17
Everything in the world seemed to be sexually charged after that. I found myself flushing and blanching the way I had in the perpetual embarrassment of adolescence. And like Joe Packer, in Michael’s book, I kept thinking: what have I done? But somehow I managed to forestall the question and banish most of the heated images from my head while I planned and prepared the dinner for Suzy and George.
The white peaches I’d found at the Vinegar Factory were especially sweet—it was the heart of their season—and Faye’s flan recipe was precise and surprisingly easy to follow. When I inverted each little ramekin, its silken contents fell out with a delicate plop and then quivered for a moment, as if it had just had a narrow escape. Esmeralda, who’d come to help me serve and clean up, had prepared the receiving plates with dabs of gingered syrup, to make it possible to center the flan, and I scribbled gibberish in raspberry sauce with a pastry tube around the rim of the plates. The results were so beautiful, I quivered a little myself as I looked at them and contemplated the evening ahead.
Having ordinary dinner guests during ordinary times had always been a particular pleasure. Maybe that’s because my parents let me sit in on their dinner parties when I was a child, and they had always seemed like such natural, cheerful events. It made perfect sense to me to break bread with friends and family, to share our common needs for sustenance and company at the same time. And why not add the enhancements of candlelight and flowers, the seductive tones of Schubert or Shearing?
But this was hardly an ordinary occasion. Suzy was bringing the man she loved to dinner at her parents’ home, without knowing that her father didn’t live there anymore, or that her mother, in a state of opaque fear and sheer anguish, had recently taken a young lover, too. None of the children knew anything. With Suzy’s consent, I’d invited Scott and Jeremy and Celia to join us. “Okay, let’s just get it all over with,” was the way she put it, sighing heavily, as if she were facing serious surgery with a certain grim bravado.
I dreaded the whole elaborate charade myself, but once things had been set into motion, it seemed impossible to stop them. And here I was, admiring the flan, worrying over the sole and the sautéed greens. It was a little like thinking about death before going on with our lives, a curiously brief panic from which we can be so easily seduced by the very worldly goods we’re going to lose.
Ev was the first to arrive, at least twenty minutes early. When everyone else got there, I realized, he would be smoothly in place, as if he’d never left—what a sly trick. He rang the bell rather than use his keys. He might have been afraid that I had changed the locks and he would have to fumble outside the apartment in growing humiliation and anger before I let him in, or perhaps he was simply presenting himself anew to me, a stranger without our long history of love and its recent dissolution. I was sure that it was Ev who had rung the bell, even before I looked through the peephole. The four-to-midnight doorman, someone new enough not to really know the children, hadn’t announced anyone, and I could sense Ev’s nervous, waiting presence just beyond the door.
I had told Esmeralda that I would let everyone in that evening, and I walked slowly down the long foyer, the way overeager brides stroll down the aisle when they become conscious of having to pace themselves. That foyer, the very wall where Michael and I had fallen so avidly upon each other, was innocent of afterimages, except in my own mind, and I blinked several times in an effort to erase them. But when I saw Ev through the peephole, I remembered seeing Michael framed that way for the first time, the way he’d combed his hair and licked his lips—
the better to kiss you
with, my dear!
I felt that old, low ache in my belly as I opened the door to Ev, and unreasonable fury with him for my own unfaithfulness.
“Hi,” he said, standing there a little slumped, a door-to-door salesman who’d had a discouraging day. He was freshly shaven, though, and wore his creamy linen jacket, and I was reminded of a time long ago when I would have bought just about anything he pitched. There were no flowers tonight, no attempt at a kiss or even a friendly embrace. Just as well, because I had instinctively taken a step backward, as if to avoid the germs of someone with a bad cold.
“Hi,” I said lamely in return. If it wasn’t such balmy summer weather, if he’d had an overcoat or an umbrella, I might have taken it from him, a conveniently mundane gesture to interrupt the terrible tension between us. Instead I foolishly waved him inside. One would think he didn’t know his own way.
Esmeralda came out of the kitchen to greet her
“Señor Guapo.”
She had always openly favored Ev over me, despite what I considered my domestic bond with her—we sometimes tackled big jobs, like the closets, together; consulted on household or beauty products; and I offered sympathetic glances when she quarreled with her own husband on our telephone. Well, so much for sisterhood. Of course, I was the one who occasionally suggested (but never demanded) that it was time to wipe out the refrigerator or vacuum behind the furniture. But I was also the one who considerately tidied the apartment before she came to clean it. She’d picked up cheerfully after slovenly Ev, though, and the incident of the Clichy—my merely having asked her if she’d seen it—had only added to my villainy, while he remained, as always, pure and guiltless.
I was certain Esmeralda knew that he had moved out. She had access to our closets and drawers, to the depressions we left in our pillows and our mattress, even to our trash, all intimate clues to the occupancy of the apartment, the state of our marriage. I wondered with a chill if Michael had left clues of himself here, too, if Esmeralda had that much power of knowledge over me. I had meticulously disposed of all the cigarette stubs and sprayed one of those scented air fresheners I hate everywhere after Michael left, to cover the damning odors of smoke and sex, but she still sniffed suspiciously whenever she entered the apartment. And I imagined her in her yellow rubber gloves, dusting for fingerprints and dropping evidence against me into ziplock plastic bags, like a vice-squad detective. Ev had a kiss for
her,
I noticed, an affectionate little peck on the cheek that almost caused me to snort in indignation, and they exchanged a few bantering words in Spanish. Without the benefit of foresight, I had taken useless French in school.
Ev went into the dining area and surveyed the table. Among his former responsibilities, when we had dinner guests, was to take the chest of good silverware down from the hall closet, put the extra leaves into the table, and unfurl the tablecloth down its extended length. As he could plainly see, all of this had been done without him tonight, and I wondered if he was brooding over his easy expendability. It would have pleased him greatly, I thought, to watch me drag the step stool to the closet before handing the silver chest down to Esmeralda, and to know that it took the two of us to maneuver the heavy table leaves.
Jeremy and Celia arrived next, and I quickly detected a rare estrangement between them. They’d always displayed a patent oneness that was sexual, social, and musical. Violet had once wryly referred to them as “Adam and his rib.” And they’d often made me think of the pair of cardinals—the red male and the brown female—that once lived in my parents’ garden, and were always seen in tandem. But Jeremy and Celia headed in different directions as soon as they walked in, as if they’d just been demagnetized. Was it something familial? Was it catching? Jeremy, who could never hide his feelings, seemed miserable as he handed me a bottle of the awful Algerian red they drank. His eyes were pink-rimmed and his cheeks were dappled with contained emotion. I believed that if I said the wrong thing to him, he would have started bawling. At the opposite end of the living room, Celia was merely defiant, with her arms folded across her flat chest, her pointy little chin lifted. Ev glanced questioningly at me, but I turned away. Somehow, this was his fault, too.
Scott, life’s sleepwalker, came in a few minutes later, waved casually to everyone, and went straight to the cashews and the cheese board. He was wearing a Hawaiian sport shirt with his jeans, rather than the tattered T-shirts he favored, and he looked flashy, but also a little blank without some name or slogan spanning his narrow chest. I had told him he could bring someone if he liked, that it would even out the table, but I really only wanted him to feel comfortable, not to be the only one without a dinner partner. He’d arrived alone, anyway, and it didn’t matter very much, since no one else in the room appeared to still be coupled. We needed Suzy and George desperately by then, for romantic relief. They were late, of course, which only made them more keenly anticipated, and when they finally made their entrance, they received all of our ardent attention.
George was the one bearing flowers, a sumptuous summer bouquet he presented so grandly, I might have just won a beauty contest. He was the beauty, though, unconventionally so, just as Suzy had said; kind of a cross between Lenny Bruce and the young Marlon Brando. I especially liked the openness of his expression, and I was moved by the tiny razor nick on his upper lip; he had worried over meeting us, too. As I greeted him, Suzy was on the edge of my vision, looking peach-skinned and ripe in a skimpy black eyelet shift. What gorgeous children they’ll have, was my precipitate thought. “Hello, Suzy’s mom,” George said, beaming at me as he bestowed my new world title. My father would have been delighted—a lawyer, the next best thing to a doctor, and a diplomat to boot. Suzy’s pride in George, her intemperate happiness, was so dazzling, I had to avert my eyes for a moment. Oh, my lucky girl! My poor girl.
I watched the rest of the action around the room as if it were a ballet, something modern, but with traditional origins. Ev stepped up from behind me to greet his daughter and his replacement in her affections with what I grudgingly allowed was good sportsmanship. The men shook hands gravely, sealing an unspoken bargain, and Ev draped his arm across Suzy’s shoulders for a few seconds before he seemed to nudge her in George’s direction. He was already, reluctantly, giving her away.
Scotty approached next, tossing cashews quickly into his mouth and wiping his palms on his jeans so he could shake hands, too. “Hey, whassup?” he mumbled to his sister, accidentally bumping heads with her when she presented her cheek for a kiss. His oddball, abbreviated way of saying hello, I suppose, of offering his blessings. And for once, no one seemed to mind. Suzy rubbed her head and smiled indulgently at her baby brother, the erstwhile scourge of her existence, and George lightly punched him on the shoulder and called him “man,” just when Scotty seemed to me most obviously a boy.
As Scott wandered off, Celia and Jeremy came warily from their opposite corners, almost, but not quite, converging. I found myself trying to measure the pulsing space between them, willing it vainly to close. There were sisterly kisses and more manly handshakes, followed soon by cocktails and appetizers. Ev played host, and Esmeralda wove in and out among the guests with the precision of a flamenco dancer, balancing a tray of miniature crab cakes and flirting with all the men before rushing back to the kitchen. I rushed in after her, transferring all of my anxieties at the last minute to the food.
And then we were seated around the table in the flattering flicker of candlelight. I silently thanked Faye for her recipes as the minted pea soup and the delicate sole were each lauded in turn. For some reason, things weren’t that awkward; we might have been any family sharing a special, festive dinner. Ev did more than his share to contribute to the illusion, attentively pouring the Chardonnay and starting a lively conversation with George about things we’d never discussed between ourselves, like legal advocacy for the homeless and the intricacies of city planning.
Jeremy and Celia wrenched themselves out of their private misery long enough to join in a little, and even Scott awakened from his usual fugue state to offer opinions. They were decidedly offbeat, of course, even absurd—some of the homeless should be given accelerated law degrees, for example, and parts of Central Park turned into farmland for homesteaders.
I had a flash of name-calling and food fights, of Suzy or Jeremy leaving the table in tears. There was passionate argument this time, and a little jeering, but nobody really attacked Scott or laughed directly at him. “Maybe you should go to law school,” George told him in a not-completely-ironic tone. Scott coolly took it as his due, and Suzy even said, “Why not?” I wondered if she was drunk, and when they had all become so mature, so incredibly tolerant of one another. I hardly even cared that Ev said, “Brava!” to Esmeralda as she cleared the soup plates, or that she bowed slightly in acceptance of his praise, as if she’d done more than just shell the peas and ladle out the soup.
When the phone rang, I didn’t recognize the sound at first. It might have been the oven timer or a car alarm going off down in the street. I even hoped, rather hopelessly, that it was someone else’s cell phone, but the ring was too familiar, too persistent. And when I heard Esmeralda say “The Carroll residence” in her stagy company voice into the sudden quiet, I knew immediately who it was. Even before she came into the room and said “Mrs.?” in that knowing and insinuating way, I’d risen from my seat, blazing, letting my fork clatter onto my plate and my napkin drop to the floor.
I had a rapid and dizzying run of disconnected thoughts. Why isn’t she ever on my side? Did he have to call now? Why couldn’t Faye have lived with her son? Why was the door to my father’s office locked? “Excuse me,” I said to the table at large, to George in particular, and then hurried down the hallway to pick up the master bedroom extension. “I have it,” I said firmly to Esmeralda’s expectant breath in my ear, and after hearing that definitive click, “Hello?”
“Alice,” Michael said. “Wow, I’m so glad you’re there.”
“This really isn’t a good time. I have dinner guests,” I told him, thinking what a handy euphemism that was for my nuclear family.