Margaret saw Edward walking toward her. He put his hand on her cheek as he passed by but said nothing, and she felt almost forlorn. If Till had seated him next to Margaret, she wouldn't have to worry about making smooth flourishes of talk, or trying to follow it. She wouldn't have to be clever. She would listen instead, and she would hear Edward. His loud, exuberant talk would swoop her up, filling her deliriously with information and observation and line after line of American poetry.
But Edward was destined for other parts, and Margaret sighed and took stock of her situation. On her left side, a highly perfumed girl slid in. Across from her sat a man who looked familiar, but perhaps it was just his eyeglasses; next to him was a woman whom Margaret might or might not have known; and so on around the large table, until Margaret met the pale blue eyes of her husband and she smiled. Some woman or other was next to Edward, then Till's appalling husband smirking and nodding ("You've created an entirely new vocabulary, a new critical language..."). Really, Margaret thought, Art's habit of thrusting greatness about, as if he had just this instant, and that instant, too, as if every instant he had just discovered a continent and were planting the flag, was becoming increasingly trying. Margaret detested Art and she liked Till very much, in the way that one likes a friend and no longer knows why. That Art and Till came together as a package was unfortunate, but they did come together and always would. Couples were miraculous, odd, ill-formed things that grew without reason and without grace, like double ears of corn. Still, she thought, Till should discipline him.
Beside Art sat Lily, a friend of Till's from college whom Margaret hadn't seen in years but remembered liking. With her short, tousled black hair and red, pouty lips, she looked like a girl on the cover of a 1950s bohemian paperback.
According to Till, Lily had traveled with one or two hangers-on, a motley collection of chic but unproductive artists, ever since college. The most loyal of them was with Lily tonight, a wiry middle-aged man named Pepe Pican who exhibited such contempt for his surroundings at all times that all he could bring himself to do was dine. He dined wherever and whenever he or anyone he knew was invited.
"Hi," Margaret said to Lily. "Hello, Pepe."
Pepe looked at her darkly and turned back to his plate.
"Margaret! I haven't seen you in, I don't know, a century! I had a dream about you last week!" Lily said, then turned back to the man next to her.
All around Margaret there were faces, more faces, smiling and laughing, their mouths opening and closing, easily, in the formation of words, the mystery of conversation. Margaret wanted to cry. She tried to recall which Eastern European government had fallen that day. Was it really Romania? She wished she was at a dinner party in Romania, beneath the family's single forty-watt light bulb, a spotty boiled potato on her plate. What a trivial person you are, Margaret, she thought. All the Romanians want to be here, where we're free. Free to be trivial.
Margaret put her chin in her hand and watched Till. Till reached for her wine, and a joyous rattling chorus rose up, a choir of bangle bracelets. Her jacket was iridescent green, her long crimped hair jet black, her teeth white and large. At the head of the table, she jingled and sparkled as a goddess would, omniscient, powerful, confident.
Till Turner was first and foremost a hostess, but she found, time to write, too. She was a playwright whose enormously popular body of work concentrated on small groups of women sitting in large moving vehicles—there was an airplane play, another on a bus, a train, a ferry—jouncing along, chewing the old bones of their lives until whole skeletons of marriage and divorce and aged parents and teenage children, an ossuary of relationships, lay gleaming white around them, clickety-clack.