At the mention of the last illness, Roger’s eyes lit up. How did Desmond know, he mumbled, that he and his brother both had ADD?
Later in the afternoon, Thomas stuck his head into Desmond’s office. He was about to call Jane. Did Desmond have any messages for her?
“Tell her to hurry up with those Florida tickets,” Desmond said. “I’m dying for a suntan.”
2.
It was a gray afternoon with a low, heavy sky and down on the street, twenty stories below, people were bundled up in sweaters and long coats. From the floor-to-ceiling window where Jane stood, the Public Garden was a distant blur of red and brown. It was windy and the trees were slowly being stripped of their pretty, dying leaves. At long last, a welcome spell of autumnal weather, even if it hadn’t arrived until November. She couldn’t wait for winter, assuming it came this year. She’d like a long spell of Arctic air to settle in and freeze the ground, the ponds, the river, and—what a comforting thought—her own heart. Dale was in the bathroom, shaving and talking on his cell phone. He was a man who needed to be in constant touch with his minions; electricians and plumbers and painters and builders. This dance of codependence was what made the world go round. They had the skills, he had the money. Most important of all, he had the forceful, ruthless male energy needed to hold it all together. When they were married, she’d often watched him at work and thought to herself that she could do what he did and do it with more grace and decency. But listening to him these past few weeks—“Then tell him to go fuck himself,” he was saying over the sound of running water. “We’ll get Tom to do it for half the price.”—she realized how foolish she’d been. There was something about his brash bullheadedness that inspired people; it had inspired her to start this documentary project. And now it was his money that was funding it.
He came out of the bathroom, his dark, damp skin set off by the thick towel he had wrapped around his waist. The Boylston Hotel specialized in thick towels and expensive soaps and cotton sheets, meaningless little luxuries that seemed to mean so much. Dale knew one of the hotel’s developers and so had access to one of the apartments—executive suites, in the silly, ego-stroking language of this world—on the upper floors. She’d rather not know how often he’d used this place and with whom, so she never pressed for details.
“New problems?” she asked.
“Business as usual. But I should get over to the site right away, stave off a meltdown.” He ran the back of his hand down her face and gently across the tops of her breasts. She’d put on her skirt, but was wearing only a bra, a new one, above it. She was completely unselfconscious around him, as if they were an old married couple, and still, she felt the warmth and texture of his hand every time he touched her, as if they were young lovers. The best illusions of both worlds: intimacy and ardor. In the waning days of their marriage, she’d been suspicious of everything he did and said, wary of his motives every time he kissed her. Now that she was in no position to judge or question him, she accepted everything gratefully: their time together in these rooms, his fingers against her skin, his advice, his money. Dale was, by nature, a lover not a husband, the way some men are built for basketball, others for racing horses. Maybe she wasn’t built to be a wife, an unsettling thought. She watched him cross the room as he took off his towel and dried his face with it.
“If you’re going to leave with me,” he said, pulling on his pants, “you’d better get ready. I’m sorry to rush off, but I have to be across town in twenty minutes.”
“I ordered a sandwich from room service while you were in the shower.” She’d ordered one for him, too, but there was no point in mentioning it now. She picked her blouse up from the chair by the window and slipped it on. “I think I’ll wait for it. I can’t remember if I had lunch or not and I’m starving.”
“I’ll bet you are, Janey. You’ve earned it.” He buttoned himself into a white shirt, knotted his tie, and shrugged himself into his jacket and overcoat. Every trace of the hour and a half they’d spent together was erased from his body and face. He kissed her on her raw, bruised lips, searched through his pockets for his watch, then headed to the door.
“How does the rest of your week look?” she asked, buttoning up her blouse.
“I’m not sure. I’ll call you at the office when I have a better idea.”
That was typically noncommittal. “You have my cell phone number, don’t you?” she asked. “I turn it off when I get home, but otherwise—”
“I’ll get it from you next time we talk.” He gave her a crisp, ironic salute and left.
The silent, ivory anonymity of the room overwhelmed her as soon as he shut the door behind him. Everything here was so pleasant, the bland furniture, the deep carpet, the thick drapes that sealed off the room from the outside world so effectively, but it all lost its charm once he’d departed. Soon, a chambermaid would come in and strip the bed and tidy up the bathroom and make it seem as if nothing had ever happened here. That was supposed to be the appeal of hotel rooms when you were having an affair, so she didn’t understand why it didn’t appeal to her at all.
She was putting on her shoes when room service buzzed, and she hobbled over to open the door, one shoe on, one off. A slender man with cropped graying hair was holding a tray at his shoulder. “Room service?” he asked. He was smiling and handsome, but Jane couldn’t help thinking he was too old and intelligent to be doing this. What personal or professional disappointment had led him to this kind of employment? Obviously, it was going to be one of those awful afternoons when everything was coated with poignancy.
“Just put it on the table by the window,” she said.
He took the covers off the plates and started to arrange two settings on the round maple table; towering roast beef sandwiches, a half bottle of red wine, a bud vase with a yellow rose, the entire romantic late afternoon lunch she’d been imagining when she’d called in the order.
“Don’t bother with all that,” she said, digging through her bag. “Just leave it.”
“Shall I open the wine?” He had a deep, cultured voice. An actor, poor man, which would explain everything.
“No, it’s fine, really. I’ll do it myself.”
He fussed a bit more, then presented her with the check and a pen. “If you’ll sign here . . .”
“I’ll pay for it,” she said. She didn’t know what the arrangement was with the room, but the last thing she wanted was to start racking up charges against Dale’s account. She handed him a stack of bills and told him to keep the change. Kindness, she hoped, was made up of small generous gestures like this that added up bit by bit, no matter what you did to those nearest to you. Although at this moment she felt more like a spoiled, extravagant Lady Bountiful. As she let him out, a woman passed in the hallway holding the hand of a child, an unsteady little boy of about three, overdressed in a gray flannel suit with short pants and a cap.
“Hello, young man,” the waiter said. He knelt down and shook the boy’s hand.
“Can you say hello?” the mother cooed, grinning proudly.
“Hello, mister,” the boy said.
Something about the boy, so tidy and polite, captivated Jane. “He’s adorable,” she said. The mother looked up at her and a shadow of confusion crossed her face.
Jane closed the door and went to the mirror. Her blouse was buttoned incorrectly and her hair was puffy on one side, as if she’d just crawled out of bed. She was still wearing only one shoe. She fixed herself up, brushed down her hair, put on the other shoe. Awful woman with her perfect string of “pearls” against her cream-colored sweater and her perfect little child. She hated women who paraded their children around and had them perform for strangers as if they were trained monkeys. Gerald could never accuse her of having done that. She took a few more swipes at her hair and then felt a hollow thump in her chest. Gerald. She looked at her watch. Ten to four. She ran into the bedroom, found her briefcase on the bureau and fumbled with the clasps. Her appointment book was on top. She leafed through it, loo
king for today’s page; a storm of notes fluttered to the floor. She squinted, afraid to open her eyes and face it head-on. But there it was, just as she’d feared, a note that Thomas had written for her over a week ago stating that he had a department meeting today and therefore wouldn’t be able to pick Gerald up at his piano lesson in Cambridge as he usually did. The lesson ended at four. She’d need half an hour—at least—to get out of this room, down to the garage, across the bridge, and all the way to the other side of Harvard Square. She yanked her sweater over her head, scurried around the room looking for anything she might have dropped. Calling the school now would only take up more time. She’d call from the car. She found her jacket and her bag, cursing herself for her forgetfulness.
She took one last swing through the rooms; for the past three weeks she’d lived in fear of leaving something important behind in this bland landscape where any personal item would be as damning as a drop of blood on a white bedsheet. Nothing here but all that perfectly good food going to waste. Sixty dollars down the drain, but worse still was the sight of it, sitting there peacefully waiting for someone to come along and eat it. Poignant. She grabbed the bottle of wine, stuck it in her bag, and ran out.
There was a young man in the elevator, dressed in a dark overcoat, staring straight ahead, carefully avoiding eye contact. If Dale were here, he’d make some joke with the man and they’d have a good laugh and wind up shaking on a deal to build the World Trade Towers North before landing in the lobby. There was something unnerving about the man’s studious avoidance of her, as if he knew that half an hour ago her head had been flung over the side of a king-sized mattress while her ex-husband stroked her throat and fucked her, and her poor, difficult son was hammering out scales, confident that his mother would be there to pick him up when it was over. But no, he couldn’t know anything. To him, she was just another forty-year-old nonentity who was starting to sweat. The elevator stopped two floors down, letting in a couple in their sixties, nicely dressed, she smelling of some faint and expensive perfume. They were wearing big smiles, professionally polite, but she was grateful. The elevator made it down only one more floor before stopping again. As three men in suits were getting in, her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her bag and tried to hold it to her ear discreetly. Undoubtedly everyone else in the elevator had cell phones, but they all looked at her as if she’d just farted.
It was Thomas, asking her if she wanted him to pick anything up on the way home. “I thought you had a department meeting,” she said.
“I do, but I should be home by six. By the way, I have some good news for you, Jody. It looks as if Celeste is going to be released early next week. Helen is going home!”
The elevator bell rang. They stopped at the ninth floor, let off the three men, let on a young man in a jogging outfit. Helen was leaving. Jane felt something catch at the back of her throat. “That’ll make things easier,” she said, although she could barely get the words out.
“What’s that gong? You remembered about the change in schedule, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. I’m on my way to pick him up now. His lesson ends at four.”
The woman with the expensive perfume checked her watch and looked at her again.
“Oh, good. Are you near Harvard Square?”
“I’m in Central Square. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
When she clicked off and looked up, the friendly couple were glaring at her with open disdain.
Yes, she thought, as she ran across the cold concrete of the parking garage, you let yourself get farther and farther off the trail until you’re completely lost in the dark forest and your life is a ruin of confusion and you find yourself running through an underground garage with your briefcase dangling off your shoulder and your helpless son stranded.
As she was bending to unlock the car door, her bag slid off her shoulder, the wine bottle fell out and cracked against the concrete floor. She felt warm wine on her ankle. If she’d left the bottle in the room, the sad waiter could have enjoyed it. No time now for regret. She climbed into the car and backed out of her space.
She fished through the change cup on her dash, but couldn’t find the garage ticket. The scrawny man in the booth with the patch of pink skin along his neck had seen it all before and wasn’t impressed. “Thirty dollars,” he droned.
“Thirty dollars? I was here for less than two hours!”
He pointed to a sign beneath his window that said something about lost tickets and full prices, some infuriating bit of rules and regulations.
“I asked you when I arrived,” she said, “if there were any spaces on this floor. And you told me you’d just come on duty so you didn’t know.”
There, that ought to satisfy him, prove to him that she’d come in when she said she had. He pointed to the sign again, and she saw that she could present sworn affidavits, photos, and DNA samples and it wouldn’t matter at all. He had his job to do and he was doing it and had been doing it while she languished away an afternoon in a hotel room. Choose Your Battles, she told herself and handed over a fifty dollar bill. “Keep the change,” she told him. More kindness, unless it was self-flagellation.
She drove through the tangle of crowded Back Bay streets until she was out on Massachusetts Avenue. Three more stoplights and she’d be on the bridge to Cambridge. She checked her watch again. Two past four. Not nearly as bad as she’d feared. Gerald would be coming down the winding staircase of the music school clutching his books. She’d call the school in one minute. She was scarcely late at all.
Halfway across the long, flat bridge over the river, traffic came to a complete stop.
She looked to either side of her, but all she saw was the cold expanse of gray water. No sailboats today, just the low sky and a froth of whitecaps whipping across the river. She pulled out the cell phone and called the school. The receptionist with the affected accent had no idea what she was talking about and grudgingly transferred her to the security guard who sat at a desk in the lobby. She’d picked this school, despite its inconvenience, because it had a solid reputation and was housed in a magnificent red-stone mansion on a lovely side street near Harvard Square. What she hadn’t taken into account was that the teachers, used to prodigies, apparently, had little patience for Gerald, who tended to play in a thundering style and blame his weaknesses on his teachers. He’d gone through two in the past eight months.
“He’s probably standing in the lobby waiting for me,” Jane explained. “If you could just put him on.”
“There are about a dozen kids here,” he said. “What’s he look like?”
“He’s six,” Jane said. “Tall for his age. He has light hair and he’s wearing a light blue jacket with a hood. Although I doubt he’s wearing the hood.”
“Let me look.” But no, no one by that description was in the lobby.
“He’s a bit plump,” Jane said, realizing that the delicate euphemism for his size made him sound like a turkey.
“Sorry. If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re running late. What’s his name again?”
After she’d hung up, Jane reminded herself of Gerald’s awkward maturity and, at times, unsettling fearlessness. Most likely, he’d sit down in the most comfortable chair in the school and bury his head in a magazine, silently berating her for being late. One thing about a child with Gerald’s personality, you never had to worry about him talking to strangers. So why was she so panicked? Guilt, that was the only explanation. She had the heater on in the car, and the whole interior was starting to smell like fermented grapes. She checked her watch again. Eight past four. Not too bad, but there was no sign of the traffic breaking up. Maybe there was an accident ahead, or, more likely, some rich, spoiled students were stopping traffic to protest some imagined assault on their privileges. She leaned on her horn, a useless exercise, and one that only made her feel more nervous.
And then, thinking about how much she’d always hated Cambridge—or the smug superiority of Harvard anyway—she rea
lized she had one more option. Brian’s office was two long blocks from the music school.
“He’s in a meeting,” she was told, which was what every receptionist and secretary in the world is paid to tell everyone.
“This is his sister,” Jane said. “Please ring him and tell him I need to talk to him immediately.”
“I’m sorry, but as I just—”
“You don’t understand,” Jane said quietly. “It’s an emergency. It’s an emergency!”
While she waited for him to come on the line, she bent down and tried to rub the wine off her stocking with a rumpled piece of tissue paper while vowing not to lose her cool like that again.
“I have clients coming by in the next hour,” Brian said. “I have three projects in trouble. I can’t drop everything to help you out with day care, Jane.”
She could hardly wait for his baby to be born, assuming it ever was. All the real work would be handed over to Joyce, who would probably accept it gratefully, but a certain amount of mess would almost certainly splatter onto Brian’s brow. “We’re talking about your nephew,” she said. “I’ve never asked you for anything and this would take all of half an hour out of your day, probably more like twenty minutes.” She spit on the tissue and rubbed hard.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. Please, Brian, this is important.”
“I’m sorry, Jane, but I don’t have a free minute this afternoon. Don’t you have a baby-sitter or your mother-in-law or someone?”
She didn’t believe him. It was more of his selfishness, one more round in the pitched battle they’d been engaged in since they were children. She was probably as bad as he, except that she, in her very worst moments, wouldn’t take it out on a child. “If I had someone else, I wouldn’t be asking you.”
“The answer is no.”
Fearing he was about to hang up on her, she said, “You don’t have time for Gerald, but apparently you have time to squire Desmond Sullivan around town.”
True Enough Page 27
