THE DINNER PARTY by Sarah Blackman
She has prepared the dinner, but the guests are late. The foods sit in their various serving bowls, wrapped snugly in foil. In rotation, she tents each foil top just slightly to let out steam and condensation. The kitchen fills with intermingled smells.
On the third rotation, the guests arrive. It feels to her as if she has been standing in the kitchen for days – chopping and slicing, trimming, basting, brazing, deglazing pans, beating together eggs and sugar, eggs and sugar, eggs and sugar until stiff peaks hang like mock icicles from the end of her whisk.
“I’m so sorry we’re late,” says Diane. Her husband stands in the doorway behind her holding a serving platter draped in a dinner-party themed kitchen towel. The towel is patterned with martini glasses and open mouths laughing. There is a woman’s mouth and a man’s mouth. The woman-mouths are misprinted so their lipstick hangs just below their lip-lines like carnelian ghosts and the man-mouths are crowned with trim black moustaches which remind her viscerally of Diane’s husband, though he is clean shaven and smiles at her, nods toward the bottle of wine he has clamped in the crook of his arm.
She reminds herself only of what is directly in front of her, that this is a failing of hers, and they all tumble into the kitchen to eat toast points crowned with various savory spreads, drink cocktails and watch as she puts the finishing touches on a dish she has set aside, unfinished, for just this purpose.
“I’ve always believed the chive was an immature onion,” says Diane. She laughs. “Can you believe until this very moment that’s what I’ve always thought?”
It is her husband, the host, who has set Diane straight on this matter. He has just now emerged from the back of the house, where it seems to her he has loitered almost exclusively for the past many months, and stands blinking against the low light of the kitchen. He is wearing his work clothes, the shirt ripped at the shoulder seam so she can see a pale diamond of his skin, and has tucked his spectacles into his shirt pocket.
“That’s alright,” her husband says, clearing his throat first, a little hoarse, “that’s your prerogative.”
Everyone laughs in a sincere way. They are good friends; it is alright to admire each other. Diane whose hip curves like a cold moon at the top of her jeans. Diane’s husband who seats himself at the table, his plate bare before him, and smiles at her as she adds the chives, at last, to the dish.
Then, the eating begins. There are many dishes and they pass them around and around. The plates are soon slick with juices and beside them her husband and Diane’s husband build growing cairns of bones. Diane picks up two bones from her husband, the host’s, plate and slips them into the sides of her mouth so they bob like whiskers. The bones are translucent, sliver thin. This is an old joke among them. They are celebrating something – Diane is pregnant again or they have bought a larger house – and Diane’s husband toasts to the celebration, to the meal. He rinses his mouth with wine and moves his chair closer to her, the hostess, so when he turns to smile at her she can feel the heat coming off his dark face, waves of heat, and sees, she believes, that his dark eyes are blacker than she had ever thought them to be. They shine in his face like polished beads and when he blinks she believes she can still see them shining.
“Another toast!” says her husband, the host, and when he reaches across the table to clink his glass the tear in his shirt gaps and yaws like a tiny, diamond-shaped mouth. There is a smell from him. A russet smell like the one in the back of their house, which reminds her of rust. Something has rusted. The pipes? Something below the house crumbling so what is contained within it pours out. It is a problem they were supposed to have dealt with a long time ago. “To us!” her husband says, draining the wine from his glass.
It has gotten louder in the room. Someone has turned the music on, turned it up. Diane’s husband passes his wife another chop, a little pot of mustard and the mustard paddle with which to slather. She herself is full, she is sure of it, but fills her plate again – root and seed, muscle, flower.
“It’s all so delicious,” Diane says. “Incomparable!”
Diane is very white and taut, she realizes. Even whiter and more smoothly muscled than she had remembered from their uncountable dinner parties of the past. She seems to glow, in fact, incomparably, and is hard to look at as she holds her naked fork in the air, dips it as if conducting the music. Her husband, the host, emits a sudden squeal and scrabbles at the table. He has dropped his spoon into the soup, cannot find it. His eyes have grown very small or his face very large. His eyes are almost totally enfolded by his face and he cannot see. His roving hands are clumsy, spill wine and gravy, and Diane’s husband dips his sleek head to his plate in seeming sympathy. He turns to face her so she alone can see he is laughing, his black eyes wet with it, and he unfurls his quick tongue so it just grazes her wrist, long and light and dry.
The music is too loud! She cannot hear what anyone is saying. But there is still dessert to be had – the masterpiece – and still in the center of the table Diane’s dish covered with its towel which, now that she notices, has darkened at the center as if sopping something, wicking it away.
“What is this music?” she asks. “If it’s Scheherazade that was my grandmother’s favorite,” but even as she says it she is rising, moving into the kitchen. The dessert has been chilling in the refrigerator and when she sees it again she is relieved to find it still pristine, unaged. It stands alone on the center shelf, the cool of the fridge a blue shadow below its peaks. She feels a great love for this dessert, almost a swooning for it. She lifts it as she might an animal, a docile one, though one whose habits remain unsure. The music swells and peters. It is Scheherazade, she is certain, and she turns to the table, the dessert held before her, smiling so that her teeth will show, but what of it? They are friends. It is a party.
And yet, what is this? She sees Diane has uncovered her dish. The men are cheering, her husband tilting his head back, holding a fold of flesh up and away from his eye with one blunt hand. Diane’s husband has laid his head fully on the table as if to get a better view of her dish, which is, she will admit, incomparable – dark, rich, heaving slightly in the very bright light that pours from Diane’s hands, spills from the deep cleft of her neckline.
“Oh, no darling,” says Diane, motioning her forward. “Yours is too beautiful. You mustn’t mind. You don’t mind? Put it here, right on the table. Let’s look at them together. Cheers.”
But it is really too late. She knows that. She can picture how her dessert will look on the table, littered now with dishes, stained, the tablecloth askew and in some places tattered. She has failed her dessert, failed its dear crevices, its frail, tremulous desires. She has failed the party, she sees, as she notices a cobweb hung thick and cloistered between the spires of the chandelier, a rung hanging down from the back of Diane’s husband’s chair and the borders of the rug unraveling, each thread faded to the same murky brown. There is nothing for it. She holds the dessert out in front of her.
“It had no chance, poor thing,” she thinks, stepping forward. Diane’s dish has somehow slipped to the side of the plate and now hangs there, pattering a warm liquid onto the table cloth. It seems to elongate as she watches, as if seeking purchase, and then there is a terrible clamor of drums, trumpets, fifes. Something insurmountable has happened to the music, and the light grows so bright, so piercing, that all she can see are Diane’s husband’s eyes, black, unblinking, tilted toward her as if sharing a joke.
Sarah Blackman is the author of the fiction chapbook Such A Thing As America (Burnside Review). Her stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, American Fiction, Web Conjunctions, Missouri Review, and The Fairy Tale Review.