* * *
—
“YOU WERE A good what?” asked Leah Cohen.
Nathan Morrill leaned toward Leah with his whole body because it no longer bent in parts. “A chef,” he said. “Not half-bad. Amazing, actually. Now I have these,” he said, looking down at his hands. He lifted his left hand and put it on Leah’s arm. It felt like a skillet, a kettle full of water.
“Tell me a dish.”
“Since we are eating this asparagus, I will tell you an hors d’oeuvre, a finger food, which needs to be made carefully.” He looked down at his own fingers and tried to splay them. “Consider a large basil leaf, of the immense variety whose name I forget; now consider a small rectangle of fontina cheese on it, and on top of that a similar rectangle of Bosc pear. Finally you wrap the basil leaf around pear and cheese and, using a thread you have pulled from a cooked leek, you tie it all up into a neat little package.”
“Leek? Why not use chives to tie your packet?”
“Chives are never as strong as they look.”
* * *
—
AS SHE MADE the rounds of the table with her bottles of wine, Sara knew it was silly to keep trying to see the dinner table itself as a scorpion, with all of its articulations and repeated segments, all those appendages hidden under the tablecloth. The image didn’t really work. For one thing, there were too many legs underneath. Forty-six, not counting Shamhat the cat—if that was who had been rubbing her foot. Perhaps Philippa Barlow at one end of the table was really the stinger, though she did not seem all that powerful or poisonous. Then the children at the other end would be the claws, the pedipalps, clawing their way into the future. But the children’s end of the table wasn’t even symmetric, with the empty place her mother had set for some forgotten latecomer or prophet. It didn’t work, her scorpion image, but she couldn’t entirely get it out of her head. The enlivened dinner table must have a better analogue in the world of jointy-legged animals. Perhaps the silkworm, then, for it did after all spin things: conversations, narratives, connections, entanglements.
Sara sat down again beside Dennis. She made herself sit straight and tall as though nothing terrible had happened. She exhaled. “How should we do it? Do you think we should have one last dinner, one last evening together? Or should this party be the last one?”
“One last dinner? With your family, you mean?”
“No no.” Why on earth would they want her beloved family? “Just you and me.”
“But, love, you and I should have very many dinners, an infinity of evenings.”
“Won’t that make it too hard?” She looked away from him, sadder than she could imagine. How had she thought she would know how to break up with this man? Where would she direct each new thought? Who would hold the other end of each strand? She could practically hear the sizzle and hiss as things fell into the void.
* * *
—
“LIZ,” HARRY WHISPERED to his twin. “Don’t worry. I can marry you two right here, under full cover of company. The whole ceremony, right now, in no time at all. If we keep our voices soft and our gestures toward the food. Are you ready?” He drank some wine and motioned to Eliza and Adam to do the same. “Weddings are very old,” he began in a conversational voice. “We were doing them before we swung down out of the trees and figured out how to stand upright. Rituals of fertility, planting, seasons, property, and clan alliances—all of these have ended up in a ceremony that is so old there may never have been a time when the participants actually understood the words. Each civilization also weaves in its own strands of current meaning. Harry poured a little of his wine on the ground, then said, “Adam, a poem?”
Adam lifted his wineglass to Eliza, and began reciting softly, one of his poems. But soon he forgot to whisper and the whole table grew quiet. Even the children looked up, startled.
Listening to her son, Celia wondered where his poetry came from. He was not the howling sort. Part of his wildness came from his delight in words, their music, the sparks as they collided. But it seemed to come also from some further place, down where presence was laced with loss, and beauty danced with grief. She often wondered if she and Pindar were less deep than their three offspring. She at any rate. These were among the things she could not ask. She felt a lack. An envy.
Across the table from Adam, old Leah Cohen caught her grandson’s eye and lifted her glass to him. She hoped he would tell his poems all night.
* * *
—
WATCHING ADAM, STEPHEN Barlow felt pity for Celia. Clearly, Barlow felt, the boy had some sort of disability that took the form of his not being able to see and express things in clear. He would never make it in the real world. As the young man recited, the disjunction of poets and golf presented itself to Stephen Barlow: Why was it that poets were not found on the links? Was it simple physical ineptitude? Did their legs wobble? Were their backs askew? Or did they not need golf? Could they be beyond it?
* * *
—
“WATER?” NAOMI ASKED Cameron. “Are you as parched as I am?” She and Cameron gazed at each other and neither of them could seem to let go.
Cameron burned in response to Naomi. He was as parched as she was. As they sat across the table from each other, whenever the space between them was violated by the passing of a dish, a word, a glance from one of the others, they each gave an almost imperceptible frown.
Pindar looked over at his daughter: Naomi was keyed up tonight, inflamed. He didn’t know if he had to save her. Or even if he could. Naomi was usually attracted to sinkholes of danger, the ones with only a dark hollow at the core, but this young Barlow looked smart and kind and benign. Of course! He was married. That was the danger here.
* * *
—
PINDAR WAS USED to working with gaps. The ancient clay tablets inscribed with his Babylonian recipes were almost always broken, even when they had been kiln-fired. He was used to ambiguities and loved fitting them together. The most famous texts from ancient Mesopotamia had the great blessing of redundancy: Apprentice scribes were given the task of copying all the important works as a way to learn their craft, so there were multiple copies of the epic of Gilgamesh, for example. Naturally these copies were also broken, but in random places, so that a coherent text could often be cobbled together. Then, too, the ancient poems were full of repeats and refrains, making it easy to guess at what was missing. The old recipes that Pindar studied, however, had not been used for copy practice, and recipes have no refrains. They were singular and rare. What was missing was lost.
His old thought-demons approached now, trying to lure him away with reason. This was not rational, they said, to picture crucial things like time in terms of honey-soaked Middle Eastern pastries. It was foolish to seek illumination in the middle of a dinner party. He was supposed to get his son, Adam, married. Be reasonable, his demons said. Work for communal blessing, and put off this selfish and dicey search until the guests are gone, your desk is clean, your mind uncluttered, and your memory clear.
But what if he should die? That was the flaming weapon he shook at the demons he called Holding Back and Sloth. They always came in pairs or quartets, his demons. He could almost see them: They had multiple wings and bore the heads of men and oxen, eagles and lions. They told him he should not expect to figure anything out during a party. Revelation, he replied, was never an act of reason. At this they bowed, slightly, all four of them, linked at the tips of their wings, then twisting like smoke they backed away.
So Pindar would do it now. He would slip seconds made of lapis lazuli among the beaten golden sheets of time. He would do it while sitting next to Philippa Barlow, listening to her talk about refrigerators, about Ping-Pong and tennis, and if he got anywhere, if he untangled any of the knots, then he would always link his findings with Philippa, simply because she had been at his side when he did this, due to the
conjugal patterns of this gathering, and by being there, then, she would achieve and deserve a place in his mind, a bit horrible but necessary, and he would have to feel for her a sort of love.
* * *
—
HARRY TURNED TO Adam. “Do you want some asparagus?” he said. And privately, “And are you willing? Seriously and now?”
“I am,” said Adam.
“Liz?”
“Yes, please pass it. I am willing, seriously and now, and even if we get interrupted.”
As she listened to Harry and the bridal pair, Leah turned to Nathan Morrill. “Are you still a serious cook?” she said.
“Not really,” Nat Morrill said, yawning and putting a heavy hand to his mouth. “Sorry. About these yawns, I mean. They are not in my control. As for cooking: I can barely manage. My daughter Philippa threatens me with one of those microwave ovens. I tell her that if she gives me one I shall put my head in it. I have a Polish friend in Paris who eats only raw things. I would rather do that than use a microwave, which is not cooking as we know it, but something else: I think it simply bothers the molecules of things until they give up and become soft. I, for one, refuse to do it.” His head lowered to his chest.
“Heads up, Leah,” whispered Adam. “Stop flirting and uphold what we are doing.”
“I am not flirting. My head is erect, although my elderly dinner partner is taking his pre-post-prandial snooze. So I am watching you and drinking to you, in the name of all that is holy and much that is not.”
* * *
—
NATHAN MORRILL WAS dozing. He had dozed off in the middle of saying something to Leah; his head had simply slipped down until his jaw rested on his chest, his slack mouth softly hissing. Pindar, watching him, felt waves of tiredness in his own back. He reached for the wine and poured more for Philippa on one side, and for Issa Barlow on the other, then finally for himself.
* * *
—
“WHAT? DID YOU speak?” Startled, shattered, Cameron couldn’t tell if Naomi was making an offer or a command.
“Water?” Naomi repeated. “I was feeling a bit…and just wondering if you wanted—”
“I,” he said. Then, “You are very kind to ask.”
She poured his water. “More asparagus?”
“Please.” He let her serve him and then he passed the platter to his brother Babar’s wife, Issa, on his left. Turning back to Naomi he said, “Exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form.”
“What?” Naomi said.
“Proust,” Cam replied. “He says they have an iridescence that is not of this world.” He blushed. This was not the kind of conversation he would dare attempt among Barlows.
“I’m lost. Who has?”
“Asparagus. Stalks of asparagus.”
“Oh,” Naomi said. “I didn’t know he wrote about such things. But I’m the only one of my family who has never read him.”
“That’s fine,” Cam said. “I’m the only one in my family who has.”
“These don’t look so iridescent.” She dangled a spear on the end of her fork. “Does he mean purple ones? White?”
* * *
—
DOWN AT THE other end of the table, seven-year-old Liam said, “I don’t like this stuff.” He poked at the green stalks on his plate. “Let’s go find fish.”
“Where?” asked Emily, leaning her elbows on the table. She was eight and ready for anything.
“In the pond.”
Three-year-old Eli looked up from the green things he had been mashing on his plate. He grunted a happy assent.
“Well, we’ll have to be careful,” said Laurie, who was ten. “I happen to know for a fact that half of the frogs in that pond are poisonous. Besides, they’ll never let us leave this table.”
“We could do it silently,” said Harriet, the other ten-year-old. “We won’t tell them. If we just dribble away, one by one, they’ll never notice we’ve gone.”
* * *
—
“WELL THEN,” HARRY said quietly. His cheeks reddened. If he could only get it right this time. He had performed six other marriages, four of which dissolved within months. Harry had taken these failures personally and thought that perhaps they had been caused by his own imperfect knowledge. There was some wording of the spells that would bind his sister to Adam and not let them come undone. One of his past grooms had telephoned him every night for three months, howling his rage at his ex-love, as though Harry had been to blame. And of course Harry felt at fault. He grieved for his friends but also for his own obvious incompetence. Two of his couples had asked for annulments. He didn’t do annulments. Go back to your Catholics, he told them. One of his friends had challenged him to find a good unbinding ritual to serve instead of an annulment. What you can do, the friend insisted, you must learn to undo. But Harry hadn’t found such a ceremony yet. It would have to be vehement and terrifying, and bring, in the end, something close to serenity, some sort of forgiveness for mistaken love. Exorcism of a failed marriage was still beyond his powers.
“Hal,” Eliza whispered. She knew that her twin’s long silences sometimes had to be interrupted. “Come back to us. You were saying?”
“Sorry,” Harry said. “Adam: going back to our earlier conversation. People are really difficult to take care of. Worse than pets. Harder than poems. Take this woman, for example.” He gestured to his twin.
“Oh yes. I take you, Eliza,” said Adam.
Naomi looked over at her brother. She caught Adam’s eye. I see that you are up to something, though I don’t know what it is. I have no attention to spare; I cannot detach myself yet from Cameron, who sits across from me and whom I have just met and fallen into. She kissed the rim of her wineglass, and blew across it to Adam and then to Eliza. Then she gave back to Cameron, older brother of the bride, her jealous gaze.
* * *
—
OF COURSE, THERE was a further problem, and Pindar couldn’t tell if this was his reason speaking, or his demons, for sometimes they mirrored each other. How could he decipher time when he was so embedded in it? Seeing anything deeply involves a stepping back. To be a philosopher of food, one could not be in the throes of eating. To work on the aesthetics of sex, one could not be in flagrante. In looking at art, one could not be in the midst of painting it. In psychotherapy, one tried to stop feeling a bit, or to step back and gaze at the self while it was feeling, in order to comb for patterns, interruptions, dislocations. One had to draw oneself in a little, in order to get a broader view—and yet the passions might be, must be, still hot. This art of stepping back, when one yearned so to be right in the midst, this took some learning.
* * *
—
AMY LOOKED UP and down the table. At least the kids were behaving. Her daughter, Emily, was doing something with some sort of insect, offering it water from a spoon. Liam was cutting his asparagus, though Amy knew he had no intention of eating it. But Cam! He was practically falling into the younger Cohen girl’s plate. Naomi, that was her name. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four. What was he thinking? Cam was a dear, and particularly wonderful when compared with his brothers, Harry-the-mystic, Babar-the-silent with his not entirely faithful Issa, and William-the-entitled with his poor sad Olivia.
Amy had recently started taking Olivia to lunch to try to cheer her up. Sometimes she got Issa to join them, but Issa diverted all conversations to herself and how attractive she found Japanese men. Finally one day when Amy and Olivia were alone, Olivia had asked her, “Is it better to be married to someone who is only half with you, or is it better to not be married at all and to raise your kids alone?”
“Do you mean, because he’s only home half the time? Or because of his involvement with war crimes?”
“Ah. War crimes. Nothing at home can ever be as c
rucially important as war crimes. I do understand that. But I meant, someone whose heart is only half with me,” Olivia said. “He has a Parisian someone.”
Amy was proud of herself for realizing that she had no idea how to answer. She finally said, “Are you lonely when he’s home with you? Or are you just lonely when he’s gone?”
“I don’t know,” Olivia said, crumpling.
During those lunches Amy had always felt so secure with her Cam. She thought of herself and Cam as the peaceful ones in the family, and she knew that that was how the elder Barlows thought of them. But perhaps being the happiest couple was a position of danger, from which one could be toppled at any moment. Look at him over there. He must be talking about books, Proust probably—his cheeks were so red. Perhaps Olivia and Issa would soon be taking her to lunch, but she didn’t think so. She and Cam enjoyed each other so much, even though they’d been together for a decade. Just being with each other made the darkest nights pass and each glorious dawn arrive.
* * *
—
“SORRY,” SAID NAT Morrill, flailing. His wineglass rocked; he caught it. “Snoozing is so impolite. I cannot control it. I get clobbered with fatigue at the oddest times. I do not know if it comes from the Lyme disease or if it is some private failure of the will. Which is what I suspect. Where were we?”
“You were telling me of your friend who eats all things without cooking.”
The Garden Party Page 11