Guests began arriving, smiles as white as the snow they were shaking from their shoulders. Time and again, Lafferty showed his own teeth, as well as the jolly dimple in the middle of his own chin. They were nurses mostly, of either or indeterminate gender, with significant others and spouses, a receptionist or two, and technician as well. Some he remembered from this gathering or that, some he didn’t, though he’d have been hard-pressed to put a name even to those he did. He saw to it that all were hailed and well met, that a drink was in every hand, including his own, to be sure, nibbles within easy reach, taking their coats to brush off the snow and pile on the bed in the bedroom. The tree was lit up and sparkling, the music loud and choirful, the gas flame in the stove sputtering blue and red and yellow, a fine approximation of a Yule log. The chatter was loud as well, bouts of laughter frequent and earnest. An hour in, it was apparent the thing was going right as the mail, and when Lafferty looked at his wife talking up a big fellow with gold in his teeth and his wife who was skinny and pale, Peggy all smiles and ease, he figured the roof over his head was secure, at least for the immediate future.
A woman named Cassidy came, a woman known by all as Cassie. When Peggy introduced him he said pleased, and Cassie said she’d met him before, did he not remember, and Lafferty had to admit he did not. At the Commodore Pub, said she, the day they gathered to bring in the summer. If drink was taken, Lafferty explained, that might account for his failing to remember a face so pretty as hers, at which point Peggy interjected that with Terrance there was always drink taken, which might account for his failing to remember where he lived a great deal of the time. She’d a pretty face indeed, Cassie did, nose regal and thin, brown eyes hiding a quiet panic, her eyebrows, sandy and fine like her hair, set straight in a line beneath a forehead with an eternal crease of incomprehension. She appeared entirely unable to quite put a name to whatever it was she was watching. When Peggy told him from the corner of her mouth a bit later that Cassie, plump, lonely, and neglected, had “problems,” that her husband had left her, and Peggy had invited her mostly from pity, Lafferty took in the desperate and thirsty look of the woman and saw her for what she was: a mortal temptress God had placed on the path to his reconciliation. The flesh of her body, near as Lafferty could judge beneath her loose-fitting dress and sweater, seemed at the crossroads of aging, still firm enough to be enticing, ample and relaxed enough to be inviting.
He caught himself holding his breath. He neither meant nor intended to be judging the flesh of another woman. He meant to spurn temptation. He looked at his wife. Pretty, prettier, dark hair in thick waves and ringlets, fine fistfuls of flesh evident beneath the close-fitting clothes. She was the woman for him. Amen and case closed.
For a time Lafferty chatted up a fellow with the ugliest wife he could find. His name was Conboy, beanpole tall and lanky with a small face and square jaw, hair balding back across the crown of his head. He paused before every laugh to make sure, Lafferty guessed, that he got it. His wife, Angelica, was a frightful scramble of straight hair, chicklet teeth, and a wee nose buried by the heft of her glasses, but Lafferty loved her wit. When the topic turned to the lamentable earthquake in Turkey and the countless hundreds dead, didn’t she say, “Ah, sure, they probably all had it coming,” and Lafferty hoped he could grow up someday to appreciate a woman such as that. Passing through the parlor, he exchanged cowboy quick-draws with a big heavy fellow by the name of Quinn with tight curly hair and a roadmap of red veins and splotches on his cheeks, the big fellow clutching his chest like it was shot full of hot lead, and in the kitchen he fell in with Browne, a grave and studious man, the prominent gray hair of his eyebrows threatening to conquer his face altogether. Browne was espousing to his wife, Ginger, and a cluster of others his conviction that there was no such thing as the present, that the present didn’t exist, that the word itself should be stricken from the dictionaries of the world. Someone said what about now? Right now when they’re all standing about, weren’t they in the present, and Browne said certainly not, it’s in the past by the time the word leaves your lips. Someone said now quicker but Browne insisted it still existed only in memory, nowhere else, and for a time they stood about shouting now quicker and quicker, trying in vain to snatch the present and keep it from becoming the past. Lafferty saw Cassie standing at the fringe, feigning interest, trying to hide the confusion on her brow. She was standing directly beneath the overhead light of the kitchen, which lent her fine, sandy hair a metallic and reflective quality that Lafferty could have taken for a halo, if he’d been so inclined.
When the time came for party pieces they congregated around the tree, great flakes of snow still licking at the window from the darkness outside. Ginger Browne went first, encouraged by the crowd who’d heard her first-rate voice before, giving a grand rendition of “O Holy Night,” hitting the high notes with gusto. Song after song followed, three nurses in a fine bit of diddlyi, Lafferty concluding they must practice in the ward when they ought to be healing people, and a little man named Enright offering a quavering version of “Wild Mountain Thyme,” making the most of a voice that was mournful and thin. Will you go, lassie, go, sang every voice in the room, except for that of a dark fellow by the name of Adams who’d been sulking behind his close-cropped beard since the moment he arrived on the outs with his wife. When it came time for Lafferty’s own piece, he demurred, glancing at Peggy, who knew that his usual was a rousing rebel song, “The Boys of the Old Brigade,” far from a favorite of hers, and he’d not had enough drink taken at any rate, wasn’t in the mood, too busy being the host, too busy minding his p’s and q’s — a redundant effort on his part, as Peggy was minding them too. When they urged and insisted, Lafferty stepped to the middle of the room, cleared his throat, and recited,
“Eggs and bacon, eggs and bacon,
If you think I’m going to sing it,
You’re sadly mistaken.”
The rhyme was well received and Lafferty was off the hook, and he opened himself another bottle of stout, and looked at the clock on the mantel. Another piece or two ensued, till it petered out over a sad effort by Mr. and Mrs. Quinn, who stumbled through a Bavarian folk song they picked up on German holiday. Lafferty noticed his own cheeks had got sore from smiling. A sad state of affairs. In an evening at the Pig and Whistle with his mates, didn’t his smile last twice as long, and didn’t his cheeks never grow weary of it. There were different qualities of smiles, those that came easy and those that did not, those that took place, say, for instance, at your wife’s Christmas party with a passel of partiers you hardly knew, and with the keen eye of your wife forever watching for the smile to be sure it was there and sincere, and which required all the more toil to maintain. Cassie was one of the first to leave, fetching her coat from the bedroom and carrying it with her out into the snow, pausing only to say a few words to Peggy passing by. Lafferty thought she’d have slunk out undetected if she’d been able, and he was relieved to see her depart, taking with her the fleshy temptation, seeing it as the first step toward an empty house, which was to say toward an empty bedroom in which he and his wife, Peggy-o, could at last consummate their reconciliation. For wasn’t your man growing all the more randy with each passing stout, each passing hour, the longer he’d looked upon the temptation, having been celibate now for so many days. Five at least, going on six.