I kissed her on the cheek and hugged her to me, then said good night to Mr. Stedmeister, who emerged from the den to “say hello to the ladies” and announce that the Orioles were ahead three to one in the ninth inning.
My bridesmaids helped carry my gifts to the car, and we said good night to Mrs. Long, who was staying in a hotel, and Marilyn, who had to get home to her children, and Sylvia, who said it was past her bedtime. That left eight of us there on the driveway, including Yolanda and Claire.
“It was like being in a time warp!” Gwen breathed.
“Awesome!” said Yolanda. “Like a contest, to see who could sit all evening without spilling tea in her lap!”
“So what do you girls do for fun down here?” Carol asked. “Now that your guys are out on the town?”
“Are you kidding?” said Liz. “Do you know where they went?”
The others turned our way. “Where?”
“An Orioles game!” I said. “They hinted that it was some forbidden nightclub, and all the while they’re at a ball game!”
“So what are we going to do with the rest of the evening?” asked Stacy, tilting her watch toward the house so she could read it in the light from the windows.
“It’s only ten. I think the guys need to be taught a lesson,” I declared. “Any ideas?”
Pamela lifted one finger in the air. “Hold on!” she said. “Let’s see if he’s working tonight.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Someone who owes me a favor,” she said, and got out her cell phone.
We waited there in the moonlight while Pamela made a call. I could tell by her expression that she’d reached the person she wanted, but there were obviously negotiations going on. Finally her face broke into a smile and she nodded in our direction.
“Got it!” we heard her say. “Okay . . . in about twenty-five minutes.”
“Where are we going?” I asked as she slipped her cell phone back in her bag.
“To the Source nightclub in DC,” she said. “We are the ‘Sullivan party of six,’ only we’ve added two other guests and hope they won’t mind,” and she gave us the address. “Let’s go.”
“That’s someone’s reservation?” Stacy asked.
“Yep, but they aren’t due until eleven, my friend says. If they show up, I’ll think of something.”
“Whoopee!” Carol exclaimed.
“Pamela!” I cried. “How will we—?”
“C’mon, live a little. If the Sullivans show, we’ll claim we said the ‘Solomons’ and made the reservation five days ago.” Pamela dug around for her car keys. “Relax. I know this guy from theater arts. He got this great job helping design the place.”
We gasped and giggled, and when my car was full, the four others got in Gwen’s, leaving the remaining cars out on the street till we got back.
16
FOREVER
We left our cars with the valet, and Pamela announced the Sullivans at the door. The doorman, also bouncer, looked us over, checked off the name, and we were escorted inside to an ultratech room of lights and sounds and furniture that resembled seats inside a spacecraft. There were headsets lying about.
Pamela apologized to the maître d’ for having added two more guests to our party but said she hoped he could accommodate us, and he icily pushed two tables together.
According to the menu, we were in the Voyage Room, and by manipulating the controls at the end of our table, something like those on old jukeboxes, we could select our particular spaceship and individual route, which sometimes had us hooking up with one at a neighboring table. A rather sophisticated icebreaker.
“What are we supposed to do with these?” Liz asked, picking up one of the headsets, and in answer to her own question, she put it on her head. We watched as her face became more intent, obviously following recorded directions, and she motioned to the screen at the end of the packed room, where it appeared we were all in space heading toward a distant planet. Three men at a corner table were looking our way, and suddenly another spaceship appeared on the screen at the end of the room. Liz yanked off the helmet, and her face got that old familiar Elizabeth blush that made us laugh, and the men also.
I was handed the drink list, and when I saw the twenty-dollar service charge per person at the bottom of the paper, I almost choked. The drinks themselves were beyond pricey. You could buy two six-packs of Bud for what one glass of wine cost here.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered to Stacy, one finger sliding down unobtrusively to the cover charge.
“Charge it to the guys’ credit cards. Serves ’em right for trying to upset us,” she said. “Wild night, my foot!”
“Amen!” I said. “Champagne, anyone?”
We each ordered a glass of wine. The room was so noisy, we almost had to shout to be heard.
“What did you have to do to get us in, Pamela?” Claire asked her.
“Nothing. It’s a guy from my theater arts school,” Pamela yelled back. “I spent a weekend helping him film a vignette. He owes me one.”
Gwen was looking at a descriptive card about the club that read: By invitation, guests are welcome to explore the Temptation and Source Rooms, by taking the hidden stairway beyond the purple curtain. “What the heck kind of club is this?” she asked.
“Don’t worry. It’s mostly ‘sophisticated suggestiveness,’ ” Pamela said. “After Antony got hired here, he came back and gave a lecture on ‘The Atmosphere of Desire.’ ”
“On what?” yelled Yolanda from her end of the table.
“Sex,” Liz yelled back.
I could hear my cell phone chime, but just barely. “It’s Patrick!” I told the others, reading his text. “Says they’re on their way back, had a ‘spectacular’ evening, and wants to know if I’m home.”
The girls all hooted. “What are you going to tell him?” asked Claire.
“Out with the girls,” I said, my thumbs sending the message.
“I feel so matronly in this dress,” said Carol, looking down at the navy-blue sheath with the white collar and cuffs. “I feel like an airline attendant or something.”
“Hike it up about five inches,” Yolanda suggested, so she did, showing a shapely expanse of leg.
On the large screen someone’s spaceship had landed, and we seemed to be going back in time, not forward. A wild garden of some sort. I put on the headset and heard a loud cacophony of parrots.
At that moment a thirtyish man dressed in silver lamé, something between a tuxedo and a spacesuit, emerged from the crowd and leaned over Pamela, then just as suddenly disappeared.
“Antony says the Sullivans just arrived. We’ve got to give them our table and go up to the Temptation Room.”
“Already? All right!” said Yolanda.
“And bring our wine with us,” said Gwen.
Elizabeth’s and Stacy’s cell phones were both dinging now, and they were laughing before they even checked their screens.
“Moe wants to know when I’ll be home,” Liz giggled, reading his text.
“That’s what Les is asking too,” Stacy said.
“What are you going to tell them?” asked Gwen.
Liz thought for a minute. “Don’t wait up,” she said, and we shrieked with laughter.
We made our way to the high purple curtains at one side of the screen, then up the winding staircase to a door at the top that looked like the entrance to a cave.
It appeared to be the restaurant part of the nightclub and, at this hour, wasn’t as busy or noisy as the floor below. Inside, we found artificial trees and fake fruit hanging from the branches, two live parrots squawking at each other. The wait staff wore nude-colored bodysuits with fig leaves placed appropriately. The spacecraft below had supposedly delivered us back to the beginning of man.
The maître d’ took us to a round table for eight. The chairs seemed to be made from twigs and branches. I avoided the snake dangling from a tree with an apple in its mouth and let Pamela have the honor
of it looking over her shoulder.
“I’m afraid we’re no longer offering dinner this evening, but would you care for fruit or a dessert? An aperitif, perhaps?” the man said.
“Perhaps,” said Pamela, and the maître d’ nodded toward a waiter, who came over with a small card listing pears and cheese and caviar and a “chocolate volcano” dessert. Valerie ordered the volcano and asked for eight spoons. We had already racked up a considerable tab, and some of the others asked for more wine.
Liz asked for Perrier. “Somebody has to drive,” she said.
“Good thinking,” said Stacy. “I’ll do the same.”
We could hear each other a little better here.
“What part does your friend have in all this?” Carol asked Pamela.
“Design and décor. He’d already had two years in design school before he came to my theater school. A friend recommended him to a man who had this idea for a nightclub, and Antony came on down.”
We were enjoying the waiters in their bodysuits, imagining them without the fig leaves, and had almost finished our chocolate when Antony appeared once again to Pamela’s left.
“The Sullivans are on their way up, and the doorman is looking for you,” I heard him tell her. “Take the service elevator up to the Source.”
When the elevator came, the doorman was on it.
“Sullivan?” he asked suspiciously as we boarded.
“Solomon,” Pamela told him. “I’m afraid someone got our names mixed up and thought we were the same party.”
He didn’t seem to be buying this, but just in case we were being truthful, he didn’t protest as we got off on the next floor, and he stayed aboard as it went back down.
We heard the music even before the elevator door opened. We had expected to enter something even more primitive than the Garden of Eden, and in a way we did, because the walls were covered with a mural of dinosaurs and exploding volcanoes, but the activity was anything but. A band was playing and couples were dancing the Dougie there on the floor.
“I don’t get it,” I told Pamela when we were seated at three small cocktail-size tables.
She looked it over, her slim arms still bearing a trace of a mild summer tan.
“Life,” she said finally. “The source of all this that came after, something like that—the dancers as evidence.”
“O-kaaay,” I said finally.
“They probably wanted a high-tech atmosphere to draw people in, a restaurant, and a nightclub dance floor, all in one club, so it’s the Voyage, the Temptation, and the Source.”
It didn’t quite work for me, but it obviously did for the club, because the place was in full swing. Maybe you weren’t supposed to think too much about it.
But twenty minutes later the doorman himself came to our table:
“Miss . . . uh . . . Solomon?” he said curtly, addressing Pamela.
Pamela put on her best act. “Yes?”
“I believe it’s time for your party to vacate,” the man said.
“Excuse me?”
“There are three gentlemen at the door, Madam, asking for you. Your husbands, I presume.”
“How can that be?” Pamela asked. “Our husbands are attending a board meeting in New York.”
“Perhaps so,” said the doorman, his voice thick with sarcasm, “but right now they are there at the door in baseball caps. And your bill, Madam . . .”
He gave Pamela the bill, but Stacy was already handing him her credit card. “We’ll settle up outside,” she told the others.
Lester, Patrick, and Moe were standing just inside the entrance, and they looked at us quizzically when we got to the door. We waited till we were outside, then cut loose in an explosion of laughter.
“What a blast!” cried Carol. “This has been one fantastic evening!”
“Yeah?” said Les. “I thought you women went to a shower.”
“And you guys told us you’d gone to a strip club to try to get us all upset,” Stacy said. “What’s good for the goose . . .” They laughed too.
“Well, just so everyone had a good time,” Les said.
“Oh, we did,” Stacy told him, and handed him a copy of the bill. “You guys can split it three ways.”
* * *
Though we had rented our apartment from the first of October, the workmen didn’t finish painting it until just ten days before our wedding. Patrick’s parents and mine, as their wedding gifts to us, gave us checks to buy our furniture, and I was at the apartment the day the living room couch was delivered. Patrick was with me on Saturday when the table and chairs and a rug arrived. Bit by bit we watched our little one-bedroom apartment turning into our first home.
There was a small study off the living room that would serve as an office, and Patrick had inherited an old desk of his father’s. Somehow—with a few end tables of Sylvia’s, a bookcase, and a dresser that I loved—the apartment grew smaller and smaller the more we put into it.
Nothing really matched—we had bought each piece separately and that’s the look we wanted. And we were happy.
We had already decided we wouldn’t spend the night there until we were married. We wanted to come back from the honeymoon to a brand-new place, a new beginning. We’d reserved Sunday to bring in most of our personal things—clothes, books, desk supplies, DVDs, all the miscellaneous stuff of life—and that’s when Patrick and I had our first big argument.
I’m not sure what it was all about, because so often you seem to be arguing about one thing when the real problem is something else. We’d agreed on most things, even a honeymoon in Ireland. But there had been a lot of tension, too—mostly happy tension—about all the wedding details, finding the apartment, moving, Patrick’s new job, my lack of one, starting a new life together. . . .
We had a lot more room than what we’d had at college, but without all the closets and attic and basement space we’d had back in our homes. We’d talked about not bringing a whole lot of stuff with us. Patrick was crazy about streamlined living, but I felt as though I had cluttered up the closets at home long enough. That Dad and Sylvia should be able to call the house their own, and this was my home now; I wanted everything near and dear to me right here. So, with the exception of some toys and books I’d had as a child that Dad wouldn’t let me give away even if I’d wanted to, I brought almost everything else with me. Except my old beanbag chair. I finally put that out in the trash.
It started with Patrick getting frustrated at how many boxes we were carrying in. When you’re living abroad, you get used to doing with very little and traveling light. And when I arrived with still another load, the last one, he lost it.
“What is all this stuff, Al?” he said. “Did you sort through any of it, or did you just dump all your things in boxes? I hate clutter.” We were both feeling tired and hot. We didn’t have the air conditioner on because the door was open.
“I did sort through it, Patrick. I just have a lot of things I want to keep,” I said.
He kept opening box after box in silence, shelving my books, putting boxes of clothes in one area, personal items in another. I’ll admit I probably didn’t need to keep a videotape of Gone with the Wind or a fifteen-year-old road atlas. I didn’t need to keep my favorite dresses from high school and a dozen or more copies of each issue of The Edge. But it was when he got to a photo album, half filled with pictures of Dave, that he turned on me.
“So what’s he doing in our apartment, Alice?” he asked, holding the album out away from him as though it were contaminated.
I shrugged, but I could feel a storm brewing. “He was part of my life for a while, Patrick, just like Jessica was a part of yours.”
“I didn’t keep her e-mails. I didn’t even keep her pictures.”
“Well, you kept at least one. You showed it to me.”
“Okay, so I kept one. I didn’t keep a whole album that would take up three inches of shelf space.”
“What are we arguing about here, Patrick? It’s only one inch
wide. Is that really worth having a fight about?” I said. I’m not sure that was all that bothered me, though. What I sensed was an element of control in Patrick’s voice, what I could and could not have in our home. Which memories were allowed and which weren’t.
“We don’t have enough shelf space as it is! Look at all this junk!” Patrick said.
The word junk set me off. “So I’ll keep it under the bed, okay?” I snapped, grabbing the album out of his hands.
Patrick sat back on his heels. “That’s great. Under our bed. Dave’s in our bedroom.”
“Oh, Patrick, grow up!” I said, and instantly wished I hadn’t. I remembered what the minister had said to Stacy at Lester’s wedding: Inside every man is a little boy. . . . Patrick glared at me for a long moment, then stood up and clomped out to the kitchen. I heard him slide a bottle out of the fridge, then slam the door. Hard. I heard the sound of a cap being taken off a bottle, and for several minutes Patrick stayed in the kitchen while I continued unloading a box.
When he came back in with a Pepsi, he said, “I hate clutter, and I hate stuff taking up every available inch of space, and I particularly don’t enjoy starting our life together with a photo album of an ex-boyfriend around the place.”
“Patrick, you can’t tell me what I can keep and what I can’t,” I told him. “I’ll try to keep the clutter down, and I’ll sort through my stuff even more. But Dave was a part of my life for a time, and while I’m not putting the album on the coffee table for all to see, I’m not going to throw it out, either.”
He didn’t answer. He simply picked up his car keys and left.
I wrapped my arms around my ankles, put my head on my knees, and cried. If Patrick was going to walk out over pictures—mere pictures—of a former boyfriend, what would he do when real problems came along? Maybe I should have taken the album to my house and left it in the attic. But then it would always seem as though there was something too dangerous to have around.
I thought of how childish Patrick was behaving, and then I remembered: Inside every woman is a little girl. Maybe I wasn’t acting very grown up either. If it were an album of Jessica we were arguing about, would I want it under our bed? I wouldn’t. In fact, I had to admit, I’d react exactly the same way.