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fortable if it were just the two of us, but I’d only have to fill TJ in afterward, and I figured she could get over it, and she did.
I said, “Trust is at the basis of most enduring relationships.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself, but—”
“It’s also a key component of most scams and con games. They couldn’t work without it. You might have an easier time trusting this guy if you can establish that there’s no abiding reason not to trust him.”
“And that’s the other thing I keep telling myself,” she said. “It seems tacky, but I can’t get past the fact that I don’t really know a thing about him. It’s not like my parents and his parents are friends, or I met him at a church social.”
“How did you meet?”
“On the Internet.”
“One of the dating services?”
She nodded, and gave its name. “I don’t know how the hell else peo -
ple are supposed to hook up in this city,” she said. “I work all day. In fact I’m supposed to be at my desk in twenty minutes, but Tinkerbell’s not gonna die if I’m ten minutes late. I spend my days at the office and my nights at AA meetings. My last relationship was with somebody I knew from the program. That gets you past the small talk, but then when things don’t work out one of you has to start going to different meetings.” She glanced at my left hand. “You’re married, right? Is she in the program?”
“No.”
“How’d you meet, if you don’t mind my asking?” We met in an after-hours gin joint, at Danny Boy Bell’s table. She was a young call girl then, and I was a cop with a wife and two kids. But that was a lot more than she needed to know, and what I said was that Elaine and I had known each other years ago, that we’d met up again after having lost contact, and that this time it had worked out for us.
“That’s romantic,” she said.
“I suppose it is.”
“Well, the men in my past, I hope to God they stay there. My boyfriend in high school was cute, but he never got over it when I 36
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threw up in the middle of . . . well, never mind. Jesus, I wish you could smoke in here. If you can have a cup of coffee you ought to be able to have a cigarette with it. Our tightass mayor should go fuck himself.
Can you believe he wants to ban smoking outside, too? Like it’s not bad enough you have to go out in the street for a smoke? I mean, who does he think he is?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, as I didn’t have one handy. “I should get to the point, Matt. I met this guy on the Internet, and we had a lot of exchanges, first by e-mail and then with Instant Messaging. You know what that is, right? Sort of an online conversation?”
I nodded. TJ and Elaine IM back and forth regularly, like a couple of kids with two cans and a wire. He lives right across the street from us, in the hotel room I occupied for years, and he comes over a couple of nights a week for dinner, and he and Elaine are both easy enough to reach by phone, but evidently there’s something irresistible about Instant Messaging. One of them will notice that the other’s online, and the next thing you know they’re chatting like magpies.
“It can get very intimate, or at least it seems that way. People let their guard down in e-mails, or forget to put it up in the first place. I mean, it’s so easy. You type something out like you’re writing in a diary, and before you have time to think about it you hit the Send button, and it’s gone. You can’t even check the spelling, let alone give some thought to whether you really wanted to tell him you had an abortion your senior year in high school. So it seems intimate, because you’re finding out a lot about the person, but it’s only what he chooses to tell you, and you’re just reading it on the screen. It’s just words, there’s no tone of voice to go with it, no facial expressions, no body language. You fill in the rest in your mind, and you make it what you want it to be.
But it may not be an accurate reflection of the real person. Sooner or later you trade jpegs, that’s online photographs—”
“I know.”
“—so you know what he looks like, but that’s just the visual equivalent of words on the screen. You still don’t know him.”
“But you’ve met this man.”
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“Oh, of course. I wouldn’t be wasting your time if this was still just an online flirtation. I met him about a month ago and I’ve seen him seven or eight times since then. I didn’t see him this weekend because he was out of town.”
“I gather the two of you hit it off.”
“We liked each other. The attraction was there. He’s nice-looking but not handsome. Handsome puts me off. A therapist once told me it’s a self-esteem issue, that I don’t think I deserve a handsome boyfriend, but I don’t think that’s it. I just don’t trust men who are too good-looking. They always turn out to be narcissists.”
“Been a real problem for me,” TJ said.
She grinned. “But you’re dealing with it.”
“Best I can.”
“I like the guy,” she said. “He didn’t rush me into bed, but we both knew that’s where we were going, and it didn’t take us that long to get there. And it was nice. And he likes me, and I’d love to jump up and down and tell the world I’m in love, but something holds me back.”
“What don’t you know about him?”
“I don’t know where to start. Well, what do I know about him? He’s forty-one, he’s divorced, he lives alone in a fifth-floor walk-up in Kips Bay. He’s self-employed, he creates direct-mail advertising packages for corporate clients. Sometimes he has to work long hours and sometimes he has dry spells with no work at all. Feast or famine, he says.”
“Does he have an office?”
“A home office. That’s one reason we always go to my place. His is a mess, he says, with a sofa that he sleeps on. It’s not even a convertible because there’s no room to open it up, with his desk and filing cabinets taking up so much floor space. There’s a fax, there’s a copying machine, there’s his computer and printer and I don’t know what else.”
“So you’ve never been there.”
“No. I said I’d like to see it and he just said it was a mess, and a mess you have to climb four flights of stairs to get to. And it’s plausible enough, it could certainly be true.”
“Or he could be married.”
“Or he could be married and live anywhere at all. I thought I could 38
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go to his building and at least see if his name’s on the mailbox, but I don’t even know the address. I have a phone number for him, but it’s his cell. He could be married, he could be an ex-con, he could be a fucking axe murderer for all I know. I don’t honestly think he’s any of those things, but the problem is I don’t know for sure, and I can’t let go emotionally if I’ve got these worries in the back of my mind.”
“And not that far back, from the sound of it.”
“No, you’re right. It’s always there, and it gets in the way.” She frowned. “I get this spam, everybody does, links to these websites where they claim you can find out the truth about anybody, I’ve gone to the sites, and I’ve been tempted, but that’s as far as I’ve gone. I don’t know how reliable those things are, anyway.”
“They probably vary,” I said. “What they do is access various publicly available data bases.”
“You can find out anything on the Internet,” TJ put in, “but only part of it is true.”
“His name’s David Thompson,” she said. “Or at least I think his name’s David Thompson. I did a Yahoo People search, and it’d be a lot easier if his name was Hiram Weatherwax. You wouldn’t believe how many David Thompsons there are.”