The Development Page 5

  "Et tu, Brute!" Sue called out (she really had been doing her homework; that "Bru-tay" phrase sounded familiar, but Dick couldn't place it). The Gibsons turned, laughed, waved, and waited; the foursome then joked and teased their way up the stone walk beside the "Eurocobble" driveway to #12's massive, porte-cochèred main entrance: a two-tiered platform with three wide, curved concrete steps up to the first marble-tiled landing, and another three to the second, where one of the tall, glass-paned, dark-wood-paneled double doors stood open and a slender, trim-toga'd woman, presumably their hostess, was greeting and admitting several other arrivals.

  "A miniskirted toga?" Hank Gibson wondered aloud, for while the costume's thin white top had a fold-and-wrap toga look to it, below the elaborately figured multipaneled belt were a short white pleated skirt and sandal lacings entwined fetchingly almost to her knees. "Amo amas amat!" he then called ahead. The couple just entering turned and laughed, as did the hostess. Then Sam Bailey—whom the Feltons now saw stationed just inside the door, in a white terry-cloth robe of the sort provided in better-grade hotel rooms, belted with what appeared to be an army-surplus cartridge belt and topped with a defoliated wreath that looked a bit like Jesus' crown of thorns—called back, "Amamus amatis amant!" and gestured them to enter.

  Their sleek-featured hostess—more Cleopatran even than Sue, with her short, straight, glossy dark hair encircled by a black metal serpent-band, it's asplike head rising from her brow as if to strike—turned her gleaming smile to them and extended her hand, first to Susan. "Hi! I'm Patsy Hardison. And you are?"

  "Sue and Dick Felton," Sue responded, "from around the bend at Ten-Twenty Shoreside? What a beautiful approach to your house!"

  "And a house to match it," Dick added, taking her hand in turn.

  "I love your costumes!" their hostess exclaimed politely. "So imaginative! I know we've seen each other at the Club, but Tom and I are still sorting out names and faces and addresses, so please bear with us." As other arrivals were gathering behind them, she explained to all hands that after calling out their passwords to Sam Bailey, whom she and Tom had appointed to be their Centurion at the Gate, they would find nametags on a table in the foyer, just beyond which her husband would show them the way to the refreshments. "Passwords, please? Loud and clear for all to hear!"

  "De gustibus non est disputandum!" Sue duly proclaimed, hoping her hosts wouldn't take that proverb as any sort of criticism. Dick followed with "Ad infinitum!"—adding, in a lower voice to Sam, who waved them in, "or ad nauseam, whatever. Cool outfit there, Sam."

  "The Decline and Fall of the You Know What," their friend explained, and kissed Sue's cheeks. "Aren't you the femme fatale tonight, excuse my French. Ethel would've loved that getup."

  "I can't believe she's not in the next room!" Sue said, hugging him. "Sipping champagne and nibbling hors d'oeuvres!"

  "Same here," the old fellow admitted, his voice weakening, until he turned his head aside, stroked his thin white beard, and cleared his throat. "But she couldn't make it tonight, alas. So carpe diem, guys."

  Although they weren't certain of the Latin, it's general sense was clear enough. They patted his shoulder, moved on to the nametag table on one side of the marble-floored, high-ceilinged entry hall, found and applied their elegantly lettered and alphabetically ordered stick-on labels, and were greeted at the main living room step-down by their host, a buff and hearty-looking chap in his late fifties or early sixties wearing a red-maned silver helmet, a Caesars Palace T-shirt from Las Vegas, a metallic gladiator skirt over knee-length white Bermuda shorts, and leather sandals even higher-laced than his wife's on his dark-haired, well-muscled legs. With an exaggeratedly elaborate kiss of Susan's hand and a vise-hard squeeze of Dick's, "Dick and Susan Felton!" he announced to the room beyond and below, having scanned their name stickers. "Welcome to our humble abode!"

  "Some humble," Dick said, his tone clearly Impressed, and Sue added, "It's magnificent!"

  As indeed it was: the enormous, lofty-ceilinged living room (What must it cost to heat that space in the winter months? Dick wondered), it's great sliding glass doors open to a large, roofed and screened terrace ("Lanai," Susan would later correct him), beyond which a yet larger pool/patio area extended, tastefully landscaped and floodlit, toward the tidal covelet where the Hardisons' trawler yacht was docked. A suitably toga'd pianist tinkled away at the grand piano in one corner of the multi-couched and -cocktail-tabled room; out on the lanai a laureled bartender filled glasses while a minitoga'd, similarly wreathed young woman moved among the guests with platters of hors d'oeuvres.

  "Great neighborhood, too," Dick added, drawing Sue down the step so that their host could greet the next arrivals. "We know you'll like living here."

  With a measured affability, "Oh, well," Tom Hardison responded. "Pat and I don't actually live here, but we do enjoy cruising over from Annapolis on weekends and holidays. Y'all go grab yourselves a drink now, and we'll chat some more later, before the fun starts, okay?"

  "Aye-aye, sir," Dick murmured to Susan as they dutifully moved on. "Quite a little weekend hideaway!"

  She too was more or less rolling her eyes. "But they seem like a friendly enough couple. I wonder where the money comes from."

  From their husband-and-wife law firm over in the state capital, one of their costumed neighbors informed them as they waited together at the bar: Hardison & Hardison, very in with the governor and other influential Annapolitans. What was more, they had just taken on their son, Tom Junior, as a full partner, and his younger sister, just out of law school, as a junior partner: sort of a family 4-H Club. And had the Feltons seen the name of that boat of theirs?

  "Not yet."

  "Stroll out and take a look." To the bartender: "Scotch on the rocks for me, please."

  Susan: "White wine spritzer?" And Dick: "I'll have a glass of red."

  The barman smiled apologetically. "No reds, I'm afraid. On account of the carpets?" And shrugged: not his house rule.

  "Mm-hm." The living room wall-to-wall, they now noted, was a gray so light as to be almost white. Poor choice for a carpet color, in Sue's opinion—and for that matter, what color wouldn't be stained by a spilled merlot or cabernet? But de gustibus, de gustibus. "So make it gin and tonic, then," Dick supposed.

  "Ars longa!" a late-arriving guest called from the hallway.

  Sam Bailey, behind them, asked the bartender for the same, predicted that that new arrival was George Newett, from the College, and called back "Vita brevis est!" His own vita without Ethel, however, he added to the Feltons, had gotten longa than he wanted it to be. Raising his glass in salute, "Fuck life. But here we are, I guess. E pluribus unum. Shall we join Trimalchio's Feast?"

  The allusion escaped them, but to make room for other thirsters they moved away from the bar, drinks in hand, toward the groups of guests chatting at the hors d'oeuvres tables at the lanai's other end, and out on the pool deck, and in what Susan now dubbed the Great Room. As Sam had foretold, once the admission ritual was done, the affair settled into an agreeable Heron Bay neighborhood cocktail party, lavish by the standards of Rock-fish Reach and Oyster Cove if perhaps not by those of Spartina Pointe, and enlivened by the guests' comments on one another's costumes, which ranged from the more or less aggressively non-compliant (the bearded fellow identified by Doc Sam as "George Newett from the College" wore a camouflage hunting jacket over blue jeans, polo shirt, and Adidas walking shoes; his wife an African dashiki), to the meant-to-be-humorous, like Tom Hardison's casino T-shirt and Dick Felton's caftan-cum-machete, to the formally elaborate, like Patricia Hardison's and some others' store-bought togas or gladiator outfits. Although not, by their own acknowledgment, particularly "people" people, husband and wife found it a pleasant change from their customary routines to chat in that handsome setting with their neighbors and other acquaintances and to meet acquaintances of those acquaintances; to refresh their drinks and nibble at canapés as they asked and were asked about one another's health, their former
or current careers, their grown children's whereabouts and professions, their impression of "houses like this" in "neighborhoods like ours," their opinion of the Bush administration's war in Iraq (careful stepping here, unless one didn't mind treading on toes), and their guesses on whether Chesapeake Bay, in places still recovering from the surge floods of Tropical Storm Isabel two years past, might yet be hurricaned in the current hyperactive season.

  "Just heard that Rita's blowing the bejesus out of Gulfport and Biloxi. I swear."

  "Anybody want to bet they'll use up the alphabet this year and have to start over? Hurricane Aaron? Tropical Storm Bibi?"

  "As in B. B. King?"

  "C. C. Ryder? Dee Dee Myers?"

  "Who's that?"

  "E. E. Cummings?"

  "Who's that?"

  "I can't get over those poor bastards in New Orleans: Why didn't they get the hell out instead of hanging around and looting stores?"

  "Did you hear the one about Bush's reply when a reporter asked his opinion of Roe versus Wade? 'I don't care how they get out of New Orleans,' says W, 'as long as it doesn't cost the government money.'"

  '"George Newett, is it? At my age, I wish everybody wore nametags."

  "On their foreheads. Even our grandkids."

  "Love that headband, by the way, Pat. Right out of Antony and Cleopatra!"

  "Why, thanks, Susan. Tom's orders are that if some joker says I've got my head up my asp, I should tell them to kiss it. Now is that nice?"

  "Some cool djellaba you've got there, Dick."

  "Caftan, actually. Some cool yacht you've got out there! Is that your RV too, the big shiny guy parked down by your dock?"

  It was, Tom Hardison readily acknowledged. In simple truth, he and Pat enjoyed owning things. Owning and doing! "What the hell, you only get one go-round."

  George Newett's wife (also from the College, and with a last name different from her husband's) explained to Susan, who had asked about Sam Bailey's earlier reference, that Trimalchio's Feast is a famous scene in the first-century Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter: an over-the-top gluttonous orgy that became a sort of emblem of the Roman Empire's decadence. "The mother of all toga parties, I guess. But talk about over the top ..." She eye-rolled the sumptuous setting in which they stood. The two women agreed, however, that Patricia Hardison really did seem to be, in the best sense, patrician: upscale but good-humored, friendly, and without affectation; competent and self-assured but nowise overbearing; as Amanda Todd (i.e., Mrs. George Newett, poet and professor, from Blue Crab Bight) put it, superior, but not capital-S Superior.

  "I like her," Susan reported to her husband when they next crossed paths in their separate conversational courses. "First poet I ever met. Is her husband nice?"

  Dick shrugged. "Retired from the College. Describes himself as a failed-old-fart writer. But at least he's not intimidating."

  "Unlike ...?"

  Her husband nodded toward their host, who was just then proclaiming to the assembled "friends, Romans, countrymen" that the dinner buffet (under a large tent out beside the pool deck) was now open for business, and that Jove helps those who help themselves. "After dinner, game and prize time!"

  En route past them toward the bar, "Me," Sam Bailey said, "I'm going to have me another G and T. D'ja see their boat's name? Bit of a mouthful, huh?"

  Sue hadn't. She worried aloud that Doc Sam was overdoing the booze, maybe on account of his wife's death-day anniversary; hoped he wouldn't be driving home after the party. "I doubt if he cares," Dick said. "I sure wouldn't, in his position." The name of the boat, by the way, he added, was Plaintiff's Complaint. Which reminded him: Since both Hardisons were lawyers, maybe he'd ask Emperor Tom about that "each survives the other" business in their wills, and Sue could ask her new pal Cleopatra. Or was it Sheba?

  "Come on," his wife chided. "They're friendly people who just happen to be rich as shit. Let's do the buffet."

  They did it, Sue chatting in her lively/friendly way with the people before and after them in the help-yourself line and with the caterers who sliced and served the roast beef au jus and breast of turkey; Dick less forthcoming, as had lately more and more become his manner, but not uncordial, and appreciative of his mate's carrying the conversational ball. Time was when they'd both been more outgoing: In their forties and fifties they'd had fairly close friends, of the sort one enjoys going out with to a restaurant or movie. By age sixty, after a couple of career moves, they had only office lunch-colleagues, and since their retirement not even those; just cordial over-the-fence-chat neighbors, golf/ tennis partners, and their seldom more than annually visited or visiting offspring. A somewhat empty life, he'd grant, but one which, as afore-established, they enjoyed more than not, on balance—or had enjoyed, until his late brooding upon it's inevitably approaching decline, even collapse, had leached the pleasure out of it.

  So "I'll fetch us another glass of wine," he said when they'd claimed two vacant places at one of the several long tables set up under the tent. And added in a mutter, "Wish they had some red to go with this beef."

  "Shh. Mostly club soda in mine, please." Then "Hi," she greeted the younger couple now seating themselves in the folding chairs across from theirs: "Dick and Sue Felton, from down the road."

  "Judy and Joe Barnes," the man of them replied as they scanned one another's nametags: "Blue Crab Bight." He extended his hand first to seated Susan and then to Dick, who briefly clasped it before saying "Going for a refill; back in a minute."

  Speaking for him, "Can he bring you-all anything?" Sue offered. "While he's at it?"

  They were okay, thanks. He ought to have thought of that himself, Dick supposed, although he'd've needed a tray or something to carry four glasses. Anyhow, screw it. Screw it, screw it, screw it.

  Some while later, after they'd fed themselves while exchanging get-acquainted pleasantries with the Barneses—Sue and Judy about the various neighborhoods of Heron Bay Estates, Dick and Joe about the effects of global warming on the Atlantic hurricane season and the ballooning national deficit's impact on the stock market (Joe worked in the Stratford office of a Baltimore investment-counseling firm)—"Aren't you the life of the party," Susan half teased, half chided her husband, who on both of those weighty questions had opposed Joe Barnes's guardedly optimistic view with his own much darker one. The two couples were now on their feet again, as were most of the other guests, and circulating from tent to pool deck and lanai.

  "Really sorry about that, hon." As in fact he was, and promised her and himself to try to be more "up." For in truth he had enjoyed meeting and talking with the Barneses, and had had a good postdinner conversation with young Joe out by the pool while Susan and Judy visited the WC—"on the jolly subject of that Common Disaster provision in our wills."

  "You didn't."

  "Sure did—because he happened to mention that his clients often review their estate statements with him so he can help coordinate their investment strategies with their estate lawyer's advice, to reduce inheritance taxes and such."

  "O joy."

  "So naturally I asked him whether he'd heard of that 'each survives the other' business, and he not only knew right off what I was talking about but explained it simply and clearly, which Betsy Furman"—their estate lawyer—"never managed to do." What it came down to, he explained in turn to not-awfully-interested Susan, was that should they die "simultaneously," their jointly owned assets would be divided fifty-fifty, one half passing by the terms of his will, as if he had outlived her, and the other half by hers, as if she'd outlived him. "So you make us up another computer spreadsheet along those lines, and we can estimate each beneficiary's take."

  "O very joy." But she would do that, she agreed, ASAP—and she appreciated his finally clarifying that little mystery. Nor had she herself, she would have him know, been talking only girlie stuff: When Pat Hardison had happened to speak of "her house" and "Tom's boat," upon Sue's questioning their hostess had explained that like most people she knew, the Hardison
s titled their assets separately, for "death tax" reasons: Their Annapolis place was in Tom's name, this Stratford one in hers; same with the boat and the RV, the Lexus and the Cadillac Escalade, their various bank accounts and securities holdings. So much more practical, taxwise: Why give your hard-earned assets to the government instead of to your children? Weren't Sue and her husband set up that way?

  "I had to tell her I wasn't sure, that that was your department. But my impression is that everything we own is in both our names, right? Are we being stupid?"

  Any estate lawyer would likely think so, Dick acknowledged. Betsy Furman had certainly encouraged bypass trusts, and had inserted that "each survives the other" business into their wills as the next best thing after he'd told her that they were uncomfortable with any arrangement other than joint ownership, which was how they'd done things since Day One of their marriage. He was no canny CPA or estate lawyer or investment geek, one of those types who tell you it's foolish to pay of your mortgage instead of claiming the interest payments as a tax deduction. Probably they knew what they were talking about, but it was over his head and not his and Susan's style. "If the kids and grandkids and the rest get less of the loot that way than they'd get otherwise, they're still getting plenty. Who gives a shit?" What he really cared about, he reminded her, was not their death, much less it's payoff to their heirs, but their Last Age and their dying. It required the pair of them in good health to maintain their Heron Bay house and grounds and the modest Baltimore condo that they'd bought as a city retreat when they'd retired, sold their dear old townhouse, and made Stratford their principal address. The day either of them joined the ranks of the more than temporarily incapacitated would be the end of life as they knew and enjoyed it; neither of them was cut out for long-term caregiving or caregetting. A Common Disaster, preferably out of the blue while they were still functioning, was the best imaginable scenario for The End: Let them "each survive the other" technically, but neither survive the other in fact—even if that meant making the necessary arrangements themselves.