Guess who?

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

We had company for dinner last night. There was Roz's friend Polly because her husband, Brainerd, left for Florida right after the first of the year and hasn't come back yet; nor is it clear when he will. True, he keeps inviting her to join him. Why she hasn't Roz isn't saying. And another friend I'd never heard of before Roz announced the guest list. And Tom Nashe.
        She brought us, Ted and me and her, around the kitchen table. We are going to have a dinner party, she announced, "a small one," she assures us, the three of us and three others in this case. (Sometimes "a small one" means the three of us and five others.) There is nothing for me to do. For Ted, there is vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning the downstairs bathroom, after which he nor I is to use it. She has the rest under control, the table and the wine and the menu: roasted salmon with yogurt and cucumber raita, wild rice and corn pudding, gingered green beans with almond butter, fruit salad, croissants; pecan pie for dessert.
        This other friend is Beatrice, not Bea! A painter and poet and painter-poet, who arrives wearing a tweed cloak with a matching flat cap. The cloak she surrenders to Ted, but not the cap, which she wears throughout the evening. Polly comes in jeans and a sweatshirt.
         A painter-poet; that is, she uses words in her paintings. She writes on the paintings with paint.
        She uses words a lot, it turns out. She likes to explain what she is working on. She has pictures on her phone; the explanations have illustrations. The pictures mingle interiors and exteriors, side by side a kitchen and a house, for example, with labels for some of the elements, "table" - "window" - "sink" - "door," and a fragment of verse, "The beginning of yesterday came . . . " She explains how the paintings with words "mean."
        But there are other things she can explain as well, tucking the food in her mouth into her cheek, so she can get the conversation back on task, directing it with impatient, extended sibilants.

Roz smiles, asks questions. Polly is mesmerized. And confused. And asks questions. Ted says nothing. I am not hearing as well as I would like, so I may have some of this wrong. When I looked more than usually confused, Tom tried to fill me in, but in a whisper, which I couldn't hear either.

As I said, he was our sixth, Tom Nashe. He drove down from Lexingford, presumably for balance, so we would be three girls and three boys. An added benefit: he doesn't drive after dark, so he spent the night. That meant that while Ted helped Roz clean up after, he and I could explain to each other how Roz collects her friends, how she can like - how she can genuinely like - such unlikely people. "Including us," Tom had to say.
        He is, I think it is fair to say, smitten with her, with Roz. You can hear it, his smittenness, when after going through the menu, the fish, the pudding, the beans, all of it near perfection, the pie a dream, he adds, "And she doesn't dislike anyone!" She doesn't only suffer fools gladly; she delights in them; she loves them. "Including us." You can hear it, his smittenness, when after an outburst like that, Saint Roz, who likes us all and can cook . . . He stops and says nothing for several seconds as if breathless. So, you feel as if you need to jump in: "How 'bout those Niners!?" Or, "How 'bout that Pascal? Did you see that he edged Montaigne and will meet Descartes in the finals?"
        When you do, jump in, changing the subject, he gets it. "I was going on again, wasn't I? Oh well," he admits. "Good thing I'm past it," he says, though he's not. But it's a crush anyway, nothing to do or to be done either with or about it. That's what he means when he calls himself past it. He is only wishing he could be more like her, though he is as tolerant of individuals, however wrongheaded and however bombastic about it, as any man I have ever known, I think. He hates their wrongheadedness, he despises their bombast; but, after all, they can't help it. Even the hypocrites - they can't help it. Look at their families of origin, look where they grew up, where they went to college; look at who they hang out with. It's no wonder they have dug a moat and built a fortress around their brains long since.
        Tom has a lot to say after having spent the last two hours listening to Beatrice. But he doesn't say a word about her.

Ted and Roz come in from the kitchen. "What are you guys up to?" she asks.
        "We are up to our waists, our paps, our necks, our ears with encomia for our hostess!" Tom says.
        "Encomia, is it?" Roz asks.
        "From the Greek meaning 'celebrations,'" Tom answers.
                                                                                                           02/04/24

 Check out the correction
on the previous post.