The Ladies' Man (19 page)

“Young?” he asks sharply. “How old were we?”

“Twenty-one. You were twenty-five. Adele was twenty-three.”

“God: engaged to be married at twenty-five.”

Lois slips off her gold sandals and folds her legs under her on the couch. “I doubt if you remember this,” she says, “but you and Adele were practicing a ballroom step for the party, a slow dance, and I stood in for her when she went to take a phone call.”

Nash looks over, blank.

“A week before the engagement party?” she prompts.

“It's coming back to me,” he lies.

“We had the radio on, and they played ‘You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' ' by the Righteous Brothers?”

“In the living room of Dean Road?” he guesses.

“Yes! Dell was gone for the whole song.”

“We started off at a polite distance but then, as the song played on, I held you a little too close?”

“That's
exactly
what happened. It started off totally innocently.”

“As these things usually do,” says Nash.

“And you knew the words, and you were singing them right into my hair, as if you were saying you'd lost that lovin' feelin' for Adele.”

This sounds right to Nash. A lifetime of crooning lyrics into the temples of attractive girls in lieu of conversation gives the story a luster of truth. “I didn't kiss you, did I?” he asks.

“I was never really sure. I felt what I thought were your lips on the side of my head, but I wasn't positive.”

Doubt it, he thinks. Although …

“I can ask you now, though:
Did
you kiss me when the music stopped?”

Nash thinks he might have. It wouldn't have been the first time
he landed a wistful kiss—usually interpreted as a brotherly endorsement and therefore not reported—near the barrette of a buddy's fiancée. “I think,” he says nobly, “it would be better for all concerned if I just leave it at, ‘No, it never happened.' ”

“Even now? We can't discuss it openly?”

“A kiss doesn't have to mean a whole heck of a lot.”

“I know that.”

“I wasn't the most reliable guy. I may have been caught up in the moment and—if I can be blunt—turned on by the music and by pressing up against you.”

“I wouldn't disagree with that.”

“It doesn't mean I used good judgment. I was a creature of my impulses.”

“That describes me to a T,” says Lois.

Nash pours himself another demitasse of cognac and offers to refill Lois's glass. “You must have been expecting some word from me after I took off,” he ventures.

Lois holds her glass out. “I had a lot of boyfriends, so I wasn't staying home waiting for the phone to ring. However, did I think of you from time to time and wonder if I had anything to do with your leaving Boston? Honestly? Yes.”

Nash seizes on the topic of Lois's many beaus. “So, after dating a lot of guys, you finally said yes to one?”

Lois says sharply, “What does that mean—'said yes to one'?”

“To the lawyer. I assume he proposed.”

“Oh, that. Obviously.”

Nash wags his finger at her. “You thought I meant sex, didn't you? You were raising your hackles there for a second. I saw it.”

Lois concedes the point with a smile. “I thought you were asking about my … dating habits.”

“Wait: You're saying that in this day and age you'd consider that an insult? Would you want me to think you sat out the sexual revolution until you married at—what age was it?”

“Not that long ago.”

“That's what you want the world to think? That you had no fun until your wedding night?”

“I don't understand your point,” she murmurs.

Nash has no point, except that he is touching on something fascinating to him, the collective virginity of the Dobbin sisters. Adele had been affectionate in a way that suggested certain future satisfactions, but she was waiting for them to become officially engaged before going all the way.

“I would have pegged you for the liberated one,” he confides.

“Why?”

“Well,” says Nash, twirling his glass by its stem, never having given Lois's comportment a moment's thought, “it's something hard to put into words: a look, an attitude.”

“Really?” Lois raises her eyebrows.

“For example,” Nash continues, “I doubt whether I would have even asked Kathleen to dance.”

“Because?”

Nash, who now conjures the desirable Kathleen as an achingly adorable teenager, says sternly, “Too young. Still in high school.”

“And shy.”

“That, too,” says Nash, who suddenly sees one of them—un-clear who, but he hopes Kathleen—in a red-and-blue field hockey uniform, thighs chafed pink from cold weather.

“Could it have been my fault? Was I sending out signals?” asks Lois.

“Anything's possible,” says Nash, “but it seems unlikely that someone would flirt with her sister's boyfriend.”

“Then what was I doing there?” Lois pleads. “You and Adele were dancing, and I was watching. Why? Was I chaperoning? Was I looking for a chance to cut in? I've asked myself this for a lot of years.”

“Maybe you were changing the records for us.”

“No! You were dancing to the radio.”

“Maybe you were giving us some pointers.”

Lois smiles. “You remember—my dancing ability. But Adele was almost as good. You knew the box step but she was trying to teach you to waltz.”

“You certainly have the details down,” says Nash.

Lois opens her eyes wide. “Because, Harvey, a week later you broke your engagement. Everyone was trying to reconstruct what you'd done and said.”

“I never actually
broke
the engagement,” says Nash. “That happened by default.”

“I always wondered: Was there a note left somewhere that never got read, or a letter mailed that we never received?”

Nash considers recasting his crime as just such a misunderstanding, a note nailed to the door that was tragically overlooked; a waylaid apology decomposing in the dead-letter office. But he doesn't bother. Lois might believe it, but the others never would. They'd cross-examine him on its contents, and he—no librettist—would have to supply the critical lines.

“You should have called,” says Lois. “You could have asked for me and I could have broken the news for you.”

“I know that. I should have asked to speak to your father, man to man. Christ, I know that better than anyone. And don't you think if I could turn back the clock that's exactly what I would do? Not only call, but come by days—hell, weeks—before the party and explain that I was losing my nerve?”

Lois shrugs. “Not really. It would have been out of character.”

Nash is wounded by her answer. He thinks he's been a diplomat and a gentleman since arriving on the Dobbin doorstep, and that Lois has no basis for her low opinion. Well, good. Now he has a legitimate reason to shrink from Lois, who, despite her harsh assessment, is creeping closer on the couch.

“Okay,” says Nash. “I admit it. I was a heel then and I'm a heel now. I don't know why I bother.”

Lois thinks this over, then asks, “Bother to what?”

“To show up after all these years.”

Lois touches his sleeve. “I thought it might have something to do with me.”

Ordinarily, he'd encourage a woman in such a misapprehension:
You could tell what I was feeling? You picked that up from across the room without my saying one word? Wow. Are you here with anyone? Can I drive you home?

But this is different. This is a house full of Dobbins, and he will be sleeping among them, setting his sights on some and disappointing others, negotiating around Richard's cautious goodwill. It is no sacrifice, though, to forgo an easy lay when the woman is not a temptation. Counterfeit tenderness clouds his gray eyes. “You're
not altogether wrong,” he begins. “You were one of the reasons I had to return. But to be absolutely honest, Adele was the first reason. She's the one I hurt the most.”

“But—”

“And you understand that I couldn't say, ‘Are you all right, Adele, after what I've done? Can you forgive me?' and in the same breath ask, ‘Oh, and by the way, how's your sister Lois? Any chance
she'd
be glad to see me?' ”

“I see what you're saying,” says Lois.

“It's an untenable position. Then and now.”

Lois pours herself her third shot of cognac. Nash wonders if Lois is a drinker, and immediately congratulates himself on this insight. Drinking makes perfect, unattractive sense. The unloved middle sister, a state employee, a divorcée with red hands and no touch on the keyboard.

Except, he notices, that she grimaces with her next swallow as if she's never tasted the stuff before.

“This is a very nice cognac you keep on hand,” Nash tries.

Lois turns the bottle to read the label at arm's length.

He smiles, raises his glass in a toast, and remembers to wince from his injuries. “Who's this fellow Kathleen is seeing tonight?”

Lois, instantly tight-lipped, says, “I have no idea.”

“My impression was, First date.”

“Could be. You'll have to ask Adele.”

“Because they're closer?”

“Adele and I are only two years apart, so there was more competition there than friendship growing up.”

“And you're saying Adele and Kathleen have more of a mother-daughter relationship?”

“Why?”

Nash smiles. “I'm interested. I like to know how women think.”

Lois cocks her head. “For your work?”

“Yes,” says Nash. “Absolutely for my work.”

“Psychologically speaking? Because women are the ones who buy the products that your jingles are trying to sell?”

“Correct.”

“Kathleen does all our shopping and most of our cooking,” Lois offers.

“And you? I understand that your field is unemployment. Does that mean that low unemployment is, in a sense, bad for business?”

The phone rings. Lois doesn't answer his question, but sits poised, listening.

“Shouldn't you get that?” he asks.

“Adele will get it. It's right by her bed.”

The ringing stops. A minute passes before a door opens down the hall, and, if bare feet hitting hard wood can sound annoyed, these do. Adele appears at the door to the den, wearing the same no-nonsense navy blue fleece bathrobe from the afternoon, and the same determinedly neutral facial cast.

“Adele! Hello!” Nash cries.

“It's for him. He can take it at the telephone table.”

“Me?” says Nash.

“Who knows you're here?” Lois asks.

“His accountant,” says Adele.

T
he voice is professional and chilly. “I have one question only: Are you all right?”

“Cynthia?” says Nash.

“I'm not calling to make conversation,” she says. “I'm calling as a concerned friend.”

“Concerned how?”

“Over your disappearance. Which I think is an appropriate choice of words, considering last night.”

Nash squeezes himself into the seat of the one-armed telephone table and whispers, “I was going to call as soon as things calmed down.”

“No, you weren't.”

“Cyn, listen: I had an accident.”

Cynthia gasps.

“Mugged. In broad daylight.”

“I knew it! I had a feeling!”

“Just a head injury and some facial lacerations.”

“How?” Cynthia cries. “What happened?”

“I was assaulted in the lobby of their building.”

“ ‘Their'? Whose building?”

“The Dobbins',” he says.

“Who did it?”

“An assailant.”

“Obviously,” says Cynthia. “Did they catch him?”

Nash says, “I couldn't give a description because it happened from behind—”

“Did you go to the emergency room?”

Actually, yes, Nash remembers. Where were they this afternoon—Cedar Sinai? Mount Sinai? Beth Sinai? He remembers and says proudly, “At Beth Israel. I was checked out and released. And we all came back here. I conked out this afternoon, and they woke me up for dinner. They're mortified, of course. And they feel responsible.”

“Do you have health insurance?”

“Of course.”

“Because you should have a CAT scan. A head injury is no joke.”

“I think they gave me one.”

“Who found you?”

“One of the sisters came home from work and she buzzed Adele, and they got me upstairs and put ice on the various swellings and lacerations.”

A misstep, he senses, producing an unhappy silence. Finally Cynthia asks, “How many sisters?”

“Three.”

“And they live together?”

Nash says, “That's correct.”

“None of them can be married if they all live together.”