Ordinary People (8 page)

“Come here, you gorgeous thing,” Ed Genthe says, reaching up to take Beth’s hand and pull her down beside him on the couch.

“Edward, Edward,” she says, laughing. “Control yourself!”

Gracious as always, but Cal knows she doesn’t like this. She is wearing a white-knit pantsuit, a long-sleeved black blouse, her hair tied back from her face with a black silk scarf. She
does
look gorgeous.

“Cal, what would you like?” Phil asks. “Scotch?”

“Yes, please. Just a short one.”

“Short on water?” Phil laughs. “Short on scotch?”

“Hey, c’mon, it’s a party,” Ed says. “Hey, somebody, how about a Dewar’s ad on this guy? What’s the latest book you’ve read, Cal?”

“How about
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
the first hundred pages,” Beth says. “Four times. Will that do?”

Call says, “Not funny.”

“How about a quote?”

He thinks a minute. “ ‘The only way to deal with absurdity is to recognize it.’ How’s that?”

“Pretty good. That yours?”

“Hell, no. You think anybody uses his own quotes in those things? Who talks like that?”

Sara comes in from the kitchen, a tray of cocktail snacks in her hands, all gracefully arranged in rows: sausages and mushrooms in tiny, fluted pastry shells; crusty little pillows bulging with some unidentified, gooey filling; hot puffs of cheese-flavored dough. She passes the tray around. “Come on, take lots.”

“Cal, you playing in the Lawyers’ Invitational next spring?” Mac Kline drifts over to where he is standing, beside the mantel.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I posted enough scores this year to qualify.”

“You ever won that thing?” Ed asks.

“Are you kidding? Too many lawyers play golf.”

“Too many lawyers play golf is right,” Phil says. “Try to get on that course on a Thursday afternoon. Hey, that reminds me—” and he is off on another crooked-lawyer joke.

Sara jockeys in between Cal and Mac with the tray. Her breasts swell provocatively from the V of the gown. He studies the tray in stern concentration. To raise his eyes a mere three inches would be to give her what she wants; she would like to catch him sneaking a look, he can feel it, and he would do it, too, if it were not for a frenetic-butterfly manner that she radiates. It grates on his nerves. She has an endless supply of nervous energy. Tiny women are often like this, he thinks. They never run down. They overwhelm him, make him feel lumpish and stupid. Too large. He glances at his wife, who is not that type at all. She is cool and quiet and relaxed at parties. He would prefer sitting next to her, talking to her. That is often the case with him. He likes women, but not nervous women. He has tried to like Sara and, at times, he has almost succeeded. So long as he doesn’t have to see her often. No, he would not like to be married to a damned butterfly.

“I saw Conrad the other day,” Marty Genthe says. “Uptown. It’s nice that someone that age still believes in courtesy. Most of Donald’s friends remember my face, but they can’t be bothered putting a name to it. It’s just, ‘Oh, hi there.’ ”

And suddenly, everyone is listening.

“How is he doing?” Ann asks. “I heard the boys say he’s swimming.”

“He’s fine,” Beth says. There is something final and forbidding about the answer, but Sara doesn’t hear it. They are still newcomers here, and she wants to be polite. Inquiring after people’s children is accepted form everywhere.

She asks, “Has he been sick?”

“He was sick for a while,” Beth says. “He’s fine, now.”

“Another drink, Cal?”

“Yes, sure. Is there time before dinner?” He crosses to the bar, the skin on the backs of his hands tightening, as if from an electric shock.

 

 

 

He sits between Ann Kline and Marty Genthe at the table, with Sara across from him.

“Sara, what a meall” Marty says. “This is a tough act to follow, dear.”

“Oh, no,” she protests, “it’s just plain food. I can’t cook fancy, honestly. No, Beth is the artist in that department. I don’t know how she does it!”

“The cheese sauce is great,” Ed says. “Marty, get that recipe, will you?”

After the main course comes strawberry mousse; it is flawless. Then the children are served up. They enter the living room on cue, to say their good nights. A command performance for all. The guests are politely impressed. Cal cannot help being touched at their grave good manners. All four of them are beautiful children, having surpassed their models. No mere reproductions, but stunning originals. Their handsome, dark-eyed fourteen-year-old daughter supervises her younger brother and sister, while the eldest boy stands, shy and solemn, in the background. He reminds Cal of Conrad at that age. So earnest, so polite. Adults and children beam awkwardly at one another until Sara’s motherly pride is satisfied, and they are dismissed.

“Good-looking children,” Cal says.

“Thank you.” She beams him a grateful smile.

In knots of two and three, they sit in the living room. Beth and Mac are in one corner, consulting earnestly about books, he is sure. Mac Kline is an English professor at Lake Forest College, who loves to talk about his subject. Beth would talk books to a deaf person, needing nothing more than an encouraging nod, now and then. He catches her eye and she smiles at him. Across the room, Ann and Phil and Ed are horsing around, Ed giving a lecture on the perfect tennis serve to Ann and Phil, the inept, giggling pupils. Cal sits on the couch between Sara and Marty, feeling pleasantly high, and full.

“Great dinner,” he tells Sara.

“Thank you.”

“When are we going to play some bridge, Cal?” Marty asks.

“Yeah, we ought to do that.”

He has an arm around each of them, and has to disengage one from Sara to sip his drink.

“I mean, now that you two are social, again,” Marty says. “How are things, really? Going all right?”

Marty is looking at him. A brittle, attractive redhead, she lost out on beauty through the accident of a razor-planed, imperious nose. One New Year’s Eve, he remembers kissing her. A long, warm embrace. He was drunk. No one said anything about it afterward, not Ed, or Beth. He was surprised. He had felt guilty and embarrassed, he would have said something, he was sure, if it had been Ed and Beth.

“Yes, pretty well,” he says. “Only I miss the kids who used to hang around. What’s Don doing these days? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Oh, the same old things. Girls. Swimming. You know how boys are, they don’t tell you anything unless you back them into a corner and
bulldoze
it out of them.” She laughs. “To tell you the truth, Donald says Conrad isn’t very—isn’t as friendly as he used to be. I suppose he feels a little, I don’t know, self-conscious—”

“About what?” Sara asks. “I’m sorry, maybe it’s none of my business.”

“No, it’s nothing,” Cal says. He is suddenly uncomfortable. The drinks have made him fuzzy. He shouldn’t have said that, about the boys not coming around. It sounded as if he were annoyed; put her on the defensive.

“Donald says he doesn’t come to practice on Tuesdays and Fridays.”

“No. There’s a doctor in Evanston. He sees him twice a week.”

“You mean he’s still having problems?”

“Not exactly. It’s somebody to talk to,” he says lamely. He looks down into his glass. This was not the direction he had intended the conversation to take. Sara is laughing loudly and elaborately at the antics of her husband, across the room, having decided not to get into this, after all. A wise decision. He wishes he had done the same.

“Cal, we’ve got to go,” Beth calls across to him. “It’s late.”

“Hey, what d’you mean? Party’s just getting off the ground!” Phil protests as they move toward the hall. “Okay, you’ll be sorry! We’ll talk about you!”

Somehow they are into their coats and out the door, and the night is cool and silent all around them, coolness against his cheeks, and silence as he opens the car door for her, closes it, walks around behind the car, gets in under the wheel.

“Do you want me to drive?” she asks.

He glances at her, surprised. “I’m not drunk,” he says. “Do you think I’m drunk?”

“I don’t know, are you?”

So she had heard it. “No,” he says. “No, I am not, I promise.” Seeking to lead her away from it, he laughs. “The thing you can’t forgive about Phil Murray is that he’s a goddamn, crashing bore. One more crooked-lawyer joke and I start in on my pesky-insurance-salesman routine—”

“I want to tell you something,” she says. “You drink too much at parties.”

“Okay.”

“She pumped you,” she says. “And you let her do it. You let her drag that stuff out of you, and in front of someone who doesn’t even know us.”

“My sentiments exactly.” He nods, hoping to head her off, hoping she is not really angry, because he doesn’t feel drunk tonight, just good and high; he would like to keep feeling good a while longer. He reaches over and pats her knee with clumsy affection.

“Why did you tell her he was seeing a psychiatrist?”

“Look, some people consider that a status symbol,” he says, “right up there with going to Europe.”

“I don’t. And I thought your blurting it out like that was in the worst possible taste.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not to mention a violation of privacy.”

“Whose privacy?” he asks. “Whose privacy did I violate?”

She does not answer.

 

 

 

The light is on in Conrad’s room. He is asleep, lying on his back, his mouth open and relaxed. He sweats heavily in his sleep. His hair is damp, clinging slickly to his forehead, curling against his neck. A book lies face-down and open on the bed.
U.S. History: Constitution to Present Day.
Cal picks up the book and closes it quietly. He sets it on the night stand. Reaching for the switch on the lamp, he looks at Conrad. His left arm is shoved underneath the pillow. His right is outstretched; the hand with its strong, square fingers curved protectively over the palm is motionless. Still biting his nails. A nervous habit. So what? Lots of people do it; he himself used to do it when he was that age.

He looks, really looks, this time at the thin, vertical scar that extends up the inside of the arm, above the palm. More than two inches long, ridged, a gray-pink line. “He meant business,” the intern told him in the ambulance. “Horizontal cuts, the blood clots. It takes a lot longer. You were damn lucky to catch him.”

High achievers, Dr. Crawford told him, set themselves impossible standards. They have this need to perform well, to look good; they suffer excessive guilt over failure. He had groped to understand. “But what has he failed at? He’s never failed at anything!”

Conrad’s head moves on the pillow, and Cal snaps off the light, not allowing himself to look again at the scar, not wanting to be guilty of any more violations of privacy.
Listen,
he prays,
let the exams be easy. Don’t let him feel he is failing.

Beth is awake, waiting for him, her hair loose about her shoulders. She reaches up to put her arms around him, all tawny, smooth skin, those gray eyes with thick lashes, silent and insistent. She leads tonight, and he follows, moving swiftly down that dark river, everything floating, melting, perfect, and complete. Afterward, she slides away from him, and her hair, soft and furry against his shoulder, smells sweet and fresh, like wood fern. He buries his face in it, still hungry. “Let me hold you awhile.”

But she is tired. She curls away from him; pushes him gently from her, in sleep. He rolls to his back, hands under his head, staring upward. Other Saturday nights, lying, waiting after sex, for the comforting sound of a car door slamming, and whispers of laughter under the windows. And earlier, at the beginning of the evenings, the endless jokes, the hassles over clothes
Hey, that’s my sweater! The hell it is, possession is
—
hey, Dad, what’s possession? Possession is gonna get your head broke
—
now give it to me!
And sounds of a struggle and fiendish, sadistic laughter
Take it, fag, it’s a fag sweater, you’ll look great in it
and more laughter You
oughta know!

He will not be able to sleep tonight for hours; another side effect of drinking too much. It condemns him to wakefulness. Without expectation of anything—of a car, of whispers or laughter. Resigned, he keeps watch and continues to listen.

A surprise quiz in trig. He takes his seat, the mimeographed sheet in his hand, his stomach pulling nervously. He wills himself not to panic.
I know this stuff. I know it.

Across the aisle from him sits Suzanne Mosely. They have known each other since grade school. What is she doing in here? She must have flunked it, too, last year. He watches as her pudgy fingers grip the pencil. Her brow is furrowed; her mouth pinched. It makes him ashamed of his own fear. She has always had trouble in math, could take it from now until the world ends and it won’t help. He looks up. Mr. Simmons is staring at him. Guiltily he looks down at his paper.

Halfway through the test his pencil point snaps. He straightens up; lets out his breath with a sigh. Not hard. It is not as hard as he thought it would be. His back is tense, and he rubs it, stretching. He goes to get another pencil from the box on Simmons’ desk. No pencil-sharpening during a quiz, that is one of the unbreakable rules.

Simmons looks up. “Everything okay, Jarrett?”

He nods, returning to his seat. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Suzanne’s paper. Cross-outs everywhere. The poor kid. He knows what that feels like. What did she take this course for anyway?

There are five minutes left in the hour when he hands in his paper. He leaves the room, taking up a spot against the lockers as he waits for the bell to ring. Down the hall, the smoking lounge overflows with people let out of class early. He does not go down there. He has nothing to say to anyone. Suzanne comes out and leans against the wall. Her head is bent over her books. She is wearing a dark skirt, a brown sweater that’s too tight. God, she’s so fat. Has she always been that fat? He doesn’t remember it. Hunched over, huddled against the wall, her hair stiff, like brown cotton candy. A lion’s mane around her face. Pretty. She was pretty in junior high.