Swim

appeared to be checking him out, too. Blue ring-neck long-sleeved T-shirt, khakis, orange Pumas. Official uniform of the Los Angeles man-boy. The khakis were supposed to signal I have a job, while the funky shirt and sneakers said but I haven’t sold out. Robert had worn the plaid shirts and concert T-shirts he’d had since high school. Nobody would ever mistake him for the Man. Once, he’d told me, he’d been sitting outside World of Pies and someone tried to put a dollar bill in his coffee cup. Which, he’d said, looking pained, was full at the time.
    “Are you pro or anti cologne?” Gary asked.
    “I’m indifferent.”
    His Adam’s apple jerked and bobbed when he swallowed. “Help a brother out,” he said. “It can’t be any worse than listening to the hopes and dreams of seventeen-year-olds.” He led me toward Macy’s and got me to sniff half a dozen eye-watering potions that he sprayed into the air. “What do you think?” he asked after each one. “Is it doing anything for you?”
    I rolled my eyes, and finally started laughing when he waggled his eyebrows and asked, in an atrocious Austin Powers accent, whether something that smelled aggressively of limes was making me horny. “Are you newlyweds?” the bespectacled, gray-haired saleswoman asked as she wrapped up Gary’s Chanel por Homme.
    He gave her a sweet smile and took my hand. “Brother and sister.”
    Back at the valet stand, I wished him good luck with his date.
    “It’s not too late,” he said. He pumped my hand up and down once, and then he just held it.
    “Too late for what?” “We could go back in there. Buy that puppy. I’ll ditch the d-girl. You’ll forget about your unfortunate time behind bars. We could go to the beach and let the little guy run around.”
    I shook my head. “You need practice, and I’ve got plans.” I retrieved my hand and put it in my pocket. “You might want to take a shower first, though. You smell kind of confusing.”
    “Can’t have that,” he said cheerfully, and handed the valet his parking stub. “See ya.”
    “Good luck,” I said, leaving him to his date as I headed for the pool.
    “Phone for you, Ruthie,” my grandmother announced, clutching the cordless as if it were a wild animal she’d managed to subdue with her bare hands. “It’s a man,” she emphasized in a loud whisper, as if I’d missed the manic glee in her eyes. It was Saturday, six days after I’d left Lonelyguy at the mall. We’d been e-mailing. His date, he told me, had been a disaster. Dana the d-girl had ordered a salad and spent the entire dinner shifting the leaves around her plate and complaining about, in order, her producer bosses, her most recent ex-boyfriend, her father, and her allergies. “By coffee, I was feeling like I was responsible not only for my entire gender, but the atmosphere, too,” he’d said. But it hadn’t stopped him from lining up somebody else. Actually, two somebody elses—a pediatric resident on Friday, for drinks, and a public relations executive for Saturday-afternoon coffee. I’d advised him on clothing, scents, and topics of conversation. Make eye contact, I said. Look at them like they matter, like they’re the only one in the room. He’d thanked me and mailed me a check. No matter what my grandmother wanted to believe, it was a business relationship, nothing more.
    I took the telephone, assuming that it was Gary, wanting to debrief in real time. “Ruthie?”
    His voice, as always, went straight to my heart and my knees, making the first one pound and the second two quiver. I sank onto Grandma’s fringed apricot velvet fainting couch, displacing two doilies on my way down. “Rob,” I said faintly. “How are you?”
    “Good,” he said. Then, “Busy.”
    “I bet.” I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to sound snide or sympathetic. My voice cracked on the last word. Pull yourself together, I told myself sternly, picking doilies up off the floor.
    “With a new show, actually,” he said. “Oh?” My tone was polite. I’d quit reading Variety in the wake of our whatever-it-was, and I’d assumed that Rob was still working on The Girls’ Room, which should just be gearing up for its next season.
    I leaned my cheek against the soft nap of the couch as he went into his pitch: a family dramedy he was preparing for pilot season. Hot mom, recovering alcoholic dad, dysfunctional sisters who managed a Miami lingerie boutique.
    “Are you interested?” “Do you mean,