The Dinner Party (16 page)

“Out of my line, Richard. I'm seventy-three years old; my heart is bad and I'm doing nothing to make it better and bleeding hearts leave me cold as ice.”

“I'm not asking for money. I'm asking you to use the road to help me make a deal with my two honorable guests. I want them to call off their running dogs, to throw out the case in Tucson.”

Augustus smiled and shook his head sadly. “Dolly once told me that she dreams of you in the presidency. Richard, Richard. It would be nice to see my daughter down there among the spooks as First Lady, but Richard, you will never make it. You are sentimental and you are decent. I'm an old Yankee type, with two hundred years of dues paid in return for ice water instead of blood, but there's enough Jewish left to admit to myself that I run with a mean crowd. No decent, sentimental, honest man can be president of this country. You know that. You're asking for sympathy; that's not my line, and neither is compassion. I don't bleed for anyone, not here, not in Africa, not in Asia. I'm in this to have fun and make money. I've had my pleasures and I've made a lot of money. It's the name of the game, Richard.”

“I can't even be properly angry,” the senator said. “You're up front with the whole thing and you don't apologize. That's something to admire. You know, Gus, in all the years I've known you, we never talked about Jewish. I always felt it was something extraordinary, noble, a kind of Judophile thing that they have in England—you know, Einstein, Salk, Bernstein, Modigliani, great doctors and scientists and artists. I labeled it a kind of humanitarian vision—”

“Because you're a sentimentalist, Richard.”

“Am I? Is that all it is?”

“Richard, I had two ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, which makes me a member of that pisspot organization that calls itself the Sons of the American Revolution. One was a Lieutenant Levi and the other a Captain Peretz. Both of them resident in Philadelphia. After Benedict Arnold did his thing and fled to the British, he had the
chutzpa
to petition General Washington, the same man he had tried so hard to scuttle, to allow his wife, Arnold's wife, to join Arnold in New York City, then occupied by the British. Well, war in those days was contrived and led by gentlemen who played by a set of silly rules, and sure enough, General Washington gave permission for his wife to join him. His wife was Peggy Shippen Arnold, a young lady of good position, as they used to say, and substantial wealth. And since the countryside between Philadelphia, where Mrs. Arnold resided, and New York, where Arnold fled to, was filled with angry folk who might not look upon Mrs. Arnold with the same generosity that Washington did, Congress sent along a military detachment to protect her. The detachment was led by Lieutenant Levi and Captain Peretz. And according to some letters I've read, both these gents fucked Peggy all the way from Philadelphia to New York—no small journey by horse and coach—raising the possibility that quite a few generations of Jewish Arnolds have been prancing around in England. What's Jewish? The kids? Or the behavior of the two officers? I find their behavior totally international. The lady wasn't raped. She enjoyed them with ladylike approval, and considering that, I can't think of anyone of the male sex of any nationality who would have behaved differently.”

Suddenly, the senator was bored and a little disgusted by the rambling of the old man. Lasciviousness is without merit or beauty after a certain age, and the senator felt that he had paid his dues and listened for long enough.

“Why don't you get a bill through the Senate?” Augustus asked, as if to mollify.

“You don't do it with a bill.”

“You can still try to work a deal with your dinner guests. I won't interfere. I won't help you, but I won't interfere.”

“You don't feel anything about it, one way or another?” the senator asked.

“No, Richard. Nothing at all. And if you feel that's heartless of me, you're absolutely right. I don't give a damn for El Salvador or Guatamala—except that they are in the general area where I'm building a road. That arouses interest, not compassion.”

“And if these people on trial in Tucson were Jewish?”

“Believe me, Richard, it would not make a damn bit of difference. If you find conservatives stupid—which many of them are—I find your liberals ridiculous and beyond the practice of reason.”

“Then why in God's name do you cling to this being Jewish—which is farcial?”

“Because I love it, Richard. It distinguishes me in a very special way. We lost the name of Levi four or five generations back; I restored it. By blood, if you buy the nonsense, I am one sixteenth Jewish; but I cherish it. It's a profound fuck-you to the entire Wasp section of the establishment. If I didn't have it, I'd create it and lie about it. But I'm afraid you don't understand that.”

“I'm afraid I don't,” the senator admitted.

EIGHTEEN

W
hen the junior members of the group left the luncheon table, Elizabeth whispered to the others, “Let's go up to my room. I have four tailor-made sticks of pure Acapulco Gold. It's very good stuff. We'll smoke a little and cry a little.”

“It's kid's stuff,” Leonard said.

“Lenny, a little kid's stuff won't hurt us right now,” Jones said.

“It'll stink up the room.”

“Come on, we're air conditioned. Blows it right out,” she said, wondering that her brother, so stricken, should worry about the scent of marijuana, and the reaction of his parents to the fact that they were smoking it. They were children. She was the youngest of the three, but she was a woman and they were children, and it came to her that death was so much more terrible for a child, for the child knows that he is cheated and that the best thing in all the universe is taken from him before he has truly experienced it, and it doesn't matter that the child is twenty-two years old, and brilliant and sensitive and even wise, because it is never a wisdom that can confront death.

“It helps,” Jones says.

“Joke,” Leonard said. “Nothing helps. I'm terminal. You know how many times we talked about the atom bombs that the lunatics in the Kremlin and the White House are piling up, and we had that big discussion at school about time, and everyone guessed that at most we had five or six years before an accident had to happen, or the president would think he was a character in a movie, which he mostly is, and he'd press the button, and that would be the end of everything and all of us—and we sort of believe it, but we also feel that a miracle could happen and that something might save us.”

“It might,” Elizabeth said.

“But that's the difference, Liz. There's no miracle for me, not even the hope of one.”

Calling back to her mother, who still sat on the terrace with Jenny, Elizabeth cried, “Mother—we'll be in my room if you want us for anything.”

“Leonard,” Dolly called after them, “do find some dinner clothes!”

“That's not so,” Elizabeth said softly. “It's not a matter of a miracle. They will find something, a vaccine, a drug—they must!”

“Dear Lizzie, I'm afraid not.”

Jones reacted strangely to Elizabeth's room. It was a large, beautiful room, with a fireplace piled with wood and framed in a white mantle, white woodwork, wallpaper of dusty rose toile, Portuguese gros-point rugs on the floor, framed eighteenth-century fashion prints, and a portrait of her great-grandmother done by John Singer Sargent. On the bed was an ancient coverlet of stitched silk that some poor Italian woman of a century ago had dulled her eyesight to create. The windows were draped with starched organdy, and the painted electrified oil lamps went well with the old cherry-wood furniture. At first sight, the room threw him off, and he was possessed with a feeling akin to panic, and he stood in the doorway, searching within himself for the origin of his fears. Far, far back. His mother had been a cleaning woman then; his brother had been hurt. He ran to the house where his mother worked, a skinny nine-year-old black kid, and the door of the large house being open, he went in, through the downstairs rooms, and then up the wide staircase to a bedroom such as this, not like this but such as this in confused memory. He had only a glimpse of the room for then there came out of a connecting bathroom, a great blonde lady, half naked and toweling herself dry. Her scream echoed through the years.

“Come on in,” Elizabeth said to him.

Leonard crossed to a window and stood looking out. “Ever notice the way Grandma Jenny walks? She sails—slowly, yet the feet don't appear to move, only the body. Rare in this country, but you see a lot of it in England.”

Elizabeth was hunting through a drawer. “Trouble with hiding things is you forget where you hid them. I must have put these silly sticks away five years ago. You know why they do it in England—water all around them. Sailing and cricket.”

“Oh, God,” Leonard said.

“Sort of clever,” Jones agreed, “but this poor black boy ain't never been to England. Ain't been much in white folks' houses either.”

Leonard looked at Jones and shook his head. “Every time you pull that blackface routine, you're mad as hell. What is it now?”

“Memories.”

“Stuff them,” Elizabeth said. “They do no good and you can't eat them. Some day, when you're up on the appellate bench or maybe as house black on the Supreme Court, and you have ten years of being a law hooker behind you, you'll get rid of all those memories. Here they are.” She handed out the marijuana. “Let's light up.”

“How did you get that cynical?”

“Daddy's a senator. I love him, but he's a senator.”

Elizabeth struck a match for her brother, but Leonard pulled back and said, “Hold on. This won't touch us if we keep thinking about this stinking Aids. Maybe tomorrow I'll cry all day, but right now I'm with two people I love and I can open up and talk to you, but God Almighty, you have to talk to me and you can't keep looking at me with death on your faces.”

Elizabeth dropped the burned out match. She struck another and lit her brother's cigarette. Jones took the matches from her and lit her cigarette and then his own. They inhaled deeply. They sat and looked at each other. They inhaled again. Jones was in a chair. Leonard sat cross-legged on the floor. Elizabeth sprawled on the floor, her back against the bed. She was dressed in jeans and a blue Levi shirt and she looked beautiful.

I would forget that I'm gay, Jones said to himself, and if you want to dream the way niggers always dream, dream that you shuck the gay and you marry this wonderful person. Just dream it good and strong.

“If we're going to sit in silence,” Elizabeth said, “we might as well stiff the pot.”

“Oh, no. No,” Jones said. “I'll tell you a story. Long ago, in the days of the Arabian Nights, there was a smuggler named Ahmad Umahr, and he was unquestionably the greatest smuggler of his era.”

“Is this another one of your creepy Sufi stories?”

“Sufi stories are not creepy. The Sufis are very wise, the result of so many of them being as black as I am.”

“Naturally,” Elizabeth agreed.

“So as I was saying, year after year, Ahmad Umahr would come to the immigration stations at the border, his train of seven or eight or ten donkeys loaded with firewood; and the border people would take each load of firewood apart, stick by stick, yet they never could find what valuable merchandise he smuggled. Then after forty years of successful smuggling, Ahmad, a very rich man now, announced that he was retired and would smuggle no more. Whereupon, a delegation of immigration agents came to him and said, Ahmad Umahr, since you smuggle no more and are retired, tell us what you smuggled? To which Ahmad replied, The answer is obvious. I smuggled donkeys.”

Jones finished with a slow smile.

“Yes?” Elizabeth asked.

“No more.”

“You won't tell us what it means?”

“He doesn't know what it means,” Leonard said. “It's like all the rest of these Sufi and Zen stories. What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

“A smile,” Jones said.

“I suppose your story is true about something. At our age, we are still young enough to reach out and try to touch something, but we always look for the wrong thing, like the immigration people, and then we stop looking.”

“Why did you say a smile?” Elizabeth asked Jones.

“I don't really know. It was something to say.”

“I don't know why you told us that silly story,” Leonard said. “When I think about dying, which is almost all the time, what hurts most is that I've missed something of great importance, and I don't know what it is, not just the life I'll never have a chance to live, but something else that was here but I missed it.”

“I know,” Elizabeth whispered.

“We all missed it.”

“What? What? You smoke this stupid stuff and your brain turns to jelly. You're both brilliant. Why don't you tell me what?”