Happenstance, page 30
‘Uncle Bernie’s staying overnight tonight,’ Jack told her, placing a feather-edge of enthusiasm on his voice.
‘Oh.’ She turned to him happily and her shoulders contracted with pleasure. ‘He’s sleeping here? Tonight? On the couch, you mean?’
‘I don’t know about the couch,’ Jack said. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead.’
‘Because he could have my room,’ Laurie said. ‘If he wanted to.’
‘Well, okay. Maybe. Why don’t we ask him when he wakes up, where he wants to sleep.’
‘I mean, I could sleep in the quilt room. On that folding bed.’
‘Okay. We’ll see.’
‘Or you know what, Dad?’ she said, excited. ‘Mother’s away, so he could sleep on her half of the bed.’
She spoke urgently, delighted with herself. She had stopped stirring the oil and vinegar around and was waving the fork back and forth in the air, dazed by her own good sense.
‘I don’t think so, Laurie.’
‘Oh.’ She began to stir the dressing again, slowly now, absorbing this unexpected ‘no.’ ‘Okay,’ she said at last.
Then the back door slammed, letting in a burst of icy air. Rob was home. His blue and white satin jacket radiated with its own cloud of cold. He had grown two inches in the last year, and the kitchen seemed cluttered with his arms and legs. ‘I’m starved,’ he said, glancing suspiciously around the room.
‘How was the track meet?’ Jack asked with hollow heartiness, and as he spoke he could feel the question drifting off into the air, apparently unanswerable.
‘Not bad. What’s to eat?’
‘Spanish rice,’ Laurie said. ‘Who won? Did Elm Park win?’
‘When’re we eating anyway?’
‘Soon,’ Jack said shortly.
Rob was opening the oven door and lifting the lid from the pyrex casserole. He grunted, made a face, and gave a ripe snort of disgust. ‘Do we have to eat this crap?’ he said.
Jack felt the room rock. For a fraction of a second – it couldn’t have been more – he was sure he was going to kill Rob. His right hand jerked upward and with horror he saw that he was still holding on to the paring knife. So this was how it happened, kitchen murders, blood on the floor, bodies falling, blind unreasoned passionate rage.
The word crap? It wasn’t that; the kids used that word all the time; he used it himself, TV was crap, Nixon was crap, the newspapers were full of crap. It wasn’t just today; today’s explosion was months overdue. But today, finally moved, he had wanted to smash Rob’s face in, to bring his fist up against Rob’s nose; he wanted to knock those teeth right out of his head. He made himself take a deep breath and then, trembling, he brought his arm down, carefully placing the knife on the counter, parallel to the edge of the cutting board. The room seemed overbright, blazing. He stared at his son.
Rob stared back, a little frightened now. He was almost as tall as Jack, but a good twenty pounds lighter. ‘I hate Spanish rice,’ he said weakly.
‘You can damn well go hungry then,’ Jack said, breathing out sharply. Lout. Insolent lout. Barbarian. Stomping in, as though he owned the place. He could feel his heart pumping blood; there were kids in the world who were starving to death.
For half a minute or more no one spoke. Rob stood, fixed to the floor, his face, with its roughened acne mask, gone suddenly formless, uncertain, and Jack could feel like a physical force his son’s instant contrition. He could also sense, and was frightened by, his own inability to let the matter drop.
‘Just who in hell do you think you are, stalking in here like this, demanding –’
‘Okay, okay,’ Rob said, backing off.
‘There’s salad,’ Laurie croaked tearfully from the corner, ‘Caesar salad.’
‘He goes without dinner tonight,’ Jack said stiffly, taking up the knife again and hacking off another wedge of lettuce.
‘I said okay, didn’t I,’ Rob shot back as he dashed from the room and up the stairs.
Silence. The kitchen was stilled. Jack stared unbelievingly at his daughter, who had stopped stirring; her poor mouth sagged open; her hands hung dead in her lap. What in God’s name had happened, he asked himself. The bubble of gaiety that had contained the two of them a minute ago, only a minute ago – where had it gone? What in hell – he surveyed the silent kitchen – what in hell had happened, anyway?
The oven was set at four hundred degrees, and the smell of Spanish rice rose in the room. He remembered, with something like anger, that he didn’t like Spanish rice. It was one of those budget dishes Brenda used to make when they were first married, hamburger stroganoff, tuna-noodle pot, corned beef pie. Brenda was a good cook, more than a good cook; why, when she was away for a meal, did she leave them bowls of pallid, insipid, impossible food? Was it a punishment of some kind, a way of reminding them of the enormity of her absence?
Upstairs he could hear Rob stomping about, slamming doors. Laurie sniffed in her corner.
‘Never mind, kiddo,’ Jack said, patting her soft round shoulder. ‘All the more for the rest of us, as your Grandpa would say.’
Then, briskly, he made himself a gin and tonic, finding in the dining-room cabinet, the tall frosted glass he liked, shaking ice cubes out of a tray, measuring out a good double ounce of gin. Outside the wind whistled and blew. Usually about this time of day he could see the moon rising over the garage roof. There it was, behind a bank of dark marbled cloud, a scattered, impressionistic luminosity. Maybe it’ll snow, he thought idly.
He was about to carry his glass into the living-room; he was halfway there when he heard the soft breezing sound of someone snoring.
He’d forgotten. Bernie was here.
Chapter Eleven
AS it happened Bernie loved Spanish rice. He hadn’t had it in years, he said, not since he and Sue were first married. ‘Glad you woke me up,’ he told Jack. His eyes were dull and rimmed with a watery line of red, but his voice was steady enough. To Laurie he said, with sturdy, dutiful blandishment, ‘You know something – I think this is the best salad I’ve had since I don’t know when.’
Laurie had set the table in the kitchen. ‘It’s cozier in here,’ she explained. She closed the red denim curtains at the window over the sink so that the room seemed warmly sealed and softened. She put three woven placemats on the kitchen table, and then she folded paper napkins into fans, weaving them in and out of the tines of the forks. She carried an African violet in a clay pot from the window sill and positioned it in the middle of the table.
‘Hey,’ Bernie said to her, ‘you didn’t tell me this was going to be a party.’
Gravely ceremonial, she placed Bernie at one end of the table, Jack at the other, and herself in the middle, collapsing into her chair with a noisy hostessy flounce. ‘There,’ she puffed, surveying the table, her face open and expectant, her dark curls shining.
Rob stayed upstairs in his room; they could hear his radio playing loudly. The Rolling Stones. A driving beat. Jack cleared his throat – he felt compelled to explain. ‘Rob’s not eating tonight,’ but Bernie only nodded and reached across the table for the salt.
It was then that a numbing gel of self-consciousness came over Jack; he could actually feel the cold, slow tensing of his skin and outer muscles. It reminded him of being at the dentist and having an injection of novacaine and then losing, by degrees, control over his face. His hands, clumsy as boxing gloves, gripped the fork, and his knees, suddenly bulbous, knocked against the table leg. A calm disbelief seized him – this embarrassment of intimacy had come too quickly; how had he arrived at this motionless disarray, this unjointed unreality?
His relationship with Bernie, with its limits and rules of procedure and orderly, trudging self-restraint – had all that been so quickly overturned? It was Saturday night; he had suffered the spectacle of Bernie’s tears; he had put an arm across his heaving shoulders; now he was sentenced, it seemed, to total disorientation. Here sat his oldest friend, yet it was impossible to meet his eyes. Should he, he wondered wildly, attempt to restore the old sense of balance by picking up the threads of yesterday’s discussion, go on with his idea about history being a matter of endings? No, the idea seemed suddenly childish. It would be too obvious a diversion. It would be insensitive. Why would a man, abandoned by his wife, want to dwell on a chilly abstraction like history? Better just keep quiet and eat.
He chewed on, engulfed by his own lumbering silence. He had always had, he knew, a disabling lack of nerve for new situations, and now, almost unconsciously, he cursed Brenda for abandoning him on this day of all days. For leaving him with Bernie’s tears and with their two puzzling and difficult children and this sticky bowl of pink rice. What had irked him, he realized now, was the assertiveness, the greed, with which Rob had plunged into the house, demanding as his right, food, warmth, clothes on his back.
Bernie’s presence – his firm occupancy of the kitchen chair and the rigorous plying of his fork – nudged at Jack. And so did the suitcase still standing in a corner of the hall. What was the matter with him? Was he so uncharitable? And did Bernie perhaps detect a subtle failure of welcome – was that why he was ploughing through a second helping of rice, knocking back a glass of beer, attempting jollity?
This was the kind of silence that could be ruinous, and he was grateful to Laurie who, as she ate, recited for them her recipe for Caesar salad. Oil, lemon, parsley, garlic. She seemed intent on her newly created role, eating with elaborate delicacy and taking masterful, cheerful charge of the conversation. Bernie, blinking, eating, smiling, listened in a daze.
‘Have some more rice, Dad,’ Laurie urged. Although she had perfect teeth, she had in the last year devised a new way of smiling, a curious closed smile with a demented sweetness about it.
‘Doesn’t anyone want any more?’ she demanded, and Jack could hear disappointment in her voice.
‘What about you?’ Bernie asked. ‘Cooks should get their fair share.’
‘I’m stuffed. All that junk I ate over at the Carpenters.’
‘I thought you were out walking the dogs,’ Jack said.
‘I was. Brinkley doesn’t heel anymore. Mrs Carpenter says they’re sending him to obedience school, and do you know what Mr. Carpenter said?’
‘What?’
‘He said “in a pig’s eye.” I thought people only said that in the movies.’
‘Uhuh.’
‘He’s in a bad mood. Mrs. Carpenter said I could open the dog food when I got back, but he said he thought I’d better get a move on. And then Mrs. Carpenter said I could stay and help her with the party food. And do you know what else? She said I could call her Janey. She said because there weren’t all that many years between us.’
‘She did, did she.’ Jack sipped at his beer.
To Bernie she explained, ‘They’re having an enormous party tonight. Huge. Shrimp and stuff. Lobster salad with guess what in it? Pecans. And these little pastry things with curled up ends and chicken inside. I’ve been helping her poke the chicken in.’
‘And she let you have a taste?’
‘A taste!’ Laurie rubbed her stomach with enthusiasm and rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve eaten tons. Tons. She – Mrs. Carpenter – Janey – kept asking me to taste everything for her. Like she wanted to know if there was enough salt in the dip or too much curry in those chicken things I told you about and stuff like that. She made this neat dip out of sour cream and grated turnip. She said last time they had the caterers do everything, but they always brought the same old stuff and it was kind of soggy. Do you remember, Dad? If the food was soggy at their last party? You were there.’
‘Actually,’ Jack paused, wishing he could say something that would make her laugh, something that would compensate for the ugly scene with Rob before dinner, ‘actually, as I remember that last party, it was the people who were soggy.’
Laurie didn’t laugh; she looked puzzled. ‘The people?’
‘It’s only a joke.’
‘What do you mean they were soggy?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t mean anything. To tell you the truth, hon, I can’t remember what the food was like. Or the people.’
The Carpenters’ last party, and Jack reflected with a mild wave of belligerence that it had been only six weeks ago, seemed little more than a blur. He had been on edge for some reason that night; he had wanted to go to a movie, something trashy and softly coloured with tap dancers, where he could drift off holding on to Brenda’s hand, but instead they had got dressed and gone to the party, where he had drunk too many scotches in too short a time, and to complicate matters he and Brenda hadn’t known anyone there. Larry and Janey Carpenter had moved out to Elm Park less than two years ago. They had made a few friends, the Lewises and the Wallbergs and the Bowmans. They’d joined the Little Theatre and the tennis club, but most of their friends seemed to live downtown. There were, as Jack remembered, quite a few journalists and theatre people at the party (Larry wrote on theatre and, sometimes, wine, for Chicago Today); there were at least two psychiatrists and a handsomely dressed, articulate group of people who seemed to have something to do with raising money for a ballet committee. No one had sat down. Jack, who had spent the afternoon cleaning out the basement, was weary, but it hadn’t been the kind of party where he felt he could ease himself into an armchair and fade away. After a while he found a doorway in the dining room to lean against, and he dimly remembered having a long conversation with a young, sharply made-up girl in a dark green corduroy suit who told him she was a troubleshooter for a uranium company. Troubleshooter? It sounded bizarre; he wanted to ask exactly what that meant in terms of the uranium industry, but he hadn’t. At the time he suspected she might be pulling his leg; now, six weeks later, he was sure of it. He had felt middle-aged and dull. The backs of his knees hurt. He remembered remarking to her that he was engaged at the moment in writing a book, and she said, shifting into a mock southern tone, ‘Ain’t everyone?’ What was that? He’d opened his mouth, about to ask what she meant, but she had wandered away toward the bar. There was a great deal of food, but it seemed to be hours before it appeared. Then, finally, later still, there was some coffee and a tray of French pastries; he especially remembered the chocolate eclairs because he had been talking in a corner to a political columnist from Chicago Today – an older man with a crude knobbled profile and a reputation for having once held hawkish views on Vietnam – who stuffed his eclair into his mouth, and then, carefully, meticulously, licked each of his fingers in turn, first the little finger, then the second finger, and arriving, finally, at his thumb, which he twisted and smacked between thick pink lips. Jack watched him, fascinated. He should start reading this man’s column again, he thought to himself, to see if he’s softened up on communism. There would be something affirming about such a softening up. He was about to confide the fact that he too was a writer of sorts, in the midst of writing a book on Indian trading practices; but he stopped himself; enough of that for one night. About the rest of the evening he recalled nothing.
Except for one thing. He remembered, in perfect, reprintable, film-like memory, the moment when he and Brenda arrived, a little late, at the Carpenters’ front door. (He had put on his new vest; then, at the last minute decided against it.) Janey Carpenter in a calf-length calico dress had flung open the door and astonished them both by dipping all the way to the floor in a strange, slightly tipsy curtsy. She had very pale blonde hair, longer than most women were wearing this year, especially women in their late thirties.
‘Enter, neighbours,’ she cried over the hubbub. ‘Greetings.’
Jack had always thought her a little cool, and the warmth of the greeting had surprised him. From nowhere Larry appeared, steadying Janey with one hand and taking charge. He was wearing a deep brown Norwegian sweater with dropped shoulders and suede patches at the elbow. His softly shining sandy-beige hair lay neat as a wig. ‘Jack! Brenda!!’ He pronounced their names with the heat of exclamation but not the force. ‘Let me introduce you around.’ Larry’s voice was smoothly elegant, but with a tremulous lack of substance about it, like yogurt packed into a carton. ‘This,’ Larry said, his hand on Jack’s shoulder, ‘is our next door neighbour Jack Bowman, an expert on Great Lakes Indians. And this is Brenda,’ he smiled, paused, slid an arm around her waist, ‘who is a quiltmaker in her own right.’
Brenda never blinked, and at the time Jack thought she might have missed it; she had drifted off after that, found someone interesting to talk to, a man who travelled around the world photographing beaches for a tourist agency. Jack had caught a glimpse of her later over the buffet table, had heard the word Madagascar float in the air, but it wasn’t until they got home that he had a chance to talk to her.
It was two-thirty in the morning. She had fallen backwards onto their bed, still in her dress, shrieking with laughter. ‘A quiltmaker in her own right! Oh, Jack, I thought I was going to burst. Didn’t you want to howl? All night long I kept thinking about it, didn’t you? Every time I saw Larry going by in that woolly sweater of his I just wanted to die laughing.’
They had held on to each other; their rhythmic laughing made the bed shake. They rolled over and over, and Jack, unzipping her dress, had felt almost mad with gratitude: she had seen how funny it all had been. (She didn’t always laugh at the same things; only a week before, early one morning, he had been sitting on the edge of the bed putting on a new pair of socks when he simultaneously found himself in a state of erection. Impulsively he had peeled the sticker off the socks, a little round gold and black sticker which said ‘New Executive Length.’ He glanced down; it was really quite a presentable erection, and he had stuck the label on its swollen tip. Then, wrapped in a towel, he had caught Brenda off guard in the bathroom and, flicking the towel aside, he’d shaken his hips and cried, ‘Ta da.’ He had been so sure she would laugh, but instead she’d gazed mildly at him from behind her face cloth and said, ‘Oh, Jack, honestly.’)
‘Oh.’ She turned to him happily and her shoulders contracted with pleasure. ‘He’s sleeping here? Tonight? On the couch, you mean?’
‘I don’t know about the couch,’ Jack said. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead.’
‘Because he could have my room,’ Laurie said. ‘If he wanted to.’
‘Well, okay. Maybe. Why don’t we ask him when he wakes up, where he wants to sleep.’
‘I mean, I could sleep in the quilt room. On that folding bed.’
‘Okay. We’ll see.’
‘Or you know what, Dad?’ she said, excited. ‘Mother’s away, so he could sleep on her half of the bed.’
She spoke urgently, delighted with herself. She had stopped stirring the oil and vinegar around and was waving the fork back and forth in the air, dazed by her own good sense.
‘I don’t think so, Laurie.’
‘Oh.’ She began to stir the dressing again, slowly now, absorbing this unexpected ‘no.’ ‘Okay,’ she said at last.
Then the back door slammed, letting in a burst of icy air. Rob was home. His blue and white satin jacket radiated with its own cloud of cold. He had grown two inches in the last year, and the kitchen seemed cluttered with his arms and legs. ‘I’m starved,’ he said, glancing suspiciously around the room.
‘How was the track meet?’ Jack asked with hollow heartiness, and as he spoke he could feel the question drifting off into the air, apparently unanswerable.
‘Not bad. What’s to eat?’
‘Spanish rice,’ Laurie said. ‘Who won? Did Elm Park win?’
‘When’re we eating anyway?’
‘Soon,’ Jack said shortly.
Rob was opening the oven door and lifting the lid from the pyrex casserole. He grunted, made a face, and gave a ripe snort of disgust. ‘Do we have to eat this crap?’ he said.
Jack felt the room rock. For a fraction of a second – it couldn’t have been more – he was sure he was going to kill Rob. His right hand jerked upward and with horror he saw that he was still holding on to the paring knife. So this was how it happened, kitchen murders, blood on the floor, bodies falling, blind unreasoned passionate rage.
The word crap? It wasn’t that; the kids used that word all the time; he used it himself, TV was crap, Nixon was crap, the newspapers were full of crap. It wasn’t just today; today’s explosion was months overdue. But today, finally moved, he had wanted to smash Rob’s face in, to bring his fist up against Rob’s nose; he wanted to knock those teeth right out of his head. He made himself take a deep breath and then, trembling, he brought his arm down, carefully placing the knife on the counter, parallel to the edge of the cutting board. The room seemed overbright, blazing. He stared at his son.
Rob stared back, a little frightened now. He was almost as tall as Jack, but a good twenty pounds lighter. ‘I hate Spanish rice,’ he said weakly.
‘You can damn well go hungry then,’ Jack said, breathing out sharply. Lout. Insolent lout. Barbarian. Stomping in, as though he owned the place. He could feel his heart pumping blood; there were kids in the world who were starving to death.
For half a minute or more no one spoke. Rob stood, fixed to the floor, his face, with its roughened acne mask, gone suddenly formless, uncertain, and Jack could feel like a physical force his son’s instant contrition. He could also sense, and was frightened by, his own inability to let the matter drop.
‘Just who in hell do you think you are, stalking in here like this, demanding –’
‘Okay, okay,’ Rob said, backing off.
‘There’s salad,’ Laurie croaked tearfully from the corner, ‘Caesar salad.’
‘He goes without dinner tonight,’ Jack said stiffly, taking up the knife again and hacking off another wedge of lettuce.
‘I said okay, didn’t I,’ Rob shot back as he dashed from the room and up the stairs.
Silence. The kitchen was stilled. Jack stared unbelievingly at his daughter, who had stopped stirring; her poor mouth sagged open; her hands hung dead in her lap. What in God’s name had happened, he asked himself. The bubble of gaiety that had contained the two of them a minute ago, only a minute ago – where had it gone? What in hell – he surveyed the silent kitchen – what in hell had happened, anyway?
The oven was set at four hundred degrees, and the smell of Spanish rice rose in the room. He remembered, with something like anger, that he didn’t like Spanish rice. It was one of those budget dishes Brenda used to make when they were first married, hamburger stroganoff, tuna-noodle pot, corned beef pie. Brenda was a good cook, more than a good cook; why, when she was away for a meal, did she leave them bowls of pallid, insipid, impossible food? Was it a punishment of some kind, a way of reminding them of the enormity of her absence?
Upstairs he could hear Rob stomping about, slamming doors. Laurie sniffed in her corner.
‘Never mind, kiddo,’ Jack said, patting her soft round shoulder. ‘All the more for the rest of us, as your Grandpa would say.’
Then, briskly, he made himself a gin and tonic, finding in the dining-room cabinet, the tall frosted glass he liked, shaking ice cubes out of a tray, measuring out a good double ounce of gin. Outside the wind whistled and blew. Usually about this time of day he could see the moon rising over the garage roof. There it was, behind a bank of dark marbled cloud, a scattered, impressionistic luminosity. Maybe it’ll snow, he thought idly.
He was about to carry his glass into the living-room; he was halfway there when he heard the soft breezing sound of someone snoring.
He’d forgotten. Bernie was here.
Chapter Eleven
AS it happened Bernie loved Spanish rice. He hadn’t had it in years, he said, not since he and Sue were first married. ‘Glad you woke me up,’ he told Jack. His eyes were dull and rimmed with a watery line of red, but his voice was steady enough. To Laurie he said, with sturdy, dutiful blandishment, ‘You know something – I think this is the best salad I’ve had since I don’t know when.’
Laurie had set the table in the kitchen. ‘It’s cozier in here,’ she explained. She closed the red denim curtains at the window over the sink so that the room seemed warmly sealed and softened. She put three woven placemats on the kitchen table, and then she folded paper napkins into fans, weaving them in and out of the tines of the forks. She carried an African violet in a clay pot from the window sill and positioned it in the middle of the table.
‘Hey,’ Bernie said to her, ‘you didn’t tell me this was going to be a party.’
Gravely ceremonial, she placed Bernie at one end of the table, Jack at the other, and herself in the middle, collapsing into her chair with a noisy hostessy flounce. ‘There,’ she puffed, surveying the table, her face open and expectant, her dark curls shining.
Rob stayed upstairs in his room; they could hear his radio playing loudly. The Rolling Stones. A driving beat. Jack cleared his throat – he felt compelled to explain. ‘Rob’s not eating tonight,’ but Bernie only nodded and reached across the table for the salt.
It was then that a numbing gel of self-consciousness came over Jack; he could actually feel the cold, slow tensing of his skin and outer muscles. It reminded him of being at the dentist and having an injection of novacaine and then losing, by degrees, control over his face. His hands, clumsy as boxing gloves, gripped the fork, and his knees, suddenly bulbous, knocked against the table leg. A calm disbelief seized him – this embarrassment of intimacy had come too quickly; how had he arrived at this motionless disarray, this unjointed unreality?
His relationship with Bernie, with its limits and rules of procedure and orderly, trudging self-restraint – had all that been so quickly overturned? It was Saturday night; he had suffered the spectacle of Bernie’s tears; he had put an arm across his heaving shoulders; now he was sentenced, it seemed, to total disorientation. Here sat his oldest friend, yet it was impossible to meet his eyes. Should he, he wondered wildly, attempt to restore the old sense of balance by picking up the threads of yesterday’s discussion, go on with his idea about history being a matter of endings? No, the idea seemed suddenly childish. It would be too obvious a diversion. It would be insensitive. Why would a man, abandoned by his wife, want to dwell on a chilly abstraction like history? Better just keep quiet and eat.
He chewed on, engulfed by his own lumbering silence. He had always had, he knew, a disabling lack of nerve for new situations, and now, almost unconsciously, he cursed Brenda for abandoning him on this day of all days. For leaving him with Bernie’s tears and with their two puzzling and difficult children and this sticky bowl of pink rice. What had irked him, he realized now, was the assertiveness, the greed, with which Rob had plunged into the house, demanding as his right, food, warmth, clothes on his back.
Bernie’s presence – his firm occupancy of the kitchen chair and the rigorous plying of his fork – nudged at Jack. And so did the suitcase still standing in a corner of the hall. What was the matter with him? Was he so uncharitable? And did Bernie perhaps detect a subtle failure of welcome – was that why he was ploughing through a second helping of rice, knocking back a glass of beer, attempting jollity?
This was the kind of silence that could be ruinous, and he was grateful to Laurie who, as she ate, recited for them her recipe for Caesar salad. Oil, lemon, parsley, garlic. She seemed intent on her newly created role, eating with elaborate delicacy and taking masterful, cheerful charge of the conversation. Bernie, blinking, eating, smiling, listened in a daze.
‘Have some more rice, Dad,’ Laurie urged. Although she had perfect teeth, she had in the last year devised a new way of smiling, a curious closed smile with a demented sweetness about it.
‘Doesn’t anyone want any more?’ she demanded, and Jack could hear disappointment in her voice.
‘What about you?’ Bernie asked. ‘Cooks should get their fair share.’
‘I’m stuffed. All that junk I ate over at the Carpenters.’
‘I thought you were out walking the dogs,’ Jack said.
‘I was. Brinkley doesn’t heel anymore. Mrs Carpenter says they’re sending him to obedience school, and do you know what Mr. Carpenter said?’
‘What?’
‘He said “in a pig’s eye.” I thought people only said that in the movies.’
‘Uhuh.’
‘He’s in a bad mood. Mrs. Carpenter said I could open the dog food when I got back, but he said he thought I’d better get a move on. And then Mrs. Carpenter said I could stay and help her with the party food. And do you know what else? She said I could call her Janey. She said because there weren’t all that many years between us.’
‘She did, did she.’ Jack sipped at his beer.
To Bernie she explained, ‘They’re having an enormous party tonight. Huge. Shrimp and stuff. Lobster salad with guess what in it? Pecans. And these little pastry things with curled up ends and chicken inside. I’ve been helping her poke the chicken in.’
‘And she let you have a taste?’
‘A taste!’ Laurie rubbed her stomach with enthusiasm and rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve eaten tons. Tons. She – Mrs. Carpenter – Janey – kept asking me to taste everything for her. Like she wanted to know if there was enough salt in the dip or too much curry in those chicken things I told you about and stuff like that. She made this neat dip out of sour cream and grated turnip. She said last time they had the caterers do everything, but they always brought the same old stuff and it was kind of soggy. Do you remember, Dad? If the food was soggy at their last party? You were there.’
‘Actually,’ Jack paused, wishing he could say something that would make her laugh, something that would compensate for the ugly scene with Rob before dinner, ‘actually, as I remember that last party, it was the people who were soggy.’
Laurie didn’t laugh; she looked puzzled. ‘The people?’
‘It’s only a joke.’
‘What do you mean they were soggy?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t mean anything. To tell you the truth, hon, I can’t remember what the food was like. Or the people.’
The Carpenters’ last party, and Jack reflected with a mild wave of belligerence that it had been only six weeks ago, seemed little more than a blur. He had been on edge for some reason that night; he had wanted to go to a movie, something trashy and softly coloured with tap dancers, where he could drift off holding on to Brenda’s hand, but instead they had got dressed and gone to the party, where he had drunk too many scotches in too short a time, and to complicate matters he and Brenda hadn’t known anyone there. Larry and Janey Carpenter had moved out to Elm Park less than two years ago. They had made a few friends, the Lewises and the Wallbergs and the Bowmans. They’d joined the Little Theatre and the tennis club, but most of their friends seemed to live downtown. There were, as Jack remembered, quite a few journalists and theatre people at the party (Larry wrote on theatre and, sometimes, wine, for Chicago Today); there were at least two psychiatrists and a handsomely dressed, articulate group of people who seemed to have something to do with raising money for a ballet committee. No one had sat down. Jack, who had spent the afternoon cleaning out the basement, was weary, but it hadn’t been the kind of party where he felt he could ease himself into an armchair and fade away. After a while he found a doorway in the dining room to lean against, and he dimly remembered having a long conversation with a young, sharply made-up girl in a dark green corduroy suit who told him she was a troubleshooter for a uranium company. Troubleshooter? It sounded bizarre; he wanted to ask exactly what that meant in terms of the uranium industry, but he hadn’t. At the time he suspected she might be pulling his leg; now, six weeks later, he was sure of it. He had felt middle-aged and dull. The backs of his knees hurt. He remembered remarking to her that he was engaged at the moment in writing a book, and she said, shifting into a mock southern tone, ‘Ain’t everyone?’ What was that? He’d opened his mouth, about to ask what she meant, but she had wandered away toward the bar. There was a great deal of food, but it seemed to be hours before it appeared. Then, finally, later still, there was some coffee and a tray of French pastries; he especially remembered the chocolate eclairs because he had been talking in a corner to a political columnist from Chicago Today – an older man with a crude knobbled profile and a reputation for having once held hawkish views on Vietnam – who stuffed his eclair into his mouth, and then, carefully, meticulously, licked each of his fingers in turn, first the little finger, then the second finger, and arriving, finally, at his thumb, which he twisted and smacked between thick pink lips. Jack watched him, fascinated. He should start reading this man’s column again, he thought to himself, to see if he’s softened up on communism. There would be something affirming about such a softening up. He was about to confide the fact that he too was a writer of sorts, in the midst of writing a book on Indian trading practices; but he stopped himself; enough of that for one night. About the rest of the evening he recalled nothing.
Except for one thing. He remembered, in perfect, reprintable, film-like memory, the moment when he and Brenda arrived, a little late, at the Carpenters’ front door. (He had put on his new vest; then, at the last minute decided against it.) Janey Carpenter in a calf-length calico dress had flung open the door and astonished them both by dipping all the way to the floor in a strange, slightly tipsy curtsy. She had very pale blonde hair, longer than most women were wearing this year, especially women in their late thirties.
‘Enter, neighbours,’ she cried over the hubbub. ‘Greetings.’
Jack had always thought her a little cool, and the warmth of the greeting had surprised him. From nowhere Larry appeared, steadying Janey with one hand and taking charge. He was wearing a deep brown Norwegian sweater with dropped shoulders and suede patches at the elbow. His softly shining sandy-beige hair lay neat as a wig. ‘Jack! Brenda!!’ He pronounced their names with the heat of exclamation but not the force. ‘Let me introduce you around.’ Larry’s voice was smoothly elegant, but with a tremulous lack of substance about it, like yogurt packed into a carton. ‘This,’ Larry said, his hand on Jack’s shoulder, ‘is our next door neighbour Jack Bowman, an expert on Great Lakes Indians. And this is Brenda,’ he smiled, paused, slid an arm around her waist, ‘who is a quiltmaker in her own right.’
Brenda never blinked, and at the time Jack thought she might have missed it; she had drifted off after that, found someone interesting to talk to, a man who travelled around the world photographing beaches for a tourist agency. Jack had caught a glimpse of her later over the buffet table, had heard the word Madagascar float in the air, but it wasn’t until they got home that he had a chance to talk to her.
It was two-thirty in the morning. She had fallen backwards onto their bed, still in her dress, shrieking with laughter. ‘A quiltmaker in her own right! Oh, Jack, I thought I was going to burst. Didn’t you want to howl? All night long I kept thinking about it, didn’t you? Every time I saw Larry going by in that woolly sweater of his I just wanted to die laughing.’
They had held on to each other; their rhythmic laughing made the bed shake. They rolled over and over, and Jack, unzipping her dress, had felt almost mad with gratitude: she had seen how funny it all had been. (She didn’t always laugh at the same things; only a week before, early one morning, he had been sitting on the edge of the bed putting on a new pair of socks when he simultaneously found himself in a state of erection. Impulsively he had peeled the sticker off the socks, a little round gold and black sticker which said ‘New Executive Length.’ He glanced down; it was really quite a presentable erection, and he had stuck the label on its swollen tip. Then, wrapped in a towel, he had caught Brenda off guard in the bathroom and, flicking the towel aside, he’d shaken his hips and cried, ‘Ta da.’ He had been so sure she would laugh, but instead she’d gazed mildly at him from behind her face cloth and said, ‘Oh, Jack, honestly.’)
