True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

Gerald scooped out a heaping spoonful and then said quietly, “Yes, please.”

  Difficult age, Jane had said. Difficult mother-son relationship might be more to the point. Still, he could feel Gerald glaring at his back as he walked out to the porch and a loud clap of thunder rattled the windows.

  Nine

  True Enough

  1.

  “It’s cramped,” Desmond said, “but there’s something appealing about living out of an armoire and a boxy little refrigerator. I guess it makes me feel young again. Like a student.”

  Jane was still trying to catch her breath after attempting to impress Desmond by climbing the three winding flights of stairs without stopping—as if he would notice or, in the unlikely event he did, care. “Why do you suppose it is,” she said, holding her breath so she wouldn’t gasp, “that the idea of being young again is so appealing when being young the first time around was such hell?” She glanced in his direction; in this room, he looked even more awkwardly tall and thin than he had at dinner the other night. She could see, through the disguise of graying hair, wrinkling skin, and the vague credentials of “biographer,” the gawky adolescent fending off insults and vainly attempting to fit in. It was obvious from his slightly hunched posture that he still wasn’t comfortable in his skin, which probably explained why he spent his time writing about other people’s lives. “It was hell the first time around, wasn’t it?”

  “Hell might be a little strong, but close enough.”

  “You’re lucky. Everyone I know who had a loud, happy youth has spent the last twenty years battling disappointment and depression.” Not that she hadn’t spent some of the past twenty years battling disappointment and depression, too, but at least she could go to Dr. Berman and complain. If she went and told him her problem was a happy childhood, he’d think she was insane, and she’d find herself slapped with one of those thirty-year analysis sentences with no chance of parole.

  Desmond offered to make her a cup of tea and she surprised herself by accepting. “I can’t believe Deerforth set you up in a place like this,” she said. “Barking dog and all. And where’s the bathroom?”

  “Down the hall.”

  “Oh, God. People in bathrobes lined up for the shower?”

  “I don’t have to share it.”

  “Something to be thankful for.” Jane walked over to one of the round windows and rested her elbows on the sill. Warm, humid air was blowing in from the east, smelling of traffic and dust and the ocean. From here she could see the sailboats in the river basin. She’d never realized how many sailboats there were on the Charles, but since that afternoon with Dale, she saw them every time she looked in the direction of water, dancing across the surface of the river, unfettered, sails fluttering, like especially tall ice skaters. Best to file that observation and images of that whole long afternoon—river, boats, and abrasive kiss—into a locked chamber somewhere, perhaps of her heart. The room was probably stirring up memories. Awful as it was, there was something about it that filled her with intense longing—for what, she wasn’t sure. Maybe Desmond was right and it was the simple, obvious thing: youth. Which in her case, she quickly realized, was just a synonym for bachelorhood.

  “They could at least supply an air conditioner,” she said.

  “Who’d have guessed it would stay this hot this late in the season? It’s strange weather, isn’t it?”

  Jane nodded noncommittally. A day didn’t go by when she didn’t worry about the rapid rise in global temperatures, the scrambled features of the seasons, about the peculiar new intensity of the sun that scorched skin, even in winter, about the extreme storms brewing in the clear waters of distant oceans, but there was something so dreary about the people who spent their time obsessing over matters they couldn’t control, she’d rather not be counted among their ranks. Standing with her back to the window and the sultry summery breeze blowing against her hair, she started to feel a little faint. Perhaps it was from the heat, or the exhausting climb, or something in the atmosphere of the pale green room. There was paint peeling from the wall in one corner, a patch of water stains and plaster dust and a hint of yellow floral wallpaper from some earlier era. She sat on the soft mattress of the bed, crossed her legs, and tried to regain her composure. “I know what it is about this place,” she said. “It’s your archetypal Parisian atelier.”

  “I’ve thought that, too. It must be the view and the round windows. Although I can’t say I’ve ever been in a Parisian atelier.”

  “Neither have I,” Jane said. “I don’t suppose anyone has. Unless they have them at DisneyWorld.”

  Although she had been to Paris. Twice. Dale had taken her there for a week after she’d discovered he’d been having an affair, and she had decided to give him a second chance. It had been an attempt at a second honeymoon. April in Paris. Aside from racing through a couple of churches which didn’t interest either of them all that much and a museum that had secretly bored her—as a group, the Impressionists had lost their appeal for Jane when their paintings started showing up on neckties—virtually all they’d done was wander through the city in lazy circles with no idea what they were looking at, then go back to their hotel and fight, fuck, and eat, usually in that order. Then, three months before Gerald was born, she and Thomas went to Paris for ten days on his semester break. Thomas had designed a rigorous itinerary that hit every major cultural and artistic highlight of the past several centuries and had delivered a beautifully researched lecture to elucidate the significance of each block of granite they stepped on. Oddly enough, she ended up feeling as if she’d seen more of the city the first time around. What Desmond’s room really brought to mind wasn’t being young or single, but rather the hotel room she and Dale had stayed in on that trip. The hotel was called the Claude something, and theirs had been a dark, incommodious room, and she hadn’t thought about it in years, and she wished the memory of it hadn’t stabbed at her so violently and unexpectedly. “It has Bohemian charm,” she said quietly. “But at this stage of my life, I doubt I could live like this.”

  “No,” Desmond said. He had his back to her and was preparing the tea with a plastic electric kettle, the kind of cracked and stained appliance you’d expect in this kind of room. “It definitely wouldn’t do for a family of three.”

  She could feel a headache coming on. She hadn’t been thinking about a family of three at all; she’d been thinking about herself. Maybe Desmond saw her as part of an undifferentiated mass, Janethomasgerald. But sitting on the bed and bouncing her legs, she didn’t know whether to feel insulted over this loss of individuality or concerned that she herself hadn’t included her husband and child in her configuration of “this stage of my life.”

  Desmond brought her a steaming cup and she cradled it in her hands, wondering what she was supposed to do with the tea bag and why she’d accepted his offer when she’d never much cared for the subtle, watery pleasures of tea. In an hour and a half, they were meeting with David at the station to pitch their idea and try to wring some money out of him. She’d read the first several chapters of the manuscript of the Pauline Anderton biography, and after discussing it with Desmond a few days earlier, had decided that this was the best place to start. Anderton would make a perfect subject for a twenty-minute pilot they could use to sell the rest of the series. There was TV footage of Anderton, a local connection, and enough falls from grace (or whatever was the appropriate term for Anderton’s career highs) to make it salable.

  Desmond hunched over the library table he had set up as a desk and fidgeted with a tape player. It was impossible to be in a room this size, sitting on a stranger’s bed, breathing in the smell of his soap and shaving cream, without feeling a little awkward; the whole setup was just one notch too intimate, even though there was no sexual tension between them. Not that Desmond was unattractive. He had on a pair of slim green pants that were either a thrift shop find or an expensive designer knockoff of the same style, a lime green polyester shirt, and an inch-wide tie. He was
a little old for this nerd rock star look, but he pulled it off convincingly enough so that even if it wasn’t flattering, it wasn’t ridiculous. It was quite obvious he was gay—something in his polite, slightly ironic manner gave him away; not effeminate exactly, but self-conscious enough to put it outside the bounds of traditional masculinity—but she wished he’d do her the favor of slipping the information into the conversation so she wouldn’t have to tiptoe around the subject.

  “Should I assume you’re single?” she tried.

  “Well.” He turned from the tape player with a look of distress. “This usually works fine, but I’m having a little trouble with it right now. The buttons are jamming. I really want you to hear her voice before the meeting. I shouldn’t have opted for the cheapest model.”

  Cheap diversionary tactic, too, she thought. Maybe he was still in the closet, a depressing, boring possibility. She hardly knew any gay people who were still in the closet. Then again, if they were, how would she know? She’d often wondered if Rosemary didn’t have some lesbian tendencies—it might go a long way toward explaining why she’d married Charlie—but she hoped not; if she found out ten years hence that she’d been a dyke after all and had never once made a pass at her, Jane would be crushed. Desmond appeared to be nervous, too, with a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. Not the best way to make a good first impression on David, who valued cool, capable characters like Chloe and mistrusted apprehensive types like himself.

  “So you are single?” she tried again.

  “No,” he said. “Not really. I have a lover.”

  Lover was infuriatingly vague, although no heterosexual would use it in this context. “Oh?” Jane said. “Is it a long-term relationship?”

  “We’ve been together for five years.” Then he looked up from his busywork at the useless machine and said, “He and I.”

  Thank God that was out in the open. She put her teacup on the floor, took off her suit jacket and hung it from the bedpost. She sprawled out on the mattress with her head propped up in her hand and kicked off her shoes. “Five years is infancy,” she said. “Although your average gay man acts as if it were three quarters of a lifetime. I have a theory gay relationships age in dog years. What do you think?”

  “I can’t say I know much about ‘your average gay man.’”

  Open mouth, insert foot. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “But understand, Desmond, I don’t have a homophobic cell in my body, so I just blurt out whatever comes to mind.”

  “It’s fine, really.”

  Clearly it wasn’t. She’d said something insulting and then promptly made an even bigger fool of herself, all while spread out like Cleopatra on his bed. She wasn’t sure why, but she wanted him to like her and approve of her. It went beyond the potential of a working relationship. She found he was easy to talk to, which was more than she could say of most people these days, Helen aside. It didn’t hurt that they knew no one in common with the exception of Thomas, and she couldn’t imagine that Desmond would find himself in a heart-to-heart with him. “I’ll give you an example of how blasé I am on the topic of homosexuality,” she said. “I have a strong suspicion Gerald is going to be gay when he grows up. Or is gay now, if that’s how it works.” It was the first time she’d given voice to this particular concern, and she was shocked to hear herself say it. It was such a monumental confession, to herself as much as Desmond, and such a profound betrayal of her son, she scanned the little room, half expecting to find that everything looked different. But the center was holding and all was quiet. Desmond was merely nodding in a calm, disinterested way, as if her words didn’t surprise him at all. Maybe he’d drawn the same conclusion when he met Gerald at the house. She picked up her teacup, sipped from it, and found the warm, gingery water comforting. Now that this worry about Gerald had been released from her archive of shameful thoughts and was dispersing in the humid air of the room, it didn’t seem like such a terribly big deal. She went on, encouraged. “When I decided to put him into therapy, it wasn’t with any thoughts of changing him. I just want to make sure he’s happy with himself, however he turns out.”

  Desmond had his head under the table and was checking the cord for the tape machine. Generally speaking, she found people who had trouble managing the most simple mechanical tasks—turning on a tape player, operating a dishwasher, using an electric can opener—baffling. Why not just come right out and ask to be taken care of? In Desmond’s case, it appeared to be genuine ignorance, which was much more appealing. He crawled out from under the table and said, “That’s good. But in your heart, I suspect you’d prefer that your son . . .” He stopped there.

  This sounded to her more like an admission of dissatisfaction with himself than anything else, confirmation of her suspicions that at least some of the balloons and chanting associated with Gay Pride were a matter of trying too hard. “I love him for who he is. And of course Thomas adores him. And I’ll tell you something else, Desmond; if Gerald does end up going to a shrink twenty years from now, I’d like the shrink to know that whatever else he says about his parents, he had a mother enlightened enough to send him to a psychologist at age six.”

  “Get the shrink on your side, you mean.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but now that you mention it, why not?” One of the most troubling aspects of dropping Gerald off at Dr. Garitty week after week was not knowing what he was saying about her, what he truly felt about her. Garitty refused to divulge much of interest about her conversations with Gerald, which surely couldn’t be ethical practice when the patient was a six-year-old.

  “It sounds like a workable but complicated plan.”

  “I’m a complicated woman. Which doesn’t prevent me from being a complete idiot some of the time. Half the time.”

  Desmond said, “I doubt you’re ever an idiot.”

  “No, not a complete one, anyway.”

  He gave her an exceptionally magnanimous smile, one that put her at ease about her series of confessions and blunders. Although his real motivation might have been finding an excuse to display teeth that appeared to have been professionally whitened. She’d been pondering having hers whitened for a couple of months now, but worried it might be a first step down a very treacherous path that ended ten years later with a $25,000 facelift. She’d started to hear women not much older than her, perfectly reasonable, intelligent women, too, talking about what they intended to have “done,” as if they were discussing altering a jacket. Jane considered plastic surgery an overpriced form of self-mutilation; a pointless one, too, since everyone agreed that the people who’d had the best things “done” were the ones who looked exactly as they had before surgery. In July, she’d had lunch with Sonia Clark, a former co-worker at the station. Sonia was fifty-three and married to a successful financial type, and after Jane had complimented her once too often on how rested she looked, she revealed that her recent “vacation” had been three hours on an operating table, followed by six weeks of at-home recovery. Jane had been appalled by Sonia’s giddiness over it and so repulsed by the idea that she’d subjected herself to such a bloody renovation, she’d had trouble finishing her lunch. Although to be fair, she had written down the surgeon’s name on a list somewhere.

  “Are you in therapy?” she asked.

  “Not at the moment.” A cloud of some kind passed over his face. “I went once when I was practicing law in Chicago. She helped me make some changes in my life, but once we started going deeper, I left. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to go back at some point.”

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t go when you’re depressed or in a crisis. You’re vulnerable and completely at the shrink’s mercy. The only reason I started going to my old doctor again last summer was because I wanted to rub his face in how healthy I’ve been since I left treatment.” Even she didn’t believe that, but she liked the sound of it. “What’s your lover’s name?”

  “Russell.” Desmond pushed a button on the machine and something lou
d and unpleasant, a shout that was equivocally musical, came blasting out of the tiny speakers. “Russell Abrams.” Desmond lowered the volume and the whole thing promptly went dead. The dog on the other side of the wall started to yap. Desmond took the tape from the machine and studied it for a moment. “This looks fine, so it must be the machine.”

  “We can listen to it in the car on the way to my office. If you don’t mind me saying so, I’d guess from the look on your face you don’t like discussing Russell.”

  He seemed to cringe slightly, probably an indication that he either missed him desperately or was having an affair. “To be honest, I’m finding it a little harder to be separated than I expected. I hope he is, too.”

  Despite what she’d said—and was fairly certain was true—about her lack of biases against homosexuals, there was some essential way in which she didn’t think of gay relationships as the equal of heterosexual ones. It wasn’t the lack of children or even the rampant sexual infidelity. It had more to do with the fact that most male couples she met seemed too fundamentally compatible to be bothered with the kind of jockeying for position that she saw as an integral part of love. It was possible Desmond was having trouble being apart from his lover, but if they were a heterosexual couple, the phone would have rung by now and the refrigerator would be plastered with photos and a spouse would be climbing the stairs at this very minute, hoping to catch someone red-handed.

  “I’ll be seeing him over Columbus Day. When you’re visiting your ex-husband, assuming you decided to go.”

  “I decided not to go,” she said, “but Dale’s wife has been talking to Thomas. He seems to think it would be good for Gerald.”

  Desmond picked up a black canvas briefcase and started tossing tapes and papers into it. He went to the small walnut armoire near the bed and opened the door. The top shelf of the thing was lined with little bottles of vitamins and other health-foody-looking items. He studied them for a minute, then turned to her. “Do you think I should take something to increase mental clarity, reduce ambivalence, relax me, or energize me?”