Let’s Party
FROM Les Linottes
BY Georges Courteline
ILLUSTRATED BY Charles Émile Egli (1877-1937)
In 1966 Peter Matthiessen missed the party of the decade. His explanation that he’d hit a rhythm with his writing didn’t appease a miffed Truman Capote. No one else — other than William Styron, also mid-manuscript — had turned down an invitation to Capote’s Black and White Ball.
The buzz preceding that party vibrated far beyond the boroughs of New York. Guests flew in from Kansas and California; Cecil Beaton came from London. As San Franciscan Herb Caen said afterward, “The elevator operators, the cab drivers, the doormen, as soon as they saw you with a mask or headdress, they said, ‘Going to Truman’s ball, huh?’” But John Knowles and Harold Prince were reminded of Versailles in 1778 and the tumbrels in the French Revolution. Frank Sinatra left early with Mia Farrow. And even Caen admitted that, as with the Super Bowl, the buildup was better than the event: “It was one of those parties that never got off the ground. People did what they always do — getting up and going into their little cliques and corners.”
Just thinking of a party composed of “little cliques” makes me want to misplace the keys to my 1993 Honda. I’ll do most anything to avoid facing a roomful of huddled backs attached to faces that look right past me when they head across the room to refill a drink. There’s a kind of inertia, a paralysis that can infect a bad party, when people won’t move beyond the comfort of their familiar crew. And costume parties can be even worse. What do you say after the intitial “Oh my god, it’s not, it couldn’t be — it’s Geoffrey!” when you’re not even sure who, encased in your own get-up, you are?
Not that I’ve attended many costume parties. Shortly after our son was born, his father Larry and I dressed in flesh-colored flannel underwear with folded white sheets around our hips, secured, diaper-style, with gigantic safety pins, and greeted our hosts at the door holding baby bottles and howling. We were the hit of the party — for about five minutes. The guests’ laughter at our entrance was louder than our mock crying, but afterward I desperately wanted to get rid of the yards of folded sheets stuffed between my legs. And who was I in this outfit anyway? The exhausted, house-bound new mother unable to finish her dreams at night, or the energetic high school teacher who could muster the confidence to walk up to a stranger and say “Hi, I don’t think we’ve met!” But to do that in diapers?
I’ll do most anything to avoid facing a roomful of huddled backs attached to faces that look right past me when they head across the room to refill a drink. There’s a kind of inertia, a paralysis that can infect a bad party, when people won’t move beyond the comfort of their familiar crew.
I must admit, however, that once, in the eighties, a colleague hosted a small-scale, small-town version of Truman’s that took off like a jet on a shortened runway. Our university’s lone classicist had sent out invitations in Latin, which (once laboriously translated) required us to dress in black, white and/or red. When we realized he was trying to force a motley group of academic dweebs to leave their T-shirts in the laundry and dress up for one of his exquisite Tuscan dinners, we revolted. Plotting together beforehand, we arrived at Paul’s door in outrageous outfits. Larry hauled out the black tails from his choral-directing days but also wore a red T-shirt, tattered Reeboks, and red socks. I borrowed a slinky black dress slit up to my bottom and bought fish-net stockings, a cheap pair of five-inch stiletto heels with rhinestone clips, and a white boa that I flapped around my shoulders. Judy unpacked her taffeta prom dress (the bodice of which ripped during the fourth course of Paul’s dinner and ripped further when, late in the evening, she lounged on the department chair’s lap). Bonnie wore a veiled black hat from the forties with a foot-long feather, and her husband Grant’s neon-scarlet bow tie blinked little lights all night. The minute people began walking in the door, that party was on.
For much of my life I’ve heeded Lambert Strether’s advice and tried to “live all you can.” But until I was twenty, when it came to attending parties, I felt more sympathy for Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.”
I missed what should have been my first party. And it was being given for me, by Barbara Bimson, for my ninth birthday. I woke up with a leaden stomach. Did I have to go? Maybe I was sick. Certainly I was sick. My stomach hurt. I couldn’t move. Convinced, my mother picked up the phone and called Mrs. Bimson, but the party went on without me, and Barbara and her mother drove over later with a piece of white cake in waxed paper and half a dozen wrapped gifts. I don’t remember them. Just that I was embarrassed and wished they hadn’t — invited me, come over, brought me presents, any of it.
Maybe I worried that Barbara’s mother would have asked me to do things I couldn’t, like cut the cake, and I would make a mess. What would I say to my friends when I opened the presents? Even the thought of such a prominent role made me sick — with fear that I wouldn’t know how to act. At that point in my life, I had never been to a party, much less been the center of one.
We were supposed to like these events, yet there was no room for us kids to play, to make up games ourselves. The whole afternoon was scripted, and I didn’t like our lines.
In our family we didn’t invite friends over for birthdays. And I never became an eager guest at other kids’ parties. Ice cream and cake didn’t make up for the fact that perfectly friendly mothers morphed into bossy stage directors, lining us up to pin a paper tail on a stupid picture of a donkey, a scarf tied too tightly around our eyes, everybody screaming. And another mortifying game: Blind Man’s Bluff. It would have been better if we’d been blindfolded for the gift-opening. My mother didn’t believe in spending money on presents for other people’s children, so when it came time for the birthday girl to tear off the plain paper and uncurled ribbon of my gift to reveal a ninety-nine-cent doll whose eyes didn’t even shut, I wanted to run out of the room. No ooh’s and aah’s greeted the undressing of my offering. Usually it was the mother who would mouth a disingenuous “Oh!” followed by a pointed, “Say thank you, Susan.” We were supposed to like these events, yet there was no room for us kids to play, to make up games ourselves. The whole afternoon was scripted, and I didn’t like our lines.
(Oil and charcoal on canvas, 92 x 73 cm)
BY Juan Gris
Musée national d’art moderne, Paris
The only other party I knew was the kind Mom and Daddy hosted for a few of their friends from time to time. Perfumed and high-heeled, the ladies would cross their nyloned legs as they sat sipping their cocktails. I sniffed the sugary smell of the Old Fashioneds, and sometimes Mom gave me her maraschino cherry. I tucked myself onto the couch beside her, listening to comparisons of hairdressers and dentists. The women spoke as if they had signed an oath swearing they would not talk about anything significant or controversial, anything that might cause contention among their husbands, who stood across the room in an inviolable circle of gray- and brown-jacketed backs, highballs in one hand, cigarettes in the other. One evening, when I was about ten, I decided the women’s conversation was boring and walked over to join the men. Whereas the women would give me occasional mascaraed winks and red-lip-sticked smiles, their husbands ignored me and kept right on talking. Just as boring: loan amounts, dollars.
Humans are, my zoologist sister reminds me, a social species. We’re primates. We hanker to hang out with other members of our tribe. We like to gather in bars, parks, and ballrooms. In the nineteenth century, ladies met in parlors, or on verandas over quilts, each one plying a needle to fill in a different part of a bride-to-be’s bedspread-in-progress. Psychologists such as J.R. Mitchell, Stephen Mitchell, and Jessica Benjamin are convinced we exist, not, as Descartes insisted, because we think, but primarily in relationship, in mutuality with others. Of course, primates don’t live in herds like antelope; as the name of our order implies, we prefer to consider ourselves primary, if not self-sufficient.
In the years we’ve lived together, Steve — who is even more in tune than I with Bartleby’s mantra — and I have kept much to ourselves. It’s not that we don’t have friends, but we’ve seldom set the table with more than two place mats. When we finally decided to marry, Steve’s inclination was to do the deed in Costa Rica, with monkeys as witnesses. But I was adamant: I wanted a party. Right here in town, with a hundred people, more, everyone we know. We compromised on a guest list of forty. We’d have the June ceremony in a nearby wilderness park, informal enough (“Attire: Goodyear or Rustic,” we said) that people could come in shorts, and then we’d all come back to the house for a party. So with Gregory Corso’s cry “O God, and the wedding!” ringing in our ears, we began to plan.
I’d had a wedding before. I was nineteen when Larry and I married, on the hottest August eleventh in the history of Phoenix. Two hundred and fifty of the three hundred guests were my father’s business acquaintances and their wives. But although the temperature that afternoon reached one hundred and eighteen, the evening reception at my parents’ house had all the warmth of a refrigerator tidily stacked with tightly-sealed Tupperware containers. Most of the crustless sandwiches remained geometrically arranged on the caterer’s platters, and ice watered the already insipid champagne punch. Larry and I spent the evening obeying the photographer’s orders. Our own wedding, and we were mannequins, frozen figures in a pageant, required only to “hold that pose” and smile.
Just as we were freed finally to talk with our own friends, my mother ushered me back to the bedroom to change into my “going away” outfit. People had already begun to leave, she fussed, so at 9:30 Larry and I were rushed out the door in a limp flurry of rice, to roar down the hill in his open-topped blue Triumph.
Somehow — this was decades before cell phones — we arranged to meet Larry’s oldest friends Sonja and Richard at Bob’s Big Boy on Central Avenue where, ravenous, we ordered Double Deckers with cheese and unanimously agreed the reception had been a flop.
This would be an occasion no one would ever forget, perhaps not as legendary as the gunfight at the OK Corral, but one that would become etched in the town’s memory…
Maybe that was why, months later, with eight place settings of Lenox platinum-band china crammed into our mobile home’s kitchen cabinet, Larry decided we needed to throw a party of our own. By the spring of 1963, he had taught in Tombstone for almost two years, and he wanted to repay the townsfolk who had welcomed him when, fresh from the University of Arizona, he arrived as the school district’s new music teacher. But Larry didn’t envision an ordinary party, and we wouldn’t be using the Lenox. This would be an occasion no one would ever forget, perhaps not as legendary as the gunfight at the OK Corral, but one that would become etched in the town’s memory, ammunition for a write-up in The Tombstone Epitaph.
Consisting of a thousand inhabitants, or, counting us, a thousand and two, Tombstone lacked the social hierarchies characteristic of larger towns: among our friends were the postmistress, the high school and elementary school principals, the bank manager, and the teller, who, with her husband, the mayor, owned the trailer park we lived in. Our guest list also included the editor of the Epitaph and the retired Army colonel and his wife (who never greeted me without crying “But honey, you can’t possibly be married, you’re still a child!”), as well as the high school janitor, the high school principal’s secretary, the football coach, and the band teacher. At least thirty people on the patch of mown lawn outside our trailer.
(21 x 29.7 cm)
Cover design of the wine menu
from Restaurant 1728 in Paris, France.
BY Alain Le Yaouanc
Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported License
The first priority, Larry decided, was to get everyone sloshed. The recipe he decided on came from Patrick Duffy’s Bartender’s Guide: Artillery Punch — a concoction of whiskey, red wine, rum, gin, brandy, benedictine, black tea, and orange juice. He mixed the ingredients in a borrowed aluminum tub, and one of my jobs was to make sure people kept coming back for more.
Even the superintendent of schools was drunk in half an hour, and the whole group grew so rowdy that the town’s kids gathered on the hill above to peer down on their grown-ups slurring jokes and swaying shoulders as the hilarity built throughout the night and into the morning. The next day our nine-month-old German shepherd was so hung over he couldn’t climb the steps up into the trailer. Apparently he’d been slurping leftovers from the bottoms of discarded paper cups, and had also been helped along by the postmistress, who thought it cute that Bismarck loved the punch as much as she did.
On a return visit years after we’d taped the Epitaph’s two-inch write-up into our scrapbook, we learned that our party had been the catalyst for the erasure of obscure enmities: people who (we hadn’t realized) had not spoken in years sang songs that night with their arms around each other, the kids perched on the hill serving as witnesses to the formation of miraculous truces. Just a mention of that party, and everyone began laughing, adding another anecdote to the legend of the party that, like the town itself, was “too tough to die.”
Never had I imagined entertaining could be so powerful. And even though I’d spent the evening frantically serving as chief busboy, waiter, and dishwasher, even though I’d spent the entire day cleaning the trailer, chopping potatoes and onions for gallons of potato salad and was exhausted for days afterward, during that night I had been happy.
Certainly there had been no corners — the patchy grass outside our 10 x 48 foot trailer overlooked a canyon reaching all the way to the Dragoon Mountains. And if there had been cliques, well — I was the hostess, I could interrupt them, ask if anyone needed another drink, urge people back to the table with the food, make sure everybody mixed. I didn’t have to follow anyone else’s script. Best of all, since we had no way of playing music, nobody could dance.
Outside Mrs. Drachman’s slick floors, from the radio, TV, and my girlfriends’ 45’s, another kind of dancing cast a shinier lure. Bee Bop Alula, I was nobody’s baby, but I knew that ballroom dancing was on its way out…
Maybe I still grew numb with terror at parties where dancing was expected because, at five feet nine by the sixth grade, I towered over ninety-nine percent of the boys I knew. In the fifties, it was an unwritten law that no girl could pair up with a guy she looked down on. Biologically, it had been proven, I believed, sparks would never sparkle, “chemistry” would never combust unless a boy could look out across the dance floor over the bobbing head of his date. Too bad if the guy at Rincon High I liked to talk with most — Steve Ledbetter, a whiz at math, science, and Latin and a fellow lover of Emerson — was five feet four.
At Mrs. Drachman’s Junior Assembly in Tucson, even if I slumped, I was taller than anyone in the room, including Mrs. Drachman, whose steel-corseted prow could have cleared ice floes in the North Atlantic. I spent the time between dances wishing I could disappear. Usually the last girl chosen by the shyest, smallest boy in the group, I knew I was lucky just to have a sweaty hand gingerly clinging to the gathers of my skirt. One, two, three, four, Mrs. Drachman called out like a drill master, as we plodded around the polished floor to the brisk tinkle of Mrs. Reynold’s piano. The rubber soles of my scuffed saddle shoes — the only pair among the girls’ black patent leather slippers — grew heavier, clumsier as the hour dragged on.
Outside Mrs. Drachman’s slick floors, from the radio, TV, and my girlfriends’ 45’s, another kind of dancing cast a shinier lure. Bee Bop Alula, I was nobody’s baby, but I knew that ballroom dancing was on its way out, reserved for old folks like Lawrence Welk and his chirpy Champagne Lady, Roberta Linn. Yet at home Daddy earnestly tried to reinforce Mrs. Drachman’s efforts. While Mom was doing the dinner dishes, clattering the Melmac and Revere Ware in the sink, Daddy, with no music to help us out, held me at arm’s length and led me in tight little fox-trotting circles around the living room. The most important thing any woman can learn, he preached as we trotted, is never to lean on her partner. My hand was to rest as lightly as a butterfly on his shoulder — I must never drag a man down. I must also anticipate my partner’s every move, keep my feet out of his way. My mother, he went on, had never developed either of these skills. Daddy was a fan of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. (It was decades before Ann Richards’ comment that “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”) After twenty minutes of my father’s lessons, I’d bolt into my bedroom with a book.
One Saturday in my teens, when social survival depended on our ability to dance “fast,” my younger sister Liza and I thought we’d taught ourselves, and called Daddy over to show him our rendition of the jitterbug. We were exhilarated, high-stepping and swinging each other at the ends of our outstretched arms. “Look, we can do it,” I cried. He puffed on his Benson and Hedges: “Not really,” he scoffed. “It’s more complicated than that.”
By the time I met Larry, the jitterbug was almost passé. I never did learn the twist, the swim, the frug. When at parties the time came for people to shake their booties in cool, let-it-all-hang-out, freed-up, with-it ways, my muscles underwent a total clamp down.
I never did learn the twist,
the swim, the frug. When at parties the time came for people to shake their booties in cool, let-it-all-hang-out, freed-up, with-it ways, my muscles underwent a total clamp down.
Yet dancing had once been different. When we were little, at summertime family dances at Squam Lake, Liza and I would grab hands and run out into the middle of the wood-planked playhouse floor. Oblivious to the grownups gliding around us, we hopped, skipped, twirled, and jumped, ecstatically moving — without a shred of self-consciousness — to the music.
Certainly not Mrs. Drachman’s style. Steve had endured dancing school too, though in Brooklyn. He would have been one of the shortest boys there. Like Steve Ledbetter from Rincon High.
Emerson: “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” But how were Steve and I to have a wedding that wasn’t an imitation of other weddings? What sort of script would we follow? Did we need one? Did we want dancing? And how were the two of us going to organize a party, especially when Steve reminded me regularly that he would prefer not to? And why did I want to?
A friend once quipped that in leaving the marriage to Larry and moving in with Steve, I went from a frat house to a monastery. Not quite. But for over three decades, entertaining had quickened Larry’s and my lives as regularly as — and more colorfully than — the Sunday funnies. It was one thing we did well together.
After our success with the Tombstone bash, we put our energies into small dinner parties. A few friends, two or three couples, and one of Larry’s casseroles — Tamale Pie — from his first culinary bible, the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Beer, chips with a sour cream dip to start with, and, afterward, perked coffee and chocolate cake.
I hadn’t yet read Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but like Clarissa, I spent hours, days making arrangements for parties. I brought out our Lenox place settings, the Baccarat goblets, and cleaned the sterling flatware my parents’ friends had given us…
If the ability to find gustatory pleasure in life is a virtue, Larry was a virtuous man. He lived to eat, drink, cook, and entertain. (He had even wooed me by baking oatmeal raisin cookies the first time that, as a college sophomore, I visited him in his trailer.) Before the sixties ended, he had mastered Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking volumes, and friends lapped up helpings of Boeuf bourguignon and Potée normande. Soon I too had caught his francophilic culinary fever, whipping egg whites in our copper bowl for soufflés and setting the alarm at intervals during the night to spread softened butter on refolded dough for croissants. We subscribed to Time Life’s Foods of the World, devouring each successive volume.
I hadn’t yet read Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but like Clarissa, I spent hours, days making arrangements for parties. I brought out our Lenox place settings, the Baccarat goblets, and cleaned the sterling flatware my parents’ friends had given us for wedding presents. I bought fresh flowers, new candles. And unlike Richard Dalloway, Larry spearheaded the planning, as we talked about seating — should Sheila sit next to Harry or John? The rhythm of the courses. What music to be playing on LP’s in the background, how to build the evening, from Schubert and Vivaldi to — by midnight — Otis Redding and Janis Joplin. A day or two of cooking beforehand, dividing up the chores. The elastic stretch of dough under the heel of the hand, the thickening of cream in the bowl, the butter and flour blending to a roux in the saucepan.
In the early seventies, I took courses from Jack Lirio in San Francisco (a bargain then, at $75 for eight classes), and learned to present a crown roast of lamb with pea purée, followed by, say, a Charlotte Malakoff made with my own freshly powdered-sugar-dusted lady fingers — or coulbiac and fresh asparagus, with crème brûlée for dessert. Once after dinner in our Oakland apartment, the six friends at our table stood up and applauded.
Such reward for my efforts! Such praise! And since I needed to be in the kitchen much of the time, no one expected me to be a brilliant conversationalist. My role was essential, limited, and clear: as co-host, my conversation didn’t need to scintillate — warm greetings, supportive murmurings were enough. Besides, during dinner, much of the conversation centered on the food. Our friends were always vocal (perhaps one of our unspoken requirements for a guest?), so conversation never lagged, and after dinner, Larry and I controlled the music, the mood for the rest of the evening. We set the stage, chose the actors, orchestrating the whole event from conception to clean-up — co-directing our own production.
For over three decades, Larry and I entertained friends with far more devotion than we paid to our debts. We’d spend our last dollars of the month on a bottle of Grand Marnier if a recipe asked for a tablespoon. We might need to sell books to make it through the summer, but our liquor cabinet was full.
We set the stage, chose the actors, orchestrating the whole event from conception to clean-up — co-directing our own production.
Even if an evening didn’t showcase our culinary ambitions, we reveled in having people over, especially on Friday nights. High school teachers needed to let off steam as much as their students, we said, and for years we nominated ourselves as the party-throwers for our colleagues. I still have an image from one of these nights, of thirty people sitting on the floor around our fire place, at least six of them strumming guitars, as we all sang “This Land is Your Land,” with a fully grown, hundred-pound Bismarck sitting tall in the midst of the group, the triangles of his silver-black ears perked above the rounded heads of sweeping hair.
But later in the sixties, by the end of a week of bomb threats and knifings in the Berkeley schools, we supposedly grown-up teachers were ready to explode. At these get-togethers, there was no peaceful sitting on the floor swaying to acoustic guitars. With the lights turned off, candles dripping wax on tables, we could barely see each other’s faces. And with the air saturated with Janis, Jimi, Ray, and Aretha blasting on Larry’s Bose speakers — helped along by gallon jugs of Larry’s favorite, Cribari red, and the dope somebody always brought — nobody cared about nuanced conversation.
The sweet carrot, the reward for finishing another week trying to control raucous high-schoolers, these blow-outs. And we were not the only ones extending invitations for these Friday nights, which became electric attractions for more reasons than the plentiful dope from Nam. This was also the era of open marriages: the aroma of the slogan “try it, you’ll like it” wafted through the air like weed, like musk.
For some time I had been persistently wooed after school by one of the coaches. And while I had been feeling increasingly neglected by Larry, as he spent more and more afternoons and evenings with his students, I’d remained steadfast, determined to remain monogamous. At one of these TGIF gatherings, however, I finally succumbed. Late one Friday night in the Home Ec teacher’s apartment I found myself in a dark alcove with my head leaning on the shoulder of our school’s six-foot-four-inch tennis coach, rocking back and forth to Roberta Flack’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” Slow and close, two magnetically attracted bodies cautiously, spontaneously, finding ways to move together. Now this was dancing I could do. After feeling my left breast massaged in a way I never had before, and having a faint but powerful glimmer of what the firm cylinder pressing into my belly promised, I agreed to go to his apartment a few nights later. We were lovers for two and a half years.
Let’s party. Let’s get down. Get it on. And wasn’t it, after all, love that Mrs. Drachman’s lessons had been designed to lead to? What used to be called courtship? Weren’t parties supposed to provide ways for people to become closer? To help deepen friendships?
While immersed in that affair, I lost interest in parties — they seemed superficial, a bothersome distraction. It was that single pair of eyes meeting mine when I stepped inside my lover’s door I wanted. The thrill of such attention, even if only for a few hours at a time. And I didn’t have to cook, or clean up, or even try to entertain. He and I were not focused on how we could plan events for other people to enjoy, but only on pleasing each other.
Here I was, tracing patterns of ingestion and gustation in characters who were trying to hold themselves tight against pain, against the threat of annihilation, just as my husband and I were trying to live within a nearly annihilated marriage, trying to piece it back together.
Eventually, though, I called it off, stopped seeing him, determined to make my ten-year-old marriage work. I resigned from teaching in the Berkeley schools and went back to graduate school, writing an MA thesis called “Filling the Void: Eating and Drinking in Hemingway’s Fiction.” And Larry and I continued to do what we did so well—even revving up the pace of our entertaining. It was during this time I took Jack Lirio’s classes; Larry was brewing his own beer in the coat closet of our Oakland apartment, and I was saving for a new copper pot every other month.
The poignancy of my choice of thesis subject didn’t strike me then. Here I was, tracing patterns of ingestion and gustation in characters who were trying to hold themselves tight against pain, against the threat of annihilation, just as my husband and I were trying to live within a nearly annihilated marriage, trying to piece it back together. In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” the woman asks her lover, “Is this all we do? Go to new places and try new drinks?” They’re headed for an abortion, and, we surmise, the end of their relationship, which clearly has become as empty as the woman’s womb is about to be. I was not aware as I traced the metaphoricity of food and drink in Hemingway’s fiction that Larry and I were also trying to fill a void.
In Tombstone, on Friday nights we had sought out Hector and Jimmy, or Bea and Carlos; we had more fun if they were along. Even on our wedding night, we had spent our first connubial hours with Sonja and Richard — I remember Richard finally saying, “Well, you guys, you’re on your own now,” as he stood up from the table. And after we began hosting parties, at the moment friends suddenly recalled the stack of papers waiting to be graded by Monday (a moment that seldom came before 2:00 a.m.), Larry would beg them to stay. You can’t leave yet, he would cry, changing the music, opening another bottle of wine. I squelched the voice inside that asked if he dreaded being alone with me.
We even had people over for “work days,” scenarios reminiscent of Tom Sawyer and his white-washed fence. When we moved to San Antonio and bought a few acres north of town, periodically we’d invite colleagues in the English department, the music department, members of the church choir Larry conducted, and miscellaneous writer friends to come on out for a “Burn Day.” Larry bought a keg, stocked up on cheap wine (though I did notice that more discriminating drinkers brought their own), and we cooked up quarts of chili, pounds of corn bread. Our closest friends arrived about noon and helped fire up the grill, prepare the burn site, and start up the chain saws — every year Larry chose a new spot on our land to clear. The guys went at it with goggles and gloves. “A bunch of academics with chain saws,” our son David once said, describing the ritual to an out-of-town friend, “not a pretty sight.” After Mark cut through half his forearm and I had to drive him into town for stitches, Larry laid down a new rule. No beer till the chain-sawing was finished. As the meat sizzled on the grill, those of us unable or unwilling to wield a chain saw diligently stacked logs and hurled unruly branches onto the fire.
By dark, with the fire calmed down, we collapsed into rusty lawn chairs. Sometimes nobody would talk for a long time, as we’d turn from the kaleidoscopic patterns of the coals to stare up at the stars. Eventually, the half dozen friends left would help carry the plastic bags of dirty paper plates, napkins, and plastic cups back into the house, where the party unwound into the early morning. Beer after beer, wine glass after glass. Easier just to bring the gallon jug into the living room, save having to get up for refills.
By dark, with the fire calmed down, we collapsed into rusty lawn chairs. Sometimes nobody would talk for a long time, as we’d turn from the kaleidoscopic patterns of the coals to stare
up at the stars.
In discussing the importance of pleasure, Susan Griffin (in The Book of the Courtesans) suggests that “gluttony” stems from a fear of losing pleasure, which is, of course, always fleeting, transitory. Strange how a persistent pursuit of pleasure can generate pain. How a virtue can become a vice.
I think Larry’s drinking crept up on us both. By the mid-seventies, I knew, though I was too cowardly to admit it, that if I wanted to talk seriously with him I’d better do it in the first hour and a half he was home from teaching. Actually, this was familiar behavior for me: as a child, I had grown expert at knowing I could talk to Daddy between his second and fourth drinks; any earlier, he’d still be tense from the bank — and later, he wouldn’t really be there. Of course, no one in our family had a drinking problem. We were nice people; it was part of civilized life to drink before dinner. During. After.
It took me decades to acknowledge the signs that now seem so obvious — the intolerance of frustration, the frantic behavior if my husband didn’t get a drink when he wanted/needed; the memory lapses; the arguments because of memory lapses; the stocking up on booze even when we couldn’t pay our bills. The slurry, insensible speech. The raging outbursts.
For my MA thesis, I had filled index cards with notes showing that Hemingway heroes drink brandy with other heroic men, white wine with lovers and priests, and beer when they’re exhausted and overwhelmed. But in the novels Hemingway heroes normally handle their booze. Communing over a cognac with a fellow “insider” is one thing, as when, for instance, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms drinks with Lt. Rinaldi, but Mike Campbell’s messy drunkenness at Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises is another. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the formidable Pilar tells Robert Jordan, that although “no one cares for wine more than I do,” drunkenness “is a thing of great ugliness.”
…before dinner, we congregated for drinks — often on one of the patios perched high over the azure arms of Lago di Como, the setting sun glittering ripples on the water.
The first year we were married, after we saw Tom Jones at a Phoenix drive-in, Larry chortled that he identified with Squire Western. Wallowing in a disintegrating hay stack, the squire’s scruples were as sloppy as his drunken stumbling. Hardly “grace under pressure.” I tried to forget Larry had said that. Maybe he’d been joking.
Is there a different expectation, a different standard we have for behavior as the decades take their toll on us? What is funny in one’s teens and twenties, uproarious, is less so in one’s thirties with a baby sleeping in the next room, and pathetic in middle and older age.
I was over fifty when I spent the month of May at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio. Between the delicious, exquisitely served meals, we residents were left alone to write, to think, to wander the gardens, drinking in the aroma of jasmine, exploring eighteenth-century grottoes. Quiet, privacy, no interruptions — a monastic silence — for hours. But before dinner, we congregated for drinks — often on one of the patios perched high over the azure arms of Lago di Como, the setting sun glittering ripples on the water.
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.
In the nineties, Larry took our party-giving proclivities abroad when he began a European touring business. Pied piper-like, he led his clients on lingering wine-drinking evenings in Verona’s Piazza Bra, the swallows circling, the passeggiata swirling. Daily three-hour lunches and dinners. An entire (magical) afternoon spent lunching on the island of Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon under a grape-vined arbor. A two-week long party. And, as with our infamous evening in Tombstone, people had the time of their lives; most of them signed on for more trips.
Pied piper-like, he led his clients on lingering wine-drinking evenings in Verona’s Piazza Bra, the swallows circling, the passeggiata swirling. Daily three-hour lunches and dinners. An entire (magical) afternoon spent lunching on the island of Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon under a grape-vined arbor.
“It’s not required to be an alcoholic to go on my dad’s tours, but it sure helps,” our son once quipped. Never one to be able to enjoy more than a glass or three, some time in my early fifties I reached a point where my increasingly finicky body couldn’t tolerate even an ounce of Riesling. Surrounded by people eager for the next, and then the next, bottle of Sauvignon or Chianti, I felt increasingly out of my element. I began to feel (am I a teetotaling grouch for saying this?) frustrated, downright bored — and, in the midst of all that sociability, often more lonely than if I’d been by myself. As the tour director’s wife, I was responsible for being gracious to all and supportive of my husband. Who, usually by the time we climbed the stairs to our room at night, was stumbling drunk, and, within minutes, snoring like an oncoming train. More than once I slept in the hotel bar.
In her memoir The Spiral Staircase Karen Armstrong speaks of learning to live in solitude, with a silence that eventually settled around her like “a soft shawl.” She describes the way that gradually she “felt at home and alive in the silence, which had a dimension all its own.” It doesn’t work, she adds, “to listen to a late Beethoven quartet or read a sonnet by Rilke at a party” (184).
Of course there were times — and many of them — during Larry’s tours and our parties when I did feel wholly alive, when the room, or the piazza, shimmered with a numinous glow. With or without alcohol, a great party can produce a certain magnetic hum, as though everyone is vibrating at the same frequency. (No wonder in recent years the young flocked to raves.) But as the years progressed, I began to find myself needing lower frequencies. I hungered for unbroken hunks of time to muse, write, and read.
Dinner parties for friends, work parties, pre-tour parties, post-tour parties, two, then four, five trips a year — finally, I overdosed. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry says at one point when the major has been trying to get him drunk, “Half-way through the wine I did not want any more. I remembered where I was going.”
It was after Steve and I became close friends — and for many months we were, as long-time colleagues, just friends — that I remembered where I had once been headed. Where I was going before being distracted by the University of Arizona’s beer busts and drunken luaus, when, at seventeen, I had dreamed of a life surrounded by book-lined shelves, together with a fellow reader and writer, someone quiet and contemplative, peaceful to be around.
Someone who — after we returned home from being married in the woods, after my son played his guitar and sang “It’s a Gift to Be Simple,” after three dozen of us joined hands and pranced through the house to a CD of the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, and after we had waved goodbye to the last guest — smiled at me and said, “That was good! And now, we can be alone.”
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