With Falkeses on the brain, Anne checked the seating arrangements. Eleanor and Rupert had been seated at a table with the Strauses; also at the table were the Javitses and “some et ceteras,” as her mother referred to the B-listers. The tables sat twelve; they were all made up of mixed groups. “That way, there are no good tables, no bad tables,” Mrs. Lehman said. “Every table is good and bad.” She believed that making everyone unhappy to the same degree was better than making only some very unhappy. The one exception she made was with the Cardozos; she had Jim’s mother seat most of them. “I don’t know them,” she said, “I can’t be responsible for them.” She put the Cardozo tables in the middle of the floor.
Anne’s spying was amateurish and boring, like most spying. Her methods, culled from film noir, were shoe leather and perseverance. Occasionally she did library research; she was reluctant to interview anyone for fear of looking insane. When she couldn’t pick out Rupert from the men streaming out of the Hotel des Artistes in the morning, she looked for the Falkses’ wedding announcement in the Times microfiche. Eleanor was beautiful in the photo despite the airbrushing. Rupert was clerking then for Judge Friendly. She asked her father how she could find out where lawyers worked. He raised an eyebrow and sent her to Martindale Hubbell. Maynard, Tandy was an old WASP firm. Eleanor had reverted to type, Anne saw with satisfaction. For two weeks, she stood outside Maynard’s offices on Wall Street in the evening to see if anyone she recognized from West Sixty-Seventh Street came out the door. It was hopeless. The only person she recognized was the delivery boy from the corner coffee shop. She wished she had the spine to hire a private investigator.
She found Rupert, by accident, after a day of reconnaissance on the Upper West Side. She often loitered at the bar at Gray’s Papaya, in her brown hat, after tennis practice. Most days, the older boys stopped there before going home. One afternoon, as they were eating their hot dogs on the street, a tall blond man came toward them from the subway. “Dad,” Harry said. “What are you doing here? It’s too early.” He pointed at the sun still overhead. “Are you allowed out in daylight?” Will asked, flapping his arms and screeching like a bat. The three headed down Broadway, the boys on either side of their father, chattering and laughing. Anne didn’t follow; she had seen what she needed to see: the cheekbones, the eyes.
“Did we dance at our wedding,” she asked Jim a few nights later. He didn’t remember. “I remember stepping on the glass,” he said. “I remember shaking hands with Kissinger and not saying anything to him, except ‘Thank you for coming.’?” As Jim talked, Anne remembered the cantor coming through the receiving line. He shook hands with Jim and offered him congratulations. Then he turned to her and, leaning in as if to kiss her cheek, whispered, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
—
Jim thought Eleanor’s boys looked like him, and though he knew they weren’t his sons, he felt cheated. They should have been his. Grieving his loss and feeding his grudge, he took an unhealthy interest in the Falkes boys. He couldn’t help it. At least once a month, he would find himself at Sunday services at St. Thomas. He’d arrive early and take a seat in the back on a side aisle. From there, he’d watch the Falkeses come in and go out. Eleanor would hold the littlest ones’ hands as she walked to their seats. Rupert would keep the older ones moving down the aisle, a sheepdog prodding his sheep. The boys wore their school blazers and ties. They didn’t go to Sunday school. Rupert didn’t believe in it. Religion was music, mystery, and ritual. Bible stories were no different from Greek myths. He left both to the d’Aulaires.
Sometimes after a morning surgery, Jim would go to an afternoon movie at Lincoln Plaza, hoping he would run into Eleanor. Occasionally he did. She was sometimes with Carlo Benedetti—his successor, as he thought of him. They would chat briefly. He would ask about the boys, wanting to keep up. She never kissed him, as friends might on meeting. Eleanor rarely greeted anyone outside the family, other than Susanna, with a hug or kiss. If she was alone, Jim would invite her to coffee; she would beg off. “Boys to fetch,” she’d say. “Take care.” As the boys came along, every two years, Jim kept track. When the fifth was almost four and no sixth appeared, he had a vasectomy. It was an impulsive decision, made more definite when his doctor questioned him. “I don’t want children,” he said. “I don’t like children.” The truth was, he didn’t want children who weren’t Eleanor’s. A vasectomy would make sex easier, safer, more pleasurable. He wouldn’t have to use condoms if he didn’t want to. He feared being trapped by a pregnancy.
To his surprise, the vasectomy was a shock to the system, not physically but emotionally. He felt acutely the ridiculousness of his position. For years, he’d clung to the fantasy that Eleanor would leave her marriage for him. He had to face facts; she wouldn’t do it while the boys were young. He decided he would have to marry, if only temporarily, for self-respect. He shrunk at the thought Eleanor might think him pitiful.
In his twenties, Jim was a serial dater, going through ten or more women a year. They were all exceptionally good-looking, tall and lean, like Eleanor, but not Eleanor; they always fell short. He would pick them up at bars or weddings or subway platforms, never the hospital. He had a reputation to keep up there. He was never a boyfriend, only a date, slippery and noncommittal. He’d call at the last minute, he’d break weekend dates. Heart surgeons had good excuses for not coming across. He rarely took a woman to dinner and he never let a woman cook for him. He didn’t like to talk but he would listen if the woman wasn’t a chatterer. He didn’t understand women; he listened for clues. The women might have been intelligent. His preference was for women who were bankers. They were better-looking than lawyers and not as talkative. He usually took a date to a late movie, then went home to her place, never to his. He was looking for sex, an hour or two. He liked women who liked sex, who were good at it. He was attentive to special tastes. He would ask a woman what she liked and tell her his preferences. “Let’s make each other happy,” he’d say. He never stayed over. “Early surgery, tomorrow, I mean today, in three hours,” he’d say. One woman asked to tie him up. She expanded his repertoire. There were women at the hospital whom he liked, whom he talked to, but until he met Anne, he wasn’t interested in dating any of them. Anne made him feel calm. She was smart, undemanding, and adoring, with translucent skin and wonderful breasts: high and firm and larger than his hands. He discovered he was a breast man, not a leg man. She looked nothing like Eleanor. She was nothing like Eleanor. She knew a stent from a shunt. She was Jewish and still she disliked his parents. She laughed at his jokes. No one before her had ever recognized his stabs at humor. Eleanor’s humor had made him nervous. Everything about Eleanor had made him nervous, nervous and excited. Eleanor had made herself sexually available to him in a way no twenty-year-old ever imagined. It had ruined other women for him, until Anne, who in her own way was as sexually thrilling. Debutantes were the best.