Real Life (14 page)

Rachel asked, “You okay, Dor?” with a trace of reproach in her voice. For what? Dorrie wondered. For failing to ensnare the divine Charles? For not even trying? For screwing up the symmetry of the party?

Dorrie said she was fine; Rachel gave her a look and returned to the kitchen. Dorrie heard her say, “I'd be terrified to write on a computer. What if it just swallowed something and lost it forever in its dungeons?”

“There goes the Nobel Prize, honey,” Leon said, and Rachel's rich laugh floated out to the living room, a banner announcing Dorrie's failure. It was like being back in high school—on the outside, watching the popular girls. So that was how you did it: you loaded on the eye makeup and pretended to be afraid of computers. But back in high school Rachel and Dorrie would have been outsiders together, making nasty cracks. And Dorrie would have been, beneath the cynicism, despairing. She looked absently out the window and saw the sun setting over the Boston rooftops: a golden, tranquil scene. She felt no despair. Maybe she had outgrown despair. The closest she could come to it, listening to the men's voices out in the kitchen, was a kind of listless nostalgia, as if she mourned a lost world.

Another couple was due for dinner, and when the doorbell rang Dorrie abandoned Rachel's story and let them in: a writer-friend of Rachel's named Margo Cornell whom Dorrie had met before, and a tall man with a drooping moustache. “Alex Willick—Dorrie Gilbert,” Margo said. “It's nice to see you again, Dorrie.”

“Good to see you, Margo.”

Alex Willick shook her hand and said, “You don't write for a living, do you?”

“No.”

“Thank God,” he said fervently. “Margo is having contract problems.”

Margo turned on him. She was a small, vivid woman, a writer of a series of novels about women in the American West. She wore braids and a flower-sprigged dress with puffy sleeves—as if she were a character in one of her own books, the doughty pioneer wife. “Up yours, Alex,” she said, destroying the illusion. “We all know why my contract problems bug you so much.”

“Because of my low boredom threshold?”

“Guess again,” said Margo. Alex looked at Dorrie and raised his eyebrows in mockery—an expression so intimate that she wondered for one mad moment if she knew him from somewhere, if they were old friends.

Rachel came in from the kitchen followed by Leon and Charles, and the party reassembled over hors d'oeuvres and drinks. The conversation turned to Margo's option-clause problem and Rachel's eternal troubles with her agent, Leon coming in with the legal point of view, Charles contributing an irrelevant anecdote about the gallery that handled his paintings. Alex Willick stayed silent, drinking whiskey, and Dorrie, sitting a little apart in a rocking chair, listened for a while to the dull talk of contracts and commissions and then—antisocial and not caring—she picked up the magazine containing Rachel's story and began to read. The evening, she felt, had already gone subtly and irreparably wrong: she and Charles disliked each other, Rachel was unhappy with herself and disappointed in Dorrie, Margo and Alex were on the outs. Dorrie was tired out from the weekend, from worrying about Hugo at the Garners', from her anxieties over this pointless party. She considered doing something outrageous and dreadful: sneaking down the fire escape to go to a movie, getting royally drunk and tap-dancing in the nude, stabbing Charles with the cheese knife. But she knew she lacked the genes for outrageous-ness; they had all gone to Phinny.

She finished the story. This one ended sadly, with Christopher the puppy slinking off with his tail between his legs and Vanessa alone in Quincy Market, sitting on a bench eating croissants from a bag. Dorrie didn't believe anyone would sit on a bench eating a bag of croissants. It didn't sound right: a bag of candy, maybe, or a bag of cookies. Peanuts. Grapes. Croissants were too much. And think of the crumbs! the grease! Earlier in the story, Vanessa had bitten her knuckle until the blood ran down her hand and dripped on her dress. Dorrie didn't believe that, either.

Alex came over and sat on the floor beside her chair. “Okay, you don't write,” he said. He spoke with an ironical air of doing the proper thing. “What do you do?”

Dorrie put down the magazine, folded her hands in her lap, and produced a cooperative smile. “I'm a potter.”

“Did you make that?” He gestured to a footed bowl on the shelf behind her: a post-William gift to Rachel.

“Yes. I went through a period when I put feet on everything.”

“What period are you going through now?”

“I carve flowers and leaves on everything.”

“Where do you live?”

“Out in the country. In Connecticut, about an hour from here.”

“In a house?”

“Yes. A little white house on a pond.” She was conscious as she said it of how idyllic it always sounded, how romantic. She thought of the sunset on the pond, missing it.

“You live alone?”

“At the moment I'm looking after my teen-age nephew.” Into the picture of the pond came Hugo, rowing back and forth in the boat. “But usually alone, yes.”

They looked at each other curiously. She liked the questions, the way his face sharpened with interest. He wasn't a handsome man, but he looked intelligent and—what was the right word? rakish? It was the long gunslinger moustache. He sat cross-legged on the floor, and she could see that his legs were bony, his knees compact squares under his khakis. He wore a striped shirt. His tie hung loose, unknotted, a frayed label visible. Everything he wore looked old, from the sixties, maybe. She wondered if he shopped at campy secondhand-clothing stores or if he simply never threw anything away. And his hair: it was blond and graying, thin in front, long in back like the hair of a tortured musician. Why did he wear it like that?

“I know you don't write,” she said to him. “What do you do?” She expected something weird and unique: a broom designer, a hamster raiser, a tuba cleaner.

“But I do write,” he said. “At least, I used to. I've come down with a terminal case of writer's block.”

“Alex is just plain lazy,” Margo called from across the room. It was a surprise, that she had been listening to their conversation. “He's only looking for sympathy.”

“True,” Alex said. “It's a long time since I had any.” Dorrie wondered about their relationship and stole glances over at Margo, trying to decide if she was attractive. Her small, red-cheeked face looked pleased with itself. Dorrie deduced from the bits of conversation she heard that Margo was on the verge of some large commercial success. She was sitting beside Charles, quite close. As Dorrie watched, he handed her a cracker and cheese, and Margo smiled at him, conspicuously coquettish. Alex sat with his back to them, stroking his moustache. She asked him, “What do you write when you don't have writer's block?”

Alex told her he was working on a novel. He had published his first novel two years ago to some acclaim, had made a little money, had signed a contract for a second book—the one that was giving him trouble. “My contract's been renewed three times, but people are losing faith in me,” he said. “I am rapidly on my way to becoming a flash in the pan.” His voice was doleful, and his hands sketched a hopeless, palmsup gesture, but the look in his eyes remained amused, as if he had trouble taking it all seriously. Dorrie had read his book; she recalled a sardonic tale of a young man on the make and the beautiful woman who ruined him. She remembered that the heroine was idealized, that the hero refused to feel sorry for himself, that his bravado had made her uncomfortable.

His new novel, he said, was called
An Infinite Number of Monkeys
, and it was about a writer who tried to get away from it all to write a great book but who kept getting involved with people. “It's lousy,” he said. He looked cheerful enough; she wondered if it was genuine. “But I keep plugging away.” He refilled Dorrie's glass and began to ask her questions again: where had she learned her craft? Did she support herself at it? Had she ever studied in Japan? in England? He seemed to know a lot about it. He said he had a potter friend in Denver—Doug Levine, a man Dorrie had met once or twice. Alex leaned back on his elbows, looking up at her, asking her about clays, about kilns, about her house and her pond, absorbing the answers with a thoughtful look, pulling at his long moustache, steadily drinking whiskey. She wondered if he was interviewing her, if he had suddenly decided to put a potter in his book.

By the time dinner was ready, the party's skewed grouping began to seem quite natural. Margo and Charles were obviously hitting it off; they sat talking with Leon while Rachel hustled to the kitchen and back, stopping now and then by Dorrie and Alex to say a few words. Once she asked Dorrie's help in the kitchen, and Dorrie followed her there, leaving Alex on the floor staring down at his ice cubes.

“I guess you and Charles aren't exactly a match made in heaven,” Rachel said. She ripped up lettuce and tossed it into a bowl while Dorrie chopped mushrooms. “He's really very sweet, you know, if you'd give him a chance.”

“Rachel, I can't cope with a man who looks like that. How could you do this to me? Not to mention to poor Charles. He looked at me like I was somebody's old spinster auntie.” She laughed. “Which I am, actually. That reminds me, I ought to call the Garners and see how Hugo's doing.”

“Forget Hugo, Dorrie. He's undoubtedly doing fine. Better than you are.”

“I'm perfectly happy,” Dorrie said. “I'm having a lovely time.”

Rachel looked up from the salad bowl and said, “I should tell you—Alex Willick and his wife were divorced last year and he and Margo have been going together ever since. They fight a lot but I think they're pretty serious.”

“Rachel, can't I sit and talk to a man without your trying to marry me off? This is life, not a Jane Austen novel, damn it!” Dorrie dumped the mushrooms into the bowl and wiped her hands on Rachel's towel. She was angry; she felt like throwing something, or like slamming out of the kitchen and into her room to fling herself on the bed and pound the pillow in rage. “First you fix me up with that pompous mannequin in there and then you warn me off the first attractive, decent, intelligent man I've talked to in years.”

Rachel laid a hand on Dorrie's arm. “Calm down,” she said. “At the risk of sounding like
Upton's Grove
, I just don't want you to get hurt.”

“At this point, it would take a lot more than a conversation with a man at a party to do that.”

“You think you're a pretty tough old bird, don't you?”

“Damn right,” Dorrie said, but when she returned to the living room something was changed. Rachel's caution had broken the spell of her indifference, and when Alex looked up at her, smiling, her heart turned over.

“Do a good deed and tell me dinner is ready,” he said. She had the impression that he hadn't moved since she left, had brooded in silence over his drink thinking bitter thoughts. “We ex-writer types get pretty hungry.”

“Dinner is ready,” she said obligingly. He held out a hand, and she helped him up. She liked the way his hand felt, lean and dry, and his lightness as he leaped to his feet, his thin-lipped smile, the rough quality of his voice and the trace of an accent she couldn't place.

“The less I write, the more I eat,” Alex said. “And the thinner I get. If I didn't have writer's block I'd write a book about it.
The Writer's Block Diet
.”

“Maybe when you waste away to nothing you can ghostwrite it,” Leon said. He slapped his stomach. “I'll be first in line to buy a copy. Lord knows I need something.” Rachel emerged from the kitchen bearing a platter of chicken. Leon took it from her and set it on the table. “Looks good, darn it,” he said, with a tentative smile. Rachel looked distracted, unhappier than ever. Did Leon sense her dissatisfaction? Did he blame it on his paunch?

They gathered around Rachel's new butcher-block table, Charles and Margo approaching slowly, still talking computers—Charles, it seemed, was explaining the computer system at the library, and Margo was listening round-eyed. Leon poured wine for everyone, and Alex clanked Dorrie's glass. “To food,” he said. “Among other things.”

While salad and bread and bottles of wine were passed up and down, Dorrie thought about Alex, conscious of his rolled-up striped sleeve next to her, his bony forearm covered with blond hairs, his long legs not far from hers under the table. Objectively speaking, she didn't much like his looks; she never would have picked him out in a crowd. He was skinny, lazy looking; everything about him seemed indolent, his thin light hair, his mocking greenish eyes, his shabby clothes. She imagined him sitting at a desk all day—a horribly cluttered desk, worse than her father's, worse than her own—staring at a blank page, doodling, looking up bizarre words in a dictionary, drinking coffee with a shot of something in it, dozing off, checking on the weather outside his window, watching a bird skim across the sky. And he frightened her: she had a feeling he knew everything about her, that if he imagined her life as she was doing his, he would be accurate, would know the most secret facts about her: that on long car trips she sang sentimental songs in a squeaky soprano; that now and then she looked in the mirror and saw not an ugly crone but a magical creature of staggering beauty; that holding his hand and then releasing it had made her desire him.

The food was good and plentiful. Dorrie picked at it, her stomach in knots. She was silent, listening to the others talk about traveling—a subject to which Dorrie, who never went anywhere, had nothing to contribute. She looked for an opening in which she could say, “I don't know why, but I never go anywhere; I just read about other's people's travels,” but she never found it, and decided, finally, that the remark made her sound even duller than she was.