecation as much as the next person, but only when it was clearly an attention-getting display of false modesty. Caroline’s humble whimpers often pointed to actual flaws. But how nice that Dale Barsamian, Jane’s ex-husband, had married Caroline instead of a fifteen-year-old beauty queen or a manic overachiever, someone who would have inspired crippling jealousy and made Jane wonder even more acutely if her own second marriage hadn’t been a little hasty.

  “I’m not getting you at a bad time, am I?” Caroline asked.

  “I’m supposed to be doing damage control,” Jane said, “so I’d much rather talk with you.” Despite her quirks, there was something relaxing about talking with Caroline; she was genuinely kind and thoughtful, and was so modest, you didn’t have to engage in conversational one-upmanship with her. Jane often found herself bringing up boring topics she wouldn’t dare discuss with someone she wanted to impress. “How are the cats?” she asked.

  “All right, I guess. Willie kept me up last night. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. He’s so talkative all of a sudden.”

  “Really? Has he got anything interesting to say about plane crashes?”

  “I didn’t mean it literally.”

  Caroline could be one of the most curiously dull intelligent people Jane had ever met, not counting everyone at Deerforth College. She had a Ph.D. in English Lit (from Yale, no less) and a law degree from NYU, but she didn’t seem to know what to do with either of them. Since marrying Dale five years earlier, she’d devoted herself to studying Sufism. You’d think you could get her to make an interesting comment every once in a while, or at least recognize a joke when she heard one. The one time Jane had had her on the show, she’d made a few embarrassingly dim observations about George Eliot and then sat there eating, something most guests had the common sense to realize was out of the question, no matter how tempting the food looked.

  And yet Dale was devoted to her. Jane didn’t know whether to envy Caroline or pity her for that. At his worst, Dale was a cad, a liar, and a self-centered, uncommunicative brat. When their divorce had come through, Jane had felt a ripple of elation pass through her body, as if she’d just quit the worst job of her life. The problem was, as soon as she’d untied all the strings that had made Dale’s bad qualities so maddening and confining, she was free to see all the good things that had made him so attractive in the first place: his intelligence, his spiky survival skills, and his languorous, louche sexual charms.

  Caroline had been going on about the cats—they had three—in an overly detailed way that suggested she was using them to avoid talking about whatever it was that had made her call. When she finally grew silent and sighed wearily and sadly, Jane snapped back to attention, sensing that she was beginning to circle the field in preparation for landing. “Is everything all right, Caroline? You sound a little exhausted.”

  “Everything’s fine. I don’t even know why I called. I shouldn’t be dragging you into this, it’s not fair. I’m going to hang up. I’ll call next week.” She inhaled sharply, let out two short breaths, and, in a voice that sounded close to tears, said, “You don’t have any idea how many times I sat here and dialed your number before I went through with the call. I know you’re the last person I should be calling about this. You’re the last person, but somehow . . .”

  With anyone else, Jane might have said: What’s he done now? But you had to be gentle with Just Caroline; she bruised easily. “If you’ve been running it through your head for days, it’s probably not as bad as you think. I suppose it’s about Dale.”

  “Oh, of course it’s about Dale. Everything’s about Dale, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly in his mind,” Jane said, wondering why it was so satisfying to be thought of as an expert on the subject of her ex-husband.

  “Well . . .” Caroline paused, and Jane heard her light a cigarette. Caroline had two saving graces: she smoked fiendishly and was insanely aggressive behind the wheel of her ancient Citroen. Without these steam vents, she probably would have blown someone’s head off a long time ago, most likely her own. “I don’t know why, I don’t have any proof, but I’m almost certain Dale’s having an affair. I don’t know, Jane, maybe he isn’t, but he’s been acting so strangely these past few weeks. I know you’re going to tell me to confront him, but I can’t do that. I’m not like you. I wish I were.”

  Jane had begun to think of “I wish I could be more like you” as a frill people slipped over an insult to dress it up and try to pass it off as a compliment. You’re a no-good lying thief. I wish I could be more like you. You’re a hateful bitch. Oh, if only I were, too.

  “Besides,” Caroline went on, “I’m the kind of person people always lie to. I suppose it’s something about my face.”

  Undoubtedly, it was something much deeper and more subtle than her blond, fine-boned beauty and her long-legged, Barbie doll figure, but Jane didn’t know what. Chloe was pacing in her cinder block shoes just outside Jane’s open door and unless Jane swung into action, any action, very soon, Chloe would probably do her the favor of finding a few guests ready to go on camera, making Jane look like a useless fossil.

  Still, she couldn’t hang up on Caroline until she had the full story. Jane had been married to Dale for six years and had incontrovertible proof of two infidelities and one all-out affair. What surprised her most about Caroline’s worries was that they were coming so late into the marriage. “I think you need to take a deep breath and calm down,” Jane said. “It sounds to me as i
f you’re jumping ahead and assuming the worst. When you say he’s been acting strangely, what do you mean?”

  “Strangely. Distant, cut-off.”

  Jane was stung. Distant and cut-off had been the norm when she and Dale were paired up. Was he really that much more attentive and loving toward Just Caroline? An important part of putting the past in the past is believing that people really can change and that ex-husbands really can’t.

  “He’s probably got too much going on,” Jane said. “He’s probably involved in some deal he believes the future of the planet depends upon.” Dale was a developer, one of those real estate millionaires who destroyed whole neighborhoods with their buildings and then seduced a reporter from the Boston Globe into writing laudatory stories about them because they included an affordable studio apartment for a Haitian family in one of their hundred-unit monstrosities. Now, in what Jane saw as an attempt at acquiring a veneer of glamour, Dale was a principal investor in a grotesquely expensive restaurant set to open in downtown Boston sometime next year. She’d heard about this through her brother, an architect on the project, and had seen it as the first signs of a midlife crisis arriving right on schedule. Restaurant business today, cocaine habit tomorrow.

  Caroline exhaled luxuriously. “It isn’t his work,” she said.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Caroline. Somehow or other you have to ask him. If he admits to it, at least you’ll know where you stand.”

  “And if he denies it?”

  “Then you’ll know he’s lying.”

  There was a storm of hissing and yowling in the background, and Caroline squeaked out a halfhearted reproach: “Come on you two, cut it out.” Jane could see her, pretty and puffy-eyed, sitting in their sunlit living room surrounded by stacks of books on some obscure, useless topic. Caroline had insisted they buy a modern house in Weston, a Gropius-style box that was ninety percent glass and looked out onto acres of conservation land. What an elegant, cheerful little refuge she’d made for herself, a perfect prison, cats and all, while Dale was off in the city carrying on like a middle-aged adolescent. She felt suddenly protective of Caroline, out there in her glass cage with the miserable cats taking swipes at her. Just Caroline with her degrees and her old-money family and, rumor had it, her barren womb. What a rotten deal for someone like that to be hitched to a cad like Dale. And worse still, what an absolutely wonderful deal for a cad like Dale, married to a trust-funded, well-bred woman who was too timid to make him suffer the consequences of his actions.

  Chloe stuck her head into Jane’s office again and hooked a curtain of dark curls behind her ears. She’d been in the sun recently, and her skin had a wonderful glow, like polished copper; although she appeared to wear no makeup, her eyelids had a metallic shine that Jane found mesmerizing. She gestured toward her watch and then pointed up toward David’s floor, not impatiently, but with pity, as if she were warning Jane that she had ten minutes to save her career.

  Jane covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “It’s been settled. I’m speaking to our guest right now.” Chloe’s shoulders dropped with genuine, generous relief. “Close the door, will you?”

  There was a satisfying whoosh of air as Chloe sealed her into her office. She’d have to get off and make a round of frantic calls. If Rosemary didn’t come through, she’d try to get an air traffic controller they’d had on a couple of times, a bitter man who was full of horror-movie-quality statistics about catastrophes. “I wish there was something I could do for you, Caroline, but I’ve got so much going on now . . .”

  “This is going to sound terrible, Jane, but I was hoping you might . . . talk with him.”

  “Me? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Who else could I ask? It’s too humiliating to even discuss it with anyone else. I knew you’d understand, having been through this. I know we haven’t spent much time together recently, but somehow I’ve always felt close to you, almost as if you were extended family. Does that make any sense?”

  In other words, Dale still talked about her; she’d never doubted it, but it was nice to have confirmation. Everyone wants to be remembered, especially by the people they’d most like to forget. “I’m going to need time to think this over, Caroline.”

  Not that the idea of calling her ex-husband on yet another round of infidelities didn’t have its appeal. In the wake of their divorce, she’d picked up the pieces and made a successful second marriage; she had a child, a husband who was faithful to her, a legitimate career. He was still waist-deep in the same old rut. And here was fresh evidence, just in case either of them ever had had any doubts about it, that his disloyalties during their marriage were not owing to any of her inadequacies. Finally, it was the least she could do for Just Caroline. They’d been in a book group together two centuries ago and had been casual friends since; Jane had always felt partly responsible for introducing Caroline to Dale.

  “There’s just one thing,” Caroline said. “If you do talk with him, I want you to tell me everything.”

  “Of course.”

  “Everything, Jane. Promise me.”

  “I promise you. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You don’t know how much this means to me. If there’s anything I can do for you, please, just call me up and let me know. I have some extra time on my hands now.”

  It wasn’t as if Jane would take her up on it, but she scanned down her lists even so. Caroline might feel better about the imposition and the embarrassment of the situation if she gave something back.

  One item on one of the lists leapt out at her. Caroline was a close, fast reader, and it might give her pleasure to put her academic credentials to use.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve read a biography of someone named Lewis Westerly by someone named Desmond Sullivan, have you?”

  3.

  Rosemary Boyle came through. Half an hour before taping was to start, she called the station. She dominated the Dinner Conversation by making a series of vague comments that gave the impression of being witty and profound. “Living is losing,” she’d said at one point, a comment that silenced the other guests for a full five seconds.

  As Jane was about to leave the office, she pulled out a pad of blank paper and started yet another list, this one for things she had to do as soon as she got in tomorrow morning. Call Dale she wrote. But then, thinking better of it, she attacked it with an eraser and changed it to the more ambiguous: Call Roofer.

  Two

  Going Away

  Anderton claimed to hate going on the road and leaving her husband, Michael, her daughter, and her goldfish. “My family is the most important part of my life,” she said during an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. “Aside from the booze. And I don’t trust Michael with the fish.”

  From Cry Me a River:

  The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan

  1.

  The record dropped onto the turntable, and within seconds, the noise of the traffic on West End Avenue and the sound of the piano student practicing in a neighboring apartment and the deep rumble of a jet making its final approach toward La Guardia were drowned out by Pauline Anderton’s big, grainy voice belting out the opening bars of “The Man I Love.”

  Desmond Sullivan sat back in his chair, the unfinished manuscript of his biography of Pauline Anderton spread out on the desk before him. That’s singing, he thought. Not great singing—technically speaking, not even good singing—but sincere, unadulterated, and emotionally wrenching. There were no safety nets here, no studio filters or electronic tricks, just a beating heart, exposed nerves, and a tremendous amount of oxygen. “Some day he’ll come a LOOOOONG.” Every note Anderton sang went through your body, even when, clearly, it was the wrong note. Leave precision to brain surgeons and airplane mechanics; he’d take a singer willing to plow through a song with heartfelt inaccuracy any day.

  He leaned his elbows on his desk, put his head in his hands, and stared out the bedroom window and across the air shaft. In less than a week he was heade
d to Boston for a four-month-long teaching job at Deerforth College. The offer had come through a mere three weeks ago, an indication that he wasn’t the school’s first choice and probably wasn’t their second or third choice either. Well, guess what? Teaching hadn’t been his first choice. He needed a salary and an airtight excuse for leaving New York for a little while, and Deerforth College was providing him with both. If the offer, with its aura of last-minute desperation, had been an insult, he’d thrown it right back in their faces by accepting it. With a little money and a little time away from Russell, he could finally fit all the pieces of this new book together and send it off to his publisher.

  The song was approaching the bridge, the weakest part of Anderton’s rocky performance. The pretentious way she pronounced Tuesday (“Ta-Youse-Day”) always made Desmond cringe. One of Anderton’s managers had tried to refine her diction by sending her to elocution lessons, and the result was this occasional lapse in honesty, especially when she’d been drinking before a show or a recording session.

  Russell walked into the bedroom, his head cocked as if listening for a cue. He pushed his round yellow glasses against his nose and then, doing a nearly flawless imitation of Anderton, sang along with the record: “Maybe Ta-Youse-Day will be my good Na-Youse day.” He left the room, laughing merrily at his own performance.

  Depending on your mood, Russell’s ability to mimic people could be an entertaining party trick or the emotional equivalent of psoriasis. This afternoon, it was a perfect example of why Desmond had to leave New York in order to figure out exactly what was missing from the book he’d been writing and researching for nearly four years. It wasn’t that Russell was unsupportive of Desmond’s project. It was hard to imagine how anyone could be more supportive. Russell owned a secondhand store on the Lower East Side. In scavenging for merchandise at yard sales and thrift shops, he’d unearthed: several records Desmond had given up hope of ever finding; a rare program from one of Anderton’s rare performances at The Sands in the early 1960s; and a scrapbook of clippings kept by some obsessed fan that spanned the entire course of Anderton’s career, from discovery by Walter Winchell to slide into obscurity fifteen years later. He was always willing to discuss Anderton or listen while Desmond trod the same ground over and over, trying to figure out what crucial piece of information or insight he was missing. The problem was that after nearly five years of cohabitation, Desmond was finding it increasingly difficult to make clear distinctions between his own thoughts about Anderton—along with everything else—and Russell’s. Who had been the first to pick up on this grating quirk of pronunciation? He couldn’t say for sure, nor could he say for sure why it mattered to him so much that he know, especially if it turned out he had picked up on it first.