Fast Start, Fast Finish
Stephen Birmingham
FOR BOB GUTWILLIG
1
Edgar Willey was an enormous man with a long, sheeplike face and a hoarse voice. For his party he had encompassed his huge frame in a blue yachting blazer and cerise trousers. He towered over Charlie Lord.
They had just come in from a tour of Edgar Willey’s tulip garden—where Charlie Lord had learned that one astonishingly pink variety was called Mrs. Harrison Williams—and now Edgar Willey had Charlie cornered at one end of the living room and was expounding on his favorite topic: the uniqueness of the Lane. “The most unique thing about the Lane,” Edgar Willey said, “is that all of us on the Lane are good pals. But—and I emphasize the but—we each lead our own individual lives. We get together when we feel like it, like this afternoon, but we don’t get involved with each other. We don’t feel obligated to invite each other to each other’s parties, for instance. The gals don’t drop in on each other for coffee klatches or any other damn thing. And there’s an unwritten rule against borrowing things. I may need a lawn-spreader, but I don’t run over and borrow yours, I go out and buy my own—just did, in fact. We keep a healthy distance from each other. That’s why we all get along. It’s extremely unique.”
Charlie Lord nodded and tried to think of something to say. He and his wife had moved to the Lane exactly a week ago, and he had not met his host before this evening. The Willeys were giving this party to welcome the Lords to the Lane, and so whatever Charlie said he felt should be something intelligent and pleasant. But Edgar Willey had such a flat way of putting things and such an aggressive way of talking—jabbing at the air with his forefinger as he spoke—that, once he had finished a statement, there seemed little else to add. He doesn’t talk, Charlie thought; he recites; he’s a list-maker. I’ll bet he’s a salesman, he thought. Looking at Edgar Willey’s long, ovine face, he was sure he was right. I’ll bet he sells big things. Edgar Willey was still waiting for him to make some kind of comment, and so Charlie nodded again and said, “Good fences make good neighbors. That sort of thing.”
Edgar Willey frowned and tugged at his underlip. “Well, nobody has any fences around here,” he said. “You thinking of putting up some kind of fence? I wouldn’t if I were you. I won’t say there’s a rule against fences, because there is no such rule. But we’ve just none of us ever done it. The lawns all blend in together on the Lane, which is one of the Lane’s very unique features.”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “I see what you mean.”
“Sure you do. We Lane people are proud of our Lane. The only rules we have on the Lane are, one, keep your grass cut, and two, keep your garage doors closed. Avoids that unsightly look. Now, I’ve got automatic electric garage doors, open and close from a button right in the Lincoln—naturally I’ve also got a button in the Merc. Fellow in White Plains put ’em in for me. I’ll give you his number in case you want to put some in yourself.”
“Why, thanks,” Charlie said. He had been trying to find his wife, but the little group seemed to have scattered around the house, she was nowhere in sight, and he was trapped with Edgar Willey. “I wonder where Nancy went?” he murmured. I can’t stand this man, Charlie thought, and grinned at him.
“By the way,” Edgar Willey said, “I’m vice-president of the Cellex Corporation; we manufacture paper for photocopy process. What do you do? If it’s none of my business, just say so.”
“I paint,” Charlie Lord said.
“You paint for a living?”
“Well, I try to,” Charlie said easily.
“Well, well. All I can say is, you must be pretty successful if you can afford to live on this Lane. No starving artists here—ha-ha. Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of you, though I probably should have.”
“No reason why you should have,” Charlie said pleasantly. “No reason at all.”
“You famous?” Edgar Willey asked.
“A few prizes,” Charlie said. “One-man show coming up in the fall of some of my new things.”
“Don’t hold it against me, your name didn’t ring a bell,” Edgar Willey said. “Afraid I’m not the arty type, though I do have a nice collection of courier knives in the game room downstairs.”
“Oh?” Charlie said. “What are courier knives?”
“Courier knives? You mean to say you’ve never heard of courier knives? Well, maybe you modern artists wouldn’t think much of them, but they’re pretty much classics. You never heard of ‘Ruins of the Merchants’ Exchange,’ or ‘Christmas at the Home Place’? Come on down, I’ll show ’em to you.”
“Oh, Currier and Ives,” Charlie said. “Excuse me. I thought you said …”
From across the room another of Charlie’s new neighbors called, “Hey, Edgar—have you told him about the liquor pool yet?”
Charlie, on the tulip tour, had been invited to admire an oval reflecting pool in the center of the garden, and he had a brief vision now of this receptacle filled with martinis.
Leaning close to Charlie’s ear, Edgar Willey said in a loud whisper, “Let me ask you a question. What did you end up paying for the Peterson house? If it’s none of my business, just say so.”
Here was the moment, Charlie thought, to snap back, “None of your business!” and walk away. Whenever he thought of doing things like that he thought of his twin sister, Cathy. He remembered all the charming, funny little stunts they used to play on people when they were young. He and Cathy had been a bit of a legend, in school and college, for those stunts they invented, the tricks they played, the acts they put on, their famous imitations (Dr. Christian and his nurse, Judy). They had been a team, Lord & Lord. Their pranks never hurt anyone. Their acts were designed only to startle people a bit—with the too-candid reply, the unorthodox question, the unexpected reaction. Cathy was celebrated for one trick in particular: She would listen earnestly while someone told her a funny story; then, at the punch line, she would burst into wild tears. He wondered what Cathy would have made of the Lane and of Edgar Willey. If she were here now she would probably look straight at him with her enormously innocent blue eyes and say, “Oh, but Mr. Peterson gave the house to me. You see, I’m carrying his unborn child.” Charlie Lord smiled at Edgar Willey and said, “I paid fifty-three-five for the house. Sold a few of my string of polo ponies.”
Edgar Willey frowned again and said, “I knew Peterson was asking sixty, but I figured it wouldn’t be hard to Jew him down. You’ve got a good house there. Needs gutter work, but it’s a good house. Now, there’s another unique thing about this Lane …”
Charlie’s eyes wandered about the room; there was still no sign of Nancy. It was queer, remembering Cathy, to realize that they had been brought up on a suburban street much like this one, in a house not too different from Edgar Willey’s house. Theirs had not been quite so prosperous a neighborhood as this one, perhaps, and the houses hadn’t been quite so large. But there were similarities, echoes, that made it possible to transpose one house with another, the present with the past: the flowered curtains, the neatly papered walls, the bull’s-eye mirror, the grandfather clock in the front hall, the “genuine oil painting” over the mantel, the carpeted stairs with the “sculpture niche” at the landing, the guest towels in the bathroom that no one used. He and Cathy had always sworn that once they were able to leave it they would never go back to suburbia (or, as Cathy used to call it, “Siberia-ba”). And yet here he, at least, was again, back as though nothing had happened, as though no long-ago promises had been made.
Before leaving California he and Nancy had talked of the move east as a giant step forward for them both. “At last!” they kept saying. “At last!” Taking huge steps through the rooms o
f their Encino house. Somehow he had envisioned the East as, at last, the city—the metropolis, the anonymity of apartment living where you never really had neighbors. But, of course, there was that rule, as Nancy reminded him, that said you couldn’t bring up children in the city, and so here they were. Now it seemed more like a step backward. Or a step in place. Had he ever really left the suburbs? Or was this the sort of place where he had always belonged—was that it? Was that what all the years between had been trying to prove, that he would never leave these ordered interiors, these wallpapered rooms? If so, it was a long way to travel to get back where you began. He shook his head and told himself he was being morbid. He was on his second drink, and they seemed to be affecting him more than usual; his head was full of cobwebs. “I’m sorry,” he said to Edgar Willey. “I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I said, how old are you?”
“Thirty-eight,” Charlie said. “Wait a minute—am I thirty-eight?” He laughed hollowly. “Hell, no—I’m thirty-nine. Thirty-nine.”
“See what I mean? That’s another unique thing. We’re all about the same age on the Lane, as well as in the same economic bracket! I’m forty-six. What’s more, most of us still have pretty young children. That keeps us young. But the main thing is, on the Lane we all think young.”
“Yes,” Charlie said. And he thought, My God, I am thirty-nine years old, almost forty. Cathy has been dead for fifteen years.
“I admit I’m not in as good shape as you are, though,” Edgar Willey said. “Wish I could lead the artist’s life, but with me it’s behind the old desk all day long. That’s where this comes from.” He patted his paunch. “That,” he said, lifting his glass, “and from these little mothers. How about letting me wet you down with another dry martini, Lord?” For the first time, Charlie saw Edgar Willey smile.
“Oh, hi there!” A large florid woman, all in yellow, swept into the room. “Edgar, I’m sorry to be late but I was in the tub.” She rushed to Charlie Lord (with this non sequitur), beamed up at him with a wide pink face, and seized his hand with hers, which was hard with rings. “Hi there!” she said, tilting her chin. “I’m Alice Mayhew, the brick house with the white shutters. Welcome to the Lane!”
The Lane was having one of its parties, and now that the Mayhews had arrived, all the Lane people were there. It was a Sunday afternoon, the best time for parties on the Lane, and it was spring, the Lane’s best season. In the frozen winter, the Lane houses—five houses, attractively distributed, as everyone pointed out, on eleven acres of Westchester County hillside—wore a frozen look. Large two-and-a-half-story Colonials, they were imposing in winter, yes, but also, beyond their hard brown lawns, at the end of their manicured walks, somehow implacable and stern. But spring softened and colored everything, and the Lane became not only proud but graceful and queenly.
Outside the windows of the Willeys’ house azaleas were coming into flaming bloom and forsythia shot up in yellow fountains of blossoms. It was an afternoon for women to pin yellow daffodils to their blouses and to put on pearls. It was an afternoon for neighborhood dogs to resume old friendships and to run hectically from tree to tree, across newly green grass, leaping and yelping and scuffling, pursuing squirrels without hope but without cease. And it was an afternoon for making wishes. Just an hour ago, coming on her alone in their own living room, which was still barren, scattered with painters’ dropcloths and plasterers’ ladders, Charles Lord had caught his wife, Nancy, making a wish. She stood with the fingertips of one hand pressed against the center of her forehead, her other hand touching the door frame. He heard her whisper, “Touch wood.” “What are you wishing?” he asked her. She laughed. “Can’t tell. If I do, it will spoil the wish. How do I look?”
“You look beautiful,” he said. “How do I look?”
“You look beautiful too. Isn’t it lucky we’re both beautiful? Do you think they’ll like us?”
“People usually do.”
“Do they?”
Leaving the front door open to let in the sweet spring air and to carry out the smell of paint, they had started across the Lane to the Willeys’ party. “Willey, Jane and Edgar,” she had reminded him. “Phelps, Vaughan and Vera. McCarthy, Bob and Genny. Mayhew, Sam and Alice.”
“Such substantial names!” he said.
On Roaring Brook Lane (“It means we all have water in our cellars,” was the rather lame but pertinent joke among Lane residents) there were two unofficial hostesses for Lane parties—Jane Willey and Genevieve McCarthy. No one knew quite how this situation had come to be, but it was certainly true that the other Lane wives entertained only rarely. The Willey parties and the McCarthy parties were alike in that they were almost always given to celebrate something. The occasion might be the Fourth of July, or Labor Day, or (since Jane Willey and Alice Mayhew had discovered to their astonishment and delight that they had married their husbands on the same date) a joint wedding anniversary. Today’s party, of course, was to welcome the first newcomers to the little winding, tree-shaded street with the discreet sign, “Private Road, No Outlet” in Old English letters on a rustic cedar shingle at the head of it, the street that everyone who knew it called simply “the Lane.”
There were certain differences, though, between Jane Willey’s parties and Genny McCarthy’s. Jane Willey was proud of her reputation as a hostess, and also she liked to do things rather fancily—with monogrammed linen cocktail napkins and candles lighted in silver candlesticks, cigarettes (both filtered and unfiltered) in little Steuben cups on all the tables, and a monogrammed matchfolder in the center of each polished-silver ashtray. In fact, Jane Willey monogrammed everything; her towels, her table linen, her sheets and her pillowcases, her hankies and her blouses and the linings of her coats, and of course her letter paper were all graced with her “J.W.,” the left arm of the “W” draped artfully through the loop of the “J.” (Unfortunately, her maiden name had been Jane Elizabeth Eastland, which meant that she was doomed to a two-letter monogram; “J.E.W.” certainly did not look right, and “J.E.E.W.” was not much better.) Jane Willey was renowned for her innovations. She was the first woman any of her friends had heard of to take all her silver dinnerware to Tiffany’s and have it vermeiled. Once, after a Lane dinner party, she had served crème de cacao in tiny cordial glasses made of Swiss chocolate; the guests were instructed to eat the glasses after drinking the liqueur, while everyone begged Jane to tell them where in the world she had found such darling things. But like her mother, Jane would never reveal her sources (McCall’s mostly) to anyone.
Genny McCarthy’s parties, on the other hand, were, as she put it, “less promptu.” Guests were told to wear whatever old thing they had on, it didn’t matter. She hated to cook, and when Genny McCarthy had the Lane for dinner, she usually asked each of the “gals” to bring something—Vera Phelps would bring a Waldorf salad, Alice Mayhew would bring a casserole of her boeuf Bourguignon, and so on. Genny McCarthy always ran around at the last minute passing out paper napkins, if she had remembered to buy any, and though boeuf Bourguignon did not do well on paper plates, those were what she invariably served. It was a shame—she had that lovely big house that someone like Jane Willey, who had imagination, could do so much with—but Genny’s house was always a mess. She loved dogs, and had four lively Labradors, which said it all about her housekeeping, and the other women on the Lane felt sorry for Bob McCarthy, who, one would think, might occasionally want to entertain important clients in his home (he was a lawyer downtown).
Some people said that the reason Genny McCarthy was such a slob was because she knew she could always get away with it; she was a member of an old New York family, well founded in the Social Register. Always, when she gave her parties, she told everybody to bring their children—even little children, who ran around getting into the food and spilling things. Genny didn’t mind. But Jane Willey, who had a white carpet and silk-covered French-reproduction furniture, never included children in her invitations. “I think this should
definitely be a grown-ups’ party,” Jane Willey had said to Genny McCarthy when the two women had first put their heads together to discuss “doing something” about the newly moved in Lords. “It’s so hard to get to know people with children all over the place,” Jane said, “—not that I don’t love parties with children.”
“I agree,” said Genny McCarthy, which settled it; the party would be at the Willeys’ house. “I hear he’s an artist,” Genny said. “We’ve never had an artist on the Lane before. Gadzooks!”
“I was reading somewhere the other day,” Jane said, “that when an artist is a painter you always refer to him as a painter—not as an artist.”
“Is that so?” Genny said. “Not an artist? I’ll be damned. Has he got a beard or some damn thing?”
“I’ve only seen him from a distance. Quite nice-looking, very normal-looking, really. Late thirties, I’d say. She’s a pretty little thing, and seems attractive.” She paused, pencil in hand (whenever Jane Willey planned anything she made notes on a pad of paper, and today’s memorandum was headed “Lord Party, May 3, cocktails”). “I’m thinking it should be just for cocktails,” she said, “not dinner; I was reading somewhere that you should never invite new acquaintances to dinner. It rushes the friendship. We don’t know these people at all. They could turn out to be quite unattractive.”
“Cocktails are a good test of people,” Genny said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Cocktails can bring out the worst side of a person. If they have a worst side. I’m thinking of my frisky little old husband.”
“Mm,” Jane Willey said politely. They were sitting in Genny McCarthy’s living room, which was strewn with last Sunday’s newspapers. “Genny,” Jane said, “what is that terrible racket from upstairs?”
“My bitch is in heat; I’ve got her locked in the guest room. Naturally the boys are trying to get at her. Quiet!” she roared.
“I suppose we’ve got to go,” Charlie Lord said when Nancy showed him Jane Willey’s invitation.
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