My Education (8 page)

“Thank god they are asking you both,” Sahba said on an evening they cooked dinner for me, the weekend before the event. “So you will go with Laurence as his date, Regina, and let me stay home.” Sahba accused Laurence's colleagues of looking down on her for her long-ago hobby of winning beauty contests, and her postexile fate representing the House of Chanel, though I was an exception, as was Nicholas.

“Oh, come on, Sahba,” Laurence tried. “You do like Nicholas, and he adores you. Given Regina is invited in her own right, she's entitled to bring her own date. It's not fair to make her squire me.”

“I don't have anyone I'd bring,” I assured him, wanting to please Sahba, although I knew Casper would have enjoyed it.

“I do like Nicholas, but he will understand. I must stay home with Beb.” The charge in question was asleep, it being past nine
P.M
., and the three of us were sitting outdoors, in thick sweaters and beneath heaps of blankets, on their deck, which jutted off the hillside and seemingly over the lake, as if we floated offshore on a ship. Like all the lakes in the region this one, while wide, was much longer, in the shape of a crooked cigar. Now the opposite bank was picked out distantly by a strand of dock lights spaced at long intervals, but the north and south terminus points might as well have plunged over the ends of the earth. It was a very deep lake, glacier-made Laurence had said, and even without the play of light on its surface I could feel its restless activity, and the ropes of its currents, as if it weren't a lake at all but a vast magisterial river.

“We can bring Bebi,” Laurence persisted. “We can bed him down there. They have a baby now. They understand.”

“Please, Laurence. The idea is giving me stress.” This was said with such tranquil finality that even I knew the matter was settled. And so the following weekend it was only Laurence who pulled up outside in the Alfa Romeo, to drive me to dinner.

I told myself it had been distinctly-not-shy Sahba's aversion that made me so nervous. I'd found myself revising and revising my clothes, and in the end had been glad Dutra hadn't been home to observe the outcome, a resurrected come-hither costume of calfskin miniskirt with a zip up the side, patterned tights, lace-up boots, and a cropped chenille sweater that slid off one shoulder and was knit in a pattern of purple and gold. At least Laurence had also dressed up. Like me he was very different from his daytime self, in a black turtleneck and black slacks and black shiny wingtips instead of his accustomed double-pleat khakis with Top-Siders and Fair Isle sweater. His tonsured hair was glued flat and gleaming with some kind of gel. “Sahba dressed me,” he acknowledged my compliment. “I tried at the last minute but she wouldn't be budged. She says our story is that Bebi caught a cold. But she insists you and I have a wonderful time, and we're supposed to remember everything Martha cooks so we can tell her about it. I don't know if you've heard what a phenomenal chef Martha is.”

“Is she?”

“Astonishing. She's very serious. You know she once cooked professionally. It was while they were living in Berkeley. She was finishing up at UC but she was more serious apparently about cooking. She's very intrepid, Martha. She lived on Madagascar for a year for some reason, and learned to cook anything in a can. Truly—she can cook you a multicourse meal with no more than a fire and a large-size tin can. The first time I went to their house it was summer, and Martha had constructed a fire pit of stones in their backyard, and she'd set up a wrought-iron grill, and she served clams casino, wild-mushroom pizza, whole lobsters, a corn salad, and, I am earnest, a peach pie, all of which she produced from that fire without setting foot in her kitchen. You know Nicholas almost can't boil water. Sometimes he's successful and sometimes he isn't. And Sahba is a magnificent cook but even she isn't up for this macho survivalist thing Martha does. Sahba and I need a kitchen and a recipe book and the right kind of pan, and then we do very nice things. But Martha—! Sahba wants to know just what she makes, and whether she does it outside in a hole in the ground.” And so Laurence rattled on as we climbed up the hill, managing somehow in the course of this epicurean tantalization to ruin my appetite, for I could feel he was nervous also, a condition in which I had never seen him, which made my nervousness even worse.

The driveway was already full. “Can we be late?” Laurence exclaimed as he shifted the Alfa Romeo forward and back in its difficult spot by the side of the road, alternating between his tires on their lawn, and his tires in the road, and displeased with both options. In every other respect we seemed early. No lights were on outside the house, and we had to grope our way to the solarium door and from there to the door to the kitchen—but within was abrupt light and heat and a noisy disorder. And Martha, amid a chaos of plastic bowls, plastic cups, plastic spoons, seltzer bottles, crumpled bags, takeout menus, dirty pots, and incompletely unpacked sacks of groceries occupying every inch of the yards and yards of deep counter space, and the central island, and even avalanching here and there onto the black and white tiles of the floor. Every leaded window was coated with steam. A dull roar shook the room that I realized must be a dishwasher but was more like an animal stuffed in a cage. Martha was dressed in unraveling jeans that the wash had turned white and the sort of limp, depleted tank top—unambiguously underwear, not outerwear—that the wash had turned gray. I felt a stab of panic—had we come the wrong night?—even as she said, “Hi, Laurence, Regina,” remotely, and plucked the bottle of wine out of Laurence's hands. She shoved it into the mess beside her. “Everybody's in the dining room. Actually, take this with you,” and she thrust the wine back.

In the dining room the temperature dropped perhaps twenty degrees. I noticed a window cranked open. The gargantuan slab of the table, despite being set for twelve, appeared desolate and institutional beneath its twelve matching white plates and twelve neutral-toned placemats and napkins and twelve sets of cutlery and twelve empty wineglasses. The insides of the glasses were coated with dust. A cloth covered the table but there was otherwise no festive embellishment, no centerpiece of dried flora or bowl of fruit, apart from a pair of tapers and a pair of candlesticks that had been taken to the far end of the table as if into protective custody by an ursine man in wool sweater and corduroy jacket and slacks who was struggling, with no tool apart from persistence, to fit the tapers, the bases of which were slightly too large, into the candlesticks, the tops of which were clogged with old wax. He was watched with disproportionate intensity by two younger men, as if he handled a bomb they all hoped he'd defuse.

“Ah!” he cried with too much relief when we came in. “Laurence, isn't it? Gareth Waggoner from the Hum Center, Regina, is it? Gareth Waggoner from the Hum Center, just visiting here for the year. I'm so sorry we haven't yet met, the year just began and it's practically ending—you have matches, don't you? Doesn't anyone smoke? I always have matches in all of my pockets, books and books of matches, and today I should decide to wear something that was just to the cleaners' and my pockets are empty. But a penknife is what we need first. I'm almost never without a penknife and now tonight when we need one—”

“
I
might have a penknife in my car!” exclaimed one of the two younger men.

“Good thought, Karim.”

“I might even have matches—”

The two young men disappeared down the dim hall. The dining room's other adjacency, a vast parlor I had never been in, was in absolute darkness. A cold breeze was flowing from there, in current with the breeze from the dining room window. I could just make out the vast marshmallow forms of a modern-style living-room set, everywhere confusingly supplemented by other irregular spindly forms which must be the baby's equipment, but perhaps optional, for the silhouetted disorder, obscure as it was, gave the strong sense of a room not in use, like an attic or basement. Laurence had begun pouring wine, and put a glass in my hand as the doorbell, a ponderous clangor like the bells of a church, broke on us with the force of an earthquake. Laurence ran to get it. “They never use the front door,” I could hear him apologizing. Karim and his friend reappeared empty-handed, but with a comp lit professor named Frank who produced a lighter. “Oh! Give it here!” Gareth said.

Soon all ten of the guests ringed the table, yet still no host, hostess, or food. With frantic high spirits we accosted our neighbors to the left and the right, as if we sat at the table, though we didn't dare sit, nor venture into the murk of the parlor, nor the blaze of the kitchen. Tendrils of steam from the kitchen slipped between the doorframe and the door, as if the kitchen housed the hellish boiler works of a coal-burning ship. I'd drawn Karim's fellow match seeker, a postdoc named Joe, when the influx of the rest of the guests left him trapped between me and the sideboard. What year were we? What were we studying? Who were we studying with?—the whole duet performed with flushed cheeks and raised voices, as if our lives hinged upon it. Even as I was speaking to Joe I had no idea what I was saying. I only knew I must not let Joe's eyes stray from mine or the threat in the room would become real and triumph; and Joe understood it also; so did everyone else. An ardent gratitude enlivened us all, that no one of us knew more than two or three others so that we could be a long time hollering our professional associations, departmental matriculations, academic specializations, permanent or temporary addresses, and opinions of the weather at each other before the fuel ran low; and at almost that moment, as if her entertaining instincts continued to serve her no matter how little she wanted them to, Martha abruptly appeared, with the terrifying air of a contemptuous waitress who has had almost all she can take of a table and is only continuing service in order to bring off a mass poisoning. She shouldered the kitchen door open and came clanging in with four more bottles of uncorked red wine, two per hand, to replace the four long since drained dry. She slammed them onto the table and went straight back out. Hardly had the door closed on her than these bottles were empty also.

All this time Nicholas never appeared. No one dared mention him. And then just as sufficient confidence, or perhaps drunkenness, had led the professor named Gareth to drop his weight into a chair, a high-pitched wail rose in the distance, like a siren approaching, and Nicholas materialized in the mouth of the dim corridor, perfectly blind to the roomful of guests and with a red, shrieking child in the crook of his arm.

“MARTHA!” he thundered.

“Nicholas! Oh! This must be Joachim! An angel . . . how lovely . . .” we were stupidly saying, tripping over each other with fear as if he'd caught us in the process of robbing his house. But this reaction of ours wasn't noticed any more than our presence had been.

Martha responded so quickly she might have been waiting just behind the kitchen door. She mowed us down from one end of the room to the other, snatched the screaming child from her husband, and disappeared up the stairs.

Nicholas disappeared also, without a word spoken to us. We were imploring each other: “So how do you know Nicholas and Martha? Oh,
where
do you stay in Provence? Oh my God,
what
did you think of her latest? Could you even get through it?” Laurence was still on the far side of the table from me, crimson from his pate to the part of his neck I could see just above his thick sweater. Now not just the one but every one of the windows had been opened in response to the furnacelike heat the trapped ten of us, in our fear, had produced. Even as I systematically elicited from Joe his detailed opinion of every Hitchcock film either of us could think of—
Strangers on a Train
?
The Thirty-nine Steps
?
Rope
?
Shadow of a Doubt
?—I couldn't take my eyes from those windows, and the unalloyed blackness of night they held just out of reach. Any stranger passing by would have thought that we ten were in heated conflict with one another, and maybe we were, underneath the barrages of small talk. Could no one, we raged wordlessly, have the courage to call this thing off, or at least venture into the kitchen to look for more drinks? And then something shifted; I was very drunk already; a moment passed between my perceiving the shift and perceiving its source. Nicholas had joined us. He wore a beautiful sky-blue dress shirt so new as to still be knife-creased, and into which he was calmly installing the cuff links as he stood in conversation with Gilles, a visiting Foucauldian from Paris, and an English professor named Larry Kornblatt, whose satirical book praising sloth as a virtue had met with surprising commercial success.

And then Martha was standing beside him, a peasant blouse thrown over her tank top, as if it were already summer. She had painted her mouth with a dark red lipstick in such a way that the delicate skin of her lips, parched from winter, seemed much more exposed. I could see their detailed scaliness, even the place where the lower lip's plumpness had split, like an arrow of blood.

Now Martha became yet more swift and determined. She still spoke to no one, but sliced back and forth through the double-hinged door. A tureen of extremely green soup was banged onto the table. Vivienne, a professor of French with her hair in a gleaming chignon and her sinuous body in a tight sweaterdress and thigh-high leather boots, trailed Martha into the kitchen and was apparently tolerated. Vivienne's departure left a hole beside Gilles the Foucauldian which was soon filled by Laurence. Slowly, I began to decode the guest list. Visiting Gilles from Paris would appreciate serpentine, French Vivienne, who wore no wedding ring, while Larry Kornblatt alone of the guests was accompanied by his spouse, a women's studies professor named Lois. Both of them were garrulous, hearty, and with drink increasingly profane, which endeared them to Gareth, the ursine visitor from Scotland, who was also, I realized, the sort of gay man whom to that time I'd never encountered: thick in the middle, unkempt, and plainly on the prowl for the young, groomed, and slender. Karim, an Americanist whose adviser was Martha, was for Gareth. My dull Joe, another Americanist whose adviser was Martha, was for Karim, to disguise Karim's function as bait. Karim and Joe, allied to Martha, balanced Laurence and me, allied to Nicholas, while the comp lit professor named Frank, who made ten, was a young, recent hire, unmarried, easy-going, good looking, always equipped with a lighter and smokes, the sort of high-value crowd-pleasing guest every party requires.