"Later, Tamara. It's a long story." With which he lapsed silent. Very
out of character.
About then everybody else started coming up, reasonably on time since
Tam was known far and wide to hate the concept of "fashionably late."
Also, she was a great cook. Bottles of bargain wine with the prices
scraped off collected on the table in the foyer, and coats amassed in
the second bedroom. Given that everybody knew everybody, it was mostly
elbow patches and open collars. Only the women had bothered to dress.
Simpson from Computer Science, whose wife worked in Admissions; Gail
Wallace from Business, whose pudgy, skirt- chasing husband had guided
two companies into bankruptcy; Alice and Herman Knight, who both taught
in Economics (she was dean of the undergraduate college) and published
as a team; Kabir Ali from Mathematics and his browbeaten little Iranian
wife Shirin who seemed frightened of the world--and her husband. Only
Dave had the nerve to be late and hold things up.
While they waited, they knocked off a little Scotch and white wine,
trashed the administration, and complained about all the committees on
which they were being pressured to serve. Around a quarter to nine Dave
finally appeared, sandy curls askew to let her know where he'd been.
She didn't even bother offering him a drink, just announced that
everything was ready so let's adjourn to the dining room.
There're two kinds of dinners: ones that follow the rules, and ones
that break them all. Tarn's were the latter. This time it would be real
tallow candles and everybody's wine, including her own. Somehow her
craziness always seemed to click; they inevitably came back for more.
This time she'd decided to pay an offhand tribute to autumn and
American cuisine. Cheddar cheese soup, marinated Ottomanelli's quail
broiled with fresh sage, sweet potato fritters and baby peas, homemade
corn bread, and then, as a change of pace (keep 'em off balance), an
endive salad spiked with coriander. Dessert was an apple- walnut
casserole, washed down with pots of McNulty's dark Haitian coffee. At
the end she produced an ancient cognac you could inhale forever. By
eleven-thirty everybody thought they'd just ascended to paradise.