“No food till everybody is sitting down!” Tang stood in the dining room with a majestic scowl and his arms folded. “Right now! It’s ready.”
Evan and Jake came along the upstairs hall talking and laughing. Sochi took off her apron, revealing a dark green knit dress patterned with roses. With a big smile she arranged herself in the dining-room doorway, leaning against the doorframe with one arm up, her knee cocked, and the other arm cupped around the distinct bulge of her belly. What? Sochi was pregnant? Impossible. Yes: true.
Jake stopped at the bottom of the stairs, dazzled. “Sochi, baby! Hey there — looks like you’ve got something in the oven.” He rushed across to give her a brotherly hug.
Evan froze on the bottom stair. “What have you done!” he shouted. His look of horror turned the room to ice. Tang stood in the doorway, expressionless. Nobody spoke.
Sochi straightened up. “Don’t worry. This is nobody’s concern but mine.”
“How could you do this?” Evan stood rigid. “You promised—” He and Sochi were nose-to-nose in a quietly furious argument, all hisses and snarls.
Jake murmured in my ear, “So what is he? Just the sperm donor?”
“Come to dinner now.” Tang clapped once. “The ducks will be ruined! They dry out! You can talk at the table.”
Tang directed us to our places, and the ritual took over. Waiting to be seated, I noticed odd little crackling sounds in the big chandelier close overhead. The crystals were veiled in dust and cobwebs starred with tiny clots of shrouded insects. A few surviving spiders ran frantically through the maze until they frizzled in the heat.
Evan sat at the head of the table with Sochi and me on either side, Jake beside me, and Farley opposite him. Sochi appeared calm and inward-looking, radiating content. No need to envy her: My turn would come. What a way to tell Evan, though. Why? Because she’d been afraid of his reaction? “You promised!” Evan had said.
Tang served everybody from a rolling cart, starting with Sochi. The duck was truly wonderful, though I caught myself shielding my plate from possible fried spiders. Jake asked Farley about the effect of this rain on the vines, and he launched into a lecture.
“Larousse lists fourteen steps in the making of wine.” We were up to “noble rot” when Jake interrupted, raising his glass. “This is certainly wonderful.” He turned to Evan. “Home-grown?”
“The Calabresi label is defunct,” Farley said. “The wonderful grapes are now simply raw material for other vintners. Time to replant Noni’s Parcel with Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.” Clearly, Farley lusted to get back into wine-making and be a player again.
A gust of rain splattered the windows beyond the heavy draperies. “It’s beginning to break up,” Evan said to me. “Should be an excellent snow pack in the hills. Ever done any cross-country skiing?”
We were discussing his favorite trails when Evan went blank. Literally: silent and unseeing — I thought he was about to topple over, and put out my hand. He blinked, looked vague, and gave me a questioning look.
“It’s okay,” I said, and saw that he knew I’d keep his secret. My heart sank, and kept on descending. Evan’s little episode looked like an epileptic seizure, a petit maclass="underline" I had a cousin who was epileptic, we’d all been prepared to react as needed. Did Jake know? Had Evan told him?
Epilepsy is usually manageable, and I could’ve been entirely wrong. Still I felt a sense of dread — that the curse was starting. “Let’s don’t feed this thing,” Sochi had said. Because it was nothing, nothing unless you believed in it, and then it was everything.
The rumble of a deep-throated engine came from beyond the front door. The others heard it, too; we were all watching when the door crashed open. A sixtyish woman burst in, blond and decisive in a shiny black cape, calling, “Tang? Evan? Quickly, I need you!”
“My God, it’s your mother,” Sochi said. Tang groaned out loud.
Evan’s mother, Leonor, waved to someone outside and swept in with a voluminous hug for Evan, cheek-kisses for Farley and Sochi, and nods to us. “I got a ride up with Leo Bonaducci in his Hum Two, the maddest luck.” A Martha Stewart-type in black turtleneck and sweatpants, just blown in from the South Pacific, Roger somebody sent his plane for her, wasn’t that sweet?
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming when we talked Thursday?” Evan demanded.
Leonor’s look would have pierced an armadillo, but her smile never faltered. “Because you might’ve tried to talk me out of it, love.”
In a trice the men hustled her three bags inside and she displaced Jake and me, moving us down one so she could sit next to Evan, all the while filling us in on her life. In the highlands of New Guinea four days ago watching the headhunters dance, she’d brought Evan one of their drums.
Tang, sullen, arrived with a heated plate for Leonor. “You didn’t have to do that,” she cooed. “You know I’ll eat anything.” She took in the grimy chandelier. “Your cleaning crew is cheating you, Evan. We need to have a talk. This place is an absolute slum! It ought to be gutted from the walls out.”
I kept waiting for someone to tell Leonor about Sochi’s condition. How would she receive the little intruder? She had two daughters by her developer husband, both safely married, and a baby grandson. Not till Tang had gone round with seconds and Farley’s plate was cleaned did he sit back and turn to Leonor. “You should know that tonight we’re having a double celebration. We’ve just learned that our Sochi is pregnant.”
Leonor smiled back, waiting for him to go on: Clearly she thought he was joking.
“By all appearances, it’s true,” he said. “Ask her.”
Leonor looked at Sochi. “This is amazing.” She half-rose in her seat, staring at Sochi’s belly, and Sochi, smiling, pushed back her chair to show Leonor.
“How terribly exciting. When are you due?”
“The doctor figures the third week in April.” Sochi gave Evan a quick look. We were now in the first week in February.
The two women dropped into the duet: Who’s your Ob-Gyn, which hospital, ultrasound, boy or girl? Sochi said she wanted to be surprised. Leonor recommended someone brilliant she knew at Stanford Medical. She never once looked at Evan, and projected warmth without revealing either approval or the opposite. But I felt in my bones that Leonor was shocked and furious, and that she too believed in the Calabresi curse.
After dinner Jake hung back to talk to me. “Can you believe Sochi?”
“So maybe it was an accident.”
“You think Sochi ever allows accidents in her life?” Jake said.
“Anyway, it’s a done deal. Everybody’s just going to have to adapt.”
“I don’t think so,” Jake said.
Sochi and Farley settled in to watch a hockey match, and Leonor sent Tang running to fetch lamps, bedding, and whatnot to make up the master suite at the far end of the upstairs floor. Evan and Jake were doing battle on the pool table, dealing with disaster in typical masculine fashion, by ignoring it. All the vital confrontations would take place later, behind closed doors. I watched a little hockey and the news, and went upstairs to bed.
When I opened our bedroom door I smelled something scorching. What? The space heater sat out of sight beyond the far bed, glowing red and not quite touching the white chenille bedspread, which was charred and beginning to smoke. I yanked out the cord and kicked the heater away into the middle of the floor.
Impossible. I was positive I hadn’t left the heater anywhere near the bed, and Jake wouldn’t have moved it. But then how—? I pulled the spread off the bed and ran water on the burned spot. The blanket underneath was hot to the touch, and browning, and I spread a wet towel over it to cool it. And then I noticed that the bathroom heater was gone.