Love All: A Novel (12 page)

“They were all at the bar by nightfall,”
Tom began, and everyone turned to their neighbors and smiled indulgently with raised eyebrows: this was a first, even for Tom.

“They were all at the bar by nightfall,”
he repeated, then,
“the Art Peevers and the John Logans and the Ted Halloways, Ridgefield Corners’ gay young marrieds.”

“Uh-oh,” said Helen Logan good-naturedly, elbowing Jack.

Bob felt warm bodies press against his back as both men and women—husbands and wives—gravitated toward the book. Tom signaled for silence and a hush whispered through the group, then he picked up where he’d left off. The setting: Harry Kyle’s tavern, where apparently none of the characters had paid their chit.

Bob thought of his own account with Harry Kaye, owner of Sportsman’s Tavern, where Bob had run up quite a tab with Stan that summer.
John Logan
,
Harry Kyle
,
Ted Halloway
—the names in Tom’s book were slightly off but also completely familiar. It was disorienting, surreal, like listening to Anne read from a page of her nonsensical Mad Libs.

“Tom,” said Jack Logan. “What is this?” But it was still a joke just then and the sound of their collective laughter floated up into the powder-blue sky.

Tom flipped forward a few pages.
“In Stu’s bed,”
he read, pausing. “Doctor Stu Everett,” he clarified, staring at Stan Cavett, MD.

No one moved, least of all Elva Hanson, Stan’s mistress, who was standing near a tiki torch with her ginger hair aflame in light. Everyone at the cocktail party—save, perhaps, Joanie—already knew about Stan’s affair with Elva, but they certainly hadn’t imagined they’d see it printed in a book. Was it possible? In Stu’s bed, who? Not Stan’s wife, Betsy, but
“Olivia,”
Tom announced, and just as Bob’s eyes darted over to gauge Elva’s reaction, she melted away from the light.

“Tom,” said his wife sharply, slipping into the center of the circle that was now completely silent. She reached for the book but he held it away from her, tilting it to catch the light off the tiki torches arranged near the bar. “It’s too much,” said Audrey, but Tom showed no sign of stopping.

“Why, Doctor,”
he said, but before Tom could continue, Stan barreled into the circle and shoved him back into the bar, rattling the glasses and tipping a bottle of liquor into the thirsty grass.

Audrey finally got hold of her husband’s party prop and shook it, and if anybody expected a cocktail-napkin script to fall out from between the pages, Tom’s idea of a joke, they were sorely disappointed.

“We’re all in it,” said Tom, jerking away from Stan and straightening his blazer. “They’re selling copies on Main Street, if you don’t believe me. Read it for yourselves.”

All at once everyone pressed in toward Stan and Tom so that without moving Bob was again standing outside the group. He spotted Betsy Cavett halfway across the lawn, in a huddle with two other women, and he was momentarily grateful that she hadn’t sought comfort from him. Bob’s mind felt fuzzy, as though he’d consumed several more than his two gin and tonics. He wondered what time it was and if it was too early to go home.

Stan emerged victorious from the fray and waved the book over his head. The thirty or so guests that had also been clamoring for it sighed back into the audience.

“Elaine Dorian,” Stan said, reading the author’s name off the cover as though he were taking role call. “Elaine Dorian?” He looked around for someone with information, but there were only headshakes and confused murmurs.

“Tom?” said Stan.

Tom shrugged.

Stan opened the book and scanned a page, then turned to a new page and scanned again. He stopped and read,
“‘The doctors at the hospital,’ Clark Stevens had informed her, ‘are all a bunch of horses’ asses. When I want a doctor, I’ll get my doctors from New York. I just keep that hospital for the peasants.’”

“Are you kidding me?” asked Herb Lindsay, the longtime head of public relations for the hospital.

“Wait,” said Tom. “It gets worse.”

The ice at the bottom of someone’s glass settled, a reminder that their drinks were empty and in need of refilling, but that particular party had ended. The name Clark Stevens was so perilously close to Stephen Clark that, if the author would risk characterizing Mr. Clark—whose family had founded the hospital, the Hall of Fame, and the village library—as a feudalistic lord, there was no telling what else she might say.

Jack Logan grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the bar and tipped it over his glass. Never mind the ice. Never mind the soda. The sun had set, dragging an eraser-pink smudge along the horizon, a last great hope that they might all still forget this day.

As Stan and his friends continued to pore over the book, Bob began to retreat. He was suddenly relieved that Joanie had gone into the house. Whatever was in Tom’s book—and from the sound of it, it wasn’t good—Joanie didn’t need to know about it. His wife had been right: they should’ve stayed home. Now Bob would go find Joanie in the Cavetts’ kitchen or their sitting room and tell her to collect her things, that it was time to go, but just as he started off toward the back porch Joanie came into sharp focus not ten feet away, a borrowed stole draped over her shoulders, her lips turned down in a curious frown.

The next day, Bob spent both the morning and the afternoon catching up on chores. He raked and bagged the first fall leaves, cut and edged the lawn, replaced three broken bricks in the front walk, and was considering tarring the driveway when Joanie returned from running errands. In her hand was a shopping bag from a bookstore in town.

On their way home from the party, Bob had insisted that the book was a hoax, Tom mugging for an audience, but Joanie’s willingness to be placated had apparently evaporated: she was meeting this potential mortification head-on. It occurred to Bob that she suspected him of playing a role in the story. Even as the thought nibbled at Bob’s mind that such a thing was, in fact, possible, he was already pushing it away.

Bob could barely swallow his throat was so dry but he resisted the urge to follow Joanie. He assumed she’d eventually call him for lunch, then dinner, but when the sun set after seven o’clock, neither Anne nor Joanie had come for him, and Bob realized with a growing sense of dread that he and his wife had not actually spoken that day. He finally went inside, exhausted, hungry, with dirt smudged on his khakis and oil staining his hands. He left his Top-Siders in the mudroom, then padded sockless across the linoleum to the kitchen.

Bob found Joanie and Anne together at the breakfast table, Joanie with her new copy of
The Sex Cure
, Anne nursing a tall glass of milk, each of them nibbling a cookie.

“You already ate,” said Bob, noting the dirty dishes in the sink.

“There are leftovers in the fridge,” said Joanie. “I figured you would’ve come in if you were hungry.”

Bob turned the bar of soap over in his hands, watching it blacken. He scrubbed his fingers, his wrists, his forearms, then ran his arms under hot water and began the process again.

“Anne,” said Bob without looking up. “Go watch TV.”

Reluctantly, Anne went to the den, but there was no sound from the television set and Bob knew his daughter was probably eavesdropping.

Bob shut off the water and dried his hands, then looped the towel around his fist as though he were preparing for a fight.

We’re all in it
, Tom had said, and Bob thought of the stole he’d removed from Joanie’s shoulders last night before they’d left the party, red fox and scented with Betsy’s perfume.

“You bought it,” he said finally, nodding toward
The Sex Cure
.

“One of the last copies,” said Joanie.

“Really?” asked Bob, wishing he’d never met Stan and Betsy Cavett. He’d always been happy to go with secretaries in Oneonta or salesgirls he met after work on Water Street. If he worked late, stayed over at Charlie Stanwood’s house near the office, kept a change of clothes in his desk drawer, what could Joanie really know?

Since he was a little boy—long before he’d taken Maud Corley up to his father’s hayloft—Bob had loved women. His mother, who’d pinched her cheeks in wintertime to bring out a flush in her pale skin; his teacher, Miss Gray, whose skirt had been just that much shorter in front; his cousin Sophie, from Buffalo, who’d pushed him into the tall grass during a walk in the back meadow when Bob was seven: his first kiss. Now, at the age of fifty-five, Bob still marveled at their endless varieties: the ones with the full lips and button noses; the leggy brunettes with no bosoms to speak of; the black-haired beauties whose grandmothers had been part Mexican or full Iroquois; their eager or hesitant kisses; their salty or sharp tastes; the looks in their eyes when it was over, because Bob was always clear on this point: he had a wife.

But Bob and Joanie had never talked openly about his affairs; their marriage was a dance, a measure of closeness and distance, and when Bob sensed that he’d strayed too far, that Joanie was in turn pulling away, he would come bounding back with gifts of handpicked wildflowers or broken arrowheads from a field, visibly repentant if also unreformed. Now he’d let this get too close to home, and it seemed to have ignited a combative instinct in Joanie. She sat with her legs crossed knee over thigh, her forearms resting easily on the table, her right hand thumbing the pages of
The Sex Cure
as though she were testing the tension of a bowstring.

Bob’s nerves were starting to fray. He wanted to ask Joanie if he was in the book—just get it over with—but that would suppose there was reason to think he might be. And so he started to assume he wasn’t, but then, what if he was? Bob couldn’t ask for forgiveness without admitting guilt, and he couldn’t presume innocence when he and Betsy Cavett had been going together since July, and with a dawning sense of fear, Bob realized that Joanie had already moved into checkmate.

His attempt to minimize the book last night, his decision to flee the party, his willingness to do his chores today when normally he had to be asked three or four times—these had all been tacit admissions of guilt. Now, whether his name was on the page or not, it was too late.

“Joanie,” he said.

“Yes?”

He glanced at the book on the table and Joanie tapped it with her index finger.

“This?” she asked.

Who was this woman, his wife of twenty-two years?

“Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded frightened, and he realized that he was.

The author had used a pseudonym, Joanie told him, though Bob wasn’t asking about the author. It’d taken Joanie all of three seconds to deduce that “Elaine Dorian” was Isabel Moore, the forty-something writer from New York City who’d recently rented the house at the corner of Lake Street and Hoffman Lane. Bob was positive he’d never laid eyes on any Isabel Moore but Joanie said, “Oh, sure, you’d recognize her.” In fact, Mrs. Moore had been spotted that very afternoon at Danny’s Market, doing her shopping without a care in the world.

“It’s all anyone can talk about,” said Joanie. In hushed voices and shocked whispers, at the First National bank and at the A&P, written covertly inside checkbook registers and on the backs of grocery-store receipts: cast lists were quietly being drawn up and filled in with real-life names.

Bob felt light-headed; he needed to sit down, but Joanie hadn’t offered him a seat at the table, hadn’t offered him lunch or dinner, had instead polished off the last cookie on the plate. Was this what it would be like? Bob thought of twenty-seven-year-old Charlie Stanwood’s bachelor pad, the mismatched furniture, the cupboards with only three cups and two plates, the sharp smell of Pine-Sol that Charlie’s cleaning lady left behind. Bob didn’t want a divorce. He didn’t want Betsy Cavett. At that moment, he never wanted another woman in his life besides Joanie.

“It’s all spelled out,” said Joanie. “Like
Peyton Place
.”

Joanie had devoured the Gilmanton, New Hampshire, scandal six years before, while Bob had been appalled that anyone would write such a thing. Now it seemed Cooperstown was having its moment, and Bob realized with a jolt that if he were in the book, he would have to leave town. It would be too much to be talked about incessantly, to be looked at askance; even standing here in his own kitchen guessing at what Joanie was thinking was making him sick.

“Is it that obvious?” asked Bob. “The who’s who?”

“You certainly don’t need much of a road map,” said Joanie. Then, “You should read it.” She slid the book across the table and waited for Bob to pick it up. “Just make sure to give it back when you’re done.”

He considered refusing—if Joanie had found something in the book that she wanted him to see, she could go ahead and tell him—but Anne was lurking only a few feet away on the other side of the wall, listening to every word Bob and Joanie said. He couldn’t bear to have his infidelities cataloged aloud for his daughter. So he took the book and, without meeting Joanie’s eyes, told her he would read it.

*   *   *

That night Bob remained downstairs long after Joanie and Anne had gone to bed. At first Anne wouldn’t stop pestering him about the novel—was it any good? Did he know anybody in it?—but Bob told her to mind her own business and finally she went upstairs.

The Sex Cure
opened with the local rumor mill churning over the news that a young woman had been brought into the hospital, hemorrhaging from a botched abortion and naming Justin Riley, Ridgefield Corners’ favorite playboy surgeon, as the father. Stu Everett, OB resident extraordinaire, would have to operate to save the girl’s life. The questions remained: Would the young girl live, would the playboy surgeon be run out of town, and would Stu finally marry his longtime mistress, Olivia Riley, giving their biological son his legitimate name?

Bob quickly turned the pages, his heart rate vaulting over every capital R, B, or C, then steadying when these letters turned out not to be the beginning of his own name. Bob had spent the summer with Stan and Betsy Cavett, Preston and Elva Hanson. He’d let them sign for his drinks and tour him around in their cars. He hadn’t initially understood when Stan mentioned that Bob would hit it off with his wife, Betsy, but it was Betsy who’d initiated the affair, and it’d quickly become clear that Stan and Elva were going together on the side, as well.