LITMIR.BIZ

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it had been a constant struggle to catch up: she didn’t know what prosciutto was, or how to make stuffed mushrooms for twenty, or choose wine, or play hostess in the manner to which his friends were accustomed. And Ray’s reassurances that he would handle it had the unintended effect of highlighting all her shortcomings. The morning of the party, she woke up drenched in sweat. Flop sweat, her sister would have said. As in, the performance you’re about to give is going to flop.

      It was true—things were going badly even before noon. First, Ray didn’t take the afternoon off as promised; a mistake had been found in a set of drawings, and he’d stayed late to fix them. In his absence, Evelyn had ruined the vichyssoise by puréeing the cooked potatoes in the blender until they were the consistency of glue. No matter how much milk she added to try to fix it, the soup was like library paste. Don’t freak out, she lectured herself. Don’t even start—just do it over, you have enough potatoes.

      The second batch of soup was better. Ray came home, tasted and pronounced it perfect, unaware of its predecessor now gurgling through the sewer pipes below the toilet. Evelyn started in on the salad while Ray went down to the basement to choose wine. She wasn’t sure about the green pepper—should it be diced, or cut in circles? Well, she would do the tomato first; anyone could do tomatoes, without even thinking.

      But without thinking, she brought the knife down on her thumb. Ray always kept the knives well sharpened and the cut was deep. She knew it should probably have stitches, but by then it was five-thirty and time was running out. If she went to the emergency room, she was liable to be there for hours, and there was still too much to do. She bandaged her thumb herself, wrapping it in layers of gauze and surgical tape, and only then called Ray to come finish the salad. She just nicked her thumb, she said when he noticed, and no, it wasn’t too bad.

      “Poor baby.” Ray kissed her cheek, then began kissing her neck, her hair. “You’re beautiful, you know that?”

      “No, I’m not.”

      Ray put his arms around her waist. “Come upstairs.”

      She half-wanted to; she was so tense, it would be good to be forced to stop thinking, forced to give herself over to her body. But it was almost six, and they were way behind schedule.

      “I have to vacuum,” she said.

      “There’s time. The smell of your skin is burning me up.”

      “You mean I smell like sweat. Then I have to shower, too.”

      He let her go, and then she wished she had given in. Instead she vacuumed while Ray maneuvered expertly among spices and shallots, making a salad dressing so good she felt again the sting of her own inadequacy. Her cut thumb throbbed.

      After her shower Evelyn sat at the dressing table and tried to relax. After all, there was no sign that anything was wrong. She could hear Ray downstairs whistling some classical thing—he couldn’t be happier, so why was she so worried? She brushed her hair, checked to see if among the bright red any gray had appeared, put on foundation to hide her freckles, chose a lipstick.

      As always, leaning into a mirror to do her makeup reminded her of how, as a child, she’d watched others perform the transformation: she used to peek around the canvas alley to watch the men get in makeup. Crouched on stools, close to the long mirrors so they could see in the bad light, their hands flew over their faces, transforming them with daubs of greasepaint from men into clowns. Evelyn considered the lipstick in her hand. If she made the line of her lips a good inch wider all the way around, she could be a clown too, and in one stroke of color return to where she had come from: down in the dirt with the clowns and the roustabouts, squinting up into the high reaches of the big top at three glittering blurs walking gracefully into the air—father, mother, sister. She put the lipstick away.

      By seven-thirty, the Shepards’ living room had filled with people. Evelyn tried to stay close to Ray, but guests kept sweeping him away from her. Where was he now? In crowds Ray was unremarkable, neither tall nor loud. You might not notice him unless you met his eyes, which held a lightness of movement more suggestive of boyhood than a man approaching middle age. He looked his best in company: alone, his habitual expression was that of someone attempting to solve a crossword puzzle. But even then, if interrupted, he would look up, more startled than annoyed at the intrusion, and he would smile.

      He looked up now, as if he’d felt her searching for him. He was standing with his back against the carved oak mantelpiece—cornered, it appeared, by a tall woman in a brown cardigan and a necklace that looked like it was made out of blobs of clay.

      “Evelyn,” said Ray as she came up beside them, “this is Liz Luce, from Newell Academy.”

      Newell Academy, Evelyn had been told several times, was on the National Register of Historic Places, and the dining hall Ray had designed for them had just been written up in some magazine Evelyn couldn’t remember the name of, though she’d cut out the newspaper clipping and saved it.

      “So pleased to meet you,” Liz Luce said, extending her hand.

      “Ray’s dining hall has made all our other buildings look absolutely ramshackle by comparison.”

      “Actually,” said Ray, “your campus buildings are a wonderful example of the Federal style. Take the roof lines for example—”

      Evelyn felt a prickle of irritation. When Ray got going on architecture it was impossible to shut him up. Liz Luce must have felt the same way: she interrupted.

      “Honestly, Ray, I’ve been so burdened with adolescent crises this week, I don’t think I could even tell you what color my own kitchen’s painted. Thank God this year is almost over.” She turned to Evelyn. “I was on the phone with parents until eleven o’clock last night dealing with one thing and another, and now I have a girl we’ve suspended but can’t send home because her folks have disappeared.”

      “Disappeared?” Evelyn echoed, startled.

      “Oh, not literally disappeared, not foul-play disappeared.” Liz smiled, not unkindly, but Evelyn blushed. “I mean, we can’t get hold of them. Some parents think boarding school is a sort of glorified babysitting service—just dump your progeny and go off globe-trotting.”

      “There were a few boys with families like that when I was at Andover,” Ray said. “Never any place to go for the holidays. Poor kids.”

      Liz looked at Evelyn. “Such a soft-hearted husband you have. That’s my problem too. Well, unless you know anyone who’d like to take a sixteen-year-old girl with purple hair for the summer, I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Thank God school ends on Wednesday.”

      As Liz Luce moved off, Alex Yeager came up to them. Alex was Ray’s best friend at the firm. Tall and blonde and tanned—the only suntanned architect you’ll ever see, Ray had said once. Evelyn thought Alex looked like an aging Ken doll.

      “Sorry about that,” he said to Ray, picking up an earlier conversation, “Now look, all you have to do is forget about this Victorian architecture book thing you’re writing and knuckle down on the Goldstein job. Tell Dunlap you’ll keep it under budget this time, and don’t go sneaking in things like copper downspouts.” He turned to Evelyn. “The prize-winning architect here is having a slight difference of opinion with our boss—”

      “Who is standing not ten feet away,” said Ray. “Jesus, Alex, this is a party. Forget that, let me get you another drink.”

      “I’ll do it,” Evelyn said, grateful for an excuse to avoid being stuck in a conversation with Alex Yeager. She took his empty glass and escaped to the table of bottles at the other end of the room.

      On and on it went. Eight o’clock, nine. She circled the room with a tray of stuffed mushrooms Ray had made, a shield against conversation, until she was cornered by Gillian Dunlap, Ray’s boss’s wife.

      “Everyone’s talking about how wonderful the new dining hall is,” Gillian said. “You must be so proud of Ray.”

      “So proud of him,” Evelyn repeated. I’m like a trained

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