The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (8 page)

“Well, how might I identify her?”

“She’s the pretty one,” he said.

I snorted. They were all pretty, of course, in a uniform fashion, like an assortment of chocolates whose ornamentations seem meaningless to nonaficionados.

“Why don’t you bring her by for a drink this evening?” I said.

“Can’t,” Rafe said.

“Come on,” I said. “I promise to put away the magnifying glass, the scales, the calipers…”

“Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin,” Rafe said. “Just kidding, of course—I’d love to. But anyway, you’ll meet her at Cookie’s next Thursday.”

“Cookie’s!” I said. “Oh, God, that’s right. I’m dreading it.” I hate parties. Particularly Cookie’s parties, but Louise Dietz had just published a volume of photographs of investigative reporters at home, which was the ostensible raison d’être of this do, so I had to put in an appearance at least.

“Whoop—my other line,” Rafe said. “Want to hold?”

“No, darling. I’m frantic. Thursday, then.” I hung up and looked around. It had been nice with the TV on. All those other people seeing exactly the same thing as oneself, at the same time—one knew exactly where one was, somehow. It seemed a flawless form of having company. But it was over so suddenly.

I had things to do before lunch, but time was standing completely still, as it does occasionally at that hour. Then one’s day will pass unexpectedly into a giant, permeable block of sunshine that converts surfaces into hypnotic sheets of light and drenches one’s belongings in a false, puzzling specialness. I hated it—it was terrible. I simply stood in front of the TV, wrenched out of the ordinary smooth flow of entire minutes, and I remembered being home from school as a child, pinioned to my bed by the measles or whatever, while the world blazed beyond me in that noon glare.

When I got to Cookie’s on Thursday, Rafe and Heather had not yet arrived. In fact, no one much had yet arrived, so I wandered about the shrubbery in Cookie’s living room looking for a hospitable encampment. Eventually I distinguished Marcia Meaver’s name in a stream of syllables that issued from some source not far from me. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused. What was there to be mentioned about Marcia Meaver? Except, of course, that she was going out with my husband. Which, I must admit, did annoy me. It’s one thing, after all, when one’s husband takes up with a fascinating woman or a woman of great beauty. But Marcia Meaver! I felt I would have to rethink those years of my marriage—John’s standards were not, I realized, all that one might have supposed them to be.

I followed the voice I’d overheard, and it led me to a rather clammy blond boy. As I stood at his shoulder, listening, I came to understand that this boy worked under Buddy Katsukoru at the museum, and it was to Buddy that he was now praising himself, fulsomely and with riveting dullness, for having convinced Marcia to make to the museum a tax-deductible gift of some gowns.

“I will remember this,” I said. “I’ve been giving my old clothes to the Salvation Army.”

“Schiaparelli,” the boy said dimly, without even turning to glance at me.

“Good grief!” Cookie trumpeted from behind us, incidentally saving the boy from the heartbreak of my response. “It’s Lydia!”

“Heather, actually,” said a girl’s voice, and I turned and saw Rafe, and—and—and I couldn’t figure out
what
I saw for a moment; but sure enough, if you were to exchange, paper-doll fashion, this girl’s dashing suede for one of those demure TV-tart dresses, her calm regard for the shiftings of a tense, hectoring flirt, if you were to paint sharp black lines around this girl’s eyes, what I saw, I realized, would in fact be Lydia, the femme fatale, as I’d supposed, of “This Brief Candle.”

How interesting. I was eager to take Heather aside and let her share with me her feelings about exploring on a daily basis some dingy side of her personality, but Cookie cut in like a sheepdog and led her off. “Come tell me, dear,” Cookie shouted tactlessly, “what it’s like to be a bitch!”

“Imagine Cookie needing to ask,” I heard the blond boy say as he and Buddy floated toward the bar. Well! Isn’t that just absolutely Mr. Guest for you, though! Trashing the hostess the instant she’s out of earshot! Cookie might not be the sweetest person in the world, it was true, but she would never do something cheap like that herself!

“So how’s the whiz biz?” Rafe asked as he and I settled ourselves into the sofa. “Find any geniuses crawling around under that pile of grant proposals?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Oh, it is slow work, no question.”

“Oh, by the way,” Rafe said, “Heather and I finally got to that performance piece for which you people so thoughtfully provided the funding. The one with the four-hundred-piece glass-harmonica orchestra, where the mechanical whale rolls over for a few hours.
Beached
, isn’t it called? It was really great, I have to tell you, we really enjoyed it.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t care for it, Rafe. And if what you saw had been in fact what you describe, I would hardly blame you. But whether you personally did or did not care for it, the piece you refer to certainly must be considered an important piece. What
are
those—nachos? No thank you, Rafe. Really—a major piece.”

“You know,” Rafe said. “All these years, I’ve really wanted to ask you, how do you decide whether something really is a major piece or whether it’s a major piece of crap? I mean, seriously, how do you decide whether something is good or not?”

“Well, seriously, Rafe, I decide in the same way that I decide whether Bergdorf’s is a good place to shop. I decide in the same way that I decide on which wall to put the Ansel Adams that you so admire. I decide these things by decision-making processes.”

“Ah, silly me,” Rafe said.

“Really, Rafe. I can’t imagine what it is about Cookie’s soirée that’s inspired you to disburden yourself, finally, of this canker of doubt you say you’ve harbored for so long. But if you must really hear right now how I can tell whether something is good, I’ll explain it to you. The explanation is that I have been trained to do just that. Oh, of course I do have a certain natural eye—and ear—as, obviously, do you. But what you so clearly find to be a sort of sanctified caprice on my part, concerning my funding recommendations, is actually considered, systematic judgment. I’m not saying I could describe its sequence to you, but I have a solid background in the fine arts, as you know. I studied English and art history in school, and I’ve worked for years in art-related fields. And therefore, I’m qualified to make the judgments I make in the same way that…that, well, Mike Dundy over there is qualified to design the cars he designs.”

“I take your point,” Rafe said.

“Good,” I said.

“But it does not suffice to answer my question,” he said. “You see, if you were to drive around in a car of Mike’s design, and the engine fell out, everyone could agree that there was a flaw in that design.”

“Rafe,” I said—I simply couldn’t believe this! In all the time we’d known each other, Rafe had never indicated any distaste for my profession—“I am not saying that my work is a science. It cannot be. I am not saying that I’m infallible. All I’m saying is this: I’m not a profoundly gifted person myself. I’m a person whose small but very specific gifts and whose very specific training suit me for this task—the task of being able to seek out, with great care and a certain…actual precision, and to reward, others who
are
profoundly gifted.”

“And here I thought it was all glamour and prestige. There’s quite a lot of kicking and biting for those jobs, I understand, among folks who don’t rightly appreciate the gravity of the trust, or the backbreaking labor involved in carrying it out.”

“Well, I didn’t have to kick or bite anyone for my job. I was merely appointed. And you know perfectly well that ‘glamorous’ is the last thing I find it! Trudging across that great tundra of manuscripts! Of course, you do learn how to, well…”

“Skim,” Rafe said.

“Certainly not!” I said. “Just to—to read for the worthwhile bits. And I admit that it’s very gratifying when you do stumble across something good. And once in a while, you do. You really do. You see,
that’s
the thrill of the job for me, when that happens, and you know that
here’s
someone who’s going to be an important voice. Rafe, I’m sure this sounds pompous to you, but sometimes I’m reading the Arts and Leisure section or whatever, and there will be an article about someone we’ve encouraged—did you see, by the way, that there were three whole pages on Stanley Zifkin’s studio in this issue of
Architectural Digest
?—Anyhow, I see these things, and I feel a sense of, well…”

“Ownership,” Rafe said. “The sixth sense.”

“You’re very jolly tonight, aren’t you?” I said.

“I’m a jolly good fellow. Ah, there,” he said. Heather, having been released at last by Cookie, was coming toward us.

“What’s happening in the real world?” Rafe asked her.

“Oh, just taking in the sights. All these people. It’s so funny. Parties always make me think how funny it is that everything’s all divided up into these different packages. A package of Cookie, a package of you, a package of me. When you see people all together, milling around like this, it seems so, sort of, arbitrary.”

“It doesn’t seem arbitrary to me at all,” I said. “Cookie’s Cookie, and I’m not, thank heaven. Anyhow, what do you mean, ‘everything’? What’s this ‘everything’ that’s divided into me and Cookie?”

Heather shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Just everything. And what else is funny is that at every single party I’ve ever been to, every single person I speak to says how much they hate parties.”

Rafe nodded. “Hatred of parties. The sentiment that unites all humanity.”

“But we’re all here,” Heather said.

“That’s right,” Rafe told her. “It’s a job that has to be done. Going to parties is the social analogue of carrying out the garbage.”

“Well, anyhow,” Heather said, “everyone seems to be having fun. Cookie’s nice, isn’t she?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, she is, really, if you look deep enough. She can be very vicious, but underneath she’s a fine person, really. She has principles at least, which is more than can be said for a lot of rich people.” Something was tugging at my attention. “Jesus,” I said. “Look at Geoffrey Berman’s jacket! It’s
hairy.
One of his research assistants must have grown it for him in a bottle.”

“They’re certainly crazy about him, aren’t they?” Rafe said absently. Obviously, he was paying no attention at all to what I was saying.

“So—um, what does Cookie…apply her principles to?” Heather asked.

Rafe laughed.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “They’re just something one
has.
”

“Yes?” Heather said. “It sounds so…inert, sort of. Like a stack of fish on a plate.”

“Fish on a plate!” I said. God, I was hungry. “Do you suppose there’s anything edible within reach?”

We threaded our way around a nest of journalists who were disclosing to each other their coastal preferences, and reached the buffet table just in time to catch the gratifying sight of Buddy’s friend spilling enchilada sauce on Cookie’s Aubusson. Really, Cookie had never served more annoying food. Last year it had been julienned Asiatic unidentifiables; the year before that it was all reheated morels en croûte étouffés avec canard aux fraises poivrées kind of thing; and this year, Spam, it seemed, was more or less our lot. “And with her money,” I said. “I really don’t know what I’d do if I had Cookie’s money.”

“You could buy Cookie’s sofa,” Heather said. “That’s what I’d do.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s odd. I can’t really say I’m mad for it.”

Heather wasn’t listening, though. She and Rafe had become absorbed by the engineering problems of feeding each other tacos. Well, that was certainly something they weren’t going to get any help with from me. Besides, there was no point in trying to have a rational conversation with Rafe when he was in one of his playmate-of-the-month moods. I wandered off and eventually found myself talking to Jules Racklin, whom I’d met here and there but never really talked to and who turned out to be a very interesting man. Very intelligent.
Very
interesting.

The day after that party, I happened to turn on the TV at eleven o’clock, and having so recently seen Heather, I do have to say that I was pretty mesmerized by Lydia. The plot of the show didn’t seem to have progressed to any great degree since the episode I had seen previously, and at the appearance of each familiar figure, I felt a slight sensation of agreeable reinforcement, of knowing my way around.

I had tuned in while Eric was speaking on the phone. And while I had never actually seen Eric before, I was able to identify him by inference from the conversation I had heard between—um, let’s see—Brent and…yes, Hank. As he talked, Eric moved a painting on the wall, exposing a safe at which he looked gloatingly for a moment. Then he replaced the painting, hung up the phone, and left his house, never noticing—the foolish fellow—that Brent and Hank were sitting in a car parked right across the street. Carolyn and Chad then drank cocktails and had an agonizing discussion (which I suspected was one of many) about whether they did or did not want to start a family. Carolyn appeared to acquiesce to Chad’s insistence that it would be better to wait, but I saw right through her. She felt hurt, I could tell, and disappointed. Then Colleen appeared to be developing, in a supermarket, a rather modern crush on Ellie’s mother, who herself, to judge from what followed, was somewhat more interested in Mr. Armstrong. Suddenly there was a woman from another universe holding a box of soap called Vision. What had happened? Ah, one episode of “This Brief Candle” had been concluded, of course. I turned off the set (I had a thousand things to do), and the little light in the center danced furiously, brighter and brighter, into oblivion.

Now. Right. The first thing was to call and thank Cookie. Cookie and I had the requisite little jaw about what a delightful evening, etc. (actually, it had turned out rather nicely, due to that nice Jules Racklin), and when I’d heaped upon Cookie what I hoped were sufficient thanks, I felt I might as well hit her up for a couple of grand for the foundation. Not that it would do any good, but you never knew. She might have some good ideas for sources, anyhow. Cookie always had on hand the scrap of information one needed, if one could bear to pick through the refuse to get it.