The Ladies' Man (38 page)

“I know,” says Adele. “That's why I dropped it. My father loved me. He may have been a snob, but he wasn't cruel. I think I would have known. I think there would have been a word or a hint over the years.”

“Did you ever confront him?”

“I asked my mother.”

“And?”

“She said it was nonsense, and she'd do me the favor of not relaying such an insulting question to my father. And really, if you'd known him, you'd know how outlandish a theory it is.” She forces a smile. “That's all it was, Henry James—a protective father who doesn't want his beloved eldest daughter to marry beneath her station. Or leave. Too many episodes of
Masterpiece Theatre
under my belt.” She touches the face of her watch. “Is Kathleen meeting me up here or was I supposed to go back downstairs?”

“Did you ever sleep with Harvey?” asks Cynthia.

“No!” says Adele. Then: “Not quite.”

“Even though you were engaged?”

“Never formally, don't forget. It hadn't been announced.”

“And what year was this?”

“Nineteen sixty-seven.”

“Not exactly the dark ages,” says Cynthia. She stands, and goes to the kitchen; returns after a few minutes balancing a half-eaten chicken carcass in a plastic boat on top of two plates, a roll of paper towels under her arm, no cutlery, and a single, gorgeous, two-toned martini glass, brimming. Adele stands to help, and Cynthia hands
her the martini.
“Skol
. Sit. Mesquite barbecue. I live off these. I cooked real food when Nash was here, which was another thing in the plus column.”

“When did he leave?”

“Sunday morning.”

“And where do we think he went?”

“I don't know. Maybe he got on a plane and went back to his California girlfriend. His equipment's there. He was hamstrung without it, grand piano or no grand piano. No one writes jingles with a keyboard and a pencil anymore. He called a bunch of Boston jingle houses and said, essentially, ‘I'm your fellow composer from L.A. and I have a deadline. Could I use your studio for a few hours? I'll return the favor when you're on the West Coast.'

Balls, huh?”

“I should say so.”

“But no bites, not the whole time, which makes me think he went home.” Cynthia rips a drumstick off the carcass and offers it to Adele.

“No, thanks. How did you leave it with him?”

“Horribly. He spent the last night in the guest room. We had people over and he flirted with this long-legged car saleswoman—who lives one floor below me, no less—and I threw him out the minute he came back.”

“Came back from where?”

“Escorting her home.”

“A floor below!”

“Exactly!”

“It's so interesting,” Adele murmurs. She takes a sip from her martini and offers the glass to her hostess.

“No, thanks.
What
is?”

“People. Their ability to … act. To take action. To seduce and be seduced. Obviously they're made of different stuff than I am.”

Cynthia wipes her hands on a paper towel, closes her eyes, and massages her temples. “Am I getting a message here? That there's something else you need to tell me, someone out there you'd like to reach, but the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past, or more likely, the Ghosts of Parents Past won't let you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“A man. Not Harvey Nash. Someone in
your
peripheral vision.”

Adele doesn't answer.

“Someone who's not perfect, is my guess,” says Cynthia. “Someone who's waiting for a signal from you. And either you're afraid to come clean with him, or you're afraid you'll wake up some morning and read about yourself in ‘Names and Faces' in the
Globe.”

“It's not that,” says Adele.

Cynthia opens her eyes again, and tears a wing off the chicken. “Is it a woman? Because you're allowed. I have dozens of lesbians as clients. I
love
lesbians.”

“No, sorry.”

“Married?”

“No.”

“Is it something really weird and complicated—like your brother?”

Adele actually laughs. “You can rest assured it's not my brother.”

“Then you have to come clean. And let me tell you why: because of what I do for a living. I'm like one of those Internet safe servers—‘Why you can purchase on-line with us using your credit card without fear.' Clients trust me with their financial histories. I'm a professional secret keeper, as good as a therapist.”

Adele looks across to the picture window. “It's been such a peculiar day,” she says. “At work, then at The Other Woman, now here: confiding things I never told anyone. Drinking a martini with a colossal green olive in it. It makes me wonder, looking out your window, why I live miles from the ocean, with no view. Well, I know why I do—because my parents did. I sleep in their bed and eat on their dining room table, surrounded by their children.”

“Who's the
guy?”
asks Cynthia.

Adele helps herself to the remaining wing. “I shouldn't. I haven't even told Kathleen.”

“I have two sisters, and I tell them
nothing
. They'd pass it on to their husbands, which would fuel their grudge against me—essentially, that I make four times as much money as either one of them. Besides, Kathleen's going to be less and less available as roommate-confidante. If I need to talk, I call a friend.”

Adele repeats, “A friend. That's good advice. I have friends at work.”

“I'm a
fabulous
friend,” says Cynthia.

“What if you know him? He might be a client.”

“Don't be such a prig,” says Cynthia. “It's tiresome. And I can only think it must be just as tiresome for you.”

No one speaks to me like that, Adele marvels. “Marty Glazer,” she says.

C
all it a moral and medical imperative: thirteen close friends lost to AIDS and, by Byron Sprock's assiduous count, forty-four acquaintances (neighbors, actors, understudies, collaborators, costume and lighting designers, favorite waiters, ushers, dog walkers, sublessees, house sitters, and bank tellers) dead or dying. Accordingly, he will not, under any circumstances, have anything but unerringly safe sex. Dina goes along with his scrupulous practices for the first dozen acts of intercourse, but now that she is ovulating she has to pop the question: Wouldn't he enjoy
not
using a condom? Just this once, and maybe again in the morning?

“Sorry,” says Byron. “I don't do that.”

“Ever?” asks Dina.

Byron shoots to a sitting position in bed. “I can't believe what you're asking! What do you think all those little red ribbons are telling you: Wear a condom! Don't take a chance! And what about that tomcat you used to live with? Can you vouch for him?”

“I had to,” she says. “You can't use a condom when you're trying to make a baby.”

And thus Dina confides the plan: I selected you—your height, your brains, your supposed easygoing nature, your jokes, your pale blue eyes, your rosy toenails, your high arches, your silky heels.

Byron finds his eyeglasses on the night table and puts them on.

“You thought—let me understand this—after some magic number
of safe sexual acts, I'd let down my guard and impregnate you?”

“Jeez,” says Dina. “You'd think I was asking for marriage and child support. What's the big deal?”

“It's a huge deal—'making a baby' as you so coyly put it. A child of mine raised in a single-family home as if his father's a deadbeat dad who wasn't smart enough to use protection. What kind of example is
that?”

Dina touches his freckled back, and he shrinks from her hand.

“So the donation route is out, too?” she asks.

“I'm not your man,” he says.

“Even with no responsibilities attached?”

“Except after my child finds me through some birth-father network support group, and we go into therapy so I can explain that I was recruited for the job while on a business trip, and left him in the care of a woman I hardly knew?”

“Now you're hysterical,” says Dina.

“Only in California,” he rants. “Only in the land of perpetual sun and, and, cult suicides—”

“No one impregnates women on the East Coast? No one makes donations to sperm banks?”

“That's different,” he says. “That's science. People sign papers. I can't believe what you're asking. I can't believe the risks you took with that philanderer.” He flops down, rises again. “A philanderer who could return at any moment and become my child's in loco parentis.”

“You pompous ass,” says Dina. “I want a baby. Nash and I were practically married. My doctor didn't throw up his hands in horror and say, ‘What kind of idiot are you? You can't try! You'll get AIDS!' ”

“In that case? Seriously? I'd change doctors. He has no business pushing you into unprotected sex in the name of procreation.”

Dina gets out of bed, and for the first time ever in his presence, in the bedroom, puts on a robe. She opens a bureau drawer and sticks a digital thermometer in her mouth, then sits on the edge of the bed, her back to him. She doesn't speak until the instrument bleeps. “Some men would be flattered,” she says.

“Stupid macho men!”

“Is it that you're gay?” she asks. “Bisexual?”

“Is that your call to arms? ‘Prove you're a real man. Prove you weren't a flight attendant before you became a playwright'?”

Dina yanks a tissue from a pop-up box. “What a terrible person I am. I want a baby and I picked you to inseminate me.”

After a moment, Byron touches her back. “It's one thing if we had a relationship, and you were tested, and we waited the proper interval—”

“I'm perimenopausal,” she says, elbowing him away. “I don't
have
a proper interval in me.”

“If you couldn't get pregnant by him,” he asks, “what makes you think it would be different with my sperm?”

“Honestly? A feeling. It seemed to me that you were sent by forces in the universe. You said as much yourself: I backed into your car, and there you were—tall and nice and wanting to romance me, and with the right number of letters in your name, according to my numerologist. I'm a very spiritual person. I don't believe in accidents.”

This is what Byron likes least about Dina, her belief in everything. Tonight it seems less charming and more vapid than usual. He doesn't want her raising a daughter to believe in angels and aromatherapy, and he doesn't want a son's science to turn on the theory that all bodily functions begin and end in his feet.

Thus, after three weeks of highly satisfying safe sex, he is willing to have none. By the next day, he misses New York acutely—its speeding taxis and its public transportation, its libraries and magazine stands, its maître d's and its homeless. His newfound love for palm, lemon, avocado, and olive trees has given way to sardonic jokes about Dina's home state's starlets, its mud slides, its earthquakes, its smog, its automobile brassieres. Suddenly he can't live without some stupid sausage or gyro or French fry sold only on the streets of New York, with its famous creative and intellectual energy—like that's a reason to pick a place to live.

The people who flew Byron Sprock to Hollywood for one month are now sending him home. There is no movie in his play, no appetite in Hollywood for making fun of Renaissance Weekend or
the Clintons. He is going back to theater—Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, regional, big, small, whatever will have him. Though he and Dina have stopped having sex altogether, and exchange no pledges to call or write, she drives him to John Wayne Airport and kisses him good-bye, on the cheek, at curbside.

She tells him that a soul chooses its parents, and she shouldn't have tried to play God.

“Good luck,” he says. “I'll call you.”

He will type “Act One, Scene One” on his laptop while still waiting at the gate: “Southern California. The exterior of a modest beachfront rental belonging to a pretty, slightly faded, wistful, tanned ex-model who has embraced New Age malarkey. Enter, on in-line skates, a bespectacled New York intellectual.” They collide. They share enough common ground and chemistry to date for the duration of his business trip. The man thinks he may be falling in love against type, while the woman feigns affection as she measures him for the job of biological father. He declines out of epidemiological prudence and moral indignation. A third character, a spectral presence achieved through lighting, a disembodied, ex-live-in, cheating common-law husband hovers over the set, as does a giant ticking clock. For added poignancy, he gives the leading man a fatal, time-bomb genetic disease and a conscience. The man and woman part.