We’d argued about the couch. She wanted white and got her way. She always got her way. I’d loved the hard wood floors and the oak cabinets in the kitchen, the mosaic shelves. We’d agreed on most things. Not the colour of the couch or the colour of the walls.
“They’re pink. She’s got you saddled with a white couch and pink walls.” He said. My friends laughed at me.
“They’re peach.”
“Pink. Didn’t you even put up a fight?”
“I did.”
“Not much of one.”
We were young professionals in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the heart of the country. My friends and I liked each other’s company. Hung out together. Discussed Seinfeld and George. Played racquetball and squash. Our wives were friends. We mostly were all young and married. New in our work. It was stressful but we were the brightest and best. That’s what we were told.
I don’t remember who divorced first. It wasn’t me. Others went onto have children and grandchildren. Long careers. Stable noteworthy folk. We’d had similiar beginnings.
I liked the picture of the polar bear on the wall. She was with her cubs up close. All of them eating a seal.
“I don’t like that picture,” she said. “It’s too martial.. It does nothing for women’s digestion.”
“I almost died to get that picture.” I said.
“It doesn’t fit our decor.”
At least she liked my friend Toni, professor of art at the University of Manitoba’s painting. She put that in the living room above her white couch.
Looking back I think I could have compromised on the polar bear picture frame. I’d carved the frame myself waiting to deliver a baby, in the arctic , where I’d met the polar bear mother who’s intent had been to eat me.
I felt pushed into a tiny corner but held my ground refusing to take the picture down. Sometime later I’d find she’d moved it to the basement.
We’d just brought in groceries from the Toyota. The car was parked in the garage and the groceries had to be brought from the back seat and the trunk. Years of being a vegetarian helped me immensely choosing vegetables. Once we’d got the parkas off and outer boots off, the groceries in the kitchen, I’d start on the chopping. I loved chopping vegetables and making huge tossed arrays with treats like almonds strewn into the standard fare. The piece de resistance was my salad dressing. I made my own. Just the right proportions of oil and vinegar, one fresh egg, and Tobasco sauce with a touch of soy, stirred lightly.
She had selected sole for the evening. She had a recipe from the Joy of Cooking. Sole in white wine. We’d bought a dish specifically for oven baked fish. It had it’s own woven metal basket. A work of table art.. All was presentation. That was her most important contribution. That and her special nut pie. She liked to cook the nuts in sauce to pour it into a light pastry shell. It was a delicate procedure and all the ladies expressed delight at her pastry. My salad was not a show stopper. But I’d loved my Henkel knives. I’d always loved knives and chopping vegetables with Henkel was sweet. I had bought the baggots remembering Paris as I did. We’d both been to Paris separately. I’d ridden my bicycle through the town while she’d worked there as an au pair and been violated. There were things young couples didn’t discuss. Her past was a minefield. I dared not go there. Everywhere, especially in her family, were awful memories.
“It was only because of my sister, I survived it. Mom and Dad always fighting. The boys arguing. The shouting, the screaming. The drinking. It would have been hell without my sister. We rescued my mother from it all. She says that.”
We’d had the requisite dinner parties with our families. They were the first we invited to our new house. Early days. She had her mother and father over. I had my mother and father over. We had them over together. It was all very well. She was pleased. I found it all very awkward. My mother and her mother didn’t get on so well. She thought they did. But I knew my mother didn’t like other women around my father. She found her mother alright but ‘brazen’. She was a nurse. Her father was a car dealer. Dad liked him well enough. As men they got along just fine talking about cars and small towns in Manitoba. They both knew the country. The mothers were the problem.
“They drink too much. I know they’re your in laws. But they’re not very respectable.” When my mother said ‘respectable’ she was really saying they weren’t Christian. She was Baptist and she was next to Jesus. Others were judged by their proximity to her and the Lord. My mother in law was nominally Christian but clearly not next to God. My parents both thought my wife was. They doubted I was but loved my wife despite her questionable beginnings.
Women grow bigger with age. The men take up less space. I remember an image of the two of them in the kitchen vying to clean dishes and my mother’s frown. Her mother considered herself superior and didn’t appreciate how superior my mother thought she was herself.
“You cooked the meat well,” her mother told me. I’d thought it wasn’t such a big deal. I had an oven with numbers and a thermometer that I stuck in the roast. I ‘d majored in biochemistry. But this arcane art of the cooking of the meat took on mythical manly proportions.
“I heard my mother tell you, you cooked the meat well. That’s high praise.” She beamed. I often thought women were unusually touched. My dad had certainly liked the beef. But he was as he was proud to say, ‘a meat and potatoes man.” My mother didn’t approve much of spices. “Salt and pepper were good enough for the Lord.” She once said. I never did learn where it said that in the Holy Bible.
We’d served roast beef and baked potatoes with sour cream that night. Because my parents hardly drank we went light on the alcohol. Her father hadn’t liked that. My dad didn’t care. “Nice enough, fellow,” he’d said of him. It was a very tense affair and we talked of the stress of having our parents over. She loved her mother but didn’t care for her father. I loved my parents too but was focussed on the future. It was the friends that mattered.
I loved my house. I loved coming in from the cold to the warmth of this place. In the summer I loved the back yard. I’d put a barbecue by the back door and barbecued year round. I grew basil and peppers along the sidewalk so I could use them for cooking.
It was the dinner parties for the friends that mattered most to me. I’d read of the Huxley’s and Virginia Wolf and thought the ‘circle of friends’ was apocryphal. The whole dinner party was a piece of work, a symphony production. Live theatre. We’d made the stage so well. My carpenter friend, Gord, had hand produced the perfect table and chairs. Oak. Minimalist. Elegant. He was a university graduate. Rough in his work but extremely clever in his mind. The finished product art. I loved his company though his association with a security firm and the tales of the dark side of the city that his family’s business brought him next to, seemed risqué. I rather thought of him more as the carpenter monk in Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmond.
I wasn’t a theologian but took pride in being an ‘intellectual’. An ‘intellectual’ colleague had called me that and I ‘d rather beamed in the glory of it. Now I had my carpenter friend, like Jesus, and we discussed character and heaven. He charged me well for his work but was much admired. His wife was an artist in her own right. He worked out of his home, his basement turned into a workshop. I loved his pragmatism and the freedom of his life. By contrast I felt such pressure in my work and home. He seemed satisfied. He’d have an annual party and bring in lobster from the east coast. I’d learn later that it was mostly customers and lots of booze. I loved it more than my wife who preferred a more stately affair. Though he made dinner tables, his parties were always smorgasbord plates set on side tables.
My brother in law introduced me to Jean Luc Ponty, jazz electric guitar. John was an accountant. He liked hockey. I did too. I liked him well enough but what we most had in common were marriage to identical twin sisters. Our wives truly were the beauties of the world. Lithe with long blond hair. I taught mine to dance Viennese waltz. We froze whatever dance floor we were on. Everyone happily stood aside and watched her flow like mercury about the room. We loved Cleo Lane those days, attending the concerts she had in the summer in the park. I thought of music as central to the dinner party.
The choosing of the stereo had been as important as the choice of blond hard wood for the floors of the house. I’d gone with a musician acquaintance to ensure I had the best one. The speakers, the turntable, the amplifier. The turntable was Phillips but the speakers had to be Bose.
She cooked the main course but I made sure that the sound was just right. I liked a mix of music for greeting and appetizers, the dining and the after dinner conversation music. I felt that if I got it just right I could massage the evening to perfection. Repartee and fine feelings would flow from all the parts of the evening coming together. I S days he turn table was as much the man’s job as the barbecue.
She seemed to think the night all depended on the main course and the house she’d decorated and her dress she’d chosen. I thought it was more about Steely Dan, Jean Luc Ponty, Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. She shopped at Holt Refrew for her dinner party dresses.
The women wore cocktail dresses and heels. The men wore slacks, sweaters or jackets. Guests brought a bottle of wine to add to the collection. I favoured Mondavi Brothers Cabernet Sauvignon and a German Riesling. I was a wine connoisseur in those days, as only young academics in Winnipeg Manitoba could be. I thought serving Dubonnet as an aperitif always began things well. The guests arriving and leaving their outer clothes in the hallways coming into sit on the white couch and white lounge chairs. There was a cut out portion to the kitchen so that whoever was doing preparation could still be a part of the conversation in the living room. We’d had that modification made to the house when we redid the cabinets and mosaic counters.
I always felt uncomfortable sitting on the white couch talking with people at first. I’d suggest she do it but she insisted it was the ‘man’s job’. I felt my knees came up about my ears on that couch and that we were became all ankles and knees. I was glad to get the dubonnet poured and get glasses into everyone’s hands. No toasting at this point. Just lubricant.
Breaking the ice conversation was always difficult with her friends. Debbie was a quiet beauty, large brain and very pleasant but I always thought she was more interested in the price of things. I didn’t know her man who like her was calculating the costs of everything in the house as if they were cat burglars. I thought them shallow though I cared about money as much as the next person I thought it gauche to enquire about prices. I simply didn’t see things in price tags. I was more interested in ideas.
“She doesn’t want to be poor. Wealth is security for her.” My wife said. They’d been friends since childhood and she defended her.
“But she’s never reciprocated. She’s come for dinner a dozen times and never once returned the invitation.”
“They don’t have anyone over. They’re not social that way.”
“She’s social enough if someone else is paying for it.” I said sounded oddly like my father.
“I don’t think she’s that way at all. You’ve got her all wrong. She’s a very dear friend.’
“Maybe, but I’ll still watch the Oneida.” She didn’t laugh. I meant it as a joke.
Other than her being cheap and a taker I liked Debbie well enough. But she also didn’t have a lot to say, smiling, listening and looking pretty but never contributing to the conversation. I was the one selecting the evenings companions always hampered in my design to have an illustrious dinner party of great conversation by her insistence on her girlfriends who were ‘fine’ but not at all the entertainment I thought my friends were. Her sister was dynamic but that was pretty much it.
My friends Frank and Miles and my artist friend Paul were definitely brilliant dinner party companions I found my friends and their dates incredibly entertaining. I’d often add a young professor ,male or female from work, a playwright. I always ensured a single man and a single woman to balance out the table. I loved ‘match making’ . We’d have ten for dinner and 8 would be couples.
We had the Rosenthal dinnerware, the Colleen crystal, Oneida silver, and candle light. The men were handsome. The women incredibly beautiful, young well heeled, bright and downright sexy. Mile’s Kate was startlingly funny. I loved when Jon could come. He’d often play guitar after. I had always had a guitar about in those days. Later it would be a Martin but then it was the Canadian guitar, the wood suited to the changing climate. Susan came later too. But mostly it was conversation, good food and booze. I loved those dinner parties, the conviviality, the laughter and the rich exchange of ideas.
“The communists really did think they just had to put up a banner, ‘workers unite’ and all the workers of the world would come to them. They were deeply disappointed. They didn’t give up on that tactic till the wall fell. They moved then to the environment. Saving the world became their new gambit for power. I don’t think it’s going to work out well for them but that’s what all the concern about the spotted lizard is. Part of their grand strategy for world dominion.”Frank said one night.
Frank’s father, a doctor, had fled Checkoslovakia and his insights into world politics were so beyond the average Canadian. Paul, the artist, was Latvian an had visited Riga. His mother and grandmother had escaped the Russians and the Germans.
“When I visited , “ Paul said. “the things I took that people most cherished were the condoms and American jeans.” He laughed.
Miles, our resident writer and poet spoke of Ginsburg and Franny and Zooey. We all talked of books and movies. It seemed we were all ready Saul Bellows those years.
For me, Red wine always made the girls breasts look bigger. Susan and Lynn were best endowed. I found that by the second bottle of the night, considering I’d begun with the dubbonet, I was losing eye contact, but I felt I’d died and gone to heaven. My wife’s breasts were already perfect. They became more so after a bottle of wine. Paul danced on a table once or twice. Simon sang Gilbert and Sullivan acapello. Miles sang IRA revolutionary songs. Frank couldn’t stop laughing.
In the summer as guys we’d go out into the back yard and smoke cigars. I was a bad influence. Later I invited Lori and didn’t know that her husband was a drug dealer. I just loved the variety of conversations.
“I delivered twins for the first time.” I shared.
“How was that?”a big breasted beauty asked me.
“Shocking. I didn’t know there was another one coming.”
“No shop talk,” my wife said. My wife liked to interrupt me when I was about to tell a story. It was like there was this music control in her mind that insisted that it must always be elevator music. Her family had been so angry and rock and roll she liked the superficial. Only later when as guys we sat about drinking drambuie or whisky while the girls sat together talking about whatever, I never knew, by then didn’t care.
We were discussing hockey teams or government and I was wondering if I’d behaved because I was by then hoping everyone would go so I could sleep with my delectable wife. I’d have slept with any of the others wife’s or all of them together if decorum allowed. Getting ‘lucky’ in marriage, as we called it , all depended on my personal performance in her eyes. It was never very good.
“What’s the greatest sexual turn off for women?” He joked
“Wedding cake.” He said when I didn’t answer.
There was a point in the dinner party when we all sat at the table and the food was being savoured. The candlelight lit up the room. Snow was falling outside. Handel was playing on the stereo. I’d lean back in my chair and look at the light flickering of the crystal, this collection of friends, my gorgeous brilliant wife, and think for a moment, that life couldn’t get better. Then I’d help her clear the table and we’d sneak a kiss in the kitchen.
The herb teas and liquors would come out. The coffee and French Press. It was all so good. The dinner party. A domestic play couples put on for friends. An improvisation. Ours was a favourite. No one ever turned down an invitation that I recall. Often colleagues would ask about these special times. The word of them spreading. We had parties too. It was good to entertain when young. Before the divorces and the babies.
I remember the Rosenthal and wonder where it is today. She took the Colleen crystal. I have no room in my life for that these days. I loved my library, floor to ceiling books. After the dinner party the men and I would stand in there and talk of the latest books we were reading. There always was talk of shop and politics but mostly we discussed ideas. The times of existentialism. Kafka Camus. Reading Dostoyevsky.
I remember the best nights we made love after the guests were gone and the dishes were stacked in the dishwasher. She was truly exquisite. I became one with her spirit, wild in the night, smooth as a lake at dawn. Her sensuality flowed out from her, forming a halo around us. Lying back looking up at the ceiling my heart beating, the musky scent of her beside me, her breath returning to normal, I felt samadhi. If I’d died in my sleep those nights it would be good, for I’d have known heaven on earth.
The dinner party, he fine food, the wine, the conversation, love making and sleep. Waking in the morning a little hung over. Reading the Manchester Guardian Weekly on the white couch in pyjamas and wool housecoat, I Tek ER watching her, fragile, move like a fawn across the room. She drank the coffee I’d made her holding the cup with both hands. I savoured her, reminiscing on the deliciousness of the evening. All of it but especially her.
That was the dinner party. Colleen Crystal and Rosenthal dinnerware.Candlelight and Epicurean. Philia and Eros love.
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