empty. It wasn't the old Ritz bar. It had been refurbished by new owners into something that looked like an English hunting club, or the last twenty-five hotel bars you'd been in. But you could still have a table by the window, looking out at Arlington Street and the Public Gardens.
'What do you think about Paul?' I said. 'It's not just that he wants to locate his mother. He wants to find out about her.'
'He's thinking about getting married,' Susan said.
'Yeah?'
'For a kid like Paul whose parents' marriage was a failure, whose own life has made him careful, and introspective, the idea of marriage carries with it heavy baggage.'
'His mother really is missing,' I said.
'His mother has always been missing.'
'Mine too,' I said.
Susan took a gram of Riesling and swallowed it carefully and put the glass back down. She looked out at the wet street for a moment.
'How long have we been together?' she said.
'If you date together from the time I first got your clothes off,' I said,
'sixteen years.'
'Aren't you the romantic fool,' Susan said.
'How do you date it?' I said.
Susan thought a minute. Outside, chic Back Bay women were picking their way past the rain puddles on their high heels, bending in under the little black umbrellas they all had, most of them holding skirts down by pressing their left hand and forearm across their thighs as the wind pushed at them.
'I'd say it begins with the time you first got my clothes off.'
'September,' I said. 'Nineteen seventy-four. After Labor Day. It's almost an anniversary now that I think of it. You had on red undies with big black polka dots and a little black bow on the side.'
'Selected with great care,' Susan said. 'I planned that you'd get my clothes off.'
Outside on Arlington Street, the taxis all had their lights on in the rain and the overcast. The yellow headlights mixed with the neon and the traffic lights to make glistening streaks on the wet pavement-red, green, and yellow mostly. Two young Boston cops strolled past, heading toward Park
Square, their slickers gleaming in the rain, the plastic covers on their hats looking oddly out of keeping.
'In all that time,' Susan said, 'you have spoken maybe for five minutes, total, about your past.'
'My past?'
'Yes, your past.'
'What is this, an old Bette Davis movie?'
'No,' Susan said. 'I know you as I am sure no one in the world knows you.
But I only know you since we undressed that first time in September 1974.
I don't to this day know how you got to be what you are. I don't know about other women, about family, about what you were like as a little boy, peeking out at the adult world, trying to grow up, getting scarred in the process.'
'Heavens,' I said.
Susan smiled. Dampened the tip of her tongue with her wine. I drank the rest of my Sam Adams. The waiter noticed and raised an inquiring eyebrow.
I nodded and he hustled over a fresh bottle on a silver tray.
'It's a rainy day,' Susan said. 'We have nothing to do but look at the rain and watch the people go by on whatever street that is out there.'
'You've lived here since the Johnstown flood,' I said. 'That's Arlington
Street, runs from Beacon Street in the north to Tremont Street in the South
End.'
Susan smiled the smile she always smiled when you knew she hadn't the slightest interest in what you were saying, and she knew it, and she knew you knew it.
'Of course,' she said.
The only other people in the bar were two women at a table, with Bonwit's shopping bags piled on the two empty chairs; and a guy at the bar, reading
The Wall Street Journal and sipping what looked like a Gibson, up. The women were drinking white wine. Both of them smoked. Susan settled her gaze on me and waited.
'Well, we had a dog named Pearl,' I said.
'I know that,' Susan said. 'And I know that you were born in Laramie,
Wyoming, and that your mother died while she carried you and you were born by caesarean section and your father and your two uncles, who were your mother's brothers, raised you.'
