Beautiful Day(25)

It was at the end of the night that he’d bumped into Pauline. He was sitting at the bar finishing a nightcap when she walked through the room with Russell Stern, who was the president of Wee Burn’s board of directors. Russell Stern was divorced himself; he’d endured a rather high-profile split from his wife, Charlene, who sang with the Metropolitan Opera. Doug wondered for a second if Pauline and Russell Stern were dating. He had to admit, the thought irked him.

Pauline caught sight of Doug at the bar and said to Russell, “You go ahead, Russ, I’m going to stay for a minute. Thanks for everything.”

Russell eyed Doug and waved, then said to Pauline, “You sure you’re okay getting home? I can wait, you know.”

“I’m fine,” Pauline said. “Thanks again!”

Russell Stern lingered for a moment, and Doug felt both a surge of macho triumph and a flicker of worry that, as president of the board, Russell might inflict some kind of institutional retribution—a raise in Doug’s dues, perhaps, or revocation of Doug’s front-row parking spot. Then Russell left, and Pauline fluttered over.

She said, “Hey, stranger.”

He had ended up taking her home that night to the house in Silvermine that he had helped her wrest from Arthur Tonelli’s grip. They had kissed on the front porch, then in the foyer like a couple of teenagers. Doug had been amazed by his level of arousal. He hadn’t even allowed himself to think of sex in years. But with Pauline, his body asserted its natural instincts. He had thought they might do it right then and there up against the half-moon mail table, or on the stairs—but Pauline stopped him.

He said, “Are you dating Russell Stern?”

She paused for what seemed like a long time. “No,” she said. “We’re old friends.”

“Really?” Doug said. “Because he seemed a little miffed that you came over to talk to me.”

“Just friends,” Pauline said.

Doug asked Pauline to dinner the following week. He picked a place on the water in South Norwalk, where neither of them had ever been before. This was important, he thought, for both of them. They had a fine time, and during the dinner conversation, it came out that Pauline and Russell had gone to high school together in New Canaan. They had dated their senior year, Russell a football star and Pauline a cheerleader. They had stayed together for two more years while Pauline went to Connecticut College and Russell went to Yale. They had talked of getting married.

“Wow,” Doug said.

“Then I met Arthur at the Coast Guard Academy, and Russell met Charlene, and that was that. Now, we’re just friends.”

As “Layla” ended, Doug went to the counter to pay his bill. In retrospect, he could see that he had been dazzled by Pauline’s ease out in the world alone; he had been comfortable with her, and he had been intrigued by her relationship with Russell Stern. Pauline was nothing at all like Beth, and so Doug was free from feeling like he was replacing her. Pauline was someone else entirely—a friend, a lover, someone to enjoy. Doug had never fallen in love with Pauline, he’d never had the sick, loopy, head-over-heels feeling that he’d had from start to finish with Beth. And that, he saw now, had been preferable. Pauline wasn’t threatening. She wasn’t going to break his heart. She was someone to do things with, someone to talk to, someone to hold at night.

The problems had started when he agreed to move into Arthur Tonelli’s house with her. Why had he ever agreed to that? At the time, the real estate market had been good, and Doug had been anxious to get rid of his house. The kids were grown, Beth was dead, the house was far too big for him alone, it was filled with memories, nearly all of which were excruciatingly painful, and he didn’t want to take care of the house anymore. And so it had been wonderful to have another place to go, a place he wasn’t responsible for. But he had never thought of the Silvermine house as anything but the Tonelli house.

The bigger mystery was why Doug had married Pauline. More than anyone in the world, Doug knew how dangerous marriage could be. Why not just cohabitate without the messy business of binding their union  ? The answer was that Doug was old-fashioned. He was nearly sixty years old, he had been married to Beth for thirty-five years, he was used to being a married man. He was comfortable with a ring on his finger and a joint checking account, and one way of doing things. He was comfortable in a union  . The thought of him and Pauline “living together,” referring to her as “my partner” or worse still “my girlfriend,” and keeping two memberships at the country club and two sets of finances (his money, her money, most of which arrived in the form of Arthur Tonelli’s alimony checks) was absurd to him, bordering on distasteful.