It was quiet walking along the road — so quiet that she could hear Angela swallowing vodka.
Eight
JOHN JOEL and Mary had an easy life. It was too easy, and now both of them were slipping and sliding. Mary had been a bright child, almost all A’s in elementary school, but when she got to junior high, she stopped trying. He could actually remember Louise’s saying that it was a phase. He noticed it in her friends, too — that nearly manic combing of the hair, the chewing gum and talk about music. They disparaged everything, and their talk was full of clichés and code words. He did not envy Mary’s summer school teacher. Mary and John Joel wanted only to avoid things. He had tried to find out what she thought of Vanity Fair. “I’ve been reading it,” Mary had said, sulkily. “I read the damn books. Don’t sweat it.” He had tried not to be antagonistic when he asked.
They had gone to the Chinese restaurant, and Louise tried to get them to order sautéed vegetables along with the rest of their food. He tried to care that it was a good idea, but finally he said, to keep peace, that there were a lot of vegetables in the dishes anyway. Louise stopped talking. He watched out of the corner of his eye as John Joel gnawed on one sparerib after another, thinking, all the time, what a pleasure it was to eat with Nina. He tried again: “Did you feel sorry for Dobbin, did you feel happy that he became a hero?” “I don’t know,” Mary said. “He’s like something out of a soap opera. John Wayne probably would have liked him. If he’d been bloodthirsty on top of being such a goody-goody.” So he switched the conversation to John Wayne, wondering if one other family in America could possibly be having such a Saturday night discussion. He said that he didn’t forgive John Wayne for his position on the Vietnam war, sure that Mary would agree with that. She shrugged. “He’s dead,” she said. As they ate in silence, he noticed that the Muzak was playing “Eleanor Rigby,” followed by “You’re So Vain.”
“Do you like Carly Simon?” he asked Mary.
“God,” Mary sighed. “I feel like I’m at dinner at Angela’s house. Her father is always trying to find out what everybody’s thinking, like we’re all plotting or something. He says that at dinner you ought to fill your head with ideas the way you fill your stomach with food. He actually said that.”
“I just asked if you liked a singer.”
“James Taylor looks really wasted,” Mary said, picking up a sparerib. “I don’t know.”
“If you don’t like eating at Angela’s, why don’t you eat home more often?” Louise said.
“What is this?” Mary said. “You want me to talk, I talked. I said something, and everybody’s jumping on me.” She turned to John. “How was work this week? You say something.”
He hadn’t known what to say. Perhaps: I’ve got to tell you about my lover’s dope-dealer friend who’s got a tongue as fast as a race car at the Indianapolis 500. That’s because he’s on speed, of course. The grass she bought was from Cuernavaca. Very good stuff. I got stoned before I drove out to Rye, and what do you think I saw there? Grandma, drunk as a skunk, out on the lounge all wrapped in mosquito netting. So I went into the house and called Nina — that’s my lover — and I was half laughing and half crying, and I kept saying to her that she had to help me, but she was stoned and sad that I was gone, and it wasn’t a very good call.
“Why do you always have something sarcastic to say about my going to work? Who do you think supports you? It’s not that unusual to have a father who goes to work, Mary.”
“Angela sleeps with people,” John Joel said.
“What did you say?” Louise said.
John Joel lowered his eyes, but he said it again.
“I don’t even believe this,” Mary said. “Like, she’s my best friend, and I’m supposed to sit here and listen to this from the ten-year-old? I don’t even believe that he lies the way he does.”
“Why did you say that?” John said.
“Because we were talking,” John Joel said.
“You and Angela were talking?”
“No. The four of us. She said something about Angela’s father, didn’t she? So I just said something.”
“You are so out of it,” Mary said.
“Oh yeah? Parker’s cousin works at the garage and he’s got a car behind his shed he’s restoring, and the door was unlocked, and Angela and Toddie was in there.”
“Were in there,” John said.
“I don’t know if she does or she doesn’t,” Louise said, “but this isn’t what I want to discuss at dinner on Saturday night. Please.”
“Everybody has to talk about just what you want to talk about,” John Joel said.
“You should be nice to us and not speak that way,” John said to John Joel. “Your braces are going to set us back two thousand bucks.”
“I don’t even want them.”
“So what,” Mary said. “You have to have them.” She smirked at John Joel.
Louise turned to John. “Don’t speak to him kiddingly about showing respect for his parents. He should speak to us nicely, damn it, braces or no braces.”
“Everything’s fucked,” he said. “What does it matter the way things should be?”
Louise put her napkin on the table. She refolded it in its original triangle shape. He did not know that Louise knew how to make a napkin cone-shaped. She fitted the napkin into her full water glass, got her purse from the floor and walked out of the restaurant.
“Jesus,” Mary muttered.
“You started it,” John Joel said.
There were little dishes on the table: mustard, duck sauce, dim sum dishes with bits of rice cake, an empty dish where the spareribs had been. And leftover food: a little pork ball in a dark brown sauce, chopped shrimp on lettuce, and the stuffed duck’s foot, which he had ordered out of curiosity. It had indeed been a duck’s foot, with a small ball of something in the claw. The industrious, frugal Chinese. No Chinese would ever be having such a dinner. And this had been an attempt to do something right, instead of taking them on a picnic.
“What do you want to talk about now, brilliant?” Mary said to John Joel.
“Pissball,” John Joel said.
“Maybe if this is the way things are going I should get a polyester leisure suit and be an asshole,” John said. “I feel, when I am with my loving family, that everybody is conspiring to beat me down.”
Mary sighed. John Joel reached for the last pork ball.
“No one is going to see where Louise went,” John said. He was not asking a question, just stating a fact.
“So what could I do?” Mary said.
“No one cares,” John said.
“So?” Mary said. “What about you?”
“I care,” he said, “but I have to pay the bill. I don’t work all week — that unusual pastime of mine — for nothing. I am here to pay the bill. One book I remember very well from college has a character in it who behaves well. A novel by Ernest Hemingway, which I’m sure you’ll never read. The Sun Also Rises. A woman runs away with some other man, but the hero pays the bills. That’s what I do: I work, and I pay the bill. I also care about where my wife is. Not as much as I would have cared years ago, but enough so that I will summon the waiter and go out and try futilely to find her. Don’t let me interrupt your meal. If I do find her, I can stand outside with her while she screams until you’re done.”