The Dinner Party: A Novel

by Brenda Janowitz

  “Close that window!” she said. “Are you trying to blow us all away with the wind?”

  He turned to face his mother and saw Becca looking at him. Her blond hair was blowing in the breeze, all around her shoulders, like on Botticelli’s Venus. She wore a tiny smile on her lips. He smiled back.

  “I’ll put the air on for you,” his mother said, and began fiddling with the air vents.

  “I just needed some fresh air,” Henry said, still looking at Becca, smiling at her. She smiled back at him and tightened her grip on his hand.

  “The fresh air feels nice,” Becca said.

  Ursella agreed to let him keep the window open for the duration of the ride.

  Twenty

  Valentina got into her Camry and teared up just the tiniest bit. It’s okay to feel sorry for yourself, isn’t it? As she pulled the car out of the garage, dabbing at her eyes, she realized that the four-inch heels on her boots were making it difficult to drive the car. Her Camry lurched as she hit the gas pedal too hard, and then came to an abrupt stop when she tried to put her foot down on the brake. It was too late to go back into the house to change her shoes—it had taken her over an hour to choose these; God knows how long it would take her to select another pair—so, she did something she’d never done before. She took off her boots and drove barefoot.

  Valentina felt a bit silly as she drove down her street. First, there was the fact that she could feel the dirt under her foot as she pressed down on the gas pedal. But what was bothering her, what was really bothering her, was that she was acting like a teenager. It was unbecoming. Especially since she was on her way to Sylvia’s house. Sylvia probably never acted like a teenager. Sylvia was classy.

  But no one knew she was driving barefoot, acting like someone who didn’t have a mortgage and responsibilities and bills. And this was a feeling she liked. She glanced at the clock and decided to take the long way to the Golds. The streets would be longer. There would be fewer traffic lights. She turned the radio to a classic rock station. As the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” blared through her speakers, Valentina rolled down the windows, opened the sunroof, and sang along as loudly as she could. And she drove. Fast.

  On the sleepy county streets, with the blacktop newly paved, Valentina went faster and faster. Faster than she’d ever driven before. And it felt good.

  Yeah, I’m gonna fade away.

  She sang with her mouth wide open, oblivious to everything around her. She didn’t know the right words, but that didn’t stop her. She kept singing.

  It’s just a kiss away …

  She was so lost in the music that she didn’t even realize that a police car had been trailing her. As the song ended and the DJ went to commercial, she heard the siren blare.

  Her first thought was to put her shoes back on. Was it illegal to drive barefoot? She pulled her car over to the side of the road and realized that she’d never been pulled over before. An evening of firsts.

  She pulled her feet back toward the seat, trying to hide her bare feet, as the police officer approached her car.

  “Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked, not looking up from the pad he was writing on.

  “Danny?” Valentina said. “Is that you?” She wasn’t sure, but underneath the police uniform, she could swear it was little Danny Manetti from the neighborhood. She and his mother had been friends back when the boys were in school together. He’d even worked in Dominic’s garage for a summer or two in high school.

  “Mrs. Russo?” the officer asked. Valentina gave Danny a broad smile. He did not smile back. “I didn’t realize it was you.”

  “How’s your mom?” Valentina asked, as if they had just bumped into each other at the library.

  “She’s good, real good,” he said. Valentina noticed the name plate under his badge: Officer Manetti. That was adorable, just adorable. Maybe she shouldn’t tell him that. “Do you know you were going sixty-four miles over the speed limit?”

  “Well, that can’t be,” Valentina said. “In this tiny car? I doubt it can even go that fast.”

  “It does,” he said. “It did. I clocked you going ninety-four miles per hour. That’s a really big ticket, Mrs. Russo. A lot of points.”

  “You’re not going to give me a ticket, are you?” she said, laughing. “I’ve known you since you were this high!”

  “Once I start writing a ticket,” he explained, “I have to issue it.”

  “How can you give me a ticket?” Valentina pleaded. “You know I just lost Dominic.”

  “I know, Mrs. Russo, and I was really sorry to hear about that.”

  “And you’re still giving me a ticket?” she demanded. “I’m going to tell your mother about this. Giving a ticket to a woman who just lost her husband.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Russo,” Danny said, his eyes firmly planted on his shoes, “he’ll be back in two months.”

  Valentina gasped. “You have no idea—” she began, but Danny cut her off.

  Sheepishly, he repeated: “Once I start writing a ticket…”

  Valentina was too angry to even speak. So many thoughts flooded her mind, she couldn’t land on just one.

  So instead, she sped away even faster than she’d been driving before. The car screeched as the tires spun wildly on the blacktop. As she turned the radio back up—Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”—she looked out her rearview mirror. She could see Danny’s police car, idling at the side of the road. She took the ticket, crumpled it in her hand, and threw it out the sunroof.

  Twenty-One

  Joe put the roof down on Sarah’s convertible; he knew that she wouldn’t want to do it herself and risk getting her dress dirty.

  The convertible had been a gift for Sarah’s college graduation. Joe got it for free when one of his clients couldn’t pay his bill. The car was practically a write-off, but somehow Joe got the engine running again. He spent the following year restoring it on nights and weekends. Sarah had no idea it was for her until he painted it red and put a bow on it the day of her graduation. Her friends all thought it was the most romantic thing they’d ever seen.

  Sarah didn’t think graduating college was a big deal, but that didn’t take away from Joe’s excitement. College wasn’t an option for him. He didn’t have the grades, to begin with, and the student loans would have put him in massive debt. No, thank you.

  He knew he would take over his father’s shop eventually. Why wait? Joe loved cars, he always had. And he loved working alongside his father in his shop. It was a gas station and auto body shop, in business well before there was an Exxon or a Mobil on every corner. Everyone in town was a customer. Dominic had been good to his regulars during the gas crisis in the seventies, and as he used to tell Joe, that’s not the sort of thing that people forget.

  Dominic ran a true family business. He knew when to let a guy pay in installments because he couldn’t afford a bill. He knew when to fix a seventeen-year-old’s dented bumper and not tell his old man—and he knew when he should.

  Dominic was great with numbers and would run most of the books in his head. Valentina did the books now. Joe had had no idea that his mother was so good with a calculator. But there she was, every Tuesday with her trusty Casio and black composition notebook, as if she’d always been there.

  Sarah had rolled her eyes when Joe told her that Valentina was coming every week to take care of the accounts. “Can’t you do them yourself?” she’d wondered aloud. Joe wasn’t sure if he could or not, but he liked having his mother there. He missed his father in the shop—his loud voice bellowing over the din, his fingers always stained black with grease. It didn’t matter how many times he washed them, Dominic’s fingers always had a shadow, a faint shade of gray that reminded Joe of what his father did. What he was made of. Joe supposed he was made of the same things. He checked the tips of his fingers often. He was still able to get them clean when he wanted to, but he was just waiting for the day when the pads of his fingers, too, would be marked permanen
tly by the job.

  Joe had a plan. A big plan. He may not have gone to college, but he was going to be a big success. A huge success. He would make Sarah and his mother (and even Sarah’s mother!) proud. He knew it. He just didn’t expect to be putting his plan into motion just yet.

  * * *

  Joe fell in love with his first car when he was six years old. It was a 1969 Corvette Stingray, and his father’s friend had won it in a poker game. He’d brought the car to Dominic to see if he could get it running again. Joe loved everything about the car—the color, cherry red, the brightest thing he’d ever seen; the lines, so curvy he could get dizzy just from looking at it; and the most amazing thing of all—it had no roof! Joe would sit inside the car on Sunday mornings—when Dominic would spend the bulk of the day working on it—and pretend to drive. He’d imagine that he was driving along I-95 without a care in the world. Top down, music blasting from the radio, speedometer well past 100 mph.

  It wasn’t until Joe was eight that Dominic let him help with an actual repair. The first car Joe and Dominic ever revived together was a 1978 Mustang. A couple of teenagers had driven it into a nearby lake, and the owner thought it was beyond repair. Dominic thought it could be a good car to teach Joe on, so he bought it for a song, and began to teach Joe everything he knew.

  They put it up on cinder blocks in their driveway. (Oh, how the neighbors must have loved that.) On Sundays when Dominic wasn’t in the shop, they’d work on it right out there, in the driveway. Valentina would be inside, cooking Sunday night dinner, the smells of his childhood wafting out to Joe and his father. She’d occasionally bring them a snack or a glass of lemonade. It was the longest Joe had spent with his father. Most of his time was spent with Valentina, hanging around the house or running around town doing errands. His father worked long hours at the shop most days of the week, so it was usually just Joe and his mother. (“The two musketeers, us against the world!” she would often say.)

  But those Sundays belonged to Joe and his father. Whenever he felt his father’s absence, those were the days he looked back to. Those were the days he’d never forget.

  Twenty-Two

  “What on earth are you doing up there?”

  Sylvia was ten feet in the air, on a ladder, balancing on three-inch heels and sheer force of will.

  Their guests would be arriving in half an hour.

  “A spiderweb,” she said, the anger bubbling. “I found a spiderweb! With insects!”

  “Nobody will notice, Syl.”

  “I noticed,” she said. “I noticed.”

  “Okay, so you noticed. Come down from there.”

  “My God,” Sylvia cried. “What on earth did the painters think they were here for?”

  “To paint?”

  “Very funny. You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t think they were responsible for pest removal, Syl.”

  “Well, don’t you think they noticed it?” Sylvia asked. “Couldn’t they have done something about it? Or at least mentioned it to me?”

  “If you think it’s bad, I’ll call an exterminator next week.”

  “I didn’t say it was bad,” Sylvia said, suddenly defensive. “Do you think it’s bad?”

  She showed him the rag covered with spiderwebs and dead insects.

  “I think that it’s great. Adds to the charm of the house. Don’t old-money people like stuff like that?” Sylvia did not laugh. “You used to laugh at all my jokes,” Alan said. “When did you stop laughing at my jokes?”

  Sylvia climbed down the ladder. She patted her skirt; it hadn’t gotten dirty. She checked her hose; they hadn’t run. She inspected her manicure; nary a chip. “I never laughed at your jokes.”

  Alan held out his hand to his wife, but she hopped off the last rung of the ladder without his assistance.

  “If you want to help, put this thing in the laundry room and get the ladder back into the garage,” she said, shoving the rag into his hand.

  Alan was left to wonder how Sylvia had gotten the ladder out into the entryway in the first place. He took off his tie and his sweater before getting started. The ladder was heavier than he’d anticipated, and he felt a thin layer of sweat forming on his brow as he made his way toward the garage. He placed the ladder against the back wall, next to the worktable he never used, and then looked around the garage for a paper towel to wipe his face. Sylvia would not want to see him sweating.

  He couldn’t find any paper towels. What he did find, though, was an enormous spiderweb, one that made the spiderweb in the entryway look small and unimportant. It spanned four feet in width, and was just as high. Alan did not want to remove it. It was filled with more insects than the other had been. Larger insects, too. Insects that looked like they might break away from the web, jump onto his head, and devour him.

  He wasn’t scared of the bugs. He wasn’t. He just didn’t want to do it. He looked at his watch and wondered if Joe would be there soon. This was the sort of thing Joe wouldn’t think twice about. He did all manner of repairs on the house he shared with Sarah—didn’t he once remove a wasp’s nest from their mailbox with only a pencil and a dustpan?

  Alan recalled the house he had grown up in, how it was always covered in dust, filled with spiderwebs. His mother couldn’t clean it properly—her eyes were bad—and she would never allow a stranger into her house to do the job for her.

  He was like a little boy stomping his feet: he did not want to clean up this mess. Why should he have to? Anyone who walks out to the garage gets what he deserves for snooping. And anyway, this web was like a work of art, all long lines and glistening in the sun. Almost beautiful, if you could forget what it really was.

  A memory: the girls, in elementary school, sent home because they had caught lice. Sharing hats or hairbrushes, probably, but it didn’t matter how they had gotten it. It had to be dealt with. Sylvia immediately covered every family member’s head with mayonnaise—even her own head, which was lice-free, and Gideon’s, also lice-free. She had read in a magazine that when one person in the house has lice (or two, to be more precise), everyone in the house must be treated, just in case.

  She had instructed Alan that when he came home, she would cover his head in mayonnaise in the garage, before he walked into the house. He should knock on the garage door when he arrived home, and she would come out to treat him. But that night—wouldn’t you know it?—Alan got stuck in the hospital on an emergency shift.

  Bedsheets and stuffed animals were washed, couch cushions and pillows were stored in sealed plastic bags, and hair was painstakingly combed out over and over, throughout the course of the following week. Thinking about it made Alan itch.

  I am not touching this thing, Alan thought. I’ll call an exterminator tomorrow. He made his way toward the garage door, and caught sight of the garden hose. An elegant solution. He could get the spiderweb down from the corner, and he didn’t have to touch it. He unfurled the hose, pleased with his cleverness, and pulled the trigger.

  Before he realized what had happened, Alan was soaked. Covered in swaths of wet spiderweb, covered in a blanket of large insects. He was afraid to open his mouth to yell out in anger, lest a bug enter his mouth.

  What Alan hadn’t counted on was this: how powerfully the hose would spray. He had imagined a gentle mist, slowly breaking down the web and washing away the dead insects. Instead, a gush of water ricocheted off the back wall and all over Alan’s body, bringing the web and its inhabitants down onto him. Alan was covered in it, head to toe.

  Sylvia must not know. Alan waited until he heard her footsteps in the kitchen and then darted up the back staircase, stripping his clothes off the second he made it to his bathroom. He got into the shower before even letting the water heat up, and watched the insects pool at the bottom, too large to go down the drain. Alan stood toward the back of the shower, careful not to step on any. He washed his hair twice. He couldn’t get it clean enough. And he used Sylvia’s loofah all over his body, scrubbing himself until he
was raw.

  The shower door opened. Sylvia stood, looking at Alan.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “I’ve laid out fresh clothing for you on the bed,” she said. Her eyes moved to the bathtub, where Alan’s dirty clothes lay. “The guests will be here in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be down in eight.”

  Alan quickly dried himself off. As he dressed, he could still feel the insects all over his body. He imagined them climbing up his legs, covering his arms. Biting the back of his neck.

  And he was sure he’d contracted lice.

  BOOK TWO

  The Last Supper

  The second question:

  On all other nights we eat all vegetables, and on this night only bitter herbs.

  Twenty-Three

  Sarah and Joe quickly found themselves in their usual spots—Joe in the living room with Alan, Sarah in the kitchen with Sylvia. On the short walk to the kitchen, Sarah noticed that the house was different. She didn’t know that the gutters had been cleaned, the paint touched up, or new linens acquired. Still, she sensed something in the air.

  “Sarah, this is Chef Michael,” her mother said, introducing her to the man standing at the kitchen island. He had on a serious-looking chef’s coat embroidered with his name.

  “You’re not cooking?” Sarah asked.

  “I thought I’d make things extra special this year,” she said.

  “Can I sneak a bite of chopped liver before you put it out?” Sarah asked. It was an even trade. If she wouldn’t be having her mother’s brisket, she could at least console herself with her favorite appetizer.

  “Oh, we’re not having chopped liver this year, honey.”

  “Foie gras?” Chef Michael offered, presenting a beautiful tray.

  “I don’t eat foie gras,” Sarah said, and turned to her mother for an explanation.

  “It’s practically the same thing as chopped liver,” Sylvia said. “I just wanted things to be … you know … slightly elevated.”