Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else’s lust. “I think I need a drink,” she said. The kids were swimming.
“Don’t expect me to buy you a drink,” he said.
Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passersby? Who told you that?
When they left La Caribe, its crab claws of land extending into the blue bay, she was glad. Staying there she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act naturaclass="underline" natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it all in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But for now she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who as he aged stoically and carried on regardless would come scarcely to recall — was it past even imagining? — that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.
FOES
Bake McKurty was no stranger to the parasitic mixings of art and commerce, literature and the rich. “Hedge funds and haiku!” he’d exclaimed to his wife, Suzy — and yet such mixings seemed never to lose their swift, stark capacity to appall. The hustle for money met the hustle for virtue and everyone washed their hands in one another. It was a common enough thing, though was there ever enough soap to cut the grease? “That’s what your lemon is for,” Suzy would say, pointing at the twist in the martini he was not supposed to drink. Still, now and again, looking up between the crabmeat cocktail and the palate-cleansing sorbet sprinkled with fennel pollen dust, he felt shocked by the whole thing.
“It’s symbiosis,” said Suzy as they were getting dressed to go. “Think of it being like the krill that grooms and sees for the rock shrimp. Or that bird who picks out the bugs from the rhino hide.”
“So we’re the Seeing Eye krill,” he said.
“Yes!”
“We’re the oxpeckers.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to say that,” she said.
“A lot in this world has to do with bugs,” said Bake.
“Food,” she said. “A lot has to do with grooming and food. Are you wearing that?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Lose the— What are those?”
“Suspenders.”
“They’re red.”
“OK, OK. But you know, I never do that to you.”
“I’m the sighted krill,” she said. She smoothed his hair, which had recently become a weird pom-pom of silver and maize.
“And I’m the blind boy?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to say that either.”
“You look good. Whatever it is your wearing. See? I say nice things to you!”
“It’s a sarong.” She tugged it up a little.
He ripped off the suspenders. “Well, here. You may need these.”
They were staying at a Georgetown B and B to save a little money, a town house where the owner-couple left warm cookies at everyone’s door at night to compensate for their loud toddler, who by 6:00 a.m. was barking orders and pointing at her mother to fetch this toy or that. After a day of sightseeing — all those museums prepaid with income taxes; it was like being philanthropists come to investigate the look of their own money — Suzy and Bake were already tired. They hailed a cab and recited the address of the event to the cabbie, who nodded and said ominously, “Oh, yes.”
Never mind good taste, here at this gala even the usual diaphanous veneer of seemliness had been tossed to the trade winds: the fund-raiser for Lunar Lines Literary Journal—3LJ as it was known to its readers and contributors; “the magazine” as it was known to its staff, as if there were no others — was being held in a bank. Or at least a former bank, one which had recently gone under, and which now sold squid-ink orecchiette beneath its vaulted ceilings, and martinis and grenache from its former teller stations. Wood and marble were preserved and buffed, glass barriers removed. In the evening light the place was golden. It was cute! So what if subtle boundaries of occasion and transaction had been given up on? So what if this were a mausoleum of greed now danced in by all? He and Suzy had been invited. The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.
The invitation, however, to this D.C. fund-raiser seemed to Bake a bit of a fluke, since Man on a Quarter, Man on a Horse, Bake’s ill-selling biography of George Washington (in a year when everyone was obsessed with Lincoln, even the efficiently conflated Presidents’ Day had failed to help his book sales), would appear to fit him to neither category of guest. But Lunar Lines, whose offices were in Washington, had excerpted a portion of it, as if in celebration of their town. And so Bake was sent two free dinner tickets. He would have to rub elbows and charm the other guests — the rich, the magazine’s donors, who would be paying five hundred dollars a plate. Could he manage that? Could he be the court jester, the town clown, the token writer at the table? “Absolutely,” he lied.
Why had he come? Though it was named after the man he had devoted years of affectionate thought and research to, he had never liked this city. An ostentatious company town built on a marsh — a mammoth, pompous chit-ridden motor vehicle department run by gladiators. High-level clerks on the take, their heads full of unsound sound bites and falsified recall. “Yes! How are you? It’s been a while.” Not even “It’s been a long time,” because who knew? Perhaps it hadn’t been. Better just to say, neutrally, “It’s been a while,” and no one could argue.
He clung to Suzy. “At least the wine is good,” she said. They weren’t really mingling. They were doing something that was more like a stiff list, a drift and sway. The acoustics made it impossible to speak normally, and so they found themselves shouting inanities, then just falling mute. The noise of the place was deafening as a sea, and the booming heartiness of others seemed to drown all possibility of happiness for themselves.