“Your honeymoon? I do not understand. Did you not say—”
“I wasn’t really lost -”
“Weren’t you, Larry? At Hampton Court? I remember how we waited for you. How we were worried when you didn’t come out with the rest of us.”
“A person doesn’t need any particular knowledge to solve a maze. You’re born with the necessary navigational equipment.”
“So this was another honeymoon.”
“Ah!”
“I haven’t had a chance to explain that both Dorrie - and Beth - well, by coincidence they both -”
“- happened to be here in town, and that’s why Larry and I decided to have a few friends in to dinner at Larry’s place and -”
“And Derek? Is he—?”
“Dead. Some time ago. Cancer.”
“I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have -”
“Terribly sorry.”
“Cancer, a scourge.”
“My therapist believes that most cancers are caused by anger, by not recognizing and embracing your anger. He says I’m a case in point, not that I have cancer, not yet anyway, but he says I really have got to attempt to claim -”
“Do you have a family back in Spain, Samuel?”
“My brothers, my sister -”
“But are you married?”
“She has been dead one year. My wife. It was a depression. She took some sleeping pills.”
“My therapist says - ”
“‘That’s one reason I accepted to take this project in Canada. To make some air between my sorrow and myself.”
“To put some distance.”
“Yes, precisely! To put some distance.”
“Who was it who said ‘only disconnect?’”
“Forster, wasn’t it? But I think he actually said -”
“If no one would like another helping of the soup—”
“Let me give you a hand, Charlotte.”
“No, Larry. Let me give Charlotte a hand. If I sit any longer this baby’ll get a permanent crick in its neck.”
“Ah hah! that looks like a leg of lamb.”
“I thought I smelled lamb when I came in the door earlier.”
“I adore lamb!”
“Larry, this is a night of surprises.”
“He shops, he cooks, he carves.”
“And sets a mean table.”
“No, really, I -”
“And he gets himself lavishly praised.”
“Men!”
“It’s not their fault that we love and patronize them in the same breath.”
“Good heavens. I just noticed! This is our old table we’re sitting at. Larry and I bought this table in Chicago, at an auction!”
“Beautiful.”
“Men! The praise men get just for being men!”
“What’s it like being a man these days?”
“Yes, what’s it like? In the last days of the twentieth century?”
“Tell us.”
Larry, slicing through the pink lamb and serving second helpings on to still-warm dinner plates, is struck by a thought. That he’s hardly ever given a party before. He grew up in a house that, except for family dinners, never once resonated with the chimes of party noise and festivity. No children’s birthday parties, nothing happening on New Year’s Eve except the TV, Times Square, New York City, and a glass of sweet sherry at midnight. Had his mother and father simply lacked the gene for hospitality? Or, and this is more likely, had they been too shy, or else ignorant of the shaping impulse that blows a party into being? It should be such a simple, natural thing, really, the gathering of a few friends under a roof, the offering of food and drink and warmth and also that curious tensile and sometimes dangerous platform of opportunity for something to happen.
But, of course, it isn’t simple at all - and he realizes this now, looking around the softly lit table, his friends, this gathering of strangers and kin - and three women he has known so well, known - and feeling the party, his first and only party, slipping sideways, collapsing, turning rigid. Shouldn’t a party loosen ordinary human bonds? Good question.
At this moment Larry is feeling the opposite, that the membrane between people is tougher than he’d imagined. Where was the tonic glitter of personality he’d imagined. Perhaps he should open another bottle of wine. Wine the great loosener. Yes.
“Yes,” his first wife, Dorrie, is asking from her end of the table, “tell us what it’s like being a man these days.” Her mouth is crisper than he’d remembered and now it shapes itself into the beginning of a smile, or perhaps another question.
Dorrie’s idea of giving a party had been to invite another couple over to the house for pizza and TV. He remembers those late seventies evenings, Dorrie in jeans and a sweater and her thick hair brushed smooth around her small face, setting a bowl of chips-and-dip on the coffee table, and another of peanuts, muttering to herself about whether the rug needed a quick vacuum. Then thawing the frozen pizza for heating up later, checking to see that there was a bottle of wine in the fridge, worrying about the baby waking up.
How many such evenings had there been? - probably only a few, Larry thinks. And where had he been in the preparations for those joyless, weary, two-couple gatherings? Nowhere. It seemed nothing had been expected of him.
He wonders what kind of parties Dorrie gives now. She lives in the same house, but both the house and her life have changed dramatically. She’s stronger now, but she’s also softened; he supposes some people would call this change a mellowing, but it goes beyond that. He can tell by the way she’s cutting her lamb, the neat, sure strokes of her knife, the alert look of pleasure on her face, that she’s more comfortable in the world than she once was. None of which should surprise him. But it’s not her skill with a knife that holds his attention. No, it’s her eyes, those wide, remembered gray eyes, that seem to be tipping the whole room in her direction. Her neck rising out of the collar of her dark dress and that wide strip of silver at her throat - has she any idea how she looks?
“Are we talking about young men?” Beth asks. “Or men who grew up convinced they belonged to the dominant culture?”
“I think,” Midge says, “that we’re talking about the men at this table.”
Beth sits back in her chair, registering delight. She has already cleared her plate of vegetables. “In that case, who’s going to go first?”
“This question. Do you mind - my English is so slow - do you mind saying again this thing, this question you have asked.”
Contentedly, Beth laces her hands across her abdomen. “We want to know what it’s like being you, at this time in our history.”
She’s happy tonight. Larry remembers that she always loved parties, that she had grown up with parents who hosted a dinner party every week or two. Beth, when he married her, took for granted a chest of family silver, enough for twelve. Also several sets of china, and individual saltcellars, each with its own tiny spoon. She sailed into married life with a calm regard for well-cooked, traditional food, immense roasts carved into thick slices and accompanied by the passing of a silver gravy boat. These were the very parties she always talked about giving, she and Larry in their Oak Park house. That, after all, was why they’d bought the house, and the table with its ten beautiful chairs, a table whose edge she is now fingering through the heavy cloth, perhaps calling up its smooth grain and luster.
These parties, though, hardly ever took place. She was too busy with her dissertation, her lectures, too preoccupied to dive into serious arrangements, the phone calls or written invitations, the menu, the kitchen work. Besides, she’d given up meat, and found the thought of preparing fish for eight or ten too daunting. “We owe everyone,” she used to moan to Larry, but with a sly catch of amusement in her voice. “We’ll never catch up.”
“Lima beans,” Garth McCord says happily. “I haven’t had lima beans since was a kid at school.”
“In France they ”
“In our family we never had leans. It’s a l
ong story.”
“More wine, Marcia?”
“Lovely wine. It reminds me of the time Garth and I -”
“This table. If you find you don’t really need it, Larry, I wouldn’t mind having it back.”
“Being a man at this moment of history means—”
“Go on, Ian. What does it mean?”
“It means — are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Yes!”
“Well, we’re certainly no longer providers and guardians. That went years ago.”
“For the most part, not for everyone—”
“And we don’t belong to male lodges anymore. That used to be part of the male support system. The Elks, the Moose, the Lions, the Rotarians.”
“I can’t picture you belonging to—”
“And hunting and fishing? — forget it. Women sneer when we men talk about hunting and fishing.”
“That’s not true, Ian. I love it when you go fishing.”
“Because you want the house to yourself. Admit it.”
“All right, I admit it.”
“A man these days is no more than an infrastructure for a penis and a set of testicles.”
“That’s not true! Tell me it’s not true.”
“That’s all that’s required of us. Our bodies are just walking, talking envelopes designed to contain our paltry store of genetic tissue.”
“Who says we’ve come to that?”
“Well,” Beth offers, somewhat irrelevantly, “an apple’s no more than a thickened ovary wall that - ”
“Next time I bite into an apple I’ll remember that.”
“A man today—”
“What we all really want is to marry the men we’d be if we were men.”
“Pardon?”
“Be serious, Ian,” Midge says. She joins her palms to form a basket. An empty basket that wants filling. “You can see we really want to know.” She’s leaning forward so that the candlelight, flatteringly, colors half her face. Larry remembers that his sister is about to turn fifty. Her tone is only mildly mocking.
“All right, then. I’ll be serious. But you ought to be warned that I wouldn’t call myself a typical man.”
“And I’m certainly not one either.”
“And I wouldn’t say that I am -”
“Typical, never.”
“Methinks thou dost protest too -”
“We’re waiting, Ian.”
“All right, all right. Today, and I think you’ll agree, a man’s position has become entirely reactive. We have to take our signals from women or we’re out of the game.”
“Backlash! Hmmm. But go on.”
“Being a man in 1997 means walking on eggshells. I don’t dare tell a woman that she looks nice anymore. That I like the color of her dress or the way she’s changed her hair. They’d have me up for sexual harassment.”
“Whoever they are.”
“But this isn’t what it’s about, is it? Compliments. Courtesies. Whether or not to open a door for a woman.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Partly that is what it’s about.”
“It’s a smoke-screen.”
“I’ve found the most marvelous hairdresser, the nicest, most brilliant little man, I’d be happy to give you the name—”
“I’m a little tired,” Ian says, “of men always being buffoons. They’re buffoons on TV, buffoons in movies, and in books - they’re goofs, they’re weak in the balls, they’re the butt of every joke.”
“But maybe they really are. Buffoons, I mean.”
“What ever happened to men who had dignity and courage?”
“Oh, they’re still around, those men, but they’re ... they’re just a little bit -”
“Corny?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“And that’s why,” Ian continues, “I’ve been walking on eggshells since about 1980.”
“But,” Dorrie says, leaning forward, “how much do you mind walking on eggshells?”
“Good point.”
“I agree with Dorrie. You shouldn’t damn well mind at all.”
“That’s not quite what I mean. I mean—”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that walking on eggshells just means - ordinary kindness.”
“And respect!”
“For women—”
“And men.”
“Eggshells all around, you mean.”
“Something like that.”
“It could just be that it’s men’s turn to major in eggshells.”
“Male sensitivity. Hmmmm.”
“I’m not sure I go along with that, Beth. Aren’t you being just a little bit sweeping in your -?”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
“Me too.”
“Maybe you misunderstood me. It’s not a question of minding. It’s a question of confusion. Of being off-balance half the time.”
“What do you think, Garth?”
“I haven’t thought much about it, to tell the truth.”
“I knew you’d say that, Garth. I could absolutely depend on you not to have thought about it. Let me tell you what Garth thinks about. He gets up in the morning and he starts -”
“Easy does it, Marcia.”
“But it’s to be expected,” Beth perseveres. “Confusion is the natural climate - the only climate for the post-feminist age.”
“I wonder why people always talk about the post-feminist age,” Charlotte muses. “As though we’re already there. As though we’ve already got there -”
“Good point, Charlene.”
“It’s Charlotte.”
“Right, sorry, Charlotte. But my point - well, it’s not so much a point as a -”
“I would so very much like to hear your point. In Spain we -” “My point is that we - both men and women - ought to cherish this period of confusion. Our present period of discomfiture — well, it’s a great and ecstatic gift. We’ve had 5000 centuries of perfect phallic clarity. Everyone knew the script. Men buttoned themselves into their power costumes -”
“But at least we all knew who we were and what was allowed.”
“Will you shut up, Garth, for God’s sake. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Lighten up, Marcia.”
“What if I don’t want to lighten up?”
“—the first half of the century was packed with evil, the second half with emptiness—”
“So men stood in their upright posture -”
“Erect!”
“Ha.”
“—and—”
“And womans? What about womans?”
“Women walked around the edges.”
“Very, very quietly.”
“Tell me about it. Garth always -”
“Women tiptoed on eggshells.”
“Ouch.”
“Is that all you can say, Larry? Ouch.”
“I just meant - ”
“Do you know what my mother told me before Larry and I got married? She said, ‘If you want to keep him from straying’ - I was wife number two, remember ‘don’t gain more than ten pounds. In your whole married life. Ten is the maximum allotment.”’
“Omigod, I’ve already—”
“My mother - this was before Derek and I got married - she said a wife should send her husband off to work every day with a clean white handkerchief that she’d washed and ironed herself. That was his calling card to the world. And the handkerchief was her contribution to his success.”
“And did you? Do the hanky thing?”
“I did. Oh, lordy, I bought all the bromides. There was a steady parade of handkerchiefs until the day Derek died, damn him. And goddamn all those handkerchiefs too. If I had it to do over again I’d do a ritual burning—”
“Bromide! A good Scrabble word.”
“Did you know that if you put all the world’s Scrabble tiles in a row, they’d go twice around the earth.”
“My mother said to me that there w
as one thing a husband wouldn’t tolerate and that was pantyhose dripping on the shower rail. So when Larry and I got married back in seventy-eight, and bought our house on Lipton Street, I made a trip down to the dark basement every single night, just before bed, so I could hang my pantyhose on the clothesline.”
“Whisked out of sight!”
“I never knew that, Dorrie. I wouldn’t even have noticed if you’d—”
“Maybe not consciously, but Dorrie’s mother knew how these things accumulate -”
“And get added to the resentment that’s already in the bank. The inexorable adding machine.”
“What resentment is this?”
“Yeah.”
“The natural hatred men feel for women once the women have done their reproductive duty. It’s Darwinian.”
“I love women.”
“So do I. Marcia and I -”
“But have you noticed the way men hog the armrest on airplanes? Sorry to be so petty, but it’s like women don’t have an arm that they’d maybe like to - rest.”
“I must say, if you kind people will permit me, that I find the sight of a woman’s, how do you say it? - pantyhose? - I find this sight quite, well very -”
“Erotic?”
“Ah, yes, indeed, e-ro-tic.”
“And so my lucky brother’s virgin eyes were never once assaulted by the nasty and unbearable sight of dripping -”
“My mother gave me just one piece of advice before Garth and I got married. Don’t ever embarrass your husband in public. No husband will stand for it.”
“Oh.”
“So that’s why we’re in therapy as I speak.”
“Marcia, for God’s sake -”
“I can’t seem to stop embarrassing him. It’s like an addiction. Something I’ve got to do.”
“We all have some form of addiction. Where I work we—”
“But you haven’t heard the worst part. The worst part is that he loves being embarrassed in public. He sort of, you know, solicits it. He thrives on it, as you’ve probably noticed. That’s his addiction.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, my mother didn’t give me any pre-marital counseling—”
“Lucky you, Midge.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I might have done a whole lot better with a little sage, targeted advice.”
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