With Friends Like These... (6 page)

“You’re an excellent cook.”

Lizzie made a rueful face. “All my life, food’s been the good news and the bad news. Well, for a while, once, other substances were the worse news. But food…that’s why I’m on a major, major diet. Once and for all, I want to prove I can do it.”

“You look perfectly fine to me.” She did, but I felt creepy as soon as the words were out of my mouth. It’s a line best spoken by old relatives and people with no standards whatsoever, and never, ever, has it comforted a woman who’s convinced that she’s fat.

“Fifteen pounds,” Lizzie said. “Not one delicious thing till then.”

“Not even while you were making that?” A froth of white and dark chocolate curls enclosed an enormous fluff of birthday cake. “Didn’t you at least lick the spoon? Eat all the broken pieces of chocolate? I could never resist.”

She smiled. I left her, justifiably proud of her moral superiority and handiwork, and I made my way back to the front parlor, where Tiffany was still center stage.

I wondered whether somewhere in America less upscale offspring were named after, say, Wal-mart. Who would baby Walmart grow up to be?

With astoundingly accurate timing, my answer—the spirit of the low-end mall—walked in. Walmartine’s borscht-colored hair clashed with her vermilion evening pajamas, their satin straining over her hips. Her face was heavy with makeup, all smearing or melting. I couldn’t decide whether she was trying too hard or not trying at all.

Her companion looked familiar to me. I had seen that slight figure before. It had been lost inside an ill-fitting jacket that time, too, but I couldn’t place him. “My best friends in high school,” Lyle told the group. “Wiley and Janine. The Wileys, nowadays. Back when it was Janine Riley, the three of us were inseparable. The W.R.L.’s we called ourselves—even had jackets with the initials sewn on them. Wiley, Riley, and Lyle—sounds good together, doesn’t it? Nearly makes a poem.” He hugged each of them. They remained where they were at the entrance to the living room.

“It’s been so long,” Lyle said to the couple. “Can’t tell you how surprised I was,” he said, now addressing his other guests. “I called our alma mater for help tracking these two, and I was told that Wiley was right there—as a teacher now.”

A teacher. That’s how I must know him.

Wiley smiled uncertainly. His wife’s blue-coated eyelids drooped and she squinted, as if Lyle had said something suspicious. I tried to imagine those three as a trio, and all I came up with was Lyle as the energy the other two used for fuel. And it looked like W. and R. had permanently stalled once L. moved on.

I watched as he maneuvered them into the party—or gave it an honest try. They were not greeted with open arms.

“I’m really sorry about your father’s accident,” Lyle said to me once W. and R. were semilaunched. “He’s a good man and he was part of a time of my life that was…bittersweet. However, I’m glad your mother conned you into coming, or I might never have met you. Tell me more about your work. I’m not familiar with Philly Prep….”

I had watched him do the same intensely interested number with everyone. I knew that was his shtick. But that did not diminish the power of that fierce attention. If only Freud were still around to whine about what women wanted, Lyle could answer him. So could any woman.

Attention. Undivided. It was that simple, that attractive, and that unusual.

Lyle was a master of it. His undiluted concentration gave you—well, why be coy—gave me the giddy sense that my life was now as exciting as his, as much fun. That I mattered in some brand new way.

I found myself glancing at Tiffany with honest envy, and not of her long, long legs.

The mix of people, no longer strangers, hummed and became a real party in the afterglow of Lyle’s industrial-strength attention. All except for Sybil, the unapproachable, who huddled with her son Reed, and except for Wiley and Janine, the unassimilated lumps who recognized me as another outsider and pounced.

“You know these people?” Janine asked as soon as we’d swapped names. I explained as how I knew no one except my mother.

Janine had donned hot pink harlequin glasses which kept slipping down her nose. She pushed them back up and looked balefully at her husband. “Neither do we,” she said. “Don’t even really know Lyle anymore, either. Haven’t seen him in years. Maybe twenty.” She inhaled and looked at me as pointedly as one can through tilted, sliding harlequin specs.

“Yes,” I said. “He mentioned that it’s been a long time.”

She harrumphed, as if she had her own special meaning for the words long time and she wasn’t going to share it, either.

“Come out on a night like this…” she said in her oh-I-could-tell-you-things way.

She was obviously hell-bent on having a bad time. I considered another nose-powdering escape. But before I could take a step, her husband leaned myopically close to me. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.

“I teach, too,” I said. “At Philly Prep. English.”

“General Science. Biology. South Philly High.”

No curriculum overlap. He was part of the public school system, I was with an independent school. How did I know him?

Janine looked at me sideways, eyes slitted. I felt on trial.

I suddenly had it. “You’re the school paper’s advisor, right? We met at Junior Journalist Day last year.” He nodded, but tentatively, as if he were only pretending to actually remember me.

“We had lunch,” I added. No recognition. A sinking depression on my part. How could someone so forgettable forget me? “Going again this year—this week?” I asked.

Janine swiveled her head and stared at her husband, who nodded again.

“Good!” I don’t know why I said that, and so emphatically. Perhaps because Mrs. Wiley was behaving as if I were talking in code, cover for a sinister message.

“Can I get you a drink, Janine?” Wiley said. “And you, too, Miss…”

“Mandy Pepper.” I had said my name no more than seven minutes earlier. I had become instantaneously forgettable. Maybe his wife wore bilious makeup and garish colors just to make an impression on him.

“How about if I get both of you ladies a drink?” he said.

“No, thanks.” I was already near champagne capacity for a designated driver.

“I shouldn’t have come,” Janine whined as soon as her husband was in retreat. “Just look at me. I’m falling apart.”

I murmured some noise of polite demur. She didn’t appear to be falling apart. She looked like a rock-solid mass that couldn’t be toppled. Her body was all function, no form, a utilitarian block of flesh separating her head from her feet.

“I don’t feel well,” she said. “Certainly not well enough to go out on one of the worst nights of the year for some party for Lyle Zacharias of all people.”

“Oh, my.” I tried to sound sympathetic and interested while I searched for a decent exit line. I always attract the kind of person everyone else shuns, but I think I’m better off not finding out why.

“Haven’t seen him since…” She released a harsh noise I was sure she thought was a laugh. “Right after Ace of Hearts opened, remember? His big break. Hah!”

Some friend. No wonder they hadn’t seen Lyle in years. Obviously couldn’t stand his success. But all I said was, “I wasn’t too aware of what was happening on the stage twenty years ago.” Didn’t I look too young to remember?

“I have sciatica,” Janine announced without benefit of a logical transition. “The nerve running down the back of this leg?” She waited until I watched her finger trace her pain route from her left buttock over the back of her thigh. “I try to make the best of it, try to stay sunny, but it kills me, you know? And aggravation makes it worse, like tonight.” She tilted her head and waited, as if she’d just thrown down a challenge.

“Coming here has made your leg hurt?” Why did I ask? What did she want, a purple heart for party attendance?

“You got it!” She bobbled her head until beet-blood hair strands jiggled. Then she put a hand on her lower back and sighed in sympathy with her own suffering. “I told Wiley I didn’t want to come. Why should I aggravate my back just so Lyle Zacharias can flaunt how far up the ladder he’s climbed? My sinuses are starting up, too.”

“Maybe you should find a chair. I’ll find one for you.” I’d build one for her. Anything to get her off her sciatic nerve and my back. Surely it was long past time for dinner. Isn’t it supposed to be a—single—cocktail hour?

“How long have you known my husband?” Janine asked.

“What?” My mind was on food, not spouses.

“My husband. How long?”

“I don’t really know him at all. Only met at the—”

“How long?”

“I met him last year, I think.”

She sniffed and seemed ready for a new complaint, but just as I approached despair, I saw my mother, radar in action, scanning. I knew that when she found me talking to a person no one could consider marriage material, she’d save me. She has never understood that the knight in shining armor, not the maiden’s mother, is supposed to rescue the maiden. In the Bea Pepper version, the mother forges and polishes the suit of armor and goes out to find the knight. Still, this once, I was happy about her misplaced protectiveness.

But it turned out I was only a way station on her quest. She was actually matching up Hattie, or trying to, if she could find her. “There’s this darling gentleman,” she said. “I’ve seen him on TV. I think on a Hallmark commercial. He’s eager to meet her.”

“Does he know that, Mother?” I asked as sweetly as I could. She did not deign to respond.

I introduced her to the listless Janine, who shook her head. “I didn’t see Hattie Zacharias,” Janine said. “I’d still recognize the old—”

“She went home for a nap,” my mother said. “Her apartment’s only a few minutes away and she thought it’d be easier to sleep there. But she should have gotten back by now. We’re going to eat any minute, and I wanted her to meet Gregor before then. He’s a widower, you know, and quite charming.”

“Gregor can meet Hattie after dinner,” I said, but my mother’s face had brightened and she waved energetically. “There she is!”

Even after a nap Hattie looked like one of those baggy Tibetan dogs. “I feel much better,” she said as she approached us. “Ready to dance the whole night long!” The pouches and creases of her face rearranged themselves as she arched her eyebrows. “I can, you know, and I intend to!” Then she squinted, as she had this afternoon, this time in the direction of Janine, who had resumed her belligerent silence. “I know you, don’t I?” Hattie said.

“I’m Janine.”

“Yes. High school. Quite a tomboy, weren’t you? Married the Wiley boy, didn’t you?”

“You have an amazing memory!” my mother said.

“Yes,” Hattie said with no self-consciousness. “Good with names and faces. Good with other things, too. Just got back from Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama.”

“My!” My mother is a world-class appreciator. “How exciting!”

Hattie nodded. “Lyle’s birthday gift to me. Wants me to settle down in my rocking chair, but not yet, I say. Next year I want to go to Galapagos. Central America was splendid. Before I went, I memorized the list of flora and fauna we could expect to find. Everybody else was thirty-forty years younger, but I was the one who knew. They were quite amazed. I don’t forget much.”

Well, so she wasn’t modest. But she was certainly sharp.

“I think it’s because I never married,” Hattie said. “Didn’t waste energy on some man who’d want all my attention and would drain off my energy. All I had to concentrate on was dear, dear Lyle.”

“Yes!” Janine was suddenly activated. “I get such headaches from my husband’s demands that I think I’m about to—”

We never did find out what neurological damage her husband’s existence had done her, because we were saved by the bell—the dinner one in this case, waved delicately, like a tinkling handkerchief, by our golden hostess, Tiffany.

In the light of what followed, we should all have skipped the meal and stuck with Janine’s migraines.

AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE hotel dining room, we picked up place cards with table numbers. “I’m at five,” Janine said.

To my great relief, I wasn’t.

I was, however, Sybil Zacharias’s tablemate. She bumped into me as I pulled out my chair. I thought she might have had too much to drink already. “’Scuse,” she said. “Oh, it’s you! Somebody said you teach at Philly Prep.”

I nodded.

“Trying to get my son in. Can you help me pull strings?”

As long as those strings were attached to an ATM machine, she’d have no problem. “I’m sure you won’t need them,” I said, “but if I can help…”

“I can’t believe I’m networking with Lyle’s friend!”

“I’m not,” I said, but that sounded wrong, and I gave it up. Sybil nodded and lurched off.

The room was relatively intimate, and our crowd of fifty or so filled it to capacity. Five rounds, each seating ten, encircled a small center table with only four seats. Only two were currently occupied. Hattie sat at one like the dowager queen, her bright pebble eyes gleaming and her wrinkles taking on happy configurations. Next to her, Reed Zacharias looked made of denser material than human flesh and seemed to wish he were anywhere but here.

“You see that woman over at that table?” my mother whispered as she settled in next to me. “With the canary hair? Her husband left her for an older woman, can you imagine? Humiliated, poor dear. And that man there? Just out of the hospital for a duodenal ulcer. Thinks his son, who’s in a drug program, caused it.”

The woman is a magnet for personal revelations. Within seconds of meeting her, absolute strangers download their secrets. She should have been a spy—or a talk show hostess.

The seating strategy appeared to be one celebrity per table. Anna Pacocci, the Golden-Throated Czech, was surrounded by less recognizable faces at the next table. According to my mother, the former diva’s throat had become a slightly less precious metal, and nowadays she played a political refugee on Second Generation. Pacocci looked bored with her role as table ornament for the little people, and called out to Rhoda Roundtree, the Brit TV gossip seated one over in the ring of tables. I listened intently for Eurotrash gossip, bulletins from the arts, or whatever bons mots semifamous people swapped with one another.