Blow Hot, Blow Cold

2

The party, as it turned out, wasn’t a barbecue at all. No deception was intended, of course; it had merely become a tribal tradition to refer to backyard cookouts as barbecues. It was actually a hamburger fry, or broil, or whatever — they were cooked by Jack Richmond on a grill over charcoal. Dr. Jack Richmond was positively paranoid about his ability to cook hamburgers just right on a charcoal grill, and it was verboten to help him or interfere in any way. The fact that he wore a starched chef’s cap and an apron was misleading; his hamburgers were really as good as he claimed.

Nancy in shorts and David in slacks, having accomplished a great deal in the meanwhile, went over at seven. They cut across the Connors’ backyard, and while they were on the way a window was opened suddenly and Larry Connor’s voice shouted out.

“Hey, you guys! We’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Nancy and David waved at the window, which immediately closed, and went on across a second low hedge into the Richmonds’ yard and onto the terrace where Dr. Jack was watching a beautiful bed of glowing coals with stern concentration. He turned and raised a coal tongs in salute, and Nancy was forced to admit — to herself — that he was probably the handsomest man she had ever known. She wondered how she could be so objective about it. Maybe it indicated a kind of perversion or something. Was it abnormal to prefer a crooked nose to a beautifully straight one?

“Welcome, neighbors,” Jack said. “Wasn’t that old Larry bellowing at you?”

“Yes,” Nancy said. “He said he and Lila would be here in a few minutes.”

“I must say he sounded in good humor. Let’s hope it lasts.”

“Oh, Larry’s all right,” David said.

“Sure, and Lila’s a great gal, and they’re a charming couple. But when they get to cutting each other up, it makes things a little tense.”

Nancy had to concede that it did, but she conceded it silently, to herself. She didn’t think Jack Richmond ought to talk about Lila and Larry Connor like that, even though it was true. There was certainly a bitterness between them that exploded unexpectedly, especially when they had been drinking. Nancy supposed it was because Lila wasn’t particularly choosy in exploiting her sex appeal, which was considerable. Although Larry wasn’t exactly inhibited in certain circumstances either, as Nancy could testify from a couple of personal experiences. Anyhow, she didn’t think there was any real nymphomania in Lila. In fact, Nancy suspected that Lila was on the chilly side, under that almost feverish exterior; sometimes Lila gave her the impression of a rather cruel duplicity. Take, for example, the way she worked on poor old Stanley Walters. Stanley was no woman’s dream, that was for sure, and there was something sickening in the way Lila deliberately excited him so that he lost the use of the few wits he had. In Nancy’s opinion, Lila did it to irritate Stanley’s wife; it probably didn’t occur to Lila how cruel it was to Stanley, who got nothing from Lila and hell from Mae, and so was the victim of both. Nancy shrugged. She liked Lila in spite of everything, and she had no wish to continue the conversation Jack Richmond had begun.

Fortunately, at that moment Vera Richmond came out of the house toting a large wooden bowl full of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers and onions in sweetened vinegar. Vera set the bowl down on a table, and Nancy went over to greet her and see if she could help. Vera said she could.

“Darling,” Vera said, “such beautiful brown legs. It’s bitchy of you to wear shorts and show the rest of us up.”

Vera herself was wearing shorts, and the reason she was so generous in the matter of Nancy’s legs was that she really had nothing to worry about in the matter of her own. Vera’s face was characterized by too much nose and too many teeth; but her legs were long and lovely, and if they were in fact slightly inferior to Nancy’s, that was surely nothing to make a federal case about.

Nancy said something appropriate, and Vera laughed, showing her long upper teeth. She took Nancy into the kitchen, where other platters and bowls and trays of goodies were waiting to be brought out. One thing about Vera Richmond, you could always expect the best at her parties. Even at a little do like this, for a few close neighbors, featuring hamburgers. No ground meat that was 50 per cent fat — Vera always bought the most expensive grade of ground top round, and delicious side-things to go with them. She had been a nurse at the hospital where Jack Richmond interned, and she had come from a very poor family whose many children never got enough to eat.

It took two more trips to get everything out to the terrace. By that time Lila and Larry Connor had come over from next door and Mae and Stanley Walters from across the alley. Lila was talking with David, Larry was talking with Mae, and Stanley was standing by the grill with Jack, who had started grilling the big luscious-looking patties of dark red beef that he was taking from a portable ice chest. Everyone was nuzzling a goblet of beer.

“Hey,” Nancy said, “how come everybody has a beer except the workers?”

Stanley Walters went over to the keg and drew two beers and presented them to Nancy and Vera with what he pathetically meant to be a gallant flourish. Stanley ran to clumsy fat, and there was a kind of unintentional clownishness about everything he did that was more absurd than comic. He had come to town as manager of a chain shoe store, but he had lost his job and Mae had made him take a big bank loan and go into business for himself. His shop (Shoes For The Family At Family Prices) was finally prospering after a shaky start. The bank loan was almost paid off. Mae kept his books straight, and she kept Stanley straight, too. Mae was tall and had light red hair and white skin that couldn’t tolerate the sun. She was not overweight for her height, but she had large breasts and hips that made her seem heavier than she was.

“Nectar of the gods,” Stanley beamed, “for a pair of goddesses.”

“Stanley,” Mae said, turning away from Larry, “it’s too early to start making an ass of yourself. Wait till you’ve had at least two beers.”

Stanley had no talent for dissimulation. He flushed and bit his lower lip like a small boy fighting tears. Silenced, he started back to the grill. Unfortunately, he had to pass Lila. She reached out and took him by the arm.

“Stanley darling,” she said, “you didn’t even kiss me hello. Are you mad at me or something?”

Lila Connor lifted her inviting face, and Stanley Walters kissed it with the conditioned reflex of one of Pavlov’s dogs. Immediately he realized what he had done and looked utterly terrified. There was a shattering silence. Everything was put back together by David.

“What I would like to know,” David growled, “is how the hell Stanley rates special favors. I haven’t kissed anyone hello yet myself.”

David gave Lila a kiss that Nancy thought warmish, but then Larry Connor said clearly, “As the Bible says, a tooth for a tooth,” and strode over to kiss Nancy with an ardor that struck her as not entirely pretended. Also, it seemed to reflect on Mae Walters, who had been closer at hand; but Jack Richmond corrected the oversight by promptly kissing Mae, and then everyone moved around kissing everyone else and the party was reprieved, if not saved.

Soon after that the hamburgers began to come off the grill. Everyone began to stuff himself and make frequent visits to the keg; even Mae sufficiently unbent to enjoy the deliberate attentions of Dr. Jack, which had the intended effect of taking poor Stanley off the hook.

Shortly after eight, darkness set in, and a slivered moon appeared. The party began to swing.

It was some time after that — nine or ten or so — that Nancy found herself on a redwood bench with Larry Connor. Lila’s husband had been drinking with both hands and getting more and more sober and sad and lost. Nancy had always thought of Larry as being lost. Lost in his love, which had turned sour; lost in his work, which had gone stale; lost in his hopes, which had evaporated. Larry should have been a poet, Nancy thought. At least he looked like one — hot-eyed and thin and dark, with black hair that was always a little shaggy. He made her think of François Villon. François Villon leaving the gates of his beloved Paris, never to be heard of again.

“How was Paris when you left it?” Nancy asked solemnly.”

“What’s that?” Larry Connor said.

“Nothing, Larry. I’m just a leetle drunk.”

“Are you drunk enough to permit a neighborly kiss?”

He kissed her before she could think, and she was astonished and touched at the quality of the kiss, which was brief and tender and did not threaten other intimacies which would have had to be rejected.

“You’re a sweet girl, Nancy,” Larry Connor said. “I wish I were David.”

“Why should you wish you were David? David is probably off somewhere kissing Lila.”

“In that case, God help David.”

“Oh, come off it, Larry. Lila’s a beautiful gal. She looks so much like Natalie Wood it’s disgusting.”

“Does she? I hadn’t noticed. I’ve sort of lost the capacity to notice things. Or to feel things.”

“Poor old Larry. Positively decrepit.”

“All right, it sounds pretentious. But it’s true. I’ve been thinking about F. Scott Fitzgerald lately,” the accountant said suddenly.

“Maybe you should ask Jack to give you something for it.” Nancy giggled.

“Maybe I should at that. Fitzgerald had a kind of theme, you know. That the saddest thing in life is the diminishment of the ability to feel intensely. Lesion, he called it. The lesion of vitality. Just listen for a minute, Nancy. What do you hear?”

Nancy listened. But her head was whirling a little, and all she could hear was a pleasant singing in her ears that was partly personal music and partly the hi-fi that Jack Richmond had channeled to the terrace from inside the house.

“Nothing much,” she said.

“That’s what I mean. There are a thousand sounds around us, if we could only hear them. You remember how it was on a night like this when you were growing up? I used to sit and isolate each sound and listen to it separately. It was an intensely sad, almost torturing experience — a kind of bitter, wonderful ecstasy. But it’s all seeped away. I remember, but I don’t hear or feel any more.”

“Keep trying, Larry. It will come back.”

“It won’t. Not ever.”

Larry sounded so peculiar that Nancy began to feel uneasy. At the same time, she became aware of a compulsion to pull his shaggy head to her breast. This compulsion she successfully quelled. It was chiefly an effect of the beer, she told herself, and it could lead to something dangerously more than motherly tenderness. So she merely waited for Larry to continue.

“Do you know how Lila and I met?” he asked. “Has Lila ever told you?”

“No.”

“It’s just as well. Anything she’d have told you would almost certainly be a lie.”

“Larry, you mustn’t say such things about Lila. You’re drunk, or you wouldn’t.”

“In vino veritas, or whatever the hell the word is for beer,” Larry said with a laugh. “Lila’s the world’s slickest liar. Didn’t you know that, Nancy? It took me quite a while to get on to it. What’s more, she’s a psychopathic liar. She actually prefers lying to telling the truth. She has no conscience, no sense of the difference between right and wrong. She’s sick in the head, Nancy, and there’s no cure for it except to put her out of her misery, the way you’d shoot a rabid dog.”

If Larry Connor had sounded drunk, Nancy would simply have jumped up from the bench and gone away. But he did not sound drunk. On the contrary, he sounded cold stone sober, even deliberate, as if he were thinking a serious problem out aloud.

“You mustn’t say things you’ll be sorry for later, Larry,” Nancy said. “There’s Lila and Jack. Let’s join them.”

She started to get up from the redwood bench, but Larry seized her hand and pulled her back. She was not aware until later that he held on to her all the while he was talking.

“Wait a minute, Nancy, I was going to tell you how Lila and I met. It was in Kansas City. I was in an office there with two older accountants, and everything was going fine. There was even a girl I was thinking about marrying. Then I went to this cocktail party one night and met Lila. She was sitting by herself in a corner with a Martini in her hand. I went over and began to talk to her. We left together and had dinner and went on to her apartment. She began to tell me about herself. She had just got a divorce, she told me, from a sadist who’d got his kicks out of making her suffer. I was furious and protective, and I built up quite a hate for the poor slob.

“None of it was true. I met him after Lila and I had been married about a year, and he turned out to be as nice a guy as you’d ever want to meet. Furthermore, he hadn’t been her first husband, as she claimed. He’d been her third; I’m her fourth, and she’s only twenty-six now. She started early, at sixteen. She’d been divorced by husbands one and three. Number two committed suicide.”

“Larry, you simply must stop. I don’t want to hear any of this.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“I just don’t want to listen.”

“Please, Nancy. You’re the only one here I give a damn about. I’d like you to know so you’ll understand anything that may happen later.”

“Don’t talk like that, Larry. You’re scaring me!”

“No, no, I don’t mean to frighten you. It’s a kind of therapy to be able to talk, Nancy. Please, let me. Have you ever wondered why Lila and I moved here a year or so ago?”

Nancy settled back. “You came to take over old Mr. Campbell’s business, didn’t you? I heard that you bought into it just before he died.”

“The truth is that I thought Lila and I could start over in a small town. She’d run up about ten thousand dollars’ worth of bills I couldn’t pay, even though I had a good income. I thought maybe she’d be different here. She isn’t. I still owe about half the Kansas City debt, and she’s getting me over my head in debt all over again. I’m half out of my mind, Nancy. Maybe I’ll just cut and run.”

“Running wouldn’t do any good, Larry.” Nancy was terribly uncomfortable.

“I wonder. Sweet neighbors you’ve got, Nancy.”

“We think so. David and I both,” Nancy murmured fatuously.

“That’s because you didn’t know the truth, and probably don’t believe it now that you’ve heard it. Thanks, anyhow.”

“Yes, Nancy,” Lila’s voice said suddenly from behind the bench. “It’s kind of you to say so. Larry darling, have you been entertaining Nancy with your drunken fantasies? Why is it you’re always impelled to tell such monstrous lies when you’re stoned?”

Nancy jumped up, startled and ashamed. Lila Connor was regarding her husband with the strangest smile. Jack Richmond, beside Lila, was wearing the professional expression of his consulting room. Larry merely shrugged, not bothering to turn his head.

“Must you sneak up behind me like that, Lila? I was just telling Nancy what a psychopath you are.”

“I heard you. Nancy, you’ll have to forgive him. He’ll say or do anything to gain a little sympathy from a pretty woman.”

“Forget it,” Jack Richmond said. “Let’s have another beer.”

“I think we’d better not,” Lila said. “I think we’d better go home. Don’t you think we’d better go home, Larry?”

“Yes.” Larry sighed and rose, a picture of defeat and weariness, as if he had lost and lost and lost again. “Good night, Nancy, Jack. Next time, Jack, be more discriminating in your guest list.”

The accountant walked off into the darkness beyond the terrace toward his house. From Lila Connor came a brittle little laughing sound. She seemed about to say something. But then she raised her arms, and dropped them, and walked off after her husband.

“Well,” Jack said, “they’ve done it again. What in the world was all that babbling about, Nancy? I only heard a bit at the last.”

“I’d rather not discuss it, Jack.”

“Right,” the doctor said instantly. “Let’s go see if we can stamp out more fires, Nancy. I think Mae’s lighting into old Stanley again.”

But Mae and Stanley Walters were in a truce for a welcome change, and soon, without further incident, the Walterses said good night and went home across the alley. Jack and David had a last beer while Nancy helped Vera clean up the terrace; then Nancy and David went home, too, across the Connors’ backyard. Although it was still early, about eleven o’clock, they saw only one light in the Connor house, coming from a room upstairs.