THE S CLUB

“Yes, Mrs. Quail” replied the Maitre’d. A polite, pale and sad-eyed man who had relinquished his ego years ago. “We have your party in one of the private rooms upstairs,” he said in a voice that was once trained for the stage.

The restaurant was once a rambling manor house where at one time one of the great families of the North Shore who had sat on the porch and sipped summer cocktails, hunted fox, defended Theodore Roosevelt but defiled his cousin Franklin. The patrons remained resolutely truthful, diluted, and anglophiled. Now the place was teeming with computer programmers, peptic Jewish lawyers, families bitching and dining together. Single and sexually active people were trying to enjoy their meal as they worried about the impression they were making and what the bill would be. Everyone was launching themselves into a well-deserved alcohol laced Friday night.

At the top of the stairs Boom and I were ushered down a hall. To the right was party held by chattering Nippon businessmen while across the hall, a middle aged woman in an Ann Taylor suit sat drinking and thinking in the lavender light.

“You bastard, Neil,” rung down the corridor and into my subconscious. It was a shriek that could have only come from my childhood. Boom and I looked at one another, as we had heard exploding howls and firecrackers in the twilight many years before.

“Fucker,” Farley bellowed.

We quickened our gait. “They behaved so well at the funeral but it was just a matter of time before,” said Boom under her breath,” that they would start fighting like a real family again.”

There was a crash of glass.

“Don’t waste good scotch like that,” said a voice that could have only been Neil’s.

Boom opened the door and pivoted around graciously to the Maitre’d. “That will be all.” She then swung back equally dramatic to the problem at hand. Neil and Farley faced one another in a stupefied standoff.

“Mother,” said Farley. “Neil is such a gross beast. He called me ah...” She stopped. There was nothing her mother could do when she young and certainly there was nothing she could now. “He called me a cunt just because Daddy left me the...” she stopped, ”oh forget it.” She then started laughing because she was suddenly dizzy at how stupid all this was. Neil was getting at her, the same way he always did as a child simply because she was the favored child. Yet there were some notes in her laughter that hit a few self-loathing tones that made celebrated her futile mirth at this folly. “Oh fuck,” she said, “I am glad I threw that scotch at you. You deserve it. I hope it splashed all over you and it costs you a fortune to clean.”

“I had thought,” announced Boom, “that we could have at least one quiet family dinner together. At least on the night of your father’s burial.”

“Fat chance, Blondie,” retorted Neil, he, then turned to me, “nice to see you, scum bag.”

“Same here,” I said.

I felt a warmth graze on my face and mien. Slowly I turned like the magnetic pull of a compass and peered into Farley’s almond eye gaze. Her eyes still glistened from her sibling’s rage. She blinked; I am all right now Edmund, really I am. In her eyes was her history; she attended a small and expensive junior college outside of Boston in which she fell into a number of bad relationships. These liaisons were either with revolutionaries in which she would come home on Easter vacation and expound what a beautiful country Red China was. Or else entanglements were with drug addicts which were equally as rewarding. However, once graduated, she really had no other recourse to take but to take her scant typing skills and enroll at Katy Gibbs. Once she was able to type seventy words a minute, she landed a job working for a fat, friendly, fatherly, upper West Side shrink who also wrote a very famous self-help book Losing and Loving It! After six months of working together, they began to seeing each other, and a year after leaving his wife; they were married. At this time, Boom had sold her home on Long Island and moved into the Ponce De Leon condos in Boca Raton.

Farley had a hypnotic quality to her. Feline and volatile. She could turn on a turn of a phrase, a look, and especially a sigh. Her long brown hair was now curled into a horrible red razzmatazz permanent. She smiled with open lips now displayed white and perfect caps. She hugged me with fond memories because I was one of the few moments in her childhood that didn’t overtly malign her.

Over the shoulder I noticed Neil who had not grown much taller than when he was fourteen. His baby fat had matured into cholesterol rotundity. His hair was blond and brushed back. He carried himself with a self-assured vanity buttressed by strong ego. He drank from his glass with a manner that was forever haughty and bellicose; now twenty years later.

There was a slap on my back, ”Edmund,” he said. Farley released me. I turned and there, gulp, was Chris. Chris was a little shorter than me. He was bald and sported an Abraham Lincoln-like beard. He winked at me like he was Mickey Mouse.

I remembered when his cocker spaniel, Wimpy the Second, was run over on the highway. He was a running and screaming paroxysm with the dog flopping dead in his arms. He was a suburban Pieta’. The dog funeral was solemn one; held behind the azalea bush by the swimming pool. By that time, Chris had quieted down because Boom had the wisdom to dole out a much-needed Valium. The next day, Chris and Boom shopped around and found Wimpy the Third.

“Sorry about your father,” I said.

Chris’ eyes were grey and they were open like an open oyster with two grey eye-lid shells. His eyes swam in a ponderous, steadfast yet blank gaze. His aura glared because he was the only one in the room who consciously perfected one; he was all things meditative and monotonous.

“Thank you,” he answered. He then added, “Edmund.” On my name, an elfin smile arose, that, at age seven, procured popsicles. That smile at age seventeen, procured pussy and an extra “taste” from drug dealers. Now this same smile was smug and ensconced in the wisdom and glory of Jesus Christ.

“Peace be with you,” he said.

“Oh fuck yourself, Fatty,” said Neil. “Edmund let’s have a drink.”

I poured myself a stiff one, I turned to Neil. “I am sorry about your father.”

“Don’t be,” he answered.

“I know when my father died,it was....”

“Don’t say another word about it,” he said.” I am sick of it. It is over. He is dead. I am glad he is out of pain. But for the most part, it is over and I am going to inherit a little bit of money.”

He stopped. ”O.K.”

“O.K.” I answered.

“It ’s fine,” he said sounding that it wasn’t fine at all. “He wasn’t a father, he was a grandfather.” He guffawed. “I am sure my mother is all up in arms that she isn’t in the will. But, hell, she bled him dry alive.”

I inhaled and laughed uncomfortably at Neil’s innate ability at tapping into the root of the most ugly truth. He was still unsettling to be with, so, I turned the conversation in what I hoped would be easier going. “Well,” I asked, “how is Kuwait?”

“The part I live in,” he said adjusting his weight to a contrapuntal position “is nice. Nice and protected little enclave for the Standard Oil people. I have a nice house, pool, two kids and a wife,” he said in a tone that was as if he was reading off a list. “And naturally I have a...” he started to say, but I cut him off with another domestic question.

“How old are the children?”

“Oh those shit asses?” he snorted. “Six and eight, or something like that. Old enough to go to school but not to be sent away.”

“Well how is the oil business?”

“It is not the Seventies any more. We need big Mid East crises to get the oil business back to where it was. But hell, the oil business will not always be the oil business, anyway. Inevitably, it will go from Standard Oil to Standard Energy which is always the Standard Got You by the Balls.”

I nodded.

“But I got it nice. Good job and the place itself is really O.K. I mean, the Arabs can be bought off and it is like a suburb of San Diego except there is camel shit on the street.” He shook his glass. “I am getting another.” He crossed the room to the table where the bottle, ice, and glasses were.

Farley stood with a drink in her head: willowy in the wind.

“I am sorry about your father,” I said.

“You know,” she said. “I don’t even think he is dead yet. I saw him in the casket and I saw the casket being lowered in the ground. I know he is dead but I actually haven’t realized it yet.”

“Oh,” I uttered.

“I think tomorrow I’ll get up in the morning and I’ll dial his number at home and I’ll think that I’ll realize that I can’t. Or ever will. And then I will cry. A long hard luxurious cry. I really haven’t been able to cry yet. I have been coping. Coping with the kids. They are back in the city with their father now. Coping at the funeral. Coping with my mother. Coping like I am on Automatic Pilot. I am driving on instinct alone. But give me time to think and then I will fall to pieces.” Farley’s eyes watered, “when I have to finally accept that I will never see him again.”

“Well I saw him last night,” announced Chris who seemed to suddenly appear.

“Who?” said Farley.

“Dad,” he said.

Farley and I looked at each other.

“He woke me up and he was at peace, sort of, Jesus was with him.” He sipped his mineral water. “Ever since my coma,” he said “coma” like it was a new drug, ”I see Jesus all the time.”

“Oh,” I sighed.

“And the word is good,” said Chris.

“Please Chris,” said Farley with tears of pity and aggravation, “we have heard this all before.”

“But Jesus is here,” he said pointing to the floor. ”And his presence should be made known.”

“Fine,” said Farley dismissing him.

“By the way, Dad is very very tired and shocked like we all are. He is so confused. He still walks through doorways when he really doesn’t have to, he does stuff like that all the time. Even he doesn’t know that he is dead.”