Dale looked puzzled. He paused for a moment and said, “Who, for example?”
“Have you ever heard of a writer named Lewis Westerly? He wrote brilliantly so-so novels.”
“The name sounds familiar.”
Oh good, Jane thought, he’s lying. She had him. She motioned for the waitress and ordered them another round of drinks. Jane was wearing a linen jacket, a boxy sand-colored thing that she’d never really liked but had thrown over her silk blouse this morning because she knew it would make her feel less exposed to her ex-husband’s scrutiny. Now that he seemed so impressed with her project, she didn’t care what he thought of her figure, which, after all, wasn’t that much different from what it had been fifteen years ago when Dale had been so enthusiastic about it. Unlike the vast majority of heterosexual men she’d met, Dale actually liked women, and so wasn’t repulsed by female fleshiness. Anyway, people generally take your lead in reacting to your appearance. Two thirds of Dale’s attractiveness had to do with his narcissistic appreciation of himself. She slipped off the jacket, rested the back of her head against the banquette, and began free-associating, creating a brilliant plan right there while the silly, pretty fishes swam in circles in the goblets at the tables all around them.
2.
By the time both were on a third drink, the bar was more crowded, mostly with pompous, well-scrubbed young men with pink skin, no matter their race, and the boisterous good cheer that indicated a serious lack of life experience. Recent college grads working at Fidelity or Bank of Boston, so low down the corporate ladder they were still chummy with each other. Poor things, thinking that careers were ruled by logic and love was ruled by the heart. Thank God optimism like that dried up with age.
She’d laid out a whole theory behind her proposal for Dale, he’d bought it, told her it sounded wonderful, and in truth, it did. And why not? So what if she’d stumbled upon it at the last second, it was a hell of a lot more original than yet another fifteen-part series about the goddamned Monroe Doctrine or Westward Expansion, one of those showcases for someone’s research skills and lack of imagination, the kinds of things people were so busy praising they didn’t have time to watch. She’d arrange a meeting with Desmond Sullivan and pick his brains about it. Like most academics she knew, he could probably be bought out of academia with a few subway tokens and the promise of meeting a few third-rate TV personalities. The whole afternoon had been remarkably productive. So much so she’d forgotten why she was here until Dale brought it up himself.
“Tell me something, Janey,” he said, leaning on the table, cupping his face in his hand and gazing at her with the limp focus she recognized as his stock look of seduction. “Why did you call me up and arrange this little meeting? After all this time?”
“Millennial fever,” she said.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Neither do I,” she said, “but I’ve heard it’s contagious. I hope you realize you’re making eyes at me.”
“If I am, it’s completely unconscious.”
She mimicked his body language, chin in her hands, her face inches from his. “Puberty,” she said, “was the last uncalculated move you made.”
“Oh really? I thought it was falling in love with you.”
“If you’d fallen in love with me, you never would have married me.”
“You’re so full of theories, Janey, you should have your own Web site. Why did I marry you?”
“How else were you going to have extramarital affairs?”
One of the big pink boys on the other side of the room dropped a cigar on the nearly marble floor and there was a stir of activity and laughter. Dale sat back in his seat and looked away from her, troubled now, and ran his hand through the dark brush of his hair. He had lovely, large hands, and Jane had always suspected he went for regular manicures. There was no other way to explain those perfectly shaped, shiny fingernails. “I have a suspicion,” he said, “just a suspicion, Caroline’s been talking to you. Am I right?”
“Caroline and I have friends in common. We were in a book group together before she married you, and we’ve been friends since. Why wouldn’t she be talking to me?”
“I mean about me. She thinks I’m having an affair. And believe it or not, Janey, I’m innocent.”
“I believe it not.”
“I promise you.”
“Oh. That’s different.”
“All right. There is someone I’ve been seeing, but it isn’t like that. We’ve had dinner, we’ve gone for walks in the middle of the day, I’ve called her from the phone booth at the supermarket, but that’s it. I don’t want to fuck up my life again, Janey. I don’t want to fuck up my marriage. I did that once and I’ve lived to regret it.”
This outpouring sounded so heartfelt, she didn’t know how to respond. The bitter envy she felt at learning that he just might have been faithful to Caroline all these years was tempered by his admission of regret over the mess he’d made of their marriage. “Well,” she said, perhaps too quietly. “So have I. Regretted your fucking things up.”
He put his heavy warm hand over hers, and she couldn’t help looking down and admiring those pearly fingernails and his big fat wedding band. “Tell Caroline not to worry. I’m not going to fuck up our marriage. Janey,” he said, and she looked up into his eyes. “You can help, you know. You can help me through this. That’s why I agreed to meet you here today. I knew what this was all about.”
She felt a certain amount of sympathy for poor old Dale, who at this moment looked ridiculous. She’d always liked him best when he’d just made a fool of himself or had the flu. “I don’t know how you expect me to stop you from sleeping with this girl.”
“She’s thirty-five. She’s married. Her husband’s a friend of mine. Tell me what’s wrong with me?”
“You’re a hopeless romantic and a shit. It’s a deadly combination. You’re over forty and getting restless. And your mick mother spoiled her darling prince rotten.” She reached up and ran her hand down his rough face. Definitely showing the signs of too much sun. In five years, he’d look like luggage, the expensive kind, but old. She gave his face a sharp little slap.
He took her hand in his and pressed her palm to his lips. He murmured something into her hand, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then he looked up at her and whispered, “You know me better than anyone.”
“That’s why I divorced you.”
“You know how much I’ve missed you, don’t you?”
“How much?”
He placed her hand against his chest, and through the thin, cool cotton of his shirt, she could feel the thump of his heart. “This much,” he said.
She had to laugh. What else could you do? It was much too late in their lives for this kind of giddy flirting and already the afternoon had been much too long. She could see the reflected glare of the late sun, golden and vulgar, in a mirror near the entrance of the lounge. How could I possibly have spent six years buried under the weight of this louse? she thought.
But the truth was, she’d begun to feel a little golden and vulgar herself, and she was suddenly struck by the realization that he meant it, that somewhere in his heart, amidst the gridlock of self-absorption and sexual obsession, he did miss her. She felt something flare up inside her, not lust, but recklessness and power. If I were drunk and stupid and young and spiteful enough, she thought, something truly regrettable might happen here.
“Janey?” he said, so softly she could barely hear him. “Tell me the truth. You’ve missed me, haven’t you?”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Maybe a little, when I’m especially full of self-loathing.”
“Will you see me again, later in the week?”
“For what? What possible reason could you have for wanting to meet me?”
“To talk. Who else am I going to talk to?”
“They have these wonderful things called shrinks,” she said, “people who sit in little rooms and do nothing but listen to other people talk.
You pay them by the hour so they’re not allowed to participate or pass judgment. They’re listed in the Yellow Pages under EARS.” But as she said it, she was wondering how many of her carefully arranged plans she’d have to cancel to meet with him at whatever time and whatever place he wanted.
Four
Cry Me a River
1.
One of the more dubious advantages of being a homosexual is that people will tell you anything about themselves. You don’t even have to ask. Show up at a dinner party with a companion of the same sex and by the end of the evening, you’re almost certain to find yourself backed into a corner, listening to a whispered, alcohol-soaked confession of a love affair with a sister-in-law, a wedding day infidelity with the bridegroom’s best friend, or a secret addiction to sedatives or cheesecake. When Desmond was younger—he suspected it was during that burst of optimism and self-confidence that burned brightly between the rush of revealing his secret sexual inclinations to the world and the disappointment of hearing that everyone already knew—he had a number of flattering explanations for this. Gay men are good listeners; gay men are sympathetic; gay men are trustworthy. More recently, he’d come to realize that people are eager to spill their darkest secrets because they assume that all homosexuals live in a swamp of moral ambiguity and are therefore in no position to pass judgment.
It was an assumption that baffled him. People whose lives are rife with moral contradictions are generally the first to pass judgment. Look at the Catholic clergy. Look at the whole of the American right wing, that strangely cherubic cast of haloed scoundrels, characters out of a Disney production of Ubu Roi, hurling insults and stones from their sloughs of hypocrisy. Still, Desmond wasn’t one to correct anyone’s suppositions, especially if doing so meant losing access to their dirty laundry. He was a voyeur by nature and he’d take whispered confessions whatever way they came. As for his own moral ambiguity, he wasn’t sure. He liked to think he lived on the high ground of moral principles strictly adhered to, but he realized he’d chosen this absolutist path for what was undoubtedly the wrong reason: he found it easier to lead a productive life when his options were limited. Monogamy was a perfect example. For all its drawbacks, it certainly made it easier to find time to do the laundry.
It was his tendency toward voyeurism that had brought him around to writing his biography of Lewis Westerly, an act that changed his life on almost every front and was indirectly responsible for this pending move to Boston.
Desmond was living in Chicago when he became aware of Westerly. He was practicing law and was so desperately unhappy with his life, he was seriously considering taking up handball, the last stop on many a road to emotional ruin. He’d rushed into law school right out of college in a mad dash to follow in his father’s footsteps, only to learn, on the day he graduated, that his father had secretly hoped he’d go into a more creative and loose-jointed profession. “If I hadn’t had to support a family,” his father had said, “I think I would have tried to put together a career as a songwriter. I used to write songs when I was in college. I’ll show them to you sometime. What the hell, it’s too late now, for both of us, probably.”
Great, Desmond thought, I’ve gone through three years of law school to please a man who wishes he’d sired Kander and Ebb. The next time he planned his life around pleasing other people, he’d have to make sure he first knew what they wanted.
Lewis Westerly was the author of Broadside, Ferocious Wind, and The Bright, Bold Beginning, to mention only three of his twenty-three novels. He was one of a breed of writers that flourished in the early 1950s; burly, chainsmoking men who, in between drinking binges and divorces, churned out dozens of vast novels that attacked a variety of white-hot social concerns: Drug Addiction, Interracial Marriage, Juvenile Delinquency, Anti-Semitism. And they didn’t just attack them, they sank their teeth into them and wrestled them to the ground, and made the reader feel he’d heard everything he ever needed to hear on the subject. On to Incest! Decades earlier, readers were in awe of these men and their massive, virile tomes. They couldn’t get enough of them. The more rugged and verbose the better. Men had made the world safe for democracy, so they must be worth listening to. Before sensibilities were forever altered by feminism and LSD, these cartoonishly manly men were gods.
Desmond had first read The Crowded Room, one of Westerly’s earliest novels, this one on the subject of schizophrenia. He’d come across the book on a sale table at a library and had bought it, feeling he was offering a last meal to an author whose work hadn’t been checked out in nearly twenty years. By current standards, the psychology was laughable, and the happy ending, in which lobotomy is made to seem like a minor surgical procedure with fewer downsides than a nose job, was deplorable at best. Still, there were sections of the novel that were so stirring and powerful, Desmond had nearly wept reading them.
No one would accuse Westerly of being a brilliant stylist. He had a haphazard approach to sentences and an undisguised disdain for the logic of paragraphs. Out of my way! he bellows to the commonsense rules of grammar. I’m trying to make a point here! But he had the secret magic of a writer who could hold you to your chair and toss you into the middle of his imagined world, no matter how ludicrous or even offensive, and Desmond had been drawn to him immediately. As soon as he’d finished that first book, he haunted used bookstores trying to acquire the complete body of work.
As Desmond was purchasing a foxed copy of The Hard Road to Hell in an especially dilapidated shop off Halstead, the ancient owner glanced at it casually and said, while writing up a sales slip, “I didn’t know we had any Lewis Westerly left in stock. We used to have shelves of him. I thought I’d cleared them all out.”
“He’s underrated,” Desmond said. “Have you read him?”
“I skimmed a couple. He used to come in here sometimes. Kind of a sloppy old queen, usually drunk off his ass and slobbering on about some sixteen-year-old boy he was obsessed with. I wonder what happened to him?”
Desmond set off to find out, thinking he’d stumbled upon a hobby. Four years later he had a nearly completed manuscript, an advance from a publisher, and a new career.
After much consideration, he called his biography of Westerly His Hard Road to Hell. In ways that Desmond hadn’t anticipated at the start, Westerly’s life, like his novels, encompassed Big Social Issues, although not ones the author had written about at such exhausting length. In this case, it was Homosexuality, Domestic Violence (each of Westerly’s four battered wives had divorced him, a fact which helped boost his macho image), Alcoholism, and Laxative Abuse. In the decades since his death, debunking the myth of the manly man had become as popular as sitting at his feet once had been, and the biography became a minor best-seller. In the wake of the publicity for Desmond’s book, three of Westerly’s novels had been reissued and had sold surprisingly well. Readers were no longer interested in hearing what he had to say about the world, but they examined the books closely, seeking authorial homoeroticism and unintended hints at pedophilia. Westerly’s personal life was so vastly at odds with his public persona, Desmond’s book was taken seriously by academics who saw some deconstructionist value in it. In a final coup, the book had been optioned by Paramount, although it looked to Desmond as if a film would never be made. Several screenwriters had attempted to come up with a script, but any movie star with enough clout to get the project made wanted to play an inspiring and heroic character, which meant doing away with every fact of Westerly’s life that made it interesting.
Shortly after His Hard Road to Hell came out, Desmond had been offered a job teaching writing courses at Fordham. Since then, he’d accepted temporary teaching jobs around town when he needed money or formal structure in his life.
In his more grandiose moments—the ones in which he wasn’t berating himself for a lack of talent, ambition, looks, and intelligence—Desmond saw teaching as a waste of his time and abilities. Paid headaches was how he’d started to think of it. Deerforth College promised to
be more of the same, although rumor had it the campus was exceptionally beautiful. If things worked out as he had planned, this would be his swan song to teaching. The biography of Pauline Anderton had been his work in progress for four years and was, the last time he’d bothered to calculate, nineteen months behind schedule. Last year, his editor had stopped phoning him to inquire about it, and recently, the ominous communication problems. And yet, Desmond couldn’t seem to pull together the material he had and draw it to a satisfying conclusion. He had enough facts, enough family history and social background, enough information about the recording industry in the 1950s and 1960s; he had two dozen chapters neatly typed, over a hundred interviews carefully recorded and transcribed, but Pauline Anderton, the long-dead woman herself, seemed to be swimming somewhere offshore, just out of his reach. I’m throwing you a life preserver, he wanted to tell her. Look what I did for Westerly. How many people get offered the chance for reincarnation? Her ghost wasn’t having any of it.
There’s a key to almost every life, a piece that holds the entire puzzle together and makes sense of all the disparate fragments: the ambitious mother, the clubfoot, the eye-opening journey to Spain. In the case of Westerly, it was the torment of his hidden sexuality. So far, Desmond had been unable to discover the piece that would bind together all the pages he’d written about Pauline Anderton, the essential truth or the essential lie that would bring her to life in his mind and, hopefully, on the page.
After her husband died, she moved to a suburb outside Boston to live with her sister and brother-in-law. Desmond hoped that by living in the area, turning over a few more stones, or simply soaking up the atmosphere, he’d find the elusive fragment he needed. That, he’d explained to Russell, was why he’d applied to six schools in the Boston area. The fact that they’d be temporarily separated was an unavoidable side effect.
2.
True Enough Page 6
