by John Barth
Yeah, well, her husband supposed so. Sure.
That less-than-eager agreement earned him one of Sue's see-me-being-patient? looks: eyes raised ceilingward, tongue checked between right-side molars. Susan Felton was a half-dozen years younger than Richard—not enough to matter much in her late sixties and his mid-seventies, after forty-some years of marriage—but except for work he inclined to be the more passive partner, content to follow his wife's lead in most matters. Over the past year or two, though, as he'd approached and then attained the three-quarter-century mark, he had by his own acknowledgment become rather stick-in-the-muddish, not so much depressed by the prospect of their imminent old age as subdued by it, dezested, his get up and go all but gotten up and gone, as he had observed to be the case with others at his age and stage (though by no means all) among their limited social acquaintance.
In sum (he readily granted whenever he and Sue spoke of this subject, as lately they'd found themselves doing more often than formerly), the chap had yet to come to terms with his fast-running mortal span: the inevitable downsizing from the house and grounds and motorboat and cars that they'd taken years of pleasure in; the physical and mental deterioration that lay ahead for them; the burden of caregiving through their decline; the unimaginable loss of life-partner ... The prospect of his merely ceasing to exist, he would want it understood, did not in itself much trouble him. He and Sue had enjoyed a good life indeed, all in all. If their family was less close than some that they knew and envied, neither was it dysfunctional: Cordially Affectionate is how they would describe the prevailing tone of their relations with their grown-up kids and growing-up grandkids; they could wish it better, but were gratified that it wasn't worse, like some others they knew. No catastrophes in their life story thus far: Dick had required bypass surgery in his mid-sixties, and Sue an ovari-ectomy and left-breast lumpectomy in her mid-menopause. Both had had cataracts removed, and Dick had some macular degeneration—luckily of the less aggressive, "dry" variety—and mild hearing loss in his left ear, as well as being constitutionally over weight despite periodic attempts at dieting. Other than those, no serious problems in any life department, and a quite satisfying curriculum vita for each of them. More and more often recently, Richard Felton found himself wishing that somewhere down the road they could just push a button and make themselves and their abundant possessions simply disappear—poof!—the latter transformed into equitably distributed checks in the mail to their heirs, with love ...
These cheerless reflections had been center-staged lately by the business that he readdressed at his desk after breakfast: the periodic review of his and Susan's Last Will and Testament. Following his routine midyear update of their computer-spreadsheet Estate Statement, and another, linked to it, that Susan had designed for estimating the distribution of those assets under the current provisions of their wills, it was Dick's biennial autumn custom, in even-numbered years, to review these benefactions, then to call to Sue's attention any that struck him as having become perhaps larger or smaller than they ought to be and to suggest appropriate percentage adjustments, as well as the addition or deletion of beneficiaries in the light of changed circumstances or priorities since the previous go-round: Susan's dear old all-girls prep school, e.g., had lately closed it's doors for keeps, so there went Article D of Item Fifth in her will, which bequeathed to it three percent of her Net Residual Estate after funeral costs, executors' fees, estate taxes, and other expenses. Should she perhaps reassign that bequest to the Avon County Public Library, of which she and Dick made frequent use? Estate lawyers' fees being what they were, they tried to limit such emendations to codicil size, if possible, instead of will-redrafting size. But whatever the satisfaction of keeping their affairs in order, it was not a cheery chore (in odd-numbered-year autumns, to spread out the morbidity, they reviewed and updated their separate Letters to Their Executors). The deaths in the year just past of Sam Bailey's so-lively wife, Ethel (cervical cancer), and of their own daughter Katie's father-in-law out in Colorado (aneurysm)—a fellow not even Dick's age, the administration of whose comparatively sim ple estate had nevertheless been an extended headache for Katie's husband—contributed to the poignancy of the current year's review. Apart from the dreadful prospect of personal bereavement (poor old Sam!), he had looked in vain for ways to minimize further the postmortem burden on their grown-up daughter and son, whom they most certainly loved, but to whom alas in recent years they'd grown less than ideally close both personally and geographically. Dick couldn't imagine, frankly, how he would survive without his beloved and indispensable Susan: less well than Sam Bailey without Ethel, for sure, whose lawyer son and CPA daughter-in-law lived and worked in Stratford, attentively monitored the old fellow's situation and condition, and frequently included him in family activities.
For her part, Susan often declared that the day Dick died would be the last of her own life as well, although by what means she'd end it, she hadn't yet worked out. Dick Junior and Katie and their spouses would just have to put their own lives on hold, fly in from Chicago and Seattle, and pick up the pieces. Let them hate her for it if they chose to; she wouldn't be around to know it, and they'd be getting a tidy sum for their trouble. "So," she proposed perkily when the couple reconvened at morning's end to make lunch and plan their afternoon. "Let's eat, drink, and be merry at the Hardisons' on X-X-I-V Septembris, since tomorrow et cetera?"
"Easy enough to say," her grave-spirited spouse replied. "But whenever I hear it said, I wonder how anybody could have an appetite for their Last Supper." On the other hand, he acknowledged, here they were, as yet not dead, disabled, or devastated, like the city of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina just a week or so since: No reason why they shouldn't go to the party, he supposed—if they could figure out what to wear.
Over sandwiches and diet iced tea on their waterside screened porch, facing the narrow tidal creek of Rockfish Reach agleam in end-of-summer sunshine, "No problem," Sue reported. She'd been on the Web, where a Google search of "toga party" turned up no fewer than 266,000 entries; the first three or four were enough to convince her that anything they improvised would suffice. It was, as she'd suspected, an old fraternity-house thing, made popular among now-middle-aged baby boomers by John Belushi's 1978 film Animal House. One could make or buy online "Roman" costumes as elaborate as any in such movies as Ben-Hur and Gladiator, or simply go the bed-sheet-and-sandals route that she mentioned before. Leave it to her; she'd come up with something. Meanwhile, could they be a little less gloom-and-doomy, for pity's sake, and count their blessings?
Her husband thanked her wholeheartedly for taking charge of the matter, and promised her and himself to try to brighten up a bit and make the most of whatever quality time remained to them.
Which amounted (he then honored his promise by not going on to say), with luck, to maybe a dozen years. No computer-adept like his wife, Dick nonetheless had his own desktop machine in his study, on which, between his more serious morning desk chores, it had occurred to him to do a little Web search himself. "Life expectancy," entered and clicked, had turned up nearly fourteen million entries (more than a lifetime's worth of reading, he'd bet), among the first half-dozen of which was a questionnaire-calculator—age, ethnicity, personal and family medical histories, etc.—that, once he'd completed it, predicted his "median quartile" age at death to be 89.02 years. In (very!) short, fourteen to go, barring accident, although of course it could turn out to be more or fewer.
Only a dozen or so Septembers left. How assimilate it? On the one hand, the period between birth and age fourteen had seemed to him of epochal extent, and that between fourteen and twenty-eight scarcely less so: nonexistence to adolescence! Adolescence to maturity, marriage, and parenthood! But his thirties, forties, and fifties had passed more swiftly decade by decade, no doubt because his adult life-changes were fewer and more gradual than those of his youth. And his early sixties—when he'd begun the gradual reduction of his office workload and the leisurely search for
a weekend retreat somewhere on Maryland's Eastern Shore that could be upgraded to a year-round residence at his and Sue's retirement—seemed the day before yesterday instead of twelve-plus years ago.
So: Maybe fourteen years left—and who knew how many of those would be healthy and active? Eat, drink, and be merry, indeed! About what?
Well, for starters, about not being a wiped-out refugee from the storm-blasted Gulf Coast, obviously, or a starving, gang-raped young African mother in Darfur. "God's only excuse is that He doesn't exist," Sam Bailey liked to quote some famous person as having said (Oscar Wilde? Bertrand Russell? Don't ask Dick Felton, who anyhow regarded it as a pretty lame excuse). But here they were, he and his long-beloved, on a warm and gorgeous mid-September afternoon in an attractive and well-maintained neighborhood on a branch of a creek of a river of a bay luckily untouched (so far) by that year's busier-than-ever Atlantic hurricane season; their lawn and garden and crape myrtles flourishing; their outboard runabout, like themselves, good for a few more spins before haul-out time; their immediately pending decisions nothing more mattersome than whether to run a few errands in Stratford or do some outdoor chores on the property before Sue's golf and Dick's tennis dates scheduled for later in the day.
So they would go to the goddamn party, as Dick scolded himself for terming it out of Susan's hearing. Some hours later, at a break in whacking the yellow Wilson tennis balls back to Sam Bailey on the Heron Bay Club's courts (since Ethel's death, Sam had lost interest in playing for points, but he still enjoyed a vigorous hour's worth of back-and-forthing a couple of times a week, which had come to suit Dick just fine), he mentioned the upcoming event: that it would be his and Sue's first toga party, and that they'd be going more to have a look at their new neighbors' Loblolly Court mansion and get to know it's owners than out of any interest in funny-costume parties. To his mild surprise, he learned that Sam—although an Oyster Cover rather than a Rockfish Reacher—would be there too, and was in fact looking forward to "XXIV Septembris." As a longtime board member of the Club, Sam had met Tom and Patsy Hardison when they'd applied for membership, even before commencing their house construction. And while he himself at age eighty could do without the faux-Roman high jinks, his Ethel had relished such foolery and would have loved nothing more than another toga party, if the goddamn nonexistent Almighty hadn't gifted her with goddamn cancer.
They resumed their volleying, until Sam's right arm and shoulder had had enough and the area behind Dick's breastbone began to feel the mild soreness-after-exertion that he hadn't yet mentioned either to Susan or to their doctor, although he'd been noticing it for some months. He had shared with both his life partner and his tennis partner his opinion that an ideal way to "go" would be by a sudden massive coronary on the tennis court upon his returning one of Sam's tricky backhand slices with a wham-o forehand topspin. "Don't you dare die first!" his wife had warned him. All Sam had said was "Make sure we get a half-hour's tennis in before you kick."
"So tell me about toga parties," Dick asked him as they packed up their racquets and balls, latched the chain-link entrance gate behind themselves, and swigged water from the drinking fountain beside the tennis court restrooms. "What kind of high jinks should we expect?"
The usual, Sam supposed: like calling out something in Latin when you first step into the room ...
"Latin? I don't know any damn Latin!"
"Sure you do: Ave Maria? Tempus fugit? After that, and some joking around about all the crazy getups, it's just a friendly cocktail-dinner party for the next couple hours, till they wind it up with some kinky contest-games with fun prizes. Susan will enjoy it; maybe even you will. Veni, vidi, vici!"
"Excuse me?"
"You're excused. But go, for Christ's sake. Or Jove's sake, who ever's." Thumbing his shrunken chest, "I'm going, goddamn it, even though the twenty-fourth is the first anniversary of Ethel's death. I promised her and the kids that I'd try to maintain the status quo as best I could for at least a year—no major changes, one foot in front of the other, et cetera—and then we'd see what we'd see. So I'm going for her sake as much as mine. There're two more passwords for you, by the way: status quo and et cetera."
Remarkable guy, the Feltons agreed at that afternoon's end, over gin and tonics on the little barbecue patio beside their screened porch. In Dick's opinion, at least, that no-major-changes-for-at-least-the-first-year policy made good sense: Keep everything as familiar and routine as possible while the shock of bereavement was so raw and overwhelming.
But "Count me out," said Sue. "Twenty-four hours tops, and then it's So long, Susie-Q. But what I really want is the Common Disaster scenario, thanks"—a term they'd picked up from their estate lawyer over in the city, who in the course of this latest revision of their wills had urged them to include a new estate-tax-saving gimmick that neither of them quite understood, although they quite trusted the woman's professional advice. Their wills had formerly stipulated that in the event of their dying together (as in a plane crash or other "common disaster"), in circumstances such that it could not be determined which of them predeceased the other, it would be presumed that Dick died before Susan, and their wills would be executed in that order, he leaving the bulk of his estate to her, and she passing it on to their children and other assorted beneficiaries. But inasmuch as virtually all their assets—cars, house, bank accounts, securities portfolio—were jointly owned (contrary to the advice of their lawyer, who had recommended such tax-saving devices as bypass trusts and separate bank and stock accounts, not to the Feltons' taste), the Common Disaster provision had been amended in both wills to read that "each will be presumed to have survived the other." It would save their heirs a bundle, they'd been assured, but to Dick and Sue it sounded like Alice in Wonderland logic. How could each of them be presumed to have survived the other?
"Remind me to ask Sam that at the party, okay? And if he doesn't know, he can ask his lawyer son for us."
And so to the party they-all went, come "XXIV Septembris," despite the unending, anti-festive news reports from the Louisiana coast: the old city of New Orleans, after escaping much of the expected wind damage from Hurricane Katrina, all but destroyed by it's levee-busting storm surge and consequent flooding; and now Hurricane Rita tearing up the coastal towns of Mississippi even as the Feltons made their way, along with other invitees, to the Hardisons'. The evening being overcast, breezy, and cool compared to that week's earlier Indian-summer weather, they opted reluctantly to drive instead of walk the little way from 1020 Shoreside Drive to 12 Loblolly Court—no more than three city blocks, although Heron Bay Estates wasn't laid out in blocks—rather than wear cumbersome outer wraps over their costumes. The decision to go once made, Dick had done his best to get into the spirit of the thing, and was not displeased with what they'd improvised together: for him, leather sandals, a brown-and-white-striped Moroccan caftan picked up as a souvenir ten years earlier on a Mediterranean cruise that had made a stop in Tangier, and on his balding gray head a plastic laurel wreath that Susan had found in the party-stuff aisle of their Stratford supermarket. Plus a silk-rope belt (meant to be a drapery tieback) on which he'd hung a Jamaican machete in it's decoratively tooled leather sheath, the implement acquired on a Caribbean vacation longer ago than the caftan. Okay, not exactly ancient Roman, but sufficiently oddball exotic—and the caesars' empire, as they recalled, had in fact extended to North Africa: Antony and Cleopatra, et cetera. As for Sue, in their joint opinion she looked Cleopatralike in her artfully folded and tucked bed sheet (a suggestion from the Web, with detailed instructions on how to fold and wrap), belted like her husband's caftan with a drapery tieback to match his, her feet similarly sandaled, and on her head a sleek black costume-wig from that same supermarket aisle, with a tiara halo of silver-foil stars.
Carefully, so as not to muss their outfits, they climbed into her Toyota Solara convertible, it's top raised against the evening chill (his car was a VW Passat wagon, although both vehicles were titled jointly)—and got no
farther than halfway to Loblolly Court before they had to park it and walk the remaining distance anyhow, such was the crowd of earlier-arrived sedans, vans, and SUVs lining the road, their owners either already at the party or, like the Feltons, strolling their costumed way toward #12.
"Would you look at that?" Dick said when they turned into the tree-lined keyhole drive at the head whereof shone the Hardisons' mega-McMansion: not a neo-Georgian or plantation-style manor like it's similarly new and upscale neighbors, but a great rambling beige stucco affair—terra-cotta-tiled roof, great arched windows flanked by spiraled pilasters—resplendent with lights inside and out, including floodlit trees and shrubbery, it's palazzo design more suited in the Feltons' opinion to Venice or booming south Florida than to Maryland's Eastern Shore. "How'd it get past Heron Bay's house-plan police?" Meaning the Community Association's Design Review Board, whose okay was required on all building and landscaping proposals. Susan's guess was that Tidewater Communities, Inc., the developer of Heron Bay Estates and other projects on both shores of the Chesapeake, might have jiggered it through in hopes of attracting more million-dollar-house builders to HBE's several high-end detached-home neighborhoods, like Spartina Pointe. She too thought the thing conspicuously out of place in Rockfish Reach, but "You know what they say," she declared: "De gustibus non est disputandum"—her chosen party password, which she was pleased to have remembered from prep school days. "Is that the Gibsons ahead of us?"
It was, Dick could affirm when the couple—she bed-sheet-toga'd like Susan, but less appealingly, given her considerable heft; he wearing what looked like a white hospital gown set off by some sort of gladiator thing around his waist and hips—passed under a pair of tall floodlit pines flanking the entrance walkway: Hank and Becky Gibson, Oyster Covers like Sam Bailey, whom the Feltons knew only casually from the Club, Hank being the golfer and Becky the tennis player in their household.
