A Dual Inheritance (28 page)

“Tell me everything,” she said, while simultaneously waving over the bartender.

“Well,” said Ed, “what you see is what you get.”

“In that case, I see an expensive Italian suit and …” She tilted her head. “Someone’s been jogging.”

“Tennis,” said Ed. “I’ve taken up tennis.”

“I bet you have. And don’t kid yourself, because of course I already know about your wild success. I know all about it. Ear to the ground and all that. Hey,” she said, her brown eyes shining, “congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“No, really. You’ve done what you set out to do. How often does that happen?”

“Okay, but what about you? I hear you’re a force.
Powerhouse
is actually how you were described.”

“Though,” said Connie, after some modest and satisfied smiling of her own, “if you recall, it’s not exactly what I set out to do.”

“So what happened with the dentist? Son of a bitch got your virginity, I suppose.”

“He’s a dermatologist. And he did; it’s true. But I have to hand it to you—you gave it a noble effort.”

“Good old college try.” Ed drank the last of his beer. “Maybe that’s where that dopey expression comes from. Connie, it’s so good to see you.”

And despite one quick kiss later that evening that neither of them would ever mention, they quickly settled into the kind of fast friendship that can mysteriously and quickly transpire between two equally busy people who never have time for anything or anyone. That they were not dating seemed a mutual certainty, though Ed couldn’t exactly say why. Connie was funny and smart and attractive. They coveted the same real estate, ate the same food, wanted the same two kids, and neither was stuck on having boys or girls or both. They even talked about how neither of them had any interest in moving to the suburbs when those fantasy children arrived and how Manhattan was the best place they could
think of to raise children. Throughout the month of September they had dinner most nights and met up at open houses each Sunday (Connie was looking to buy a condo), which was routinely followed by Chinese food at Ed’s place.

“This is a fabulous table,” Connie said, while pausing her thorough gnawing on a sparerib. She was an enthusiastic but extremely careful eater; he could tell she relished each bite.

“Really?” asked Ed. “I had no idea.” Connie had the ability to render something or someone
fabulous
or
ridiculous
, and once she’d said it he was rarely able to look at something or someone the same way again.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s great design. You can’t argue with great design.”

He’d been toying with the idea of buying something bigger, with a glass top, but he didn’t mention it. This white square Formica table that he’d bought at a thrift shop on West 23rd Street? It would not be going anywhere—not for a good long while.

“The dermatologist left me,” said Connie, as if she’d finally decided to respond to a question Ed had asked over a month ago.

“Yeah,” said Ed. “I was beginning to get that feeling. I was hoping it had been you who’d done the leaving.”

“Thanks. But, you know what? It was a long time ago at this point. Bastard’s remarried. Three kids.”

“Connie, I have to tell you: He wasn’t in your league.”

She smiled uncharacteristically shyly. “Come on, you never even met him.”

“I could tell,” Ed said. “Guy was a zero.”

“He was!” Connie said. “He really really was! But listen to this: I truly thought if I didn’t get engaged before I was twenty-two, then what was the point of having moved to Boston? What was the point of having gone to college? Can you imagine? And now …”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Out with it.”

“I’m afraid I’m not going to get to have kids.” She coughed, and Ed realized she was tearing up.

“Oh yes, you will,” Ed said.

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Okay, then,” she said, taking a sip of beer.

“Okay.”

“Thanks for saying so.”

“No problem.”

Ed looked out the window at the bright lights of Manhattan. The sound of an airplane flying overhead, sirens blaring—it was all muted through the thick glass. Connie cleared their plates and put them in the sink. She ran the faucet. He could almost imagine that she was his wife. During the day he looked down on the treetops of Central Park; this room was flooded with so much light that sometimes it felt as if he was living in a terrarium, but now the dark night made that vision impossible and the view seemed downright desolate.

“I bet Helen Ordway has kids,” said Connie, turning from the sink. “I bet they’re beautiful.”

Ed shook his head.

“No kids?”

“Nope. Not that I know of.”

“But she married Hugh Shipley, I bet.”

“Yes,” said Ed. “That she did.”

It was three more Sundays before Ed finally told Connie what had happened between Helen and him, to which she replied:

“Are you
insane
?”

“No,” said Ed, opening another beer. “But I was for a while there.”

“I bet,” she said, nodding.

“For a while, I really think I was.”

“That bitch,” she said.

“No,” said Ed. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh,” said Connie, raising one eyebrow, the way she did sometimes; Ed could never tell if she was aware of doing so. “Oh, okay.” When Connie bit her lip, Ed knew that she was practically begging him to notice how she was, in fact, refraining from offering an opinion.

“What.”

“Of course.”

“What.”

“She got to you. You thought you loved her, that you really loved her, and she left you with nothing more than a clichéd note on a pillow.” Connie waited for Ed’s reaction, but he didn’t know what to say. He had never told anyone about what had happened with Helen, and the shock of his confession was distracting.

“It was only a couple of nights,” he said. “That’s nothing.”

I’m so happy
, Helen had said on their second morning. He remembered the yellow sheets, the promise of a perfect day; they’d drifted back to sleep. She was gone only hours later.

He’d torn up the note she’d left him, with the words
I’m sorry
in her always-surprising handwriting, which leaned to the side as if the words were all windswept, like her hair that night after the jazz club: windswept and, yes, drunk, too, just short of falling down. He’d torn up the note and immediately regretted having done so. As he recalled that windswept hair and how she’d tried to light a cigarette backward and how her face had never been more intent, he remembered, too, how she’d seen the comedy in the backward cigarette immediately, how all week long she’d laughed harder than he’d ever seen her laugh. He’d even gathered the pieces of the note from the dust-coated floor, dumbass that he’d become.

And as if the note had not been enough, as if Ed might have, in fact, been in danger of missing the point, Helen also telephoned him from Idlewild, before she boarded her plane. She hadn’t been crying or pleading or sweet. She’d told him simply that she’d made a mistake; they had both done something awful.

“That’s why you’re different,” said Connie now. Her dark hair, he noticed suddenly, was oddly unruly—loose from any barrettes or tortoise combs. To Ed’s surprise, he realized that she looked better this way.

“I’m not different.”

She leaned across the table, taking both of his hands. Her nails were unpolished, her olive skin was smooth. “You’re heartbroken.”

Ed shook his head, but he wondered, for the very briefest of moments, if this was why he was still unattached at thirty.

“But you are,” she nearly whispered.

Your heart is fine
, he’d said to Hugh, and, most important, he’d meant it. He’d never had a friend like Hugh, someone he’d loved like a brother, with the genuine depth of feeling that didn’t need much else, including like-mindedness. And yet he’d betrayed Hugh horribly, in the very worst possible way. He’d known it would be up to him to distance himself, to do his duty and lose touch.

And he did. It was easy.

He’d read about their marriage in the papers. How they’d shockingly eloped in Africa, and how apparently—and Ed thought it was telling that neither of them had ever mentioned this, not even as a joke—Shipleys and Smythes (Mrs. Ordway’s family) had been marrying since before the Civil War. He had cried—wept, really—when he’d seen Helen’s bridal photograph in
The New York Times
. She must have flown in and had it taken; surely she would have done at least that for her furious parents. It was so stiff and so unlike her, similar to how a corpse could never look like a living soul (and leave it to him to think of a bride as a corpse—God, he’d gotten morose). The first wake he’d ever attended had been for his favorite secretary’s mother. He’d stood with Hy Bechstein at some funeral parlor in Queens, and upon seeing how that poor woman’s skin looked no more alive than clay, Ed had said:
The Jews have the right idea on this one, don’t you think? Get it done in twenty-four hours, thank you. Plant me like a goddamn tree
.

Connie pulled her hands away, and when she did, he felt the strangest
sense of betrayal. As if Connie’s hands, in fact, belonged to him. He looked beyond her, beyond the windows, as if the city itself could offer succor. “It’s raining,” he said.

“Look at that.”

“You thought she was a bitch?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Connie said.

“But she was your friend.”

Connie nodded, almost sadly. “
Kind of
. She was kind of my friend. She wasn’t exactly the type to stay up late telling secrets.”

“Were you?”

“No, I guess not. I think we both wanted to be that type, though. Maybe that’s why we liked each other.”

“Hmm,” intoned Ed. He had no idea what Connie was talking about. “You think I’m different from back then?”

She nodded in that semi-sad way again.

“How?”

“Ed, it was almost ten years ago,” she said, suddenly dismissive. “We are who we are.”

“That was a fun time, though,” said Ed. “Wasn’t it?”

He never asked Connie to accompany him to various business functions; he didn’t want to complicate matters by confusing their comforting routine with something that seemed like a real date. But Hy took a table at a Sloan–Kettering benefit, and the thought of someone’s wife inquiring, between a too-cold iceberg wedge and medallions of overcooked beef, why Ed had not asked her too-good-for-him-anyway friend out on a second date inspired Ed to ask Connie Graff to join him.

He picked her up in the marble lobby of her building, on an unseasonably warm evening, and when the elevator doors opened and Connie stepped out, he felt a sudden and very real urge to tell her to get back inside the elevator. With him. He was always a sucker for a dramatic dress, and Connie was wearing a silver cocktail number, cinched in at her small waist.

“You look dynamite,” said Ed.

“You do, too,” she replied, before smiling at the doorman. “Don’t wait up, Rodrigo,” she said lightly, which made Rodrigo—who resembled the great Tito Puente—chuckle.

“This him?” asked Rodrigo.

“Rodrigo Vasquez, meet Ed Cantowitz,” she said, and Ed shook his hand before Rodrigo opened the door for both of them, ushering them out into the warm night.

“Well, you two seem to have a cozy routine,” said Ed. “Cab or walk?” he asked.

“Have you even noticed my shoes?” she asked.

“I’d been focused a bit higher.” He shrugged, sticking his hand out for a cab.

“You never surprise me,” she said, smiling.

“You make that sound like a good thing.” A cab swerved over to the curb.

“Well,” she teased, “who’s to say it isn’t?”

Ed opened the door and shuffled across the black vinyl seat first, the way Helen had taught him to; Helen, who, after he’d held open the taxi door for her that first evening together in Manhattan, had corrected him.
The polite thing to do?
she offered, once she’d told the driver their destination:
Give the lady the shortest distance to slide
.

Shouldn’t I hold the door open, though?
he’d asked.

She’d shaken her head, though not—he’d noted—without a note of apology for pointing out this gap in his knowledge.

And now here he was, nearly a decade later, still … what? Wallowing?

What’s wrong with you?
He could almost hear Helen hiss at him now, as the taxi driver slammed on his horn.
You’re perfect for each other!

That evening, as if guided by something that he could only later (graspingly) identify as inevitability, he took Connie in his arms on the dance floor at the Plaza. She smelled like cherries and baby powder. When
they didn’t say a word to each other as they danced to the swooning music, when they danced a waltz and then a fox-trot so blatantly well together that not only Bechstein but also Steve and Barbara Osheroff told them so, Ed put his hand on Connie’s neck and said, “What do you say we get out of here?”

She smiled, almost primly.

Her apartment was closer and, because they had not stopped kissing since they’d gotten into the taxi, proximity was a deciding factor. Ed briefly wondered about Rodrigo seeing him and disapproving, then banished the thought as ridiculous (who cared what her goddamn doorman thought!). He told himself that Connie was no longer a virgin, for God’s sake, and was more than capable of making her own decisions. He was definitely attracted to her—he would not be burrowing his nose in her powdery neck if he were not—but part of his urgency was rooted in the fear of stopping. He knew he feared stopping and becoming too conscious of what he was doing. He feared knowing with complete certainty that he was making a choice. But he was also dead sick of feeling this way.

“Whoa,” said Connie, “easy, tiger.”

Ed forced a laugh.

“You’re not drunk, are you?”

“Yes,” he said, “I am.”

“How drunk?” asked Connie, pulling ever so slightly away.

It was cool inside Connie’s apartment. She didn’t turn on the lights or ask him if he wanted anything to drink. She only walked toward her bedroom, and he followed. Streetlights streamed through the windows, allowing Ed to see her perfectly made bed. For a moment he only wanted to lie down and fall asleep. He turned her around so that her back was facing him and ably undid several tiny buttons along her spine.
She’s too thin
is what he was thinking, as he removed her silver dress. But she turned around and her breasts were in his hands and they were heavy and perfect, and she reached up for his shoulders as they fell onto the bed in their underwear.