“And this has got to be your husband,” Mrs. Simon ventured. “I'm Anita Simon—I'm so pleased you could come. Didn't we get just a beautiful night for a party?” she said, beaming at each of them in turn and allowing time for agreement. “This morning they said something about rain and I nearly keeled over—but it just couldn't have turned out to be a nicer night, could it? Let me introduce you around,” she said, the sleeves of her scarlet blouse billowing out as she looked for a good place to start. “Stan, go and fetch the Nashes over here.”
Dutifully, Stan brought back the Nashes, and for a while they all made conversation about the weather, the new street signs in Passet Bay, the tree spraying for Dutch elm disease that was due to commence soon. Byron found himself eventually drawn aside by Mrs. Nash, who was from Virginia herself and fancied that she'd found in him a fellow rebel; Peter was carried off by Mr. Simon to meet a friend of his from a New York publishing house; and Meg found herself back with her two original acquaintances, Mrs. Simon and her friend Mrs. Plettner. “Please, just call us Betty and Anita,” they insisted, and though it seemed a little awkward to Meg, she complied.
“But are you a professor, too?” Betty asked ingenuously.
“No, I leave that to my husband,” Meg replied, and she smiled at hearing herself use the words “my husband” she nearly always called him Peter. She figured she must be trying, despite her best intentions, to “fit in,” after all. “I have a studio in what used to be a boathouse, where I do some potting and some sculpture.”
The news of this was greeted with extraordinary enthusiasm. “So that's what you were doing at the Artworks shop!” Anita cried. They were both very excited about finding a real-live artist in their midst—when they learned that her pieces were actually sold through a gallery in Manhattan, they fairly swooned—and to Meg's great dismay, they insisted on coming for a private viewing sometime very soon. They were also, Anita hinted strongly, art lovers and collectors. The promise of a sale hung heavy in the air.
Peter was over by the buffet table, with Mr. Simon—Stan, as he would no doubt insist—and someone Meg hadn't met, a tall good-looking man, probably in his early sixties, with steel-rimmed glasses and wavy silver hair. She expected to see Peter wearing his all-purpose expression of interest and attentiveness—an expression she'd seen at such functions before, a mask for boredom and impatience—but she was surprised instead to hear his laughter suddenly erupt over something the third man was saying, and to see him shake his head vigorously in agreement. Stan looked wryly amused; with one raised finger, he caught O.P.’s eye, swirled the finger in a small circle to indicate another round for them all, then returned his attention to the conversation. Peter turned slightly, so his face was no longer visible to her, but she could tell from the movement of his head and elbows that he was talking. Animatedly.
Byron, on the other hand, appeared to be in trouble. Mrs. Nash had recruited another, equally plump lady, and the two of them were double-teaming him at one of the little tables. Anita excused herself to check on the supply of guacamole, and Meg took the opportunity to go to his rescue. They were talking about the glories of colonial Williamsburg, and Byron was already looking a little glazed.
“It's the authenticity I love,” Mrs. Nash was saying. “Everything, right down to the knockers, is completely authentic.” Meg and Byron smiled discreetly.
From Williamsburg, they drifted on to the reproductions sold through the museum store at the Metropolitan, to flowers, to home decor, to the inevitable difficulty in finding good, reliable cleaning help these days. At some point, Byron tapped Meg's foot under the table, and she noticed that Larry Lazaroff, from the Artworks shop, had come in. Meg wouldn't have expected to see him there. He was younger than the other guests; he couldn't have the money most of them appeared to possess; and he just seemed as if he'd be a part of some very different, and funkier, social set. Still, he was there, and Meg thought to herself, maybe there's a stronger sense of community out here than she was accustomed to in Mercer. Maybe she shouldn't be so quick to judge Passet Bay.
Silver serving tureens were carried out onto the deck by O.P. and the maid—from the way they worked together, wordlessly but totally in sync, Meg could tell they were a married couple—and placed on the buffet table. One tray was filled with enchiladas, another with chili, a third with something else cheesy and hot. It dawned on Meg that the “theme” of the party—the salsa music playing on the stereo deck speakers, the festive red paper lanterns—was Mexican, and that her own white peasant dress had been the perfect choice, after all. Byron, however, was only three forkfuls into his dinner plate before the sweat began to trickle down his forehead. He mopped at his brow with a wadded handkerchief, and Meg laughingly asked if he'd just swallowed a pepper.
“No, it's not the food,” he confessed, “it's this damn jacket. I feel like I'm wrapped in a blanket.”
“Then take it off,” Meg insisted. “No one will care. Look,” she said, surveying the deck quickly, “there's a man over there with his jacket thrown over the back of his chair, and that Lazaroff guy came in without wearing one at all.”
For a split-second more, Byron debated, then shrugged the familiar brown jacket onto the canvas back of his seat. “Now I feel naked,” he said. “What's happened to Peter, anyway? I don't even see him around.”
It was true—Meg hadn't seen him for the last half-hour either. He must have taken his dinner plate into the house, through the sliding glass doors; the gray-haired man was absent, too. Meg was considering going to find him when Lazaroff turned at the buffet table, spotted her, and hurried over with a heaping plate of enchiladas.
“Saw you guys on the way in,” he said, drawing up a chair to the table, “but I had a little business to drum up first.” He took an enormous mouthful of enchilada and retried beans and, before completely swallowing it, said, “Met your husband. Great guy.” He swallowed. “Really interesting. He and Caswell are hitting it off inside. Talking about Henry Miller, Paris in the forties, Nexus, Sexus, Plexus, all that shit.” Meg wondered why Peter hadn't introduced her to Caswell and drawn her—and Byron—into the conversation. Lazaroff rubbed a dab of melted cheese off his beard. “Stan, by the way, thinks you're hot stuff. He's partial to blondes. I thought you might like to know,” he said, digging into his plate again. Meg didn't know what to say, or how she was supposed to react to this; she'd hardly met Stan Simon, and she couldn't imagine why he would be commenting on her to anyone. She wasn't complimented, but she did wonder, a little annoyed, exactly what it was he'd said. Lazaroff, she suspected, had given her the edited text of his remarks.
“Who did he tell this to?” she said, unable to resist asking. “Was my husband there?” There it was, that locution again.
“Peter?” Lazaroff said, unnecessarily. “I don't remember.” He seemed to be stalling. “I don't know—does it matter?” he added, realizing he'd said the wrong thing. “I just thought it was kind of funny. I didn't know it would tick you off—I'm sorry I mentioned it. Forget it—okay? I'm sorry.”
Meg was suddenly embarrassed by her reaction and touched Lazaroff's sleeve. “It's okay,” she said. “I don't know, it just struck me as sort of strange.” She mustered a weak smile. “Nice to know I'm a femme fatale.”
“Who are most of these people?” Byron interjected, just to change the subject. “This Nash guy I met made his living doing something I never did understand.”
“Oh, Nash, he's a drag. He runs some kind of numbers outfit, an actuarial firm, that does statistics for big insurance companies and all. Most of the people out here do pretty boring things, but they make a ton of bread doing them. Stan, and Caswell, are actually the exceptions. Stan made a killing in the restaurant business, with a place in New York called Rio—”
“I've heard of that,” Meg said.
“—and Caswell used to run something called Emperor Press, sort of an underground operation that made a lot of money publishing the second-rate work of some of the first-rate wri
ters.”
“Or third-rate work of the second-rate writers,” Byron said. Lazaroff laughed and said, “Right.”
“A lot of quote unquote erotica,” Byron said to Meg, by way of clarification.
“Anyway,” Lazaroff continued, “the rest of them made their packet in plumbing supplies, or dry-wall construction, or orthodontia.”
“If you don't mind my asking,” Meg said, “how do you know so much about all these people? I mean, you don't strike me as . . .”
“Their sort?” Lazaroff laughed again, in that strange staccato fashion. “I'm not. But it's not a very big town, and all these people for some reason like to think they're art lovers. They're always bringing me some new piece of dreck to frame. How'd you like that hunk of junk Anita Simon had done?” When he saw Meg and Byron smile in agreement, he said “Check it out—it's hanging over the fireplace right inside. It's their newest, most prized possession.”
Later on, in search of Peter, Meg and Byron went into the house, where they saw the painting, a pastel blur of polo players, mounted above a fireplace made of round gray stones; a Duraflame log was laid in the grate, ready to go. Several of the guests were sitting or standing around the room, on white sofas, or against white walls, or on oversized white floor cushions; the room was apparently the den, with a color-TV console, an elaborate array of stereo components, a standing chess board with the pieces arranged as if in midplay.
“What do you want to bet me the set came that way?” Byron said, sotto voce.
Peter was sitting cross-legged, his shoes off, on one of the white cushions; the pose was so uncharacteristic Meg would hardly have recognized him. On the other side of the coffee table, on which he had rested his dinner plate and drink—his gin and tonic glass, unlike the plate, was full again—sat the silver-haired Caswell beside a tall, thin woman in an expensive-looking striped silk tunic. With Peter on the floor and the Caswells on a white settee, it looked like one of those informal living-room seminars some of the “hipper” young professors held, with Peter cast as the eager student. When Meg and Byron were introduced—Joan Caswell gave them both a polite if somewhat perfunctory smile—they had no choice but to sit on the floor with Peter. Jack Caswell, leaning forward, said they'd been talking about the later diaries of Anaïs Nin, and then, in a smooth and cultivated voice, went on with his lecture.
His conversation was indeed interesting, peppered with famous names and unusual anecdotes, all tellingly documented, cross-referenced, catalogued. Even scenes at which Caswell could not possibly have been present—a bedroom squabble in Beverly Hills between Henry Miller and one of his last attachments, a hostile encounter between Jean Cocteau and a Parisian journalist—he related with such relish and acuity that it seemed he must have been secreted somewhere nearby, with a tape recorder and camera in hand. But there was also something Meg found slightly . . . distasteful about it, something oily and self-congratulatory. He laid claim to too much, insinuated himself into too many impossible situations, took too much satisfaction from other people's lives or triumphs. It seemed somehow voyeuristic to Meg, to be so bound up in someone else's career or struggles, particularly people who could in the last analysis be known, despite all of Caswell's claims, only in terms of their public persona.
Peter, however, sipping repeatedly from his drink—was it his third, or even fourth, Meg wondered—seemed not to mind. He seemed enthralled by Caswell's remarks and often prompted him to further recollection—or appropriation—with a question, or respectful aside of his own. Part of it, Meg knew, was genuine interest. Peter was, after all, an English instructor, and even people and events beyond the scope of his specialty would hold some residual appeal for him. But watching him attend to Caswell's every word—while sitting at his feet, no less—it appeared to Meg that something else, subtler but stronger, was also at work. Something Meg had seen before, with the former chairman of the English department at the college, for instance. It was, even though she hated to resort to psycho-babble clichés, a “search for the father figure,” as much as she could make it out. Peter had never known his own father; he had no older brother; his grandfather had been kept apart from him all his life. Once in a while, he would develop a crush—Meg didn't know what else to call it—on an older man, someone who would serve as a sort of cross between a mentor and a parent, an authority figure that Peter could at once learn from and play to, for guidance and also for approval. With the English chairman, it had been perfectly harmless, even beneficial, up to a point—Peter had gotten some useful professional advice, some shaping and direction for his doctoral work, some old-fashioned masculine evenings of tweedy talk and brandy by the fire. But he'd also been drawn, deeper and deeper, into the chairman's own personal problems—his suffocating wife, his ungrateful daughters—and even more dangerously, into his professional vendettas and feuds. At a time in his career when Peter needed allies, not enemies, he was increasingly perceived as one of the chairman's minions, which went down well with some, but badly with plenty of others—particularly other grad students and junior faculty members. Though Meg knew Peter wasn't a brown-noser, she also knew it couldn't help but look that way to most outsiders. And Peter, absorbed in his own elusive quest, was blind not only to all appearances, but to what, in anyone else's case, he would have been quick to see and understand.
Now, with Caswell, the problems didn't even seem so distant or difficult to predict to Meg; this was no one to emulate in any way whatsoever.
She excused herself to find the bathroom, threading her way through the other guests; Mrs. Plettner waved to her with three fingers from the kitchen. The bathroom was exactly what Meg might have guessed: pink walls, fuzzy pink toilet cover, a matching pink floor mat. When she opened the door to leave, Mrs. Caswell was standing right outside.
“Gets a bit academic at times, no?” she said. “I think our husbands are rather taken with each other.” Meg smiled, as if in tacit agreement, and moved to one side of the door so that Mrs. Caswell could go in. But she'd apparently only been waiting to talk to Meg. “Your husband's very bright,” she said, then rolling her eyes, added, “Jesus, I didn't mean that to sound so condescending.” Her voice had a cool, dry edge to it. “I suppose we all strike you as hopelessly bourgeois and tacky,” she said, and when she saw that Meg was about to assure her otherwise, she laughed and said, “We are, we are. If you didn't think so, I'd wonder where your standards had gone.” Meg was amused, despite herself, at the woman's candor and even at her presumption that she knew what Meg's “standards” were. “Jack and I sometimes wonder what ever happened to ours.”
Drawing Meg aside into a little oasis of quiet in a dim, carpeted hallway, she asked, with evident interest, about Meg and Peter's plans, how they felt about the house, who exactly Byron was. Her face was long and somewhat drawn, her skin a little leathery from too many summers in the sun. But still, she was an attractive woman, Meg thought, probably beautiful in her youth, and now one of those sophisticated, world-weary types Meg associated with the jet set and private parties on the Riviera. Gradually, between the questions, she wove into the conversation some infor- mation about herself and her own husband, how they'd met when Jack and his second wife had moved into the apartment across the hall from the apartment in which she was living at the time with her first husband. How they'd invited the new neighbors over for drinks. And how everything had just become musical beds from that point on, with a Japanese masseuse mixed in there somewhere, and a lot of unexpected acrimony, two more divorces, some rebound affairs, and finally, as far as Meg could follow the elaborate concatenation of events, a reasonably satisfactory union with Jack, whose shoestring publishing venture had ultimately caught fire and begun to bring in some very considerable sums. “Bad form, I know, to mention money, even in the most oblique terms,” Mrs. Caswell confessed, “but if the truth be told, that's what eighty percent of the conversations out here are really all about anyway . . . the other twenty is sex, and who's still capable of it.” She laughed again
, with the sound of gravel in her voice, and gave Meg a long, appraising look. Then, cocking an eye at the unoccupied bathroom, she said, “You wouldn't care to step inside, would you, and"—making quotation marks in the air—"do a line or two? I find these parties interminable without it.”
For a moment, Meg didn't know what Mrs. Caswell was suggesting; it wasn't that she hadn't heard the expression before. Plenty of times. It was just so unexpected here, so out of the blue. Cocaine? With Mrs. Caswell? In that little pink powder room with the fuzzy seat and the matching mat? She had already felt as if she'd wound up at one of her parents’ parties, with the uniformed help, the bossa nova beat, the stilted, or awkwardly bawdy, conversations. Now she felt like a teenager again, the way she had when she was sixteen years old and Mary Kaye Ash had suggested they go up to the attic and experiment with some marijuana she'd found in her brother's dresser drawer. Mrs. Caswell was still observing her, with cool but critical gray eyes, waiting for her reply.
“Thanks, anyway,” Meg mumbled, “but I think I'm doing fine.” She gave a feeble smile and jiggled her glass in her hand, to indicate that she was at least drinking, and not on priniciple against intoxication of one sort or another; the glass, unfortunately, turned out to be empty. Mrs. Caswell drew a gold compact case out of the sequined clutch purse she'd been holding under her arm, and said, “It's really the very best. Larry—you know Larry, don't you, the framer from town—he's what I like to call The Source,” and she laughed again. “You're sure now you don't care to try some? Anita won't be upset with you if you do,” she said, acutely tapping Meg's subtle sense of dislocation. “No one will even know,” she whispered. Meg politely declined again; Mrs. Caswell paused, then disappeared into the bathroom by herself. Meg, feeling a little like she'd just flunked a pop quiz, went in search of Peter and Byron and found them outside on the deck. Byron was standing at the fringe of a small group; Peter was laughing at something a short man with bright red hair was saying. The man's hand was gripping Peter's shoulder as he spoke.
The Spirit Wood Page 10
