John Barth - The Development

" Et tu, Brute! " Sue called out (she really had been doing her homework; that "Bru-tay" phrase sounded familiar, but Dick couldn't place it). The Gibsons turned, laughed, waved, and waited; the foursome then joked and teased their way up the stone walk beside the "Eurocobble" driveway to #12's massive, porte-cochèred main entrance: a two-tiered platform with three wide, curved concrete steps up to the first marble-tiled landing, and another three to the second, where one of the tall, glass-paned, dark-wood-paneled double doors stood open and a slender, trim-toga'd woman, presumably their hostess, was greeting and admitting several other arrivals.

"A miniskirted toga?" Hank Gibson wondered aloud, for while the costume's thin white top had a fold-and-wrap toga look to it, below the elaborately figured multipaneled belt were a short white pleated skirt and sandal lacings entwined fetchingly almost to her knees. " Amo amas amat! " he then called ahead. The couple just entering turned and laughed, as did the hostess. Then Sam Bailey — whom the Feltons now saw stationed just inside the door, in a white terry-cloth robe of the sort provided in better-grade hotel rooms, belted with what appeared to be an army-surplus cartridge belt and topped with a defoliated wreath that looked a bit like Jesus' crown of thorns — called back, " Amamus amatis amant! " and gestured them to enter.

Their sleek-featured hostess — more Cleopatran even than Sue, with her short, straight, glossy dark hair encircled by a black metal serpent-band, it's asplike head rising from her brow as if to strike — turned her gleaming smile to them and extended her hand, first to Susan. "Hi! I'm Patsy Hardison. And you are?"

"Sue and Dick Felton," Sue responded, "from around the bend at Ten-Twenty Shoreside? What a beautiful approach to your house!"

"And a house to match it," Dick added, taking her hand in turn.

"I love your costumes!" their hostess exclaimed politely. "So imaginative! I know we've seen each other at the Club, but Tom and I are still sorting out names and faces and addresses, so please bear with us." As other arrivals were gathering behind them, she explained to all hands that after calling out their passwords to Sam Bailey, whom she and Tom had appointed to be their Centurion at the Gate, they would find nametags on a table in the foyer, just beyond which her husband would show them the way to the refreshments. "Passwords, please? Loud and clear for all to hear!"

" De gustibus non est disputandum! " Sue duly proclaimed, hoping her hosts wouldn't take that proverb as any sort of criticism. Dick followed with " Ad infinitum! " — adding, in a lower voice to Sam, who waved them in, "or ad nauseam, whatever. Cool outfit there, Sam."

"The Decline and Fall of the You Know What," their friend explained, and kissed Sue's cheeks. "Aren't you the femme fatale tonight, excuse my French. Ethel would've loved that getup."

"I can't believe she's not in the next room!" Sue said, hugging him. "Sipping champagne and nibbling hors d'oeuvres!"

"Same here," the old fellow admitted, his voice weakening, until he turned his head aside, stroked his thin white beard, and cleared his throat. "But she couldn't make it tonight, alas. So carpe diem, guys."

Although they weren't certain of the Latin, it's general sense was clear enough. They patted his shoulder, moved on to the nametag table on one side of the marble-floored, high-ceilinged entry hall, found and applied their elegantly lettered and alphabetically ordered stick-on labels, and were greeted at the main living room step-down by their host, a buff and hearty-looking chap in his late fifties or early sixties wearing a red-maned silver helmet, a Caesars Palace T-shirt from Las Vegas, a metallic gladiator skirt over knee-length white Bermuda shorts, and leather sandals even higher-laced than his wife's on his dark-haired, well-muscled legs. With an exaggeratedly elaborate kiss of Susan's hand and a vise-hard squeeze of Dick's, " Dick and Susan Felton! " he announced to the room beyond and below, having scanned their name stickers. "Welcome to our humble abode!"

"Some humble," Dick said, his tone clearly Impressed, and Sue added, "It's magnificent! "

As indeed it was: the enormous, lofty-ceilinged living room (What must it cost to heat that space in the winter months? Dick wondered), it's great sliding glass doors open to a large, roofed and screened terrace ("Lanai," Susan would later correct him), beyond which a yet larger pool/patio area extended, tastefully landscaped and floodlit, toward the tidal covelet where the Hardisons' trawler yacht was docked. A suitably toga'd pianist tinkled away at the grand piano in one corner of the multi-couched and — cocktail-tabled room; out on the lanai a laureled bartender filled glasses while a minitoga'd, similarly wreathed young woman moved among the guests with platters of hors d'oeuvres.

"Great neighborhood, too," Dick added, drawing Sue down the step so that their host could greet the next arrivals. "We know you'll like living here."

With a measured affability, "Oh, well," Tom Hardison responded. "Pat and I don't actually live here, but we do enjoy cruising over from Annapolis on weekends and holidays. Y'all go grab yourselves a drink now, and we'll chat some more later, before the fun starts, okay?"

"Aye-aye, sir, " Dick murmured to Susan as they dutifully moved on. "Quite a little weekend hideaway!"

She too was more or less rolling her eyes. "But they seem like a friendly enough couple. I wonder where the money comes from."

From their husband-and-wife law firm over in the state capital, one of their costumed neighbors informed them as they waited together at the bar: Hardison & Hardison, very in with the governor and other influential Annapolitans. What was more, they had just taken on their son, Tom Junior, as a full partner, and his younger sister, just out of law school, as a junior partner: sort of a family 4-H Club. And had the Feltons seen the name of that boat of theirs?

"Not yet."

"Stroll out and take a look." To the bartender: "Scotch on the rocks for me, please."

Susan: "White wine spritzer?" And Dick: "I'll have a glass of red."

The barman smiled apologetically. "No reds, I'm afraid. On account of the carpets?" And shrugged: not his house rule.

"Mm- hm. " The living room wall-to-wall, they now noted, was a gray so light as to be almost white. Poor choice for a carpet color, in Sue's opinion — and for that matter, what color wouldn't be stained by a spilled merlot or cabernet? But de gustibus, de gustibus. "So make it gin and tonic, then," Dick supposed.

" Ars longa! " a late-arriving guest called from the hallway.

Sam Bailey, behind them, asked the bartender for the same, predicted that that new arrival was George Newett, from the College, and called back " Vita brevis est! " His own vita without Ethel, however, he added to the Feltons, had gotten longa than he wanted it to be. Raising his glass in salute, "Fuck life. But here we are, I guess. E pluribus unum. Shall we join Trimalchio's Feast?"

The allusion escaped them, but to make room for other thirsters they moved away from the bar, drinks in hand, toward the groups of guests chatting at the hors d'oeuvres tables at the lanai's other end, and out on the pool deck, and in what Susan now dubbed the Great Room. As Sam had foretold, once the admission ritual was done, the affair settled into an agreeable Heron Bay neighborhood cocktail party, lavish by the standards of Rock-fish Reach and Oyster Cove if perhaps not by those of Spartina Pointe, and enlivened by the guests' comments on one another's costumes, which ranged from the more or less aggressively non-compliant (the bearded fellow identified by Doc Sam as "George Newett from the College" wore a camouflage hunting jacket over blue jeans, polo shirt, and Adidas walking shoes; his wife an African dashiki), to the meant-to-be-humorous, like Tom Hardison's casino T-shirt and Dick Felton's caftan-cum-machete, to the formally elaborate, like Patricia Hardison's and some others' store-bought togas or gladiator outfits. Although not, by their own acknowledgment, particularly "people" people, husband and wife found it a pleasant change from their customary routines to chat in that handsome setting with their neighbors and other acquaintances and to meet acquaintances of those acquaintances; to refresh their drinks and nibble at canapés as they asked and were asked about one another's health, their former or current careers, their grown children's whereabouts and professions, their impression of "houses like this" in "neighborhoods like ours," their opinion of the Bush administration's war in Iraq (careful stepping here, unless one didn't mind treading on toes), and their guesses on whether Chesapeake Bay, in places still recovering from the surge floods of Tropical Storm Isabel two years past, might yet be hurricaned in the current hyperactive season.