But life is strange, and years later he became reacquainted with one of Luther’s sons. The bitch remarried — step, step, stepping up the rungs of the social ladder in her Manolo Blahniks — so that when Haveabud saw her again she was the young wife of a sixty-year-old multi, standing outside Collegiate, waiting for her son (the other twin being, for some reason Haveabud never got clear, with her parents in upstate New York), with a Cuban au pair who stood at her side, looking into the swarm of children leaving school with the wide eyes of one of her relatives fleeing Castro’s Cuba. The bitch looked Haveabud up and down and then spread an inappropriately radiant smile on her face. What was he doing there? He was about to attend a meeting, with his third wife, about her nephew’s progress in overcoming dyslexia. (His third wife’s sister was at the Betty Ford Clinic, and Haveabud had been persuaded that he should attend the meeting as a show of support to the boy.) Luther’s son turned out to be his third wife’s nephew’s classmate. His third wife emerged from a cab then and was introduced. The bitch said that she and Haveabud were old friends and invited them to dinner that Saturday, and his wife accepted. On a run, the seven-year-old boy rushed not into the bitch’s arms but into the arms of the au pair, and a most extraordinary thing happened to Haveabud: He felt a surge of tender affection for the boy. The boy was a dead ringer for his father, so much so that Haveabud had the eerie feeling that Luther in miniature stood near him on the sidewalk. It brought back memories of the good times he and Luther had had — the shopping expeditions for clothes sure to impress, when the two of them laughed so merrily that one clerk had said, as she wrote up the sale, “You know, evening wear is not returnable.” The two of them used to toke up and go for tango lessons. They had owned, together, a ski chalet in Stowe and a house on the beach in Barbados, half a mile from the Sandy Lane. They had had drunken sing-alongs with Dolly Parton records, late at night, savoring the quality of Luther’s Blaupunkt, even learning an a cappella version of “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You” that would have friends rolling on the floor. When Haveabud had to explain to his third wife who Luther was, Luther became an eccentric artist who had encountered fleeting fortune. He did not fill her in on their personal relationship. He did warn her that the bitch was poison, but she discounted his words because she thought he was always too harsh. The bitch’s lawyer and her hairstylist had been at the dinner that night, her multi out of town on business (it gave Haveabud pause: The bitch was one of those women he would have encountered years before in the bookstore, who would have given him a bottle of champagne), and she and Haveabud’s third wife chatted merrily about house renovation, agreeing that exposed beams were as necessary for aesthetic reasons as a frame on a painting. His wife was astonished to learn, during the warmed-goat-cheese-and-grapes course, that Luther and Haveabud had enrolled in an Arthur Murray dance class. The hairdresser wanted to have a dance with Haveabud, but he declined, saying that he’d forgotten everything he’d learned. (Later that night, alone in his living room after his wife had gone to bed, he went through the dance movements.) Roederer Cristal was poured throughout the evening, and at party’s end the two women kissed the air, his third wife inhaling the bitch’s Graffiti, the bitch sniffing his wife’s lavishly applied Joy. The two would meet again, to discuss ceilings.
Haveabud disdained the lawyer’s Republican politics, but since the hairdresser — whom Haveabud had rather come to like — had given him such a rough time, Haveabud had not had to expend any energy in that direction. But the child, Spencer, he was quite fascinated by. In the boy’s bedroom were hundreds of dinosaur models, some cast in bronze and arranged on a long shelf, others standing among the palm and ficus trees. An inflated Rhamphorhynchus dangled from the ceiling fixture. (“It means ‘prow beak,’ ” Spencer said.) That one Haveabud had to be informed about, but he was able to recognize the large green Stegosaurus, and he nodded with faint recognition when Spencer told him that that particular dinosaur usually weighed almost two tons. “How long have you been collecting them?” Haveabud had asked, and the boy’s answer made it clear that he would have preferred teething on dinosaurs if they had been offered in place of teething rings. Here was a child who would not plead for a pet, unlike his third wife’s nephew, who would agitate himself into weeping fits, chanting corgi, corgi, corgi. In a frame was a drawing of a Brachiosaurus, which Spencer proudly pointed out, saying it was probably the largest animal that ever lived. “It was strictly herbivorous, too,” the boy said. “Do you know what that means?” Assuming that the boy was asking if he knew, in point of fact, what “herbivorous” meant, Haveabud nodded yes. The implications, on the other hand … But the boy had rushed to pull a massive book from the shelf. “This one is about carnosaurs,” the boy said, raising his lip and exposing his little top teeth. “They were really wicked.” Haveabud was startled that the word “wicked” was in a seven-year-old’s vocabulary. He wondered if at night the dinosaurs came alive for him, ranging around the room or wading into the river of his dreams.
But the au pair had come to the door for the second time, accompanied by his impatient wife, and because he had felt protective of Spencer and his reassembled prehistoric world, he quickly said goodbye and left the room to rejoin the party. He also had the distinct thought that the au pair knew he did not love his wife, an impression she later confirmed over cappuccino at The Cupping Room in SoHo. But that night he had really not planned to meet Gloria again. It was only later, thinking it over, that he realized the obvious: The au pair was his way to Spencer, and Spencer was a person he wanted to know better. How much of Luther, besides his looks, had gotten planted in the child? To his complete surprise, he began to swell with emotion, like the buddy of a soldier killed in action who must go to that person’s hometown and kiss the wife’s cheek, lift the child into his arms. It was surprising because, while Luther was indeed M.I.A., his disappearance was only into le monde chi-chi of Paris. But really, why bother to understand your reasons when you are so strongly drawn to something or someone? Sipping through the foamy milk, Haveabud knew there was something that he wanted, but he did not know exactly what that something was. Only that it involved Spencer, and staying on good enough terms with the bitch to have access to Spencer.
But that was the past, and right now Haveabud was sipping not cappuccino but a sour-sweet, fashionably silly blue margarita with Mel Anthis, from whom he also wanted something, and Mel Anthis’s ladyfriend, who turned out to be a more impressive photographer than he could have imagined. To get Mel, he might have mounted a show of thumbtacks and string, but this woman, whose name he had forgotten in the haze of remembering that night, several years ago, with the lawyer, and the hairdresser, and Gloria, and the person who had served the dinner, and Stegosaurus, and …
The waitress asked if he would like his salt rim freshened.
“What?” he said. The Rolling Stones were singing “Wild Horses” and a group of hyperactive partygoers had just come in and were playing musical chairs around a table too small for them.