The Dinner Party Read online

  So he did, he picked up, and after they bantered about nothing for a few minutes, she said, to no one’s surprise, “Will you do me a favor today, Leonard?”

  He abided by answering, “What’s that, Mom?”

  The unvarying reply was, “Will you please not take a drink today?”

  “I won’t take a drink today.”

  “Will you promise me?”

  “I promise you, Mom.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Okay. Thanks for calling, Mom.”

  “I love you, Leonard,” she said.

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said.

  She tried. She did all she could. But it just wasn’t enough, and he got out of the car and went into the bar, where he sat down before all the familiar labels of his misery.

  He stared, and soon his small and laser-focused eyes began to water. The labels lost all crispness, and the glass bottles dissolved into rays of heavenly light. The bartender broke his trance by tossing a coaster Frisbee-style down to the grainy bar. “What can I get you?” he asked. Leonard paused theatrically, as if debating, then ordered the whiskey and chaser he came in for. The whiskey and chaser was all he needed to make it to Kate Lotvelt’s party unconcerned about his place there and at ease without sunglasses or jacket, and sufficiently fortified that, should the opportunity arise, he could ask Kate to have a look at his pilot. It was only twenty-four pages. It was only a whiskey and chaser.

  He turned away from his fellow patrons as he waited for his drinks to arrive. Better not to engage, or even be looked at, while falling off the wagon. Was that what he was doing? After sixteen months of sobriety, he was just gonna…fall off? You betcha he was. His brain was killing him. He needed something to help him turn it off, especially if he was going to find the courage to talk to Kate. So he angled away from his fellow patrons in private shame and found himself staring into a separate room.

  It was a dining room of some sort, decommissioned and darkly lit, with red vinyl booths and a cash-out station with an old silver register. Next to the register sat a bowl of peppermints and a toothpick dispenser. By some intuition—something having to do with all the television he’d watched that day—he was drawn off his bar stool and over to those toothpicks. He removed one and studied it. He placed it in his mouth and let it roll around, releasing its mildly minty, mostly wooden flavor. Then he removed it and stabbed the air with it sharply, screwing up his eyes and mouthing a few words, as if chastening someone. The gesture was filled with righteous instruction. Then he put the toothpick back in his mouth and stood there, staring hard into the imagined eyes of the recently chastened. He moved the toothpick around, still staring, transformed.

  Who did that?

  That was the Coach. The Coach did that.

  The Coach was on every Friday night, winning games, teaching his boys how to be men.

  He took the toothpick from his mouth and stood there. It was curious. First his mother’s call, now this.

  He turned in time to catch the bartender setting his drinks down. He went back to the bar and paid for them, telling the man he had been called away. He left a courteous tip. On his way out, he removed a number of toothpicks and put them in his pocket.

  Now we detour away from Leonard’s mind, he thought, and enter a new realm. A realm of high spirit, few words, and the best of intentions. To want to be the Coach—there was no better intention than that, for any man. That was what that toothpick could do for him. It could locate within him what he shared of the Coach’s character. A character limited, yes, by the emotional restraint of athletic-minded men, their incurious and circumscribed intellects, but also one liberated by an expansive, uplifting, and victorious heart. The noble Coach was always victorious, even in defeat.

  He stopped at a sporting goods store to purchase a blue windbreaker to go with the toothpick, and to go with the blue windbreaker a matching hat whose stiff bill he worked hard to break in on the drive over to Kate’s.

  Was it weird to be impersonating the Coach? Leonard had never been the coach of anything. He was borrowing character from a TV character, a scripted, writer-engineered fiction—was that, uh…maybe a little pathetic? No, it wasn’t pathetic. The Coach was a great man. He had focus, and backbone, and an admirable lack of ceremony. He wasn’t trying to impress. He was just trying to win tomorrow’s game. Even his circumscribed intellect was enviable. People thought drink was the enemy. It wasn’t drink. The enemy was thought—looping destructive gnawing thought. Drink was just a cure. A cure, in the end, worse than the disease. Wasn’t channeling a good man better than destroying yourself with drink? Yes, it was. No doubt it was. Also pretty fucking sad and pathetic? Stop it now, enough thinking. He was pulling into Kate Lotvelt’s house. He got out and let the door hang open as a one-armed valet came forward. Distracted by the sounds of the party, he drifted away without his ticket and a few seconds later was startled when the valet chased him down.

  The 1920s Mediterranean was resplendent in the night breeze. Party lights climbed the pink columns of the porte cochere. He walked past a baroque fountain tinkling vigorously before the bougainvillea as distant laughter mingled with a d.j.’s midtempo beat. The party was evidently under way. Feeling left out, he slowed, wondering: Had he gotten the times wrong? Or had they changed the times? Perhaps in that follow-up email he had never received? He turned to beat a retreat back to his car and home when one of Kate’s Death co-stars (a silver fox in a Scottish kilt) came around the corner with his long-gowned companion and forced Leonard to swivel back in the original direction, and together—or, rather, the one party pushing the other along like a snowplow—they went around the side of the house to the pool and terraced garden. At their feet lay a glittering view of downtown. The diving board rattled like a tuning fork, and a second later a cannonballer came up cackling in the white wake.

  Breathing shallowly in the hostile embrace of a hundred strangers, Leonard remembered the Coach at the last minute. Remembered that he no longer needed to impress these folk. He was there to mingle, to booster, and to nod tight little hellos at everyone, touching his fingertips to his toothpick. When he saw an opportunity, with clear eyes and a full heart, he would go up to Kate Lotvelt and ask a favor of her. He had the pages of his pilot carefully folded lengthwise in his back pocket.

  He entered the house. All the chic and beautiful guests were paired off or tripled up or twined together in intimate laughter. He knew none of them. He tried to look casual as he drifted past: sufficiently out of place, as the Coach would have been, but never so lost and hopeless as to undercut his core dignity by fleeing the room. Eventually he took an open seat on the nearest sofa. To his left sat a delicate blond back whose animated shoulder blades mocked a passionate conversation. He turned in the other direction and found two more backs and four shoulder blades. He chewed his toothpick nervously until he worried that anyone paying the least attention would take him for a lone shooter, and he left to find a bathroom. Ten minutes later, having read all the labels on the medicine vials, he flushed and departed. He searched the enormous house for the kitchen and something nonalcoholic to drink. When at last he found it, the catering people seemed so put out by his request that he retreated empty-handed. He watched from some doorway as two men in rich red shadow played a game of pool. At last he drifted back to the room that led out to the patio, and there he spotted Kate.

  Wow, was she tall. He’d forgotten that about her, just how tall she was. He went straight up to her—well, to those gathered around her, as she was just then regaling a little circle of rapt admirers with an anecdote about hangers. He couldn’t follow along because he’d missed the beginning and was nervous.

  “So this is the guy I go to now to buy hangers,” she said. “Travis at the Hollywood Split—my hanger guy.”

  Someone asked her how many hangers she’d bought.

  “Twenty hangers, four bucks.”

  “Wait…four? Didn�
��t you owe him five?”

  “He’s a homeless guy selling hangers on the highway,” she said, “and you’re not going to haggle?”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Hey, I need some hangers,” someone said. “Which highway?”

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Kate?”

  She turned to look. Everyone else did, too. He brought his hand up to his toothpick and nodded at the man on his right. Then he looked back at Kate and nodded at her, too. “You got a minute?” he asked her, his voice quivering most un-Coach-like. He had removed the toothpick from his mouth and was pointing the soggy end at her. It had turned to mash between his teeth and now looked stringy and gross, almost obscene. He quickly crumbled it up in his hand.

  “Sure,” she said. She turned and gently touched the arm of the person directly to her right. “Excuse me a second,” she said.

  He took the opportunity to pocket the old toothpick and replace it with a fresh one, which he twitched back and forth in his mouth. “I’m awful sorry to take you away like that,” he said. He’d grown up in Atlanta, which wasn’t Texas, where the Coach lived, but it was the South, so the thick accent he was suddenly deploying wasn’t totally disingenuous.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, as if he might be with catering, bringing to her attention a snafu with the hors d’oeuvres.

  No, she had no memory of him from Gleekman’s or the dinner party, didn’t recognize him, hadn’t invited him, couldn’t explain why he was there now. “Uh…,” he said, “Sorry, I…uh…”

  Then, with relief and amazement, he watched her puzzled expression iron out and that grand smile familiar from TV beam his way. “Wait a minute—is that Leonard?” she cried. She reached out and pulled his cap off. “It is you! What are you doing under that cap, Leonard?”

  “Yeah, I’m wearing a cap,” he said.

  “You look like what’s-his-name,” she said. “You know, the Coach.”

  “The Coach?”

  “From TV. You watch that show, don’t you? You have to, if you don’t already. It’s a great, great show. Anyway,” she said. “What’s your favor, stranger?”

  “Did you invite me?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Did you invite me here tonight?”

  “Of course,” she said. “What do you mean? You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “I just wondered if you meant to.”

  “Of course I meant to,” she said.

  “I thought it could have been a contacts mishap.”

  “What is that? What is a contacts mishap?”

  “You know, like when you press Select All and don’t mean to.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” she said. “Hey, it’s nice to see you. How’s your pilot coming along?”

  “My pilot?” he said. He was surprised to be asked. “My pilot’s close, I think. It’s real close.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  “I think it just needs a polish,” he said.

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “Hey, and congratulations to you.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “On wrapping the third season.”

  “Thanks. Yeah, thank God. It’s nice to be done.”

  They talked about wrapping the third season, and then she was called away. She didn’t leave without touching him on the arm and promising she’d be right back. He felt enormous relief. He walked straight to the bar and ordered a whiskey. While it was being poured he asked himself what he was doing and told himself to shut up. He had the second one in hand before he had finished the first.

  After that he moved freely from room to room and from group to group. He double air-kissed and sometimes only single air-kissed the beautiful people, one of whom, inadvertently, he felt he stabbed in the cheek with his toothpick a little on his way in. But he fled that little clique and on the whole found the party to be a relaxed and easy affair. Disappointment in himself nagged at him, but he ignored it. He went up to Eaton Aiken and spoke his name while staring at his back. Eaton was forced to pivot away from the conversation he was in. He was wearing a maroon velvet suit coat and a pair of strikingly red slip-on sneakers. “Yes?” he said.

  Leonard extended his hand. “Leonard,” he said. The Coach’s Southern accent was giving way to something more English-y. “We met at Neil Connell’s dinner party.”

  “Neil who?”

  “Connell. He’s an actor. Bloody good actor, too. He plays—well, he did play, until they canceled the show, now he’s just…”

  “Connell,” Eaton said. “Name’s vaguely familiar. Vapid little fuck? Self-satisfied?”

  “Who? Neil?” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “It was an empty night we all spent together. You never removed your sunglasses. Somehow you remained sober. Are you an alcoholic? No, you have a drink. I was a recovering alcoholic once. Before I became the alcoholic I am today.” He rattled his glass. “This feels more like home, you know. Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” he said.

  “You can’t toast with just ice. It’s bad luck.”

  “I was just on my way to the—”

  “You sat next to my wife. You looked at her all night as if she were Helen of Troy. I painted that cocksucker’s wall with house paint and raised the resale value by a hundred thousand dollars, for which I got paid back in blather. Is that the night you have in mind?”

  “I think maybe.”

  “Right,” Eaton said. “And how have you been?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Eaton excused himself to get another drink.

  Leonard spent more time on the sofa, then returned to the bathroom where he tried to steady himself in the mirror, then he was on the patio doing shots. Toward the end of the evening, he followed the producer Sydney Gleekman down the hall and caught him coming out of the bathroom. Gleekman was told, without his soliciting the information, that the pilot was close, the polish was only a pilot away, and that he should expect a draft from Pleble on Monday.

  “Remind me again,” asked Sydney. “Who’s Pleble?”

  “Mark Pleble? My agent? We met you at your big party last year?”

  “Does he work for CAA?”

  “No.”

  “William Morris?”

  “No.”

  “UTA?”

  “He works for a kind of boutique agency, I guess.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Sydney. “I know just who you mean. Have him send it to me. Ah, there she is. Excuse me.”

  Sydney left, and Leonard headed back to the bar. Was the party winding down? He thought it was; there were fewer people around. He knew he should probably go home but chose instead to have a final drink with a guy who was maybe famous. Then he went outside and lay down in a chaise on the far side of the pool.

  He took the pilot out of his back pocket and started to read by the watery blue light. He lit a cigarette. He wasn’t sure he was in the right frame of mind to properly evaluate what he had written, but as he read, and smoked, and read, and smoked, something new occurred to him. His pilot was a comedy in which the main character was a recovering alcoholic who, every episode, found himself surrounded by drunks. Every episode—or so he envisioned it; there weren’t any “episodes” yet—his character had to work hard not to drink. He was the “life of the party.” The title was ironic; the life and humor came from the many drunks all around him. But could that conceit be sustained for an entire season? What if, he thought, just what if his character got on and off the wagon from episode to episode? Then the question became (every Thursday on CBS, ideally), will he or will he not take a drink? Just like Death in the Family. But instead of, “Who will die this time?” people will ask about his show, “How will he fall off the wagon?”

  He fell asleep. The embers of his cigarette caught the pages of his pilot, which began to smolder and burn. He coughed and woke himself up, looked down and found his new windbreaker on fire. He tossed the burning papers aside
and leapt out of the chaise. He tried patting the flames down, but they wouldn’t disperse; they seemed only to spread. He wasn’t sure where the fire started and where it stopped. He was the fire. He threw himself into the pool.

  He came up to the surface. He was coughing now not from the smoke but from having taken in water. Where was everybody? Was that dawn breaking in the sky so high up? The water was slippery. He couldn’t get purchase. Every once in a while, the Coach, too, had too much to drink, and you could see in his eyes just how much he regretted it. He tried to call out for help, but his voice was muted by another intake of water. Sobering infusion of chlorine. Desperate silent eye-popping wheezing. Reach for the closest edge! Which way? He spun, grew dizzy, took in more water. How quickly the new dawn was disappearing! Shimmeringly at first. He was going under, losing the surface to the depths. Happening? He hit bottom. Well, what better position from which to launch himself back into life? Only the water had turned impossibly heavy all around him. His body shuddered violently. And yet his eyes were open and everything was suddenly so clear. Of course Kate Lotvelt’s party was on, had always been on, with or without a reminder email. Why did he trouble himself over such trivial matters? He doubted his worth on so many levels and so frequently missed the point entirely. That was no way to live!

  This was just like the pilot. Not his pilot, of course. Kate’s pilot. His pilot was still a polish away. But he’d cracked it! Before falling asleep he knew the way forward! Or had that been a dream? At the bottom of the pool, his arms continued to make little arcs of almost peaceful effort. Here, at last, the pith and core of a deeper understanding came into focus. There was no need for RSVP anxieties. No need for fraudulent costumes. Time to get serious! He’d stay in tomorrow and finish the pilot. He was never going to take another drink again tomorrow. First thing tomorrow, he was going to put aside his hang-ups and retire his shame, and when he wrote to Kate Lotvelt to ask her to read his pilot, he would also mention without fear of being a fanboy how in love he was with her very true show.