The Last Book Party(36)

Arnold lifted his scotch to clink it against my glass of wine. “It’s summer,” he said. “Don’t take things too seriously. You’ll move on in the fall and put that expensive education to good use. Just make sure the illustrious Mr. Grey treats you well.”

Arnold joined his wife at the end of the deck. Watching couples chatting and laughing politely, I realized that my parents’ friends were roughly the same age as Henry. But they all looked so stiff and starched, their clothes restrictive on their middle-aged bodies, as if even the laces of their shoes were tied extra tight. I would never consider a sexual interlude with any of them. Or would I? I glanced around, at Arnold, with his khaki shorts, knobby knees, and clean Top-Siders; Don Schwartz, with his crisp, short-sleeved button-down shirt and pressed slacks; and his wife, Elaine, with her chunky necklace, starched linen blouse, and flowery, cropped pants.

And then, with a new willingness to consider the previously unimaginable, I pictured myself crossing a line so ingrained in me I hadn’t known it was there: Hey, Arnold, can I join you? I slip into the hot tub on the side of his house and untie the halter strap of my bathing suit. He is shocked; I smile at him to calm his nerves as I float up and touch his waist. Don, I think you missed a button, as I undo the other buttons and press my lips to his chest. Elaine, don’t mind me, as I walk up behind her and slip my hands under her pink blouse and touch her small breasts.

What was wrong with me? Had Henry uncorked me like a bottle, releasing a looser, reckless Eve?

Henry, I told myself, existed on a different plane. He was more sexy professor than stiff, middle-aged dad. He and Tillie were from a completely different world. They would never start their days with dull rides on a commuter train to uninspiring jobs. Henry and Tillie lived outside the conventions that guided my parents and their friends. As I was learning, creative people, real writers and artists, made their own rules. This summer, I too was playing by those rules.

Across the deck, my father was carrying two drinks precariously in a single hand and a wooden board of cheese and crackers in the other toward a table covered with platters of smoked bluefish, shrimp cocktail, and spinach dip. Walking over to him, I caught a wheel of brie as it was about to slide off his tray and set it on the table. My father handed me a drink. “I can’t for the life of me recall who wanted this, so have at it,” he said. “It’s vodka and tonic.”

“Thank you kindly,” I said, and took a sip. My dad looked as trim and neat as ever, his plaid short-sleeved shirt tucked smoothly into his khaki pants. Along with marrying a woman two inches taller than he was, my father’s love of simple Truro, so unexpected for a man who looked as if he belonged at a staid suburban country club, was one of the only unconventional things about him. He was totally at peace here, where he loved to walk the beach with a fishing rod, garden with my mother, and fall asleep reading the newspaper on the beach. I shared his love of the landscape but couldn’t understand why his bland social life didn’t stifle him.

“Do you really like all this?” I asked. “I mean, it’s like you took a complete cocktail party in Newton—same guest list, same menu, plus smoked bluefish—and airlifted it across the bay and plunked it down in Truro.”

My father looked at me as if he didn’t understand the question.

“These are our friends, Eve. Why wouldn’t we like it?”

We stood in silence for a moment, watching Don hold forth about something to Arnold and his wife, both of whom looked slightly bored. The rest of the guests, probably without thinking, had slipped into same-sex gatherings, the women on the far side of the deck, talking in low voices punctuated by occasional high-pitched laughter, and the men closer to my father and me, their voices rising enough for me to know they were debating something about Reagan and Gorbachev.

“The thing is, Eve, I never wanted a big life.”

“You wanted a small life?”

He shook his head and looked at me as if I was a child.

“I wanted a good life. A wife I loved, kids, a secure job, a home in a safe, quiet place like Newton, with good schools. Those things matter more than you think, Eve.” He swept an arm toward his friends, the harbor in the distance. “All this? It’s more than I ever imagined. If this is the pinnacle, if this is my life and these are my friends, that’s fine with me.”

I was about to ask if he thought my mother agreed, when I felt a hand on my arm. My mother’s college roommate, Roz, who rented near the ocean every August, took my hand and pulled me to the side of the deck to sit down on the bench. “Is Tillie as eccentric as she comes off in her poems?”

She looked at me with such expectation that I had to laugh. It’s not everyone who wants to gossip about a poet.

“She’s more pretentious than she is eccentric,” I said.

Roz crossed her legs, rested an elbow on her knee, and rocked her glass of white wine.

“But the things she writes about! In one poem she describes making love to her husband in a hammock, above a circle of lit candles! Who does that?”

I didn’t like to think of Tillie and Henry making love anywhere, let alone outside in a hammock.

“Oh, Roz,” I said, “you shouldn’t take poetry so literally.”





30





At breakfast, my mother announced that Danny was coming to Truro for a quick visit and that she was counting on me to spend the day with him.