Emptying his second glass of wine, Doug lifted his fork from the table, wondering how quickly she would bleed out from a stab to the heart.
“You were a schoolteacher, right?”
“That’s none of your business. But yes, I was.”
“Do they have mandatory retirement these days? Or was there some other reason you had to leave?”
“It’s incredible to me, Mr. Fanning, that a person could be quite so transparent as yourself. One imagines that adulthood comes with some minimum of complexity. You had one of your minions look back over the local paper, did you? Learned of my travails? How intrepid of you. Perhaps you already know, then, that my subject is history. Most of my fellow teachers, and the textbooks for that matter, presented the material as if it were a simple record, a kind of newscast to be placed in front of the young, for what reason these days no one’s particularly sure, beyond a few nostrums about not repeating ourselves. But that’s not the tack I took. I was a little more opinionated than that. I had the temerity to suggest that certain developments in human society were better or more dangerous or more evil than others, and I’m not talking about your standard twentieth-century horrors, the ones they throw in for free. I’m talking about people like you. The despoilers. The patriots of capitalism. Given the ubiquity of your type these days, is it any surprise they forced me out?”
Doug took a breath to calm himself and said, “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you knew the Gammonds.”
“Herb and Ginger?” she said. “Of course. They were lovely people. Have you bought their land as well, then?”
“No. When I was a kid I knew them. My mother used to clean their house.”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“No. I grew up in Alden.”
“I see,” she said, examining his face in earnest, considering this new fact. “I know what you see when you look at me. An old whatsit crying, ‘Not in my backyard.’ That’s what you say to yourself about what I’m doing. A crone who wants her trees back. Which I do. But I have to take my stand where I can. You probably won’t believe me when I say that it’s not personal, but it isn’t. I suppose I have allowed myself to think of you as a villain, but really it’s not you I despise. For all I know you’re a Democrat. It’s just what you stand for that I can’t abide. And I’m not so naïve as to think that running you off that land will solve the bigger problem, but at least I will have done that.
“I wonder, Mr. Fanning. If you were to see a lone soldier fighting an army, what would you think of him? That he is a fool? Or that he simply believes in his cause?”
“Neither. I’d say he was going to lose.”
“Right. Because that matters more than anything to you, doesn’t it? Dominance. That’s the childish pleasure you people can’t get enough of. You get your fix dressed up in a suit, but it’s no different than a drug. You’re angry. And once the men like you start this war of theirs, people will die by the thousands to cure that feeling in them.”
“In my experience, killing doesn’t cure much.”
She raised her head, turning her ear to listen to something over the din of the party. “Do you hear that?” she asked. “Do you hear barking?”
“You need to understand something,” he said. “You haven’t won anything. You just haven’t lost yet.”
“What have they done with them?” she cried, standing abruptly from the table, straining to hear some phantom noise. “Henry,” she called out, bringing a halt to the table’s conversation, the bankers and their wives staring at her in polite alarm. “Henry, where are they?”
RELEGATED to the children’s table, Nate and the gang had waited what seemed an eternity before the fat-slathered pork and spareribs finally arrived. They set to gorging and in no time at all their plates were clean and cleared and peanut-butter parfait topped with American flags on toothpicks appeared in front of them.
“I can’t take this music anymore,” Jason said. “We need to get out of here.” He rose without pushing back his chair, causing his knees to slam against the underside of the table and spill multiple water glasses before he fell again into his seat.
Eventually, they roused themselves and headed out through the broiling kitchen tent, past a swarm of short, dark people scraping half-eaten dinners into heaping garbage pails, the taller black waiters staring blankly at the tips of their cigarettes, as the head man popped the corks of the champagne. “On the trays!” he shouted, as the four of them slipped through an opening by barrels of melting ice.
“It’s hotter than a jungle out here,” Hal said.
Spotting a guard lounging at the gate in his shirtsleeves, they tacked rightward toward the trees in front of the house. That’s when they heard growling and the rustling of chains. Jason jumped sideways, falling into a rose border.
“Dogs,” Hal said.
Walking nearer, Nate recognized Wilkie and Sam. “Weird,” he said. “They’re my tutor’s.”
“That’s deep. What do they teach you?”
Their bowls were empty and they looked up at Nate with sad, gaping eyes.
As the others drifted off, he untied their leashes and shooed the two of them up onto the terrace and into the house. Adjacent to the kitchen was a kind of cat apartment with carpeted walls, wicker bassinets, and in one corner a forest of dangling string. Way too large for this feline retreat, Wilkie and Sam knocked about like vandals in a child’s room, their bulky heads clearing windowsills of teak brushes and padded collars, Sam ripping strands of twine from the mobile with an impatient yank of his jaw.
“Chill out there,” Nate said, looking through the cabinets of tinned salmon and prescription drugs for something more substantial. Finding nothing, he opened as many tiny cans as he could into the miniature bowls before the dogs shouldered him aside to get at their supper. He fetched them water and sat for a moment on the chair in the corner, watching their glistening tongues lick the steel clean.
And then their heads were up again, eyes still brimming with hope.
“That’s it, guys. Sorry.”
They sniffed at the cat baskets, rummaging in search of their inhabitants.
“Stay here, okay? Just stay.”
He pulled the door ajar and crossed back through the kitchen, heading out into the front hall, wondering where Ms. Graves might be. Here and there on decorative chairs and benches guests had taken refuge from the heat and the crowd, an older couple dozing upright on a chaise longue, a Japanese businessman in a tight black suit tapping away at his BlackBerry, while a few feet behind him a gaunt woman in a sweat-stained silk dress ruminated on a painting over the fireplace.
Heading up the stairs, Nate paused on the first landing, from which three hallways ran off into different wings of the house, each painted a different color, one beige, one pale blue, one dark red. The others had likely retreated to the third floor, back up to Jason’s room, which could only mean more bong hits and combat, a prospect he didn’t relish just now given how forcefully his retinas continued to pulse to the beat of his heart.
Stilled there on the landing for a moment, he found himself slowly drawn to the pattern on the wallpaper of the blue hallway. Little indigo diamonds were set on an azure background and surrounded by tiny gold stars each in turn ringed in a halo of silver, the design stretching on uninterrupted by picture frames or light fixtures, as if decoration of this particular wing had gone unfinished.
Coming closer, he could see another pattern beneath, stamped in outline onto the paper itself: hexagons contained within octagons contained in circles, which were themselves woven of figure eights, each figure only an inch wide, the stamp repeated a thousand times over. Moving from background to foreground and back, his eyes roved up and down, left and right, searching in vain for a place to rest, for something to comprehend or analyze, but he could find nothing, no larger, central figure or meaning, forcing him eventually to give up and simply let the pattern enter him unconceptualized, the whole ungrasped, which strangely enough, after a few moments, produced an oddly pleasurable sensation, a kind of relief from the responsibility to understand, at which point he moved in a step closer losing all lateral perspective, as when he’d lost himself in the endless zigzag of the houndstooth check of his father’s overcoat as he was carried half asleep from the backseat of the car up to his bedroom as a boy, pressed against that endless repetition. The sudden memory of which he now condemned as sentimental. Thus covering self-pity in self-punishment, both of them equally false, both of them walls thrown up to block the view of something hopelessly vaster.