“What’s so funny?” Phil asked, his head ducked to hide his acne.
“Private joke,” Sandy told him.
“Give me an E,” Arthur said to Deuce. Behind them, the drummer began a series of rolls designed to cause sections of the beach to break off and slide into the ocean.
“Not so loud,” Sandy’s mother called from the deck. “Peter, tell them not to play so loud.”
“You heard her,” I said.
“Loud? We’re not even plugged in yet,” Deuce complained.
“Sandy,” her mother called, “may I see you a moment, please?”
Sandy went into the house and came out a few minutes later with a tray of canapés. I helped the Dynamiters lay out their extension cords across the lawn and into the house, where I found an outlet behind Mr. Caudell’s unslept-in cot. Then I retraced the whole process because the cord was trailing across the entrance door and I was afraid somebody would break his neck going in or out. What I finally did was unhook the living-room screen at the bottom, and pull the cords in through the window. One of Mr. Caudell’s old cigar butts was on the windowsill. David came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of glasses while I was plugging in the cords.
“The Dynamiters all set?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Looks like we’re in for a musical treat,” he said.
“Oh yes indeed,” I said.
“How’d you like old Short Fuse?”
“Uncommonly hilarious,” I said.
“I never thought he was humorous until today,” David said. “Shows how wrong you can be about a fellow.”
“Oh yes indeed,” I said.
“Where’s Sandy?”
“Out serving.”
“I’d better bring these glasses out.”
We went out together. The deck was fairly crowded now, and more people were coming up the boardwalk toward the house. I kept circulating among the guests, asking them if I might refill their glasses, and then asking them what they were drinking, and then carrying the empty glasses over to Mr. Caudell, who tended bar almost as excellently as he told humorous stories, point of fact. There wasn’t much to do in the beginning, but by four o’clock, when almost everyone had arrived, Sandy and David and I got fairly busy. Mr. Matthews, the island councilman, was there of course, an honored guest whom no one dared call Tom except his wife. (She, in fact, called him Tommy.) Everyone else called him Mr. Matthews, and they endowed the term of address with all the respect due the president of the United States. “Excuse me, Mr. Matthews, but we were wondering what your thoughts were on the proposed bridge to the island,” or, “Excuse me, Mr. Matthews, but I’d like you to meet my sister-in-law, who’s visiting for the weekend,” or, “Excuse me, Mr. Matthews, but did you personally arrange this wonderful sunshine?” Mr. Matthews, meanwhile, could not take his eyes off Sandy, and along about 4:15 he maneuvered her into a corner of the deck and began telling her about his deep-sea fishing exploits the day before (apparently he was a big fisherman, too) while simultaneously trying to cop a feel under the protective cover of the canapé tray. I went over at that point and asked him if he would care for another drink, and then I told Sandy that Mr. and Mrs. Friedman over on the other side of the deck were saying they would like some more shrimp, so she escaped him and blew a kiss at me as she went by, and I brought his glass to Mr. Caudell and said, “Bourbon and water, very heavy on the bourbon,” figuring the sooner we got the old bastard drunk and incapacitated, the sooner Sandy could relax.
David’s parents weren’t at the party because they had left the island the day before to attend a wedding in New Jersey. My parents, however, had arrived at about a quarter to four, and they kept calling me over to introduce me to this or that person, always seeming to take great pride whenever anyone said, “My, how big he is! Did you say he’s only sixteen?” (to which my father invariably replied, “Sixteen going on twenty-four”). Actually, I was not, and am not, a tall person for my age, and I was surprised each time my parents were taken in by such flattery, nor could I figure out why they seemed so thrilled to hear I was big. I performed as expected, though, smiling shyly, and sirring everyone to death, and then offering to serve up some more hors d’oeuvres or carry off a glass that needed replenishing. My father’s glass needed replenishing more than most people’s, but that’s because he’s a connoisseur of good scotch, as he is terribly fond of saying. One night, after having connoisseured a great deal of good scotch, my father came into the bedroom where I was fast asleep. I was ten years old at the time. He woke me up, and then sat by the side of the bed and began crying.
“Oh, Peter,” he kept saying, over and over again. “Oh, Peter.”
I felt very strange that night. As if I was the father and he was the child. Very strange. Just “Oh, Peter,” over and over again.
Every time my father asked for another scotch that afternoon of the cocktail party, my mother threw him a little warning dagger, green eyes snapping off the knife with a quick flick, whap!, right between the shoulder blades. But my father always smiled back at her in a gracious and loving and absolutely sober-seeming way, his gray eyes crinkling and assuring her he would know when he’d had too much, which he rarely knew until he was falling-down drank and telling people once again that he was a connoisseur of good scotch. Everyone agreed that my father was just the most darling sweetest man in the whole world when he got drunk — except my mother. She called him a drunken pissing fool one night three summers ago while I was lying in my bed, without benefit of cuddly toy this time, being all of fourteen. That was the first inkling I had that perhaps my father drank a trifle too much at parties. The second inkling was in the city, when he drove the maid home after a party and nearly killed himself and her by ramming his Porsche into a lamppost. Everyone in the building knew that he had been drunk. I told the kids at school they were all crazy. That was when I was fifteen.
Last summer I was sixteen and serving drinks to guests at Sandy’s mother’s cocktail party, and trying very hard to keep my father from having one too many, which usually meant forty-four too many. I asked David to help keep the sauce away from him, but of course my father was a grown man capable of finding the bar all by himself, which he did with increasing regularity as the afternoon wore on. The Dynamiters, over constant threats of castration by Sandy’s mother, turned up their amplifiers full-blast and nearly blew everyone off the deck, for nothing had they been named so colorfully. Violet began dancing a fat lady’s version of the Frug, and most of the guests joined in, though hardly any of them knew what they were doing. The new dances are all on the upbeat, you see, and most people who learned to dance when my parents did are used to the downbeat, which is the one-and-three beat dominant in the Lindy and all of the other fast dances going all the way back to the Big Apple and the Shag and the Black Bottom, I guess. The Frug and the Monkey and the Watusi and all the other new ones, though, have the stress on the two-and-four beats, and it’s very difficult to explain that to people who were raised with the beat of another generation in their heads. So whereas some of them were very good dancers (Frankie, for example, had an excellent sense of rhythm and style as he danced with Violet, snapping his fingers and tossing his blond locks), they simply weren’t with the new beat; something looked wrong, distorted, off. I kept waiting for someone to say, “Let the kids do it; come on, kids, show us how to do it,” but they had the good grace not to. Besides, the three of us were very busy by that time, plying our way to and from the bar, coming out of the kitchen with hot little cheese patties, and chestnuts wrapped in bacon, and frankfurters with sharp delicatessen mustard, and beautiful tiny shrimp, and toasted little tortillas fresh from the oven, feeding the horde of hungry guests, most of whom seemed to have arrived expecting dinner, even though the invitations (which David and I had helped Sandy and her mother address and mail) had clearly stated Cocktails 3:00–7:00.