The Side of the Angels (3 page)

“Spare me, Louise.”

Louise knew that I didn't fall for her pose of New Age nanny to the lovelorn. Having survived the brainwashing of the Catholic Church, I wasn't about to succumb to the mush of self-help lingo, Horatio Alger pep talks, and warmed-over Transcendentalism she served up to the despondent and discouraged who sought out her advice. What's more, Louise and I had had the same English teachers. So I could spot every borrowed line in the superficially profound patter that worked with her clients. With me, she couldn't get away with cribbing from Matthew Arnold or Edna St. Vincent Millay, or, God help us, Christina Rossetti. I knew all her sources.

“This karmic shove is coming from my mother, isn't it, Louise?”

Louise does not like to lie, so her avoidance of this question was all the corroboration I needed.

“What if I at least prepared a roster of possibles for you? I've had some great men sign up recently. Good, solid men. Men you could count on.”

“I'm still convalescing, okay?”

Louise assumed the expression of the sympathetic Mother Superior counseling Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music
, and said, “ ‘Let us grieve not, but rather find strength in what remains behind.'”

“Louise, that's from Wordsworth, whom you know I can't stand, and it's ‘
we
will grieve not,' and that poem is not about breaking up with someone who screwed around on you, it's about Wordsworth's stupid childhood.”

“It still applies,” said Louise.

“You know, your clients may think you're so wise, but really you're just exceptionally well read.”

Louise looked hurt, but shelved her feelings for the moment.

“You don't have to go through the preliminaries,” she said.

“Boy, my mother must really be in a hurry to get me on the market.”

This ready-set-go approach was a departure from Louise's usual playbook. Louise normally put her clients through an intense “pre-dating” course of preparation. I wondered why her customers put up with it, but I guess they figured that Louise was like a personal trainer: anyone who made you work
that
hard
must
be good.

Louise's methods had proven so successful that, had she wanted to, she could have bought a nice Edwardian condo in Kalorama, rather than the seedy apartment she rented on Capitol Hill. She could have afforded a reliable car instead of the old Chevy Cavalier that broke down six times a winter. But Louise was uncomfortable with her comparatively recent security. She still feared that Custom Hitches would collapse, or that the IRS would find fault with her scrupulously honest tax returns.

Louise had nothing to worry about. She had found her vocation and would continue to thrive on her uncanny intuition for what made one poor slob right for another poor slob. You had only to look around her office to know that she was a natural for her job. The rooms (the third floor of an old storefront in Woodley Park, above a yoga center and a florist's shop) were painted a dusty, womblike pink. Wedding invitations and engagement announcements lined the windowsill. See, they mutely testified, this could be
you
. Dim lighting, bowls of potpourri, and faded rose brocade curtains turned the office into a scented, firelit cave, a refuge where you could confide the ridiculous dream of finding someone to love you who'd actually love you back.

I had no interest in Louise's offer, though. I was still bewildered, still wondering how I'd been so unsuspicious. Jeremy had cheated on me with Virginia Sprague, the head of admissions at Laurel Hill, the girls' college on Boxwood Road where he taught modern world history and was far too spoiled with attention and admiration. Laurel Hill was a glorified finishing school for not-too-intellectual young women of
good family, and Jeremy was a star on its underachieving faculty. It's not good for a man like Jeremy to be too long in a place where he's top dog. He starts thinking he can get away with anything.

I'd met his honey once at a department dinner party. Virginia was cool and poised, gracious but not friendly, a forty-year-old divorcée from Charleston with a lilting Carolina accent that recalled Civil War love letters. It was funny, how she'd never lost that accent after ten years in D.C.

“Virginia is nice, but she's not very warm, is she?” I remembered saying to Jeremy after that dinner party. Virginia had wafted in during the second round of cocktails, wearing a lilac organza blouse so fragile and expensive that only a woman who never, ever spilled or tripped would be confident enough to purchase it.

“She's very closed off, isn't she?” he'd agreed. “It's quite unattractive.” By which I should have known he found her very appealing. Men make those immediate denials of interest solely about women who do, in fact, interest them intensely.

Maybe it was that voice, sweet and cool as the wisteria-shaded corner of a veranda on a hot summer afternoon. Or her often-silent self-containment, so challenging to a man like Jeremy, to whom women presented confidences and confessions like bouquets. Or maybe she'd simply wandered into his enclosure just as he started to feel restless.

Now, listening to Louise extol the virtues of a fresh start, I wondered at her faith in happy endings. I'd thought Jeremy was trustworthy. I'd thought we had something good going on, something that merited his keeping his pants zipped up at the office. What accounted for Jeremy's straying? And what was so great about Virginia, with her outdated Grace Kelly pageboy and her cultured pearls?

“What about the process?” I asked Louise.

“You don't have to go through the process. I know you well enough, don't I?”

She poured me more coffee, her own special almond-hazelnut blend (she uses hazelnut coffee and pours a tablespoon of almond extract on top before brewing).

Before she sent you out on your first date, Louise cataloged your romantic history, asked you to write down your dreams for a week, and
made a genogram of your extended family to pinpoint any possible “intimacy roadblocks.” If something in your past or present was getting in the way of your finding a lifetime partner, Louise would discover it faster than a drug-sniffing canine at the Miami airport sussing out a cocaine stash in a duffel bag.

Not to worry—if you
were
a subconsciously reluctant lover, Louise guided you through a free monthlong “unblocking” course, with personalized prescriptions for opening yourself up to love. These ranged from juice fasting to singing lessons to spending a weekend alone in a mountain cabin “to fall in love with yourself first.” Louise even led rituals for saying farewell to past loves, in which souvenirs of the unfaithful departed were burned, buried, or, in one case she told me about, spat upon. “Nothing else really seemed to express how she felt,” Louise said. “It was incredibly cathartic.”

On the rare occasions when a client left in dissatisfaction or gave up after encountering disappointment, Louise mourned for weeks. Once in a while she'd confide in me about a particularly difficult problem. I felt honored and pleased when she did that. It meant that Louise knew that underneath my pessimistic surface I rooted for love just as fervently as she did, though with less faith. It was like being a Red Sox fan. You prayed the Sox might make the play-offs, you cheered them through every victory of the season, but history told you that they'd never win the Series. Somehow it always ended with a heartbreaker in the bottom of the ninth.

But it was one thing to cheer for the home team, and another to be shoved out onto the field after a disastrous spring training.

“You have nothing to lose, Nicky. There are three great guys I can think of offhand that I know you'd have a terrific evening with, and that alone would be a boost for your confidence.”

“I don't know, Louise. I somehow don't have the courage for meeting a lot of new men right now.”

“I'd hold your hand every step of the way.”

“You can't come on a date with me. You can't feed me the right lines while I make chitchat over dim sum. I promise, Louise, when I'm feeling up to it I'll give it the old college try, I really will.”

“Then I won't push you.”

“I'll tell my mom you did your best.”

Louise smiled.

“I can handle Aunt Maureen,” she said.

They understand each other, Louise and my mother. In fact, if my mother could have chosen a daughter, she'd have chosen someone like Louise, someone who, like my mother, was as delicate-looking as a calla lily and as tenacious as bindweed.

“Thank you,” I said. “I know you mean well. Unlike my mother, who's just bossy.”

“Go to your meeting.”

As I was dusting bits of brownie off my skirt, there was a perfunctory knock, and our cousin Johnny ambled in. I noted Louise's expression: initial joy, followed by an immediate reining-in of the thousand-watt smile. On Johnny's face, I could discern no emotion other than easygoing affection, but that was Johnny. He played his cards close to his chest.

“Cousinettes,” he said, his nickname for us together.

“What brings you here in the middle of the day?” I asked.

“The same thing that brings you here. I wanted a decent lunch.”

He scooped some chicken salad into a folded-up piece of wheat bread and began eating, hanging over the table so as not to mess up his clothes. Today he was unusually dressy for Johnny: spotless jeans, his only good blazer with a black T-shirt underneath, and clean sneakers. Over his arm was the classic and becoming charcoal-gray tweed coat that Louise had persuaded him to buy at a flea market in Salisbury, Maryland. Before Betsey came along, Louise picked out most of Johnny's clothes. Now he would occasionally appear in something suburban and cutesy, like a pine-green cable-knit sweater with snowflakes dancing across the chest, and we would see Betsey's hand.

His light brown hair, as usual, was flopping into his eyes. At the shop he had to tie a twisted bandanna around his head to keep it back.

“I came to ask Louise if she'd go shopping with me,” he said. “Betsey's parents are coming to town this weekend and I need to look nice.”

“What's wrong with what you've got on?” I said.

“They want to take us out to dinner. Betsey said no sneakers. I thought Louise might want to advise me on some nice dress shoes.”

It was always Louise, and still Louise, whom Johnny turned to for advice on how to get on in the real world. At the garage, Johnny knew exactly what to do. But outside the shop, he constantly struggled with a void of information about how regular life should be led.

Johnny came to live with us a week before his fourteenth birthday because his mother drank. She was also, even more scandalously, divorced. In the months before he came to us, the nuns at Johnny's school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, noticed that he was arriving at school every day without a lunch, his uniform unpressed, his hair growing longer and longer. The parish priest investigated, a family conference was held, and Johnny was taken in by my mom and dad.

If my parents had suspected the situation earlier, he'd have been rescued from neglect years before, but Johnny's mother was a charmer, Dad's adorable, flighty little sister, Peggy, who knew how to keep up appearances—until one day she couldn't anymore. Johnny's dad was notable only for his spotless record of absence and his reluctance to contribute to his son's financial support. The result of this haphazard upbringing was that Johnny, although he put up a good front, still guessed a little at what regular people did about things like buying dress shoes. And Louise was the only one he allowed to assist him with the things he didn't know. It had always been that way. It was Louise who'd told him what flowers to get for his high school girlfriends on Valentine's Day and how much to spend on them, Louise who drilled him for tests and proofread his papers when he was getting his BA in business administration at Towson State, Louise who ordered him his first business cards when he became co-manager at the shop, Louise who encouraged him in the aw-shucks politeness that was such an asset with his customers and his lady friends.

For her part, when Louise broke up with someone and I was on the road, it was Johnny she called to come hold her hand. Johnny made sure she had her snow tires each winter and that her crummy apartment was equipped with enough locks and window bars to discourage an entire chain gang of escaped Lorton inmates. Johnny did the books for Custom Hitches. He even changed her lightbulbs.

But lately Louise had seemed impatient and distracted in Johnny's presence. I knew that she'd seen him a little less than usual this fall,
and this change was not due to Betsey, a diligent and industrious type who had so many evening classes, book discussion groups, bridal workshops, and knitting festivals on her schedule that she often left Johnny at loose ends these days.

Louise said, “I can't go, Johnny. I'm booked for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Maybe tonight?”

“Shouldn't Betsey help you with this? She'll know what sort of place her parents would take you.”

The old Louise would rather have gone out to buy vacuum cleaner bags with Johnny than be taken to a four-star restaurant by anyone else.

“Betsey has her class Halloween party tomorrow. It was delayed by the flu. All the kids got it.”

Betsey was a second-grade teacher, and she was always busy with tasks that struck me as overwhelmingly boring, like putting up bulletin boards in celebration of Arbor Day or visiting the arts and crafts store for origami paper. Betsey was … well, the only word for her was
damp
. There's something about teaching grade school that does it.

What did Johnny see in her? Maybe the shakiness of life with his mother rendered cautious, reliable girls like Betsey attractive to him; they'd always been his type. Betsey would remonstrate with Johnny when he got a little wild. He would shock her by driving a hundred miles an hour down Dalecarlia Parkway or going “cliffjumping” up the river with the guys from the shop. He'd take a road trip to Atlantic City for a weekend and lose every cent he brought with him, just for the hell of it. Betsey would reproach him for these excesses and suggest some safe outlet for his energy, such as learning golf or coaching Little League.