The Ladies' Man (31 page)

Lois waits; stalls, he thinks, when she raises an index finger to signal that she couldn't possibly answer with an atom of food yet unchewed. “Can I ask why Cynthia kicked you out, as long as we're being forthright?”

“I'll tell you: A young woman flirts with me at a party and, whammo, my head gets turned.”

“Were you flirting back?”

“To be honest? I was. I walked her home from the party—”

“Stranding Cynthia?”

“Not exactly. The party was at Cynthia's. I walked Olive back to her apartment.”

“Why?”

Because she was a knockout and she slipped me her card when Cynthia wasn't looking and I couldn't see any panty line and I got the
idea …
He says sorrowfully, “Because I'm weak, and I'm addicted to temptation. Cynthia happened to be correct. I was walking Olive back to her apartment because I was attracted to her and I was thinking with my … you-know-what, wasn't I?” he asks.

“All men do,” says Lois. “How long were you gone?”

“Ten minutes? Fifteen? We had a nightcap. Half hour, tops.”

“And Cynthia was angry?”

“Furious. And now I'm out on my ass.”

“Were you in love with her?”

The question strikes Nash as absurdly sentimental. Where do women get these ideas? “We met on a plane,” he says. “We hit it off. We had dinner. I needed a place to stay, she has a big heart, and she thought I had an honest face.”

“No,” says Lois. “I'm sorry. She thought you had a
handsome
face. ‘Honest' is a reason you hire someone, not why you take him home. My guess is that Cynthia fell in love with you before the plane landed at Logan.”

“Do you think so? A woman can fall in love with a man in, well, let's count—a five-hour flight, then drinks at her place, then dinner here … Seven, eight hours?”

“Basic chemistry,” Lois explains. “It can happen like
that.”
She snaps her fingers and her silver bangles clang.

Nash taps his index finger against his forehead. “You know what I think? Something got out of whack up here thirty years ago when I welshed on Adele. I don't want to bore you, psychoanalyzing myself, but I think there's a pattern: If I get close to someone and I'm even
contemplating
commitment, I run away because I'm afraid of hurting her as badly as I hurt Adele.” He nods with conviction, takes a sip of wine and rolls it around in his mouth. “Ahh. I love an assertive Bordeaux with my meatloaf.”

“I prefer red wine with everything,” says Lois. “Even with fish. The scrod, by the way, is excellent.”

“I wasn't changing the subject. I was trying to inject a little humor into my X-rated autobiography.”

“I'm sorry. Of course you were. I date so many men who are wine snobs, who actually
say
things like that, that I heard it as a statement of fact.”

“Tell me you don't go out on second dates with these stiffs.”

“No,” says Lois. “Absolutely not.” Seconds pass before she adds, “A sense of humor is chief among the qualities I admire in … anyone.”

He winks. “But especially in a man?”

Lois lowers her voice. “You know what people say when you list the qualities you'd like in a male friend? ‘You're too fussy.' Meaning, When you've been divorced and are no longer twenty-five years old, can you afford to be fussy?”

“By ‘people' do you mean ‘sisters'?”

Lois puts her fork down. “It's remarkable.”

“What is?”

“The way you pick up on every signal, every nuance, relating to my family.”

He grins. “I am a student of the Dobbins. A Dobbins scholar. Half of them hate me and the other half … feed me.”

“This? This is nothing, meatloaf special and wine by the glass. When you're back on your feet financially, I'll let you reciprocate.”

He should have thought of that: the inevitable thank-you dinner, another night in public with Lois and her curlicued blond bob. He smiles gratuitously. “Or, if that door is closed, if I'm still lying low, I'll pay you back in full.”

“But you'll still be taking meals, won't you? Monks eat. We could go to a vegetarian restaurant.”

His attention is drawn to the cash register, where Jennifer, his favorite waitress, has just arrived and is pinning her embroidered handkerchief inside the pocket above her left breast. Because she went to high school on an island in Maine and is studying elementary ed, he is sure she has not had implants. Lois is talking about something that happened at the Division of Employment Security, some wet-behind-the-ears commissioner who killed a benefits program that was not only humane but …

Nash swirls his wine, tries to think of some way to get this Dobbin dame laid short of doing it himself. “Let me see,” he muses. “Who do I know?”

“For what?”

“For you!”

Lois blinks.

“You know: ‘D.W.F. seeks man between fifty and—what? sixty-five?—for dining, movies, plays, good times, et cetera. Must have marked sense of humor.' ”

Lois says, “I hope you're joking.”

Nash leans closer. “No, listen: I think I may be on to something. I didn't know what was bubbling up until I said it—which is not unlike the creative process. Your fingers take on a life of their own, and next thing you know your right hand has a melody.”

“A personal ad? Do you know what that brings? Hundreds of letters from weirdos and prison inmates.”

“So? After you screen them, you can send the overflow Adele's way.” He grins and pats her hand, which has closed around a balled napkin. “I'm teasing you! Your sister is the last woman on earth who would find a guy through a personal ad.”

“No,” says Lois.
“I
am.”

He wags his finger. “Unh-uh. Don't say that. What do you have to lose?”

“Time,” says Lois. “Self-respect. Personal safety.”

“Seriously? You never read them for fun, and once in a while see one that grabs you?”

“I may scan them from time to time, but that's as far as I could ever take it.”

“Really? You were never tempted to pick up the phone? I've done it. Not the ones that require sitting down and writing letters, but since I've been here, I read the ones in the Sunday
Globe
. There's a nine-hundred number you call.”

Lois says, “And is this where you say, ‘Loosen up, Lois. You're a snob and a fussbudget'?”

“No, frankly, I'm thinking of all of you: Adele, Lois, Kathleen—three great women who never found the right man. Maybe it's worth some examination. Maybe no man can measure up to the family standards.”

“That's not true. And it's unfair. You haven't married anyone. What about
your
standards? And what about Kathleen? She's relaxed the famous family standards, wouldn't you say: a doorman? A Hispanic doorman?”

“Worse than me!” says Nash. “Worse than a college-dropout musician from Brighton, son of a mail carrier.”

“I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I'm not a racist. I just meant, he's not the person our parents might have chosen for her.”

“But we're not like our parents, right? What matters to us is that he's a very decent guy who seems to be ga-ga over your sister, and vice versa.”

“
Is
he decent? I've never exchanged two words with him except ‘Good morning' or ‘Good day' in the line of duty.”

“I like him very much—”

“Based on?”

“Conversations. Observation. I've always found him polite and helpful. Cynthia was crazy about him. Invited him to her parties, in fact, which must tell you something.”

“Such as?”

“That he fits in. That he's comfortable socializing with people outside his own sphere. Kathleen isn't the only one who saw past the braid and the epaulets.” He grins slyly. “And who knows? Maybe he has a friend.”

There is a forkful of scrod on its way to Lois's mouth, but she returns it to her plate.

“For
you
,” Nash continues. “What do you have to lose? You did it by the book the first time, married one of those college graduates who, I assume, had the right pedigree. And look how that turned out—a Victoria's Secret customer.” He laughs appreciatively, but stops to admire Jennifer, who is making her way from table to table, with a pot of regular in one hand and an orange-cuffed pot of decaf in the other.

Following his eyes, Lois tries to relay a cautionary tale about a friend who signed up with a dating service for Ivy League graduates, well, Ivy League and Seven
Sisters
, of course, and the first man she contacted was not even divorced! Nash tunes her out, then jumps back in to cut her off. “Do you want me to ask Lorenz myself? I'm probably going to see him in the next couple of days.”

Lois, peering into her big black pocketbook, brings out a compact and a lipstick but doesn't open either. “Please don't. I'm lying low, too, Nash. I'm certainly not seeking out dates with people I don't know.” She opens and untwists her lipstick, and with mirror
poised says, “I guess you could say I'm not looking for any more trophies for my mantel, either.”

“It does take energy,” agrees Nash. “And who the hell needs to be worrying at our age about viruses and diseases? God, I remember when the worst thing you could get was gonorrhea.”

Lois says, “True.”

“Obviously, we're in sync,” he continues. “Regrouping and staying out of trouble.”

“We're in a good place for that,” says Lois.

Nash looks around The Gold Dome. He's grown fond of the place; big portions served by young waitresses in tight uniforms and saddle shoes. He loves the schoolgirl look, the ankle-sock dress code, required, apparently, even on the coldest nights. “Wasn't sure if you'd like it,” he says.

Lois says nothing for most of the ten-minute walk to Grove Street. Now she knows that Harvey Nash's occupancy at The Lucky Duck is meaningless, and she feels the fool. Lately she's been thinking about her marriage. Cullen didn't want the divorce. He'd insisted that he loved her, that the pleasure he derived from silky fabric against his own skin was a benign and not extraordinary condition, affecting but not harmful to their marriage. He was without question heterosexual. She knew that. She could testify with her hand on ten Bibles to that, couldn't she? Was their conjugal life a lie—had she forgotten they had to make love on their honeymoon with the TV volume turned up so their cries wouldn't be heard in the next suite?

He'd written her after she'd moved back home, asking was it such a huge price to pay? Lots of women lived with this. And whom did it harm? He thought he could confide in her. Don't prove him wrong. The volume of mail had to be explained to her sisters. “Did he hit you?” they asked. “Is it another woman?” And then he'd sent the book, which effectively solved the riddle. Hadn't he realized that the sisters opened their mail without self-consciousness in the foyer, hardly expecting anything in a Dobbin, McLendon, Katzenbach and Jessep mailer to be
The Man in the Red Velvet Dress?

Tonight, every man and woman they pass on the street between
The Gold Dome and The Lucky Duck is part of a couple. Surely some of these men have secrets more debilitating than ownership of bras and slips? Some must be criminals and adulterers, yet these women stay. Cullen was truthful, at least. When she walked in on him that first time, fastening not anything of hers but a turquoise satin garter belt with cheap black lace bias tape as trim, he didn't lie. And for as many months as it took to file the papers, she had refused to listen to his explanations or read the books, as if she were so popular and marriageable that she didn't have to salvage what they had.

Men could do worse things. Cullen had courted her and proposed to her and married her in a beautiful garden wedding at the DeCordova Museum, conducted by a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Adele had been her maid of honor, and her father had been Cullen's best man, which everyone in the firm thought was a lovely gesture. They didn't depart from any tradition. She'd worn white. The judge had been rather reserved until he announced parenthetically that Cullen's moot court argument in law school had been so brilliant that he had remembered it to this day. Lois now thinks, Brilliant and kind and heterosexual wasn't good enough for me. I needed perfection. No compromises; no room for individual expression. If only she had kept her job when they married, he might have had the time and space to come home at lunch and indulge his needs in private, and she never would have burst in on him, and never would have been put at such a disadvantage by the truth. Maybe if she'd been so horrified and so unforgiving she wasn't such a woman of the world. Sometimes she thinks about writing to Cullen. Fetishes, she now understands from her reading on the Internet, don't have to destroy a marriage. It takes understanding and tolerance on the part of the wife, who is encouraged to pray, to enter chat rooms and discuss the five stages of grief with women in the same boat.

It may even look to the passersby that this man is her date, confiding in her, fine-tuning details of the next outing. But he is not. Nash is counseling her in the ways of meeting men so he can feel less guilty about seducing every woman except her. What kind of man while on a date—and few would argue that dinner between
unrelated, eligible people is
not
a date—would volunteer to matchmake and screen personal ads as if he's never had one millisecond's romantic inclination toward her himself? His monk's phase! Brother Harvey! Who did he think he was dealing with, Mrs. Chabot? Harvey Nash is just another unemployed fast-talker hustling for benefits. And Lois Dobbin, who makes her living sizing people up and rejecting their appeals, is the wrong woman to insult.

She hitches the shoulder strap of her big black pocketbook more securely on her shoulder so she can walk with a self-assured stride. Look at what the streets of Boston showcase: couples. But not Lois Dobbin. She had her chance, but she took care of that with one scream, one hastily packed suitcase, and two deaf ears.