"Here's how it's done, girls," Pat explained. Out of the large bowl of dark grapes the bartender had produced from behind his station, she plucked a bunch and nestled it neatly into her cleavage. "You tuck 'em in like so, and then your significant other, or whoever, sees how many he can nibble off their stems — without using his hands, mind. The couple with the fewest grapes left wins the prize." Turning to her husband: "Want a no-grope grape, sweetie-pie?"
"Yummy! Deal me in!" Doing his helmet, he shmushed his face into his wife's fruited bosom and made loud chomping sounds while she, with a mock what-are-you-going-to-do-with-men? look at the laughing bystanders, uplifted her breasts with both hands to facilitate his gorging, and one of the hors d'oeuvre servers began circulating with the bowl among the female guests. A number of them joined in; as many others declined, whether because (like Susan's) their costumes were non-décolletaged, or they preferred watching the fun to joining it, or chose the quoits contest instead. More disposed to spectate than to participate, the Feltons moved with others out to the far side of the pool deck to see how Thong-Undie Quoits was played. Tom Hardison, his grape-bobbing done for the present ("But save me a few for later!" he called back to Patricia), led the way, carrying a white plastic bin full of varicolored thong panties in his left hand while twirling one with his right. On the lawn just past the deck, a shrubbery light illumined a slightly tipped-back sheet of plywood, on the white-painted face of which were mounted five distinctly phallic-looking posts, one at each corner and one in the center: six-inch tan shafts culminating in pink knobs and mounted at a suggestively upward angle to the backboard.
"Here's how it's done, ladies," Tom explained; "not that you didn't learn the facts of life back in junior high…" Holding up a robin's-egg-blue underpant by it's thong, from behind a white-taped line on the deck he frisbeed it the eight feet or so toward the target board, where it landed between pegs and slid to the ground. With a shrug he said, "Not everybody scores on the first date," and then explained to the waiting contestants, "Three pairs for each gladiatrix, okay? If you miss all three, you're still a virgin, no matter how many kids and grandkids you claim to have. Score one and you get to keep it to excite your hubby. Two out of three and you're in the semifinals; three out of three and you're a finalist. All three on the same post and you win the Heron Bay Marital Fidelity Award! Who wants to go first?" Examining the nametag on one middle-aged matron's ample, grapeless bosom, "Helen McCall," he announced, "Spartina Pointe. How about it, Helen?"
The lady gamely handed her wineglass to her neighbor, pulled three panties from the bin, called out "We who are about to try salute you!" and spun the first item boardward, where it fell two feet short. "Out of practice," she admitted. Amid the bystanders' chuckles and calls of encouragement she tossed her second, which reached the board but then slid down, as had the host's demonstration throw.
Somebody called, "Not everybody who drops her drawers gets what she's after," to which someone else retorted, "Is that the Voice of Experience speaking?" But Ms. McCall's vigorous third toss looped a red thong undie on the board's upper left peg, to general cheers. Tom Hardison retrieved and presented it with a courtly bow to the contestant's applauding husband, who promptly knelt before her, spread the waistband wide, and insisted that she step into her trophy then and there.
"What fun." Susan sighed and took Dick's hand in hers. "I wish we were more like that."
"Yeah, well, me too." With a squeeze, "In our next life, maybe?" He glanced at his watch: almost nine already. "Want to hang around a while longer, or split now?"
Incredulously, "Are you kidding? They haven't awarded the prizes yet!"
"Sorry sorry sorry." And he was, for having become such a party-pooping partner to the wife he so loved and respected. And it wasn't that he was having an unenjoyable evening; only that — as was typically the case on the infrequent occasions when they dined out with another couple — he reached his sufficiency of good food and company sooner than Susan and the others did, and was ready to move on to the next thing, to call it an evening, while the rest were leisurely reviewing the dessert menu and considering an after-dinner nightcap at one or the other's house. To his own surprise, he felt his throat thicken and his eyes brim. Their good life together had gone by so fast! How many more so-agreeably-routine days and evenings remained to them before… what?
Trying as usual to accommodate him, "D'you want to watch the game," Sue asked him, "or circulate a bit?"
"Your call." His characteristic reply. In an effort to do better, "Why not have a go at the game yourself?" he proposed to her. "You'd look cute in a thong."
She gave him one of her looks. "Because I'm me, remember?" Another fifteen minutes or so, she predicted, ought to wind things up, gamewise; after the prizes were handed out they could probably leave without seeming discourteous. Meanwhile, shouldn't he maybe go check on Doc Sam?
Her husband welcomed the errand: something to occupy him while Susan made conversation with their hostess, a couple of her golf partners, and other party guests. He worked his way barward through the merry grape-bobbers, their equally merry encouragers and referees ("How many left down there? Let me check." "No, me!" "Hey hey, no hands allowed…"), and the occasional two or three talking politics, sports, business. Couldn't immediately locate his tennis pal, in whose present position he himself would… well, what, exactly? Not hang around to be in that position, he hoped and more or less re-vowed to himself. Then he heard the old fellow (but who was Dick Felton, at age five-and-seventy, to call eighty "old"?) sing out raucously from the living room, to the tune of "Oh Holy Night":
"O-O-Oh ho-ly shit!…"
Sam stumbled out onto the lanai, doing the beer-bottle-microphone thing as the Hardisons had done earlier, but swigging from it between shouted lines:
"The sky, the sky is fall-ing!…"
Smiling or frowning people turned his way, some commenting behind their hands.
"It is the end… of our dear… U-S-A!…"
Dick approached him, calling out as if in jest, "Yo, Sam! You're distracting the thong-throwers, man!"
"And the grape-gropers, too!" someone merrily added. Thinking to lead him back inside and quiet him down, Dick put an arm around the old fellow's bony shoulders. He caught sight of Pat Hardison, clearly much concerned, heading toward them from the food tent. But as he made to turn his friend houseward, Sam startled him by snatching the machete from it's sheath, pushing free of it's owner, raising it high, and declaring, "If there's no red wine, I guess I'll have a bloody mary."
"Sam Sam Sam…"
Returning to his carol parody, "Fall… on your swords!" Sam sang. "Oh hear… the angels laugh-ing!…"
Too late, Dick sprang to snatch back the blade, or at least to grab hold of it's wielder's arm. To all hands' horror, having mock-threatened his would-be restrainer with it, Sam thrust it's point into his own chest, just under the breastbone. Dropped the beer bottle; gripped the machete's carved handle with both hands and pushed it's blade into himself yet farther; grunted with the pain of it and dropped first to his knees, then sideways to the floor, his blood already soaking through his robe front onto the lanai deck. Pat Hardison and other women screamed; men shouted and rushed up, her husband among them. An elderly ex-doctor from Stratford — whose "toga" was a fancied-up set of blue hospital scrubs and who earlier had complained to the Feltons that the ever-higher cost of medical malpractice insurance had pressured him into retirement — pushed through the others and took charge: ordered Tom Hardison to dial 911 and Pat to find a bunch of clean rags, towels, anything that he could use to stanch the blood flow; swatted Sam's hands off the machete handle (all but unconscious now, eyes squint shut, the old fellow moaned, coughed, vomited a bit onto the deck, and went entirely limp); withdrew and laid aside the bloody blade and pressed a double handful of the patient's robe against the gushing wound.