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“Not my type,” Frank said.

“Listen to this.”

“You think nothing goes on in this place? Not by me. There’s plenty of mufky-fufky.”

“Honestly?”

“Virgins we don’t have here.”

Later in the day Doug took a walk with his mother.

“You and Dad seem to be getting along really well.”

“We’d better. This is last gas before the highway.”

“I’d like to know something. You had some difficult years—”

“I’ll say difficult.”

“What kept you together?”

“Nobody got divorced in the neighborhood. Hollywood stars got divorced. Myrna Loy got divorced. As far as I know, I was not Myrna Loy.”

“People left each other.”

“Not people we knew. You stayed. You had children, you stayed for the children. I’m not criticizing. You’ve done wonderful with my grandchildren, but you and your brother, no matter what, you had one roof over your head and two parents.”

“True.”

“You stayed. What you have is what you have. Who says it’s going to be better somewhere else?”

His generation had sophisticated marriages and divorces, but he wondered, listening to his mother, if this older generation for all their lack of sophistication knew something his did not.

The following morning they went to the outdoor pool. People were competing to get the best spots, leaving sunglasses or a book on the poolside chairs, then coming back after breakfast to claim the chairs. Doug went in the water, then dried himself in the sun in a lounge chair, Frank and Norma in chairs on either side of him, sunning themselves.

“What do you call this?” he heard someone say angrily.

He turned to see a bony man of about 70 in a baggy bathing suit confronting a stout woman a few years younger in a one-piece suit that did not cover the folds of her fleshy body.

“This is my chair! It had my hat on it,” he said.

“What hat? There’s no hat.”

The man bent to look under the chair and found a peaked cap lying nearby on the ground.

“It was on the chair. You threw it off.”

“I didn’t throw it off,” she said, pulling the chair toward herself.

“Gimme my chair back,” the man said, trying to pull it away from her. “You fat moose.”

“You call me names? You old bonebag.”

“Gimme. It was my chair. Gimme!”

They were both pulling on the chair, and Doug could see, the way they were doing this, if either lost a grip that person would fall backward and be hurt. People poolside were watching as though it were the morning program. Doug rose to intercede but before he could reach them the man yelled, “It’s my chair, you fat robber!” He pulled with great effort and collapsed, a kite falling. He was grabbing his chest and gasping. The regulars knew the signs. People were rushing on all sides, one man ministering to him, someone else running to use the security guard’s phone. The man lay on the ground next to his prized chair, and in a few minutes an ambulance came and took him away. People settled back to their places, late arrivals were told about what had happened, and in a while it was quiet at the pool again.

At night, Doug and his parents were sitting on the patio, looking out at the artificial lake.

“This is yours someday,” Frank said. “Yours and Marty’s.”

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Norma said of this small patch of space she owned. “To have something like this in your life.”

The incident at the pool seemed to have no particular effect on them. They had learned to live with ambulances. Doug was shaken by the occurrence. Comparing himself to his children or to yuppies, he was not extraordinarily younger than some of these people at the pool. Was this next? Your life is about a place to sit and you can have a heart attack over a chair?

A
NN TOWNSEND’S HOUSE OVERLOOKED
the harbor on a hill high above the town of Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas. A person could sit on her terrace, scan the boats and cruise ships in the harbor, sip daiquiris served by her houseboy, and congratulate oneself on one’s personal wonderfulness.

In the afternoon Doug drove a Jeep Ann kept at the house and they went to a cove facing the island of St. John. Ann was there for a meeting with Steve Clair, a developer who was converting a former beach club into a condominium complex. Ann’s financial adviser had made an investment for her in the development, and Clair, whom she knew in New York, had asked her to look at the site while she was on the island. Out of courtesy she came for a tour of the grounds. Clair was in his 40s, blond, tanned, six feet tall, casually dressed in a work shirt and dungarees. He showed them the site while referring to blueprints and drawings.

“Steve is a genius at real estate,” Ann said to Doug.

“If you know how to get work done down here, you can come out very well,” Clair said.

“All looks good to me. I gather I’m in it anyway,” Ann said.

“You are. Incidentally,” he said to Doug, “if you want to get in on this, have your lawyer call us in New York.”

That was how it was done in certain circles. If you belong—have your lawyer call us. Clair went off to his Jaguar and Doug and Ann strolled along the secluded beach.

“We’re going to make love right now, right here,” Doug said.

“Not in public.”

“This is not public. There’s no one here.”

“Doug, please.”

“Even if someone saw us, they wouldn’t quite believe what they were seeing,” and playfully he started to pull her to the sand, but she resisted.

They made love that night, after cocktails, after dinner, after the houseboy left, at the correct end point of the evening. On a beach the next day Doug found a Frisbee half buried in the sand, and he tried to toss it with Ann, but she did not care to join in. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her and say, “I like you, but I want you, just once, to throw a Frisbee, be spontaneous, sing ‘On the Road to Mandalay’ like Jerry Colonna.” He started to sing “On the Road to Mandalay” and when he got to where the flying fishes play, a few sunbathers looked up and Ann asked him to stop. They stayed in St. Thomas for another two days and nights, reading, talking about what they were reading, making love at the appropriate moment, after dinner, before sleep, a time in the Caribbean without tropical passion, rather, with tropical correctness.

A few days later in New York a charity ball was held for the Red Cross at the Waldorf, Ann listed on the program as a member of the organizing committee, while Doug was a “friend of the ball” for five hundred dollars. Ann was busy with other members of the committee talking to the press, and Doug stood by himself observing the assemblage. Tom Daley was there with his wife, Mary, an attractive woman in a glittering silver gown, and he introduced her to Doug.

“This man’s a quick thinker,” Daley said. “What have you got for me fast? A modest good deed.”

“Literacy. You manufacture computers. There’s a relationship. A person has to read to use them. Give some money to literacy programs.”

“See that?” Daley said. “I will, Doug.”

Daley excused himself and led his wife to the dance floor. Doug watched the dancers while he sipped champagne. He knew several people on the floor and they waved to him, a few executives he had met in business, people he knew through Ann and the Macklins. God! This is
my
crowd. I’ve become
they.

Susan phoned Doug to have a drink with her at the Pierre after work. She did not look well to him. Had he not been paying attention or was it that now, completely released from her, he saw her more clearly? He noticed wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, the faint beginnings of a redistribution of weight around her face and chin. No. I really don’t want this to be. But you, too, Susan. You’re looking older.

They talked about the children and Karen’s decision to stay in New York. Susan was preoccupied while they spoke, nervous, fidgeting with her glass, folding and refolding a cocktail napkin. Then she said, “Doug, I have something to tell you. Jerry and I are getting a divorce.”

“What?”

“We’ve brought in lawyers. We’ve told the children. I’m moving out this week.”

“You are?”

“He was having affairs. Whether that’s the symptom or the cause, I don’t know. But he was having them—” her voice broke. “From the beginning. I didn’t want to see it. Eventually the pattern was so evident, I couldn’t deny it anymore.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m coping.”

“How did the kids react?”

“They were upset. I had to give them a reason and I said, among other things, that Jerry and I were incompatible, and that didn’t go over too well. Then I told them Jerry was a bit immature for marriage, and I imagine they understood it had something to do with other women. He had a long talk with them privately. He was crying. He said he cared for them very much and that they should continue to be friends. I wish I could believe him. Looking back, I think I was just another possession. We all were. He got me the way he would a new car.”

“I’m very sorry for you.”

“I’ve been seeing a shrink. We discussed the impact on the children. Apparently it’s better than if they were little. She said it would be good if they didn’t create any reconciliation fantasies about us.”

“Right,” he said, finally beyond those himself.

“So I talked to them about the new apartment I was going to take and about fixing it up with them.”

“You’re going to leave that palace?”

“I don’t want to be there. I’m getting a smaller place on East Seventy-second Street. Poor Harry. I don’t know how he’s going to take it, sleeping in a hallway like other dogs.”

“All those rooms in all your houses—”

“Jerry’s going to keep the country house and sell the apartment. He’ll make a profit. And I’ll be all right. He’s paying for my new apartment, which he should, and I own a piece of the Flash stores.”

“Oh—”

“I thought of them. I planned them. I designed them. His imagination is limited to stories covering his tracks with women. Doug, I’m such a disaster. Two divorces!”

“Right now there are young girls going to schools and working in their first jobs trying to be you.”

“Thank you for saying that. But maybe they’d want my bankbook—they wouldn’t want the rest of it. My shrink said that Andy and Karen should come through this all right because they know that individually you and I have been ‘rocklike.’ ”

“That’s us, rocklike,” he responded softly.

“Who would have known? As a couple we ended up better in divorce than we were in marriage.”

He went home, exultant. The games with Broeden were over. Doug bought a bottle of chilled champagne and sat in his living room drinking adieu to Denim Jerry. He ordered a pizza, pizza and champagne, a goodbye Broeden party. About an hour later, having finished the bottle, tipsy, he went into the shower and tried to think of an appropriate song for the occasion, choosing to sing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” shouting, “I know it’s a girl’s song, neighbors, but the sentiment is right!”

Then the headache in the morning and the implications of the divorce. What view of love could Karen and Andy possibly take out of this, their parents divorced, their mother divorced twice? And Susan was going to have to begin all over. He wanted to believe that in Susan’s marriage to him she had married for love, and with Broeden, perhaps in part, she had married for convenience. Either way it didn’t work out for her.

Doug felt it was important to see the children soon to talk about the divorce. Andy was coming into New York to visit the new apartment, and Doug took Andy and Karen to lunch. They sat in a booth in the Blarney and the children tried to give him the impression that furnishing rooms in another new place was a positive experience, they were going to choose new art, new colors, but Doug could read the pain in their faces. We’re doing this again. It didn’t work out again. Humpty-Dumpty. He couldn’t put together the pieces of these marriages or remake his own. The children talked on, too fast, too enthusiastically, about interior-decoration details, trying to conceal the pain from him and themselves. They stopped. Karen and Andy were still, seemingly exhausted from pretending interior decoration was the real concern.

“I want you to know,” he said, “even though this marriage didn’t work out, that doesn’t mean love isn’t possible.”

“Your marriage didn’t work out either,” Andy said.

“I’m well aware of that fact, Eunice,” he answered, quoting a line from a funny television commercial they all liked, and they smiled.

“Maybe when I’m older there’ll be something invented beside marriage,” Karen said.

“The important thing is for you not to decide from this that love can’t happen. You’ve got to look at my marriage to Mom and Mom’s to Jerry and say to yourselves that we don’t speak for you. That you can fall in love and get married in spite of us. You’ve got to listen to the most old-fashioned, syrupy, June-moon sentiments about love and believe them for yourselves. And at your gloomiest, most cynical times—”

“—which may be right now,” Andy said.

“Fair enough. And when you’re older, I want you to think back on this moment, this very instant, and I want you to remember that I said to you, the most important thing in my life, what I care about more than anything, is being your father. And I wouldn’t be your father, and you wouldn’t be here, if once upon a time I hadn’t fallen in love with your mother and she hadn’t fallen in love with me.”

Doug was on a large powerboat, possibly a yacht, he couldn’t tell the difference. The last boat he’d been on was a rowboat in Central Park. This boat was called
The Red Herring
and was owned by Sy Chapman of Chapman Realty. They were bursting through the waters of the Hudson on a tour of Manhattan Island so that Chapman could point out his real-estate holdings along the way. A crew of three were doing boat tasks while Doug and Chapman surveyed the skyline. Chapman was five feet six, in his late 50s, and so round his shape looked like it was created by someone rolling dough for a large pizza.

“You like it so far?” he asked Doug.

“It’s sort of my own Circle Line Cruise.”

“I’m one of the biggest owners of residential. Commercial there’s bigger. Residential, I’m tops. Right in there, I got,” he said pointing to the shore. “And there, I got.”