Menage (16 page)

“Okay, okay.”

Heather spotted Zoltan near the bar talking to two attractive people: a man whose bald (or shaved?) head was firmly set atop a youthful body sheathed in jeans, Western boots, and a dark, well-tailored jacket; and a young moonfaced woman painted with a slightly garish shade of blush and style of eye treatment. She was wearing one of the two uniforms of the season—cashmere-and-silk top with dark, skinny pants, or else a short black sheath. Suddenly, scanning the room, Heather feared she herself might be the only woman in the entire place wearing a party dress. She blushed.

Zoltan waved the McKays over. He'd been told to take care of them, introduce them around. “Come. Heather, Mack. I want you to meet Wayne Auerbach and …?”

“Ericka Esposito,” said Wayne. “Zoltan Barbu.”

“Oh,” said Ericka, catching her breath, “I've heard of you.”

“These are the McKays, Heather and Mack,” continued Zoltan. “My benefactors.”

Heather took Zoltan's arm in one of hers, Mack's in the other, and announced they had just come from the opera, hoping to explain her dress.
When she looked down she saw Mack's missing cufflinks in Zoltan's cuffs.

Barely glancing at the McKays, Ericka focused her blue gaze on Zoltan. A string of round blue beads around her neck matched her large, almond-shaped eyes. She wore her beige cashmere top tucked into a strikingly slender waistband, with a silk scarf tied in an artful French knot at her throat. In an excited voice she exclaimed like a child, “You're famous, aren't you?”

Wayne coughed; Zoltan puckered his lips into the smirk he wore to denote modesty (what was he to say? Thank you very much? No I'm not? It means nothing? You may be too, someday?) and proceeded with the introductions. “Wayne here, famous New York editor. Mack, famous builder. You should see the Eden we live in that he built.”

“Really? Where?”

“In Wildbloom, New Jersey.”

“New Jersey!” said Ericka, shocked.

“There, there, my dear,” said Wayne, patting her hand, “contrary to recent studies, there is still life beyond Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

“We are exactly seventy minutes from Lincoln Center,” defended Heather.

“And we have a forest in front yard,” added Zoltan, rewarding the McKays with the unexpected “we.”

“And a river,” added Mack.

“And books. Walls and walls of books. Heather has amazing library,” said Zoltan.

Heather beamed for her books.

“Really? Then as soon as you get home you should look up Chekhov's
The Seagull
,” said Wayne. “Or perhaps you remember? Act II opens with Irina and the doctor reading Maupassant. Now pay attention to this, Ericka. ‘It's as inadvisable for people in society to fawn over writers and invite them into their houses as for a corn chandler to raise rats in his granary.' Who should know better than Maupassant or Chekhov?” He grinned like such a rat. “Consider yourself warned.”

Chagrined by Wayne's patronizing remark, Ericka turned to Heather for relief. “Are you a writer too?” she began. During the introductions, the women's occupations, unlike the men's, had not been specified.

“No. Well, yes, if journalism counts. I write a column for
EarthBell
, the online journal? And you? Are you a writer?”

“I wish! I'm a reader, though,” said Ericka, bobbing her head, as the three men drifted off with
their drinks. “I haven't read anything he's written, but now that I've met him I'm going straight out and get his books.”

She paused to pluck a piece of tekka maki from a platter held by a passing blonde in a black tux, and for the first time Ericka's initial registered on Heather. Could she be the E-person Zoltan had met for lunch? Could they be deceiving her with this sham of being strangers? For all his penetrating glances and intimations of intimacy, Zoltan was as secretive about his life as a spy, rendering every woman here a potential rival.

“What's it like living with him?”

Heather laughed a proprietary laugh. “Sometimes it's like having an extra child in the family—although we do have some very unchildlike conversations.”

“Does he show you what he's working on?”

“Not exactly. But sometimes he talks about his writing.”

“If he was living with me, I'd read his manuscripts when he went out. But you won't tell him I said so, will you?” She giggled, crinkling her blue eyes and covering her mouth.

Near a corner table Mack popped raw cashews one at a time into his open mouth and watched the guests circulate among the writers positioned like pillars around the room. He watched and popped
until the bowl was empty. “Here, let me fill that up,” said Rebecca, the hostess, sidling up from behind, reaching for the empty bowl.

“Not for me,” said Mack, “I've had enough.”

“Don't be silly, There's no such thing as enough,” she said, followed by a brazen pause. “So, I hear you've built yourself quite a dream palace. Zoltan says it's a writer's paradise. Makes me wonder if we shouldn't have been less rigid about leaving the city.”

“You've got a great place here. Must be a hundred people, and it doesn't even feel crowded.”

“Yes, it's a lot of space for the city, but I'll bet this whole loft would fit into a little corner of your flower garden. Am I right?”

“Oh, I don't know. You can't really compare a loft like this with a house in the country. Most of our garden, as you call it, is Ha-Ha Land.”

“Ha-Ha Land?”

“Wilderness owned by the state.”

“All the better. Taxes will pay the gardener. I guess everything is a trade-off. We've got twenty-four-hour delis in every direction, while you've got nature. And Zoltan.”

Mack laughed. “You think Zoltan wouldn't prefer to live in the city if someone offered him a place?”

“Oh, I know he wouldn't. All the frenetic fuss of city life is just what he doesn't want right now. He's desperate to write, and he says your place is ideal, a private artists' colony. He told me that if he can't write there he'll give up trying.”

Mack wondered why, in that case, he was so seldom home nowadays.

“We can't get over how nice you were to take him in, flat broke, practically a stranger,” continued Rebecca. “For someone with his talent for getting into impossible situations, he finally seems to be doing something right. Personally, I think you're probably the best thing that could have happened to him—a stable family situation. I want you to know I am personally very grateful to you.”

Mack thought it odd that Zoltan had hardly ever mentioned this woman who spoke as if she owned him. She began to seem less fat and more voluptuous; he would have to read her stuff.

“I was thinking of giving a party in honor of Zoltan's return to New York, but since he's described your estate, some of us were hoping that maybe you'd want to have the party instead. Do you think I'm naughty to suggest it?”

Something in the way she said the word “naughty” gave Mack the distinct impression that she was
suggesting more than he could make out. Heather called him naive about women, “a pushover.” He remembered other parties where women had asked him things he didn't know how to answer, and Heather, ever alert, had had to interpret for him afterward. “No harm in suggesting,” said Mack. He thought he was saying it noncommittally, but the particular laugh Rebecca tossed at him, her head cocked coquettishly, her lips parted to reveal the iridescent teeth, told him he might have conveyed something more. She took his arm. “Come. We're both empty. Let's fill up together.”

Over Ericka's shoulder Heather watched plump Rebecca pirouette before Mack, then steer him to the bar. Women liked her husband—friendly, generous. He was the man who remembered your birthday, your drink, your favorite song, your best color, the man who offered to take you up in a plane or help you with onerous tasks like packing and moving, who had things shipped for you and got things wholesale, who picked up the check, who drove home anyone who asked, the farther out of his way, the better. Heather knew these qualities were simply pufferies of ego and said nothing, but she took note, kept track. If Ericka had to be watched, then so did Rebecca.

Orville Lask, the guest of honor, clasped both of Zoltan's hands. They had first met at a writer's conference in Santa Fe and then wound up sharing an office at the New School. He was small and sickly, with a perpetual sniffle, a high voice, flat feet, and rimless glasses, whose career had been devoted to developing in print an image of himself as big and tough, as his enemies were quick to point out. He did not resemble the picture on his book jackets. Before he and Zoltan had become office mates, he had twice written pointed criticisms of Zoltan: once for his long silence and once for his “sententious” style; but today he could afford to be chummy, not only because he had excluded those particular essays from his new collection, but also because this was his book party and, unlike Zoltan and all the other writers present who weren't publishing anything this season, he was relieved of writing worries while he was occupied promoting his new book and a few grace months more.

“Rebecca tells me,” said Orville to Zoltan, “you've got yourself another setup. Rich patron, dream house in the country. Son of a bitch, you always did know how to pull off deals, didn't you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don't be coy. You know what I mean. Hollywood contracts, free pad in the Village, now this. Bet you're banging the wife, too?”

“Be careful,” said Zoltan, “she's standing right there. And, no.”

“Where?”

“There. In the green dress.”

“Damn! Is there some foundation to apply to?”

Zoltan smiled.

“When you get tired of country living, man, introduce me, okay?”

A waiter carrying a platter of puff pastries topped with crabmeat caught Zoltan's attention. He bowed slightly before following the waiter, who was now a few steps away. He snatched up a canapé and slipped it whole into his mouth. He was just settling in to chew it when a stranger pronounced his name.

“Zoltan Barbu?”

Annoyed to be interrupted before having a chance to fully savor the canapé, Zoltan examined the person's face: stuck-out ears, moist, bulbous eyes, a high forehead that would have excited a phrenologist, a stringy neck circled by a bow tie.

“Tony Agasian,” said the man, extending his hand. “I thought that might be you. We met years ago at
the Aspen Institute, on a panel on Writers in Exile? Remember? But what are you doing here? I thought you were in California writing for the movies.”

Zoltan swallowed. As he was systematically searching his memory bank, Agasian sprang on him the Forbidden Question: “So what are you working on?”

Zoltan was aghast at such a breach of etiquette. Writers had been known to choke on their food or spill their drinks in face of such a blatant demand to justify themselves. Those who could brag of a recent success or a book in press were exempt, but everyone else felt assaulted by the intrusion. Even the phenomenally prolific John Updike once confessed in print to resenting it; how much more so the bulk of writers who exerted their maximum labors to produce one or two books in a decade. On the early advice of a friend, Zoltan had prepared a response to the Question, especially when asked by a layman—which presumably described this meddling Mr. Agasian. Either that or, if he too was a writer, he was perhaps a sufferer of Asperger's syndrome, a major symptom of which was a lack of empathy and social grace.

Before Zoltan could deliver his rehearsed response—I am currently working on a very long
project that I am not at liberty to discuss—his interlocutor's cell phone began playing Beethoven, and he gestured to be excused.

With relief, Zoltan moved quickly away. The decibel level of the room was high enough to give him a headache; big parties always brought back to him the inescapable noise of prison. As he made his way toward an open window, he spotted a clutch of people who had been at MacDowell with him and Rebecca. (Did she stay in touch with everyone she ever knew? Was that the secret of her social success?) Among them was Sophie something, an up-and-coming poet who had been working on her second collection. At the first composers' recital in the colony library she had come on to him by inviting him to visit her studio for “tea,” but the timing was wrong; Rebecca had two more weeks left at the colony, and by the time she was gone Sophie had hooked up with someone else. Tonight she looked better than he remembered. He quickly searched the room for Heather before approaching her but was stopped abruptly by the insistent ring of silver spoon on crystal goblet, wielded by Rebecca, who thwarted him once again.

“People! People! I have an announcement,” she shouted, flanked by her tall, hunky neurosurgeon of a husband.

People began exchanging signs. Zoltan swiveled in his tracks and urgently searched for Mack, to signal his desire to leave.

“I am so glad that you could all join us tonight to tip a glass to our guest of honor, my dear friend Orville Lask, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals, who has kindly agreed to grace us with a brief reading from his new book, published just last week.”

There was a sudden scurry of bodies as some claimed choice seats on one of the leather sofas or grabbed a chair, while others began inching toward the coatroom.

Rebecca continued: “This book is bound to make an important contribution to the cultural life of our city, in fact the debates have already begun, as you will see in next week's
Times Book Review
 … Yes! Isn't it wonderful? A page four review! And no, I did not write it; we are far too good friends. This is the
Times
, not
n+1
.” (Laughter.) “But don't take my word for it, you will see for yourself. Now, if you'd like to refresh your drinks before Orville begins …”