Once they’d been served their first course — Dabob Bay oysters on the half shell — she knew that he had a wife and young son in Westchester County, but that he lived in an apartment in the East Village, traveling most weekends to Mount Kisco to keep in touch with the boy, Asher.
“We have to do something about it soon,” he said. “But as a lawyer I’m more afraid of the mechanics of divorce than most people. I’m like the dentist who neglects his own teeth for fear of the drill.”
For her part, Lucy spun the tale of Maureen and Rosemary into bright comedy, casting herself in the part of dupe. Edward probed her for details. He wanted to know the reason for every cut and change.
“Total bullshit,” he said, producing legal arguments that validated nearly all of Lucy’s original phrasings, elegantly wiping the floor with Rosemary and Maureen.
“God,” she said, “I wish I’d had you standing at my elbow for the last two weeks.”
“Honestly, there’s no place on Earth I’d rather have been.” He made the remark easily, with a smile, showing those glamorous metropolitan manners that surely reflected the enviable milieu in which he must move in Manhattan.
This was just after the halibut arrived.
Never once did he put the moves on her. The progression from dessert to nightcaps and coffee in his suite to the bedroom was a safe and relaxed glide, with much laughter along the route. From the moment she stepped into the elevator, she knew that he knew that she was going to spend the night, and that neither of them was going to make a fuss of it beforehand or after.
As they helped each other undress, Lucy pointed to her thighs. “Cellulite,” she said.
“You’re perfect, Lucy. I hate those bony sylphs.”
“Is your wife a bony sylph?”
“Bony, yes. Sylph, no.”
In sex, too, he was a paragon of good manners, both teasing and patient, waiting to come until after she did, which was surprisingly quickly and strongly. Still on East Coast time — midnight for her, three A.M. for him — he was asleep in minutes, with her snuggled up behind him, her arm crooked around his waist, her open palm on his very slightly paunchy stomach.
She woke before six, with no hangover, no bewilderment as to her whereabouts, no regrets. He was giving a paper that morning, and she had a hair appointment at 8:45. As she separated herself from him, limb by cautious limb, a phrase came into her head: “the tenderness of the one-night stand.” He stirred for an instant, then rolled back and began to snore.
She picked her clothes up from the floor and went into the living room to dress. She came back to the bedroom with a stub of old lipstick from the bottom of her bag, to write a message on his dressing-table mirror. That was so sweet…thank you. Talk well today. Must go (Dr.’s appt.) Fondly, Lucy. Then she wrote her phone numbers, landline and cell, in unmissably bold numerals. Before leaving, she rested her hand on his sleeping haunch through the bed linen. Snore, snore. She was glad he was sleeping in.
That afternoon, still in a buoyant mood, she traded in her old rust-bucket Honda for the Spider — a car she’d fancied, in its various incarnations and remodels, ever since she watched Dustin Hoffman drive one in The Graduate, a movie already ten years old by the time she saw a TV rerun in Missoula. Gingerly maneuvering the new car back to the Acropolis, she looked forward to showing it off to Edward. Perhaps they could go Dutch tonight at Ray’s Boathouse, which would give her an excuse to put the Spider through its paces.
He didn’t call. She told herself that it was perhaps best to leave things exactly as they were, a warm memory, unalloyed by complications. Having gone through one bicoastal romance, she’d sworn never to try another. So farewell, Edward, nice to have known you. Or so she tried to feel.
Three weeks later, she was four days late. The Rosemary/Maureen nightmare had probably fucked up her cycle. The night with Edward must have been at least three days before she started ovulating, but sperm have tenacious survival skills. She bought a test from Bartell’s, peed onto the stick thing, and saw lines in both windows. A blood test at the doctor’s the next day confirmed it. She was pregnant.
She was shaken by her own delight. At thirty-eight, with forty looming fast, she took the news as a pure, undeserved gift from gods in whose existence she had no belief at all. Of course she’d have the baby. How could she not?
But then there was the question of Edward. It would take five minutes to locate him. No need to snoop through the Alexis guest register; all she had to do was get the list of speakers at his conference. But in the last three weeks, Edward had rather dwindled in her estimation. It wasn’t that he hadn’t phoned, more that in retrospect his charming, ironic manners had come to seem a bit too easy, too practiced, too ostentatiously East Coast. It was as if all he was was manners. When she thought about him, she realized that she didn’t know a person so much as Williams College, Yale Law School, Westchester, and the Village. If she were to tell him this news, she didn’t have an inkling as to how he might respond. Horror, as likely as not, and a gentlemanly offer to arrange for an abortion.
As the slogan said, it was the woman’s right to choose. And faced with this most personal, impulsive, and daring decision — the biggest decision of her life — Lucy thought that the last person she wanted to consult was a lawyer, especially one as quick-minded and fluently logical as Edward had shown himself to be at dinner. She was frightened that Yale Law School might be horribly adept at talking her out of it, even though she held out a distant hope that Greenwich Village might be more understanding of her need to have the baby.
She forced herself not to find out Edward’s last name. There had been times in the last few years when the thought did cross her mind that a New York lawyer dealing in intellectual property rights, the hottest specialty in the Internet age, must be unbelievably rich, and that she might sort of owe it to Alida to make her existence known to this legal tycoon. But each time the thought came into view, she quashed it: to follow up on it now would put her own behavior back then in a very bad light indeed.
Lucy was glad Alida had inherited Edward’s hair and height, and much relieved she hadn’t got his nose.
TAD WAS ANGRY. He was angry with himself, angry with the presidency, angry with the nation, angry with the century. That much was rational, justifiable. In his view, only the ignorant, the hopelessly self-preoccupied, the Halliburton fat cats, and the mad Christian zealots were in any position not to be angry. Decent people now were angry people, and what America needed at this low moment in its history was more anger, not less.
But lately his own anger had been metastasizing at such speed, and in all directions, that it frightened him. It felt terminal.
He was angry with the landlord, that smarmy shyster Chinese bully so obviously bent on robbing him, Alida, and everyone else of their rightful homes. He hated the man’s ill-fitting double-breasted suit, his droopy eyelids, his real estate jargon, his vile heh-heh-heh! laugh. His ownership of the Acropolis was a prime symbol of how the world had lately fallen into the hands of grifters, liars, and cheats.
He was angry with Lucy, so willfully deaf and blind to the reality of what was happening, with her smug little sarcasms, her tolerant smiles. Aren’t you overreacting? That drove Tad wild.
He was angry with total strangers. One day last week, two women yakking in a supermarket and blocking his passage with their carts had managed to rouse in Tad his inner murderer. When he saw moms on the school run driving Hummers, he wanted to fling bricks through their tinted fucking windows. A knot of lawyers in Armani suits and tasseled loafers, talking outside the Rainier Club after a long and evidently profitable lunch, made him want to reach for his thought machine-gun.