“Darling,” Vera said, “such beautiful brown legs. It’s bitchy of you to wear shorts and show the rest of us up.”
Vera herself was wearing shorts, and the reason she was so generous in the matter of Nancy’s legs was that she really had nothing to worry about in the matter of her own. Vera’s face was characterized by too much nose and too many teeth; but her legs were long and lovely, and if they were in fact slightly inferior to Nancy’s, that was surely nothing to make a federal case about.
Nancy said something appropriate, and Vera laughed, showing her long upper teeth. She took Nancy into the kitchen, where other platters and bowls and trays of goodies were waiting to be brought out. One thing about Vera Richmond, you could always expect the best at her parties. Even at a little do like this, for a few close neighbors, featuring hamburgers. No ground meat that was 50 per cent fat — Vera always bought the most expensive grade of ground top round, and delicious side-things to go with them. She had been a nurse at the hospital where Jack Richmond interned, and she had come from a very poor family whose many children never got enough to eat.
It took two more trips to get everything out to the terrace. By that time Lila and Larry Connor had come over from next door and Mae and Stanley Walters from across the alley. Lila was talking with David, Larry was talking with Mae, and Stanley was standing by the grill with Jack, who had started grilling the big luscious-looking patties of dark red beef that he was taking from a portable ice chest. Everyone was nuzzling a goblet of beer.
“Hey,” Nancy said, “how come everybody has a beer except the workers?”
Stanley Walters went over to the keg and drew two beers and presented them to Nancy and Vera with what he pathetically meant to be a gallant flourish. Stanley ran to clumsy fat, and there was a kind of unintentional clownishness about everything he did that was more absurd than comic. He had come to town as manager of a chain shoe store, but he had lost his job and Mae had made him take a big bank loan and go into business for himself. His shop (Shoes For The Family At Family Prices) was finally prospering after a shaky start. The bank loan was almost paid off. Mae kept his books straight, and she kept Stanley straight, too. Mae was tall and had light red hair and white skin that couldn’t tolerate the sun. She was not overweight for her height, but she had large breasts and hips that made her seem heavier than she was.
“Nectar of the gods,” Stanley beamed, “for a pair of goddesses.”
“Stanley,” Mae said, turning away from Larry, “it’s too early to start making an ass of yourself. Wait till you’ve had at least two beers.”
Stanley had no talent for dissimulation. He flushed and bit his lower lip like a small boy fighting tears. Silenced, he started back to the grill. Unfortunately, he had to pass Lila. She reached out and took him by the arm.
“Stanley darling,” she said, “you didn’t even kiss me hello. Are you mad at me or something?”
Lila Connor lifted her inviting face, and Stanley Walters kissed it with the conditioned reflex of one of Pavlov’s dogs. Immediately he realized what he had done and looked utterly terrified. There was a shattering silence. Everything was put back together by David.
“What I would like to know,” David growled, “is how the hell Stanley rates special favors. I haven’t kissed anyone hello yet myself.”
David gave Lila a kiss that Nancy thought warmish, but then Larry Connor said clearly, “As the Bible says, a tooth for a tooth,” and strode over to kiss Nancy with an ardor that struck her as not entirely pretended. Also, it seemed to reflect on Mae Walters, who had been closer at hand; but Jack Richmond corrected the oversight by promptly kissing Mae, and then everyone moved around kissing everyone else and the party was reprieved, if not saved.
Soon after that the hamburgers began to come off the grill. Everyone began to stuff himself and make frequent visits to the keg; even Mae sufficiently unbent to enjoy the deliberate attentions of Dr. Jack, which had the intended effect of taking poor Stanley off the hook.
Shortly after eight, darkness set in, and a slivered moon appeared. The party began to swing.
It was some time after that — nine or ten or so — that Nancy found herself on a redwood bench with Larry Connor. Lila’s husband had been drinking with both hands and getting more and more sober and sad and lost. Nancy had always thought of Larry as being lost. Lost in his love, which had turned sour; lost in his work, which had gone stale; lost in his hopes, which had evaporated. Larry should have been a poet, Nancy thought. At least he looked like one — hot-eyed and thin and dark, with black hair that was always a little shaggy. He made her think of François Villon. François Villon leaving the gates of his beloved Paris, never to be heard of again.
“How was Paris when you left it?” Nancy asked solemnly.”
“What’s that?” Larry Connor said.
“Nothing, Larry. I’m just a leetle drunk.”
“Are you drunk enough to permit a neighborly kiss?”
He kissed her before she could think, and she was astonished and touched at the quality of the kiss, which was brief and tender and did not threaten other intimacies which would have had to be rejected.
“You’re a sweet girl, Nancy,” Larry Connor said. “I wish I were David.”
“Why should you wish you were David? David is probably off somewhere kissing Lila.”
“In that case, God help David.”
“Oh, come off it, Larry. Lila’s a beautiful gal. She looks so much like Natalie Wood it’s disgusting.”
“Does she? I hadn’t noticed. I’ve sort of lost the capacity to notice things. Or to feel things.”
“Poor old Larry. Positively decrepit.”
“All right, it sounds pretentious. But it’s true. I’ve been thinking about F. Scott Fitzgerald lately,” the accountant said suddenly.
“Maybe you should ask Jack to give you something for it.” Nancy giggled.
“Maybe I should at that. Fitzgerald had a kind of theme, you know. That the saddest thing in life is the diminishment of the ability to feel intensely. Lesion, he called it. The lesion of vitality. Just listen for a minute, Nancy. What do you hear?”
Nancy listened. But her head was whirling a little, and all she could hear was a pleasant singing in her ears that was partly personal music and partly the hi-fi that Jack Richmond had channeled to the terrace from inside the house.
“Nothing much,” she said.
“That’s what I mean. There are a thousand sounds around us, if we could only hear them. You remember how it was on a night like this when you were growing up? I used to sit and isolate each sound and listen to it separately. It was an intensely sad, almost torturing experience — a kind of bitter, wonderful ecstasy. But it’s all seeped away. I remember, but I don’t hear or feel any more.”
“Keep trying, Larry. It will come back.”
“It won’t. Not ever.”
Larry sounded so peculiar that Nancy began to feel uneasy. At the same time, she became aware of a compulsion to pull his shaggy head to her breast. This compulsion she successfully quelled. It was chiefly an effect of the beer, she told herself, and it could lead to something dangerously more than motherly tenderness. So she merely waited for Larry to continue.
“Do you know how Lila and I met?” he asked. “Has Lila ever told you?”
“No.”
“It’s just as well. Anything she’d have told you would almost certainly be a lie.”
“Larry, you mustn’t say such things about Lila. You’re drunk, or you wouldn’t.”
“In vino veritas, or whatever the hell the word is for beer,” Larry said with a laugh. “Lila’s the world’s slickest liar. Didn’t you know that, Nancy? It took me quite a while to get on to it. What’s more, she’s a psychopathic liar. She actually prefers lying to telling the truth. She has no conscience, no sense of the difference between right and wrong. She’s sick in the head, Nancy, and there’s no cure for it except to put her out of her misery, the way you’d shoot a rabid dog.”