The Ladies' Man (3 page)

“I would think that would be interesting work,” she says politely, “and something that requires a very specific set of skills.”

Nash concedes that this is very true.

She asks if the work is, well, for lack of a better term—steady?

Nash smiles and says, “Steady. Too steady. I can work twenty-hour days for a week straight out.”

Cynthia, pleased with this answer, says, “How awful—no time for family and friends.”

“I chose it—the life, the craziness.”

“As opposed to what?”

Nash assumes a thoughtful, philosophical posture. He peers into his plastic glass like a man with artistic regrets. “Composing in another idiom, performing … teaching.”

“Starving,” she adds.

Nash laughs. “A pragmatist. That's good. Obviously you're in the right field.”

She picks up her client homework again with an exaggerated sigh.

“That's what I need,” Nash adds after a short silence, as if musing to himself. “Someone to look over my portfolio.”

She has her car, and asks about his destination.

“I'm not sure,” he begins. “I'm on a mission. There's someone I need to apologize to.”

“You flew all the way cross-country just to apologize to someone?”

“If I get up the nerve,” he says. “I won't know until we're face to face.”

They are on a down escalator. Cynthia's carry-on bag is between them. “Is this ‘making amends'—that A.A. thing where you go back to apologize to everyone you ever treated badly?”

He says, “I know what you mean—Twelve Steps. It's an epidemic in California. But this is something much more …” He makes a fist and raps his shirt where he thinks his heart is beating. “An old wrong I have to right.”

“A woman?” asks Cynthia.

Nash nods; manages to look both chagrined and blameless.

They have reached the bottom of the escalator. Cynthia, wheeling her carry-on expertly, returns to the original question: Can she drop him somewhere?

Nash admits that he doesn't know the exact whereabouts of the former Adele Dobbin, the wronged party, or her married name, but has reason to think she never left Brookline.

“How long ago?”

“We were kids,” he says.

Cynthia says she knows a web site that can find virtually anyone's phone number, and she owns a CD-ROM that draws maps of any block in the United States. Would that be useful?

“I couldn't trouble you,” says Nash.

“Not at all,” says Cynthia. “I'm not going into work at five-thirty. What else are you going to do? Call Directory Assistance?”

She drives a 3-Series Bimmer convertible, automatic transmission, with a tissue dispenser and miniature wastebasket suspended from the dashboard. At what seems to be a luxury high-rise, an attendant waves her enthusiastically into an underground garage as if genuinely glad to greet her, as if Cynthia John tipped well at Christmas. The building is on what she calls “the waterfront,” which she explains was rat-infested warehouses in his day. When did he leave Boston?

“ 'Sixty-seven,” he says.

“Before Quincy Market,” she says. “Maybe even before Government Center.” She asks if he remembers Scollay Square—the old red-light district? Nash says, “Vaguely. From newspaper headlines.”

“They tore it down to put up Government Center.”

“Did it work?” asks Nash, and Cynthia understands what he is asking.

“Of course not. The hookers moved a few trolley stops to the Combat Zone.”

“Human nature,” says Nash as clinically as he can.

Her computer is in her white bedroom in a dramatic condo with skylights, blue neon tubes as artwork, a wall of windows that look out to the harbor islands, and a gorgeous, gleaming, ebonized mahogany Steinway grand. Nash circles it as Cynthia chats about the creative financing that led to her outright ownership of the condo in five years. She is not flirtatious because she views Nash and his Hollywood earnings as a potential trophy client. But questions that reveal one's financial obligations at the same time sound personal. Own or rent? Married or single? Ex-wives? Children?

Nash is sipping seltzer with twists of both lemon and lime, and eating Gorgonzola on pear slices, which have been fanned out on a granite slab next to cocktail napkins bearing the seal of Harvard. All told, an impressive hostess offering, he thinks, for someone who wasn't expecting a guest. Cynthia is graceful on her stockinged feet, moving between refrigerator and cutlery drawer. There is evidence all around the kitchen of advanced culinary skills—a food processor, an espresso machine, copper pans, wooden spoons and wire whisks.

“Do you like to cook?” he asks.

“Love it,” she says. “Wish I had time to throw dinner parties every weekend.”

“But your work doesn't give you that much free time?”

“I travel too much.”

He runs his fingertips across the spines of her cookbooks.

“Thai,” he reads. “Indian. Chinese. Italian. French. New Orleans. Lebanese. Mexican. Wow.”

“I do more takeout than I should,” she says, agitating their martinis in a silver shaker. “Cooking for one is not that rewarding.”

It appears to Nash that Cynthia is making the first move, which is normal for him, even expected. He is used to being admired and approached by women of all ages. It's why he never married—this social, often sexual, goodwill that his combination of handsome features, expensive clothes, and good manners invites. He believes in pheromones; he thinks he may give something off, and wears a touch of musk to enhance his natural chemicals. Having left Dina behind in Newport Beach, knowing the utter West Coastness of her blond, ex-actress (a Zest commercial), skinny-bodied (large, implanted breasts notwithstanding) identity, which has turned to the submedical field of reflexology, he is charmed by the idea of an ethnic, olive-complected, nonstarlet with an M.B.A., and how it reflects on his own maturity and his symbolic flight eastward.

Cynthia slaps her forehead in a way Nash finds authentically … something, and announces that she left her client's unreadable book in the seat pocket! What would Freud say about
that
rather blatant act? But she'd pull it off; she'd buy another copy on her way to her meeting, and skim enough to make the client think she'd read every boring word. “On the bright side,” she says, “I won't have to cram tonight.”

It is only right, he states, to repay this hospitality, this gorgeous view, and her invaluable computer assistance. Dinner?

“Now?”

“Sure,” says Nash. “You must have a favorite neighborhood bistro.”

She allows—not yet a commitment—“Down the elevator, across Atlantic Ave., two blocks west.”

“In the North End?”

“Or we can do that,” says Cynthia. She gets their coats from her bedroom, along with the computer printout of Adele Dobbin's block. “What about your date with destiny?” she asks wryly, waving the grid.

Nash feels a pinch of duty and guilt, but it passes. “First things first,” he says.

She takes his arm against the snow that seems to be blowing up from the sidewalks and off the renovated granite warehouses. He says he is delighted—unseasonably bad weather custom-made for a Boston boy returning from a sun-baked, spoiled life.

“Ugh,” Cynthia responds. “You can have it. I need a vacation.”

Nash conjures Cynthia on a white beach under a coconut palm. A shelf circles the tree trunk and holds their suntan oil and their tropical drinks. She's wearing a smart sarong over her bathing suit, and her visible flesh is the same smooth olive as her face. The scene changes suddenly to a Caribbean island of French ownership, to a topless beach, to the unveiling of Cynthia's God-given breasts leaping like baby mammals off her five-foot-ten-inch frame. It's been ages, he thinks wistfully (and not without stirrings), since he's kneaded a real breast.

“Closer might be better,” says Cynthia. “Mind if we go down a notch, foodwise, to get in out of the cold?”

“I'm completely open,” says Nash.

She crosses the street and leads him to a diner that looks both brand-new and authentically retro. They slide into a booth, laughing as if they have outwitted or outdistanced someone. The banquette is upholstered in swirly, cobalt blue; the waitress—young and adorable in peach and white (an actress looking to break into pictures, Nash assumes in his West Coast way)—brings menus shaped like the State House.

Cynthia orders without making excuses: the meatloaf with the horseradish mashed potatoes, Roquefort-creamed spinach, and spiced apple rings.

“The same for me,” says Nash, who hasn't eaten chopped meat in any form since
E. coli
made the news.

“They also make the best hamburgers in the financial district,” she tells him after the waitress has yelled their orders in diner lingo that is part of the show. “They use real cheddar and both raw and grilled onions.”

Nash grins until Cynthia is compelled to ask why.

“What am I smiling at? You. Your enthusiasm. Your lack of self-consciousness. It's very refreshing.”

“It's fattening,” she answers dryly. “Not that I spend ten seconds worrying about that anymore. I've accepted the hand I've been dealt, which is no size six.”

Nash chuckles again, as if he hasn't noticed and agrees completely.

Cynthia continues. “It was my fiftieth-birthday present to myself: Enjoy life. Experience life. Which means, on some days, order what you want.”

Nash is thrown by the “fifty” but doesn't show it. Almost immediately, the number charms him for unexpected reasons. He is, after all, older than that. He is not looking for a wife or a mother for his unborn children. Adele Dobbin, when he sees her, will be fifty-three. This Cynthia is a good transitional experience, particularly if he ends up in bed with Adele. And California has taught him that aging is not as unalterable as it once was.

“You're not shocked, are you?” she asks.

“Not me,” he says.

Cynthia says, “Tell me what you did to this Adele that's made you feel guilty since you were a kid. How old
are
you, by the way?”

“Fifty-five.”

“What did you do—love her and leave her?”

“Worse.”

“Love her,
impregnate
her, and leave her?”

“Not that bad.”

She lifts her hands from her lap and folds them on her paper place mat. “You tell me.”

“I disappeared,” he says, looking straight into her eyes as if he were a man accustomed to facing consequences.

Cynthia does not flinch. “At what point?”

It's not the first time he's confided to a woman about his romantic history, so he knows how to shade his answer. “Just as we were about to announce our engagement.”

“Define ‘just about'?”

“Her parents were throwing a party—”

“A party or
the
party?” asks Cynthia.