by Alison Lurie
“Hello, Chuck. How are Lily and the baby?” Though she has not spoken to him face to face since December, Erica has often driven by the Markowitz’s Glenview Home and seen Chuck working with his snow blower, pushing before him the large machine with its bright-red nozzle extended and spurting snow, its vigorous mechanical noise. Occasionally he has called and offered again to clear her driveway; naturally, she has always refused.
As soon as she politely can, Erica disengages herself from Chuck. Smiling and nodding at arm’s length, she makes her way through Danielle’s guests toward the dining room, where Dr. Bernard Kotelchuk stands behind the long oak table pouring drinks with large gestures, a loud red tie and an offensive hostlike manner.
“Good evening, Mrs. Tate! How’re you doing tonight?”
“Fine, thank you.” She smiles thinly, irritated to be addressed as “Mrs. Tate,” though aware that his intention is not facetious, merely formal.
“What can I give you?”
“Some white wine, please.”
“Coming up.”
Erica moves away with the glass, sipping sparingly from it: not only is she aware that she will have to drive home—she knows that she is being watched. Because of her separated condition, if she seems to be even slightly high both men and women will look at her with suspicious pity: is Poor Erica starting to drink?
The party is in full blast now, its density and volume increasing every moment Nervously scooping up cheese dip with a cracker, though she is not hungry, Erica scans the room. Years ago, and again for a time this winter, she went to every party with the fantasy that someone would be there—” someone whom (though they had never met before) she would recognize who would recognize her.
Foolish; pathetic. As usual, she knows every grown man present tonight, and doesn’t want to know any of them better. Most of them are out of bounds anyhow, being married—as is most of the male population of Corinth over thirty. Among the remainder there are two or three men (not now present) whom Erica has finally decided she might be willing to go out with. It is not that her opinion of men has altered, or that she has any desire to become romantically involved. But it would be nice sometimes to have a respectable, attractive escort to concerts, films and art shows.
As yet, however, none of these men has offered to escort her. The only man she has gone anywhere with for nearly three months is Sandy Finkelstein, who is neither respectable nor attractive, though he is—just as, long ago, in Cambridge—usually available. There are problems even with Sandy: he can’t afford to go to anything that costs money and will not let her pay for him; he has no car and his appearance is weird. Last Sunday at the afternoon concert he wore a secondhand Army overcoat he had bought for two dollars, and a red knit hat with a long tail and tassles like one of the Seven Dwarfs.
Erica thinks of something Danielle once said: that what men do if they can afford it is take a naive young woman, give her a couple of babies and a big house to look after, and then after fifteen years of hard work they discard her. By that time she’s used goods; damaged merchandise. Nobody wants her any more. Except maybe the sort of man who buys day-old bread and gets his clothes at church sales.
But she must not think that way. She is at a party, where people have come together to have a good time. She scans the room, looking for someone to talk to; but they all seem to smile and then turn away, avoiding her. It is a strange sensation. For years, as a beautiful, happy young woman, she was the object of general admiration and attraction; last fall when Brian first left she was also surrounded, wherever she went, by interested sympathizers and wolfish husbands. But now her story is no longer news, and as a lonely middle-aged woman with moral principles she is dull, an embarrassment. As Danielle said, it gets later and the buses run less often—finally not at all.
Taking a deep breath, suppressing these thoughts, she scans the crowd again and then moves through it toward Clara Dickson, her lawyer—also once Danielle’s. Indeed Clara, a motherly broad woman, long happily married, has helped to end most of the local unhappy marriages Erica knows of.
“Hello, Clara. How are you?” Good manners demand that she should not ask instantly whether Jack Lucas is still dragging his feet about the settlement; Erica begins the conversation by inquiring about Clara’s many grown and successful children. Before she can finish this polite ceremony they are interrupted by neighbors of Clara’s who are remodeling a house on the lake and intend to explain the process room by room. Discouraged, smiling chalkily, Erica drifts away, waiting for a better opportunity. She moves through the guests, keeping a becoming distance, stopping at intervals to smile, deplore the weather, and parry inquisitive remarks with conventional answers. (“How are you these days?” “Oh, fine.” “Well, what’s new with you?” “Oh, nothing much.” “And how is all your family?”)
In the front room, away from the bar, the crowd is thinner; in the hall there is only one person: a tall, very shabby, dim looking man standing by the stairs reading a magazine.
“Sandy.” Erica smiles. It is a relief to see someone who knows her story and won’t ask questions, and it is mildly pleasant to see Sandy. “I didn’t think you were coming.”
“Neither did I.” Zed puts the magazine down.
“I’m glad you came.” Erica smiles, but with mixed feelings. She had asked Danielle if she could invite Sandy for his own good, so that he might again meet people of his own age, background and intellectual sophistication. For in spite of his shabby appearance he is an intelligent and sophisticated man; he has been kind to her this depressing winter, and Erica wants to repay him—to restore him to his right place in the world.
But now that he is here, Sandy looks incongruous and uncomfortable. He has put on his only respectable shirt—a frayed white oxford button-down, an apparent survival from his years of teaching—and a narrow, limp black knit tie. The effect is somehow to make him seem even more of a dismal outcast than he does in his secondhand pants and sweaters.
Still, since he is here, he can’t spend all evening in the hall reading the New-York Review of Books.
“Have you had anything to drink, yet?” she asks. “There’s tonic and orange juice if you don’t want liquor, or I could make you some tea.”
“No thanks. I’m not thirsty.”
“Well then. Come and talk to someone.” Erica reconnoiters the crowd in the next room and selects a professor of French named M. Alain who is known for his good will. She propels Zed to his side, introduces them, and suggests the neutral topic of Japanese theater, a sample of which has just been presented locally.
Cheered by having accomplished a good deed, Erica heads for the kitchen to see whether she can do another. She finds Danielle simultaneously spreading pâté on squares of toast and talking on the phone.
“Yes ...All right ...You’re welcome, good-bye.” She puts the receiver down with some force. “Dhhh. That was Mrs. Heyrick again. She wants to know can we please, please, be a little less noisy. Mr. Heyrick has a migraine headache.”
“He would,” Erica says, thinking that she too has a headache. “Can I do anything?”
“Yes. We’re running out of glasses already. Everyone must be leaving them around.”
“I’ll go and see what I can find, and wash some.”
“That’d be great. I didn’t think so many people would come.”
Why not, you invited them, Erica thinks as she returns to the living room with a tray and begins to collect used glasses. She has nearly a dozen and is on her way back when the front door opens and a person Danielle hasn’t invited enters—not Brian, but the next-worst thing: his lawyer, Jack Lucas. Jack is accompanied by, and has evidently come with, a friend of Danielle’s named Nancy King. Erica looks at them with a heavy, angry feeling, for Jack is not only Brian’s lawyer and hence her enemy, but also one of the unattached men she had in years past flirted with and later chosen as a possible escort. She had even, before Brian went to him, had the fantasy that Jack would refuse to take the case out of
admiration for her. That he should come with Nancy is another blow—for until recently Erica has never had anyone else preferred to her by those whom she preferred.
“Erica!” Nancy whinnies, galloping toward her and pawing her arm. “Lovely to see you. It’s been years. You know Jack, don’t you?”
“Of course we know each other,” Jack cries, smiling broadly and hobbling up as fast as possible. He is literally dragging his feet, or at least one foot, which is in a cast as a result of one of his continual skiing accidents. “How are you, Erica?”
Jack leans forward; guessing his intention, Erica tries to retreat, but there is a wall behind her and her hands are full; she can do nothing but turn her head at the last moment, so that Jack’s belligerent kiss explodes damply on her cheek.
“Must get these glasses back, Danielle needs them,” she insists, escaping. She hastens into the kitchen to complain to her friend (“YOU might think he would have known—would have had the good manners not to—”). But Danielle is not there.
She washes and dries the glasses and takes them back to the dining room, where Danielle is laughing with Bernie Kotelchuk in a noisy group. Frustrated, she takes her complaint back across the room.
“Jack Lucas just came in,” she announces to Clara in an angry whisper.
“Oh, yes?” Clara turns toward her, smiling. “That’s nice.”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s extremely rude. He must have known I’d be here.”
“Heavens, Erica.” Clara shakes her head, laughs gently. “If Jack or I couldn’t go anywhere we might meet someone we’ve got a case pending against, we’d both have to stay home most of the time. In this town.”
“I suppose you’re right”
“Of course I’m right.”
“Mm.” Erica hesitates. “But now he’s here, will you speak to him?”
“Why, of course I’ll speak to him!” Clara stops smiling. “Jack and I are old friends.”
“I mean, about the agreement. You can ask him why he hasn’t answered your last two letters.”
“I couldn’t ask him that now,” Erica’s lawyer says firmly. “This is a social occasion.” She gives Erica a smile of maternal disapproval mixed with pity, as if she were a child who wanted to bring up some silly old quarrel at a party. “Why, hello, Nancy. How are you?”
“Beautiful.” Nancy, who is of course also one of Clara’s former clients, embraces her warmly, while Erica slides away, feeling worse than before.
The front hall, where she goes to recover her composure, is again empty except for Zed, who is now crouched on the rug reading one of Danielle’s books.
“Sandy?”
“Hello.” He straightens up, smiling sheepishly.
“You’re not enjoying the party. Didn’t you like Monsieur Alain?”
“He was all right. But then these other people came up. A very angry man who was always laughing, with a bristly beard and a sad wife. I forget their names.”
“The Diacritis,” Erica supplies with a sigh. “He’s the chairman of Danielle’s department.”
“I see.”
“But what happened?”
“I said something he didn’t like. He was complaining about how hard it was to stop smoking; When he goes to a party where there are people like Monsieur Alain with cigarettes, he gets very angry and wants one too. He asked me what I thought he should do about it. I suggested he might stop going to parties, or else, what a Zen Master told me once, he could try to experience his desires fully without satisfying them. Then he figured out I was the nut who runs that bookshop, and started to abuse me.” The telephone in the hall beyond Zed begins to ring. “So I got out of his way. Do you think I should answer that? ...Hello ...Yes, just a moment ...It’s the next-door neighbor. She wants to speak to Danielle.”
“Oh, Lord. I’ll get her.”
Erica makes her way back through the party, delivers the message, and returns. “Danielle’s busy now, she says to tell Mrs. Heyrick she’ll—Sandy! You hung up on her.”
“She hung up on me.” Zed grins. “She was worried because there’s a car parked in front of her driveway. She was afraid there might be a fire or some other emergency and she couldn’t get out. But I told her she needn’t worry, because both the lights are in watery signs tonight, and Jupiter is conjunct Uranus. Only good adventures can happen.”
“Oh, Sandy. How could you make fun of her that way?”
“I wasn’t making fun of her.”
“But that’s what she’d think. She must be furious.” Erica looks toward the wall which divides the two halves, of the house, imagining Mrs. Heyrick in the room beyond, which is the mirror image of this one; she is standing facing Erica, furious, in her perpetual hat. What is to be done now?
She looks into the living room. In the far corner, Danielle is laughing tipsily and leaning on Bernie Kotelchuk, who is even more red-faced than usual—obviously drunk. A feeling of exhaustion, disgust and hopelessness comes over her.
“Where are you going?” she adds, as Zed moves past her toward the hall closet.
“Away.”
Erica opens her mouth to protest, shuts it, opens it again. “I’ll drive you home.”
“You don’t have to do that, Erica,” he says in a strained voice. “I can walk.”
“It’s too cold out. I’d like to get away for a while anyhow.” She swallows. “I’m not enjoying this party much either.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll tell you about it on the way downtown.”
It is not only cold outside, but starting to snow. The hill is already slippery, making conversation difficult; by the time they reach the bookshop Erica has only half expressed her resentment at Nancy and Jack.
“Would you like to come in and have a cup of tea?” Erica hesitates, checks her watch. It is not yet ten. She feels cold, damp; her mind is clogged with depression. There is nothing to go home to except the mess Jeffrey and Matilda will have made of her house, especially her kitchen; and she doesn’t want to return to the party, where Mrs. Heyrick and the Diacritis have probably already begun to complain to Danielle about Zed and ask who on earth brought him. “All right. For a few moments.”
14
ACROSS TOWN ON THE same cold March evening a very different social event is taking place in the apartment of Linda Sliski, Wendy’s nominal roommate. Danielle’s party is brightly lit and everyone is standing up, talking loudly. Here it is smokily dim; the few guests are sitting or lying silently on the floor, passing around a joint. When it reaches Brian he does not take a drag, but hands it on to Wendy, who is leaning against his leg with her head on his raised knee.
It is peaceful here, warm; a little too warm and too peaceful for Brian, who can’t get any conversation going and whose left leg is starting to ache. But he is willing to ride with it; more, it is a matter of pride with him to do so. He believes that a political scientist, like a politician, should be able to fit into a wide range of social scenes.
It is as well that he feels this, for he has had few opportunities of late to attend more conventional parties. Like Erica, he has noted a falling off in his social life. However, he is aware of the correct explanation, which is that—in spite of their protests that this is an amicable separation—nobody wants to ask them both to the same party, because it is not the custom. The custom is to keep them separate; to invite the estranged husband to small dinners as an extra man, because he cannot cook for himself and is probably starving; while the estranged wife is asked to large cocktail parties for visiting celebrities, on the grounds that she needs to meet people.
In the case of the Tates this policy is irritating to everyone. Brian already feels overfed by Wendy, but would welcome the opportunity to have a few drinks and some interesting conversations before returning to Alpine Towers. Erica, on the other hand, does not want to meet visiting celebrities, and cocktail parties come at the worst time of day for her—the children’s supper hour. After serving the pizza, spaghetti or hamburgers
they demand, she would be delighted to go out to a civilized meal, but nobody asks her.
Wendy is not so much irritated as depressed. She becomes weepy every time Brian goes out to dinner without her, and she believes he isn’t invited to large parties to which he might bring her because people disapprove of her and don’t want her in their houses. As for the hosts at these dinners and parties, they also are irritated and depressed because so many of their invitations are refused.
Brian cannot return even those invitations he does receive, because his apartment is too small and too full of Wendy. Nominally she is still living with Linda, but she is seldom there, and over the past months there has been a steady movement of her clothes and personal effects into Alpine Towers. By now it would be obvious to any guest who happened to open the bathroom cabinet or the coat closet that some woman is more or less in residence. Moreover, if he turned Wendy out while he, entertained she would be hurt, while if he did not it would amount to openly declaring that they are living together.
Though he hasn’t been asked to Danielle’s party, Brian is well aware of its existence. Several of his acquaintances have mentioned it, adding naively, or maliciously, that they hoped to see him there. His lawyer, Jack Lucas, even suggested that Brian might like to tag along with him and his date. Needless to say, Brian refused. He has never in his life liked to “tag along,” and if he were to do so in this instance, Danielle would probably ask him to leave.
Moreover, Brian is tired of Jack Lucas and his interminable negotiations. Leonard Zimmern—whom he saw recently in New York—has advised him to discharge Jack. (“Sure, he’s a nice guy; that’s the whole trouble. A divorce lawyer isn’t supposed to be a nice guy. You want fast action, go to Frank Panto. That’s what I should have done, but I was too dumb.”) As yet, Brian has hesitated to take this advice. He is unacquainted with Frank Panto; but like everyone else in Corinth, he knows the name. It often appears in the newspaper, in reports of trials for burglary, forgery, rape and drunken driving—and is always taken as a sign that the defendant is guilty, but having retained Panto, may with luck get off.