A Place at the Table: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  And now she stands before me, bubbling over with enthusiasm, giving me a great big welcoming smile while touching the sleeve of my dress and remarking on how pretty it is.

  “We are just so glad y’all are here! We’ve been so busy putting the house together we haven’t had much time for company, so this is a real treat.”

  “Thanks for having us,” I say.

  “No, thank you for coming,” she says, and I think to myself: Good God, this woman is Taffy minus thirty years.

  “Okay, y’all need drinks. Cam, do you take Scotch? Bourbon? Something else?”

  “I’d love a Scotch,” says Cam. Already he’s reacquired his good ol’ boy accent.

  Parrin smiles at me conspiratorially. “Amelia, you don’t happen to be a Champagne drinker, do you?”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Oh good!” Parrin says. “I’m so glad. This means we’ll be friends. I try to have a glass every day. Does that make me terribly decadent?”

  “Parrin, darling, you are the definition of decadent,” says Bo. “Y’all know what I said to my wife the other day when the AmEx bill came in? I said, ‘Honey, I give you an unlimited budget, and you still exceed it!’ ”

  “Oh, hush,” Parrin says.

  Bo throws his arm around her. “Just teasing you, darling.”

  I shoot a glance at Cam. In a better time he would have caught it, would have known that I was thinking, Call Dr. Freud; someone married her father. But Cam is not looking at me. All eyes but mine are on Parrin.

  “Now don’t worry, Cam, we’re not forgetting about your Scotch. Here’s what we’re going to do. Bo is going to show you his big-game room, where he also happens to have a very old bottle of Glendronach. And Amelia and I will just sneak off to the kitchen and get ourselves a little bubbly. Sound good?”

  Bo gives Cam another resounding slap on the back, a display of affection I’m beginning to enjoy because I can’t imagine it not stinging. Parrin, meanwhile, loops her arm through mine, steering me first through the living room, then the dining room, and finally into the kitchen, which is a study in white—white floors, white cabinets, white appliances—all except for the stove, which sits like a gunmetal-gray tank in a field of snow. There are trays of food displayed on the center island. Seeing them, I realize that I am hungry.

  Parrin opens the refrigerator and pulls out a cold bottle of Moët & Chandon. She unwraps the foil from its top, then removes the hood, standing poised for a moment, a dish towel over the cork, which she eases out with great concentration. The cork discharges quietly into the towel, and she proceeds to fill two flutes already sitting on the island, next to the food.

  “Bo says I went a little overboard with appetizers.”

  I lift my glass, “Cheers,” I say, before taking a sip. “It all looks delicious.”

  In addition to a stack of small white plates, a basket of rolled cloth napkins, and a pile of polished silver forks, there is baked Brie in puff pastry, caviar with blinis (caviar!), a shallow bowl of beautiful purple grapes with a sterling silver pair of scissors placed beside it, poached shrimp with cocktail sauce, and a pale pink mold in the shape of a fish with crackers surrounding it, thin lemon slices and capers on top.

  “That’s not the salmon mousse from the Silver Palate, is it?” I ask. The salmon mousse from the Silver Palate is perhaps my favorite thing to eat in the world.

  “Oh shoot,” she says, and I can all but imagine her stomping her little foot. “You found me out. Is it just so tacky I brought in food from the city? I did press the mousse into the fish mold myself, and I also fixed the Brie. That is, I put some apricot jam on it and wrapped it in Pepperidge Farm puff pastry dough.”

  “Parrin, you are about ten steps ahead of the rest of us. This all looks incredible.”

  “I’m so glad y’all got here first,” she says, as if confiding something top secret. She turns and reaches above the refrigerator, patting around for something, then pulls down a pack of Benson & Hedges. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asks.

  I shake my head, though I kind of do.

  “I’ll just open the back door and you’ll hardly notice. Bo hates that I still smoke, but I can’t help it. And I’ve cut down to one cigarette a day. I tell him he simply must tolerate it or else I’ll be a devil to live with.”

  She stands near the opened back door, blowing her smoke outside.

  “It’s nice to be with people from Atlanta again. It’s so different up here. People are just . . . strange.”

  “I’m actually not from Atlanta.”

  “Oh my gosh! I’m sorry. I thought you and Cam both were. Where are you from?”

  “Connecticut, born and raised.”

  “Oh Lord. You must think I’m a beast. I’m so sorry. It’s just when you sent over that sweet welcome basket I thought you must be southern because I couldn’t imagine a Yankee doing such a thing.”

  She brings her free hand to her mouth, covering it temporarily. “Oh Lord, forgive me. There I go talking about northerners being rude, and look at who the rude one really is.”

  “Why, just look,” I say, mimicking her accent without meaning to. I resist the urge to twist my finger into my cheek and make a dimple.

  And then I decide to summon my better angels, realizing it’s going to be a long night if we get caught up in a battle of who has most offended the other.

  “Tell me about your daughters. What are their names?” I ask.

  “Ivy and Olivia.” She takes one last inhale, then tosses the remaining stub of cigarette outside and shuts the door. “They’re in the playroom with the babysitter. It’s the sweetest little space. In the attic, with dormer windows, like a fairy tale. I bribed them with a pizza and a video, told the babysitter I’d give her a bonus if she could keep them upstairs while the guests are here. They’re precious, but if I bring them down to meet you they’ll be here all night. And frankly, I need a little time off.”

  I can’t stop thinking about Parrin’s discarded cigarette butt, still lit. I want to tell her to be careful, that she might burn the house down. But I swallow my anxiety. Parrin is a grown woman and not in need of my advice.

  “The portrait of the three of you is beautiful,” I say. “I caught a glimpse of it from the hallway.”

  “Please tell Bo that! It will make his night. He had that painting commissioned for my Christmas present last year. I just love it.”

  The fact that I will see her children in a painting rather than in the flesh seems very fitting to me and illustrates something about the Atlanta world she and Cam both come from, where surfaces matter—a lot.

  “Is Bo’s big game room where you keep the Parcheesi set?” I ask, deadpan.

  Parrin laughs, delighted by my joke. “I actually love board games, but no. The game room is for Bo’s ‘spoils.’ He’s been big-game hunting in Africa and India, plus we have a camp in Louisiana, where Bo’s from. His most prized possession is his lion, but he’s also got a tiger and a bear—he calls it his Wizard of Oz collection—and then there’s just a bunch of deer heads and stuff. Oh, and some squirrels. Bo hates squirrels. They made a salad bar out of our garden in Atlanta, so Bo shot a bunch of them with these special bullets he buys that have an acorn engraved on the bottom of each one. He took a couple of the squirrels to the taxidermist, and afterward we put the stuffed squirrels in the garden to see if they’d scare away the live ones, but I think they did the opposite and made the rest of the squirrels think we’d thrown them a cocktail party or something.”

  “Wow,” I say, not sure how else to respond. This is certainly outside the bounds of normal Connecticut dinner party conversation, which tends to circle around school issues, library fund-raisers, which play Frank Rich butchered in the Times, and what new restaurants we’ve visited in Manhattan.

  “Do Bo and I sound absolutely barbaric?”

  I shrug. “Cam hunts. Dove mostly, though occasionally he still goes deer hunting.”

  “In Connecticut?”

&nbs
p; “No, he goes on a boys’ retreat every winter. They go to a plantation in South Georgia.”

  “Bo would love that.”

  There is a pause for a moment while I wonder how rude it would be for me to make a little dent in the salmon mousse. The other couple is still not here, or at least I haven’t heard the doorbell ring.

  “Did you grow up in Old Greenwich?” she asks.

  “I grew up in the country. Litchfield County, in the northwest corner of the state. A town called Roxboro.”

  “Didn’t Alexander Calder live there?”

  I look at her, surprised. I forget that pretty southern girls can be intelligent. “He did. My family didn’t know him or anything, but we knew his house. There were mobiles in the front yard. It was pretty amazing to drive by.”

  “I hope I didn’t sound too rude earlier about northerners. I think I’m just nervous about having left home. But really, Bo and I think this part of the country is so beautiful.”

  I nod, but I’m distracted. The salmon mousse is just sitting there. I decide “What the hell,” lift the sterling silver serving knife, and glance at her one more time before cutting into the big pink fish.

  “Oh, thank you for doing that!” she says. “Now it’s a real party.” She beams at me like a little girl.

  By the time the other couple arrives, Parrin and I have nearly finished the bottle of Champagne and grown very giggly. It is nice to let go after so many nights of holding my breath around my husband. It is nice to get a little tipsy, to let someone cook for me, to be in a home where people are talking in warm and dulcet tones, where Cam is talking in warm and dulcet tones. The dinner Parrin serves—vichyssoise, squab, rice pilaf, green salad, chocolate-orange mousse—is all very “of the moment” and delicious, as I knew it would be. I decide that Parrin is silly but dear, though I continue to be startled every time she puts her hand on her husband’s leg. He’s fifty-five, Parrin told me, while she is thirty-seven. Even so, he looks older than their eighteen-year age difference, or maybe she, with her Jane Fonda body (she teaches an aerobics class twice a week at the studio in town), looks younger than she actually is.

  Observing Bo makes me appreciate what I have in Cam, physically at least. Cam runs five days a week and often lifts weights at his gym in Manhattan before returning home in the evening. No flabby belly presses against me when we make love. Not that the thought of making love to Cam seems very appealing right now. (I no longer even undress around my husband. My clothes have become my armor.) I was right about the party loosening him up, though. He is as charming as he can be in front of these people. He tells funny stories, listens attentively whenever anyone else speaks, and jumps up to help Parrin clear the dishes when we are all finished eating.

  After dinner, Parrin claps her hands together, as if she’s troop leader of the Scouts, then asks if we might like to adjourn to the living room to play board games and have after-dinner drinks.

  “Amelia and I were talking about how much we love playing them,” she says, winking at me.

  We follow Parrin to the den while Bo goes off in the direction of his office. Parrin pulls A Question of Scruples out of the den closet. We groan, but good-naturedly, as we have all come to expect this. This is the third party I’ve been to this year where Scruples has come out. It is both awful and fun, but we are all tipsy enough to be titillated instead of nervous. And here comes Bo carrying the bottle of Scotch and another bottle of Champagne.

  “This game always gets me in trouble,” says Cam.

  His accent keeps getting thicker and thicker.

  “Well, don’t bluff so much,” I say. “Because the truth will out.”

  In Scruples everyone is dealt five “dilemma” cards, each of which asks a morally ambivalent question. For each round played, everyone gets one answer card, which says either “Yes,” “No,” or “Depends.” Depending on which answer card you draw, you have to guess which one of your opponents would answer the same way. If their response matches your answer card, you get to discard your question card without drawing another one. If it doesn’t match yours, you have to draw another question card. The first one to run out of question cards wins. The fun part of the game comes when you think someone is bluffing the answer. Then you can challenge them. This is what happened to Cam the last time we played the game at a party, when he answered “Yes” to my question, saying he would leave a note if he were to hit a car in a parking lot and no one else were to witness it.

  I knew he was lying. I had been in the car with Cam once when he tried to squeeze into a tight space and ended up scraping the side of a station wagon. I was with him as he backed out of the space and drove right out of the lot. So I called his bluff, brought up his past indiscretion, and everyone voted that his answer was insincere, resulting in me winning the round. Cam had laughed it off at the party but was irritated later that night. “Would it really hurt you to let me be right for once?” he asked.

  The thing about Scruples is you aren’t really playing to win. You’re playing for the questions, to ponder them, to see how your friends will answer. And so Cam, Parrin, Bo, and the other couple—I keep forgetting their names—go round and round, asking strangely intimate questions of each other:

  “Your child support payments will be cut in half if you tell your ‘ex’ about the big raise you got. Do you tell?”

  “Your fifteen-year-old daughter needs your permission to get the pill. Do you consent?”

  “Your elderly mother-in-law can no longer manage alone in her house and doesn’t like nursing homes. Do you take her in?”

  It is my turn, and, though I am not supposed to care, I am winning. I only have one question left: “If you could have an affair with no chance of your mate discovering your infidelity, would you do it?”

  My true answer fits the response card I have: “No.” I would rather leave Cam than cheat. I just don’t know how you would do that—live one intimate life beneath another. Even if it were only a one-night dalliance. But here’s the thing: I know not to pose the question to Cam, because if he answers “No” I will be tempted to call his bluff. It’s not that I am certain he’s had an affair. I have no hard evidence, save for the time years ago when he had that woman from Coventry stay at our house while the girls and I were out of town, but honestly, in that case, I don’t believe anything untoward actually happened. I met the woman when I returned home early from my trip to New York, and she was a weepy mess about her divorce. In fact, Cam seemed relieved that I had come home, relieved that there was someone else for her to talk to. But if that woman hadn’t been such a wreck, if she had been looking for a fling, I would not put it past my husband to cheat. It occurs to me that I must accept this awful truth about my husband: when he can get away with bad behavior, he will. Like the way he peeled out of the parking lot instead of leaving his phone number on the car he damaged.

  I settle on Parrin as my “No.” I don’t really know the other couple, and besides, I am pretty sure Parrin is my best bet. She is just so sweet and southern and wifely. Or at least, that’s how she presents, how she looks in her portrait. Meaning that even if she wanted to answer another way, I can’t imagine her saying anything but “No.” And I’m certainly not going to call her on her bluff if she does, because I want to win and I don’t need to know her secrets.

  “I call on Parrin,” I say. “Would you cheat if you knew you wouldn’t get caught?”

  “Heck no,” she says.

  I flip over my card, and everyone sees that it matches her answer. She and I smile at each other, woman to woman.

  “We’ve got ourselves some good wives,” says Bo, raising his Scotch glass toward Cam’s.

  Cam does not raise his glass, which is full of amber liquid, having been steadily refreshed by Bo through the night.

  “Parrin’s bluffing,” says Cam.

  “Cam,” says Parrin, and for the first time that evening she doesn’t look in control.

  Cam is drunk. This, along with so many other thin
gs, I had not fully realized. And as he drawls, “Cause I know there’s a naughty girl beneath that sweet exterior,” she reddens, and the answer to a question I’ve been avoiding all night long slides right into place. It is like solving my daughter’s Rubik’s Cube, when you look and look and look at those mismatched colored squares and suddenly you realize if you turn it like this, then twist it like that, then turn it one more time, all of the colors on all six sides will match up perfectly and the puzzle will be solved.

  Cam’s fury toward me, his nights of rage, his inability to see anything from my side—I’ve been looking at it from the wrong perspective. I’ve been looking at it as if I’m central in this drama. But if I twist and turn myself out of the center and look at the situation from the outside, it all makes a sudden and awful logic: Cam and Parrin are having an affair. This dinner is a setup, a naughty game they are playing, displaying their cuckolded spouses for the other to evaluate. I imagine they have met in the bathroom to grope and to gossip, with neither Bo nor I aware of what they are up to, until this, this (intentionally?) careless move on Cam’s part that reveals the exquisite fire these two are playing with, neither of them concerned about whom the flames might lick and burn.

  I look around the room. No one but Cam, Parrin, and I seems to realize what is going on here, but clearly Cam wants his affair out in the open, wants to make a scene. And I’ll be damned if I give him that pleasure.

  “Oh, I don’t believe that for a minute,” I say, my voice hardy. “Parrin might be naughty, but she’s not nasty. When you’re naughty you wear black lace panties beneath your conservative clothes. When you’re nasty you engage in a cheap, cavalier affair. And that’s not like Parrin, is it?”

  Parrin gives Cam a pleading, desperate look. He looks at her, then looks at me, then looks at her again.

  “Of course not,” he says. “Challenge withdrawn.”

  “Amelia, darling,” booms Bo, seemingly oblivious to all that just happened. “Looks like you just won!”