Every night a dinner party. But not like Larry’s and mine. Here were hours of witty conversation. Storytelling. Attentive listening. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but no outright drunkenness. And I didn’t have to work so hard; I wasn’t responsible for anything. I was only a guest. Although at our parties, I had often hidden behind a mask of hostessing (“excuse me, I have to check on the roast”), here I was a participant like all the other fellows. Who actually seemed to enjoy my conversation. Who laughed at my jokes. Who called me over me to sit down, as we talked together about our days alone in our studios, about our work, about our discoveries of the lake, the luxuriant hillside.

The last weekend of my residence at the Villa, Larry joined me. The contrast was inescapable. Especially at dinner, when he couldn’t refill his wine glass fast enough and reached across the table to pull the bottle to his glass, proceeding to become slurry drunk. And critical of me. The raised eyebrows, the polite silence of my fellows, followed by their resuming our conversation, pointedly including me as if to say, “Don’t worry, you’re still one of us.” As if someone had untied a blindfold, let it fall from my eyes.

If Hemingway’s characters can be divided into ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders,’ as a host, I was a clear ‘insider,’ deciding, in fact, who else would be insiders too. Giving parties carries a certain kind of power. If I was hosting, then my place was secure at the center of the clique.

It was then I began — mentally — to leave our marriage, although the hills surrounding the Villa did not resemble white elephants, and although it took four more years to file for divorce, and many pleadings with Larry to stop drinking. But what had been in it for me for three decades? I was no Alice Roosevelt Longworth, rebellious and famous for my parties. Or was I more rebellious than I wanted to admit?

In her memoir Drinking, A Love Story, Caroline Knapp talks about the anger she felt toward her family, her resentment of their controlled, genteel covering over the “pains and rages that lurked below the surface.” About her desire “to stand up in the middle of the room and yell something, shatter all that restraint.” Larry shattered restraint and then some. I suppose for years I let him do it for me — holler out all my own unacknowledged desire to tell my father to take his tidy fox trot and stuff it. To tear up the inane scripts of those silly, over-controlled birthday parties. And to break through the tension of the clipped conversations in my parents’ living room. As if, to quote one of my favorite children’s books, Where the Wild Things Are, secretly I had wanted a “wild rumpus,” and Larry knew how to get one going.

But it was more than that. If Hemingway’s characters can be divided into “outsiders” and “insiders,” as a host, I was a clear “insider,” deciding, in fact, who else would be insiders too. Giving parties carries a certain kind of power. If I was hosting, then my place was secure at the center of the clique. And I didn’t have to play a part someone else had given me. Perhaps even more important, I didn’t have to feel the social terror of being adrift at a party where making conversation was up to me. Besides, if people came to my house for a party, they must like me, mustn’t they? If I was the one giving the party no one wanted to leave, then I could avert my terror of finding myself unchosen, standing all alone against the dancing room wall.