THE SURPRISE PARTY WASN’T REALLY a surprise, because there had been so many hints, and a few dead giveaways. The Thursday before, when I was visiting my mother, she’d said, “What time on Sunday—” and then stared at me, stricken, covering her mouth. But even before that, Spence and Ann had spoken too broadly about their plans to go away that particular weekend. And when I’d looked in their freezer for coffee beans, I found hundreds of tiny meatballs and stacks of cakes and pies. Still, there were considerable elements of surprise that Sunday—like the adrenaline that surged through me as we approached our shuttered, waiting house. And when Howard unlocked the door and we heard the whispers and scurrying that preceded the shouts, he sucked in his breath and seized my arm. “Surprise! Surprise!” they all cried, and I turned to bury my face in Howard’s neck.
The only trick Ann had actually pulled off was having the party here instead of at her own house. That would have been the logical choice; it was so spacious and handsome and well equipped. I suppose she relished the challenge of fooling us on our own territory. But it wouldn’t be ours much longer—we’d put the house up for sale at the beginning of the month.
I pretended to be surprised when we walked in, and so did Howard. We had discussed the imminence of this event for days. Our actual anniversary had been Friday, and except for my mother’s slip, I would have guessed Friday or Saturday night as a more likely time. They didn’t have to do anything to get us out of the house on Sunday, though. At noon, we’d driven to Bayside, where one of Howard’s cousins’ children was playing the cello in a music-school recital. We’d agreed to attend in a weak moment—Howard’s cousin had phoned to invite us a month ago—and whenever I regretted accepting, Ann would remind me of how sensitive Cousin Sheila was about her kids, and how she’d sent that lovely quilt when Byron was born. So we’d dutifully left the house at noon. Getting us back there in time for the party was harder; Howard and I might have gone into Manhattan after the concert, and stayed for dinner. They had to invent a ruse about the real-estate broker bringing hot prospects who could only view the house today at five. I’d almost fallen for that part—they had even gotten the broker to call us himself. And they’d set up another blind by sending us anniversary gifts in advance.
There we were now, at the party I’d vowed last August never to have. It had started without us—some of the guests had been there since three, drinking the wine, nibbling the cheeses and pâtés and then smoothing them over. The rooms were festooned with silver streamers and bells, and a flotilla of Mylar balloons had been allowed to drift to the ceilings. A poster-size blowup of our wedding portrait was on prominent display in the living room, with the signatures of all the guests scribbled around its borders. And there was live music—two new friends of Howard’s, a pianist and a bass man, had played “The Anniversary Waltz” at our entrance, and then swung right into a jazzy rendition of “’S Wonderful.”
“Were you really surprised?” Ann wanted to know immediately, and of course we swore that we were. “Just feel my heart,” I told her, and Howard said, “Does this mean we’re not showing the house?”
It was the first joke he’d made on that subject. Selling the house was an essential term of our reconciliation, but he had resisted the idea until June. All the old arguments against living in the city were dragged out once more, and it was hard to dispute them in this season of bloom and regeneration. But I was adamant—in order to heal our marriage, we had to go back where we’d begun.
We had put a deposit on a two-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side, the final deal contingent on the sale of our house. The apartment was half the square footage of the house, but it was in one of the city’s older buildings, with thick plaster walls and high ceilings. There was a sunny southern exposure, and you could just see the spire of the Chrysler Building from the master-bedroom window. Howard was going to rent studio space nearby. He would commute to Hempstead two or three days a week, until he built up his Manhattan clientele, and then he’d probably sell his share in the other studio to Mike.
Mike was at the party with a beautiful black woman named Trish. When he introduced us, she said, “Congratulations. I didn’t think anybody stayed together this long.”
“We did it in installments,” Howard explained. We did it with mirrors, I thought.
The house was jammed with friends and relatives—even Howard’s cousins had beat us here from their daughter’s recital. La Rae came over to greet us. “You can return what I bought you,” she said. “It’s only a book, a walker’s guide to the city. I know how you hate to polish silver, Paulie, and nothing else seemed appropriate.” La Rae was at the party without an escort. She’d left Frank early in May, suddenly, as if struck by lightning or inspiration. Her father had been quickly moved to a nursing home in Elmont—Katherine had gotten him in there, through political connections, past a long waiting list. If I were more generous, I knew, I’d introduce Bernie to La Rae, or to one of my other unattached friends. In one of our private sessions, Dr. Lewin wondered if I was, perhaps, keeping him on a back burner.
I found out that Katherine and Tony had been in cahoots with Ann about the party. They’d served as her local liaison, drawing up a list of neighbors to invite, ordering the balloons, and providing flowers from their own fertile garden. The flowers had been set out everywhere in fragrant profusion: white and lavender lilacs; tea roses; foxgloves; and long-stemmed Japanese irises, my favorite. “Thank you for everything,” I said. “The flowers are simply wonderful. Everything is.”
Katherine stood in the circle of Tony’s arm. “Just be happy,” she said doubtfully.
Sara carried Byron around in a canvas Snugli. He was asleep, and so closely curled against her I might never have cut the cord between them. We’d started calling him “By” right from the beginning, and a thousand other pet names as they occurred to us. He responded to all of them, to everyone, with a crooked, naked smile. His eye hardly wandered anymore, and his hair was a crown of golden feathers. Sara had stopped coloring her own hair, and the emerging roots were a surprising, ordinary brown. She was beginning to look more and more like her sister Peggy.
Ann and Spence had hired a bartender, and two waitresses who passed among us, serving hors d’oeuvres. The meatballs I’d seen in Ann’s freezer were sizzling hot now and skewered on silver toothpicks. There were stuffed mushrooms and bite-sized quiches, and triangles of black bread studded with blacker caviar.
My mother washed a meatball down with a swig of ginger ale. “Things work out for the best, knock wood,” she said, rapping on the marble top of an end table. “But I almost gave it away, didn’t I?”
“I never had a clue,” I told her, the harmless and harmful lies continuing between us.
Later, I found her in the dining room with Sherry, advising her to “stop running around” and settle down with somebody. It certainly wouldn’t be Nicholas—he’d recently found someone even older than Sherry, through another personals ad in The New York Review. She had brought her old friend Dave Becker to the party, and my mother said, “He looks very nice, Sherry, although, believe me, looks aren’t everything.” Sherry didn’t bother to tell her that Dave was gay, and spoken for, in any case. Nor did she say how much she liked the unpredictability of her single life.
Sharon Danzer was making her first formal social appearance since Gil’s death. A few weeks ago, when I told her that I was going back to Howard, she said that all separations were only dress rehearsals, anyway. Now she stood on the sidelines of the party, trying to remember how to enjoy herself. Shadow, who had grown just as wary of large gatherings, stayed close by her, and she absently fed him bits of caviar and quiche.
Jason had been in the bathroom before me, smoking grass. I opened the window to air the place out, and then went looking for him. I found him hiding out in his old room. He was lying on the bed, in a crush of silver-wrapped gifts, with his arms folded behind his head. I sat on the edge of the bed, the way I did sometimes when he still lived here, and we talked a little, mostly about his music, and about Byron. He said that the punk sound was on the way out, and that Blood Pudding was moving toward heavy metal, to attract a larger, younger audience. They were thinking of changing their name to the Cattle Prods. He tried to write new songs for their new image when the baby wasn’t sleeping or crying. Jason’s speech was slightly slurred and his eyes had a remote, abstracted look. I got up at last and left him there, saying, “Come back in when you’re ready, Jason. We’ll see you later, okay?”
Our next-door neighbor, Gordon Brooks, cornered me near the kitchen. He wanted to know who we were thinking of selling our house to. “Whoever wants to buy it,” I said, remembering how he’d once marked off his property line with a shoveled trench that left our azaleas on the wrong side. So far, several people had come to inspect the house, but nobody had made a serious offer. And one of them may have stolen a gold bangle from my dresser top. It was missing, anyway, after a series of prospective buyers had been through. I’d suspected that some of them were only browsing, looking for a little distraction on those boring Sundays, the way Howard and I used to do. “Well, don’t forget that we still have to live here,” Gordon reminded me.
Sara’s parents arrived at the party about an hour after we did. “What a lovely occasion,” Mrs. Bartlett said, kissing the air near my cheek. I had followed up my unreturned phone calls to her, during Sara’s pregnancy, with a furious and imploring letter, which she didn’t answer, either. But she had been unable to resist the actual, born, named baby, although she’d held out a week longer than her husband. I had called his law office the Monday after Byron was born, and he burst into tears over the phone. They gave Sara an allowance now, and they’d set up a trust fund for Byron, carefully keeping the money out of Jason’s reach.
I looked at the oversized wedding picture, and remembered a double sarcophagus I had seen years ago, when Howard and I were in Boston, and wandering through the Museum of Fine Arts. Etruscan, 4th century B.C., the little sign said. The stone couple were facing one another in an embrace on their stone bed. I realized they bore an uncanny resemblance to Howard and me: the very curve of their features, their carved, eternal curls. The man even had a beard, the way Howard did then. “Look, Howie!” I’d cried, but he had gone ahead into the next room. Now Gordon’s younger daughter came up beside me and stared at the photograph. “That’s not you, is it?” she said.
I went into Ann’s room and took By from Sara, who had just finished nursing him in the rocking chair. I inhaled his milky breath, nuzzled his talcumed neck. “Who’s the most beautiful boy?” I asked. “Who does Grandma love best?”
There was a murmur of excitement when I came back into the living room, still carrying him. Someone swooped him from my arms, the lights were dimmed, and I saw Jason coming from the kitchen, balancing a three-tiered wedding cake high on one hand, like a basketball. “Watch out! Be careful!” people warned, and the bride and groom on the cake seemed to whirl near the silvery spackle of the ceiling. Howard was on the other side of the room, being pushed toward me, as if he were a shy and reluctant suitor.
I thought of Bernie again as Howard claimed me, to a burst of whistling and applause. When I’d told him that Howard and I were getting back together, he said, with a rueful smile, that he’d expected as much all along, that I had never really let go. I denied it fervently, because it shamed me, although I knew it was true.
“Oh, Paulette,” Bernie said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
“But we did, didn’t we?” I said, realizing too late that he might have only been quoting Brett Ashley.
When the children were little and broke one of their toys, Howard would promise to fix it, to make it as good as new. But, oh, dear reader, I’d married him—and toys are one thing, marriage another. Dr. Lewin spoke more conservatively to us of forgiveness, of renewal. At first, Howard had resisted counseling as much as he’d resisted putting the house up for sale. He’d sit in Dr. Lewin’s office, brooding and silent, like a prisoner in the docket, as I leveled charges against him. But then he began to defend himself and bring those old countercharges, until we were interrupting each other and shouting, while Dr. Lewin beamed at us across the steeple of her hands. “Listen to yourselves,” she said. “Still so much passion!”
Had it endured, despite everything, or had it merely been revived? I’m not sure. But at his little cousin’s concert that afternoon, as she sawed her way through Mendelssohn’s D minor Trio, we held hands like the sweethearts we’d once been. And later, after the wedding cake was ceremoniously cut, we waltzed around the perimeters of the living room, the winners in an arduous marathon dance.
That night, when the party was over, Howard went to our bedroom and lay in wait for me, wearing only his suit of tarnished flesh. I walked toward the bed through the pewter light, dressed in all the awful beauty of my years. We looked at one another.