“It is different now,” Betty said to Peter. “The competition is fierce. Public schools are much worse and also there are all these well-to-do parents who’ve been told that early education is the most important of all.”
“It’s all bullshit,” Tony said. He lowered his voice. “Paula told me Hunter is great because it’s more real than going to a private school. More real? Everybody in the class has an IQ of one fifty or better. That’s real? When those kids go out into the world and work for people whose IQs are in two figures, we’ll see how well prepared they are. More real. Sure — the world is loaded with black, Hispanic, Oriental, and Jewish kids with IQs of one eighty.”
“I guess your boy didn’t get in, huh, Tony?” Garth said, and roared with laughter to cover the insult.
“Yeah,” Tony said effortlessly. “Now he’ll have to become an actor.”
Diane burst out laughing, more at the unexpectedness of Tony’s return of serve — since he was a screenwriter, she assumed he’d let any abuse go unanswered by a big star like Garth. Delilah and Amy Howell both scanned Diane after her guffaw, noticing her for the first time. Delilah gave Diane a thorough going-over, up and down. “You’re a lawyer, I bet,” Delilah said to Diane in a sluggish tone. Amy smiled reflexively.
“How did you know?” Betty said, delighted, missing the implied insult, her face open with wonder, a child delighted by a card trick.
“Yes, I am,” Diane said.
“Did you see Legal Eagles?” Garth asked.
“What’s that?” Diane asked.
Garth was stunned. Tony laughed, deeply and resonantly. “Grown-ups who don’t work in the movie business don’t go to the movies,” Tony said to Garth. “They don’t even think about movies.”
“It must be hard having a kid and being a lawyer,” Delilah said to Diane. “Do you work, Betty?”
“Not anymore. Our housekeeper left suddenly—”
“Suddenly last summer,” Tony mumbled.
“—and I decided to quit and stay home.”
“How do you like it?” Amy Howell asked. “I couldn’t stand just being home. I need to work.”
“I like it fine,” Betty said primly, a hint of self-righteousness in the tone.
“How about you?” Delilah asked Diane, her voice tough, almost like a street kid making a dare.
Diane, for a moment, couldn’t think, looking at this famous face from her youth, from when she used to smoke grass, protest the war, dream of arguing in front of the Supreme Court, and lived, in general, convinced that she would never imitate the conventions of her parents’ generation. If, the first time she had heard Delilah sing, someone had shown Diane her future — married to a respectable, balding Peter, a son home with a baby-sitter, working to defend a major American corporation from its disabled employees, her stomach still puffy from childbirth, the whole dreary list of things and decay that had changed her, changed her utterly from a tough young girl eager for life to a cautious aging woman fighting to hang on to what she had — if someone had abruptly presented the future, skipping all the gradations of the change, using her first sight of televised-Delilah to now in-the-flesh-Delilah, Diane would have screamed, fled college, run to the countryside, and, like some of her friends, raised vegetables, let her armpit hair grow, and scoffed at the ones who stayed.
I’m thirty-six years old, she thought; in four years I’ll be forty. I am closer to death than I have come from birth. My life has hardened in the mold. I am riding an express to the glassy-eyed, hearing-impaired, bladder-weary terminus. I am thirty-six years old and my growing is over.
“Diane?” Peter said, looking at his arm.
Diane followed his glance: she had a desperate grip on his sleeve. All Diane could see, for the moment, was the tweed fabric bunched up in her fingers.
“Are you all right?” Peter asked.
“I feel a little faint,” she managed to answer. “I’d better—” She stumbled out of the noisy room, back to the foyer. Paula was still there with her children, surrounded by a half dozen new arrivals. Peter and Betty followed Diane, Peter taking her arm, Betty appearing in front, peering at her.
“You look green,” Betty said.
“Hey!” said Patty Lane, the celebrity author, tapping Betty on the shoulder. “No hello?”
Betty glanced back at Patty. “Oh. Hi. My friend — have you met? — she’s not feeling well—”
Diane looked at Patty’s beautiful body, displayed by tight black stretch pants and a loose pink blouse unbuttoned to reveal the tops of her black bra, and she thought: all these women are more famous and more beautiful than I am.
Patty’s pleasant party smile evaporated, her big green eyes widening. “We’re fainting,” Patty announced, and pushed Peter away, taking Diane’s other arm. “There’s a bedroom this way,” Patty said.
The two women half carried Diane to a huge sedate bedroom, all the fabric beige and the furniture made of light, glistening wood. Patty shut the door in Peter’s startled face, as if he were a molester.
“That’s her husband,” Betty explained.
“Who cares?” Patty answered.
“Diane, this is Patty Lane—”
“I know,” Diane said. Diane had read and enjoyed Lane’s two novels of distressed young womanhood in New York, pitying and envying the main characters’ woes.
“This is your friend Diane!” Patty said with recognition. “Didn’t you just have a baby? Should you be out in a mob scene like this?”
Betty laughed. “She had the baby six months ago.”
“Oh,” said Patty. “So? I’d still be in bed.” There was a knock on the door. “If it’s your husband, do you want him?” Patty asked.
Diane nodded, although she felt much better alone with the two women. Younger, at ease, free from the world’s intense demands.
Patty opened the door. But it wasn’t Peter. Paula Kramer bustled in, asking questions, suggesting remedies, mentioning Stoppard’s concern that Diane rejoin the party to talk with the Gedhorn people. At the mention of the clients, Diane stiffened. Her anxiety at the chaos of the universe focused into tension at the demands of the present. Diane declined Patty’s and Betty’s suggestion that she rest for a while and instead returned to the party, ignoring Tony, Peter, and the group that she had embarrassed herself in front of, joining, instead, Stoppard and the Gedhorn people.
Diane felt sure of herself the moment she was back in her element, making fun of the way opposing counsel had deposed the vice-presidents, bolstering Stoppard’s ego as he became expansive and predicted victory.
Once they all went to the buffet, she was split from the Gedhorn people and found herself beside Delilah. The star winked at her and said, “You feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Diane answered. “I’m not getting enough sleep.”
“Does your husband help with the baby?” Delilah asked, but in a tone that implied she already knew the answer.
“Of course not,” Diane answered, relieved the secret was out. Yes, I am a failure as a feminist.
Betty, Patty, and Paula waved her over to a corner of the dining room and Diane ate ravenously while they talked. Paula continued to praise Hunter, perversely egged on by Betty, and in the cab ride home, the words of the mothers about getting their children into a good school stayed in Diane’s mind. Betty had said to Diane, “You don’t have to worry — Peter’s mom can get you into any of the good private schools.”
The baby-sitter reported that Byron had been an angel, playing happily on the rug until nine, and falling asleep without any fuss the moment he was rocked. While Peter paid her, Diane went into Byron’s quiet room and stood over his crib.
Paula’s prideful remarks—“They get into Hunter on merit”— Tony’s envious ones—“They all have IQs over one fifty”—Paula’s advice—“If you just read to your boy a lot, he’ll score high on the test”—and Peter’s infuriating “He’s not a genius” were replayed over and over in her mind.