The Dinner Party

by Joshua Ferris

  “Jay?”

  “Hmmm,” he said.

  “Look at me.”

  He looked up from his beer, though he continued to pick.

  “Know what I’ve always wanted to do?”

  “What’s that?”

  “In the park? Behind some trees?”

  “What?”

  “Lean in, Jay. Let me whisper it in your ear.”

  The hostess never rescued them. The view of the park remained out of sight. The bar where their knees touched never turned comfortable, and they left.

  “Well, that was a bust,” Jay remarked helpfully on the elevator ride down.

  The street again. Only difference now: it was dark. Half the night was over. Stupid to think that when it wasn’t yet eight o’clock, but she couldn’t help it. The past hour of frustrations and bad luck, of vacillating, of stalling out at a moment in time when she needed the most to happen, had come to define her night, and her life.

  “What are you in the mood for?” he asked.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “Dinner?”

  “Sure.”

  “Dinner, or not?”

  “I said sure.”

  “Not with any conviction.”

  “What do you want from me, Jay?”

  “The night’s not over, you know.”

  “Let’s go to dinner.”

  “Here, or downtown?”

  “Either way.”

  “Sarah.”

  “Downtown. Downtown. Downtown.”

  They took a cab downtown. That was the most they could imagine for themselves on this first night of spring: another dinner downtown. Food was the default, food and alcohol, whenever the imagination failed. They would eat and drink themselves sick and call that, somehow, living.

  On the corner of Delancey and Allen, she stepped out of the cab, over a puddle and onto the curb at the same instant that a group of friends in a rowdy mood burst through the door of a bar. She didn’t know them. She hardly had time to register them. But she knew at once that she wanted to be in the thick of that night, and not this lame one where she and her husband went to dinner again and drank too much out of sheer boredom.

  Jay paid the cabbie and met her at the corner. “Do you have a taste for something in particular?”

  “No.”

  They went down the block, stopping here and there to read a menu. “What do you think of this place?” he asked.

  “It’s fine.”

  “You’re not crazy about it.”

  “Do I have to be crazy about it? It’s dinner, who cares. It’s fine.”

  “It should be more than fine if we’re going to drop a hundred bucks in there,” he said. “It should be a place you want to go.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, and opened the door and walked inside.

  It was an Italian place with checkered tablecloths, guaranteed to be nothing special. And air-conditioned! Who runs an air conditioner on the first day of spring? It was an affront to time. This place had the most delicate day of the year in a chokehold, waiting for its legs to stop kicking. There’d be no limpid breeze here, only a cheap blast of recycled air. She’d have turned and walked out had Jay been beside her, but she’d scored some obscure point against him out on the street just now and wasn’t ready to forfeit it.

  She followed the hostess to a table in the far back. Jay was still hanging in the window, refusing to come inside—unbelievable! She opened the menu to ignore him. So this, finally, was what the night had come down to: a squalid little showdown at a cheap Italian restaurant that was as far from a picnic in the park as—

  She didn’t see him open the door. He raised his voice above the racket.

  “I’m not fucking eating in there!” he yelled.

  Startled, she watched him disappear as the door fell slowly shut. People turned. She was mortified. Stared at, cast out, or feeling so, she stood and walked toward the door, aware as she hadn’t been on the way in that Jay had picked out the perfect place. The traditional tablecloths enlivened by the roar of conversation and ringing laughter. Everyone in perfect little parties of friends and lovers. Not a soul burdened by the possibility of a different night, better companions, competing visions of a finer life, as their nourishment arrived at the table like destiny.

  She had found the nerve to whisper into her husband’s ear, and by some miracle Jay ceased picking at his bottle of beer and could not call for the check fast enough.

  Seems he, too, wanted to break out of the missionary rut, he just didn’t know how to suggest it. He lacked the initiative of other men, their imagination, or maybe just their daring. Well, at least he was game. That was half the battle.

  In the elevator he looked over at her with a suggestive, uninhibited, private smile she hadn’t seen in months, and already it seemed they were renewed.

  “Is this what you had planned for us all along?” he asked. “Is this why you asked me to come home early?”

  No, she hadn’t planned it. She had asked him to come home only to make something like it possible. But she didn’t tell him that.

  They entered the park at Fifty-Ninth and Columbus, threaded their way through the last of the runners and cyclists on the inner drive, and walked north along a winding footpath until darkness fell completely. At Strawberry Fields they hopped a fence and slipped behind some bushes.

  If, in her fantasy, which apparently took place in late summer, they weren’t perfectly concealed, there had certainly been more leaves! They seemed to be so very out in the open still. Was that a woman going by with a stroller? Foreplay was out, a luxury they couldn’t afford. He unbuckled in a hurry. She had to take her panties down herself.

  She was bent over, waiting.

  “Do you need help?” she asked.

  “Shh…do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  He was quiet.

  “Jay?”

  “I need some help,” he said.

  She turned to help. A few minutes later, she brought her hands back to the ground. She waited.

  “I lost it,” he said.

  She stood and dusted the dirt from her hands.

  “That’s okay,” she said. He was quickly buckling up. She reached out and touched him on the head.

  There was an essential difference between them—what he might have called her restlessness, what she might have called his complacency—which had not surfaced before they were married, or, if it had, only as a hint of things to come, hidden again as soon as it peeked out. When they argued now, as a married couple, it was often over this essential difference. Why could she not be more like him and why could he not be more like her? But if there was some intractable self in her that was so easy to identify and so deserving of scorn, it was one in search of more life, more adventure, of the right thing to do at any given hour. It was not a homebody. It was not a moviegoer.

  But suddenly she stopped. Was she really any less predictable than she accused him of being? Night after night she was anxious not to miss out on…what? She didn’t know. Something she couldn’t define, forever residing just out of reach. It must get to be so tiresome for him, she thought. He must be convinced by now that she would never find it, that indeed there was nothing to find.

  She was no longer beside him. It took him a minute to notice. He turned, then walked slowly back to her.

  She reached out and took his hand. “Jay,” she said. “What do you want to do tonight?”

  “I thought we were having a picnic.”

  “But that was my idea,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “I want to have a picnic,” he said.

  “Am I predictable, Jay? Am I tiresome? I must drive you nuts.”

  “Because you like picnics?”

  He put his arm around her, and they walked the rest of the way to the park. Friends again. Was it so hard? After they ate, they lay on the blanket in the dark and talked for the first time about starting a family.

  He was gloomy
on the ride downtown, and gloomy when they stepped out of the cab. Gloomy going from restaurant to restaurant while she studied the menus posted outside.

  “Do you have a taste for anything in particular?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you just want to go home?”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Up to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to go home,” she said.

  She chose a harmless Italian place. She wanted to turn to him to express her outrage that they were blasting the air-conditioning on the first day of spring, but she knew that he wasn’t in the mood.

  The place was louder than she expected, a fate that became clear only after they’d been seated. They looked at the menu, keeping their impressions to themselves. Finally, he set his down on the checkered tablecloth, on top of the blanket he’d brought for the picnic.

  “Do you know what you’re getting?”

  He shrugged.

  “Jay,” she said, “it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t.”

  “Maybe not to you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry that I even suggested it,” she said.

  “Why did you touch my head?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Afterwards,” he said. “Did you really have to pat me on the head?”

  She returned to studying the menu. Had she patted him? She hadn’t meant to. She was just trying to make him feel better. When she looked up, sometime later, she found Jay staring intently across the room. She tracked his gaze to a table and to the man there who was, she thought, his opposite in every way: charismatic at a glance, holding the table rapt with some expansive conversation. He was the handsomest man in New York, no doubt about it. A man like that would know what to do with her in the park. Jay’s fixation on him, she thought, while sullen and violent with envy, was also, possibly, at root, pure curiosity, a reflection, a desire. He wanted to be the man, or at least someone like him: someone poised, commanding, rapacious. He would never change, but, in his way, he wanted to, as she had always wanted most to be someone better than she was.

  They waited for their meal in silence, in muted unhappiness, the odd ones out in that lively place. They ate quickly, but it took forever. She just kept drinking. She stuffed herself with food and wine, and though she considered opening the door on the way home and throwing herself from the cab, she fell asleep instead, which by then sort of, if not entirely, came to the same thing.

  He went to bed when they got home. She stepped out on the brig. She was too dulled to respond to any breeze now, and she understood that her night had ended several hours earlier, just as she believed it was beginning, when everything she was seeking from the world had been brought out from within her.

  They missed out on a picnic. The park was a bust. And dinner just made them feel dull. When eleven o’clock rolled around, they found themselves standing in line outside the movie theater. The night was practically over by then anyway.

  “You sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You said earlier that you’d rather kill yourself than go to the movies tonight.”

  “Well, that was then.”

  “And what’s now?”

  “Now it doesn’t matter,” she said.

  They went inside and watched the 3-D follow-up to the superhero sequel. It made Jay very happy. Then they went home and went to bed.

  “In the brig!” she called out.

  With her wineglass at a tilt, she peered down again on the neighborhood. Two boys in bike helmets rode their scooters past the stoop where their mothers sat. Someone unseen was sweeping a broom rhythmically across a courtyard. Then the breeze came. It was mellow, carrying off the last of winter, and transformed inside her into a warm chill that ran down her spine to her soul. What a breeze! You didn’t get too many like it. It reminded her that time was ticking down, that life was for the taking, and that if she failed to seize the hour it would be gone forever. She hurried inside to Jay, who was idly flipping through the mail.

  “Hey,” he said, without looking up.

  She set her wineglass down. What did she need wine for? She removed the credit card offer from his hand, and he looked at her at last.

  “Come outside with me, Jay,” she said, taking him by the hand. “There’s a nice breeze out there. I wouldn’t want you to miss it.”

  Ghost Town Choir

  One day Lawton was with us at the picnic and the next day he was outside the trailer with his boom box singing “What Have You Got Planned Tonight, Diana.” That is not a good song. She was trying to ignore him, but he was outside with his foot up on a milk crate, and he was singing. She was doing what she does whenever she’s mad at me—cleaning everything in sight and banging the pots and pans around. Then she stopped at the sink and stuck her middle finger up at Lawton in the window, and the look on her face said it was the end of good times. What have you got planned tonight, Diana? he sang, though my mom’s name is Sheryl. Would you consider lying in my arms? “He doesn’t give a fuck what I have planned,” she said to me. “He just wants his records back.” I didn’t know what was happening, but I was guessing it was all over with Lawton. She was having me collect the dirty dishes. I was finding them everywhere, with stuff on them I couldn’t even remember eating. Old bowls of oatmeal, and spoons covered in peanut butter. “What is this, Bob, a spatula? How many times do I have to tell you? You can’t let these things sit.” “Mom, why are you mad at Lawton?” She opened the window above the sink, and all her figurines fell into the water. “Because I got an expiration date on my stupidity!” she yelled out at him. Then she went to the door and started throwing things. The Ball jars, the butter knives. People were peering out from their windows and doorways, but only for, like, a murder does anyone on Stock Island ever call the police. Lawton was laughing, showing his buckteeth. His mustache moved up and down like a centipede. He was watching the kitchen things whiz by him until the time he turned back and got pinged on the collarbone with an I ♥ Florida mug. He quit singing like that, picked up his boom box and stomped away.

  After that, she put on her big blue plastic gloves and started in on the bathroom. She hadn’t cleaned in about six months, ever since she broke up with the cop. “I’m sick of throwing away men’s combs,” she said, throwing away Lawton’s comb in one of those huge lawn-care trash bags. “I’m beginning to believe a free comb is about all they have to offer.” She also threw away a toothbrush and some hair tonic. When she got to the toilet bowl, she said, “I’ll be happy when it’s just your hairs and my hairs again, Bob. There’s nothing nastier than a man’s hairs.” “I don’t have hairs,” I said. “You have head hairs,” she said. “And I love every single one of them.” She mussed my hair up with the blue gloves on, which was kind of gross. Then she went back to cleaning. “But can you think of a single man worth these hairs?” she asked, turning the sponge over and showing me all the hairs from the toilet on it. “The cop,” I said. “The cop?” she said. “How do you even remember the cop?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Only thing I remember about the cop was that he wasn’t worth a single one of these hairs,” she said. She ran the sponge under the water. “What about Lawton?” I asked. “Oh, Bob,” she said. “You have about the same good taste in men as I do. How could you like Lawton?” “He has good arm veins,” I said. “And he was a cowboy.” She stopped cleaning. “What ever made him a cowboy?” “His card,” I said, “from the Cowboy Hall of Fame. I’ve seen it. He keeps it in his wallet.” “Let me tell you something,” she said. She stopped cleaning and took her gloves off. She got on her knees and took hold of my arms. “There’s three things that man’s done in his life approximating success. He kicked dope, one. He won a paternity suit. And he switched to low-tar. Those are his three achievements. Sure as shit he’s no cowboy.”

  She got off her knees and went into the main room, even though the bathroom still wasn’t but half-clean. She lifted up the sofa cushions and pulled out
three quarters, two fish sticks and a bottle of baby aspirin. She pocketed the quarters. Everything else she put in the trash bag. “I swear to God, Bob,” she said to me. “I don’t know why I pay you an allowance. What is it you do around here—anything?” She shook an enormous tube sock at me. “Can’t you at least put your stuff away?” “That’s not mine,” I said. “I don’t have that big a foot.” She considered the tube sock again before putting it in the bag. She hated that trailer. She hated how small it was. Whenever she got a ball of fire up her butt to clean, she dumped everything into the trash, no matter what. That’s how it was with Lawton’s records. There was a whole milk crate full. “You can’t throw those away,” I said to her. She swiveled around on me so fast. “Why do you stick up for him, huh, Bob? Why stick up for a man who won’t even throw a Frisbee with you at a picnic on account of the schedule of beer he’s trying to keep to?” “Mom, you can’t throw those away,” I said. “They’re his whole life.” She dumped them all in. “Then there’s no better place for them than the trash,” she said.

  When she returned from the dumpsters, she didn’t go back to cleaning. She did something she’s never done before. She put on her tool belt and got down on her knees with about a hundred tools, and soon her sweaty bangs were sticking to her forehead like they do when she’s cleaning. “Mom!” I said. “What are you doing?” “What’s it look like I’m doing?” she asked. “I’m taking up this old floor.” And she was, too. She was tearing it up strip by strip. “But that’s the floor!” I said. “I’m sick of this old floor, Bob,” she said. “Aren’t you? Look at it. It’s all brown.” “So?” She swept the back of her wrist across her forehead to get the sweat off. “Just look around you, Bob. Everything’s so fucking brown. Aren’t you sick of it?” I didn’t know what she meant other than the TV and the lamp shades, and the fridge, and the walls and the carpet. I guess I’d never noticed just how much brown there was all around us. “How come you don’t like brown?” I asked. She pulled really hard with some kind of gripper tool and tore another strip of floor like it was taffy all the way to the carpet. Then she sat back on her knees.