The Ladies' Man (26 page)

Nash winks. “No one keeps a secret better than I do.”

“Do you mean right away? Today?”

“I'm homeless,” he says, making it sound like a charming overstatement. “I might as well see if there's a bed there with my name on it.”

Lois scribbles three lines on a corner of her yellow pad, and tears it off.

“Would she take an out-of-state check?” he asks.

“I'm sure she would.”

Nash reads the landlady's name aloud, and Lois corrects him.

“Should I say you sent me?”

“No need,” says Lois. Her mind has raced ahead to future trysting. Best to let Mrs. Chabot think she introduced them at her breakfast table and mentored the monkey business herself. “She'll like the looks of you. Not everyone who shows up on her doorstep is presentable.”

“A woman of discriminating taste, then.”

Lois laughs. “She's not the blue-haired Beacon Hill dowager you might be picturing.”

“No? Younger?”

“Does it matter? She has a vacancy, the price is right, and it's walking distance to everything.”

“Irrelevant,” says Nash. “I don't even know why I asked.”

Mrs. Chabot has never seen such an elegantly handsome man on her doorstep, or a valise made entirely of leather. He asks for a room with a queen-sized bed and a television, and she assigns him to the one double that has a name: the Mallard Room, after the family in
Make Way for Ducklings
. The new guest signs her cloth-bound ledger and asks, “May I?”

“May you what?”

“Flip through the pages?”

“Why?”

He smiles. “Do you know when the last time was I signed something like this to register for a room? Not a credit card slip or a printed form, but a
book?
I feel like I've entered a time warp.”

“I take credit cards.”

“I'd heard this was a charming place, but I didn't realize how
charming. It's right out of—what was that film?
The Thomas Crown Affair
.”

“Oh, my,” says his new landlady. “They took the pictures for that up the hill in Louisburg Square.”

“Charming,” he repeats.

“Newport Beach, California,” she reads from his entry.

“Do you know it?”

Mrs. Chabot says she's never been to California. She and her late husband had saved for Disneyland, but then when the other one opened, they only had to go as far as Orlando, Florida. It was Christmastime, and the lines were awful, but it was so beautiful—the parades and the Christmas trees as tall as telephone poles—that she wouldn't go any other time.

“And may I ask when you lost your husband?”

Mrs. Chabot bats the question away as if it's a matter of little import and no tenderness.

“Recently?”

“Ten, eleven years.”

“I'm so sorry. It must be hard running a bed-and-breakfast by yourself, worrying about changing every light bulb and fixing every leak.”

She shrugs. “I have a handyman. He's on disability so I pay him under the table.”

Nash picks up his valise and motions that Mrs. Chabot should lead the way. “I'm no Mister Fixit,” he says, “but while I'm here, feel free to ask me to hang a picture or move a piece of furniture.”

“Really?”

“If I'm here, why not?”

Nash follows her up the front carpeted stairway, then the length of a narrow, dark second floor for the ascent by back stairs to the third story. “Woodwork!” he exclaims. “Colored water in lovely decanters.… Is that a Maxfield Parrish? A tub on legs! Claw feet!”

“You folks from California—you always like old stuff. You think everything's an antique.”

Cracks in the beige walls of the converted attic have been patched but not repainted. Mrs. Chabot stops in front of a door
bearing a badly painted 300. “I usually put gentlemen guests up here because of the color scheme,” she says. The room is square with walls and trim a dull gold, and window shades that his mother had in all the bedrooms in Brighton. The floors are bare except for a furry brown bathroom rug, a purported match to the crisply new and ugly comforter patterned with duck decoys. “Perfect,” Nash exclaims.

“I change the linens every Saturday, and you get a new bath towel and facecloth every day. If I forget, remind me.”

“I'm enchanted! And what're those buildings?”

“Mass. General.”

“Of course! The famous M.G.H.”

“You get used to the ambulances.” She points to the ceiling. “There's smoke detectors in every room.”

“I don't smoke.”

“No, I meant we meet code. There's a fire extinguisher in the hallway, and a plunger by the toilet.”

“How nice that there's a table and chair I can work at,” he says. “A matchbook under one leg will get rid of the tilt.” He asks if the room is remote enough and soundproof enough to accommodate a synthesizer. Mrs. Chabot—confusing it with a former medical-student boarder's white-noise machine—shrugs and says, “As long as it fits, and it's not a fire hazard, I don't care what you plug in.”

“Great!”

“Breakfast's at seven-thirty weekdays, and eight on weekends. Continental.”

“My triglycerides are a little high …” he tells her.

“I got margarine in a tub,” she says.

The lawyer is a woman, fiftyish, lean and snappish, not remotely attractive. Good, Dina thinks; Nash won't like her and vice versa.

They discuss property, leases, joint accounts, expectations, intentions, wills, and services rendered. “Did your acquaintances hold you as husband and wife?” the lawyer asks.

“Hold?”

“Regard you as. Consider you to be. Think you were.”

“Some,” says Dina. “I wore a wedding band.” She displays her left hand, which hasn't fully tanned over the evidence.

“Did he purchase the ring with his own funds?”

“I picked it out.”

“But who paid for it?”

Dina hesitates, then says, “Me.”

“But he sanctioned it? You wore it and he understood its significance?”

Dina looks out the window of the conference room. A man in purple spandex is reading headlines through the glass of a newspaper dispenser. “I considered it an engagement ring,” she says. “It had a marquis diamond set into it. After a while, when we didn't set a date, I just considered it … us. Old marrieds without the ceremony.”

“No,” says the lawyer. “You held it to be a wedding ring.”

“Okay,” says Dina.

“Did Mr. Harvey wear a ring?”

The man in purple is stretching his hamstrings. Dina turns back to the lawyer. “Never.”

“No matter,” says the lawyer. “Married men often don't wear wedding rings. My husband doesn't.”

Another married woman, Dina thinks; another man who followed through.

“No children, correct?”

“We tried,” says Dina. “I mean, seriously tried. Then he changed his mind.”

The lawyer looks up.

“I wasn't getting pregnant so we saw an infertility specialist.”

“And he was a party to it?”

“Sure! It was his sperm all the way.”

“And you represented Mr. Harvey to your doctor as what?”

“My husband.”

“Excellent,” says the lawyer.

“He got cold feet, though. We stopped trying.”

“Stopped having relations?”

“No, stopped taking the shots. He got nervous when that woman in Iowa had septuplets.”

The lawyer harrumphs.

“Nash wasn't crazy about the idea,” says Dina. “He thought he was too old to have a baby. But a lot of men aren't so keen at the beginning. Until they have them. I've seen that happen—the man's not sure, then the baby's born and he falls madly in love with it.”

“What interests me here,” says the lawyer, “is Mr. Harvey being an active and willing participant in the infertility process.”

“That's a fact,” says Dina. “The name on my chart was Dina Dorsey-Harvey and when the receptionist called my name in the waiting room, she said, ‘Mrs. Harvey.' ”

“How many visits? Approximately?”

“A lot,” says Dina. “Like, every month, then every week.”

“For how long?”

“At least a year. First I was on Clomid, then they gave me Pergonal.”

“Excellent,” says the lawyer. She has forms ready in a manila folder with Dina's name typed on it. “Our questionnaire. You'll take it home and use it as a worksheet.”

Dina reads aloud from the form, “ ‘Assets.' ‘Property.' ‘Personal possessions.' ‘Inheritance prospects'—ha. ‘Business situation'—ha. ‘Relative education'—exaggerated. ‘Behavior.' ” Dina looks up. “Behavior?”

“In this context,” says the lawyer, “sexual behavior. Has your spouse ever been unfaithful?”

“To me?”

“Most certainly to you.”

“I'm pretty sure he has,” says Dina, “but I've been a little bit in denial.”

“Until now,” says the lawyer.

“Is it good or bad—I mean is cheating on me good for my case?”

“The more evidence of bad behavior we can document, the better our position. They call this ‘equitable apportionment,' and conduct is one of the factors taken into consideration.”

Dina checks the back of the form.

“Questions?” says the lawyer.

“I was looking for the questions about me, the place where they ask about
my
conduct,” Dina explains.

The lawyer frowns. “Were you unfaithful to Mr. Harvey during the period we're holding you to be husband and wife?”

Dina takes a sip of water from the plastic cup. “Like, say that he moved out in the morning. Are you asking about the period of time we were together? In other words, did I cheat on him from the day we met until the day he left? Or even the next day?”

“Correct.”

“Never!” vows Dina.

M
rs. Chabot, intercepting Lois on the front porch, whispers urgently, “We got a gentleman from California, and I mean that—‘gentleman.' I put him up on the third floor. I didn't want you two to share a bath. It's not a good way to meet someone.”

Lois feigns mild, polite interest. “Young?” she asks. “Old?”

“A nice age. Fifty? I put him on the third floor.”

“You told me.”

Mrs. Chabot confides the real reason for her excitement. “Did I tell you he's a movie star?”

Lois stops, her hand on the doorknob.

“I put two and two together: He's from California, was playing it a little cozy as to what exactly he did—and he looks like he just stepped out of
People
magazine.”

“Handsome, you mean?”

“A sexpot,” says Mrs. Chabot. “And if an old lady like me notices, he's got it to spare.”

“Wouldn't a movie star stay at a bigger hotel?”

Mrs. Chabot has thought this through and has the answer. “He could be hiding out here. Ducking the press.”