Ryerson-his friends called him Rye-also was a man who made mistakes, a fact with which he would have quickly agreed, and one of his choicest mistakes, he maintained, was marrying Coreen. "The old, old story," he said once, "of the triumph of biology over good sense."
"And what," Coreen whined on, "are you doing with that disgusting dog?"
"I like him," Ryerson protested.
"Well, for heaven's sake, he sounds like he's going to die!"
Ryerson shook his head. "No," he said, and stroked his Boston bull terrier pup, Creosote-so named because Ryerson had found him, shivering and thin and just a lick away from death, six months earlier in a smokehouse in Massachusetts. "He's not going to die, Coreen. He's got asthma. It's a fault of the breed-"
"Breed?" Coreen said incredulously. "Breed, Doctor? Are you saying that that dog has a pedigree?"
Coreen was the quintessential bitch. She was also a knockout. She was tall, buxom, red-haired; she had a small, pouty mouth, huge bright-green eyes, and she possessed the sort of natural sensuality that made everyone turn around and look. She used this sensuality to her best advantage. No one could blame her, least of all Ryerson, who, fifteen years earlier, had been one of its first wide-eyed and willing victims.
He said now, "Did you get the part you were after, Coreen?"
And she answered, from the small gray love seat in Ryerson's Newbury Street row house, "Which one?"
He smiled wearily. Was Which one? merely a pose-Well, you know, Rye, there are literally dozens of producers after me. He could not easily peer into her psyche for the answer. He had never been able to peer easily into her psyche. It was like looking into the head of a wild animal; what he saw was usually a mass of harsh angles and static and snow-it was, in fact, one of the things that he found attractive about her in the first place, beyond her obvious physical attributes. It made her mysterious, unreachable, and thus, at the time-when he was still working toward his doctorate at Duke University-a challenge.
He had quickly found that if he could not easily peer into her mind, it was, sadly, because there was precious little to see. Her concerns in life were basic-food, control, sex, sleep, comfort, and status. The order of those concerns varied from day to day and week to week, of course, as they do with everyone, but control always stayed near the top of the list. She exercised control, of course, with her body and her sensuality. She controlled Ryerson for the three years of their stormy marriage because she got a kick out of controlling him, and Ryerson let himself be controlled because, of course, he loved going to bed with her. It was a pit that he was not about to let himself fall into twelve years later, as she sat prettily on the small love seat, clearly offering herself to him in return for some as yet unasked for favor.
She sighed and let a sad little grin play on her mouth. "Well, actually, Rye"-Ryerson stiffened; she never called him Rye-"I didn't get the part I was after." She'd been auditioning for a part in a big-budget horror movie called Strange Seed, which was to be shot near Boston. She'd charmed the director, the associate director, the assistant director, a few of the camera operators, and even the male secretary to the producer; the part, she felt certain, was hers. She had failed, however, to consider that the world she moved in turned not on sex alone or on money alone, but on sex and money together, and, bedroom favors aside, there were other women better for the part. She added, "Someone else got it. Someone named Irene!" She said the name as if it were a forkful of bad fish she was trying to get out of her mouth.
"My sister's name is Irene," Ryerson said, smiling to himself.
"And she has a face like an owl," Coreen said.
"My sister has a face like an owl?" Ryerson said. "No, she doesn't."
Coreen waved the observation away. "No, not your sister. This person who got my part. She has a face like an owl, like one of those white owls you see on cigar boxes-"
"A barn owl?" Ryerson observed. He stroked Creosote, who gurgled, grunted, and licked happily at Ryerson's chin. "What's the part?"
"The part?" Coreen asked, momentarily confused-which was nothing new-then hurried on. "Oh, the part. Yes. It was the part of a dead woman. Some woman who died and came back to life."
Ryerson shrugged. "Well, it seems ready-made for someone who looks like an owl.
Coreen looked at him. "Is that a joke?"
Ryerson smiled thinly. "Sort of, Coreen." He paused. "Listen, I'm sorry, but if you've come here for a favor-"
She cut in sharply, as if offended. "A favor? My God, Rye, husbands and wives don't do favors for each other. Whatever they do, they do out of love." She gave him a straight and serious look, as if she had just uttered an astounding profundity. Then she smiled coyly. "And since you are, as they say, not without influence-"
"First of all, we aren't husband and wife anymore, thank the good Lord, and secondly, yes-I am completely without influence. I wouldn't want to influence anyone, Coreen, even if I could …"
"All I'm saying is that you know people. And because you know people-"
"No," Ryerson said firmly.
She looked appraisingly up at him from the love seat for a half minute, trying to gauge the firmness of his position. Then, nodding slowly, she went on, "Yes, of course. I understand. But you know, Rye, what makes this world go around-"
"No," he said again.
"Well then, I'll tell you," she said, misinterpreting his answer.
"No," he said yet again, very firmly. "You're not going to tell me what makes the world go around. I know what makes the world go around. Inertia. Not sex or money or whatever it is you were going to say, Coreen. Inertia! Conservation of momentum! We learned about it in high school."
She sighed heavily, in resignation, and stood: She was normally almost as tall as Ryerson; now, wearing very high heels, she contrived to appear even taller. She conjured up her most regal and offended look-chin jutting forward, eyes looking at Ryerson down the bridge of her nose, and she said, "You are weird, Doctor." It was a phrase she had used quite a lot during the breakup of their marriage and Ryerson said now, as he had so often then, "No more than anyone else, Coreen."
She focused on Creosote, who was trying mightily to lick Ryerson's chin. "And so," she finished, "is your disgusting dog!" Then she stomped from the house.
~ * ~
Joan Mott Evans had never been in Boston before and she wasn't sure what she thought of it. She found the Boston accent intriguing, and the people passably friendly, at least the few she'd met-a bus driver, a drugstore clerk, a cop who'd given her directions to Newbury Street. But the aura of the city seemed stiffer than she was used to. She'd lived in Buffalo for the past several months, but she thought of Erie, Pennsylvania, as her real home, and before that, Brockport, New York, home of Brockport State College. She was used to small towns and small concerns, where it was true that everyone knew everyone else's business, but it was also true that if you were in trouble, a lot of people knew about it, and someone was usually willing to help.
Boston wasn't at all like that. How could it be? Crowds made people turn inward, and look for identity within themselves; crowds made people yearn to be something other than just another face, or another body. And what was a city like Boston if not simply a very well-mannered crowd? She grinned self-critically. Or maybe, she decided, she was reading much more into what the city was telling her than she ought to; maybe she wasn't being fair.