Z by Therese Anne Fowler

Author:Therese Anne Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

26

Sara Murphy looked sad as we all filed into the dining room for the season’s final Dinner-Flowers-Gala, as she called these more formal events. The men were in tails, the women in slim, ankle-length summer gowns in all the colors of a Mediterranean summer. Sara stood next to her chair and sighed. “One final gathering—”

“Before the next one.” Gerald kissed her forehead and took his seat at the opposite end of the table.

Present in this, their rented Antibes home, were Scott and me; Dick and Alice Lee; Pablo without Olga—they were on the outs; Pauline Pfeiffer, a friend of Sara’s who worked as a writer for Vogue magazine; Dottie Parker; and Linda without Cole, who, she said, was “traveling.” She said it like that, with quotation marks in her voice; no one asked her what she meant.

The weather had been perfect for us all week: clear skies, hot afternoons, the sea still warm enough for the children to spend all day splashing and playing. We’d toured the grounds and house that were slowly becoming the grand estate that the Murphys would name Villa America. In the evenings, the adults gathered for charades and bridge and a game Scott invented, whereby I sat at the piano while he named a theme, and then each of us had to ad-lib a story and sing it to one of the half dozen tunes I could play by heart. Every time I opened the keyboard, I apologized in advance: “Y’all will forgive me for not being Cole.”

“And forgive me as well,” Scott would say, but I knew he preferred it this way. Without Cole, the spotlight was all his.

Gerald’s invented cocktails were a real help with our game, which Linda named “The Terribly Witty Ditties.” Gerald poured the drinks while Scott exhorted everyone to come up with ever-more-creative rhymes. Then, when our imaginations could no longer meet the challenge, Scott would single out one or another of the group for Twenty Questions, which, depending on how much he’d had to drink, might go on well past twenty and into the night. His subjects always cooperated; who doesn’t love being found unendingly interesting?

Now Sara sat down at the table across from Gerald, saying, “It might be months before we see these friends again.”

At her right, Dick Myers reached over to Scott next to him and thumped him on the back. “One can hope.”

“Have I exhausted your talents?” Scott asked.

“Prob’ly their patience,” I said fondly.

“When he has exhausted yours,” Pablo told me in heavily accented English, “you must come to mi estudio en Paris, sí? I will exhaust you all about art.”

Sara put her hand on mine. “You must. And visit Gerald’s studio, too. But see Rome’s art first, then bring them every question that comes to mind. You won’t find better mentors than this pair.”

* * *

It was while standing in front of the Temple of Vesta that I first had the pain, a funny twinge low in my pelvis, near my right hip. Women

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