The Second Part of Chapter 5: Yes!

At the garden party, the foccacia, which was the first item on the glass-bottomed table, was the first gone, and Pia quickly replaced it with a tray of assorted cheeses: Swiss, havarti, Saint-André, Oka, and Brie.

Laura looked at Belinda. She looks worse than usual, she thought. Normally, for this sort of party, she would be smiling in her way, well made-up, with not a hair out of place. Now, however, she looked somewhat dishevelled, sweaty, and her lustrous cocktail dress––she had a habit of dressing provocatively––had several wrinkles and sweat stains. She was usually up on the latest gossip, which in some respects was nice; who would want to be in the dark about friends? Tonight, however, she had a spritzer before she started talking about people––tonight it was about her ex-husband Kale––and the quality of her gossip was therefore noticeably lacking. She already knew that Belinda thought of Kale as “that asshole”, and she had no particular interest in the factoid that Christine––or whoever, the name was slurred––had planted chrysanthemums. It was additionally unfortunate for her that when she was drunk, she tended to lose control over the volume of her voice. Apart from Belinda’s gossip about Christine, Christine herself was a very nice person; like Belinda, she was single, but unlike Belinda, did not engage in gossip to the extent that it became tasteless or rude; whatever she said about others portrayed them in a good light.

Like Laura, Eunice also thought well of Christine. She kept her home spotlessly clean, seemed to know how to manage her money, and in every way was what a typical woman would strive to be, and could plausibly do so; she was intelligent, had a good job as a teacher, and was sensible in almost every way; all that was missing was a man. Eunice had a friend named Zachary, an accountant with a small firm that did her books, who would be a good match for her; she should introduce them to each other sometime, she thought.

In Laura’s mind, all the news was with James and Clarissa, rather than anybody Belinda was interested in discussing; there was definitely something going on. She could see the pair standing under the arbour, looking doe-eyed at each other. It seemed sappy, and was such a match made in heaven. They were both smart, they were both economists, and they talked each other to death on topics that only they could find interesting. They would probably have a pair of beautiful kids; they were meant for each other, she thought, as she had over the past four months that they had been dating. Something similar had happened between David and Pia three years back, as related to her by the elder Mr. Vanetti at their wedding, though she had also heard that the elder Mr. Vanetti had played matchmaker, something in which he turned out to have prodigious skill. She stared at James and Clarissa longingly, and thought, “I want a man like that.”

“Pardon?” It was Kevin; she hadn’t just thought that. Kevin also watched James and Clarissa as they went inside, giggling and telling each other small jokes.

“Oh, hello Kevin. I didn’t say anything,” said Laura, which left Kevin entirely unconvinced.

“You didn’t say that you wanted a man like James?”

At this point, Belinda butted in, and Kevin could clearly tell she was hammered: “Yes, just like I didn’t say that I was single and longing for partnership. I also neglected to ask you––“

“Sorry, I’m gay.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Belinda, not entirely taking in what he had said. He’s gay? She thought, well, so am I! It’s a very gay party, after all.

“What I wanted to ask was: are you enjoying this party?”

“Um, yes,” said Kevin, who wished to be talking to someone else just then, to a person like Rick, or Laura before they had been interrupted, for instance; Rick, like himself, was an economist, but unlike him, was a monetarist after the fashion of Milton Friedman; they always had robust debates. He was not at all surprised when Belinda and Kale divorced; the two were very much unlike each other, and he was disappointed that Kale rather than Belinda had moved to Calgary, because he preferred Kale; the good thing about the divorce was that they had harmed no children in the process, as their marriage had been a childless one and, Kevin suspected, sexless. The case was different for his friend Ken, who had just finished a very messy settlement; he had custody of the children, while his ex-wife got the car, which was a Porsche, and thus considered a prize by both of them. They could not agree on the house, which they had to sell, with half the money going to each, while Viola carted off many other possessions, leaving Ken to purchase new furniture; this had been in lieu of them dealing with the divorce amicably. It was a pity about the house: it was a very old and elegant house, a relic from the Victorian era, and a builder quickly snapped it up in a desire for a much more modern house in a cubist fashion. Cubism was nice, but a cubist house would look out of place surrounded by three-storey buildings that had been standing since the 1880s. He also felt for the ex-wife, who was a nice person when not around Ken; they simply disagreed with each other, which they found out too late, only after they had two children, who he thought were unjustly alienated from their mother. He knew all of this due to a close relationship with the man; he lived on Cooper, a block over from Kevin, and the relationship went back to their university days; Ken shared many details with Kevin, though Kevin felt uncomfortable in that some of this information verged closely on gossip, with which he took an ambivalent attitude. His worries were mostly because when gossip spreads around, it looks too much like the game of broken telephone played by schoolchildren.

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