American Wife

your husband forgot there’s an alternate ending for the limerick.” Both the words alternate and limerick had been daunting to pronounce, and I was proud that I had surmounted them. “What he said was ‘And bits of her tits down in Dallas.’ But also, it can go ‘And her anus in Buckingham Palace.’ Did you know you’re married to a plagiarizer?”

Jadey peered at me more closely, then whispered. “Oh my Lord, are you drunk?” I shook my head, but she was saying, “Oh, I would be, too! Oh, you must be just beside yourself! I can only imagine what this weekend is like for you. They tease you so much, don’t they? My first year of marriage, I was on the brink of tears the whole time, and I had grown up with the Blackwells! Oh, I just hated all of them, and after Arthur made me marry him, I thought to myself, Jadey, are you crazy? You knew that family was a bunch of hooligans!”

Was Jadey crazy? I had been in her company for about a minute, and already, I felt that I could have answered this question accurately.

“Stay right here,” she said. “I’m getting Charlie. You poor baby, you’re drunk as a skunk.”

Because I was indeed drunk, I didn’t mind standing there doing nothing; I gazed up at the silver trophy vase sitting on the mantel above the fireplace—it was about a foot tall—and by the time Charlie emerged from the dining room, Jadey just behind him, I was holding the trophy in my arms, squinting down at it. “Where’s your name?” I asked Charlie, and he seemed both amused and perturbed.

“Let’s put that back where it belongs, sticky fingers.” He eased the trophy from my hands and returned it to the mantel, then said to Jadey, “Tell Maj you think Alice has whatever the baby is sick with.”

Jadey made a face. “Colic, Chas?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Make something up. I’m taking her back to Itty-Bitty.”

Jadey set her hands on the slopes where my shoulders became my neck; the effect of her standing like this was halfway between a babushka pinching your cheeks and a lover moving in for a kiss. “Alice, we are going to be best friends,” she said. She dropped her voice. “Ginger and Nan are no fun. They mean well, but they’re worrywarts. But I heard about you”—she was talking louder again, and more quickly—“and I just knew right away. I said to myself, ‘Alice sounds like my kind of girl.’ ”

What had Jadey heard about me? And when—that day or earlier?—and from whom?

“You seem like a very special person,” I said, and Charlie burst into laughter. To Jadey, he said, “She’s never like this. Seriously, I’ve never seen this before.”

“She’s adorable,” Jadey said, and she held the clubhouse door for us as we stepped outside. “Don’t let her fall, Chas.”

The slate sidewalk was lit only by the stars and the half-moon, and the distance we needed to go seemed significantly greater than it had on the way there. Charlie had one arm across my back and the other hand holding my elbow. “Steady there, party girl,” he said. “Was Rump Higginson that bad a dinner companion?”

We were passing the family compound closest to the clubhouse—this one, I’d learned a few hours before, belonged to the Thayers—and I said, “Everyone here is so rich.”

Charlie laughed but not all that heartily. After a beat, he asked, “You like that?”

“Rich people are bizarre!” I exclaimed. (This was a remark Charlie quoted back to me many times in the years to come.) “I love you, Charlie, but all this fuss about tennis and Princeton and the Biltmore Hotel—if you were the foreman at Fassbinder’s, sometimes I think that would be easier.”

“You mean Fassbinder’s the cheese factory?”

“They make butter, too,” I said. “Want to go swimming?”

“I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”

“You’re supposed to be the fun one.” I poked him in the ribs. “Good-time Charlie. Are you scared now? Remember when you told me you’re scared of the dark?”

“I’m doing my best to keep it together for my blotto girlfriend.”

“I know you’re scared of the dark, because I wrote it down in my dossier. My Charlie Van Wyck Blackwell dossier.” I pronounced each of his names lavishly. “And now I can’t protect you because I’m”—I thought of Jadey—“drunk as a skunk.”

“That you are,” Charlie said. “What I’m trying to figure out is if you’re a good drunk or a bad one.”

“If you let me go swimming,” I said, “we’ll be naked, and you can put your penis inside me in the water.”

“Oh, man!” Charlie said. “Okay, I’ve decided you should become an alcoholic. You’re an excellent drunk.”

“It’s my first time,” I said.

“Sorry, but it’s a little late for me to believe that one.”

“No, no,” I said. “My first time being drunk.”

“Well, you seem like a pro.”

“No, honestly—I can tell you don’t believe me, but I’m telling the truth.”

When we reached the Blackwell compound, he said, “The problem is, I don’t know how long till the others get back, and if we’re splashing around in the lake after Jadey told Maj you were sick—”

“I don’t think you’re afraid of the dark.” I tapped the end of Charlie’s nose with my fingertip. “You’re afraid of your mother.”

He laughed. “You would be, too.” I suspect Charlie’s own fondness for drinking, his lifetime spent around it, made him especially tolerant of the drunkenness of others. “I’d love to take you up on the whole penis-inside-you offer,” he said, “but how about if we go in Itty-Bitty?”