Jane Austen in Boca (13 page)

“Let him come,” she conceded, shrugging, “but I won’t promise to be civil.”

“You may not be civil”—May smiled, in another one of her flashes of spontaneous insight—”but you’ll be smart, and with a man like Stan Jacobs, smart is better.”

“I
WONDER WHAT
CHEF HAS UP HIS SLEEVE FOR THE VALENTINE’S

Day dinner?” Lila raised the question at lunch the next day. She had returned to the table with her plate heaped with salad. (“No club has fresher greens,” Hy Marcus liked to boast, “or a better variety of fixings.”) But the existence of the food before her had obviously not suppressed her interest in food at some prospective date.

“It’s supposed to be a secret,” said May, who was highly cognizant of club rules and regulations.

“All the more reason to want to know,” said Flo. “Last year, as I recall, Pixie Solomon got into the kitchen, found the list of ingredients, and pieced together the menu. It made quite a scandal.”

“One thing about Pixie,” said Lila, “she has initiative.”

Mel arrived at the table at this point, and everyone shifted so that he could pull a chair in next to Flo. “Are we talking about the upcoming dance?” asked Mel. “I hear it’s the social event of the season. But I feel like Cinderella without a gown. May, Flo tells me you’re a wizard with the needle and wouldn’t mind letting my tux out under the arms. I don’t have the build I had when I was thirty-five—that’s when I first bought that monkey suit, and it’s held up pretty well, I must say, given some hard wear and tear in between.”

May said she’d be delighted to let out Mel’s tux.

“I’ll bring it over tomorrow, if you’ll allow me,” continued Mel cheerfully. “I don’t mind saying that I’m looking forward
to getting out my dancing shoes and twirling this lovely lady on the dance floor.” He looked over at Flo, who lowered her eyes. She hadn’t danced for almost ten years. Eddie had been a good dancer, but the first stroke had put an end to the dancing. The second stroke had put an end to him.

“Speaking of the dance,” said May, clearing her throat and taking a leap that went against her timid nature, “I wanted to let you know, since I’m responsible, that Stan Jacobs will be attending. I know you two don’t get along,” she added hurriedly, glancing at Mel, “but I’m sure you can clear things up with a nice talk.” She looked plaintively over at Flo. “I told Norman last night to let Stan know that Mel would be there, thinking he might not want to come. But Norman called this morning to say that Stan didn’t seem to care. Maybe,” she said hopefully, “he wants to bury the hatchet.”

Flo noticed that during this speech, Mel’s face had lost its smile. Now he appeared to regain his composure and said lightly, “Why should I mind if Stan Jacobs chooses to inflict himself on me? I’ll have the loveliest lady on my arm, and it wouldn’t bother me if the devil himself sat at our table.” Then he leaned over and kissed Flo on the cheek.

Lila gave Hy a look, and Hy twirled his finger in the air. “L’amour, l’amour,” he said, and dug into his salad.

F
OR THE
V
ALENTINE’S
D
AY DINNER-DANCE, THE ACTIVITIES COM
mittee of Boca Festa had gone all out. The dining room had been festooned in swathes of red velveteen drapery, and luminescent red and pink plastic hearts hung from the chandeliers, themselves newly installed when the clubhouse had a face-lift a few months earlier. They now cast a romantic luster on the freshly painted faux-marble pink walls. The tablecloths were red embroidered with gold sequins, producing the illusion that each table was actually in the shape of a giant heart. The buffet table was awash in roses and baby’s breath.

The three women had taken pains to look their best for the occasion, each according to her taste. May wore a pink chiffon sheath, empire style with a high neck that she had been assured by the saleswoman was both elegant and slimming. Her hair had been swept back by Lila’s stylist into an elaborate twist—she usually wore it clipped up more casually—and she put on the amethyst-and-diamond earrings and brooch that had been Ir ving’s one gift of fine jewelry in commemoration of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, their last, for he had had a heart attack six months later and survived only a month beyond that. The gift, which she sensed had not been without the involvement of her daughter-in-law, had struck her at the time as too extravagant. Tonight, however, the purple stones went well with the pink dress, though most becoming was her expression of luminous happiness, which, Flo thought, gave her friend the appearance of an aging madonna.

Lila had always been more glitzy than her two friends, and she had for this occasion a kind of nervous enthusiasm that was reflected in her choice of attire. She wore a red dress plunging immodestly low—or so Flo thought, since breasts, beyond the age of forty-five, she took to be assets best kept under cover. Flo was distinctly in the minority among her peers in Boca Raton, however, where cleavage was as common as Bermuda shorts and often worn with them. Lila’s unusually extensive cleavage on this evening might have been explained by the hefty gold necklace that dominated her throat and upper chest—and that her friends, who knew one another’s wardrobes by heart, had never seen before.

“It’s amazing!” said May, gazing at the large knucklelike links that looked heavy and were therefore likely to be real.

Lila patted her chest complacently. “Just some baubles,” she said, laughing, “that happened to come my way”

“Lila is being mysterious,” said Flo. “Tell me, Lila, did you rob a bank, or did your long-lost grandfather leave you some money?”

Lila laughed. “It’s from Hy,” she said, looking at both women somewhat accusingly, as though expecting them to say something and warning them against it. “It’s a token of his affection.”

May kissed her; Flo said nothing. Lila’s involvement with Hy Marcus struck her as distasteful, and yet she also couldn’t help feeling that her reaction was an injustice toward her friend, and maybe even toward Hy. After all, she had never had to count pennies like Lila. And what did she know of Hy, besides the few encounters in which he had rattled on about his children, their possessions and accomplishments? A man had the right to be proud, as Lila said, and it was unfair to jump to conclusions based on so little evidence.

Flo had tried to share her friends’ enthusiasm in preparing for the dance, but she had to admit that the affair had lost some of its luster when Mel called that morning to say that he
wouldn’t be able to attend. He was under the weather—more than under the weather: temperature of 102, throbbing headache, nausea, diarrhea, and a hacking cough.

“I wouldn’t inflict myself on a dog, no less a woman I care a lot about,” he said gallantly between spasms of coughing. “It must be a bug I picked up in the hotel.” Mel had been staying in one of the area motels for the past few weeks as he scouted Boca Festa. “You saw that special on
20/20
on hotels and how they use the same rag to wash the toilet as they do the tele phone—” Mel broke off with another spasm.

“Don’t speak,” said Flo. “Rest yourself. I could care less about the Valentine’s Day dinner-dance.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mel. “I wanted to twirl you across the dance floor.”

“There’ll be other occasions,” said Flo. “Just get well. I wouldn’t want you to pass away before we had a chance to twirl.”

Mel laughed. “You’re the woman of my dreams, you know,” he said softly. “Good common sense, not a prima donna, fun to talk to.”

“Quite a résumé you’ve got for me,” laughed Flo. “But remember, I can’t cook or sew.”

“You can always hire someone to do that. Anyway, I didn’t say you were perfect, just the woman of my dreams—” He was cut short by another fit of coughing.

“You better get off the phone,” said Flo. “I wouldn’t want you to rupture something talking to the woman of your dreams.”

“Okay,” said Mel, “but think kindly of me in my misery while you’re at the dance. Think more than kindly, if you can.”

W
ITH THE PROSPECT OF BEING DATELESS AND, WORSE, FETTERED
to Stan Jacobs for the evening, Flo looked at herself in the mirror without much interest. Even so, she had to admit, she looked about as good as her age and natural endowments would permit. She wore, as she always did for Boca Festa events, her long black dress, bought years ago during a trip to New York City when Eddie, who was forever trying to convince her to buy expensive things after he made partner, had pushed her in the door of Martha’s, then the chicest of Madison Avenue boutiques, and insisted that she choose something for the University Ball. It was the year she was being honored, along with about twenty others, for “her service to the intellectual life of the academy.” The prospect of the award had embarrassed her. As a mere librarian, she hardly thought she merited special consideration in an institution in which the likes of Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom had taught the great books for decades. As it turned out, however, the event had been the highlight of her life when Bellow himself had stepped to the podium and personally thanked her for helping him with his research on
Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
She was at a loss as to what he meant, unless it was the brief conversation they’d had in the library one day about the quality of New York versus Chicago delis. For a novelist, she supposed, that probably did count as research.

She and Bellow had, over subsequent years, developed a friendship of sorts, since whenever he came into the library he looked for her to chat. He seemed to appreciate her brand of
wit, and they had traded quips on such topics as the eccentricities of the Jewish people, the war between the sexes, and the trials of being no longer young. He sometimes sent her an announcement about a new book or a reading he was going to give somewhere in town, always with a scribbled personal note. She had saved these notes, not above the awareness that in time they would come to be worth something. He was, she thought, a good writer (“great” she reserved for Tolstoy and Henry James) but also a fairly typical Jewish man of his generation. She had recently read in the paper about his becoming a father, again, at age eighty (no personal note to her on this accomplishment!). The news made her glad that she no longer risked running into him; she might have ended forever his appreciation of her wit by letting loose on the subject of an eighty-year old man having a baby.

The black dress from Martha’s still managed to evoke that auspicious moment when she had stood at the podium next to Bellow. And given its durability and its simple stylishness, she acknowledged that it had been worth its exorbitant price. It lay with the sureness of its pedigree, following the lines of her large-boned body without being clingy, which her figure could not have carried off. The neckline, likewise, had a stylish diplomacy: It was modest without being Legion of Decency. Best of all, the dress was comfortable, which for Flo was a prerequisite for anything she put in her closet. She liked to feel that, if she had to, she could play tennis in whatever she wore. For shoes, she had on a pair of two-inch Ferragamo heels, bought on sale at Saks two years ago. For jewelry, she wore the diamond studs that her son had given her during one of their periods of truce and the gold chain with the peace-sign pendant that had been a birthday present from Amy. Her hair, she left alone. It was short and, unlike her friends’, aggressively gray. Thirty years ago, finding herself graying at the temples, instead of “going blond” like so many women she knew, she had taken an unusual but characteristic
step and gone the other way. With the help of a product called True Gray, she had dyed her whole head that much maligned color and never turned back. Being gray at forty, she liked to say, had made her distinguished before her time. In fact, it softened, in a way ash blond never would have, her rather hard and angular features, and gave a sheen to her hair that made it glow silver. For those discerning enough to tell, it was highly becoming. For Flo, it afforded the satisfaction of going against the grain of her peers, something which, reverse snob that she was (and she admitted this freely to her friends), she enjoyed.

“I like the novelty of gray in a land of red and gold,” she explained, “and who knows, but it might catch on: like the success they had bringing back corn flakes.”

Flo usually looked forward to Boca Festa events and, even without Mel’s presence, would have been inclined to have a good time were it not for the prospect of Stan Jacobs being a wet blanket and judging them all. Thinking about him made her angry, and she determined then and there to resist his spoiling her fun—even if it killed her.

As the three women made their way up the steps of the club house into the lounge area that preceded the main dining room, they saw Hy Marcus waiting expectantly by the door. Hy was sporting what in Boca circles was termed “a look.” All affairs at Boca Festa were black-tie optional, but most of the married men, at the promptings of their wives, and even the few single men, tended to opt for the tuxedo. They enjoyed dressing up as much as the women. As Norman Grafstein had said, the lure of the English aristocrat always beckoned. At clubs like Broken Arrow, there were even dining rooms in which black tie was favored on a regular basis, as though the members had decided to bodily transplant themselves to nineteenth-century England and play at being, if not the Duke of Windsor, then at least Queen Victoria’s favorite counselor, that charming Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli.

There were, however, always those who preferred the flashier version of black tie—more Las Vegas than Hampton Court. Hy was of this school and had chosen to deck himself in a lime-green cummerbund and matching lime-and-yellow bow tie. Carol, thought May, would have approved. She was always nagging Alan to liven up his attire. Hy was definitely lively, his good cheer manifesting itself in a veritable avalanche of anecdotes about his children and grandchildren. In between, he chose to comment appreciatively on the women’s appearance. Lila’s red dress pleased him exceedingly, but he also took admiring notice of May, whose relationship with Norman Grafstein he had decided should proceed at the same pace as his with Lila.