A Certain Age (7 page)

Finally she managed to get the mouth off her nipple by clamping his nostrils between two fingers. Eventually he would have to come up for air. "John, John, I want to go to the party!" she said. It wasn't exactly what she had intended to say, it was probably giving him the wrong idea, but if she let him do anything now, she knew the whole evening would be spoiled—not that it wasn't

already, but she would look even more disheveled, violated. It was so horrible, the whole thing was such a mess.

His tongue, which had been fibrillating wildly, seemed to be dying in his mouth as his oxygen supply diminished. She kept her fingers firmly clamped on his nose. Finally, baffled, he stepped back to inhale through his mouth and she bolted, yanking open the door behind her, stepping into the hall, slamming it shut and trying to get her bra up and her shirt back down all at the same time. There was a button on the doorknob and she pressed it—it seemed odd to have a lock on the outside, probably it didn't work, but it might slow him down for a minute.

She walked quickly down the hall and downstairs, trying to wipe the incident off her face. Perhaps he and Natalie really were getting divorced—no doubt they were—but how could he behave like that? It was so hateful, so disgusting. She should say something to Natalie, but there was nothing she
could
say . . . no doubt if this was how he was acting with her, he was carrying on with innumerable women. Still, it was none of her business, really; it wasn't her position to tell Natalie that John was screwing around—it was hard to believe, in any event, that Natalie didn't know. Women, wives, had a way of knowing such things; if they didn't want to deal with it, it was their own solution to the problem.

5

Twenty or thirty people
had already arrived. Everyone projected a
bleak aura of frantic, nervous despair, as if they were not going to let the fact that they were in the country and not the city have any effect. "Florence! Florence!" She turned to find Neil Pirsig headed in her direction. There was no one she wished to see less. He was contemptible, the way he managed to appear whenever an artist died and take over, skimming the cream off the estate. He was so puffed up with his own importance—his life story, from street-gang member to Yale Law School, had been sold to the movies—

and he obviously thought all women were desperate for him. He always acted as if Florence wanted to marry him. His amused smile whenever she talked to him provided him with some kind of fix. Yet, she had to admit, there was something about him she found attractive. "Hi, Florence. Still single?" He held up his fingers, crossed, as if warding off a vampire. "Don't start looking at me with those hungry eyes! I'm still not prepared to ask you out on a date."

"Excuse me for just a second, Neil," she said coldly. She walked across the living room and out to the patio, smiling weakly, though no one was looking at her.

"Have you seen John?" Natalie approached her at the bar. An attractive blond kid, hired for the evening as a bartender, was busy making a drink. There was a silver tub of cigarettes on the edge of the table and Florence picked one up and lit it, for something to do.

"I saw him a while ago," she said. "Oh, gosh, Natalie, I just feel so terrible about what happened."

"Don't worry about it," Natalie said. "Florence, have you met Mike Grunlop?" She gestured to a short, barrel-chested man standing nearby who resembled a Roman senator. "Mike's a famous painter—you've probably noticed a lot of his works around the house. We've been collecting him for years. We were one of your first collectors, weren't we, Mike? And his wife, Peony, is a photographer. I'm sure you've seen her things in
Life
magazine; she just did a whole thing on dying gorillas in the Cameroons. Now she's off to Lima to shoot dogs. What kind of dogs is Peony going to shoot, Mike?"

Mike muttered something in a sullen voice, practically advertising his contempt for anyone who was a "collector." Probably he felt it was an astute move, politically, to accept Natalie's invitation, but at the same time he wanted to make it publicly clear that he was superior to her.

"What did you say?" Natalie looked distracted.

"Peruvian Inca orchid dog," Mike mumbled.

"That's just wild! Are you going to go with her, Mike? Excuse

me a minute." Natalie's small darting eyes glared furiously past Florence as she looked around the room to see who had already arrived.

As soon as she had moved away, Mike snatched his drink and also wandered off—it was a well-known fact he was interested only in Asian women. His paintings were imitation Chinese calligraphy, black scrawls on gray or white. His reviews always pointed out how simple, pure and powerful his scratches were. The canvases went for almost half a million. Peony made Florence think of a crumpled flower whose petals had been plucked—probably because Mike had spent their entire marriage tormenting her by sleeping with other women.

For a minute Florence stood by the door, looking in. The crowd was growing, the hideous details of the room becoming progressively hidden. Natalie had decorated it in the era of chintz, some seven or so years earlier: the overstuffed furniture was covered with cabbage roses, every end table was heaped with china pug-dogs or wooden English lap desks. The works by Mike Grunlop (there were only two or three, from what Florence remembered) were all upstairs—they had escalated in value only recently.

Over the fireplace hung a portrait of a pop star, an Andy Warhol silk screen—Natalie's father had acquired it back in the late seventies. Nearby were a series of nineteenth-century oil paintings of dogs and opposite these what might have been a bad painting by Sargent of an Indian couple, the man in a pink turban, the woman in a red-and-yellow sari, but which, on closer inspection, proved to be a recent painting by another New York artist whose summer place was nearby.

The house was virtually identical to any one of several hundred others, both in architecture and furnishings, a Levittown of the wealthy. Built by a quite successful young architect in 1982, the size and shape of several barns or, more accurately, an airplane hangar—not completely austere, with half-moon-shaped windows and several silolike appendages to soften the modern appearance—and it was set squarely in the middle of three ex-

tremely expensive acres on the correct side of the highway, that narrow strip of road that fronted the ocean rather than the bay.

The landscaping, including the area around the swimming pool and tennis court, had been done by a popular local landscape-gardening firm—to look at a tree was to look at anywhere between six and ten thousand dollars, to examine a plant was to examine one to two hundred. Perhaps each blade of grass was worth a dollar. There was an underground sprinkler system, and year-round gardeners, locals sent out from the same firm, uprooted impatiens—those tiny, pink, screaming petals lining the drive in late summer—and replaced them with chrysanthemums, bulgy and yellow. Diseased trees, or limbs fallen in a storm, were immediately removed; a dead or sickly plant would be replaced with one more currently in style. This year bright flowers must have been viewed as contemptible—Florence had not known that an entire bank of bedding plants could be filled with such grayish, sage-colored frowzy things. Had the land not been so carefully maintained but been allowed to return to its natural state, it would have been nothing but scruffy pines and grasses. Nowadays there were strict zoning laws against such things.

A man on the far side of the room was looking at her with a disgusted expression. It took her several seconds to realize he was offended by her cigarette smoke. It was supposed to be a party; if he didn't like the smoke, surely he could go outside. What gave such an eggy little creature the right to glare at her, as if no decent woman would light up. She was about to blow smoke in his direction when she realized it was Charlie Twigall and quickly crushed out the cigarette. She tried to distract him, turning her scowl into a smile—it was, however, perhaps just a split second too late; he had seen her contempt.

He peered over at her, wanting to talk to her yet—somehow— to avoid her at the same time. Her peculiar little eyes—narrow gray-blue slits, vaguely alien, perhaps from some ancestor raped by a Mongolian invader, a souvenir flung down across generations and the only feature preventing her from resembling a perfect, bland American doll—were half closed. Her blond hair, the color

of dirty honey, hung down in messy chunks. And with the back of one graceful hand she reached up to rub her nose, a short, perfect little nose like that of a Persian kitten which had been punched in the face. She tried to make herself seductive; still, he didn't approach.

Now the only way she could compensate was to bludgeon her way eagerly across the room and act overexcited, as if she had been hoping to find him from the start. "Thank goodness!" She grabbed his forearm. "I was hoping I'd see you! I don't know anyone here! What's happening? What have you been doing all day?"

"Hi . . . Florence," he said.

It was hard not to rush him. Yet after a pause she suggested he have a drink. "I'm having white wine," she said.

"Oh ... no thank you," he said. "I . . . don't drink."

"I usually just have a glass of wine," she said quickly. "At a party, or dinner. So what have you been up to?"

"I spent the day . . . trying to get them . . . to fix my car," he said.

"And they still haven't fixed it yet?" She spoke in a tone of shocked disbelief.

"It's in a . . . garage . . . the dealership . . . out here. It still . . . smells. They said ... it was fixed . . . but when I went to the SAAB dealership ... I said, 'I can still . . . detect an odor.' And the salesman . . . the man who sold it to me . . . initially . . . got in. And he said, T don't smell . . . anything.' I said, 'You must have an olfactory . . . problem.'"

She laughed appreciatively. "An olfactory problem! That's very good! And what did he say?"

In bliss at her laughter, Charlie averted his eyes from her gaze and stared dreamily at her breasts, as if the breasts had been pleasantly responsive rather than her. "I was extremely . . . angry . . . and I asked if he wouldn't mind . . . sitting in the car. After a few minutes ... of sitting in the car ... he said that they would try . . . again." How old had Natalie said he was? In

his fifties? "Meanwhile ... I ordered a new Lotus . . . but it's on . . . back order for the summer."

"A Lotus! Great!" She wondered just how many others had been down this path before her, looking at him attentively, trying to find some common ground of interest, trying to convince themselves a sexual magnetism or chemistry was possible. If he had been willing to date plain and undemanding women—a high school math teacher, for example, or a veterinary technician—a life for him with another might have been possible. But as far as she knew he wanted only the flashiest, the most glamorous—fashion models, young movie stars—and these women didn't need his money and didn't want his personality.

He was looking at her as if he could tell what she was thinking. Perhaps, like a draft horse that could read minds, break into a trot with just a thought from its rider, he was not as slow-witted as he appeared. "So how are you getting around?" she asked nervously. "Did they give you a good replacement?"

"A what?"

"A replacement while they fix yours."

His face crinkled with disappointment. "Might they . . . have done that?"

"Gosh, I don't know!" she said. "I suppose . . . maybe if you asked."

"I didn't think ... to ask."

"Well, they should have offered."

"I took Mother's . . . car and driver ... for the evening. Mother . . . gave up driving. She says . . . there's too much traffic these days."

"That's true!"

"When she first started . . . coming here ... as a girl ... it wasn't at all . . . fashionable. And it was . . . the country. In those days ... it took five hours ... to get to Southampton."

"Five hours!"

"The roads . . . were single-lane ... or something. Now

. . . it takes almost that long . . . because of the traffic." She laughed merrily. He looked up at her almost suspiciously, as if she might be making fun of him, but then he studied her eager, guileless face and relaxed, pleased with himself. "Do you want to . . . sit outside? It's so . . . nice out, and it might be . . . easier to talk."

"Oh, I would love to! I'll just grab one last glass of wine on the way out."

They sat at one of the little tables for what seemed an interminable length of time, beneath a striped canvas umbrella decorated with hundreds of twinkling lights. "Did anybody see John?" Natalie said, sailing feverishly past.

A waiter circulated announcing that dinner was being served. The line at the buffet already coiled out through the dining room toward the pool. Charlie stood protectively behind her. He was very attentive. This was a good sign, she thought, if she could keep thinking of questions and acting interested in his responses. The man ahead of her turned around. "This line is moving incredibly slowly," he said in an Italian accent. "But I do not mind if it gives me a chance to talk to you."

"Oh yes?" she said nervously. Charlie, who was the same height as she, was already beginning to scowl and jostled her forward slightly, like a bulldog using his stout chest to bully an owner's leg into submission.

"I am Raffaello di Castignolli," the man said, looking down at her with a bemused smile.