T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

Kyra appeared in the bathroom doorway. She was in a black slip and she'd put her hair up. “Hurry, can't you,” she said, “I need the mirror. And yes, we're taking the car, of course we're taking the car-with this wind? My hair would be all over the place.”

Jordan was in the living room, occupied with the tape-delayed version of the Macy's parade, Orbalina was scrambling to set the table and clean up the culinary detritus in the kitchen, and Kyra's mother-Kit-was in the guest room, freshening up. Delaney cracked the blinds. The day was clear, hot, wind-driven. “You've got a point,” he conceded.

Back then, he'd always worn a suit, tie and overcoat, even when he was five or six, as the yellowed black-and-white photos testified. But those were more formal times. Plus it was cold. There'd be ice on the lakes now and the wind off the Hudson would have a real bite to it. But what to wear today-to Dominick Flood's cocktail party? Delaney sank his face into the towel, padded into the bedroom on bare feet and pushed through the things in his closet. This was California, after all-you could wear hip boots and a top hat and nobody would blink twice. He settled finally on a pair of baggy white cotton trousers and a short-sleeve sport shirt Kyra had bought him. The shirt carved alternate patches of white and burgundy across his chest and over his shoulders, and in each burgundy patch the multiplied figures of tiny white jockeys leapt, genuflected and gamboled their way through a series of obscure warm-up exercises. It was California all the way.

There must have been a hundred people at Dominick Flood's, two o'clock in the afternoon, umbrellas flapping over the tables set up in the backyard. A string quartet was stationed under the awning that shaded the den, and the awning was flapping too. Most of the guests were packed in near the bar, where two men in tuxedos and red ties were manipulating bottles with professional ease. To the left of the bar, along the interior wall and running the length of the room, was a table laden with enough food for six Thanksgiving feasts, including a whole roast suckling pig with a mango in its mouth and fresh-steamed lobsters surrounded by multicolored platters of sashimi and sushi. Dominick himself, resplendent in a white linen suit that flared at the ankle to hide the little black box on loan from the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service, stood just inside the door, greeting guests, a long-stemmed glass in his hand. Delaney maneuvered Kyra and her mother through the crowd to introduce them.

“Ahh, Delaney,” Dominick cried, taking his hand theatrically even as he shifted his attention to Kyra and her mother. “And this must be Mrs. Mossbacher? And-?”

“Kit,” Kyra's mother put in, taking Flood's hand, “Kit Menaker. I'm visiting from San Francisco.”

The string quartet started up then, sawing harshly into something jangling and modern, their faces strained against the rush of wind and the indifferent clamor of the party, and Delaney tuned out the conversation. Kyra's mother, fifty-five, blond and divorced, with Kyra's nose and legs and an exaggerated self-presence, was the single most coquettish woman Delaney had ever known. She would tangle herself like a vine round Dominick Flood, whose incipient bachelorhood she could smell out in some uncanny extrasensory way, and she would almost certainly invite him to their little dinner party, only to be disappointed and maybe even a bit shocked by the black manacle on his ankle. And that, of course, would only whet her appetite. “Yes,” he heard Kyra say, “but I was just a little girl then,” and Kit chimed in with a high breathless giggle that was like a warcry.

Delaney excused himself and drifted off toward the food, picking at a few things here and there-he never could resist a bite of _ahi__ tuna or a spicy scallop roll if it was good, and this was very good, the best-but pacing himself for the feast to come. He smiled at a stranger or two, murmured an apology when he jostled a woman over the carcass of the pig, exchanged sound bites about the weather and watched the bartender pour him a beer, but all the while he was fretting. He kept envisioning the turkey going up in flames, the potatoes congealing into something like wet concrete, Jordan sinking into boredom and distracting Orbalina with incessant demands for chocolate milk, pudding, Cup O' Noodles, a drink of juice. And their guests. He hadn't yet seen the Jardines or the Cherrystones (though he could hear Jack Cherrystone's booming basso profundo from somewhere out on the back lawn), but he was sure they'd fill up here and push their plates away at dinner. Delaney wasn't very good at enjoying himself, not in a situation like this, and he stood there in the middle of the crush for a moment, took a deep breath, let his shoulders go slack and swung his head from side to side to clear it.

He was feeling lost and edgy and maybe even a bit guilty to be imbibing so early in the afternoon, even on a day dedicated to self-indulgence like this one, when he felt a pressure at his elbow and turned to see Jack, Erna and Jack Jr. arrayed in smiling wonder behind him. “Delaney,” Jack sang out, holding on to the last syllable as if he couldn't let it go, “you look lost.”

Jack was dressed. Three-piece suit, crisp white button-down shirt, knotted tie. His wife, a catlike bosomy woman who always insisted on the two-cheek, continental style of greeting and would clutch your shoulders with tiny fists until she'd been accommodated, as she did now, was dressed. Delaney saw that she was wearing a shroudlike evening gown, black satin, and at least sixty percent of her jewelry collection. Even Jack Jr., with his hi-tops, earrings and ridiculous haircut, was dressed, in a sport coat that accented the new spread of his shoulders and a tie he must have inherited _from__ his father.

“I _am__ lost,” Delaney admitted. He hefted the beer and grinned. “It's too early in the afternoon for me to be drinking-you know me and alcohol, Jack-and I've got a six-course dinner to worry about. Which you're going to love, by the way. Old New England right here in California. Or old New York, anyway.”

“Relax, Delaney,” Erna purred, “it's Thanksgiving. Enjoy the party.”

Jack Jr. gave him a sick grin. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the room. His voice cracked when he excused himself and drifted toward the suckling pig like some incubus of the food chain.

“I see from the letters this month you've been taking some heat on that coyote column,” Jack said, and a glass of wine seemed to materialize magically in his hand. Erna grinned at Delaney, waved at someone over his shoulder.

Leave it to Jack to bore right in. Delaney shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. There've been something like thirty letters, most of them critical, but not all. But that's something. I must have pushed some buttons.”

Actually, the response had surprised him. He'd never generated-provoked? — more than half a dozen letters before, all from literal-minded biologists taking issue with his characterization of the dusky-footed wood rat or his use of the common name of some plant in preference to the scientific. The readers, die-hard preservationists to the last man, woman and child, had seemed to feel he was advocating some sort of control on coyote populations, and though he'd been upset over Osbert when he wrote the piece, he didn't see the column as being at all environmentally incorrect. After the tenth letter had come in, he'd sat down and reread the column. Twice. And there was nothing there. They just weren't getting it-they weren't reading it in the spirit it was intended. He wasn't pushing for population controls-controls were futile and the historical record proved it. As he'd indicated. He was just elucidating the problem, opening up the issue to debate. Certainly it wasn't the coyotes that were to blame, it was us-hadn't he made that clear?