The Dinner Party

  She was preparing for bed when she thought she heard the doorbell ring again, and again her first thought was that it was Ilsa, come to apologize. It would be such a relief to have her matinee partner back again, but as her bare feet left the Persian rug for the red Spanish tile, she remembered that Ilsa had returned north to Chillicothe on Wednesday, and she quickly reverted to the opinion that her former friend’s ideas of both movies and morals were wanting.

  Through the peephole, she watched the pizza boy pointlessly ringing Arty’s doorbell until she could take it no more. She stepped out into the open-air vestibule to explain the situation: Arty Groys was inside that condo with a woman who had appeared half-naked on his doorstep. Mrs. Zegerman was convinced that the two of them were in there interrelating. It was shameful and disgusting. It was also interfering with commerce.

  “Arty’s in there with a woman?” the boy said. “Our Arty?”

  She had no idea what he meant by “our.”

  “You sure he didn’t just kick off?”

  “He’s not dead,” she replied.

  “Well, goddamn,” the boy, a Newport smoker and native of Florida, said. He removed the pizza from its space-suit pouch and placed it with the Sprite to one side of Arty’s door before nodding goodbye and galloping down the stairs. “Tell him it’s on the house!” he cried.

  This was not the first time she had watched that boy go. He was such a well-tanned boy. Perhaps he surfed. For a brief second, she felt her body warmed by the sun and her head pillowed by the sand, while out in the distance, doggie paddling on his board, Dusty waved to her between surging whitecaps.

  She stepped back inside her apartment and picked up Cookie. She decided to wait there for Arty to emerge with his floozy so that she could give him a piece of her mind. A moment later, Arty’s door slammed shut like a shot. Mrs. Zegerman jumped to the peephole in time to catch a glimpse of the departing girl, who fled down the same stairs as her delivery boy while quickly tying her blouse, carrying her silver heels in one hand. Mrs. Zegerman naturally assumed she had been repulsed by the sight of Arty’s horrible penis. Then a long time passed at the peephole, and Arty didn’t come out for his pizza.

  Mrs. Zegerman found Arty on the floor of his living room. She was thrown into a panic at the sight of him that emptied her mind entirely of common sense. She simply did not know what to do, and the sensation of helplessness resounded with the one thing she remembered in all her years: the terror of the day that Mr. Zegerman had stumbled while walking along the wharf and hit his head on that utterly purposeless green metal thingy. She remembered the seep of his warm blood through her summer dress as she cried out for help. Now it was her neighbor whom she might have loved for years and years, so swiftly and completely had she been struck dumb by his perfect helplessness. He had collapsed between wicker sofa and coffee table, his legs hairless and white as wax, his stomach a great pale mound, and his face as pinched and pink as crab shell.

  “Oh, thank God,” Arty said when he caught sight of his neighbor. “Call the paramedics, Mrs. Zeger—”

  He was cut off by a terrible grip, a twisting vine-strangle of the heart—but his words had the intended effect. Mrs. Zegerman kicked into high gear. She rushed over to him throbbing with adrenaline and restored him to respectability by returning to its rightful place the underwear that had been dangling around one ankle. Then she clamped his left arm like a nutcracker over her slender neck and supported his bulk all the way to the elevator. She planned to get him downstairs and to drive him to the hospital in her Mazda. If she had learned one thing from the death of Mr. Zegerman, it was never to put your faith in the promptness of men who drive ambulances. But they had to wait too long, much too long, for the infernal elevator, which liked to clamor down below with buckling metal and other echoes of motion the minute the call button was pressed, dallying there for untold minutes before zooming right past, up and up, to some grander view of Bequia Tower. At last she told Arty that they would have to take the stairs, and she carried him over to their brink and started the descent with her weighty dying charge. On the final flight, however, they got tangled up and he went flying, bouncing down brutally step after step, while it was everything she could do to catch the banister and not follow after. She took one look at the twitching body that lay in a yellow pool of security light and, scared that she had killed him, raced upstairs again to call an ambulance.

  The first two days, he was incommunicado, lost beneath a breathing apparatus when he was not in surgery. To move out of the I.C.U. into a regular unit took him another five days, by which time she had found his insurance card and called his children.

  “What does this mean?” Paul asked.

  “Will he live?” Gina asked.

  “How will he get around?”

  “Who will take care of him?”

  Mrs. Zegerman assured them that she would take care of Arty. Not only did the children not object, they seemed to imply that there was simply no one besides Mrs. Zegerman whom they would have looking after their father at this difficult time.

  “He’s always spoken so highly of you,” said Paul, who had heard Arty speak about Mrs. Zegerman only when denigrating her dog. “And we, for one, the children, I mean, are just so grateful knowing you’re there.”

  Arty’s knee was in terrible shape from the fall. Once his heart had fully recovered from what proved to be a mild heart attack, he would need to have an operation to determine the extent of the ligament damage, followed by a long regime of physical therapy. His weight posed a significant impediment to a swift recovery. The orthopedic surgeon predicted that it might be as long as a year before her husband walked again. Mrs. Zegerman had succeeded in convincing everyone that she and Arty were engaged to be married and did not correct the surgeon’s error.

  Mrs. Zegerman walked the corridor to Arty’s room. The coarse, almost particulate sun showering in through the window there filled the small, antiseptic space with a false radiance. There was no need for it, as his children’s flowers had wilted and died days earlier. Now the competition between the outside heat and the meager central air made the room feel claustrophobic and unpleasant. These things might have gone unnoticed had her first observation not covered her in a thin sweat of panic: the bed was empty. Arty was not in his room. Had he had another heart attack? Had he died overnight? Gone! Overnight! She wished she had never gotten involved. Oh, dammit. The dog was enough.

  Suddenly the toilet roared and the bathroom door was thrown open. Arty Groys came staggering out, favoring his good leg while fiddling with the fly of the pressed trousers she had brought for him the day before. Mrs. Zegerman was beside herself, for he was walking in defiance of the doctor’s predictions. She rushed over to him with exclamations of dismay.

  “What are you doing up and about, Mr. Groys? Your knee is in no condition to be walking around, to say nothing of your heart.”

  “God bless you, Mrs. Zegerman, God bless you,” he said. “But the heart has never been better, and the knee is only knocked off center a little. If I had remembered to take that cane with me, I would hardly have noticed a thing.”

  Mrs. Zegerman saw an ivory-handled cane in the far corner of the room. She turned to Arty with surprise, as though she had just found something unsavory in his sock drawer. She had been with him practically every waking hour since he entered the hospital. Where had that cane come from?

  “We must get out of here, Mrs. Zegerman,” Arty said. “We must get over to Jimmy Denton’s house.”

  “Who’s Jimmy Denton?”

  “Jimmy Denton is the man responsible for all this, God bless him. He never visited or sent flowers, but no doubt his Asiatic wife is to blame for that. She must have closely guarded from old Jimmy the fact that I was dying only ten miles away. She has always been jealous of our friendship. Now, it’s better we do this on the sly. Are you ready?”

  “But you haven’t been released yet, Mr. Groys.”

  “Mrs. Zegerman, I must see Jimmy Denton. H
e knows how to put me in contact with the girl who saved my life.”

  Mrs. Zegerman had been under the impression that she had been the one who’d saved Arty’s life. “And who is that?” she asked.

  “No time for particulars, Mrs. Zegerman,” he said. “Now take a peek and tell us if the coast is clear.”

  And so Mrs. Zegerman suddenly found herself sneaking Arty Groys out of the hospital. They simply walked down the corridor, into the elevator, and out the main exit. Arty did remarkably well with the assistance of his cane.

  “They did a wonderful job in there,” he said, “but I’m happy to be leaving. Too many people die in hospitals. You’d be safer on a Chinese beach with those scavengers and their rusted circuit boards. And would you look at that,” he added when they had crossed the threshold and entered the day. “The sun is shining so gloriously. Before that heart attack of mine, I would have just called that glare.”

  Jimmy and Jojo Denton lived in a gated community whose thriving heart was a golf course dotted with sun-dappled ponds—a perfectly manicured oasis of hurricane-proof Spanish colonials, manatee mailboxes, and geriatric promiscuity. Mrs. Zegerman, staying put at Arty’s insistence, watched her hobbling neighbor get out of the car in front of a gaudy palazzo and limp across the dense lawn. He returned not five minutes later, hastily shutting the door.

  “Jojo dropped a dime, Mrs. Zegerman,” he said. “She’s always been a meddlesome woman. We have to get to East Naples, and pronto. Apparently they all crowd into a single apartment unit. The thought of it just tears the heart out of my chest.”

  “Who are you talking about, Mr. Groys?”

  “The young lady who saved my life.”

  “I have news for you, Mr. Groys. I am the one who—”

  “Mrs. Zegerman, I beg you. Jojo Denton had sicced the police on someone very dear to me. There’s no time to lose. Please put the car in motion and head east.”

  Mrs. Zegerman thought it was imperative to get Arty Groys home, to set him up, with his bad leg and weak heart, in bed or on the recliner, with pillows and remotes and restorative liquids, and to discuss his dietary preferences so that she would know what to buy at the grocery store. She was looking forward to a long convalescence. The obvious indifference with which the widower’s children treated their father’s caretaking guaranteed that she would preside with crowned authority over many months of incremental improvement.

  But Arty’s sudden mobility had made her heart sink. The long months of sequestered progress vanished instantly, casting doubts on her hopes and dreams, and his oblique agenda in East Naples reduced her to feeling like a mere chauffeur. They were heading down a swath of highway raised out of the wetlands, past a schizophrenic landscape of saw-grass prairies and strip malls, where the road signs warned of panthers and the billboards advertised outdoor malls and alligator zoos. Mrs. Zegerman came to understand, through Arty’s roundabout explanation, that his friend Jimmy had spent two hundred dollars on a birthday present for him. There had been no way for Jimmy to blame that extravagance on his time at the dog track, so to protect that beloved pastime, he had had to come clean to Jojo that very morning. His wife immediately put in a call to the Collier County Task Force Initiative, with whom she had worked in the past to enforce speed limits in her subdivision and to establish random sobriety tests at crucial intersections. At some point, after putting two and two together, Mrs. Zegerman stopped listening.

  Arty guided them into an apartment complex and through a maze of speed bumps. To the right and left stood building after gray generic building. They went past a dumpster center and a large barricade of metal mailboxes while Arty searched, squint-eyed, for the right apartment. They had to circle around three times before he found it.

  She braked quickly at his command. He turned away from the apartment complex to look at her. “Thank you for the ride, Mrs. Zegerman,” he said. “There’s no sense in mixing you up any further in all this. I’ll take a taxi home.”

  As he climbed out of the car, she was speechless. She was hurt, she was confused, and, most of all, she was angry at herself for feeling an absurd but overwhelming sensation of abandonment.

  “Mr. Groys,” she said, “don’t you need your cane?”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Zegerman. That cane just slows me down.”

  “But you shouldn’t even be walking!” she cried.

  “Isn’t it something?”

  He slammed the door. She immediately flung herself over the seat and manually rolled down the window. “Arty!”

  He turned with surprising grace and peered back at her from a distance of a dozen feet. “Yes?”

  She was propping herself up on an elbow, craning her neck and staring at him through the open window like an alien creature. He stared back at her in the full dazzle of the sun. “Arty,” she repeated. “In all the years we’ve been neighbors, why have you never asked me my first name?”

  Arty stood awhile in silence before limping back to Mrs. Zegerman’s Mazda and bending down to the window. “I don’t know,” he said. “What is it?”

  “It’s Ruth,” she said. “Although my friends call me Ruthie.”

  “May I call you Ruthie?”

  She had straightened out and taken hold of the steering wheel again. She turned to stare out the windshield while he peered in at her. She replied without looking over. “I suppose that would be fine,” she said at last.

  He did not know what to expect and imagined he might encounter some specimen of pimp—the dagger-dark madam or tracksuited thug—but it was a petite black girl who answered his knock and asked him who his appointment was with. After Arty had described her (he didn’t even know her name!), the black girl led him to a dental-office love seat in a gloomy room whose only distinctive feature was a mounted poster of a Budweiser logo, and disappeared down the hall of what was otherwise the kind of apartment that recent post-grads pile into as one pursues acting, the other a law degree, a third some kind of entrepreneurial scheme, and a fourth the dollar tips handed out at gentlemen’s clubs. The barren despondency of the place depressed him and challenged his resolution, arrived at in the earliest hours of his recovery, to see the girl again. He had been living as a dead man for years, and without her sudden presence in his suffocating cloister, coaxing and tempting him, he would certainly have died a dead man. He planned to offer to retire any debts she might have accrued and to furnish her with education funds. Was this preposterous? Would she laugh in his face?

  Something prompted him to rise and walk to the window. He widened a gap in the cheap venetian blinds and squinted out into the sun. He had a view of the entire parking lot, and he saw, once his eyes had fully adjusted, Mrs. Zegerman’s tiny sedan parked beside a gleaming black motorcycle. What was Mrs. Zegerman still doing there? He narrowed his squint and focused all his attention. She was crying. She had rested her chin against the top arc of the steering wheel, and the tears were falling down her troubled face. He had never seen her cry before. It was possible that until then, he had never really seen her at all. After a moment she righted herself, retrieved a tissue from the glove box, and blew her nose.

  His attention was called away from Mrs. Zegerman by first one and then a second squad car pulling up outside the building, their sun-muted siren lights twirling unnoticed by anyone but him. His still-delicate heart came to a stop, as if suddenly cast in stone, only to shatter into pieces when it came charging back. Jojo Denton had remarkable pull. Four Collier County police officers stepped out and began to confer, then approach, by which time he had let the blinds snap back and was rushing toward the rear rooms.

  He found her brushing her hair in front of a bathroom mirror. She turned and saw him standing in the doorway. She backed up at the mere sight of him—his eyes were still bruised from his fall, his forehead was pinkly scarred, and his pale, sweaty demeanor was ghastly. She issued something quick and terrified in a language he could not identify. “I don’t believe it!” she finally cried in English. “I leave you one
hundred percent dead man.”

  “You remember!” he said, happily but a little breathlessly. “I have survived and I have come to thank you, but first we have to get out of here. Jojo Denton dropped a dime, and the cops are right outside.”

  “Cops?”

  “Is there a back exit?” he asked.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He reached in and grabbed her hand and pulled her with him. He limped briskly to a sliding glass door in one of the bedrooms, where he struggled to undo the stubborn metal lock. While this was going on, he turned to her and said, “Do you remember the pill?”

  “The pill?”

  “The one I refused to take,” he said. “You persuaded me to take it, do you remember? How did you know I needed to take it? How did you know just what to say to me?”

  “You stupid!” she cried, having taken over. “Glass door is open whole time!”

  They left just as a thundering knock landed on the front door and reverberated through the apartment. He raced ahead of her, his knee be damned, and turned back to speak as they descended the back stairs. “How did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “How did you know what to say to get me to take that pill?”

  “Are you so stupid? I am prostitute!”

  “No, no, it was something more,” he said. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, he brought her to a halt and said, “I want to take care of you. I want to pay your debts. Let me pay your debts and fund a college education for you.”