He kept looking all around for Lawrence, who probably wanted to pay Jack back for the bottle of Taittinger Jack had poured on him in Cannes.
"My Gawd," Michele was saying--a conflation of the worst of Boston and New York in her accent. "This place is cool."
Alas, she wasn't. Her skin, which he'd remembered as glowing, was dry and a trifle raw-looking--as if she'd just emerged from a hot bath and had stood outside for too long on a New England winter day. Her honey-blond hair was dull and lank. She was too thin and sinewy, in the manner of women who work out to excess or diet too rigorously--or both. She hadn't had all that much to drink, but her stomach was empty--Michele was one of those people who looked like her stomach was empty most of the time--and even a moderate amount of alcohol would have looped her.
She was wearing a streamlined gray pantsuit with a slinky silver camisole showing under the jacket. New York clothes--Jack was pretty sure you couldn't buy a suit like that in Boston or Cambridge, and she probably didn't get those very high heels anywhere but New York, either. Even so, she looked like a doctor. She held her shoulders in an overerect way, the way someone with a neck injury does--or as if she'd been born in a starched lab coat.
"I don't know how you do what you do," she was telling Jack. "I mean how you're so natural doing such unnatural things--a cross-dressing ski bum, for example. A dead rock star--a female one! A limo driver who's married to a hooker."
"I've known a lot of limo drivers," he told her.
"How many homophobic veterinarians have you known, Jack?" Michele asked him. (She had even seen that unfortunate film.)
"I'm weird, you mean," he said to her.
"But you bring it off. You're a natural at being weird," Michele told him.
Jack didn't say anything. She was fishing for something that had fallen to the bottom of her second glass of white wine, which was half empty. It was a ring that had slipped off her finger.
"I've lost so much weight for this date," she said. "I'm two sizes smaller than I was a month ago. I keep moving my rings to bigger fingers."
Jack used a spoon to scoop her ring out of her wineglass. The ring had slipped off the middle finger of her right hand; the middle finger of her left hand was even smaller, Michele explained, but the ring was too small to fit either index finger.
It was a somewhat old-fashioned-looking ring for a woman her age to wear. A little clunky--a big sapphire, wreathed by diamonds. "It has some sentimental value, this ring?" Jack asked her.
Michele Maher knocked over her wineglass and burst into tears. Against Jack's advice, she'd ordered a pizza--not pasta. The pizza at Jones had a pretty thin crust; Jack didn't think the pizza had a rat's ass of a chance of absorbing the alcohol in her.
It had been her mother's ring--hence the bursting
into tears. Her mother had died of skin cancer when Michele was still in medical school. Michele had instantly developed a skin ailment of her own; she called it stress-related eczema. She'd specialized in dermatology for personal reasons.
Her father was remarried, to a much younger woman. "The gold digger is my age," Michele said. She'd ordered a third glass of white wine, and she hadn't touched her pizza.
"You remember my parents' apartment in New York, don't you, Jack?" she asked. She had placed her dead mother's unwearable ring on the edge of her plate, where it seemed poised to eat the pizza. (The ring honestly looked more interested in eating the pizza than Michele did.)
"Of course," Jack answered. How could he forget that Park Avenue apartment? The beautiful rooms, the beautiful parents, the beautiful dog! And the Picasso, toilet-seat-high in the guest-room bathroom, where it virtually dared you to pee on it.
"That apartment was supposed to be my inheritance," Michele said. "Now the gold digger is going to get it."
"Oh."
"Why didn't you sleep with me, Jack?" she asked. "How could you have proposed that we masturbate together? Mutual masturbation is much more intimate than having conventional sex, isn't it?"
"I thought I had the clap," he admitted. "I didn't want you to get it."
"The clap from whom? You weren't seeing anyone else, were you?"
"I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher. You probably don't remember her, Michele."
"Those women who worked in the kitchen were all old and fat!" she cried.
"Yes, they were," Jack said. "Well--Mrs. Stackpole was, anyway."
"You could have slept with me, but you slept with an old, fat dishwasher?" she asked, in a ringing voice. (She said dishwasher the way she'd said gold digger.)
"I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole before I knew I could sleep with you," Jack reminded her.
"And your relationship with Emma Oastler--what was that, exactly?" Michele asked.