“I’m sure you’ll tell my mother I was drinking this.” Before I could say anything, she said, “By the way, she’s sleeping with this new guy Brad at the travel agency. That’s why she’s late. She’s going to tell you all about it. But she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.” She smiled at me. “On the other hand, I don’t mind hurting your feelings at all.”
“So your boyfriend dumped you, huh?” Hell, I was just as petty as she was.
For the first time, I felt sorry for her. The anger and arrogance were gone from her face suddenly. She just looked sad and lost and painfully young. She even lost some of the sexiness in that moment, tiny sad pink barrette turning her into a little girl again. She was all vulnerability now.
She went over to the breakfast nook and sat down in the booth.
“You want a beer, Dwyer?”
“You gonna tell your mom I took one?”
She laughed. “I actually like you.”
“Yeah, I could tell.”
“I’m sorry I told you about Mom’s new boyfriend.”
Women know all the secrets in the world. All the important ones, anyway. Men just know all that bullshit that doesn’t matter in the long run.
“It was bound to happen,” I said.
“You’re not gonna be heartbroken?”
“For maybe a week. Or two. Probably more my pride than anything.”
“He’s sort of an asshole. I mean, I met him a couple of times. Real stuck on himself. But he’s real cute.”
“I’m happy for him. Maybe I’ll take you up on that beer.”
I felt betrayed, stunned, pissed, sad and slightly embarrassed. I was more of an interloper than ever in this house. Very soon now I’d be back to roaming my apartment and talking to imaginary women again.
I got a beer and sat down.
“You ever been in love?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Really in love?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes.”
“This is the third one.”
“Third one?”
“Yeah, the third boyfriend I’ve had who’s fallen in love with Molly. The first one was in sixth grade. His name was Rick. I loved him so much I’d get the Neiman-Marcus catalogue down and look at wedding gowns. Then one day I found a note he’d written her. It took me a year to get over it.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I’ve never gotten over it.”
“So it happened again.”
“Yeah, Paul — you met him — he broke off with me six weeks ago and he’s been calling her ever since. She doesn’t encourage him — I mean, it’s not her fault — but he follows her around all the time. Takes pictures of her, too. He’s the photographer for the high-school paper. Real good with a telephoto lens.” She stared out the window. “He was like part of the family. Mom liked him, even. And she doesn’t like many boys.” She looked over at the sheepdog, Clarence, who was treated like the third child. Now he sprawled on the kitchen floor, watching her. “Clarence wouldn’t bark at him or try to eat him or anything.” Reference to Clarence made her smile.
“If it isn’t Molly’s fault, why’d you hit her?”
She shrugged. “Because I hate her. At least a part of me does. If she wasn’t so beautiful—” She looked at me. “She’s even got one of her teachers in love with her.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. One day I was afraid my boyfriend was writing her letters, and so I snuck in her room and started looking around and there was this letter from Mr. Meacham, her English teacher. He said he loved her and was willing to leave his wife and daughter for her.”
“Molly ever encourage him?”
She shook her head. “Molly is the most virginal person I know. Sometimes I think she’s retarded. I really do. She’s still a little girl in a lot of ways. She gets these crushes on her teachers. This year it’s Mr. Meacham. He’s teaching her the Romantic poets and Molly keeps telling me how much she thinks he looks like Matt Dillon, who’s her favorite movie star. To her, it’s all very innocent. But not to Mr. Meacham.” She hesitated. “I even think she’s started seeing him at nights. Last week I was out at Warner Mall and saw them sitting together in the Orange Julius.”
“Does your mother know about this?”
“I haven’t told her. She’s got problems of her own with Molly. Well, with Brad.”
“The guy at the travel agency?”
“Uh-huh. He’s been over here a few times and it’s pretty obvious he’s fallen in love with Molly.”
“You said he was young. How young?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Well, that’s better than Mr. Meacham lately.”
“He may be the one stalking her.”
“Someone’s stalking her?”
“Yeah. Grabbed her the other night in the breezeway. But she got away. And been sending her threatening notes.” She sighed. “I want to be pissed off at her but I can’t. She doesn’t understand the effect she has on men. She really doesn’t.” Then: “I feel like shit. God, I can’t believe I slapped her. I’d better go talk to her.”
“Good idea. Tell your mom something came up and I had to go.”
“Sorry I broke the news to you that way. I mean, about Brad.”
“It’s all right.”
“Like Mom says, I can be a bitch on wheels when I want to be.”
We stood up and she gave me a hard little hug and then I went away. For good.
2
So it was back to the streets for me the rest of the summer. I kept thinking about Molly and how beautiful she was and how otherwise sensible men, young and older alike, seemed to take leave of their senses when they were around her. While I wasn’t looking for virginal fifteen-year-olds, I was looking for the same kind of explosive love affair those men were, one that blinds you to all else, the narcotic that no amount of drugs could ever equal. In a few years, I’d be fifty. There weren’t many such love affairs left for me. I’d had three or four of them in my lifetime, and I wanted one more before the darkness. So I went back to the bars, I became infatuated ten times a day in grocery stores and discount houses and even gas stations when I’d see the backside of a fetching lady bent slightly to put gas in her tank. But mostly my reality was my solitary bed and moonshadow, white curtains whipping ghostly in the rain-smelling wind, my lips silent with a thousand vows of undying love. A drinking buddy tried to make me believe that this was simply an advanced stage of horniness and I said it was, it was spiritual horniness and when I said spiritual he gave me a queer look, as if I’d told him that I’d started sending money to TV preachers or something.
The summer ground on. One of the investigators at Allied Security had to have a heart by-pass so they shifted me from security (which I like) to working divorce cases (which I hated). While I’ve committed my share of adultery, I can’t say that it’s ever pleasant to think about. Betrayal is not exactly a tribute to the human spirit. The men seemed to take a strange kind of pride in what they were doing. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about being secretive, anyway. But the cheating women were all a little furtive and frantic and even sad, as if they were doing this against their will. Maybe they were paying back cheating husbands. Four weeks of this stuff before the investigator came back to Allied. My Advertising daughter came to town just as August was starting to punish us. My son drove in from med-school in the east. Their mother had married again, third time a charm or so she said, a man with some means apparently whom they liked much better than husband number two, a bank vice-president with great country club aspirations. “You’ve got to find yourself a woman,” my daughter said right before she kissed me goodbye at the airport.