"Aye-aye, sir," Dick murmured to Susan as they dutifully moved on. "Quite a little weekend hideaway!"
She too was more or less rolling her eyes. "But they seem like a friendly enough couple. I wonder where the money comes from."
From their husband-and-wife law firm over in the state capital, one of their costumed neighbors informed them as they waited together at the bar: Hardison & Hardison, very in with the governor and other influential Annapolitans. What was more, they had just taken on their son, Tom Junior, as a full partner, and his younger sister, just out of law school, as a junior partner: sort of a family 4-H Club. And had the Feltons seen the name of that boat of theirs?
"Not yet."
"Stroll out and take a look." To the bartender: "Scotch on the rocks for me, please."
Susan: "White wine spritzer?" And Dick: "I'll have a glass of red."
The barman smiled apologetically. "No reds, I'm afraid. On account of the carpets?" And shrugged: not his house rule.
"Mm-hm." The living room wall-to-wall, they now noted, was a gray so light as to be almost white. Poor choice for a carpet color, in Sue's opinion — and for that matter, what color wouldn't be stained by a spilled merlot or cabernet? But de gustibus, de gustibus. "So make it gin and tonic, then," Dick supposed.
"Ars longa!" a late-arriving guest called from the hallway.
Sam Bailey, behind them, asked the bartender for the same, predicted that that new arrival was George Newett, from the College, and called back "Vita brevis est!" His own vita without Ethel, however, he added to the Feltons, had gotten longa than he wanted it to be. Raising his glass in salute, "Fuck life. But here we are, I guess. E pluribus unum. Shall we join Trimalchio's Feast?"
The allusion escaped them, but to make room for other thirsters they moved away from the bar, drinks in hand, toward the groups of guests chatting at the hors d'oeuvres tables at the lanai's other end, and out on the pool deck, and in what Susan now dubbed the Great Room. As Sam had foretold, once the admission ritual was done, the affair settled into an agreeable Heron Bay neighborhood cocktail party, lavish by the standards of Rock-fish Reach and Oyster Cove if perhaps not by those of Spartina Pointe, and enlivened by the guests' comments on one another's costumes, which ranged from the more or less aggressively non-compliant (the bearded fellow identified by Doc Sam as "George Newett from the College" wore a camouflage hunting jacket over blue jeans, polo shirt, and Adidas walking shoes; his wife an African dashiki), to the meant-to-be-humorous, like Tom Hardison's casino T-shirt and Dick Felton's caftan-cum-machete, to the formally elaborate, like Patricia Hardison's and some others' store-bought togas or gladiator outfits. Although not, by their own acknowledgment, particularly "people" people, husband and wife found it a pleasant change from their customary routines to chat in that handsome setting with their neighbors and other acquaintances and to meet acquaintances of those acquaintances; to refresh their drinks and nibble at canapés as they asked and were asked about one another's health, their former or current careers, their grown children's whereabouts and professions, their impression of "houses like this" in "neighborhoods like ours," their opinion of the Bush administration's war in Iraq (careful stepping here, unless one didn't mind treading on toes), and their guesses on whether Chesapeake Bay, in places still recovering from the surge floods of Tropical Storm Isabel two years past, might yet be hurricaned in the current hyperactive season.
"Just heard that Rita's blowing the bejesus out of Gulfport and Biloxi. I swear."
"Anybody want to bet they'll use up the alphabet this year and have to start over? Hurricane Aaron? Tropical Storm Bibi?"
"As in B. B. King?"
"C. C. Ryder? Dee Dee Myers?"
"Who's that?"
"E. E. Cummings?"
"Who's that?"
"I can't get over those poor bastards in New Orleans: Why didn't they get the hell out instead of hanging around and looting stores?"
"Did you hear the one about Bush's reply when a reporter asked his opinion of Roe versus Wade? 'I don't care how they get out of New Orleans,' says W, 'as long as it doesn't cost the government money.'"
'"George Newett, is it? At my age, I wish everybody wore nametags."
"On their foreheads. Even our grandkids."
"Love that headband, by the way, Pat. Right out of Antony and Cleopatra!"
"Why, thanks, Susan. Tom's orders are that if some joker says I've got my head up my asp, I should tell them to kiss it. Now is that nice?"
"Some cool djellaba you've got there, Dick."
"Caftan, actually. Some cool yacht you've got out there! Is that your RV too, the big shiny guy parked down by your dock?"
It was, Tom Hardison readily acknowledged. In simple truth, he and Pat enjoyed owning things. Owning and doing! "What the hell, you only get one go-round."
George Newett's wife (also from the College, and with a last name different from her husband's) explained to Susan, who had asked about Sam Bailey's earlier reference, that Trimalchio's Feast is a famous scene in the first-century Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter: an over-the-top gluttonous orgy that became a sort of emblem of the Roman Empire's decadence. "The mother of all toga parties, I guess. But talk about over the top…" She eye-rolled the sumptuous setting in which they stood. The two women agreed, however, that Patricia Hardison really did seem to be, in the best sense, patrician: upscale but good-humored, friendly, and without affectation; competent and self-assured but nowise overbearing; as Amanda Todd (i.e., Mrs. George Newett, poet and professor, from Blue Crab Bight) put it, superior, but not capital-S Superior.
"I like her," Susan reported to her husband when they next crossed paths in their separate conversational courses. "First poet I ever met. Is her husband nice?"
Dick shrugged. "Retired from the College. Describes himself as a failed-old-fart writer. But at least he's not intimidating."
"Unlike…?"
Her husband nodded toward their host, who was just then proclaiming to the assembled "friends, Romans, countrymen" that the dinner buffet (under a large tent out beside the pool deck) was now open for business, and that Jove helps those who help themselves. "After dinner, game and prize time!"
En route past them toward the bar, "Me," Sam Bailey said, "I'm going to have me another G and T. D'ja see their boat's name? Bit of a mouthful, huh?"
Sue hadn't. She worried aloud that Doc Sam was overdoing the booze, maybe on account of his wife's death-day anniversary; hoped he wouldn't be driving home after the party. "I doubt if he cares," Dick said. "I sure wouldn't, in his position." The name of the boat, by the way, he added, was Plaintiff's Complaint. Which reminded him: Since both Hardisons were lawyers, maybe he'd ask Emperor Tom about that "each survives the other" business in their wills, and Sue could ask her new pal Cleopatra. Or was it Sheba?
"Come on," his wife chided. "They're friendly people who just happen to be rich as shit. Let's do the buffet."
They did it, Sue chatting in her lively/friendly way with the people before and after them in the help-yourself line and with the caterers who sliced and served the roast beef au jus and breast of turkey; Dick less forthcoming, as had lately more and more become his manner, but not uncordial, and appreciative of his mate's carrying the conversational ball. Time was when they'd both been more outgoing: In their forties and fifties they'd had fairly close friends, of the sort one enjoys going out with to a restaurant or movie. By age sixty, after a couple of career moves, they had only office lunch-colleagues, and since their retirement not even those; just cordial over-the-fence-chat neighbors, golf/ tennis partners, and their seldom more than annually visited or visiting offspring. A somewhat empty life, he'd grant, but one which, as afore-established, they enjoyed more than not, on balance — or had enjoyed, until his late brooding upon it's inevitably approaching decline, even collapse, had leached the pleasure out of it.