True Enough Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR STEPHEN McCAULEY AND TRUE ENOUGH

  “With True Enough, his wry new novel, [McCauley] ventures farther down the path of cross-gender empathy, creating a female protagonist who doesn’t merely claim our hearts but rips them out and slings them over her shoulder . . . . The good news is that McCauley has continued to hone his talent, and True Enough is, in many ways, his best book yet—the prose snappier, the dialogue sharper and tarter than ever.”

  —The New York Times

  “McCauley has a talent for creating immensely appealing characters who, while far from perfect—or perhaps because of this lack of perfection—wend their way into the reader’s heart. True Enough continues his streak of producing novels that blend laugh-out-loud humor with a welcome sense of tenderness about human relationships.”

  —The Washington Post

  “McCauley takes aim at modern relationships (both hetero- and homosexual) and urban, artsy, intellectual lifestyles in the funny, sharp, and irreverent manner that they richly deserve.”

  —Booklist

  “McCauley’s . . . insight into the small self-delusions that support satisfied lives is . . . as sharp as ever.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS NOVELS OF STEPHEN McCAULEY

  THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION

  “A very funny, exceptionally vivid first novel . . . . Surely one of the best books about what it is like to be young in these crazy times.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A joyously comic novel . . . superb . . . shimmers with hope, humor, and compassion.”

  —People

  “A wonderful romantic comedy.”

  —The New Yorker

  “McCauley has created some of the most appealing characters I’ve come across in years—quirky, flawed, irresistibly sad and funny . . . I can’t think of better company than Stephen McCauley’s The Object of My Affection. . . . A novel that warms like a hug.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Charming and affecting . . . . The strong plotting, memorable gallery of characters, and wry look at the complicated state of relations between the sexes could beguile any reader from Bensonhurst to Burbank.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  “Debonair and light as a soufflé, The Object of My Affection is an unexpected treat.”

  —Glamour

  THE EASY WAY OUT

  “Superb . . . funny, magnanimous, and devastatingly accurate . . . .”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The Easy Way Out is the best kind of contemporary fiction. Stephen McCauley captures not only how we live, but how we love, and even how we get through the day. The Easy Way Out manages to be miraculously both a joyous and important book.”

  —Wendy Wasserstein

  “Charm may be the hardest of all qualities to pin down on paper, but The Easy Way Out has it brimming from every page.”

  —Vogue

  THE MAN OF THE HOUSE

  “A comic novel about human predicaments . . . . McCauley has mastered the small yet perfect comic gesture . . . . Readers will welcome back the rueful and rumpled comic vision that is unmistakably his own.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A funny, fluent novel . . . . McCauley’s particular skill lies in his grasp of the bonds that link straights and gays in the maze of daily dealings.”

  —Time

  By the same author

  The Man of the House

  The Easy Way Out

  The Object of My Affection

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  Simon & Schuster

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  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by Stephen McCauley

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2001

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-7432-1835-1 (eBook)

  For Sebastian Stuart and Lesli Gordon

  True Enough

  Contents

  Chapter One: Things to Do

  Chapter Two: Going Away

  Chapter Three: Drinks with Dale

  Chapter Four: Cry Me a River

  Chapter Five: Is This All Right?

  Chapter Six: As One Door Closes . . .

  Chapter Seven: The Circumstances

  Chapter Eight: Dinner Conversation

  Chapter Nine: True Enough

  Chapter Ten: The Spin Cycle

  Chapter Eleven: Home Alone

  Chapter Twelve: A Relaxing Weekend

  Chapter Thirteen: Childish Behavior

  Chapter Fourteen: Specific Plans

  Chapter Fifteen: Insert Coin, Pull Lever

  Chapter Sixteen: The Walsh Kids

  Chapter Seventeen: The Piano Lesson

  Chapter Eighteen: The Other Widows

  Chapter Nineteen: The Last Dinner

  Chapter Twenty: Welcome to Florida

  Chapter Twenty-one: Pancake Breakfast

  Chapter Twenty-two: Desperate Hair

  Chapter Twenty-three: Margo?

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Key to Everything

  Chapter Twenty-five: The Man I Love

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Things to Do

  In the course of one week, Anderton went from unknown lounge singer to Decca recording artist. “One morning me and the kids are having coffee,” she told Look magazine in 1961, “and a record producer calls and says he wants to cut a demo. That phone call gave me a whole new life, even though nothing changed.”

  From Cry Me a River:

  The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan

  1.

  Jane Cody kept lists—Things To Do, Things To Buy, Bills To Pay, Appointments To Keep—but because she knew they provided the kind of irrefutable paper trail that almost always got people into trouble at tawdry junctures in their lives, her lists weren’t the literal truth. Some inaccuracies were alibis in case the reminders fell into the wrong hands, while others were there to mislead the people who were likely to read them. It was a simple system that caused her problems only when she confused the code and started missing dental appointments and showing up at restaurants for imaginary lunches, both of which had happened in the past three weeks. Obviously, she’d been working too hard, unless maybe she hadn’t been working enough.

  She was sitting at her desk poring over tomorrow’s notes to herself to stave off the anxiety attack she could feel brewing in the back of her brain, building in strength like one of the many tropical storms currently approaching adulthood somewhere in the South Atlantic. (The topic of a recent doomladen conversation on the show she produced: Another Storm of the Century?) It had been a bad morning—an argument with her son and a volleyball game of passive-aggressive selflessness with her husband—and then the chocolates one of her co-workers had brought in proved disappointing and the carefully arranged plans for this afternoon’s taping of the show had started to unr
avel. At moments like these, she wished she hadn’t tried to impress her shrink by agreeing with him that tranquilizers and antidepressants were grossly overprescribed. Why did she go out of her way to impress Dr. Berman? She was paying him $130 an hour, which ought to be enough to buy his approval, no matter what her opinions.

  It was one of those hot late-August days with the kind of filthy air you wanted to push out of the way. She actually could see—or thought she could—particles of dust and lead and pollen suspended in the fuzzy air, banging against her window, trying to get in. The Charles River was low and slow-moving there on the other side of Soldiers Field Road, and even the muscular rowing crews pulling their way through the murky green water looked sluggish. When she turned forty last year, Jane finally had been released from envying the physical perfection of youth, an unexpected birthday present and a useful one, too, if you lived in Boston, a city cluttered with colleges and private schools. Throughout her thirties, she’d been plagued by the conviction that she could be as fit and healthy and firm as all those running, rowing twenty-year-olds, if only she put her mind to it. Now she could hide comfortably behind that irresistible slogan of defeat: “I think I look pretty good for my age.”

  Jane’s office was on the third floor of the studios of WGTB, one of Boston’s public television stations. She was a producer of a thrice-weekly show called Dinner Conversation, a newsy program considered cutting-edge because it was so low-tech retro, and successful because no one had figured out what to put on in its place. The concept couldn’t have been more simple: six people were assembled at a round table in a studio made to look like a dining room and asked to discuss a topic in the news. Plates of nicely prepared food and glasses of respectable wine—both donated—were placed in front of them. The camera was turned on unobtrusively about ten minutes into the conversation and turned off thirty minutes later. There was no host, no moderator, no overarching point of view, and, most important of all, there were no expenses. The key was getting the right six people, something Jane had a special talent for, despite the fact that her at-home dinner parties were often disasters. It had been her inspiration to have an even mix of experts and man-on-the-street types. Half the viewers tuned in to find out what the biochemist from MIT had to say about global warming, and half tuned in to watch the biochemist from MIT get talked into a corner by an amateur weather watcher from one of the area’s shabbier suburbs. As long as someone sounded brilliant and someone was made to look foolish, the show played well. Reasonably well. Lately, rumors that Dinner Conversation had reached the end of its life cycle swirled around the studio daily. If you could believe the mean-spirited gossip, some of the interns spent half their time coming up with cute headlines to announce its demise: “The Dinner Party’s Over,” “Conversation Grinds to a Halt,” “Will That Be All?”

  The office was eerily quiet this afternoon as it usually was when they were in the middle of a crisis. In two hours they were taping a conversation about a recent plane crash, and one of the guests, a flight attendant, had canceled earlier in the day. Then at noon, a pilot who had agreed to appear and would serve as the authority figure and centerpiece of the discussion called to say he was delayed in Dallas indefinitely. They were left with a couple of windbag travel agents, a friend of one of the other producers whose entire identity revolved around his refusal to fly, and a New Hampshire housewife who claimed to have “died briefly” in an airline disaster several years earlier. As far as Jane was concerned, going on to write best-selling religious tracts—in this case, I Met God—was ample evidence that death, no matter how shortlived, had not occurred, but as a nervous flier herself, she didn’t want to tempt fate by calling the woman’s bluff.

  There was a faint knock on Jane’s door and Chloe Barnes tentatively stuck her head into the office and gave Jane one of her trembly looks of empathic concern.

  “Everything’s under control, Chloe. I have several people lined up, I’m just waiting for them to call and confirm.”

  “You’re sure there’s nothing I can do?”

  “Very sure.”

  Chloe bit down on her lower lip and raised her eyebrows, as if to say, “Poor you.” Jane had been touched by this wide-eyed, lip-biting expression for the first few weeks Chloe worked at the station. Then she saw Chloe staring at her with the exact same mixture of worry and pain while Jane was combing her hair in the bathroom mirror and realized it was a young, beautiful woman’s pity of a forty-year-old she considered past the point of sexual relevance. Jane would have laughed it off if she hadn’t been worrying about the sexual relevance question herself.

  Half an hour earlier, Jane had phoned Rosemary Boyle, an old college friend who was in Boston to teach a couple of courses at BU. Rosemary was a poet, usually a self-involved conversationalist, but last year she’d written a memoir about being a widow, so she could provide an expert opinion on loss, or something equally pertinent and unspecific. Since the publication of Dead Husband, Rosemary was prepared to provide an expert opinion on anything, as long as it helped promote the book. The only thing she wasn’t prepared to talk about was the $1.5 million poor Charlie had left her when he died or committed suicide or whatever, and how her wrenching description of intolerable privation had added another few hundred grand to her coffers. Jane still hadn’t heard back from her. They could easily do the show with five guests, but four was out of the question.

  “David’s getting a little worried,” Chloe said. “He’s wondering if we should get some Harvard people lined up.”

  “Definitely not!” Jane said. “I’m handling this.”

  Chloe tugged at her lower lip, a sign that Jane had sounded annoyed rather than authoritative, thereby further undercutting herself.

  David Trask was the show’s executive producer and saw “Harvard people” as the solution to every problem, as if having an endowed chair, whatever that was, was enough to make up for being pretentious and phlegmatic. Why David was communicating through Chloe, instead of talking to her directly, was a question she’d have to ask when she had a free moment. Chloe had come to the station straight out of Wellesley College four months earlier. She was intelligent—you couldn’t deny her that—and so full of energy and ideas you wanted to cap her, like a well, to control the flow.

  Chloe was wearing a black suit with a Mandarin collar and bell-bottomed pants, all made out of a tastefully shiny material that probably contained rubber or some other unwholesome, impractical material. No doubt her monthly wardrobe allowance exceeded Jane’s mortgage. Her shoes were big lumpy things with immense soles that made her walk with a heavy-footed gait, as if she were about to slap on a pair of skis and hit the slopes, but even they didn’t detract from an overall appearance of gorgeous malnourishment that had men throughout the building finding reasons to pass by her desk several times a day. Genetic engineering eventually would produce human beings very much like Chloe: satiny blends of the best physical features of every race with perfectly proportioned faces and figures, human beings with such a scrambled background that racial biases, stereotypes, and quotas were rendered irrelevant in their presence. Her father was a Korean, African-American, Italian lawyer who worked as a diversity consultant for a multinational, and her mother was a former model or dancer or something show-offy, part Colombian, part Chinese, part Native American. Despite all of the advantages wrought by her looks and her upper-middle-class upbringing, Chloe saw the world entirely in terms of villains and victims, and seemed to have equated victimhood with strength and moral superiority in a manner Jane found increasingly common among the young people, male and female, who came to the station. The fact that she’d risen to assistant producer in four months didn’t seem to register as evidence of her own good fortune. Jane suspected that Chloe, like most college grads of her generation, was bulimic, but there were bloated, premenstrual, post-lunch moments when she envied her even this messy but efficient affliction.

  “I can’t believe that airline pilot canceled,” Chloe said. “We should do a
show on people whose lives were ruined by flight cancellations—missing job interviews, weddings, important deaths.”

  “I hate missing important deaths,” Jane said. “It ruins your day.”

  Jane would have gone on the defense if someone had responded to an idea of hers with this kind of sarcasm, but Chloe took it in and decided to make the best of it. “Bad idea?” she asked.

  “It needs fine-tuning.”

  Jane could see Chloe adjusting the knobs already, sharpening the focus and heightening the contrast. She could deal with Chloe’s beauty and youth, write them off as superficial advantages which would fade in time, but there was no way to compete with someone willing and eager to actually learn from her own mistakes. She felt like saying, here, take my desk, my office, let’s just get this over with right now.

  2.

  When Chloe left, Jane went back to her lists. Reading through the orderly arrangement of words on paper—true, false, and everything in between—made her feel more in control of her destiny.

  Gerald’s gymnastics class—3pm, halfway down the To Do list, was code for taking her six-year-old son to his shrink. She had no hesitation in admitting Gerald was seeing a shrink—if anything, telling her friends made her feel like a better, more attentive mother than she quietly feared herself to be—but her mother-in-law, who was temporarily installed in their carriage house, would have been horrified at the idea, even though she routinely told Jane, in her oblique way, that she thought Gerald was a peculiar child. In Sarah’s view of the world, having a problem was life and attempting to do something about it was self-indulgence. The stoic put up with their God-given afflictions and addictions; the moral weaklings caved in and tried to do something about them.

  So to avoid Sarah’s scorn, Gerald was dragged off to his gymnastics instructor, Dr. Rose Garitty, M.D., every Wednesday. Poor pudgy, peculiar Gerald. The mere thought of him trying to do somersaults was enough to rend Jane’s heart.