DINNER CONVERSATION
We sit three couples as we always do, boy girl, boy girl, with no married couples next to each other. When we were first married, I didn’t like this. Now I don’t care.
It is 1998, and this New York City restaurant just recently opened. It’s a happening kind of place populated by the cool and the young—part bar, part restaurant, part lounge. Red walls make you feel both sexy and regal. Music beats in the background. It’s the kind that seeps into your skin and pulses under your bones.
We sit at a large round table and a waitress, her hair tied back in a ponytail, approaches us. She isn’t wearing any makeup, and she exudes a wholesome sexuality that, I have to admit, is alluring. She hands each of us a menu and lights a candle in the center of the table. She moves like an exotic bird, graceful and deliberate. I have just laid eyes on this woman, and already I am threatened by her natural beauty and her presence. She stands beside me, both feet grounded.
I play a game. I spot a person, and based on how they look, what they wear, and how they stand, I draw up a whole life for them: if they’re married or not, where they live, what their apartment or house looks like, and what they do for a living. I decide that she’s an aspiring actress, living in an apartment in the Village, venturing toward her dream.
Marisa, a Monica Lewinsky look-alike, sits to the right of my husband, Dylan. They went to high school together, and, when she married Eric, Dylan marched in their wedding. When Dylan and I started dating, he wanted me to get to know them. He didn’t care what his mother thought about me; he wanted Marisa to like me. And she did.
Dana, who is tall and blonde, sits to Dylan’s left. She just got back from a spa in California and she’s lost weight. She looks too skinny to me—the bones in her wrist protrude like large marbles. But who am I to judge? Dylan says you can never be too skinny; it’s like being too rich.
I watch my husband as he entertains. I pay special attention as he leans in to say something to Dana. She throws her head back and laughs.
Dylan and I have been friends with Dana and Peter for close to fifteen years. We met them at a parenting class we took before the birth of our first child. Dylan was complaining about having to be there on a Monday night during football season, and Peter overheard him. They took off early and went to a bar across the street to watch the end of the game.
We’ve all been friends ever since. We know this is unusual. About ten years ago, five years into the friendship, five years’ worth of dinners and vacations and cocktail parties, we named ourselves: we are “The Sixers.”
When the waitress returns, she places a basket of bread on our table. Marisa, who is facing the wall, turns her body dramatically, her long black hair swinging over her shoulder. It isn’t often that Marisa doesn’t sit facing out, able to see the crowd, and she wants everyone at our table to notice her strain.
“What can I get you?” the waitress asks.
I know what Dylan is thinking. He gets that look on his face, the one I recognize all too well. The one he, at one time, reserved for me. His eyes glimmer like two perfect diamonds. “What’s your name?” he asks the waitress.
“Judy,” she says, smiling, her teeth lined up like a row of miniature marshmallows.
“Hi, Judy,” Dylan flirts. “Nice to meet you. We’ll have two bottles of Pellegrino for the table, and I’ll have a Glenrothes, neat.”
Judy takes our drink order, and Dylan looks at me. “You’re going to eat that?”
I slip the breadstick out of my mouth and scan the table to see who has heard this. I’ve gained weight, and it bothers Dylan that his wife is getting fat. I’m not sure how I feel about it. At first it was a surprise, but now I kind of like the extra weight. It makes me feel stronger, more grounded. But Dylan has no patience for fat. Fat, in his view, is a complete betrayal of a body, and it represents a person without discipline or self-respect. Pregnancy is no exception. And while I felt full and complete, voluptuous, and even beautiful as I carried my three children to term, I knew that Dylan couldn’t look at me.
After I gave birth to David, our first, just a week after his bris, Dylan replaced the whole milk with skim, and every product in our cabinet said fat free. I suppose he wanted back the wife he’d married, but I could no longer play that part.
I glance at Eric, who is sitting to my right. He told me I looked beautiful during my last pregnancy. You have to love a guy who thinks a pregnant woman is beautiful. Dylan professes that a man who compliments a pregnant woman is blind, stupid, or simply playing his cards right, knowing that this is a temporary condition, and that in a matter of months the woman will give birth, remember the compliment, and be forever grateful.
“I have a question,” I say, reaching for my glass of red wine. “If you had a flaw, something that bothered you about yourself, like a really big nose, a bald spot, or one eyebrow, would you do something to fix it?” I bring the glass to my lips and take a sip, glancing at my friends over the rim.
“Well, it depends what you’re talking about exactly,” Peter says. He covers one eyebrow with a hand like a patch and says, “I mean I couldn’t very well walk around like this.”
“Not like that,” I giggle, and I glide my finger across my forehead, demonstrating. “I mean a unibrow. You know, one big brow. No space in between.” Doubled over, I laugh some more. The sound emerges from inside me uncontrollably. This has happened before, the giving of myself so completely that I know if I don’t concentrate, I could pee.
I’ve taken to asking questions like this lately. My friends like it. “On a scale of one to ten,” I ask, “what do you give her?” I point to a tall blonde at the table next to us. Or I might ask, “If you were stuck on a desert island with one person, and you were going to have to live with that person alone forever, who would you absolutely never sleep with? Even if it meant no sex forever.”
We all work to entertain each other like television. Last month at a party, we played the Newlywed Game. Our questions ranged from dull to spectacular: from “What color is your spouse’s toothbrush?” to “What’s your favorite part of your spouse’s body?” and finally, “If your sex life is candy, would you describe it as a Zero Bar, Fun Dip, a Blow Pop, or a Marathon Bar?”
Occasionally I like it. But there’s a line somewhere, a boundary that we cross sometimes, not knowing it until it’s too late. And then it’s simply too late, and you can’t go back.
A cell phone rings, and Dylan reaches for his most recent toy. “Hello,” he says, getting up from the table. As he strolls away, mouthing “Excuse me,” I watch him walk and I’m still taken by his good looks. Sometimes I stand back and observe him objectively, as if he isn’t mine. And I see what other women see, and I remember how I felt the first time I met him. It was at a party. I spotted him from across the room. Every girl there wanted to know who he was. And so when he strutted over to me, picked me out of everyone there, I was completely flattered. I felt like a child who’d just won a prize at a carnival and thought that if I didn’t lean on something, I’d fall.
Studying how he was dressed, I imagined him to be a successful businessman living in Manhattan. I was right. Charmed, I listened intently as he told me about his travels to Europe. But what really got me, what drew me in, was that he’d just returned from a rafting trip in Chile where he’d camped out, pitched his own tent, hiked, and mountain climbed. He was a doer, and I liked that. He didn’t sit around watching life go by; he lived it. I was completely attracted to him, and I stepped in closer as he talked. Without my consent, my hips swayed to the music, and it became difficult to speak through my continuous smile.