The Dinner Party Read online

  She left the bathroom. Jay was everywhere surrounded by livelier tables. Their friends had not been able to come on such short notice.

  “Can we go?” she asked.

  She was dozing in the cab before they reached the bridge.

  As they climbed out of the subway and the sky came into view, she knew it was too late. The ride in had taken too long and what brittle daylight remained was fast bleeding away. By the time they found food for the picnic, they would be eating in darkness.

  “What are you after right now, Sarah?” Jay asked.

  She saw that the streetlight was about to change. “Let’s cross,” she said.

  “Why did I bring this stupid blanket if we’re not going to the park?”

  They were halfway across the street when the light went red and they found themselves marooned on an island between two-way traffic. Cars zipped by in a steady stream, giving them no room to maneuver. She turned to him.

  “What should we do, Jay?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “You just killed the picnic. You’re in charge.”

  “I came up with the picnic,” she said.

  She needed an alternative, something to salvage this vital hour. But what? And this fucking traffic! A hundred million lights, and every one of them going against her.

  “What about that one hotel?” she asked.

  “Hotel?”

  “You know, the one with the view.”

  The drinks were overpriced, and there would be no breeze, but in the lounge there was a spectacular view of Central Park. It’d be better than shopping for dinner in a badly lit bodega and having a picnic in the dark. They could always eat later.

  It was a short walk. They took the elevator up. The lobby, like the lounge, was on the thirty-fifth floor. Through the window in the distance, the park was divided in two: the westernmost trees, hunkered down beneath the tall buildings, were sunk below a line of shadow, while the rest, looking fuller, rose up in the light. The budding leaves shivered in the breeze more green than silver.

  They had to wait briefly at the bar. Then the hostess came for them. Once seated in the tiered lounge, they faced outward, as in a Parisian café, and watched as the remaining trees were claimed by the shadow. They drank crisp white wine. Night settled grandly.

  It still felt like winter down in the subway. There were hot gusts, weird little eddies of cold, the steel burn of brakes poisoning the platform—but never a breeze. Nothing so limpid and delicate as spring could penetrate here. Even inside the car, they were breathing last century’s air. Salt tracks stained the floors. Soon winter would give way to hell: the subway’s two seasons.

  The train pulled into the station. The fortunate rose from their seats and stood waiting before the silver doors that failed to open. They waited and waited. Finally, off they went, given early release; two stops yet from her destination, she had more time to serve. The last of the departing passengers paraded by, and then the platform was empty, but the doors still would not close. The purgatorial train seemed to be expiring, taking in air and letting it out, pointlessly. The automated voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are being held momentarily by the train dispatcher.” A ludicrous little god at play with switches.

  At last the warning ding of the closing doors sounded, but nothing happened, and the train failed to move. She was out on the edge of her seat.

  She said, “I would literally rather kill myself than go to a movie tonight.”

  His eyes widened as if, at his desk on some Wednesday afternoon, the peal of a fire alarm had brought him to sudden life. Was she talking to him, or to herself? Her level voice was soft and frightening.

  “Okay,” he said. “We won’t go to the movies.”

  Traffic eased, and at last they were free to step off the median. They hurried the rest of the way across the street. But they didn’t know what to do or where to go now that the picnic was off, so they idled under the shadow of a tall building. Passersby ignored them in their push toward known destinations, fixed plans, the city’s eight million souls conspiring against her joining in something urgent and mysterious.

  “Sarah,” he said. “Stop. Take a breath. What is it you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But don’t put it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “What should we do, Jay?” she said pointedly. “What should we do?”

  “Don’t they come to the same thing?”

  “They don’t.”

  She spent ten minutes searching for something on her phone. He retreated a few feet, squatting near a scrawny tree planted in a little cell. When she gestured, he rose to his feet and followed her, keeping a step behind. At the next corner, they waited as taxis bounced by on their shocks. They caught every red light thereafter. They reached the building she wanted, the one with the lounge with a view of the park. She kept hitting the button as the elevator made its way down to them.

  They were the last ones out when the doors opened. The window just past the reception area showed the buildings down Fifty-Ninth Street checkerboarded with lights in the dimming hour. Bankers in their brigs, she thought. A canopy of shadow was slowly rolling across the treetops, sinking everything into a silver night.

  There were no tables available. The hostess took Jay’s name.

  “Should we be here?” Sarah asked him.

  “Isn’t this where you wanted to be?”

  The hostess watched them. “You’re welcome to sit at the bar,” she told them.

  “Thank you.”

  “How long until a table is free?” Sarah asked.

  The hostess didn’t know. She couldn’t guarantee one at all.

  They went to the bar, where they drank in silence.

  She had wanted a picnic, then the subway had defeated her. Then they’d been stranded on the median bickering over nothing, the all-consuming nothing of what to do. Was it she, she alone, who made that question so inscrutable and accusing some nights, like a stranger leveling a finger at her from across a room? Or was it the haltings and blinders of an entwined life: the fact of Jay, the disequilibrium of having to take what he wanted into consideration, whatever that might be? Because he kept it to himself, or it remained alien to him, and so how could she hope to name it? Or maybe there was no mystery at all. Maybe he was just a man who wanted to see a movie.

  The last of the daylight disappeared as they waited, and all the possibility that had arrived with the breeze was reduced to yet another series of drinks at a bar. By the time a table opened up, she felt drunk and unfocused. They had a final drink and left.

  They tried having dinner at a cheap Italian joint downtown, but they got into a fight and left before he would even enter the restaurant. When they got home, they were no longer speaking. They lay in the dark for a long time before he broke the silence. “I could have gone to a fucking movie,” he said. He rolled over and went to sleep.

  At the bottom of the subway stairs, she reached for him, turned, and, with his hand in hers, raced back the way they’d come, up the stairs, into the mellow night. She breathed the spring air in deeply, shedding the subway stuff, and the still-blue sky above them confirmed her good judgment. But he was confused.

  “I thought we were having a picnic.”

  “Let’s not get on the subway,” she said. “I can’t stand it down there, not right now. Let’s just walk.”

  “Walk where?”

  She led him west toward the Brooklyn Bridge. On the pedestrian walkway, she skipped ahead, then waited for him, then skipped ahead again, swung around and smiled. They came to a stop midway between Manhattan and Brooklyn just as the sun was setting. The wavelets in the bay turned over in little strokes, scaling the water silver before it darkened to stone. She looked straight up. Just to see the towering spires of the bridge climbing to a single point in the sky was to affirm that nothing more could be asked of this hour, nothing better apprehended in this life. She took hold of a steel cable in each hand and gazed out
again at the setting sun. The burn-off against the buildings grew milder, its colors deeper; for a minute, the certainty that it would die out was in doubt. Then the sun dropped away, and a blue shadow settled over everything—the bridge, the water. It mirrored the cool ferric touch of the suspension cables. She let go, and the blood came back to her hands in heavy pulses. Her eyes filled with tears.

  When the last of the sunlight was gone, she turned to him and said, “What did you think of that?”

  He looked at her with perfect innocence. “Of what?” he said.

  They waited a long time for their drinks to arrive. The bar was situated—stupidly, to her mind—far from the view, and besides, they sat with their backs to it. They had nothing to stare at but liquor bottles and wineglasses, while outside the sun was disappearing and shadow was unfurling swiftly across the trees.

  It had been a terrible idea to come up here, thinking they’d fall miraculously into a table. She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as it always accommodated her. It didn’t work like that. What a stupid place to live—stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance. And, as if choosing the wrong place weren’t bad enough, there were all those alternatives, abstractions taking shape only now: a walk across the bridge, drinks with Molly at the beer garden. Lights, crowds, parties. Even staying put in the brig, watching the neighborhood descend into darkness. Oh, God, was it possible…the best way to have spent the night was to never have left the brig?

  Knees pressed up against the bar, she turned to him as best she could. “I’m sorry, Jay,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For rushing us out of the apartment, and for how I acted on the subway. And it was a mistake to come up here. Let’s do something,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Like what?”

  The second he asked, the desire came over her to be in the park, obscured by trees, bent over, her fingertips dug into the earth, as he pushed her panties down to her ankles. In her mind they wouldn’t be perfectly concealed, so he would feel rushed and as a result would be rough with her, dispensing with the considerate sheets-and-pillow concerns of their weekend sex life to fuck her, simply fuck her hard and fast. Then the passersby with their exciting plans could ignore them all they wanted. She’d feel no sense of exclusion then. She’d right herself as he was buckling up, straighten her sundress, smile at him, and, just like that, all the stale tenement air of married life would disperse.

  “Sounds like you have something in mind, Sarah,” he said, taking her hand under the bar. “Tell me what it is.”

  Do it, she dared herself. Just lean in and whisper it.

  “I’m up for anything,” he said.

  But she lost the nerve.

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

  He suggested they buy their sandwiches for the picnic from the neighborhood place before getting on the train. But no, God, please no, not the neighborhood place again! She was so sick of it. They had lived off that menu for as long as she could remember. Then she climbed out of the subway and knew they’d made a mistake. Finding food would take forever. But if she called off the picnic because there was no time to find food, then what did they have if not time? Time to squander and squander until the night was over. One night after another until a whole life flew by. The first day of spring could make her go a little crazy, start thinking her options were either a picnic or death. Jay was charging forward, blanket under his arm, toward the picnic he believed was still on, when she stopped. It took him a minute to notice. He turned, then walked slowly back to her.

  It wasn’t in him to see what made this day different from other days. He didn’t pick up on breezes and breaks in weather, or they came upon him as the natural course of things, and so what was the big deal? If he had had his druthers, even today he would have worked into the night, feeding at his desk from some Styrofoam trough, then hurried to meet her for the late-night showing of the 3-D follow-up to the superhero sequel. Once home, he would have collapsed on the bed as if all the adventurous excursions of the day had depleted him of everything but the delicious aftertaste of exhaustion. She wanted to be a different person, a better person, but he was perfectly happy being his limited self.

  She had made a series of bad decisions, and now she traced them back to their source. It was not forgoing the sandwiches, or stepping onto the subway, or heading into Manhattan at the wrong hour. It was not leaving the brig, where she had fallen into a fragile harmony with the day. It was asking Jay to come home early. That was the mistake that had set everything else in motion.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She was about to tell him. She had overcome her fear and was about to tell him everything when she said, “Thanks for carrying the blanket.”

  He looked at the blanket in his hands. “Sure,” he said.

  Darkness fell. They bought food and carried on into the park. She could see vaguely that it was him as they laid everything out on the blanket, but when the time came to pack up, it was so dark that he could have been anyone, and she was grateful.

  Night drew more people out of doors and into the beer garden, and one by one the chairs climbing the stucco wall in two tilting stacks were dispersed around twenty or so patio tables. Molly showed up late with Chester, her golden retriever, and had nowhere to sit. Sarah stood and kissed her oldest friend, telling her to take her seat while she ran inside; she’d bring another chair back with her on her return from the bathroom. Chester, a lazy dog, quickly dropped his paws and began panting at his owner’s feet, but Molly was up again in no time when she spotted Sarah returning. Only Sarah didn’t return. She walked through the wrought-iron trellis and out of the beer garden.

  “Jay,” she said. “Where’s Sarah going?”

  Sarah was a block away by the time Jay caught up with her.

  “Where are you going, Sarah? Why are you leaving?”

  “It’s over, Jay!” she cried. “It’s over!”

  “What’s over?” he said.

  She stopped resisting and swiveled to face him. Passersby, intrigued by the sight of another life on fire, skirted around them and turned back to stare.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell him. “Spring,” she said.

  “What do you mean it’s over, Sarah? Spring just started.”

  But he was wrong. Spring was a fleeting moment and it blew right past her like that breeze on the brig. Then summer rushed in, as hot and oppressive as pipe exhaust, and she just couldn’t take another summer in the city. It would be followed by another single moment, that cool instant the leaves changed color. Then it would be winter again, another interminable winter, each one endured and misspent until they accrued into a life whose final hour she would never be ready to face.

  “Tell me you get it, Jay,” she said. “Please tell me you get it.” She leaned her head into his chest. “I’m scared to death,” she said.

  “What just happened?” he asked. “What went wrong?”

  “What are we doing? Why did we come here?”

  “Where?”

  “What else could we have done?”

  “We did a lot,” he said. “We had a picnic. Now we’re with friends. Why are you so upset?”

  “Should I not do the thing I do?” she asked. “Or should I do the thing I don’t do?”

  “What thing are you talking about?” he asked.

  He went back to the beer garden to say goodbye to their friends and to reassure them that everything was okay. But when he returned to the corner, she was already in a cab on her way into Brooklyn. She gathered a few things from the apartment—her pills, her toiletries—and an hour later she was in Molly’s apartment telling her friend her marriage was over.

  The hostess who had invited them to wait at the bar now came for them, just in time to quash another dumb argument before it got out of hand, and led them to a table in the lounge. The frustrations on the subway, the dithering on the street,
the self-doubt, all was forgotten before the stunning view. Even as the light was draining away and the trees outside the tall window were sinking into darkness, it was impossible not to feel restored. And with drinks on their way, and the night still young, she could sit in peace a moment without making any sudden moves from the terror of being in the wrong place doing the wrong thing.

  “What do you think?” Jay asked her. “Happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said.

  He did want her to be happy. And she could be so very unfair, expecting too much from them both on any given night and then going out of her mind when they came up short, blaming everything on him, the bickering, the bad decisions. He wasn’t to blame. He wasn’t a bad man. Only a little dull. Look at him now, spurning the view to focus on his domestic bottle of beer, pick-pick-picking at the label with his fingertips. That was no reason to wonder why she had married him, or to contemplate setting a divorce in motion and starting over. She knew herself well enough to know that the happiness she sought, so much like relief from pain, would not be handed to her by a partner, even one more passionate and alive to the possibilities than Jay, but was something she had to find on her own. It was the want of her own daring that haunted her. Overcome that, and Jay had always been game to do whatever she wished.