50 (9 page)

John McCarthy, Doug’s former colleague at the
New York Post,
asked Doug to meet him at Brooks Brothers. It was Susan who had originally encouraged Doug to shop at Brooks, and McCarthy followed Doug’s example. Now, in keeping with his position as a prominent sports-journalism packager, McCarthy had his suits custom-made there. McCarthy’s wife, a nurse, worked in Westchester, so McCarthy sometimes asked Doug to help him at Brooks with a second opinion on alterations. In his 50s, with thinning brown hair, McCarthy had a light complexion that turned ruddy when he was drinking. He also had a beer belly which Brooks’s custom tailoring could do little to conceal. Doug observed the latest fitting and confirmed that the tailors were doing their best. They adjourned for a dinner of hamburgers and beer at the Blarney.

“So how are you getting along with Hopalong Cassidy?” McCarthy asked.

“He’s not a cowboy, he wants you to know. Even as he rides over everything we were brought up on.”

“Is he giving you a hard time?”

“I think I amuse him. He seems to be making a cause out of me.”

“Well, you’re getting good money, good exposure, pretty good license to write what you want. Where is it better?”

“I feel like I’m in some terrible newspaper-sci-fi movie, ‘Hecht and MacArthur Meet Computer Man.’ ”

“You could try freelancing.”

“It’s too unstable a life for me, John. Not with my bills.”

“Look at it this way. You’ve got something I don’t have: You write pretty much what you want. I have to take what’s out there.”

“He’s like a dark wizard. Whatever I may think, he keeps building circulation.”

“Do you want to try ‘As Told To’ books? I can help. I can’t write them all.”

“That’s nice of you, John.”

“You’re the custodian of my secret information. You knew me when I was a good writer.”

“That’s supposed to inspire me to join you?”

“I just turned down a book you can have. Pat Cawley, America’s new tennis phenom.”

“He’s a racket-throwing, foulmouthed brat.”

“That’s the title,
Brat!
The money’s pretty good. There’s got to be a fantasy you could fulfill with the money.”

I’ve got a fantasy. I’m back on the
New York Post.
We’re together as a family again. We’re at Tanglewood. Susan and I are lying on a blanket. The children are playing tag nearby before the concert begins. Susan and I are watching them, our fingertips touching, smiling at our good fortune. The concert is about to begin and the children come and lie near us, fitting themselves back into a pattern with us. We are arranged as if a painter has placed us there, the four of us again.

“Doug, where are you?”

“I’m sorry, John. I’m going to pass. Now if it were Hulk Hogan,” he said unseriously.

“I’m already doing Hulk Hogan.”

Several weeks later Susan called Doug at home in the evening.

“I have some important news. Doug, I’m getting married.”

I have some important news. Those were the words she used when she first told him she was pregnant with Andy. She sat across from him on the floor that time, took his hands in hers and said, “I have some important news.” Was it intentional? Or was it a phrase she was accustomed to using at crucial times? He heard himself saying the right things. “Congratulations. I hope you’ll be very happy.” The words had nothing to do with him. What he wanted was to yell,
how?
How did you do it? I’m not even out of the starting gate and you’re getting married. And what happens with the children, how do we live, how does this work? “I wish you the best,” he said.

He imagined himself on a track with Susan, running along as she drew next to him, then passed him, pulling farther and farther away, receding from view, their history together disappearing until he could no longer see her with his middle-age eyes.

A
N ENTITY EXISTED IN
his life that took precedence over an ex-wife announcing her remarriage. The column. The work. Three times a week the column had to appear. A columnist cannot dwell on the fact that he doesn’t have someone other than a platonic friend to see a movie with, while his ex-wife has her situation so under control she is already replacing him, that this person he carried along financially waits until he is off the premises before she earns the money which, if she had earned it then, might have reduced the tension that contributed to the end of the marriage. The screen of the monitor was waiting. He felt its impatience. Fill up my spaces, man. I’m only here for words, and where are they? Millions of dollars of technological research to create me and you sit there thinking about your ex-wife. You’re going to have sexual fantasies about her, I bet, you pervert. Come on, write something. All the writers around and I end up with you. I could be working for John “As Told To” McCarthy. James Michener. He’d have chapters by now. Finally! Players’ injuries on artificial turf. Don’t ask me what I think of it. I’m only interested in quantity.

On hearing news of the marriage from Doug, Bob Kleinman said he wanted to analyze the information. Apparently to emphasize the seriousness with which he viewed this, he asked Doug to visit him at his law office.

“I don’t trust a woman in this situation. Her payment of the bills, the new man. You may be looking at a move on her part to alter the arrangement with the children, based on a change of circumstances.”

“I can think of many ways of getting depressed on my own. I don’t need help.”

“This is what you have lawyers for, to point out what could happen.”

“She’s not going to alter the arrangement. I know Susan.”

“You know Susan. I’ve seen brother and sister fighting over objects, furniture, jewelry when a parent died, relatives screaming and pulling hair over who was promised the pearls.”

“All we have here is her intention to get married.”

“She’s establishing a stable financial situation with a husband, while you, a bachelor, are screwing all over the place.”

“Could we define our terms?”

“Her lawyer could claim this. You’re very vulnerable on custody right now. You might want to consider moving for sole custody yourself. Then we’d settle for the status quo, which keeps her from getting them.”

“Are you looking for a little extra work? Do you have some children’s orthodontics to pay for?”

Bob’s pessimism troubled Doug sufficiently for him to ask Susan if they could get together and she offered breakfast at the coffee shop. Doug started to look for one of his better shirts that morning and then said the hell with it. He took the first shirt on top in the drawer. She didn’t care how he looked, she wouldn’t be impressed one way or the other. She was getting married.

Susan was radiant, a person who had managed to find a marriage in the singles world of New York, the middle-aged singles world, which made this more of a win.

“I should ask the musical question—who?”

“His name is Jerry Broeden. We met about a year ago and it got serious about six months ago. And we decided to get married.”

“What is his field?”

“Apparel. He manufactures denim.”

Denim. Laughable. Once again the doctor’s daughter doesn’t marry a professional. A sports columnist possibly outranked a denim man on the social ladder. And then he figured it out. Denim. Did he have any idea how much denim was worn?

“He must do pretty well.”

“You can’t believe how much denim is out there.”

“Right.”

“He’s very nice, Doug, very playful with the children.”

“Where do you plan to live?”

“We’re buying a co-op on Central Park West.”

“Are you?”

“There are families in the building. The kids should like it.”

“It’s a big step to take children into your life. He must love you.”

“Yes, I think he does.”

Doug appraised her over their drinks, a desirable, successful woman. When you marry young, you marry potential. I married the potential and this Jerry Broeden comes along and claims the results. He gets the career woman with her picture in
Women’s Wear Daily
and her aura of success. He doesn’t get the early childhood illnesses either, the fevers in the night as the children thrash around and you cannot absorb their pain for them, the chicken pox and worrying how badly scarred they will be. He gets none of that. He doesn’t even get the bills to handle all by himself. He gets to sleep with a star and to sleep nights.

“Susan, how are we going to work this with the children?”

“The way we have. They’ll have two weeks with you and two weeks with us. Do you have any other thoughts?”

No, just that I could kiss you for that. I knew you wouldn’t try to take the kids for yourself, and I never would have done it to you. You know that about me, don’t you?

“That sounds fine.”

They finished, walked outside and as they were about to part he did kiss her spontaneously on the cheek in thanks. He quickly rushed off before either of them would have to react to this.

In the following days he never saw so much denim. Everywhere he looked he noticed it, on the street, in his closets. His assumption was that Jerry Broeden manufactured all the denim he was seeing. Jeannie told him that Broedenco was one of the largest manufacturers of denim in the United States. Broeden bought himself a family with his denim money. Doug had worn out the images of Susan with men, now he thought about the theft of his place, this man padding around the house while the children were there.

At the children’s request, Doug served his tuna croquettes, a dish handed down from his parents’ kitchen, the artlessness of the meal amusing him. On the table it looked a step above what they might have eaten on a lucky night in
The Grapes of Wrath.
He wondered what other single parents served their children. If he were the kind of man who owned a show dog, would his children be eating tuna croquettes?

“So Mom’s getting married,” he said, unable to make it sound casual.

The children looked at each other as if they had been waiting for this.

“Yes, that’s true,” Andy said.

“What is he like?”

“He’s all right,” Karen offered. “He kids around a lot.”

“In what way?”

“He’s kind of mischievous,” Andy said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Fooling around kinds of things,” Karen said.

He saw how easy it would be for him to be subversive, to be sarcastic about “Denim Jerry.” That could fit nicely. And how did “Denim Jerry” fool around today? An ongoing game he could play with them and it could start right here, they had given him the opportunity. And nothing would be gained. The best for their well-being, he conceded, would be for them to like their stepfather and be comfortable with him and happy living with the sonofabitch.

“And I hear you’re moving. Have you seen the new apartment?”

They nodded yes.

“Is it nice?”

Andy said, “Yes, it’s nice,” with such reserve Doug interpreted it to mean the new apartment was huge.

He had been attempting to work with the survey guidelines on subject matter. One area he was supposed to write about and had been ignoring was personal fitness, which he simply didn’t consider a sport. Reynolds sent him little reminders on the computer, “Are you fit today, Doug?” “Fitness keeps you and your boss happy.” And after a couple of weeks a change in tone, “Let’s shape up on the fitness front.” And finally, “Where is a fitness column?” To quiet the screen, he wrote a column about jogging, surely jogging falls under personal fitness, Robby. He called jogging the castor oil of physical activity, so bad it had to be good for you. He included his own jogging experience, watching the world’s tushes pass him by as he plodded along. How it was best when he ran with the dog while listening on a personal stereo to National Public Radio. With the dog and the news program he managed to place as many layers as possible between himself and the act of jogging. Reynolds responded, “The jogging column barely covers you on personal fitness, but I’ll let it pass,” sending this on the computer, obviously savoring the notion of being an omnipotent high-tech Wizard of Oz.

On a Saturday evening when the children were at Susan’s, Andy called and asked if he could stop by for a schoolbook he had left at the apartment. When he arrived for the book, he was with a girl. She was chubby, with a sweet face.

“This is Lesa. Dad, Lesa.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Gardner. I’ve read many of your columns.”

“Required reading,” Andy said, smiling.

“I’d like to be a writer some day. And I like sports. I’m on field hockey,” she said.

“Dad was an athlete once,” Andy said.

“Really?”

“I played some baseball. High school and college. A long time ago. It was in black and white.”

Doug worked, wrote infrequent columns to the surveys, marginally close to his quota, read books and periodicals at night. When he was in elementary school he and his classmates would go to Rockefeller Center on Saturdays for school projects and wander in and out of the tourist bureaus of Latin American countries asking, “Got any information?” and they would be given tourist information. He had information but no woman to share it with. A new feeling at night began to overshadow the anxiety attacks and the irony attacks, and it was loneliness. The kind you might have if you go into Macy’s to buy a lamp for your bedroom and you see a young couple in their 30s buying a sofa together, holding hands, and you find yourself watching them like an old person on a park bench looking at the young ones. This was a Frank Sinatra “Wee Small Hours of the Morning” loneliness, arrangement by Nelson Riddle.

Doug was ready for phone numbers from any source. He went out with a pastry chef, courtesy of his brother, an airline stewardess from John McCarthy, a librarian from the Kleinmans, a divorced housewife from Bob’s secretary’s cousin. A new veterinarian, unmarried, came into the office where he took Harry for his appointments and Doug went out with her, meaning
Harry
had fixed him up.

Some of these women he saw for a drink or dinner and not again, some he slept with and did not see again. He was dating wildly in a mad attempt to do what? What am I doing, trying to meet someone fantastic I can elope with before Susan gets to the finish line? Or just trying to meet someone interesting, whatever that means. A couple of women he saw once perhaps he should have seen a second time, one or two he saw a second time perhaps he shouldn’t have seen again. His need to have someone in his life was turning in on itself, he was creating social chaos, losing his judgment, and he didn’t know what he was looking for any longer. He went to a Columbus Avenue restaurant called Pasta!!! A West Side newspaper had written that Wednesday night was “networking” night at the restaurant, young professionals came for “an exchange of resources,” and since he was desperate, he attempted to “network.” He watched as people not anywhere near his age exchanged business cards and interest in each other.