I was having trouble fitting into their banter. I didn’t want David to think I was too earnest or subservient to Anabel, but I couldn’t be too at ease with him without appearing disloyal to her. “That’s not in my job description,” I said carefully.
“But you do agree it’s madness?”
My eyes met Anabel’s. “No, I don’t,” I said.
“Give it time. You will.”
“No, he won’t,” Anabel said, looking into my eyes. “Tom’s not you. Tom is clean.”
“Ah, yes, the blood on my hands.” David held his hands up for inspection. “Funny, I’m not seeing it tonight.”
“Look more closely,” Anabel said. “I can smell it.”
David seemed disappointed in me when he learned that I didn’t eat meat, and outright annoyed when Anabel ordered nothing but a plate of vegetables, but his foie gras and his veal chop restored his spirits. It may only have been a form of billionaire narcissism, but he demonstrated cover-to-cover familiarity with The New Yorker, spoke knowledgeably of Altman and Truffaut, offered to get us tickets to The Elephant Man in New York, and seemed genuinely interested in my opinions about Bellow. It occurred to me that something tragic had happened in the Laird family — that Anabel and her father ought to have been the best of friends. Was she his bitter enemy, and her brothers three disasters, not because he was a monster but because he was too fabulous? Anabel had never claimed that he wasn’t likable, only that he seduced people with his likability. He told me stories of bad business moves he’d made — the selling of a Brazilian sugar mill a year before it became wildly profitable, his torpedoing of a partnership with Monsanto because he thought he knew more about plant genetics than Monsanto’s head of R&D did — and made fun of his own arrogance. When the conversation turned to my career plans and he offered, first, to get me a job at the Washington Post (“Ben Bradlee’s an old friend of mine”) and then, after I’d declined that offer, to fund the start-up of my contrarian magazine, I had the feeling that he was daring me to be fabulous like him.
Anabel thought otherwise. “He just wants to buy you,” she said on our train ride home. “It’s always the same. I let my guard down a tiny bit, and I loathe myself afterward. He wants to get his fingers into everything I have, the same way McCaskill’s got its fingers into everything the world eats. He won’t rest till he has everything. It’s not enough to be the world’s leading supplier of turkey meat, he has to have Truffaut and Bellow. You flatter his intellectual vanity. He thinks if he can have you, he’ll get me, and then he’ll have everything.”
“Did you hear me saying yes to him?”
“No, but you liked him. If you think he’s going to leave you alone now, think again.”
She was right. Not long after our dinner, I received, by express mail, a package containing four hardcover first editions (Augie March, H. L. Mencken, John Hersey, Joseph Mitchell), two tickets to The Elephant Man, and a letter from David in which he’d recorded his thoughts on rereading Augie March. He also mentioned that he’d spoken on the phone to Ben Bradlee about me, and he invited me and Anabel to New York for a weekend of theater the following month. When Anabel had finished tearing up the tickets, she pointed out the initials in the lower corner of the letter’s second page. “Don’t flatter yourself too much,” she said. “He dictated it.”
“So what? I can’t believe he went and reread Augie March for me.”
“Oh I can.”
“You’re not tearing up the books, though.”
“No, those you can keep if you can get the blood off them. But if you ever take anything more than token gifts from him, you will destroy me. And I mean destroy me.”
He continued to call me now and then, and I considered not telling Anabel about it, but I was already peeing in the sink and didn’t want to keep more secrets from her. Instead, I reported on his fabulous doings and then concurred in her condemnation of them. But I secretly liked him, secretly loved the loving way he spoke of Anabel, and she — he’d been right about this — secretly enjoyed having fresh doings to condemn.
My manifesto for The Complicater wasn’t going well. It was long on contrarian rhetoric and short on facts. If I really intended to found a new magazine, I ought to have been maintaining my friendships from the DP and cultivating relationships with local freelancers. The Complicater was an obvious nonstarter unless Anabel relented and let David fund it, and so I passed my days in the vague hope that she would relent. Oswald, who’d gone home to Lincoln to pay down his college debt, sent me droll letters to which I couldn’t summon the energy to respond. I would make it my one task for the afternoon to write him a letter, and I wouldn’t manage to write one sentence until five minutes before Anabel came home from the library. I didn’t have anything to report to anybody except that I was besotted with her.
Having spent the previous ten months shaping my personality to fit with hers, sanding away the most prominent points of friction, I was mostly blissful in her presence that fall. We were developing our routines, our shared opinions, our private vocabulary, our store of phrases that had been funny on first utterance and seemed scarcely less funny on the hundredth, and every word and every belonging of hers was colored by the sex I’d had with her and no one else. When I was alone in the apartment, though, I felt depressed. Anabel had limitless money but intended never to take any of it, I was mad for her body but could have it only three days a month, I liked her dad but had to pretend I didn’t, her dad had fabulous connections but I wasn’t allowed to use them, I had a supposedly ambitious project but no chance of making it happen, and whenever my mother dared to question what I was doing — I continued to call her every Sunday night — I took it as a criticism of Anabel and angrily changed the subject.
Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date. Anabel was so convincing that I believed in our plan. My only fear was that she’d realize I wasn’t as interesting as she was and leave me. She was the amazing thing that had happened to me, and I intended to support her and defend her from a world that didn’t understand her, and so, on the anniversary of Lucy’s Halloween party, I withdrew the last $350 from my old savings account and bought a ring with a pitiful little phonograph-stylus diamond. By the time Anabel came home from the library, I’d tied the ring to Leonard’s neck with a white ribbon and left him standing in the center of our bed.
“Leonard and I have something for you,” I said.
“Aha, you’ve been out,” she said. “I thought I smelled city on you.”
I led her into the bedroom.
“Leonard, what do you have for me?” She picked him up and saw the ring. “Oh, Tom.”
“I am not, of course, a beast of burden,” Leonard said. “I am an ornament of society, not a common toiler. But when he requested that I be your ring bearer, I could hardly refuse.”
“Oh, Tom.” She set Leonard on the nightstand and put her arms around my neck and looked into my eyes. Her own were lustrous with tears and ardor.
“It’s our first anniversary,” I said.
“Oh, my darling. I knew you’d remember, but I also wasn’t sure you would.”
“Will you marry me?”
“A thousand times!”
We tumbled onto the bed. It wasn’t the right time of month, but she said it didn’t matter. I thought that maybe now that we were going to be married she might get past her problem, and I think she thought so too, but it wasn’t to be. She said she was happy anyway. She lay on her back with our little bull between her breasts and untied the ribbon.