Perfect on Paper (16 page)

“Why, what in the world is the matter, honey chile? You sound plumb scared to death!”

Land sakes,
I thought.
My mother just addressed me as honey chile.

“I’m fine,” I responded. “Just, uh… wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone at this time of day.”

“Well, I can’t imagine why not! I’m calling about the guest list for your father’s birthday, of course.”

Of course. It was less than four months away. The caterers must be up in arms. “I tried to get hold of Tom-Tom a few weeks ago,” I told her. “He was out of town—how about I try again tonight?”

“That’s my girl!”

“How’s Dad doing, anyway?”

“Just fine and dandy! Your uncle Jim and aunt Connie drove down from Saint Augustine this morning.” My mother was referring to his old business partner, Jim Masters, and his glamorous wife, a former model whom I’d never caught in the act of ingesting solid food—unless ice cubes could be construed as food. Uncle Jimmy had been the first person to ever give me a twenty-dollar bill. I was in nursery school at the time. “How long are they staying?”

“Why, I don’t rightly know. The Commodore’s fixing to take us all down to
Twofers
in a little while.”

Ah, the boat. Dad always referred to it as his very expensive bar—which was certainly accurate. It had barely left its mooring slip since he’d purchased it seven years ago.

“Are you actually going out on the ocean?”

“Good heavens, no! Connie’s just had her hair done! But it’s a lovely day for margaritas on the deck.”

“I’m sure it is.” Unless a hurricane watch was in effect, it was invariably a lovely day for margaritas on the deck.

“Besides, Jimmy showed up with a box of Cuban cigars, and I just had to put my foot down,” she continued. “You can’t imagine how long the smell of smoke lingers in the living room curtains.”

Not for the first time, I marveled at my father’s ability to party. He probably hadn’t missed a cocktail hour or turned down a good cigar in eighty years, and he didn’t look a day over—well, ninety, but still.

“Sounds like fun,” I said, although just the thought of overindulging in tequila under a blazing Florida sun was enough to make my temples throb. “Give everyone my best—I’ll get back to you as soon as I get hold of Tom-Tom.”

“Splendid. Now, you’re
sure
everything’s okay, young lady?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Woof! Woof!” the dog portraits seemed to admonish me after I hung up. “That’s what you get for not screening your calls.”

I left my half brother a message, then prepared to go spelunking under my bed for the necklace. But last Sunday’s
Times Magazine
on the nightstand, still open to the completed crossword, caught my eye. I hadn’t yet tackled the diagramless puzzle on the preceding page. What would be the harm in postponing my next Hannah for just a tiny bit longer?

I flopped on the bed and grabbed a pencil. Pens were fine for the regular crossword, but too much could go wrong in a diagramless, even if they did tell you which square to start in. Surveying the empty grid, I recalled a comment Hank had made as he watched me cruise through yesterday’s puzzle. “Heck,” he’d said. “If I had to do one of them things, it’d look exactly the same an hour later—all blank squares.”

Blank squares. Hmm.

What if one were to construct a crossword where the word “blank” was represented by…

Fill in the [blank]! Point [blank] range! [Blank] verse!

Oh my god. Beach [blank]et Bingo! Pigs in a [blank]et! [Blank]ety-[blank]!

The possibilities were myriad. I grabbed a sheet of paper and began to compile a list—or rather, a clue set, as Billy had called it.

Within the hour, I had more than a dozen blank-themed phrases. Surely that was enough to get the ball rolling. I typed the list into an email, added a short note, addressed it to Gridmeister, and just before I hit Send, I did something highly uncharacteristic. I thought about the consequences of my actions.

On the one hand, having a crossword puzzle appear in the
Times
would be an unparalleled thrill. On the other, reestablishing contact with Billy Moody could turn out to be a major lapse in judgment. Adorable boys who engaged in flirtatious banter with women old enough to be their aunts could inflict serious damage on one’s primary relationship.

But it was
such
a good idea for a puzzle.…

“What the blank,” I said, sending my clue set into cyberspace with a decisive click.

I finally got around to retrieving the necklace, positioned the oval canvas on my easel, and applied a coat of gesso to its surface. The process took a bit longer than usual, since every three seconds or so I retreated to the bedroom to check the computer for email activity. No response from Billy Moody was forthcoming, but Amazon was brimming with gift suggestions for everyone on my Christmas list.

I printed out a full-frontal headshot of Dinner for reference and immediately realized I had a problem. Pigs’ necks were not designed to wear certain items of jewelry. Such as necklaces. The sapphire pendant that would land in the vicinity of human cleavage would dig into Dinner’s Adam’s apple—if he had one, and if the necklace managed to make it all the way around his neck in the first place, which was unlikely.

Ah. But if I concealed the ends of it behind his ears, the necklace would drape beguilingly, with the pendant falling at midforehead—if that was the correct anatomical term for it.…

The phone rang. This time I managed to hold on to the sapphires.

“Hello?”

“Oh dear,” Tom-Tom said. “Whoever you were hoping to hear from, it obviously wasn’t me.”

“Don’t be silly! How are you? How was London?”

“I’ll tell you all about it over dinner. Le Veau d’Or? Seven thirty?”

I called Hank to let him know I wouldn’t be around that evening. We hadn’t made definite plans, but we were at that point in the relationship where one would call the other late in the day, and we’d wind up getting together more often than not.

It sounded as if a 747 were idling inside the brownstone when he answered the phone. “It’s Dana!” I hollered.

After a moment the noise began to recede. I heard the front door slam shut; he must have gone out to the stoop. “Sorry about the racket,” he said. “I got the floor guy here sanding down the front parlor.”

The floor guy?
I thought, eyeing the pine planks beneath my feet. I’d gone over to the hardware store on Avenue B, rented a sander, and refinished them myself one weekend shortly after moving in. Granted, it was probably the single most grueling experience of my young adulthood, but I lacked a man’s upper-body strength. Besides, I didn’t drive around town in a truck with the words
BROWNSTONE RENOVATION SPECIALISTS
painted on the side of it.

“He’s pretty near done for the day,” Hank said. “How ’bout you come on by in an hour or so?”

“Tonight’s not good.” I explained about Tom-Tom, and Hank made me promise to come over the following evening, and then he reminisced about the blow job I’d given him the night before, reeling off a string of highly complimentary adjectives, and after a few minutes I came to the conclusion that a person would have to be crazy to sand his own floors if he could afford to pay somebody else to do the job for him.

I spotted my half brother’s mane of snow-white hair as soon as I walked into Le Veau d’Or. He was leaning against the bar, engaged in a heated argument with an inebriated elderly couple.
“Finally,”
he said when I reached his side. “Can you please tell these charming but misinformed bibliophiles that it was Harold Robbins, and not Sidney Sheldon, who wrote
The Love Machine
?”

“I always thought it was Jacqueline Susann.”

“Of
course
!” all three of them shrieked in unison, drawing stares from the conservative clientele. Tom-Tom raised his gin and tonic in a toast.

“To Jackie!”

“To Jackie!” we chorused. My brother was nothing if not festive. In that regard, he reminded me of our father, but in all other matters there was no resemblance. Dad, for example, would never dress up as the opera diva Beverly Sills on Halloween and lip-synch arias all night with the help of an MP3 player hidden in the bodice of his gown. And Tom-Tom, for his part, would never consider going duck hunting with Lee Iacocca.

He offered me his arm and led me to his regular banquette in the back of the restaurant. A waiter scurried over with his usual bottle of Brouilly, and the two of us sat there, smiling and sizing each other up, until the wine was poured and we were alone.

“You’ve lost weight.” He hadn’t.

“Liar. Love the stones.” He reached across the table and fingered the faux sapphires. Vivian had already closed up shop by the time I left the apartment; she’d never know I’d taken them out for a night on the town.

I laid my hand over his. “I have to ask you something before we move on to more… pleasant topics.”

He groaned. “Why do I know this is going to involve certain residents of the Sunshine State?”

“Sorry. Mom’s planning a hundredth birthday party for Dad. And she thinks it would be nice to have all his children in attendance.”

He sighed and retrieved a datebook from his Hermès man-purse.
“April first… Damn. I’m free. Oh, what the hell—tell Lucinda I’m looking forward to it.”

“She’ll be delighted.”

“That makes one of us. So, what’s the happy couple up to these days?”

“The usual. They were about to have margaritas on
Twofers
when I spoke to Mom.”

Tom-Tom shook his head slowly from side to side, but I noticed he was suppressing a smile. “Honestly. What a thing to do to Aunt Lizzie.”

Dad’s older sister. She was long gone by the time I arrived on the scene. “What about her?”

“She had a stroke. Never did quite get her speech back—she sounded like somebody with bad dentures. A lot of sibilant esses.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Not really. Once she learned how to drink left-handed, she was pretty much back in action. Whenever she came to visit, we’d set her up on the couch with a Chivas and soda, and whenever her glass got low, she’d shake her cubes at Dad and say, ‘Twoferssss, Tommy!’ ”

“That’s terrible!”

“I know. You always felt like a real shit when you laughed.” He shrugged. “We’re not the Cleavers, sweetie.”

“I always wondered how that boat got its name.”

“Mystery solved.” He took a deep pull from his wineglass, then looked me in the eyes. “So… who is he?”

“Who’s who?”

“The person you were hoping to hear from instead of your devoted brother this afternoon.”

I felt my face flush. “It’s not important.”

“You’re not having trouble with that new beau of yours, are you?”

“Of course not. This is a somewhat… older problem.”

Tom-Tom leaned back in his chair, studying my expression. “Oh no,” he finally said.

“Oh no, what?”

He sighed and laid his hand over mine. “Why in the
world
do you persist in flogging that dead horse known as Ray Devine?”

“It’s not like that! It’s—”

“Honestly, Dana. Reparenting is one thing when you’re in your twenties, but after all these years…”

“Reparenting, Dr. Freud?”

“What would you call it? It’s a perfectly reasonable way of dealing with an absentee father. I did the same thing myself with a charming, ruggedly handsome antiquities dealer back in the early sixties, when
I
was the one who’d just fallen off the turnip truck. I owe my entire career to Percy.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I know what you’re about to say, and dear Percy’s treatment of me could hardly be categorized as parental, either. That’s not the point. Between me and your Mr. Devine, you wisely formed relationships with protective, experienced older men who could lavish you with the attention you deserved.”

“It sounds like a book:
Dana Has Two Daddies
.”

“Exactly! Ray Daddy and Gay Daddy!”

I raised an eyebrow. “Gay Daddy?”

“It takes a village, sweetie.”

I pondered the ramifications of my half brother’s theory during the cab ride home. I couldn’t help but regard his logic as skewed. My relationship with Ray was simply too sexually charged to be labeled Ersatz Paternal.

But Ray Daddy
did
have that unconditional love thing down pat: My conversation was scintillating, my witticisms inspired guffaws, my paintings were invariably deemed masterpieces. I could do no wrong.

I thought back to my lunch date with Lark and the expression on her face when she talked about Sandro. I knew it well. Maybe you had to be
that young, and your boyfriend had to be that old, to experience that kind of love. Had I been wasting the last two decades trying to recapture the kind of relationship I’d simply outgrown?

Hmm. Ray Daddy. Maybe Tom-Tom was onto something.

For his part, Gay Daddy had been an exemplary sort-of-father as well—always ready with a few hundred dollars to cover a rent shortfall or treat me to an unaffordable, yet perfectly cut, pair of jeans. And he’d made sure I ate a decent meal—generally the sole meunière at Le Veau d’Or—at least twice a month. And who could forget that unfortunate incident back in my college days, for which he’d provided expert criminal defense?