12

S OMETHING HAD CHANGED FOR NINA AS she ate dinner with the neighbors. Before, she had been an observer, but now she had become part of the party. It was like going to the theater and finding yourself on stage. She was involved in some sort of drama, and she didn’t know the story line yet.

Or maybe she shouldn’t have drunk that Dos Equis on top of the wine.

Elizabeth accepted the bottle. “Thanks,” she said in a low voice. “Hi, all. Sorry I’m late.” She had luminous skin and high cheekbones. She wore her shining black hair simply, in an old-fashioned straight bob with a fringe. On her the effect was ravishing.

“It takes a while to climb down from one o’ them big redwoods,” George Hill said. Jolene giggled at this.

Elizabeth went straight to Ben, sitting at the table, and put her arm around him. “I am so sorry,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. Thanks for the flowers,” Ben told her.

“Come sit with us-” Darryl started, but Megan called from the other side, “We saved a spot for you.”

Smiling, Elizabeth said, “I need to say hi to Megan.” She went to the group at the far side, and Ted and Megan made room for her between them. The loud conversations resumed, but Darryl seemed to have lost interest. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the beautiful woman at the other end of the table. Tory, beside him, was seething.

Why, he’s madly in love with her, Nina thought with dismay. Four kids under the age of thirteen, a devoted wife-how could he? No question, Tory must know, because Darryl was about as subtle about it as a chain saw biting into a chunk of hardwood.

Nina hoped he and Elizabeth weren’t having an affair. She had liked Darryl, before.

Ben, too, seemed distracted by Elizabeth’s presence, although he was not as obvious. Elizabeth didn’t glance down the table again. She set her bottle of beer aside and poured herself some soy milk.

“You know what?” Tory said suddenly. “I’m going home.”

“I’m not ready,” Darryl said.

“Then stay here, damn you.” Tory got up and went into the house, followed by Jolene and Debbie. Darryl started to rise, then sat back down again.

“She gets into these moods,” he said.

Nina ate some more of Jolene’s tasty pasta. The night was young, and she had a feeling that she’d better keep her strength up.

Jolene and Debbie returned from the kitchen without Tory and the party moved into a new phase as they all started moving around again. Nina helped carry endless paper plates and dump them into trash sacks while Sam and Darryl went out into the backyard, working on something. The kids ran back into the woods.

George took up his seat on the bench, picked up his guitar, and started playing, looking now and then at Britta, who hung on the deck railing.

Green eyes and white lies

Like a fool I fell in love

An’ I’m haunted by the memory of her

Soft skin… so lost in

Dreams of those few nights together

I can’t seem to forget her

Green eyes… and white lies

“That’s your song, Sweet Lips,” he said.

Megan and Ted gathered with Elizabeth and began talking intently, and Nina, reminding herself of her mission, drifted over to listen.

“He worked on David’s Porsche a few weeks ago,” Ted was saying.

“He did all kinds of odd jobs for David and Britta,” Megan said. “Jolene got George to pay him a few bucks to clean up the Back Acre. He was immune to poison oak. I saw him back there a month or so ago, tearing up the brush, working hard. He did a good job, but he was troubled. He always looked so unhappy.”

“But he’d lost his job,” Elizabeth said. “Of course he was unhappy.” She had moved aside slightly to let Nina join the group. Standing next to her, Nina smelled the strong soap she used, something expensive and fresh.

Megan said, “No, he always had a problem. But, listen, I’m being nice about this, here’s what happened that same night. Danny was out front wrapping twine around the stuff he had pulled up, and Jolene invited him to dinner. Which would be okay, except they sat on the porch and George kept feeding him alcohol. You know some Native Americans have a big problem with that. Not to perpetuate a stereotype or anything.”

“Alcohol should be banned,” Ted said, and Elizabeth and Megan nodded. “Marijuana, there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t make people go out and commit crimes.”

“Wine is good for you in moderation,” Elizabeth said. “That’s not alcohol in the sense you’re using it.”

“We tasted the most incredible merlot at Galante Vineyards last weekend,” Megan said. They talked about wine for a while, and Nina was about to leave when Megan suddenly returned to her earlier topic.

“Anyway, I heard Danny tell George that George was like a father to him. Danny was maudlin. And you know what that doofus George said?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘You were my kid, you wouldn’t be such a useless little loser.’ He actually said that. Danny didn’t say a word. He went up the street past our house toward home and he was crying. I saw him.”

“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” Elizabeth said.

“Let’s talk about something else,” Ted said.

“How’s the new place coming?” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, the permit process was terrible.” Megan turned to Nina and said, “We’re going to move up the hill from Siesta Court soon. Green River’s going to ruin this street, so we’re building up on the mountain, about a quarter mile from Elizabeth. And it’s getting too… too… oh, you know, all the locals down here. God, the jokes tonight. I mean, get some wit.” Ted and Elizabeth laughed.

“We had such a scare,” Megan went on. “The fire on the ridge came within a hundred feet of our construction site, and we had just got the framing completed. Ted has spent every spare second up there for months. When we found out the next morning-Ted had a fit.”

“Oh, look, they’re building a bonfire,” Nina said. Just below the deck, in a clearing circled by stones, Darryl and Sam had just finished constructing a huge pile of dead wood. While the others watched, they set fire to it in several places.

“They always have a bonfire,” Elizabeth said. “It’s illegal, I think, but they don’t care. They grew up with the local cops.”

“Oh, my God, Nina,” Megan said. “Look over there. You better go protect Ben.”

“Britta keeps trying,” Ted said. “Ben’s never been interested.”

Megan lowered her voice. “I don’t know how David puts up with it. I mean, Britta and Sam last year. Debbie was so upset when she found out. Sam promised her, never again, and she stayed with him.”

Nina saw that Ben had picked up a couple of plastic chairs to bring down to the fire, but Britta had moved in on him.

As the evening progressed and Britta got drunker her eyes had taken on the wet insatiable look of a dog in heat. Ben kept his head down in defense mode. Britta worried him like one of Ruthie’s cats worrying a rat. She eyed him across the deck. She oozed close to him. His face reddened as she whispered in his ear. Then she turned, but just as he began to relax she would go at him again.

Finally she landed right in his face, saying something again, tongue flicking, plump lips moist and open. Ben must have had enough. He raised his hand and put it on her chin and gently but definitely pushed her away. She swayed in one place for a few seconds, shrugged, gave him the finger, staggered off, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one to steady herself.

The other neighborhood women watched her faltering progress along the deck without comment, her eyes speckled yellow from the porch light.

The men had not noticed what had just happened. Except for Ben, who had gone into the house, they were lounging together across from the fire, hidden in moon shadows. Bursts of talk and exclamations flew into the air like hails of bullets.

“A toast!” David Cowan said from down there. The men punched their cans into the air. Britta approached the men. “What’re you guys talking about, hmm?” she asked.

“Danny,” Sam said. “We’re toasting Danny.” Britta’s hips swiveled his way, drawn like a magnet to a Frigidaire. She sailed down the stairs toward the fire.

Nina picked up her chair and started down the stairs behind her. She passed Debbie, who looked worried.

A rough circle of chairs grew up around the fire, as most of the neighbors drifted down from the deck and sat near the warmth. Nina sat down beside Ben, who had reappeared.

“Figuring anything out?” he said.

“Having a great time,” she answered.

George and Jolene sat down beside her, saying to the others, “Debbie’s all tired out. She’s gone inside and said good night to y’all.”

Across the fire, David Cowan, Sam, and Darryl had set up their chairs. Ted joined Megan and they pulled up chairs on Nina’s other side.

Illegal or not, Nina loved the big fire blazing up. It reminded her of the old days on the beach at Carmel when they still allowed fires at the foot of Ocean Avenue. But Darryl and Sam had settled back and she was wondering who was going to tend it in the liquor-soaked post-dinner hour.

Darryl’s eyes followed Elizabeth as she moved around the circle. Suddenly he got up and followed her and said something to her.

She shook her head and he took her arm. Nina heard him say “Please.” The woman shook him off and came over to sit by Megan. Nina noticed she no longer wore the soft purse over her shoulder.

“Here,” Ted said, “I brought something for the good guys.” He passed a silver flask to Elizabeth, who tipped it back sharply, like she needed a shot. Her face flushed and she said, “I understand Courvoisier is good for the heart also.”

“Absolutely,” Ted said. “Was Darryl bothering you?”

“He’s harmless.”

“He thinks he’s in love with you,” Megan said with a laugh.

“I like Tory,” Elizabeth said. “She’s dedicated to him and their family. I honor that.” They all were silent for a few minutes, and then Ted and Megan started talking with each other about their construction contractor.

Elizabeth turned to Nina and said, her head close to Nina’s so no one else could hear, “So you and Ben went to high school together?”

“Uh huh.”

“Nina Balzac, huh?”

“That’s right,” Nina said. Elizabeth’s gray eyes had a steady insistence.

“The French writer,” she said.

“I heard there was one.”

“Oh, yes. There certainly is. I did a paper on him at Stanford. Honor'e de Balzac. Alas. He was not at all Hungarian.” She crossed her legs. “His family came from the South of France. His name came from the Latin Balteanus.”

“You’re making that part up for sure,” Nina said.

“I remember because of the anus part. I thought it was funny. When you’re eighteen stuff like that is funny.”

“Well, my grandfather’s family came from Budapest.”

Elizabeth looked down. “Your shoes betray you,” she said with a blinding smile. Nina looked down at her new shoes, which had seemed quite innocuous when she put them on.

“Born shoes,” Elizabeth went on. “Hand-sewn in European style. You don’t belong in this crowd any more than I do. And you seriously don’t belong with Ben.”

“Because I wear expensive shoes?”

Elizabeth laughed slightly. “Well, let’s just say, it tells me a lot more about you than you intended to tell. Are you a Fed? Is this about the fires?”

“Whatever.” It was all Nina could manage.

“I’d like to get your phone number and talk to you some more.”

“Sure,” she said. She dredged a scrap of paper from her purse and wrote it down.

Just then Britta came down the stairs, holding tightly to the railing.

“She’s got my purse,” Elizabeth said in a voice that was stricken with sudden anxiety.

Britta picked her way around the fire. When she came to Elizabeth, Elizabeth stood up and said, “Give me that.”

Britta smiled and whispered at the woman, putting her arm around her so Elizabeth had to stoop. Elizabeth listened and laughed desperately, as if trying to ingratiate her way free.

Looking around with a wicked grin, Britta said loudly, getting everyone’s attention, “I was looking for a match and your purse was handy. But looky what I found.” She held up a square black object.

“A tape recorder!” Britta crowed. “And it was rolling! She’s been taping us!”

“That’s not mine!”

“Oh, then I’ll just keep it and listen to it and tell everybody what’s on it tomorrow.”

“Look, Britta, just give it to me,” Elizabeth said. She seemed about to cry.

“Give it to her,” Ben said. Moving to Britta fast, he snatched the tape recorder out of her hand and gave it to Elizabeth. “And the purse.” He gave that back too.

“What’s that thing for?” George boomed.

Elizabeth didn’t answer. The fire seemed to answer in her place, surging up.

“Why are you spying on us?” George said. His voice held a new note of menace.

“I forgot about it. It wasn’t on,” Elizabeth said. “Anyway, I should go.”

“Don’t go,” Ben said, standing close by.

She looked at him and looked at Nina. “I guess I could stay for a bit.” She took his hand and walked away from the group staring at her and sat down on the steps leading back up to the deck.

“What’s going on?” Darryl asked them all. “Is she spying on us?”

Megan said, amused, “Outrageous. Who knew she cared.”

The dispassionate David Cowan looked rattled. “What exactly do you think she was trying to find out?”

Sam said, “She’s a little sneak.”

“Don’t you dare talk about her like that!” Debbie said.

“It was on,” Britta said. “Swear it was. Red light blinking.”

“I’m gonna find out why,” George said.

“George, leave it,” Jolene said. “We didn’t say a thing she shouldn’t hear a hundred times, if that’s what she wants.” Her husband leaned back. In the firelight he looked old and frightened.

The party went on. Inertia, brought on by heat and drink, captured them all. The pace of movement slowed, the talk sputtered. Only the children continued, exhausted but relentless, running and screaming.

Britta’s youngest, a three-year-old, had been crying intermittently for hours. He’d had an accident and his diapers were hanging over his little rubber boots. His parents didn’t seem to notice.

He and the other children gathered dead grass and twigs and leaned forward to toss them into the fire, while the grown-ups looked on with glazed, indulgent eyes. For one terrible moment, Nina thought the toddler would topple into the fire, but then he emerged like a dwarfish Vulcan from the smoke, black-faced but unscathed, and rushed back into the forest.

Ben and Elizabeth emerged from the house, fresh glasses in hand, and took seats by the fire near Nina. Darryl had tipped his chair back too far and now, amid general laughter, he fell backward to the soft ground.

The kids stripped sticks and some of them roasted marshmallows. Others just caught their sticks on fire and waved them around. A few feet behind the bonfire, a small group of children hunkered down. A moment later they sprang back. They had been making their own fire, outside the fire stones.

Preoccupied with their own affairs in the circle of chairs around the fire, the adults didn’t seem to notice. Nina saw Debbie at her kitchen window, rinsing dishes in a pool of light, but all around her was black sooty forest and the circle of flames.

Full dark had fallen around them. The birds no longer twittered and the stars shone indifferently through the oaks onto the pagan fire and its devotees. Nina had begun to feel hypnotized in these dark, smoky woods.

Britta, still conscious, although barely, had begun goading Sam, who had also drunk himself into mild stupefaction, with sexually pointed comments. She threw out this thunderbolt: “So do you still want me, Sammy?”

“Yes, Britta,” Sam replied, sounding weary and sardonic. He seemed to feel that further resistance would lead to gnashing of teeth, general bloodthirstiness, frightful consequences.

Britta had been gathering herself for something all evening. That time had arrived. They all knew it. She would not be denied. Nina imagined her naked, dancing on a corpse, her jeweled belt hung with skulls. What was going to happen?

Sitting a few feet from Sam, David Cowan slumped, seeming to have the strength only to lift his drink to his mouth one more time. The fire burned brighter, shooting up sparks that made George get up and move farther away, cursing. The added heat felt vivid, sharp, oppressive.

As the shower of sparks died down Nina saw through a veil of smoke that Britta, maddened by drink and boredom, had made her move; somehow she had slithered onto Sam Puglia’s lap.

She faced him, legs wide apart, dress hiked up. Slowly, she began grinding her groin against his lap. All that could be seen of her was her round gelatinous rear revolving obscenely, her freckled arms firmly hugging Sam around his chest, and the pale skullcap of her hair. Her face was buried on his chest.

Sam’s arms were raised on both sides, his right hand still holding his drink. Above her nestled head, he smiled hideously, seeming to salute them with his drink and to beg them not to notice, distancing himself from the unseemly plowing taking place below.

In the woods, the children screamed and played. Britta moved implacably, rhythmically, upon Sam. Nina couldn’t turn her gaze away, but a veil had fallen over her eyes and the movement in the chair right over there turned blurry.

Anything could have happened in those moments. Cowan could have stood up and shot his wife. The devil could have appeared in a shower of sparks. The maintenance of the universe seemed to depend on not noticing.

They all held their breaths and pretended not to notice. George Hill held on to the arms of his chair to keep them attached.

Sam kept his arms held high like a catatonic, his smile a rictus. Britta made no sound, but worked away with a will.

A few moments later, using her strange magic, Britta rematerialized through the flickering fire onto her husband’s knee, her arms around him, whispering, wheedling, and jiving. Cowan’s pallid face yielded no clue to his reactions.

After what she probably considered a respectable period, Britta resumed talking to the others.

Relief filled the air. The rest of them, Nina included, looked at one another like tattered survivors of a terrifying natural event.

They had held it together in the face of chaos. The social fabric had not been torn, all was sort of as it was.

But Britta did not play her encore for long. She slipped away, alone. She was gone for good. Soon Jolene asked, “Where’s Britta?”

“Putting her kids to bed?” someone said. But, no, Nina saw that her boys were still making mischief out there in the shadows, their faces streaked with tears and carbon.

The adults rose clumsily together, moving toward the street, calling to their kids. David Cowan disappeared too and Megan rounded up the young Cowans. Ben offered to walk Elizabeth to her car. After a querying look at Nina, and a nod back, Elizabeth accepted his offer.

Sam continued to sit in his chair, drink in hand. He hadn’t moved since Britta had screwed him into it. He might have been unconscious, but no one wanted to look closely enough to find out.

The fire still blazed, but the party appeared to be over.

“So long, great party,” Nina heard a few voices call out to whoever might hear, and she and Ben joined the crowd stumbling along the road.