“Are you okay?” Fred whispered.
Patty nodded.
“Fred!” Marion called again.
“Wait a couple seconds before you come out,” Fred said to Patty as he started to go. “I’m coming!” he shouted back to the kitchen. “That was beautiful,” he said in a throaty desperate voice to Patty and then quickly kissed her on the lips. His eyes were shining. “Thank you,” he said fervently (to her astonishment), and then walked briskly toward the living room.
“Tony!” Fred said as he entered. His voice was full of enthusiasm, an unconscious parody of Tony’s somewhat affected and theatrical speech.
“Hi, Fred!” Tony boomed back at him, his teeth showing, a cigarette waving in the air, with his wrist cocked backward, “it’s good to see you. I was just explaining to Marion that Betty couldn’t make it.”
Fred pouted. He meant his exaggerated facial response to show genuine disappointment and sympathy. “Yeah, I heard. Her mom’s not feeling good, huh?”
Tony shook his head. “Betty’s mother is young to be widowed. What am I saying? I’m thirty-two, it’s time I considered a woman of fifty young for anything, not merely widowhood.”
“Yeah, it’s rough.” Fred said, and continued, his compassion depleted: “Do you want something to drink?”
“Love it. What’s available?”
“We have everything.” Fred had spent a hundred and twenty dollars that morning to make sure of his boast.
“What are you going to have? I’ll go along with you.”
“I was going to have red wine. Okay?”
“Terrific.”
Fred made his way into the kitchen. His heart raced, he was sweaty, and his stomach felt both light and cramped. His whole system seemed to be under attack by a virus, except for his groin, which was warm and stimulated. He couldn’t look Marion in the eyes. This is terrible, he lectured himself. I love my wife. Marion stood at the counter, her hair up (the way he liked it), dressed just like the wife he always wanted: sensible, potentially maternal, and profoundly middle-class. Fred’s mother was a hysterical immigrant. Marion never shrieked or wailed or turned beet-red, as did his mother with tedious regularity. Marion, when faced with defeat or despair, simply crawled into bed and slept, as if frustration and depression were a flu that merely required rest and plenty of fluids. However, sex with Marion was boring. And Fred was bored with her body, despite Marion’s newly trim figure. Her lovemaking was too passive. She never touched him with any enthusiasm and certainly never serviced his body with anything like the diligence and seriousness with which Fred treated her physical needs.
Those were Fred’s polite words for his love life: passive, needs, servicing. They were new. Actually, his old vocabulary was more honest, though crude, when he thought privately: she doesn’t give good blow-jobs.
Lately he had tried to censure even his private feelings about Marion in bed. He now thought to himself in the jargon of popular psychology: servicing, needs, caring, experimentation, spontaneity. The last, spontaneity, was Fred’s new favorite for lunches with male friends. Marion and I aren’t spontaneous in bed anymore, he’d say, hoping, while honestly confessing how bad it was now, to give the impression that he and Marion used to screw in various rooms, in tortured positions, using exotic objects, playing roles. Thus Fred aggrandized his past sexual history while telling the truth about the present. He was glad to have so clever and handy a line available and there wasn’t a friend invited to tonight’s dinner who hadn’t heard him say, “We aren’t spontaneous in bed anymore.”
The line occurred to him now as he pulled the cork out of a new bottle of wine. “I didn’t mean to yell,” Marion said in a whisper. “I just don’t like Tony sitting alone in our living room. I can imagine him making up witticisms about our furniture.”
Tony called out to them while Marion was whispering to Fred. “Who’s coming tonight?”
“David Bergman, my buddy from college who’s a big shot at Newstime, Karl Stein, the novelist, and my new agent, Bart Cullen.” Fred said this as he began to exit from the kitchen. He whispered to Marion as he passed her: “It’s okay. I understand.”
Tony took the glass of wine. “Do they have dates?”
Patty entered. “Mmmm, wine,” she said.
“Hello again,” Tony said to Patty with such vehement cheerfulness that one might imagine he knew Patty well. In fact, they had met only a few times, through her friendship with his wife, Betty.
“Hi, Tony,” Patty said. “I was in a state when you arrived!”
Fred poured wine into a glass for her, ashamed to look her in the eyes.
“Really? Why?” Tony’s questions were disarming, his voice almost squeaked with curiosity and good will.
He’s handsome, Patty thought. “Oh! I’m so miserable. I’ve bored Fred—”
At the mention of his name, Fred lost track of the rim of the glass and pointed the nozzle past it, spilling wine on the table. He caught it quickly. Tony’s light blue eyes took in Fred’s embarrassed movements while he mopped up the wine and then handed Patty her glass. Tony’s eyes, while observing Fred, were cold and intelligent. Patty paid no attention to Fred’s actions, but she did observe the sudden transformation in Tony’s look, from empty-headed attention and charm to the clinical, almost heartless stare with which he evaluated Fred’s state of mind. “I have no job, I’m broke, I don’t know any good men,” she was saying.
Shut up, Fred thought, and nervously watched Marion enter with another plate of cold vegetables and dip.
“You don’t?” Tony said. “How shocking!”
“All the decent men,” Patty said — her small pouting lips attacked the word—“are married.”
“Or gay,” Marion said.
“That’s right!” Patty said. “Tony! Why are all the men”—she lowered her voice and even managed to peek about as if the walls were bugged—“fags? Why don’t you do something about it, Tony!”
Tony and Fred roared, or so it seemed to Marion, at this speech of Patty’s. Marion was irritated by their amusement. After all, she had said the witty thing first.
“Well,” Tony answered, “the Moral Majority has already done something for you.”
“They have?” Patty said in a tone so awed that Tony had to laugh at it.
“Yes! They invented AIDS.”
“Don’t joke about AIDS,” Marion said, almost wincing. “Someone I know has it.”
“You’re right. I shouldn’t joke,” Tony said, transforming his face into a solemn mask, like a chastened schoolboy. “I also know two people who’ve got it. You know”—and he couldn’t help but start to laugh—“in the theater world it really could be like the Black Death. It’s possible it could finish theater.”
Fred, who had been embarrassed by Marion’s correction of Tony (her attitude might seem unsophisticated to Tony), laughed hard at this, hoping to defuse the bomb of seriousness she had dropped.
“Is everybody in the theater gay, Tony?” Patty asked, again with an innocent awe that provoked laughter.
“No, no,” Tony said with great conviction. “Only half. The problem is, that half are all the males. Only the women are heterosexual and naturally after a few years in the theater, they become intensely frustrated and start screwing movie executives or owners of baseball teams.”
Patty and Fred laughed, but Marion frowned, leaned toward Tony, and said in a scolding tone, “I really don’t think it’s funny. This twenty-three-old editorial assistant has it. He was told to take a permanent sick leave — they’re paying him so they won’t get sued. His lover, his family, no one will see him. And the people who worked with him are busy making jokes about replacing all the coffee cups in the office. Jokes that aren’t so funny, and maybe aren’t even jokes, because somebody did buy new coffee cups and even a new coffeepot.”