by Lore Segal
“Who is the old woman in the stole?” Lotte asked Bessie.
“That’s your hostess, Sylvia,” said Bessie and added that she was surprised to see Lotte.
“Why are you surprised? The third time I called to ask you for the address you were understandably irritable.”
“That was the address of the Baskins’ party, and you said you were not going.”
“Yes, well,” Lotte said, “the prospect of leaving my apartment brings on a critical desire to stay home, to not get dressed, to take my Kindle and go to bed, a minimal agoraphobia. But I like parties.”
“If you call it a party. I hope they do martinis.”
“Why isn’t this a party?” asked Lotte following her friend, who seemed to know the geography of this handsome apartment in the high Bauhaus style. They were intercepted by an unusually large, young—well, a younger—man who kissed Bessie. He said, “Anybody seen Sylvia?”
“Who was that?” Lotte asked Bessie.
“Don’t know,” said Bessie. “Reminds me of the seventies, when one kept being hugged by old students come out from behind their beards.”
“Who is Sylvia?”
“Your hostess. The woman in the stole,” said Bessie.
* * *
—
Drinks were in the kitchen, where Bessie was drawn into conversation with people she knew.
Lotte put out her hand to an old man standing by himself in the doorway. She said, “My late husband and I had an agreement: Every party we went to we would talk to at least one person we didn’t know.”
“And today is my lucky day.” The old man had a good face.
“Those were the days…” said Lotte
“Of wine and roses?” the old man said.
“I was going to say the days when I used to know eighty percent of the people at a party. Today I know two people.”
“That’s doing better than I by one,” he said. “Tell me the two you know.”
“My friend Bessie, whom I’ve known for over half a century, and the woman in the beautiful red stole.”
“That’s the one I know. She’s my sister,” said the pleasant old man. “Ruthie was our aunt and I’ve come in from Albany.”
The large, younger man who had kissed Bessie performed a quarter turn, which brought him into the conversation. “We are talking about all the people we don’t know,” Lotte told him.
The younger man said, “I’m developing an algorithm which will interpret the musculature of the face of the person with whom you are talking and will tell you not only their name but where you know them from.”
* * *
—
Bessie brought two martinis, one for Lotte and one for herself, and said, “Let’s sit down. I can’t stand so long.”
Bessie and Lotte carried their drinks to a sofa.
“And just in time,” Lotte told Bessie. “I’ve used up all my conversation starters. One more time, tell me the name of our hostess.”
“Sylvia,” said Bessie.
“I talked to her brother, who has a nice face.”
“Sebastian,” said Bessie.
“Who is Ruthie?”
“Ruth Berger,” said Bessie, “Sylvia and Sebastian’s aunt, who always reminded me of that old New Yorker cartoon: ‘Mortimer was her first husband and her second novel.’ And you still like parties?” Bessie asked Lotte.
“I do.”
Bessie said, “I remember when we used to go in expectation, always, that something—that somebody—was going to happen. What do I get dressed for today? What do I come in from Rockingham for?”
“People,” said Lotte. “Conversation.”
“And have you had one good conversation today?”
“Not that kind of conversation. It’s like the old balls—you take a turn with one partner and take a turn with another partner.”
“And you’re having a good time?”
“Yes, I am.”
Bessie was looking around the room. The set of her face told Lotte that Colin was not well enough—was not all right. “What makes this, today, a good time for you?” Bessie asked Lotte.
“Let’s see. For one, my children, so far as I know, are well and modestly solvent. Two, my right knee does not hurt. Three, I enjoyed looking at—what’s her name again?”
“Sylvia.”
“…looking at Sylvia’s splendid red stole, and her brother?”
“Sebastian.”
“…has a nice face. I like being in these handsome rooms, and sitting on a comfortable sofa, drinking a good martini. I like talking with you with the sound of a party in back of me.”
“The sound of a shiva,” said Bessie.
“Shiva? What shiva?”
Bessie said, “This is the shiva for Sylvia and Sebastian’s aunt Ruth Burger.”
“It is!”
“I forget who said wakes and funerals are the cocktail parties of the old?”
HOW LOTTE LOST BESSIE
Old friends bound by the closest ties of mental sympathy will cease, after a certain year, to make the necessary journey or to even cross the street to see one another.
—Marcel Proust
Bessie, dear friend,
Let me understand for which of my crimes I am to be punished by your failing to see me, your managing not to hear me calling you—don’t we hear our own name even if we happen to be milling up the aisle in a crowded concert? Why, by the way, didn’t you let me know that you were coming to town? Where are you staying? I had to actually touch your elbow and then, of course, we were all smiles and those little exclamations on my part, of the sheer pleasure, always, of seeing you. Did you simply not see me sitting in the row on your left, three places in? Our eyes are not as quick as they used to be, it’s true, and you were busy looking for a seat. You did not take the empty place next to mine because, it turned out, you were not alone. “You remember Anstiss,” you informed me. I’m not so good these days with names, but one isn’t likely to forget Anstiss, who must be in her mid-nineties, a class act, half a head taller than you or I. She said, “I showed you round my Old Rockingham house.” You said, “The house next to Colin’s on the right, that Colin wanted you to buy.”
I said, though I knew I shouldn’t, “To give him access to the parking area,” and quickly added, “totally mistaking the sorry state of my finances.” You said, “Did I tell you we’ve bought a little pied-à-terre in Manhattan?” “You did not tell me,” I said. You did not invite me to come with you and Anstiss to find seats together.
What didn’t we used to do together, Bessie, you and Eli, and Matthew and I: our Friday night movies, Thanksgivings, seders. How many New Years did we survive together, and every summer all the way back to our trip to Venice on the day the last of our foursome finished the last of our examinations?
That vaporetto, empty except for three Dutch students attached to overstuffed backpacks, and the beautiful Venetian grandmother. You said her hair and gown were the color of pewter. The little grandson had arrived on our late flight and went to sleep with his head on her lap. “I can’t believe you actually live here!” I said to her. She pointed through a gap on the left, at her house, the Palazzo Zevi. I think we were waiting for her to invite us. She told us where to get off and how to find our hotel.
The thrill, the romance of just lugging our bags through empty Venetian streets, nobody left awake except for that party of pleasantly drunk young men sitting under a garland of vines round a table outside a closed taverna. Their shirts were the color of moons. One rose, lofted his full glass for a beacon and walked us around two corners to the small hotel that, too, was closed for the night. Through a glass inset, I could see the clerk sit up on his folding cot, brace his elbows on his lap, set his chin on the heels of his hands, and go back to sleep. Our Venetian young man banged on the door in Italian until the clerk came to hand us our keys and plumped back down on his cot. Our young man in the moon-shirt returned, we supposed, to his friends under the vines and we bump
ed our bags up the stairs and fell finally into our beds.
You and I—we loved it that our men were liking each other. My Matt made up for his five foot something with his continual jokes. Couldn’t help it. He estimated every third to be a hit, and his project, he said, was to abort the misses in between. Eli’s project was to grow a beard which didn’t, as I remember, promise well.
And, Bessie, the gondola passing the Palazzo Zevi, its walls pocked and striated by water, weather, time. Eli said, “The grandmother didn’t invite us in because Venetian palazzi do not have insides.” Matt said, “But it has another façade where a gondola is passing on another canal.” I can’t tell you whether that’s as rich as I thought it then, think it now. I was in love with the four of us. Curious, no? I would have staked my life—do stake it—on our friendship persisting into our old age…
Because the guys were bent over the map, they never saw the door open and a servant put a foot out onto the moss-covered, water-lapped stepping-stone. You and I looked through the opening to the garden inside the nonexistent dimension, where giant fronds growing out of a white marble bath cascaded to the terrace below. They were the same sharp green, you said, as the bug you had kept in a matchbox, when you were a child, but it died. The servant, having given the bucket that final swirl which doesn’t ever entirely empty what is in the bottom, took a backward step and shut the door.
When we got home, you married Eli. Matthew and I married and watched the two of you getting on each other’s nerves, though you were beautiful—you stuck by us. No brother and sister could have hung closer through the terrible, long year of Matthew’s dying.
Eli remembers that you originally intended Colin for me because you couldn’t bear me to be alone and sad. “He is large and beautiful and owns a boat,” you told me. “We’re going to his place in Connecticut for the weekend.” “Not me,” I said. “Yes! You, you!” you said. “He has a house in Aix-en-Provence.”
I refrained from asking what it was about me that made you imagine I could stomach Colin Woodworth. Or did I fail to refrain? I remember your looking disappointed, your asking me, “You don’t think he’s gorgeous?” I said, “Colin has drawn me two alternate routes from my apartment to his house in Old Rockingham.” “Oh my goodness!” you said. “How beastly of him to want to facilitate your drive for you!”
Bessie! That silly, man-high wooden fence to prevent the pedestrians of Bay Street from sneaking a peek at Colin Woodworth’s square of grass, like a toy garden kept inside the box it came in. Oh, but the deck in back! It overlooked the great crinkled blue bay, the traffic of the boats like so many little white triangles. We lay on sun-warmed wood and drank martinis and I wished Colin would shut up about the new element in Old Rockingham to whom agreements, he said, weren’t worth the paper they were written on.
“What element would that be?” I asked him. Eli took the moment to wonder if anyone wanted to walk into the village. You said, “Colin means his pesty neighbor on the left.” Colin said, “Like the Bainses in number eight. All they care about is themselves.” “In which,” I said, “they probably resemble you and me and most everybody I know.” “I don’t know what you mean,” Colin said, and he fetched out the fresh Polaroid showing the Bainses’ Toyota openly, brazenly parked on the Woodworth side of an imaginary line, which Colin’s finger described down the center of the parking area shared by the adjacent properties. I said, “But isn’t that because I, in my ignorance, parked myself on the Bains side?” Eli asked you if you were coming for a walk or not and you said, “Not.” Colin said, “It’s provocation pure and simple. I’ve spoken to my lawyers in Boston.”
In the car, driving home from that first visit, you said, “He’s the perfect host.” “Makes great martinis,” I said. “The village is nice, if you like museums,” Eli said. You said, “Well, I say he’s sweet. At bottom he’s a generous, affectionate man, don’t you think?” “Colin Woodworth is an ass and you know it,” I should not have said, and felt mean and a little guilty when Colin called to invite me for the following weekend. He sounded friendly and just thoroughly nice. Said he was mailing me a map of an alternate to the alternate route that would cut twenty minutes at the least. I asked him if you and Eli were coming and he said, Yes, you were coming.
I remember only the one conversation that you and I had on the subject of Colin. This was after you and Eli split and Eli had left for London. You came to tell me you were moving to Connecticut: “Why should you be surprised that I could love a person who might not suit your taste? I think he is a dear man.” “I’m sure he is that, to you,” I said. “I can see he is.” “If only that he likes me, which is a nice change from Eli.” “Well, I intend to like Colin,” I promised you, and promised myself. “I will. I’m going to like Colin for you.” “You’ll come weekends,” you said, “and you’re spending next summer with us in Provence.”
I try to think backward: When did you stop inviting me? When did I begin to be envious, to regret having no places to not invite you to? I don’t know that I blame you because I was never nice to Colin, nor about him. (In our emails, Eli and I refer to him as Mr. Collins.) You knew that the week in London I stayed with Eli. Funny how, afterward, we could no longer sign off with the easy old “Love, Eli” and “Love, Lotte”—the word had become freighted. It was after you and Colin married, but of course I’ve wondered, sex being what it is, if it rankled. Rankles. Except that, all the years since then, you’ve stayed with me when you come up to town. We did the theater and stuff that Colin isn’t keen on, and we talked. (Eli and I wonder what you and Mr. Collins talk about besides the still-raging parking wars.)
You and I used to talk and talk. Wait. Hold on. I had to go and find Jane Austen. Here: this is Emma thinking about Mrs. Weston, a friend “interested in every pleasure, every scheme of hers, to whom she could speak every thought as it arose.” Bessie, that was you and me until you learned to say “anyway,” which being interpreted, can only mean, “When you stop telling me what you are telling me, we can get back to what I was saying.” And so now, dear Bessie, I think twice before speaking the thought as it arises, at a time of life when I’m as likely as not to forget a name, forget the operative word.
Bessie! How can you be so sure you might not want to hear what I might want to tell you?
Or, Bessie, does it feel to you as if I am not listening to what you are saying?
I went to find you at intermission. We stood and we talked. That is to say, you and the ancient Anstiss sat, and I stood. What rose in my mind to say was how you and Eli and Matt and I used to always go to hear—but the name of what I could not remember. I asked what you and Anstiss were doing after the concert, and it seemed you had arranged to meet some Old Rockingham people for a late dinner. You said, “I’ll give you a call the next time I’m coming to town.” “Wonderful!” I told you. “Only give me some lead time.” “Will do,” you said, and I went back to my seat.
Outside, after the concert, I stood on the sidewalk, waiting to wave goodbye. You were surrounded by a small bustle of well-dressed, well-looking elderly couples, getting into cabs. You had your assisting hand under Anstiss’s elbow and I could tell that you simply did not see me.
Here’s something for us to talk about the next time: How simple is this “simply”? I’ll give you a call.
Love,
Lotte
LADIES’ LUNCH
It mattered that Lotte’s apartment was commodious. Lotte liked to boast that when she lay in bed and looked past the two closest water towers, past the architectural follies and oddities few people notice on Manhattan’s rooftops, she saw all the way to the Empire State Building. On the velvet sofa in Lotte’s living room, from which she could observe the Hudson River traffic as far as the George Washington Bridge, the caregiver sat watching television.
“Get rid of her,” Lotte said.
Samson dropped his voice, as if this might make his mother lower hers. “As soon as we find you a replacement.”
; “And I’ll get rid of her,” Lotte said.
Sam said, “We’ll go on interviewing till we find you the right one.”
“Who will let me eat my bread and butter?”
“Mom,” Sam said, “bread turns into sugar, as you know very well.”
“And don’t care,” Lotte said.
“If she lets you eat bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she’ll get fired.”
“Good,” said Lotte.
* * *
—
“Sarah,” Sam said to the caregiver, “I’ll take my mother to her ladies’ lunch if you’ll pick her up at three-thirty?”
“That OK with you?” Sarah asked Lotte.
“No,” said Lotte.
* * *
—
“Ladies’ lunch” is pronounced in quotation marks. The five women have grown old coming together, every other month or so for the last thirty or more years, around one another’s table. Ruth, Bridget, Farah, Lotte, and Bessie are longtime New Yorkers; their origins in California, County Mayo, Tehran, Vienna, and the Bronx might have grounded them but do not in these days often surface.
Ruth was a retired lawyer. She said, “I’ve forgotten, of course, who it was said that there are four or five people in the world to whom we tell things, and that’s us. Something happens and I think, I’ll tell the next ladies’ lunch.”
“True! It’s true,” Lotte said. “When I suddenly sat on my rear on the sidewalk outside my front door, I was looking forward to telling you.”
Lotte had turned out to need a hip replacement. Dr. Goodman, the surgeon, was a furry man like a character in an Ed Koren cartoon, only jollier. He had promised Lotte, “From here on it’s all good.”
“I’m eighty-two years old,” Lotte had said.
Goodman told her, “I’m on my way to the ninety-second birthday of a patient whose knees I replaced eleven years ago.”