Calvin gave them drinks. Only Hal and Cole were having wine. The rest had Perrier with a wedge of lemon, so everybody feared the conversation would be labored. But it took off almost at once, with talk of Tippi Gaspard and how chic she was looking these days and then on to the awfullest films they had seen this past summer and then little groups formed. Hal and Calvin fell into a private discussion of investment banking scandals and how they should have been prevented. Maggie and Cole and Dixie talked about painting, Dixie’s painting first, and when that began to make Dixie nervous, she switched the conversation to painters their rich friends collected. Klee and Mondrian and McKnight. The Aspergarters, she heard, had bought a Kandinsky, or maybe they just had it on loan. The McGuinns were hoping to buy … Philip, who had been helping Beecher in the kitchen, called them all to the table.
Calvin carved while everybody said nice things about the beautiful roasted color of the turkey and the wonderful smell and how you needed a turkey for Thanksgiving or it just wasn’t Thanksgiving, but then it appeared that the turkey wasn’t, in fact, cooked. Calvin attacked a leg and it would not give. He could not cut through it nor could he wrench it off. It began to bleed at the joint. “Oh dear,” he said, and the leg flopped back and forth, bloody and still attached. He went to work on the breast. The first slice came off smooth and beautiful and there was a sigh of relief around the table. But the second slice resisted and as Calvin pressed down, juice began to rise along the back of the knife and the juice was red. Everybody was watching. “Oh dear,” he said again. “It’ll have to go back to the oven.” “But my dressing,” Beecher said, “and all my nice veggies,” and everybody said not to worry, they could eat the veggies first and have the turkey afterward. “Like in France,” Beecher said. “What a good idea since everybody is in France this Thanksgiving anyway.” So Calvin spooned out the dressing and Beecher passed her veggies and everybody ate, but not very much. The dressing—oyster and prune—looked positively scary and the vegetables, they found, were underdone. The baby potatoes were like white stones, and the turnip and carrots were like colored stones, and the peas were like tiny perfect green stones. They ate a lot of celery and radishes and pushed the colored stones around their plates. Conversation slowed and then stopped. Everyone was nervous. And then suddenly Philip began to laugh. They were little abrupt laughs, like coughs, but they went on for some time until finally he stopped and shook his head, sadly.
“This is really awful, Beecher,” he said, his voice warm and sincere. “This is your worst ever.”
There was silence for perhaps a second and then Beecher began to laugh, and the others, relieved, began to laugh as well. Maggie was delighted and she said softly, “How funny, how funny,” but she was thinking, I love you, I love you, and it was like old times and, for that minute, she was very happy.
“It is terrible,” Beecher said. “I’ve quite outdone myself.” Then everyone tried to top everyone else, saying how awful the meal was, how stony and inedible, until it was time for the turkey again, but nobody could stand it. Beecher cried a little bit—she couldn’t help it, she said, all that work and just for a good laugh—but then she brought out dessert, which she’d bought at the Winchester Bakery. There was a pumpkin pie and a mince and a lemon meringue and they devoured all three. It was a very funny Thanksgiving dinner.
Maggie and Philip were getting ready for bed. She looked up from brushing her teeth and said, through the foam, “That meal!”
“It was very funny, wasn’t it.”
“You were very funny. You were outrageous. It was like old times.”
Philip was getting into his pajamas and paused to think about what she had said.
“And Hal didn’t attack Dixie,” Maggie said, “as he always seems to do. She was different tonight.” She began brushing her hair, hard. “Somehow she doesn’t seem so attackable these days. At least not tonight. She seemed very independent, flirtatious almost.” She paused in her brushing. “She certainly was flirtatious with Cole, I thought.”
“Alas.”
“Alas?”
“That phone call he got tonight just after we came in? And then he went out?”
“Not Dixie, surely.”
“It’s what I suspect. It’s what I fear.”
“Oh, it couldn’t be. Cole? Going after Dixie Kizer? My God!” She said it with contempt and then, realizing, she said to Philip, “Sorry ’bout that.”
They thought.
“No,” Maggie said finally, “he’s too sane for that. Of course he is mad for sex.”
Philip looked at her. “Cole? Mad for sex?”
“My God, he’s always been mad for sex. Where have you been? Since high school, maybe even earlier. You didn’t know?”
“I begin to think I don’t know anything.”
She put down her brush and leaned into the mirror to examine the lines at her eyes and mouth. “Sweet Philip,” she said. “Innocent Philip.” She was being mean and enjoying it but suddenly she felt hollow inside. She turned to face him. “You know the things I said when I was drunk?”
Philip listened.
“That I’d never forgive you? That I’d never love you?”
“You didn’t say you’d never love me.”
“Well, I thought it.”
“Don’t, Maggie.”
“Well, I want you to know that it’s not always in vino veritas. I said those things to hurt you, only. Not because they were true, but because they would hurt you.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to really hurt you.”
“Well, you did.”
They waited, both of them.
“I do forgive you,” she said.
“And do you love me?”
“I forgive you. We’ll have to start with that.”
They got into bed and for a long time they lay there awake.
Maggie fell asleep finally and dreamed of the terrible Thanksgiving dinner. But in the dream she was calling out to him across a great table, and the table grew wider and longer as she called, and he was so distant he could not hear her as again and again she begged him, “Forgive me, forgive me.”
22
Maggie began to write down her dreams.
She got a black and white notebook with green paper, the kind she had used in grammar school. It had a sewn binding, so you couldn’t get rid of what you wrote except by tearing it out. You had to live with everything you put on paper.
She wrote down her Thanksgiving dream, which embarrassed her a lot, but she wrote it down anyway. And then she wrote down other dreams, repeated ones she had had as a girl, and later in college, and then she wrote not about dreams but about things as they were. She wrote about Philip and about herself and about what had happened to them. She wrote as if she were preparing a document for Leona Spitzer, hard facts, concrete incidents, but it didn’t help and she didn’t go to see Leona Spitzer. She made up things, to see if she could get closer to the truth by distorting the facts. She made Philip a pure villain and then she made herself the villain and then she gave up on villains.
“I forgive him,” she wrote, “even though he has betrayed me with another woman.” And then she wrote, “But is that true, any of it? That I forgive him? That he betrayed me?”
And she wrote, “You’re a cold woman and you’re proud of it.”
And she wrote, “I’m afraid for you.”
And she wrote, “Why did I dream that I was begging his forgiveness?”
She wrote a kind of story about the times Philip had made her laugh. They were scenes from reality, but she made up lines for people to say and things for them to do and she drew neat moral conclusions which really didn’t fit the scenes.
She read Virginia Woolf and found she was no help at all.
She wrote a story called “The Great Thanksgiving Dinner” in which she tried to catch Philip’s wonderful outrageousness. He’d been like that—crazy and outrageous, saying any old thing—when they’d first met a
t college, and she’d fallen in love with him on account of it. But she couldn’t get the story right. She was tempted to tear it out, but not getting things right was part of what she had to live with, and so she kept it.
She read Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She read Dickens and Thackeray. They were even less help than Virginia Woolf.
She wrote a poem which was very bad.
She read Pride and Prejudice and then she read all of Jane Austen in the order of composition and she had a very good time. Jane Austen knew all about life. She wondered briefly if Jane Austen had had a drinking problem. A drop too much sherry? Jane Austen knew about love. Did she? And forgiveness?
She wrote down all the things she wanted in a man and was surprised to find she was describing Philip. The other things, the things he did not have, didn’t really matter to her.
“He is loving,” she wrote, “he is lovable.” She must tell him this. Sometime.
She wrote down a list of her faults: the things she had done and the things she had left undone. Could she really be nothing and yet guilty of so much? Wasn’t the humility negated by the arrogance?
She began to forgive herself. She felt less cold already.
The point is, she wrote, does he forgive me? She resisted underlining he and me, though she had taken the point.
She watched him, waiting for him to confront her. He didn’t, though. You wouldn’t either, she thought, if you were married to me. To think this was very funny. She wrote it down. You wouldn’t either if you were married to me. She knew she was getting better.
She was tired of confronting herself.
Poor Bartleby, she wrote.
On a hard gray day in late November she burned the notebook. It had done its job. She stood by the grill in the backyard and watched the pages curl, browning from the outer edges, and was surprised that she felt nothing except a curious, dull satisfaction. She poked the pages apart to help them burn and she let herself get lost, not in thought, but in the act of burning. All that time, all that misery, gone.
Snow began to fall, slowly, softly, but she pulled her jacket tight around her and waited until the last of the flames died away. Then she went into the house and, uncertain why, she looked out the window. In just this little time the world outside had begun to turn white.
23
Long before January 1 the news got out that Philip Tate was to be the new Dean of the Medical School. He refused interviews until after his official appointment, but the local newspapers ran stories about him anyway. There were articles about his distinguished career, about his father’s distinguished career, about his son in Johns Hopkins Medical and his daughter at Berkeley—both outstanding students who would certainly have distinguished careers—and about Philip’s wife Maggie, who had sacrificed her career as a scholar, they said, to support her husband through medical school. Maggie Tate, a leader in the community, taught Freshman Composition at a local college. They did not say which one.
At the medical school, things went on as usual. New deans had been appointed before this and they’d be appointed again in the future and Philip Tate was, all things considered, a smart psychiatrist and your basic good guy. Nobody minded his being Dean.
There were the customary round of Christmas parties and Hanukkah parties and, this year, small dinner parties for Philip and Maggie. Maggie had dreaded these, and so had Philip, but they carried them off with increasing ease. Maggie was her old self, except she didn’t drink. She was warm and witty and personable; she seemed happy for Philip. He, however, was more reticent than usual. He turned attention on Maggie whenever he could, he was self-deprecatory, he seemed to have some new modesty—almost shyness—about him. If he was not himself, it was because he was even nicer: this was how their friends reported the situation to one another and it was how Dixie Kizer reported it to Cole. “He’s a new man, your father,” she said on the phone, “and your mother, of course, is an inspiration.”
Christmas came, and the kids arrived for the holidays, and Emma brought with her a friend from Greece, Katina Apostolides. They were in love, Emma explained, they were lesbians, so everybody better get used to it. Philip smiled narrowly and said nothing, but Maggie welcomed the two girls and took them up to Emma’s room, chatting and laughing as if it were not the end of the world. She left them to get settled in, or to do whatever unthinkable things they intended to do, and she came downstairs to console Philip.
“She’s done with men,” Maggie said. “Men are pigs now. Men are swine.” She laughed softly.
“How can you find any of this funny? This is crazy. This is insane.”
“It’s not insane.”
“Our own daughter comes home and tells us she’s a lesbian and brings her lover with her and they’re upstairs doing it in our own house? And that’s not insane?”
“She’s still Emma. It’s a phase.”
Philip was silent for a while and then he said, “What happened to the Professor? That Bubba.”
“Bubby, not Bubba. Bubby turned out to be a … a dork, I believe.”
“A dork?”
“Bubby’s a dork and Katina is her lover. But keep in mind that Katina is a senior this year, so the lesbian stuff may be all over by June.”
“I can’t bear it.”
She put her arms around him and held him to her. “Of course you can bear it,” she said. “You just don’t like it. But you can bear it.”
“Oh God,” he said, “what would I do without you.”
“Keep it in mind,” she said. “Cole gets here tomorrow.”
Cole arrived anxious and exhausted but he had gained a good ten pounds and was looking handsomer than ever.
“My gorgeous son,” Maggie said. “Just look at you.”
They all looked at him, including Katina, who looked too long and too admiringly, Emma thought, and so she said, “He’s just another male, Katina, another oppressor.” Katina said nothing, but she did those flirty things with her eyes, and Emma took her out at once to show her the town.
“So what’s this with Emma and her friend?” Cole asked. “Is this what I think?”
“They’re lesbians, quote, and we’d all quote better get used to it,” Maggie said.
“I can’t bear it,” Philip said.
“It’s a phase,” Cole said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“You see?” Maggie said.
“Of course, it might be for real,” Cole said. “You have to find these things out. You have to experiment.”
“Which brings to mind your apartment mate, Cole,” Philip said. “Is he or isn’t he?”
Cole looked at him.
“Is he just a roommate?” Philip had decided it was time to find out these things.
“Is he gay, you mean?”
“Is he your lover, I mean.”
Cole laughed. “You’ve gotta be joking,” he said. “You’re out of touch, Father.”
His father was out of touch, Cole had always known that, and his mother, when she drank, was considerably more than out of touch. But he could see, even from the brief time he’d been home, that things were better between them, which lifted a huge responsibility from his shoulders. He went upstairs to sleep, saying, over his shoulder, “You’re cute, the two of you.”
“Our kids,” Philip said. “I can’t bear it.”
“They love you,” she said. “Me too.”
He hugged her, pleased, though he was uncertain what she meant.
New Year’s Eve was rainy and messy. It had snowed all day, but toward evening the snow had turned to rain.
Philip and Maggie had planned their usual open house, with all their Medical School friends and Maggie’s college friends and the two kids, of course, and all their friends, but this year, since it was the night of Philip’s official appointment as Dean, the party seemed larger or more important or more something.
“More frantic,” Philip said. “At least the preparations are.”
“Everything’s prepared,”
Maggie said, “if only the rain lets up.”
The preparations lasted the entire day. They had begun early that morning when Kappy’s Liquors delivered the drinks. There was a case of wine and a case of beer, and a mixed case of scotch and bourbon and gin, and this year, for the first time, there was Perrier and Pellegrino and Calistoga water, plain and flavored, fizzy and regular, and a case of Coke. In the afternoon Schaub’s showed up, early, with a turkey and a ham and a loin of pork. These were cooked, of course, and elaborately decorated, and enshrined on fake silver platters that took up lots of room. “But where do they go?” Maggie said. “Where do I put them?” and she emptied the refrigerator of everything that wouldn’t spoil. At eight, on schedule, Ollie’s Catering delivered the hors d’oeuvres, the two bartenders arrived along with the two serving men, and everything was set to begin.
Maggie, in the living room, adjusted her earrings. She had on a new cocktail dress, white, shot with silver, and her hair looked good and—she took a deep breath—she was, as much as she would ever be, ready. Philip came down the stairs, ready as well.
“Now,” Maggie said, “if only the damned rain would stop.”
“Fuck the rain,” Philip said. “I’m gonna have a Pellegrino.” He gave her a kiss and they waited.
The rain stopped at nine, just as the guests began to arrive. The Stubbses were first and then came the old-timers, the Gaspards and the Aspergarters, and then a whole mass of people arrived, and suddenly it was a party, with lots of noise, and someone playing the piano in the family room, and, blessedly, laughter.
Around eleven the young people arrived in a large group. They were noisier and they drank more and in no time there was a lot of smoke in the air and a feeling of excitement. With so many good-looking people, talented and sexy and popular, nearly everybody felt lucky to be there.
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