Marguerite had gone all French and mysterious when Emily invited her to dinner, so she had no idea who her fifth guest might be. Knowing Marguerite, he could be anything from a twenty-year-old exotic dancer to a silver-haired investment banker or a foreign film star. The only sure thing was that he would be, in Marguerite’s personal estimation, un bel homme.
By five minutes to seven Emily had the table set, salad made, Merlot uncorked, and casserole simmering in the oven. All that remained was to slice the bread once Marguerite arrived with it. When the doorbell rang, she put the flame to the last candle, whipped off her apron, and ran to answer the door.
Marguerite stood in the doorway, baguette in one hand and a promising white bakery box in the other. She gave Emily the customary kiss on each cheek, then stepped inside to reveal her guest.
Richard McClintock.
Emily had thought that after more than twenty years of friendship, she was beyond being surprised by anything Marguerite might do. But she’d been wrong.
She quickly rearranged her face, which must have registered shock, to approximate welcome. But Richard’s sneer told her she had not been quite quick enough.
‘Richard! How nice to see you. Please come in.’ She stood back to admit him.
The chair of the Division of Literature and Languages ambled across the threshold, pushing his mended wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. ‘Emily,’ he said curtly. ‘I take it Marguerite decided to surprise both of us this evening.’
She shot a glance at her friend. Marguerite returned a bland smile.
‘What would life be without a few surprises? You’re very welcome, expected or no. But surely you recognized the house? Have you actually never been here in all these years?’
‘Not that I recall.’
Emily recalled having invited him, along with other colleagues, to various get-togethers over the years, but he had never deigned to attend.
‘Let me take your coat.’ Richard shrugged off his battered parka, and Emily hung it on one of the hooks that lined the foyer. ‘Come in and make yourself comfortable. The others should be here soon.’
She showed Richard to the living room, then pulled Marguerite into the kitchen and took the baguette from her. ‘What on earth were you thinking?’ she hissed. ‘You know Richard hates me. And it isn’t too far from being mutual.’
‘But it is all part of the plan, chérie. We want him to like Oscar, no? So we give him a chance to get to know him socially. Oscar is so charmant, so genuine, he cannot fail to make a good impression.’
‘But don’t you see? If Richard knows I’m rooting for Oscar, that will work against him. For God’s sake, don’t let on about him being my brother. That would drive in the final nail.’
Marguerite shrugged. ‘If you say so. Moi, I think you worry too much. All will be well. You will see.’
The doorbell rang again. Emily handed Marguerite the bread knife. ‘Here, you finish this.’
She opened the door to Oscar and Lauren but kept them in the foyer long enough to whisper, ‘Marguerite brought Richard McClintock. Surprise to both of us. Don’t say anything about being my brother – he doesn’t like me much. We’ll just say we met when you came to Windy Corner.’
Oscar looked baffled but nodded agreement. Lauren’s eyes lit with excitement. ‘How intriguing! What’s the deal? Why does it matter if he likes Oscar?’
Emily darted a glance at her brother, hoping he wouldn’t take umbrage. ‘We’re trying to get Oscar promoted. I asked Marguerite to soften Richard up, but this dinner was not part of the plan. Well, not my plan, at least. Marguerite obviously has her own ideas.’
A smile danced over Lauren’s red-painted lips. ‘I think I’m going to like this Marguerite.’
Emily ushered Oscar and Lauren into the living room. ‘Richard, you know Oscar Lansing.’ Oscar put out his hand with a smile. Richard, who was standing next to the stereo with his hands full of Emily’s CDs, merely raised one eyebrow and nodded. Oscar’s hand hovered a second or two and then dropped, along with his smile.
‘And this is Lauren Hsu. From Psychology.’
Richard turned to face Lauren and instantly became a different man. He put down the CDs and took her proffered hand in both his own. ‘Delighted to meet you, my dear. How is it we haven’t met before? I can’t imagine how you could have escaped my notice.’
Lauren laughed and extricated her hand. ‘Oh, we psych rats tend to stay in our own little maze. Basement of Eliot, you know. We sneak in and out in the middle of the night and no one ever sees us.’ That might be true of some psych profs, but Emily doubted it was true of Lauren. She was much too vivacious to stay cooped up in the windowless nether regions of the psych labs.
No doubt casting about for an avenue of escape from Richard, Lauren pounced on the cats, who were sitting in the bay window. ‘Oh, you beauties!’ she gushed. ‘What are their names?’
‘Kitty and Levin,’ Emily replied. ‘Levin’s the bigger one, in case that’s not obvious.’
‘From Anna Karenina, right? Clever.’ She proceeded to shower the two cats with more attention than they’d received since Emily brought them from Windy Corner.
Richard turned from the scene with a disgusted sneer. He sniffed dramatically and put a dirty handkerchief to his nose. ‘Can’t stand cats,’ he muttered. Levin shot him a glare that made it clear the feeling was mutual.
With an interrogatory glance at Emily, Richard held up a CD of Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin. The CDs had belonged to Philip, Emily’s late husband; being fond of silence and preferring live music over recorded, she rarely played them. But she did love Ella and Gershwin. She smiled acquiescence, and Richard put the CD in the stereo. At least they had one thing in common.
As the opening notes of ‘Someone to Watch over Me’ floated out of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and filled the room, Richard turned to face the others and frowned slightly. ‘How do you two know each other?’ he asked Emily and Oscar. ‘You came after she left, didn’t you, Lansing?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘It is all my fault,’ Marguerite interrupted. ‘Emily was looking for writers to fill her retreat center over Christmas, and Oscar was looking for a quiet place to work on his doctoral thesis. I put them together.’
‘Retreat center?’ Now Richard looked truly baffled.
Emily realized the transformation of her inherited Victorian mansion into a writers’ retreat center was not yet common knowledge at Bede. She’d assumed Marguerite would have talked it up more generally.
‘The house my aunt left me is way too big for one person, but I love it too much to let it go. So I decided to turn it into a writers’ retreat center. People can come by invitation for a week or a weekend and donate whatever they can afford toward the food and upkeep.’
Richard smirked, no doubt searching for some sarcastic remark to make about this inherently altruistic scheme. His eye fell on the dining table. ‘So do you do the cooking and cleaning yourself? Somehow you never struck me as such a domestic type.’
Emily knew she’d been famous on campus for never bringing homemade food to departmental potlucks. ‘No, I have an assistant who does all that. She’s quite a marvel. Gourmet cook, brilliant manager, immaculate housekeeper, all while taking care of a young baby. I couldn’t do it without her.’
‘Nice for some.’ Richard gave a tight smile.
Oscar took a long sniff of the odors emanating from the kitchen. ‘Something smells delicious. Is that one of Katie’s recipes?’
‘Indeed it is. And it should be ready to eat. Shall we?’ She led the way into the dining room and brought the casserole from the oven.
‘I forgot to ask if anyone was a vegetarian,’ she said, lifting the lid to reveal the top layer of ground beef bubbling in tomato sauce. By ‘anyone’ she really meant Lauren, as she knew all the others ate meat.
‘Not me,’ Lauren said. ‘I’m an omnivore. If it’s free, I’ll eat it.’ She looked ready to dip her fork straight into the casserole dish.
‘Pass your plates, everyone. This is too hot to hand around.’ Emily loaded up the plates one at a time as Marguerite passed the salad and bread. Everyone dug in.
‘Mmm! This is delicious!’ Lauren gushed after her first bite. ‘This Katie person must be some cook.’
‘Oh, she’s amazing,’ Oscar said. ‘You should have seen the stuff she made over Christmas. I couldn’t put a name to half of it, but every bite was to die for.’
Emily took up her cue. ‘You’ll have to come down at spring break, Lauren, and experience Katie’s cooking firsthand. That is, if you don’t have other plans.’
‘I just made plans. I’ll be there with bells on.’
Oscar gave Emily a significant look, and she said, ‘You, too, Oscar, of course.’ She darted a glance at Richard, hoping he wouldn’t angle to be included in the invitation as well, but he was concentrating on his food. Something about the way he shoveled it in, swallowing so quickly he could hardly be tasting anything, made Emily shudder.
She took a moment as all were occupied with eating to ponder why her feeling toward Richard bordered on revulsion. As a rule she managed to get along with people, even difficult ones. She tried to remember that everyone had a backstory she knew nothing about and to make allowances accordingly. But Richard touched something visceral in her that was not amenable to reasonable argument. Perhaps on a subconscious level he reminded her of someone or something from her past that held more emotional power than did her actual relationship with Richard himself.
Emily shook off these unproductive thoughts and turned her mind back to her hostess duties. She’d meant the evening as an opportunity for Oscar to move forward with Lauren, but seeing how comfortable the two of them were together, she didn’t think they needed her help. Marguerite had turned the dinner into a networking opportunity for Oscar, so they might as well make the most of that.
‘How is your thesis coming along, Oscar?’ Emily knew he hadn’t made a lot of progress between Christmas and New Year’s, due to circumstances beyond either of their control, but in the week before that things had seemed to be going well.
‘Really well,’ he said. ‘I got so much done at Windy Corner, in spite of’ – he glanced at Richard – ‘in spite of being practically comatose from all that great food. I’ll probably be able to finish over spring break, if all goes well.’
‘That’s terrific! So you’ll have your PhD before next fall?’
He nodded. ‘Finally.’
‘And I’ve pretty much decided to retire completely, so there should be an opening in the department.’ That was probably too blatant, but she couldn’t take it back now. Richard still seemed focused on his food, though, so perhaps she hadn’t done any harm.
‘And I will definitely be applying for it.’
‘I have heard good things about your teaching,’ Marguerite put in. ‘From your students, that is. You seem to have a good rapport with them.’
‘That’s probably because he never really grew up,’ Lauren said with a teasing dig of her elbow. ‘He’s one of them.’
Oscar blushed. ‘Well, I do try to speak their language. While maintaining a reasonable level of authority, of course.’
Richard finally came up for air and a long sip of Merlot. ‘I expect we’ll have a strong pool of applicants for the new position. I’ve been getting feelers from all over since September.’ He smiled blandly at Emily. ‘No one ever expected you to come back once you’d joined the leisured classes. Why put up with students and long hours and campus politics if you don’t need the paycheck?’
Emily bit back the answer she would have liked to give, which would have hinted that some teachers were more dedicated than others. ‘There was a time when I would have continued teaching just for the love of it. But I have to confess, I was getting a bit burned out by the end of last year. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to change direction. And finally write my Dostoevsky book.’ She smiled brightly, hoping someone would pick up that topic and run with it.
Lauren obliged. ‘You’re writing about Dostoevsky? I love Dostoevsky! His novels are like a textbook on abnormal psychology.’
‘That’s one way to look at them, I suppose. I’ve always thought of him as simply an acute student of human nature. But his characters do tend toward the extreme, certainly.’
‘You bet they do. I mean, look at Raskolnikov – classic paranoid schizophrenic. Dmitri Karamazov – complete lack of impulse control. And Rogozhin from The Idiot? Obsessive attachment. And Dostoevsky predates Freud! Incredible.’
‘Well, Dostoevsky didn’t attempt to categorize his characters or put names to their disorders – he simply observed and recorded them. And honestly, there’s fair ground for saying that in most of his characters he took some element of his own personality and exaggerated it. He was an amazingly complex and conflicted man.’
‘He was a Russian. Aren’t they all like that?’ Richard said. A glance told Emily he meant that for the conversation-stopper it was.
‘Lauren, I’m afraid we’re boring the others. Perhaps you and I should continue this conversation another time. Marguerite, isn’t there something wonderful in that white box you brought in?’
Marguerite rose with her and they served the dessert – a mocha torte – with coffee in the living room. Conversation drifted to more neutral topics, and soon Richard took his leave. The others relaxed in his absence like Victorian ladies who’d removed their corsets for the night.
‘That didn’t seem like a great success in terms of my career prospects,’ Oscar said with a sigh. ‘He as good as said I don’t have a chance for promotion.’
Marguerite waved an elegant hand. ‘Pas du tout. That is merely Richard’s way. It is against his religion ever to say an encouraging word. You will have as good a chance as anyone when it comes to the point.’
‘Though perhaps not better,’ Emily said. ‘We still have work to do.’
‘But how is such a man to be worked on?’ Lauren’s place in Emily’s heart was cemented with that obscure reference to Pride and Prejudice. ‘He seems impervious.’
‘Oh, he has one weak spot, at least,’ Emily said. ‘Surely you noticed.’ With these words one piece of the puzzle of her feelings toward Richard clicked into place; but there must be more to the picture.
Lauren dropped her eyes. ‘Yeah, I noticed that.’ She turned to Oscar. ‘If there’s anything I can do through normal channels to further your cause, I’ll be happy to do it. But seducing Richard is too much to ask.’ She shuddered. ‘I’d rather kiss a cobra.’
Oscar turned beet red. ‘I’d sooner starve than have you so much as flirt with that creep. And after all, Bede isn’t the only school in the world. It isn’t even the only school in Portland.’
‘No,’ Emily replied, ‘but it is the best place to work, once you get your foot properly in the door. Don’t worry, Oscar, we’ll manage this somehow. Richard is only one vote, after all.’