Troldhaugen (Pt. 1)
How they met, no one can reconstruct. Not the fussy particulars, not step by step. We can't handle the past that way anymore. Can't handle it at all. It drives us mad—hot breath at the backs of our necks. Also? No one has time for it. We try—and fail—to shut up about it. Time: ah, god. Least understood, least controlled. Avalanche of loss. Present obsessions erase all else, making the past a dim dream—ancient city, slew of cities, buried under a sandstorm. We might glimpse an arm sticking through.
A month ago, a week ago: Nothing, traceless.
Surely we once knew how they met. Once. Somewhere along the path we had a grip on it. But the pile-on of intervening life dissolves that grip. Dissolves detail. Or just screws shut whatever lens stayed open.
Theater. It had to do with theater. That much we retain.
Yet our faces go warm if you ask. After so many years, visibility's curtained off; silk layers slipping sideways when we paw at it.
Likely it began backstage. Giselle, a periodontist by trade, had always been a theater geek; studied all the history, seen every show, collected playbills; herself done some acting. This passion frothed from her like flecks of latté foam as she walked and spoke: a sturdy strawberry blonde with a pinched-in nose, large of gesture and voice and severe attention, she resembled some ripe chorine whose professor nature—it only followed—burst forth and kept bursting. Her voice alone drew double-takes, snapping like a pennant across rooms and streets—often given to slicing mockery. Giselle could do Bugs Bunny or John Gielgud; she could sing like Diana Krall or David Byrne; she did a credible Billie Holliday and an hilarious Dolly Parton. Her patients adored those sudden jolts into character—boom in the midst of a procedure when they were half-stoned. Hopping back without warning, opening her arms, cutting her eyes right and left, she'd bray: What's playing at the Roxy? I'll tell you what's playing at the Roxy…Minnesota man falls in love with a Mississippi girl so he sacrifices everything and moves all the way to Biloxi…That's what's playing at the Roxy…
Or she'd stop tooling in someone's gums under the white spotlight, jump to attention and freeze. Silver probe aloft, raising her face to heaven, she'd belt Let It Go or The Room Where It Happens or Wichita Lineman or Lovesick Blues (the yodeled parts clear and pure). Her assistants, long past amusement with these outbreaks, stood and waited, eyes dull above surgical masks (finishing would now take longer). Patients' eyes, however, popped even if they were buzzed—they'd drift out of Giselle's office in a blissful haze as if they'd pocketed some secret door-prize.
Howard, to our amazement, could not have contrasted more with his wife. A tall, slim, Jeremy Irons specter with lustrous black eyes, he'd served most of his working life as an in-house concierge to the city's famous hotel (known for its towering grandfather clock in the lobby). Howard wafted the kind of dignity seen in Parisian waiters—even been given his own tiny office with a little consulting window like a fortune-teller's booth. But his manner was never pompous, never a huckster's. Gentle, sweet, attuned: everyone's handsome uncle with those liquid, long-lashed eyes, Howard seemed simply to love the world. (Howard likes everything Giselle would murmur, sighing—as if it were a disability.) Wealthy clients, grateful for his beauty and smarts, tipped him well: he'd pile the cash on the kitchen counter after arriving home to show off for Giselle—whose pay in fact supported them. For his clients, Howard scampered ahead. He checked weather, head counts; made tricky reservations; steered visitors to the food or art or secret civic charms they didn't yet know they needed. Before he and Giselle began dating we assumed Howard to be gay, strictly from his manner and elocution. This proved wrong—at least wrong on the formal surface, and one does not ask for what's not volunteered.
After hours, Howard lived for theater. And so the two met (we surmise) on the set of some mutually adored production—probably a musical. Maybe Sondheim. Had they known a cast member? Bumped into one another waiting in line to congratulate, or get a playbill signed? That part's lost. However it came about, recognition must have flared: they were members of that desperate, fraught network, maniacs for theater. Co-addicts know each other at a glance—living a parallel life inside each production. They dated: different shows each time. They sat as close to the stage as they could afford, holding hands, squeezing tighter at beloved lines and songs, bouncing in their seats to the dance numbers, nodding, pushing tears aside, mouthing lines and lyrics. During meals or walking Market Street they sang bits of scores, harmonizing; sometimes executing a flourishy step or two.
Waitresses eyed them through windows. Panhandlers squinted up from their ratty blankets.
One tentative thing led to the next, less tentative thing.
Our own earliest memory of them: the old-style fish restaurant far out in the avenues toward Ocean Beach—a scruffy, salt-wind-buffed area so fogged and cold as to be drained of color and visibility, just porous gray density, misted and unreal as if outside time. We can't now remember the restaurant's name. Inside (this part easily recalled) ragged lines of waiting people stood, most of them young working types alert to real-time perqs: the hostess walked around pouring free wine for people in line. These were the years before the Tech Bros invaded, before costs became bad satire; it was still possible to live well in the margins—there were still margins. The restaurant's waiting line, laughing and yammering, spritzed the atmosphere, a zestful pong of self-congratulation kicking up what's still called buzz.
We sat—our first clear recollection of them—with a gathering of couples that included Howard and Giselle, organized by the friends with the mansion. Dark, sticky tables, everyone shouting, glasses of wine and baskets of bread flying around, smells of butter and steak, a wall of dark bottles gleaming behind the bar—yeasty, char-broiled smells making everyone reckless with hunger—that old-style hubbub loosed by wine, no matter how cold and Russian outside. And when, finally seated, the subject arose of how each couple began—as it will, emboldened by drink—we admitted we felt confused by Howard and Giselle's courtship.
You seem—uh—such opposites, we mumbled, a little abashed.
At once Howard leaned forward, nearly knocking over his wineglass, his damp forehead radiating candlelight.
“But that's what's so compelling! That's what provokes!” He aligned the glass. His black eyes glittered.
For a beat, the table went mute. No one had any idea Howard could use words like compelling—nor muster such authority, at least in personal terms. We didn't know what to say. Giselle sat amused, her shapely brows floating, lips perceptibly twitching as if to say who knows what'll come out of him next? Certainly not me.
~
Their wedding! We'd only first glimpsed the framed photos—black and white, which made them avant-chic—hanging in the friends' mansion. Back then we hadn't known anyone well enough to earn a wedding invite but later, as regular dinner guests to the mansion, we paused before each wedding photo the way you might take in a painting. So brash, both of them in those crisp shots—stark, Ingmar Bergmanish beauty, except joyful. One of Giselle throwing back her veil-crowned head, mouth wide (those frank, smart teeth) for a roaring laugh—the lavishness of her face breaking open, not a millisecond's reserve. Even from the distance of years since that wedding, we couldn't not feel wistful. How much trust in a certain cosmic playfulness girded that laugh? More than trust: a kind of colluding. There was also a video of the ceremony itself running perpetually on a small digital screen placed on a side table, the way people run shuffled photos—we caught a few minutes of it at that party. We best remember its soundtrack when bridal Giselle enters the mansion's living room, careful, erect, a sugar figurine—white satin shift, ruffled sleeves; short pouffy veil affixed to blond chignon; gardenia bouquet—fresh and real; must have trailed lush sweetness. The song announcing her entry was Grieg's Wedding Day at Troldhaugen; somebody offscreen pounding it out on the baby grand.
This rankled us.
Not the baby grand: the song. That was our song—admitted to no one, but true. Its freshness belonged to us, its setting-forth spirit, its resolute folktale glory! That proud, punching melody—so crisp, so modern (even as it evokes images of clog-clad peasants in an alpine village). Its chorus so firm, upright: as if itemizing expected accomplishments. Three chorded assertions, reiterating and resolving as if ticking off points in a patiently reasoned argument. Yet at the same time some drifty dream garlands the melody, wry, modern. It irritated us that Giselle and Howard commandeered the song first. But that was the only overlap. We would never have married their way—fanfare, costumes, drunken guests shouting over the plonked out Grieg. Expense, for starters. No idea where they got their money. We'd driven five minutes to city hall (in our town, a series of barracks ) with three relatives and two neighbors. We chafed about the song because their choosing it flaunted—how to say this—a studied affect. It announced them as creatives. Beings apart who didn't just harness but actually owned every fucking implication of breathtaking Troldhaugen. The promise, the flair, the panache. A sparkling, unknown, heady brink-of-things. Yessir.
Was that fair?
Was it merited?
It was certainly theatrical.
Really, though, they could have chosen flamenco guitar.
It scraped at us. But we liked Howard and Giselle.
Impossible not to.
~
We were flattered to be noticed by them; included. Soon the two were hugging us hello at dinners (hosted by the friends in the mansion). This mesh slowly tightened with repetition. It might have taken them a minute during earliest encounters to remember us—who we were, what we did. We watched their faces work a beat or two to retrieve the information, then (quick, graceful) form bright questions. Yes, I was the editor; yes, he the college prof. Yes, a small, aging bungalow, the suburb in the north, all those lovely vineyards. Yes, driving that nightmare freeway, the deadly Roller-derby of it—a crappy requisite if we wished to see city friends. Yes, wine country as backdrop. Yes, travel when we could.
But center-stage always belonged to Howard and Giselle. Giselle especially, by very nature, performed a kind of parade mascot's strut, knees high, missing only the fling-and-catch of the glittering baton. We didn't mind. It was fabulous entertainment. Cheap. And our requirements so easy.
Sit, drink. Watch, listen. Admire. Praise.
Repeat.
The couple presented like traveling vaudeville—their exchanges hammy but woke—the sort that managed to teach witnesses in some droll, knowing way. There was always a moral but its landing soft. We'd sit gaping as they carried on, imitating an actor or song or perfectly sending up whichever pompous cretin headlined that day's bad news. (Giselle was a killer mimic.) The new hot film, the scathing short story in the New Yorker, the theater review that went viral—the one that began “horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.” We felt like special-issue insiders. The couple's range across years and trends, staggered us. They'd go head to head in “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” or pitter-patter-parasol around each other doing “Three Little Maids from School.” Or become a flaming Jimi Hendrix falling to their knees blasting a torqued national anthem on air guitar. Either could instantly become Little Richard, Roy Orbison, Tina Turner, Green Day, MC Hammer, Bruno Mars—numbers of artists we hardly knew.
When they locked eyes to sing Sondheim's “Being Alive,” waves of goose-bumps rippled up to our scalps.
They created, in their way, an addiction to themselves.
One felt, by osmosis, smarter. Hipper.
Not least, we craved to see what would happen next.
~
We hadn't long to wait. Howard and Giselle found a house.
We still don't understand how. Meaning, how they paid for it. Even way back then the city was expensive. And this house—oh, man. Big and stately, two stories. Chateau-y. A perfect, meringue-coated, two-layer French cake. Perched, for good measure, atop a slight rise. Yep. The sort you behold when it hoves into view. Actual columns stationed at the front—one at each end of the gracious porch—triangulated in the yard by a willow cascading green-and-silver-coins. A path wound uphill across the lawn toward the steps, which mounted to the door. As if scripted, the green apron of grass was anchored by several sturdy fruit trees, apple, pear, peach. Ivy poured over the walls. Ridiculously perfect—a house from magazine covers or ads for insurance or liquor or Provence. Tragicomic loveliness, almost accusing—as if it ran a quiet advisory like a banner: Just Meets for Shrewd Players. How were we supposed to feel? We'd always mocked and resented the rich but we liked Howard and Giselle—though we could make no sense of their finances and never would. How in God's name do you afford all this was not a question one asked unless you were on ultra-intimate, swaggering terms—or were willing to risk permanent offense. Thus, their living like wealthy people lurked as a tormenting riddle behind all we said or did not say—a riddle as durable, apparently, as their very house.
Monolithic. Graceful. French film set. Sound track of Bach Partitas or Michel LeGrand.
Its after-image scratched behind our eyes.
True, it works like this whenever we watch peers do costly things in expensive places. Sirens go off internally. The money, the money! We live in a 30s bungalow, pleasant, saggy, ordinary, softened and grimed on the outside by weather and time; below at the supporting beams, termites we must fumigate. Visitors casting about for something pleasant to say call it charming: it has character, they tell us. When cleaned it appears clean for maybe a day; then all its surfaces seem to slump. Small carpets slide west and begin to turn slightly clockwise—we promise this is true—needing to be straightened and yanked back every morning. As if the rugs were trying, slowly, to migrate. The little house has held on through floods, encroaching wildfires, earthquakes, aftershocks. We paid it off some while back—like the student loans and the Japanese hatchback—after years of shoveling fat portions of our paychecks toward it.
In result we have since assumed only two answers to how other people afford their lives, options that no one—unless they are very drunk or very rude—ever names aloud in company:
Trust fund, or—
Extreme, perpetual debt.
Sometimes, both together.
For Howard and Giselle, we could not guess.
~
However they managed it, their multi-story, leafy chateau looked out over a big quilt of city and, in the vaporous distance, the East Bay beyond: a stripe of blue, cross-hatched with freighter traffic. And after they gave birth to a solemn, mysteriously caramel-colored, loquacious boy, Enzo, and soon thereafter to a little peanut of a jewel-eyed girl, Aniela, Howard would sit, arms around both his toddlers in front of the upstairs bedroom window on Christmas Eve, pointing out to them the likely trajectory of Santa's sleigh: He should be coming in from right—about—over—there. Howard called his children sweetheart and kissed them often, gazing upon their antics as though they were small gods. He tended without complaint to the storms they made: debris, cries of pain, combat, highly specific need; This way, not that way, Daddy. Wait—let me—I want to do it. He hit me. No fair. Laundry, meals, cleaning, first aid, story-time, trendy toys, hikes, bikes, costumes and puppet shows, every Disney and Pixar movie, refereeing, fort-building, cakes and cookies and pasta from scratch, hauling in little red wagons, glitter-glue, picnics, waterslides across the front lawn.
Soon came the next level: swim lessons, dance lessons, acting and chorus, summer camps, parties and slumber parties, band practice, field trips to mountains, sea, the nation's capital. Later still, the inevitable: the kids by turns declaring themselves socialist, then Buddhist, then bisexual. Tattoos emerged. Piercings. Pronoun adjustments. Yet the stream of Sorvino images on social media shone only with gladness; the running subtext like a tickertape: Joy Without End. After a time Howard quit his concierge post to become the fulltime house-husband he'd long established himself to be—money, as usual, never appearing an issue. And no matter how chaotic the challenges, he performed steadily, calmly—presented, produced, preserved and protected—as the tenderest of fathers.
On reflection, we can't figure out why this surprised us. Howard had always shown a quick willingness to flow wide into any current need, like a river giving over into a bay—talking kindly, in low tones, as long as it took to sort through damp layers of sulks and sorrows, scrapes and bruises and dirty clothes, dented self-esteem, lost treasures, injustice, clouded hopes. Patient with all the intensities—of need; of fear, of striking out or bearing down. He had a knack, in talks with them, for unearthing the children's best selves and presenting them back to them like discovered treasure. His clients, who'd manifested adult versions of these behaviors and with whom he'd effectively trained, had always adored him. It didn't hurt, as we've noted, that he was handsome. People bee-lined for him. So, naturally, did his kids. And their friends. Even animals were drawn to Howard, cats and dogs aiming straight for his shins, shoving up against them to nose his knees.
Howard could also cook. His late parents had immigrated from Naples and he'd acquired his love of cooking from them, though he wasn't a high-end purist or snob. He seemed to relish the rituals—cookbooks, online recipes, acquiring and unloading, setting things up while minding the children. He'd put on the Gypsy Kings or Ladysmith Black Mambazo or South Pacific or Martin Denny or David Bowie or Sade, assembling, singing, booty-shaking in dust-clouds of flour, draping long yellow noodles to dry over the little wooden ladder. His manner during these proceedings was at once witty and grave—like Stanley Tucci in The Big Night's famous final scene, whisking a couple of eggs with solemnity, a tribute of love for his despairing brother. (How Howard loved that film, mentioning it as if it were a family member.) Howard loved to gather whatever he found in anyone's kitchen and fashion of it, with quiet confidence—like Tucci—some comforting dish. Everyone marveled. Everyone ate.
Giselle, meantime, brandished her breadwinner mantle about her like a matador's cape, a different show each day. No one knew what might come next. She adored her children and whenever near them, fell upon them as if to devour them. For them it did feel a bit like being eaten—also like facing high-beam headlights at point-blank range. The kids tried to be brave for whatever this seemed to mean, their eyes always searching her face for a clearer explanation. It happened during any odd slices of time Giselle could spend with them—a half hour in the morning, an hour before bed—time so precious it could not help feel freighted. Because of the tightness of those time windows (guilt snaking through the room like smellable gas), her attention to the kids carried a kind of shocked focus, as if she'd stepped from a time machine to find them in an unimagined future, unreasonably older and taller and smarter. She often crept to the door of whichever room they were playing in and hovered just out of sight, watching them with awe, tension, pain. Externally her efforts seemed to succeed: social media blistered with gleeful photos of her and Howard and the shiny darlings in every predictable phase; bathtub mugging in bubble-foam, leaps through lawn sprinklers, flapping in snow, cookie dough wrangling, thumbs-ups from backs of ponies, boogie-boards, cresting roller coasters. After the kids were old enough the family adopted a corkscrew-furred labradoodle named Mr. Hyde (the pup shimmied head to tail with craven love for anyone), its ears whirligigging out the open car window or as it scouted the path to the windy beach.
If any potholes ever opened along this smooth paving—if the road suddenly cratered or veered off for several beats into God knows what canyon—no one ever said. The Sorvino family behaved like some occult branch of a secret service—cloaked internal laws, customs, currencies. Pater and Mater, unfailingly glamorous, issued cheery updates on social media alongside lively visuals of the four of them (five with Mr. Hyde), an engine of ecstatic motion. Howard, of course, was always making sexy food: omelettes, crepes, sliders, paella, cakes and pies. Giselle served up the entertainment: clucked, crowed, crooned. The kids, poised and eloquent from early ages (their vocabularies turned heads), each now alarmingly tall, performed together and singly on ukuleles, recorders, tai-ko drums. They wrote songs, gave in-house plays and concerts and talent shows, strode into their audience to hold a kitchen-spatula mic before guests' laughing faces: And what is your name, sir?
Online scrollers could track the family hiking in the Sierra, snorkeling off Kauai, skiing at Banff, grinning beneath the Times Square tickets marquee for Lion King. Photo-montages piled like kicked-up leaves. The sprouting children attended only the most sensitive, art-worshipping private schools. (Oh, the tuitions!) They sang and danced in home-made videos, mugging.
Front and center, we could never grasp the how of it. The money. Its raging implications licked like flames around their delirious online images. We tried to smother jealousy: of course we knew it to be corrosive. Why couldn't we just be glad for them? Sometimes we could. Sometimes we failed. Our speculations spiraled around each other, twining up and up like jungle vines.
We knew Howard had been left nothing by his poor, immigrant, dead parents. We knew Giselle had inherited from her late father, a war veteran who'd become a top lion of IBM in its heyday and invested shrewdly. Maybe we were not understanding the extent of Giselle's “piece.” How long could such a legacy run? Maybe forever. Maybe that was its nature—one of those annuities where interest on some fabulous amount of principal streams in for life. Certainly the family's fluffy doings simply carried on and on. But dazzlement can wear people down. After a time their social media posts began to strike us, in our limp states, as something close to caricature—almost conspiracy. Our imaginations, like bats, smacked into a flat black wall every time:
How were they affording their lives?
Like habits of sex, the information was unavailable—also, again, not a thing you asked.
We said nothing.
~
Swaths of time furled out, wide flat gentle waves of it spreading in layers, cold and clear—as time will. You look away, then look back to find a different sky, the earth another color, flora shaggier or stripped or razed altogether. And though for some reason we do not think others are supposed to age, Giselle and Howard began, to our amazement, to get old.
It does not sit easy with us, because we are of course implicated. One could suggest, in delicate terms, that certain facial features were sort of melting—flattening, spreading, sinking. Skin tone might also be enacting a particular, ruddy-with-infinitesimal-purple-capillaries thing, a too-much-wine thing. Middle-sections may have, let's say, become denser. Of course we glimpse all these events in our own bodies—arriving to those moments when, by unspoken agreement, no one names a birthday's number anymore, and everyone knows beyond better than to ask.
We hasten past mirrors.
Frankly, we can't believe how awful our peers look in high school reunion photos. Jesus god. Bloody awful. A look you either ignored utterly or felt sorry for—once.
Do we look like that?
~
Our own kids long ago left home, found jobs, mates, and made their own kids. We travel cheaply when we can. We read and write. We win obscure awards: alas, money's never a component. Once in a while we receive a roll of foil stickers—gold or silver, depending on the award—to affix onto book covers. We watch home makeovers and cooking. We watch news scandals flash up and down the Babel Tower. We stream programs about gardening and art and music and a handful of French comedies, coveting the food. We look out the windows to marvel at how fast the trees leaf out, especially the Japanese maple in the backyard, older than we are, beloved to us over a generation: starting in February as thin red tendrils, going all the way by July to a thick explosion of saturated, stained-glass green—in late fall morphing to a shower of fire opals, before November wind and rain strip everything away to bones again. We listen to Girl with the Flaxen Hair and think about the suppleness of time, the way it can stretch like striped taffy or pause and whirlpool back into itself, a series of little ponds flowing back into their own velvety-vortex bellybuttons. We listen to Lizst's Consolations and the Allegri Miserere Mei (sometimes, to weep within seconds, Mahler's Adagietto) and stare, stricken, out the window. When we aren't doing these things we push ours limbs into shabby togs and walk the neighborhood for hours. The flat sidewalks—calm, dry, littered with tree debris—seem impervious to thought, yet to welcome thoughtful steps. Air is still warm, by day. Later we sit out in the chilling backyard under the sweet Japanese maple, its dense lace of bright lime sussurating with invisible life, to eat barbecue and corn on the cob and drink wine and beer and margaritas. As darkness falls we light citronella candles; pass around pieces of chocolate, cheese, slices of fruit.
Our home grows gentler, shabbier.
~
Sightings online of Howard, Giselle, and the kids (not kids any longer) happen less—if their Facebook captions continue to crow. My one and only love. Our fabulous friends. Our beloveds. Then one day we received an e-mail: an invite back to the mutual friends' city mansion for dinner.
We thought—hell. Of course. Why not.
It vexed us for an instant; always us making the pilgrimage, never the other way round, them to us. These friends had the mansion and could absorb big groups easily; the city itself a fabled jewel, an irrefutable draw. But also this way they could get drunk as they pleased and any city guests could Uber home. They always urged us, warmly, to spend the night. But that would mean we'd need to continue performing—even while hung over next morning in last night's wilted clothes, teeth unbrushed. We'd have to struggle to produce wit and sparkle equal to the prior night's, then drive all the dreary way home, eyes burning, after the agonizing wait—toxic, lack of sleep—because we couldn't reveal how rudely eager we were to leave.
The drive time also ate a big chunk of the next day.
Driving to the mansion also meant one of us would have to forego drink to drive us home. Worse, and weirdly: it vexed us that it vexed us. Being vexed by it meant we were old, splashing in the petty mud of paranoid brooding. In our twenties or thirties we'd not have thought twice.
We could not let such fussing seal us into a coffin.
And yet.
So yes of course, we said. We'd love to, we said. Delighted. What can we bring?
~
Sitting around the mansion's dining table—oh, that table—felt like starring in a raucous French film. The table had history. It had been purchased, we were told, from another mansion for a shocking (to us) price. Then when suddenly—this is fact—the first owners felt a rush of seller's remorse and offered to refund more than the paid price for the table to get it back, our mansion friends (fortified in their excellent choice by the fact of the seller's panic) had coolly answered, Sorry, no. It's ours now. In this way the table instantly became part of the mansion's lore, a mythology taking its place alongside those of the grand piano and the larger-than-lifesized portrait of the owners—painted by a now-idolized American artist—in the living room. The table was huge, fitting perfectly into the long dining room with its mantled fireplace and ultra-high ceilings. Blond wood. Rough-carved all over—legs, too. Then sanded and varnished many times so that its high-gloss surface was also richly textured with broad, smooth carve marks, a pattern of raised curves and shallow scoops like carved butter—chewy yet silken, eternally poised in low-chopped motion. You wanted to pet it and pet it.
That table shimmered in our minds, symbol and shrine, color of spun honey, floating in the foreground of other images every time we thought about those mansion-owning friends. And Howard and Giselle, deputies to the empire, seemed to us to function like the table. They were sleek, arty, lavish. Their manner telegraphed casual wealth, money so invisibly underpinning their words and doings no one seemed to wonder about it. They knew things. Together they made a pop-up culture; a traveling show. Thus they fit well into that niche—call it Luxury Hip—both performing it and propping it up.
Once we were seated, a splendid spread of food and drink before us—buffet-style build-your-own tacos with every possible trimming—glassware and silver throwing light beneath the crystal teardrop chandelier, our gathering indeed resembling a soft-focus film.
~
Smart talk is what we remember. Lots of it, but never, in memory, much detail. Over clinking glasses and plates piled with food, words streamed back and forth across the table like flung glitter, chased by waterfalls of laughter. Exuberance seemed the prize we kept reaching for; intensity the means. It wasn't so much that everyone wanted to sound smart—but of course we did want that; when do we not? More that the ruckus felt like refreshment, like trying on a lighter set of physical laws so we could float a few inches from our chairs, big puffs of cotton candy insights drifting around the room, the talk stretching and flexing, preening and shining; a human concertina playing beguiling sweet chords, heaving in and out, pushing along that merry momentum—
Irresistible.
Subjects branched and wandered—a map would have lit paths as they pressed forward, like flight trajectories—while plates and glasses emptied and multiplied. Soon we moved to that great human fixation: Place. Destinations. People took turns—and when, we ask, is this not true?—insisting on bestness; the most memorable experience, the consummate locale. Sintra. Raiatea. Islas Mujeras. Lucca. Çeşme. No: Ephesus. No, no: Corfu. No! Corsica. Costa Rica. Montana. What to do, where, how, why. Adventures. Folly. Prescriptions. Remedies. Secrets. The little mom and pop bistro called Carillon in Aix, where they served a simple dish of white beans that tasted better than steak or butter; struck us like gongs. The day we ducked away from noisy Parisian garbage trucks and wandered through the nearest open doorway as if through a time portal into an art vernissage like a movie set with soft chatter among mingling sorts, cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, someone playing excellent jazz on a baby grand. That time in Turkey we accepted an unofficial ride and as the road lengthened and wound through dusty, empty country, began to fear the driver was taking us off to be killed and robbed.
No question these conversations occur at the dinner tables of the fortune-blessed who must be aware, at some level, of their insane luck. What may, during these talks, be the real object—our own real object? Some misty ideal? Are we bragging? Are we telling each other we've no choice but to grab and ingest that luck like low-hanging fruit? Or are we saying we're better now because we did so, and dusting our hands of it; job completed?
Maybe all of that. By turns.
How do any of us finally justify anything we say or think or do in a blackened, anarchic world?
Paris, Giselle is saying. Her face has become somber. I can never not love it. Or get too much. My father—
Giselle had made a special trip to scatter her late father's ashes into the Seine, on his instructions.
Of course, her late father had made over his estate to Giselle: its size or duration we could only imagine.
A pause.
A recently dead parent: a thing no one can dispute let alone assuage. Words can't make sense, nor console. The sliding iron door of reawakened grief had smoothly descended and clicked into its slot. No one spoke. Air went tight. Howard watched Giselle's face, his own face alert. We, meantime, eyed what remained of the graham-cracker-crusted flan, though we were already filled with food and alcohol to the point of pain. Why, despite years of plenty, do we continue to eat as if we may never have access to food again?
Our bodies are afraid. Cells fear scarcity. They get busy stocking up, putting by. Deaf to the brain's pleading. More!
Then in the heavy silence, Giselle's face did something we'd not in all our years of knowing her seen it do. It crumpled and squinched. She dropped her head.
Giselle began to cry.
Up Howard flew before we had time to register what had happened—sinking to a crouch beside her chair. He wrapped both arms around her shoulders, nestling his cheek against her wet one, swiveling his mouth to whisper into her ear as if in some secret language.
Hey-now, c'mon c'mon. Hey-now hey-now, he crooned alongside her cheek; a kind of low-toned mantra you might use to soothe a spooked horse. Her head still hung; her shoulders shook.
And there we all were, positioned around that messy table like a posse of embarrassed burghers in a Rembrandt. Thought stopped.
Nobody knew what to do.
Then we became aware of a small, rapidfire fuss: the mansion owners had produced, seemingly from the air, their smartphones: each of their faces had locked into that universal elsewhere expression as their eyes bore into the small screens they'd called up: intent, tapping, nodding.
There's a direct flight this weekend, they said after a minute. We can use flyer miles. Let's stay in the Marais. At least a week. No sense spending less time—too long a flight. Ten days at least. Two weeks better.
Giselle had lifted her eyes to look around at them, wary, incredulous, face shiny-wet: a kid realizing she'd been supposed to scoop the candy that fell from the burst piñata.
What? she said stupidly.
Howard looked up too—blank to what swirled around him. His face had stilled.
What? he said.
We're going to Paris, the four of us, answered the mansion people. They were calm, brisk—even sunny.
Then they remembered themselves and gazed toward us, polite. You guys wanna come? Be part of the entourage?
Ah! Lavishly we thanked them, cowtowing, alarmed. Not this round anyway but thank you, thank you, we stammered. Truth: We'd have to save up more flyer miles—not to mention real spending money. Also true but unspeakable: we knew we could never, never want to be frog-marched on such a junket by the likes of Giselle. Some terrible dynamic takes over—a sort of Lord of the Flies thing—even among friends who believe they adore each other. People we'd loved had morphed into zombies, thrown fits, sprouted fangs. No apparent reason—worse, no escape. Something unforeseen set them off and then you were stuck. We seldom spoke of it in company but—believe us—it had happened.
Giselle looked around at everyone, sniffling, pushing water from her cheeks. The room had again grown still.
Face to face, she looked around in wonder.
Wait—really? Are we really?
