Love's Little Instruction Book (13 page)

She glanced at him. “He was there, of course. And eventually he came out. I stayed long enough to tell him I was leaving him. I still can’t believe how calm I was when I told him. I just said goodbye and got in the car and drove off. I went to the airport, and threw the picnic basket out the window on the way. I peeled off my birth control patch and left it in the trash in the ladies’ room. I charged my plane ticket on his company credit card and flew to our house on the Oregon coast. I always loved that house, and it was the one place I thought of that I could just go and think.

“I cried and I thought and I cried some more. Eventually I called my mother and told her. Then I called a lawyer.” She smiled. “I think he probably thought he’d hit the mother lode when he’d heard who I was divorcing. But I didn’t want it. Not his name, not his money, not his property. I didn’t want any part of him anymore. I realized that I’d left behind my life when I married him. I’d never finished college, had never held more than a part time job, and I’d always lived in his family’s houses. I decided that if I took his money or anything that had been ‘ours,’ that people would always think of me as his ex. I wouldn’t be known for my own self, but I’d be the woman who’d gotten her money by marrying well then divorcing. Then again, I didn’t want to make his infidelities a matter of public record. If I divorced him on the grounds of his infidelity, then everyone would know. I could have gotten a bigger settlement by making the divorce his fault, but it wasn’t worth the humiliation, you know?”

Dave made a noncommittal noise in his throat and reached his arm along the back of the porch swing and just waited, letting her talk.

“So I got my divorce, and my freedom and my life. I put the best spin I could on it.” She laughed. “I even threw myself a divorce party. Invited all of my girlfriends to our house in the Hamptons for an afternoon of champagne and men bashing. We burned my marriage license, threw darts at a picture of Jason, and topped it all off by passing out my wedding china and taking turns smashing it in the driveway. The next day I moved back to Boston.”

Dave waited.

After a long moment, Denise sighed. “I try not to look back. Not ever. But every now and then, it ambushes me. Like with that cake topper. I try to celebrate my singleness. And I really do believe that my divorce was a good thing. But you’re right. It really is sad that it didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry, Denise.”

She smiled sadly. “So am I.”

“You’re better of without him,” he told her.

She looked at him then. “Thanks.”

She leaned back against the swing and rocked for several beats. Dave had the sense that she was debating with herself whether or not to tell him something, and so he waited.

At last she sighed. “I feel like a fool in so many ways. For falling in love with him. For marrying him. For giving up all of the things that were for me so that I could help him get ahead.” She drew in a deep breath, then said, “For not being interesting enough to keep him from straying.”

Dave defended her immediately. “That wasn’t your choice, that was his.”

“I know. But I wondered for a long time, what was it about her that made her more desirable than me? Why didn’t it work? What could I have done differently?”

“Nothing,” Dave affirmed. “You did nothing wrong. Look, did you have an affair? Did you neglect him?”

“No.”

“Some guys are just thrill seekers,” he told her. “They like the challenge and excitement of finding a woman, but they don’t realize what a good thing they had all along.”

The corner of her mouth quirked. “That’s what my mother says. Like she would know. She and my dad were together for a quarter of a century and never so much as looked at other people.”

“Well, they might have looked,” Dave mused, “but they had too much respect for each other to have acted on it.”

“In a way I suppose it was a blessing,” she told him. “That I found out when I did. That we didn’t have any kids yet. That I still had my family to come home to.”

“You’re better off,” he said again.

She drew in a deep breath. “Yeah,” she replied. “I guess I am. I’ve got my freedom, my mom, a kick-ass new job. Hell, I’ve even got my face plastered on billboards and buses all over Boston. But you know what? The bottom line is, I’m happy. Happier now than I had been in a long time.”

Looking at her face, he could see both pride and the satisfaction there, so he simply said, “I believe you.”

She smiled at him. “You’re a nice guy, you know that?”

He snorted. “I do my best.”

She surveyed the mess that they had made of her mother’s porch; the drop clothes and sand papers and scrapers that sat waiting for them. “I guess we should get to work,” she told him finally. “I don’t think a therapy session was on today’s agenda.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you just needed to talk,” he said. “I don’t mind. Really.” He reached over and gave her knee a friendly squeeze. “Maybe I’ll need someone to listen someday myself.”

She smiled at him. “You? What secrets could you possibly have?”

“Oh,” he said with a knowing tone. “You’d be surprised.”

“I don’t get women,” Kirk announced during half time of the Boston College Florida State football game on a late October afternoon.

Dave arched an eyebrow in his friend’s direction. Kirk generally considered himself a ladies’ man. “Is there any particular reason why you say this now?”

“It’s this book I’ve been reading. Here’s this woman, right? And she enters into a marriage of convenience with this multimillionaire. He’s got a bit of a stick up his butt and she’s a bit of a wild child, but she starts to get under his skin and they’re great in the stack together. So finally, the reason they were living together gets resolved and he realizes that he doesn’t want to be without her, so he asks her to marry him. Get this, she says ‘No’ because he’s never used the words ‘I love you.’ I mean, how stupid is that?”

“So what happens then?” Ghoulie asked, tilting his head curiously.

“The poor sap has to grovel and tell her that he loves her. It’s like they’re magic words or something. Would a woman really do that? They’re just words.”

“I don’t know,” Ghoulie mused. “Words mean a lot to women. They remember things that we don’t, like the anniversary of when your meet, and exactly what you said when you asked them out for the first time.”

“Do you remember that stuff?” Kirk asked him.

“No, but Shelby does.”

“Maybe it’s just that words mean more to women than they do the men,” Dave said. “I mean, you tell women you love them all the time, don’t you, Kirkie?”

“Yeah. But that’s part of the dance. They expect to hear it.”

“Maybe you just answered your own question,” Dave pointed out.

Kirk looked over at him in surprise. “Yeah, but to turn down marriage just because a guy has never said the words?”

“Do you mean it when you say you love them?” Ghoulie asked.

“I mean it at the time.”

“He means it as long as he thinks it’s going to help him get into their pants,” Dave clarified. “But I don’t think it means to him what it means to women.”

Ghoulie nodded sagely. “I think it means a lot to them.”

“But why would the same words mean different things to men than to women?” Kirl insisted.

Ghoulie shrugged. “I guess that they’re just different from us.”

• • •

“So do you want to go?” Presley asked, jarring Denise from her thoughts.

“You really want to go?” Denise asked, feeling somewhat surprised. She wouldn’t have imagined that a visit to an art exhibit — even a visiting exhibit of Rodin’s sculpture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts — would have been of interest to Presley.

“Sure. The articles in the paper say that it’s great, and he’s one of the few sculptors I actually know anything about. I saw a movie about his mistress about ten years ago. Did you know that she actually created a lot of his works and he got the credit? The pig.”

“Uh, I think that’s still just a theory, Pres. There’s no proof either way,” Denise said. “They definitely influenced each other’s work, though.”

Presley shook her head, setting her lucky dice earrings into motion. “They wouldn’t have put it in the movie if they didn’t think it was so,” she said stubbornly. “It was just so sad.”

“They say that he asked for her at the end of his life,” Denise told her, wondering if the knowledge would soothe Presley at all. “They brought him his wife instead, but he kept saying that she wasn’t the one that he wanted.”

“The pig,” Presley said. “He wasn’t fair to her, either.”

Denise just smiled. She was right, actually. It wasn’t fair. “Do you have a favorite work of his?” she asked, hoping to get Presley off of the gossip and onto the art that they’d be seeing.

“I like them all. Are they all nudes? I think they are. I only remember ever seeing the nudes — The Kiss, The Thinker … ” She looked up at Denise. “What else did he do?”

“Balzac, the Gates of Hell, the Burghers of Ghent … ” Presley’s face was blank. Denise had a sudden thought. “Would you mind if I asked Dave DiSciullo to come with us? We were talking about sculpture at the beach last summer and I think he’d really like it.”

Presley shrugged. “The more, the merrier. Think he’ll come?”

“Hopefully.”

• • •

Dave was thrilled beyond words when Denise asked him to accompany her to the Rodin exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. He hadn’t made his next move yet — if he didn’t make an overt move toward her, then she couldn’t turn him down — but he was very, very encouraged that things were going well. The day she asked him to go to the Rodin exhibit with her, he felt like he could have leaped to the top of the highest mountain. Of all the men she knew, she wanted to go to the museum with him.
Him
. It was almost too wonderful to contemplate.

Right up until she’d said, “You don’t mind if Presley comes along with us, do you? She said she wanted to go, too.”

Presley Rosenberg. There, standing between him and Denise in front of some of the most sensual, erotic art of the modern age. It was almost too awful to contemplate.

But what could he say? His choices were clear: either he could bite the bullet and let Presley be included as a third wheel, or he could refuse Denise, missing his chance to be with her and maybe give her the horribly wrong impression that he wasn’t interested in spending any more time with her. He opened his mouth to accept, just as it occurred to him that two could play this “love me, love my friend” game.

“That would be great,” he told her. “Would you mind if I asked my buddy Kirk to come, too? He’d probably like it.” There, he thought, feeling rather proud of himself. At least now he’d have his own third wheel along to run interference with Presley.

Denise seemed surprised, but didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” she said. “If you want.”

“You’ll like Kirk,” he told her. “I’ve known him forever.”

“Is he into art?” she asked.

“To be honest, I haven’t got a clue.”

• • •

To be perfectly honest, Kirk and museums went together about as well as hubcaps and linoleum. They just weren’t even in the same hemisphere. But a friend was a friend and Dave had come through with enough favors for Kirk over the years that it didn’t take much reminding for Dave to call in the debt. Besides, Kirk was curious about the object of Dave’s affection. He wanted to meet this woman for himself, to check her out and see if she was — and this was his exact word — “Daveworthy.”

So it was that Dave and Kirk were loitering on the steps of the Museum of Fine Arts on a windy Saturday afternoon in late November. Kirk, in his black leather bomber jacket, rocked on his heels with his hands in his pockets while Dave craned his neck every few seconds, looking this way and that past the swirling leaves on the sidewalk as they waited for the women to arrive. “So you want me to run interference for you with Presley?” Kirk asked.

Dave glanced back down Huntington Avenue one more time. “That would be awesome. If there’s anything,
anything
she says that she’s interested in, offer to take her up to look at it. I’ll try to keep Denise focused on something else. We can pick a place to hook up again later.” He looked up at Kirk. “I really appreciate this, buddy.”

“Aw, don’t mention it,” Kirk replied. “It was about time I finally got around to visiting this place, anyway.”

“There they are.” Dave took his hands out of his pockets and stepped forward to meet Denise and Presley, who were walking up the sidewalk toward them. “Hey there,” he called.

Denise and Presley wore identical smiles. “Hey,” Presley called back. “Been waiting long?”

“Just got here,” Dave said, ignoring the chill that had seemingly seeped into his bones while they’d waited. “Presley and Denise, I’d like you to meet my friend, Kirk James. Kirk, I think you’ve probably seen Presley here and there over the years; she mans the reception desk at WMTR, and this is Denise Johnson, our newest deejay.”

Kirk took his hand out of his jacket pocket and extended it to each of the women, smiling what Dave knew Kirk believed was his most charming, ladies’ man smile. Dave had always thought it looked as phony as hell, but Presley and Denise were smiling back. “I think I remember Presley. You’ve gone to some of the station functions as well, haven’t you? The end of summer bashes and some of the concerts?”

Dave had occasionally gotten comp tickets to station sponsored functions — the kind of event that the station staged then gave away tickets to as prizes — and had shared them with Kirk and Ghoulie and Shelby. Presley, always one to socialize, never seemed to miss any station sponsored event.

Presley beamed. “I thought you looked familiar,” she told him.

Kirk turned his eyes to Denise. “It’s nice to meet you. Are you the one whose porch Dave painted?”

Denise grinned back. “That would be me. It’s nice to meet you, Kirk.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

“Speaking of painting,” Dave interrupted, “shall we go inside? It’s kind of cold out here.”

Denise smiled at him and he felt a warming begin even before they’d moved a step. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see some art.”