Alternate Side(48)

“Nora!” Jim said. “You cut your hair!” Not a good beginning; over the years Nora had learned that when a man said you’d cut your hair, it was less an observation than an indictment. She decided to parry with a generalization, since she had in fact been wearing her hair the same way for a decade: “It’s been too long, Jim. I hope you’re cooking.”

“Of course,” he said. (Thank God for big lunches.) “You haven’t changed a bit.”

Why did they all say that to each other? There was the fact that it was so patently untrue; Nora had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she was applying mascara and realized that her skin had begun to look like silk after you washed it, still serviceable but without its sheen. She had never been vain and had never felt she had reason to be: strangers were always asking her whether they knew her from high school or the ad agency or this or that suburb because she looked like a generic woman of a certain age. Even the people she knew who had taken preemptive action to maintain their looks had changed more than a bit. And that was only the exterior. “I used to really like him, but Jim’s a different guy now,” Charlie had said on their way downtown. As was Charlie, of course. And Nora as well.

“How’s the jewelry business?” Jim said.

“You’re in the jewelry business?” said a thin blonde behind him.

“Not really,” said Nora.

“I want to hear all about what happened on that block of yours,” Jim said. “What a story! Everyone’s been talking about it.” And Nora suddenly realized exactly why they had been invited. Luckily Charlie was placing a drink order with the cater waiter and hadn’t heard.

“Charlie, come sous-chef,” Jim cried. Charlie shucked his jacket, took off his tie, and rolled up his sleeves so that he was dressed like Jim. Nora was dressed in her dinner party uniform: black dress, statement necklace. “Are those real?” said the blonde, peering at the stones.

“If they were I’d need an armed guard,” Nora said, but the blonde continued to peer and didn’t crack a smile.

There were two other men there, one above Charlie in the pecking order, another young but, from the sound of him, promising, with the kind of party patter that was smooth and memorable, a few witticisms, a recommendation for a New Yorker article, the kind of bright young man her husband would have once befriended and now hated and feared. His wife was a lawyer—“semiretired”—who had just had her second child and wanted to talk only about private-school admissions. Nora was tolerant. She had passed through a phase in which she did the same, until the twins had been accepted to a school that had been founded just after the American Revolution and that, most important, ran from kindergarten to the end of high school. The semiretired lawyer’s eyes lit up when Nora mentioned it. Jennifer? Jessica? The husband’s name was Jason, she was certain of that. It was so hard to remember. Nora’s assistants had always been told to give her flash cards to tuck beneath the napkin in her lap when she was hosting a donor lunch so that she could keep the names straight.

“Charlie, when’s the last time you diced an onion?” she heard Jim say in that kidding way that had an edge of exasperation. Mumble, mumble: Charlie was probably saying he didn’t cook as much as he used to. Nora glided away from the kitchen, an open-plan stainless-steel number that looked as though it had been lifted right from one of those restaurants whose layout demanded you admire the chef’s technique.

Since Nora had first moved to New York, dinner parties had mainly evaporated. In the beginning there had been one a week, exercises in competitive cooking. “Whose is this?” they would ask one another, the way they now asked it about a particularly sharp coat or pair of boots. Marcella. Julia. Cookbook intimacy that passed for friendship. At the end of every evening they were wrecked by the need for perfection and the assumption of judgment.

Then they’d made some money and graduated to virtual cooking. Nora discovered that, like manicures and pedicures, cooking was something she could do herself but preferred to have someone else do for her. She was one of the first to discover HomeMade, a company that delivered meals with little cards that described how to prepare them. Like dress designers supplying gowns for a big gala, the women who ran the company kept a computerized accounting of who’d ordered what to avoid unfortunate duplications. When Nora sent along a list of guests, one of them might say, If you’re having the Roysters don’t get the Chicken Marengo; they served it themselves last week. It all seemed like cheating, but Nora prided herself on the fact that at least she didn’t lie and pretend the HomeMade dinners were homemade. In the beginning, lots of other women did, but after a while it became impossible, the roster was so well known, although Sherry Fisk’s sister-in-law swore her Apple Brown Betty was her grandmother’s recipe when it was exactly the same dessert, in the same ramekins, that they’d all had elsewhere.

“She claims her nose is original, too,” Sherry had once said.

Eventually they had all started meeting at restaurants, so that no one had to hide the pill vials in the medicine cabinets from nosy guests. It seemed the only time they went to dinner parties now was when the men had taken up cooking. Everyone acted as though that were akin to Christ turning water into wine at Cana.

“Risotto!” the women exclaimed joyfully when Jim brought it to the table in an enormous shallow serving bowl, which Nora knew meant by the time it got to her it would be lukewarm. Which was fine. It was crunchy, too, which meant she wouldn’t eat much.