Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Oh, darling, we must. It’s being given for us!”

  “And then we’ll have to reciprocate, I suppose, and have a ‘Come for Cocktails’ thing for them.” He looked at the face of the invitation. “Jesus. Pink elephants dancing in champagne bubbles.”

  “We’re just going to meet them, Charlie. After all, they’re our new neighbors. You know what neighbors are.”

  “Yes, and so do you,” he said.

  “Please, darling. I want to start out on the right foot here.”

  “Starting out on the right foot means we’re going to have to entertain them.”

  “Well, I would like to entertain them. What’s wrong with that? I want—” She hesitated.

  “What?”

  “I want everything to be wonderful now that we’re here.”

  “Isn’t everything pretty wonderful already?”

  “Darling, I don’t mean just your career. I mean for me, and for the children too. I mean, now that we’ve got this nice house, on this pretty street—” She laughed. “I guess I want a few of those dreary, horrible, middle-class things we used to laugh at. Like neighbors, like friends—”

  “And the P.T.A.”

  “Yes! Maybe even the P.T.A.! We’ve never tried any of this before. Couldn’t we at least try?”

  “Sure,” he said. He put his arm around her shoulder. “Of course we can try. We will try. I understand.”

  “Do you, Charlie?”

  “Yes. I guess I get a little selfish sometimes, thinking of us on our own little island. Independent—”

  “Oh, Charlie, we can keep our island! But can’t we take just a few little trips off it now and then? Now that we’ve got the chance?”

  Jane and Edgar Willey were famous for their gadgets. They loved anything that was new, and electrical, and gadgety—the more automatic and labor-saving, the better; they made no bones about it; their house was full of small appliances. They had not only all the standard things, such as an electric blender and waffle iron and sandwich-griller and rotobroiler and air-conditioners, and less standard things, such as an electric carving knife, an electric egg-poacher, electric toothbrushes, an electric can-opener, and electric blankets, but they also possessed such esoteric items as electric sheets, beds on electric motors that went up and down and assumed a variety of positions, a lounge chair for Edgar that reclined electrically, the whole house wired for stereo, a movie screen and sound projector that descended from niches in the ceiling at the touch of a button, an electric icemaker and an electric ice-cream maker, an electric pencil-sharpener, and a whole electric hostess table that, when plugged in, could keep trayfuls of hot hors d’oeuvres warm for hours. And, of course, they had the marvelous electric garage doors.

  Today, however, everyone was admiring two little electric carousels that were revolving in the center of the living-room coffee table. At the base of each carousel was a small bed of live charcoal briquets, and suspended above the coals, turning slowly in the heat, were perhaps a dozen small skewers, each pierced with a roasting meatball. As the meatballs circled above the coals, their hot juices spat into the fire below and gave an oniony fragrance to the air.

  “I thought charcoal fumes were poisonous,” Charlie murmured to no one in particular.

  Inspecting the progress of the meatballs now, Jane Willey pronounced them done. “Hurry up!” she cried to the room at large. “Get ’em while they’re hot!” She produced a bowl of creamy mustard sauce and a platter of uncooked meatballs ready for the fire. “This is the dip,” she explained. “And here’s more meatballs, and from now on everybody keeps his skewer and cooks his own! Real self-service!” She laughed a little hysterically, as she always did when one of her parties was assured of being declared another triumph.

  “Where did you find these darling little cooker things?” Vera Phelps demanded as everyone gathered around the coffee table.

  “They’re called electric hibachis,” Jane Willey said.

  Edgar Willey still stood between Charlie Lord and the hibachi, and now, with her hand hooked purposefully in his sleeve, Alice Mayhew had Charlie anchored there. “I’m the dowager of the Lane,” she was saying, “by virtue of having lived here longest. But if you tell me I look it, I’ll slay you, Mr. Lord!”

  “Call me Charlie, please,” he said.

  “Alice, I was telling Charlie about some of our little rules here on the Lane,” Edgar Willey said. “One, keep your grass cut—”

  With one lacquered fingertip Alice Mayhew tapped Edgar Willey on the chest, then let her finger slip into the breast pocket of his blue blazer. “You and your rules,” she said. “Why don’t you tell him about the fun we have on the Lane?” She flashed the two men a naughty smile. “We have fun,” she said, “even if we break a rule or two.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Edgar Willey. “But seriously, Lord—”

  They were interrupted now by Vaughan Phelps, who pushed toward them, brandishing a skewered meatball in one hand and a drink in the other, repeating an earlier question. “Hey, have you told him about the liquor pool yet, Edgar? It’s almost that time of year, buddy!”

  Alice Mayhew’s laugh came out in small, shrill sobs. “Oh, Vaughan!” she cried. “You can only think about one thing, can’t you?”

  As the circumference of the little circle widened to admit him, Vaughan Phelps pinched Alice Mayhew’s arm and said, “I can think of a couple of other things when you’re around, Alice. But listen, Lord—”

  “Devil!” Alice Mayhew said between more of the little sobs. “You’re going to give Mr. Lord a terrible impression of the Lane!”

  “You see, we’ve got this liquor pool,” Edgar Willey said.

  “Never mind about the liquor pool!” Alice Mayhew said. “I want to get to know Mr. Lord.” She had her hand in Charlie’s arm again. “It’s so exciting having an artist on the Lane. Why, I feel positively bohemian meeting you!”

  “You see, we all buy our liquor in Connecticut,” Edgar Willey said. “It’s cheaper there, and you save the New York state tax. Of course, the more you buy, the better deal they give you, and when you buy in real quantity the saving amounts to quite a substantial mount.”

  “Don’t you mean mounts up to quite a substantial amount?” Alice Mayhew said and laughed her gasping laugh again. “Edgar? Have you had tee many martoonies?”

  “Ha-ha. So we all get together, once a year, and pool our orders for the entire year. Some guys want twenty cases, some want twenty-five—they’ll mix ’em up for you any way you want, so many Scotch, so many bourbon, so many gin. We take Bob McCarthy’s station wagon, so let me know if you want to get in on it. We usually go up around the first of June, and today’s the, uh, eighth of May.”

  “It’s a real saving,” Vaughan Phelps said. “Works out to two, three bucks a fifth.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” Charlie said.

  “We’ve always done it that way,” Edgar Willey said. “Everybody on the Lane.”

  “Speaking of booze, Edgar,” Alice Mayhew said, “you’re positively hoarding those martinis. I’m dry as a bone!”

  Upstairs, Genny McCarthy was taking Nancy Lord on a tour of the Willeys’ house. They had started from the top, had finished with the third floor, and were now in the middle of the second. It was a little funny, perhaps, when you considered what a terrible housekeeper Genny was, that she was a woman who always loved showing strangers around other people’s houses. She did it with so much pride. The houses might have been her own.

  “Yes, we have three children,” Nancy Lord was saying. “Harold, who’s seventeen, Maggie, who’s fifteen, and Carla, who’s thirteen. Oh, what a pretty bathroom!”

  “Everything built in,” Genny McCarthy explained, opening and closing cupboard doors. “I like sliding doors, don’t you? They save such a hell of a lot of space. And this is Jane and Edgar’s dressing room. Do you play golf?”

  “No, darn it, I wish I did,” Nancy said. “Oh, this is a lovely room!”

  “Lo
ok at this—a built-in cupboard just for Jane’s shoes. A drawer for gloves … a lot of us gals on the Lane are golfers. I’ll give you some lessons, be glad to, any time you like.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you.…”

  “And look at this,” Genny said, opening another sliding door. “Electric dryer, for towels—isn’t that the dandiest little gadget?”

  “How I envy a woman who’s so organized,” Nancy said. “A place for everything …”

  “And this is Jane and Edgar’s room. Don’t you like what she’s done with it? All the shades of pink?”

  “Oh, it’s beautiful! Just beautiful!” Nancy said.

  “Now look at this,” Genny said, crossing the room and opening an exceptionally large panel. “Color television—they can watch it from their beds—remote-control switches there, by the lamps. Isn’t that a dandy gadget?”

  “Just—marvelous!” Nancy Lord said.

  Genny McCarthy stood in the center of the pink bedroom and shook a cigarette from the pack she had been carrying in her blouse pocket. “Want a cig?”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  Genny handed one to Nancy and then lighted both cigarettes with a gold lighter. Taking a deep drag, Genny closed her eyes and blew a stream of smoke that seemed endless from the nostrils of her long, thin nose. “No, Bob and I have never had any kids. And you’ve got—three, did you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  Genny shot Nancy a quick look. “They say kids can hold a marriage together.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s true,” Nancy said. “I never thought …”

  “You never thought about it? Well, I’ll bet you have—hundreds of times.” Genny’s face wrinkled in a dry smile. “I have dogs,” she said. “And don’t let anybody tell you that dogs can’t keep a marriage together, because they can. Dogs and other people’s children. I love having other people’s kids around my house—especially in the evenings. My husband, Bob, is quite a drinker, you see. You’ll notice him tonight, if you stick around long enough, how he gets when he’s got his snootful. But he never gets drunk with kids around—too much of a coward, I guess, to want them to see how he gets when he’s plastered. Jane Willey tells me your husband’s an artist.”

  “Why, yes,” Nancy said. “Yes …”

  “And a damned successful one, I gather from Jane.”

  “A very good one,” Nancy said quietly. “A very great one. He’s having his first one-man show in New York—in September.”

  “Oh, where?”

  “At the Myra Mirisch Gallery—which is one of the best ones, if not the best, as you know.”

  “Well, I didn’t know, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing. But I’m glad it’s a good gallery—glad for your sake. That means he’s good, you can be proud, he’s a success.”

  “That’s one of the main reasons he quit his job and moved east. Now that he’s going to have shows in New York he needs to be near his gallery. That’s terribly important for an artist, because the gallery handles everything. The financial end—everything.”

  Genny nodded. “Still, it must have taken a lot of guts for your husband to pull up stakes like that—leave a good job in California and move east. Real guts.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact it did,” Nancy said. “But guts are something Charlie’s got plenty of. And this is something he’s dreamed of all his life.”

  “He must have guts in spades. You too. I think I admire you even more. It must have been tough on you, making a move like this.”

  “Oh, there were … friends, of course, out there that I hated to leave, and I loved our house. But this is Charlie’s big chance, you see, and when it came I didn’t hesitate for a minute.”

  “I really have to hand it to you,” Genny said. “Most women wouldn’t give up security for a life as an artist’s wife. I mean, isn’t painting kind of risky? What if his big show doesn’t click?”

  Nancy laughed. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that,” she said. “Not with the kind of send-off Myra Mirisch plans to give him. And with the kind of assurances he’s had from professionals—experts, people who know.”

  “Well, he must be quite a guy, your husband.” Genny McCarthy took another long drag on her cigarette. “My husband has a sweetie-pie,” she said. “Don’t look so shocked. It isn’t his first, and it isn’t his second, and it isn’t even his third, for God’s sake. This has been going on for years. He has his sweetie-pies, and I have my dogs. We’re happy, we go our own ways.”

  Nancy hesitated. “Then you have what I guess is called ‘an arrangement,’” she said quietly.

  “Well, I guess you might call it that, but nothing has ever been arranged, really. We’ve never even discussed it.”

  “Never?”

  “No. Is that so incredible? Oh, I’d be perfectly willing to discuss it with him—if Bob weren’t such a rotten coward that he’d never admit what the real trouble is, that he’s sexually inadequate. I mean, why else does he have just one sweetie-pie after another? And after all, what man can be sexually adequate after he’s drunk a whole quart of Scotch? Come on, I’ll show you the guest room.”

  “Yes,” Nancy said.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this,” Genny said. “But it’s logical, isn’t it? I’d rather you heard about it from me instead of from some of the other bitches in this town. Everybody knows about it. Oh, on the Lane here it’s never discussed, but you never can tell, can you? You’re new, and one of these bitches might decide it was up to her to tell you all about Bob and me. Come on,” she said and led Nancy out into the hall. “Also,” she said, “it’s a funny thing, but the minute I met you I thought you could be my friend. It’s a funny thing, but for all Bob’s done to me, these poisonous bitches around here sort of blame me. Can you figure it out? I can’t. I’ve never done anything to harm them—nothing at all. I’ve never done anything to harm anybody.” Genny opened a door. “This is the guest room. I think it’s my favorite room in the whole house.”

  Nancy Lord took a deep breath. “Oh, isn’t it pretty,” she said. “The whole house is—terribly pretty.”

  Genny McCarthy stood with her cigarette hand resting on the door frame, gazing into the guest room. Her eyes seemed to mist over. “If you think this house is pretty, you should have seen the house my father had. We could see just the tops of the towers of the Bear Mountain Bridge from the terrace. It was torn down after the war, after Daddy died, and the place was all chopped up into little building lots. I never go back. Is your father living?”

  “Yes,” Nancy said.

  “You’re lucky. It’s a shame, though, that you don’t play golf. We have lots of fun, we gals on the Lane, playing golf. I’ll give you some lessons if you’d like.”

  “Thanks very much.”

  “Don’t mention it. It’s part of the McCarthy Service. There’s a cute little guest bathroom in here,” Genny said, leading the way.

  Downstairs, Alice Mayhew had shepherded Charlie Lord out onto a glassed-in porch that was filled with tropical plants and wrought-iron furniture. “Brrr,” she whispered, “we just missed getting stuck with Bob McCarthy! He’s getting into one of his moods. I can tell.” She turned her soft, powdered face up to him and smiled. “Now, tell me. What part of California are you from?”

  “Los Angeles,” he said. “Encino, out in the valley.”

  “Oh, I know Encino!” Alice Mayhew said. “Oh, I just can’t tell you how exciting this is—just having someone new on the Lane.”

  He grinned at her. “Well, it’s pretty exciting to be here. Makes me feel—well, new.”

  She tilted her chin farther upward. “Mr. Lord,” she said, “may I say I find you completely fascinating?”

  He let his eyes lock with hers for a moment. Then, still smiling, he lowered them. It was an old game, but he could still play it, he supposed. He had played it at more cocktail parties than he could possibly count, but that didn’t mean that it might not be worth playin
g once more at this one. A cocktail party had to be survived, that was the thing; and playing this game was certainly one way—maybe the best way—to do it. But he did not feel new at all. And for the second time that evening he had the feeling that he had somehow moved backward in time, to some earlier place and situation; his own clock had been turned back, while all around him time hurried on, ran on, running out, leaving him stranded in a roomful of garden furniture. He heard himself making his voice husky and deep and heard himself say, “And you fascinate me too, Mrs. Mayhew.”

  Her mascaraed eyes grew wide. “Do I, Chuck? Why?”

  Outside the glass room the spring twilight was deepening. At the bottom of Roaring Brook Lane, where the street came to an end in a turn-around, a swampy stretch began—a marsh whose pools were hidden with rank weeds and overgrown with sawgrass and cattails and scrub willows. Deep in this jungle, its course shifting with the seasons, never the same, ran a dark trickle of what might, at one time, have actually been a roaring brook. It was a trickle, in fact, only after a heavy rain or a sudden spring thaw. Now, and at most other times, it was silent, motionless, and foul-smelling. At times, in summer, the black water lay patched with mysterious flotations of evil-looking brown froth, and between these the surface was scummed with livid algae and squirming with mosquito wigglers. The thought was never voiced on the Lane—out of delicacy—that the stream might be polluted from the outflow of five rather antiquated septic tanks. Still, Lane parents warned their children to eschew any contact with the dirty brook and the swamp around it. For all its malodorous darkness, the swamp managed to bring to life each spring a crop of peeping frogs, and now, as the darkness approached, this colony began its evening chorus, faint at first, then rising. Inside the houses on the Lane maids began preparations for dinner, and porch lights were turned on to guide masters and mistresses home from the Willeys’ party.

  And now, in the dark swamp, a group of four Lane children—Mike and Georgie Mayhew, Billy Phelps, and Alex Willey—in ages ranging from ten to twelve, moved stealthily through the cattails and sawgrass. Billy was their leader; he always was. With a swift gesture he motioned the others ahead, guiding them deeper and deeper into the green and sunless paths of Africa. Plaited mats of grass, hidden with infinite skill, lay across the traps of enemies; mossy stumps and strange raised hummocks of grass were places of death and terrible initiation. They were moving toward a forbidden grove where alligators lay in the river mouth and where rhinos rooted under the fallen trunks of trees—where ceremonial drums beat out the ritual and sacrificial dances of an ancient order. This was the land of the cannibal and the message in the forked stick, of the arrow shivering the tree with its poisoned dart. Billy Phelps led them along these forbidden paths, these sunless paths. Thwuck, thwuck, thwuck went the boys’ sneakered feet as they were planted and withdrawn from the fetid, sucking mud. At the sound of their approach the peepers went silent. But none of these sounds, or cessation of sounds, was heard within Jane and Edgar Willey’s house, where the rooms had just become filled with stereo.