“She was, once, maritally tried and divorced, and currently unattached but not loose and teaching American literature in a college upstate. She also has a book coming out not from a university press but a real live and hearty trade publisher that actually gave more than a five-hundred-dollar advance on the short stories of twentieth-century American writers. She believes, something I scolded her for because of the counter reaction it might start against my literature professor friends, in brief plain-speaking critiques and short un-gossipy biographical sketches with plenty of humor and active verbs and few adjectives or big words or discursive turgid sentences. It’s her objective — I think because she was brought up hardworking and poor where every morsel, minute and cent meant something — to say in ten thousand words per author what most scholars manage to do in a hundred thousand or two, which could put a few of them out of business or force them to reduce their paragraphs, sabbaticals and requests for grants. She’s also very sweet, decent, modest, sensitive, even-tempered and with the most thought-out high virtues and lived-out public and private morality of anyone I know, besides being one of my best friends. Is any of this coming through to you?”
“All. It’s everything I like. If she asks, you’ll slip in a good word for me, and if she doesn’t, you’ll volunteer?”
“The truth is you’re not good enough for her. For me, yes. I prefer single-hood and no kids and my minor escapades that don’t interfere with the well-paying fulltime work and month-long vacations I love, so I’ll accept much less. But she needs and can maintain while carrying on her other major pursuits an equally right-minded child-wanting youngish dean of a highly regarded semiexperimental college who also teaches a freshman writing course twice a week and is adored by all his students, envied by most of the faculty, sought out by the most prestigious eleemosynary institutions and do-gooding organizations for his intellect, integrity and class and who also sails, skis and runs besides owning a woodsy home with fireplaces in every kitchen and den and a green thumb, bluish blood, purple passion, red background, pink glow and lots of lustrous hair-locks and stylish tidy clothes. Something of that agglutination, but you just won’t do, which she’ll let you know soon enough if you’re still so foolish to pursue her, since she’s also intently though unbrutally frank. Please put the bowl on the bar before the cubes dissolve and try to stay up till midnight when the party starts to end and a group of us is going to eat Chinese, compliments of a Soviet-supported Russian poet on tour whom I think I just heard resonate through the door.”
She leaves without the platters. Some have to be heated and I light the oven, hold the platters over my head to see if they’re ovenproof, and stick them inside. I take the ice to the bar, pour another vodka, take the cold food platters to the table, see the poet, buoyant and big-voiced and coat over his shoulders, thick cowlick falling over his cheek which he keeps remedying with a quick hand sweep or flip of his head, go back for the heated food and two hot plates and potholders and serving spoons, bring them to the table, potholders on the platters’ ends so the first people to take from them will know they’re hot, look around for someone to talk to, forget where I left my drink, elderly man in tweed and scholastic keys whom Helene had talked to, say hello and he says “How are you, sir?” and I say “Fine thanks, but weren’t we introduced?” and he says “That could be true in so rowdy a room, but my memory’s still tolerably good, so I doubt it. Wheeler Smith’s the name. Do you also work alongside Diana on that unlucid magazine?” and I say “No, strictly on my own, not that I’d snub an article-writing slot with free medical insurance if I could land one. Daniel Krin.” I extend my hand and we shake. His is mostly meaty and cold and when I glance at mine when I take it away I see it has ink stains on it from this afternoon or maybe from a memo I wrote on the train. “Nice party,” and he says “That it is, Mr. Krin.”
“Daniel or Dan. Diana gives them a lot?”
“Once a year around Thanksgiving, give or take a Friday. I often think it’s the one good thing I’ve to be thankful for around this time, not being a fancier of sugared cranberries and dried-out turkeys and parades promoting Macy’s and the advent of frenzied Christmas buying.”
“So you know Diana for a while.”
“If I were an artfully addled old man I’d say for how long. I was her dissertation director when she was finishing the city’s youngest Ph.D. in fifty years. You’re a pleasant new face here so I’ll conjecture you met her at that colony I’m a trustee of.”
“We lived in footboard to footboard rooms and shared the same bathtub and can of Ajax. I noticed you talking to Helene Winiker. You direct her too?”
