My weekend invitation was partly a working arrangement. I was supposed to advise Douglas on the basic renovations for the house and rehearse him on what he was to say to the contractor. Doug had vague but stubborn ideas of what he wanted, and he trusted me to read his mind and tell him how to express his wants. It was a fair exchange. Food and drink, a weekend in the country, a morning swim when the tide was high, in return for strolling around Doug’s property and talking about wood and glass and square footage. And then if he liked my designs for the kitchen, I was going to try to make a deal with him to do it myself. I’ve done similar projects for other friends. The art gallery near the corner of West Broadway and Prince — all my ideas, though I don’t get the credit.
All in all, an OK weekend. Even this party was not what I’d expected it to be. I’d forgotten the kinds of tasty things they serve at parties, and I was munching out on pate and deviled eggs with caviar and all those things that I never have because I eat pretty simply when I eat at my place and I never go to parties because they’re a waste of time.
“Which one is she?” I asked, looking at the group of people at the other end of the room. The women all looked alike to me. They were wearing the style that comes after preppy. Simple dresses, real pearls. Or skirts with shirts like their husbands’, with a cable knit sweater over their shoulders. Very League of Women Voters. Only this was a party, so they were all knocking it back — and it wasn’t white wine spritzers, it was vodka with maybe an ice cube. As I got closer I could see they were all mostly a little zonked.
“That’s her,” my informant said, and I peeled away from him as I suddenly remembered.
Storey Stanton, that was her name. Elizabeth Storey Stanton. That’s what I was trying to remember earlier — that she was called by her middle name. I was in college before I met anyone whose first name was actually a surname. Stuart, Tyler, Grantland, Brookes, and Phelps are from my freshman yearbook. Good old Phelps.
She was looking into her drink as if there was something floating in it. I was close enough to crane over her and look into her glass. There was nothing in it but the light reflecting off the surface of the drink, mooning back into her eyes. Elizabeth Storey Stanton. Radcliffe. That was it.
She looked up at me suddenly, shocked that anyone was standing there, so close to her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you jump. Is there something wrong with your drink? Can I get you another?”
“No. No, please don’t get me another. As a matter of fact, you could take this one away.”
I didn’t know what she wanted, but her voice was so humorless that I decided to do exactly as she said.
She wasn’t bad-looking. Fine light hair, cut off in a straight line at her shoulder. Eyes with those deep heavy lids that make it look like it takes an effort to hold them up. She reminded me a little of Eva Marie Saint, when she got to be too old for ingenue roles and they stuck her in comedies that didn’t suit her. I see her on TV late at night, gamely playing them through with the tension-etched smile, the weary gesture, the palpable civility. This woman even had the same kind of stance, elbows close to the body, one hand waving the glass in the air. “Give it to me,” I said, taking the drink out of her hand. “You don’t need that. Come and talk to me instead.”
I put our drinks down and took her hand and she followed me quietly enough. I didn’t know where I was going, of course, but I looked through an open door and found a small breakfast room, with a small glass table set for the morning meal. “Sit here,” I told her, and put her at one end of the table while I went to sit at the other. She smiled at me over the top of the table and I felt for a moment that we were actually sitting down to breakfast together.
She picked up an empty water glass and twirled it in her hands. “I’m afraid I’ve deprived you of your drink,” she apologized. “We don’t both have to go on the wagon at the same time.”
“It’s OK,” I told her. I almost said then, Look, I know who you are, Elizabeth Storey Stanton Screwbosky. You’re Lizzy in “Hard Midnight.” And “Bedtime Storey” is your song. And I guess you’re the one “Right of Way” was written for. You’re in all those early songs, the harsh ballads, the forty-fives I had to go back and find after that first time I saw him opening a concert for Led Zeppelin in Boston, the songs of loss that preceded the moving, speeding songs he was singing by the time of the Chicago concert. I walked out after his opening in Boston. I was afraid the heavy metal sound of Zeppelin would drive his songs out of my head.
But something stopped me from using her name — something told me to talk to her as if I didn’t know who she was, as if nobody had come up and hissed in my ear, “See that skinny washed-out blonde on the other side of the room? Swear to God, she was married to Screwbosky.” I might have talked to her anyway. She’s that kind of woman. The kind I pick up outside the Third Avenue exit of Bloomingdale’s, looking for a cab to take them to the Plaza. I thought then that I could have her. If I wanted to go to the trouble.
“Are you a friend of Karen’s?” she asked, naming our hostess’s daughter, one of the handful of people I had met coming in.
“No.”
“No? A business friend of Oscar’s?”
“No.”
“An uninvited guest?” She smiled.
“Almost. I came with Douglas Miller. He just bought a house on Dolphin Circle.”
“I know,” she nodded. “The old Chatwin place.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know why we call it the old Chatwin place. The Chatwins were in it only ten years. That doesn’t seem very long, does it?” She had been smiling but it faded away. I wondered if she had remembered that it was just about ten years ago that Screw had died. Of course they must have been separated a long time before that. She was already out of his life before I ever heard of him. I would have remembered.
Her face was still, and I had a chance to look at her again. I thought she was about thirty-four or thirty-five. Her face looked softer up close, and younger. She glanced at me, to see if I was thinking what she was thinking, and I made my face say something else. But behind it, I was still thinking about Screw’s death. At that time I had thought, and had said to anybody who would listen, presidents are replaceable, the pope is replaceable. Screwbosky is not replaceable. And still nobody knows what happened. Somebody said an international terrorist got him. The dude caused me some terror, all right. The first I knew about it was six o’clock in the morning when my clock radio clicked on and they were playing his songs, on and on, all day and all night, for weeks.
“You don’t live around here, do you?” she was saying.
“In the city,” I said. “West Sixty-eighth Street. I come to the suburbs when I’m invited.”
“I haven’t been into town in such a long time, months and months. I’m going in next week, though. Thursday. It’s our anniversary, and my husband is taking me to lunch at the Russian Tea Room.”
They always mention their husbands pretty early in the conversation. It’s like flipping open a wallet to show an I.D. They all travel on their husbands’ passports, these thirty-five-year-old women.
I wonder if they ever think about how they can’t be found unless you do know their husbands’ names. “We’re in the book,” they say, but she isn’t; she’s hidden behind her husband’s name.
She was smiling across the table, relaxed now, pretty and sort of earnest, trying to draw me out. I felt then that the way she looked was the way she was, and I never had any reason to change my first impression. Now she entered into the game of the breakfast table. “Crumpets?” she asked. “Shall I pour your tea?”