Page 37 of The Last Book Party

September 1987

34

When I got to the house the next morning, I was surprised to find Henry and Tillie sitting in the Adirondack chairs overlooking the tennis court. They had pulled out the little wooden side table in front of the chairs and were sharing it as a footrest, their toes nearly touching. Henry was holding theTimesmagazine and Tillie the Sunday book review. I took a few steps toward them. I didn’t want to make my presence known but couldn’t bring myself to walk away. Their renewed companionship, so soon after our conversation at the pond, was unsettling. I stepped behind the bushes, close enough to hear them working a crossword puzzle.

“‘Cry of jubilation or guilt.’ Six letters, second letterD, last letterT,” Henry said.

I heard Tillie say, “I did it.”

“Precisely,” Henry said. “‘Run-scoring bunt’…Squeeze. ‘Verdi slave girl’…Aida. Ah, here’s one for you: ‘Vreeland replacement atVogue.’ Nine letters.”

“Like I readVogue!” Tillie said. “But because I love you:Mirabella.”

“You’re a wonder,” Henry said.

I turned around and walked into the house, saddened and confused by Henry and Tillie’s relaxed intimacy, and by the break in their routine. From the kitchen, I could see that the door to Tillie’s office was only half closed. With a quick glance back outside, I pushed it open. The desk was a mess, covered with papers and books, clamshells holding paper clips and thumbtacks, and a piece of driftwood shaped like a gun. But the futon along the wall was open like a bed, taking up much of the room. A plain white sheet and a thin patchwork quilt were twisted in a jumble at the bottom of the mattress. On the floor beside it, I saw Henry’s reading glasses, his tennis shirt and boxer briefs, an empty bottle of wine and two empty juice glasses.

I realized then that I had assumed, for no good reason, that Henry had stopped sleeping with Tillie once he had started up with me. Had I been wrong or had Henry, having put me at a more manageable distance yesterday at the pond, only now drifted back to Tillie? It seemed ridiculous to feel betrayed that Henry had slept with his wife, but I couldn’t deny it hurt. And the fact that it was here, in Tillie’s office, somehow made it worse, suggesting this was not routine married sex, but that they had been too overcome with desire to go upstairs to their bedroom.

On a little table by the futon, beside a glass vase of dried wildflowers, was a small black notebook. I found it hard to believe that Tillie would keep a journal, but the thought that she might, that she took the time to write down her feelings simply and directly, without the subterfuge or embellishment of poetry, that there could be words there to reveal what was really going on with her and Henry, was irresistible. I was about to pick up the notebook when I heard voices outside. I managed to get back to the kitchen before Henry and Tillie walked inside.

I didn’t share my unease with Henry. He was in a good mood, standing behind me at my desk, humming as he massaged myshoulders and kissed my head. He offered to drop me at home on his way to Provincetown to buy booze for the party, but I had my bicycle.

Instead of going straight home, I rode to Corn Hill for a swim, hoping to clear my mind. I walked along the beach and stripped down to my underwear and dived in. Swimming toward the jetty, I tried to let the water work its magic. I focused on the gentle pull of the waves, the strands of seaweed tickling my thighs, and the gentle bump of tiny jellyfish as soft as bubbles against my skin. But my thoughts kept going back to Henry and Tillie and the open futon, to the book party and the antique dress I’d found for my costume, and to how much I wanted to look ravishing enough to make Henry think only of me.

35

For the rest of the week, as the party approached, Henry was busier than usual, intermittently working on a proposal for a Talk of the Town on the longest-serving doorman in Manhattan—who happened to work in Henry’s building—and doing chores to prepare for the big event. Tillie checked in with Henry several times a day, interruptions that didn’t appear to disturb him in the slightest. But it certainly bothered me how the party planning was bringing the two of them together. Perhaps the book party, originally meant to mark their anniversary, was a reminder of their long history and that wherever and however they meandered, they always came back to each other. Maybe that’s what marriage was, a Mobius strip of togetherness, so that no matter how much a couple twisted and turned away from each other, even toward someone else, the attachment remained.

Since the pond, and Henry’s apparent reconciliation with Tillie the day after, Henry seemed to be dialing down our affair, but subtly, as though following instructions from a manual on how to ensure a soft landing. There was no abrupt break, nothing I could put a finger on, just a drifting away that seemed almosttoo easy for him and confirmed my belief that he had been down this road before.

He still caressed my shoulder when he walked by, but often absentmindedly, without lingering long enough to see how I might react. I tried not to care, but his diminishing attention hurt. Flashes of our time together popped into my head, but in the way that you can remember something wonderful and doubt whether it had unfolded as you had thought at the time. Our rolling on the sand, our sated dozing, limbs intertwined, in the motel room—had I only convinced myself that Henry’s joy was as intense as mine?

I had been so pleased with how well I had stayed in the moment with Henry and resisted thinking about a future with him. But now that he was turning away, I realized how unready I was to let him go.

I decided not to make it easy for Henry to quit me. I continued to play the free spirit, dressing in a way that I hope looked effortlessly sexy, showing up to work in skimpy halter tops and sundresses. I wanted Henry and wanted him to want me back—at least for a few more weeks—and I didn’t feel it was something I should hide or apologize for.

36

I didn’t usually work on Saturdays, but Henry and Tillie asked me to help set up for the party, so I drove over to their house in the afternoon before meeting Jeremy and Malcolm at Truro Center.

“Excellent, you’re on chair duty,” Tillie said, as I got out of the car. She pointed me toward Henry, who was standing on the lawn by the front porch with a piece of paper that looked like a map. In front of him were two stacks of tables, one of round table tops and one of rectangular, legs folded beneath them, and several stacks of folded white wooden chairs, all rented for the party. Henry kept looking at the paper and then the chairs and the yard and back at the paper as though it were all a puzzle beyond his ability to solve.

“Spatial relations. Not my forte,” he said, holding the map out toward me, as if he had neither use for nor interest in it. I took the paper from him. It was immediately clear where the tables should go—three rectangles in the front of the house, for drinks and food, three round ones on the side of the porch with ten chairs around each, and two more round ones at the back of the house, also with chairs, on the flat grass outside the porch.

Before I started to explain the layout to Henry, Lane pulled into the driveway in her pickup truck.

“Finally!” Tillie said. She walked up to Lane’s truck holding a tall pile of folded paper bags. As the bags slipped from Tillie’s grasp, Lane grabbed them. Tillie said something that I couldn’t hear, and Lane said, “‘Whoopsy-daisy’? Did you really just say ‘whoopsy-daisy’?” and they both laughed. Annoyed by Lane’s ease with Tillie, I turned to Henry and asked what the bags were for.

“Paper-bag candles,” he said, looking somewhat surprised that I asked.

“For where?”

“To line the driveway, of course,” he said. I must have looked confused as he said, “Ah, right, you’ve never been to the book party. I forgot. Thought you had.”

His comment made me feel as though I was an afterthought—like a piece of furniture so plain and functional that you had to think hard for a moment to remember if you still had it in your house or had already given it away.

The phone rang and Henry turned to go inside. “That’s probably Franny. Damn him. We really could have used his brawn today. Mind starting with the chairs?”

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