John Barth - The Development

"Just heard that Rita's blowing the bejesus out of Gulfport and Biloxi. I swear."

"Anybody want to bet they'll use up the alphabet this year and have to start over? Hurricane Aaron? Tropical Storm Bibi?"

"As in B. B. King?"

"C. C. Ryder? Dee Dee Myers?"

"Who's that?"

"E. E. Cummings?"

"Who's that? "

"I can't get over those poor bastards in New Orleans: Why didn't they get the hell out instead of hanging around and looting stores?"

"Did you hear the one about Bush's reply when a reporter asked his opinion of Roe versus Wade? 'I don't care how they get out of New Orleans,' says W, 'as long as it doesn't cost the government money.'"

'" George Newett, is it? At my age, I wish everybody wore nametags."

"On their foreheads. Even our grandkids."

" Love that headband, by the way, Pat. Right out of Antony and Cleopatra! "

"Why, thanks, Susan. Tom's orders are that if some joker says I've got my head up my asp, I should tell them to kiss it. Now is that nice?"

"Some cool djellaba you've got there, Dick."

"Caftan, actually. Some cool yacht you've got out there! Is that your RV too, the big shiny guy parked down by your dock?"

It was, Tom Hardison readily acknowledged. In simple truth, he and Pat enjoyed owning things. Owning and doing! "What the hell, you only get one go-round."

George Newett's wife (also from the College, and with a last name different from her husband's) explained to Susan, who had asked about Sam Bailey's earlier reference, that Trimalchio's Feast is a famous scene in the first-century Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter: an over-the-top gluttonous orgy that became a sort of emblem of the Roman Empire's decadence. "The mother of all toga parties, I guess. But talk about over the top…" She eye-rolled the sumptuous setting in which they stood. The two women agreed, however, that Patricia Hardison really did seem to be, in the best sense, patrician: upscale but good-humored, friendly, and without affectation; competent and self-assured but nowise overbearing; as Amanda Todd (i.e., Mrs. George Newett, poet and professor, from Blue Crab Bight) put it, superior, but not capital-S Superior.

"I like her," Susan reported to her husband when they next crossed paths in their separate conversational courses. "First poet I ever met. Is her husband nice?"

Dick shrugged. "Retired from the College. Describes himself as a failed-old-fart writer. But at least he's not intimidating."

"Unlike…?"

Her husband nodded toward their host, who was just then proclaiming to the assembled "friends, Romans, countrymen" that the dinner buffet (under a large tent out beside the pool deck) was now open for business, and that Jove helps those who help themselves. "After dinner, game and prize time!"

En route past them toward the bar, "Me," Sam Bailey said, "I'm going to have me another G and T. D'ja see their boat's name? Bit of a mouthful, huh?"

Sue hadn't. She worried aloud that Doc Sam was overdoing the booze, maybe on account of his wife's death-day anniversary; hoped he wouldn't be driving home after the party. "I doubt if he cares," Dick said. " I sure wouldn't, in his position." The name of the boat, by the way, he added, was Plaintiff's Complaint. Which reminded him: Since both Hardisons were lawyers, maybe he'd ask Emperor Tom about that "each survives the other" business in their wills, and Sue could ask her new pal Cleopatra. Or was it Sheba?

"Come on," his wife chided. "They're friendly people who just happen to be rich as shit. Let's do the buffet."

They did it, Sue chatting in her lively/friendly way with the people before and after them in the help-yourself line and with the caterers who sliced and served the roast beef au jus and breast of turkey; Dick less forthcoming, as had lately more and more become his manner, but not uncordial, and appreciative of his mate's carrying the conversational ball. Time was when they'd both been more outgoing: In their forties and fifties they'd had fairly close friends, of the sort one enjoys going out with to a restaurant or movie. By age sixty, after a couple of career moves, they had only office lunch-colleagues, and since their retirement not even those; just cordial over-the-fence-chat neighbors, golf/ tennis partners, and their seldom more than annually visited or visiting offspring. A somewhat empty life, he'd grant, but one which, as afore-established, they enjoyed more than not, on balance — or had enjoyed, until his late brooding upon it's inevitably approaching decline, even collapse, had leached the pleasure out of it.

So "I'll fetch us another glass of wine," he said when they'd claimed two vacant places at one of the several long tables set up under the tent. And added in a mutter, "Wish they had some red to go with this beef."

"Shh. Mostly club soda in mine, please." Then "Hi," she greeted the younger couple now seating themselves in the folding chairs across from theirs: "Dick and Sue Felton, from down the road."

"Judy and Joe Barnes," the man of them replied as they scanned one another's nametags: "Blue Crab Bight." He extended his hand first to seated Susan and then to Dick, who briefly clasped it before saying "Going for a refill; back in a minute."

Speaking for him, "Can he bring you-all anything?" Sue offered. "While he's at it?"

They were okay, thanks. He ought to have thought of that himself, Dick supposed, although he'd've needed a tray or something to carry four glasses. Anyhow, screw it. Screw it, screw it, screw it.

Some while later, after they'd fed themselves while exchanging get-acquainted pleasantries with the Barneses — Sue and Judy about the various neighborhoods of Heron Bay Estates, Dick and Joe about the effects of global warming on the Atlantic hurricane season and the ballooning national deficit's impact on the stock market (Joe worked in the Stratford office of a Baltimore investment-counseling firm)—"Aren't you the life of the party," Susan half teased, half chided her husband, who on both of those weighty questions had opposed Joe Barnes's guardedly optimistic view with his own much darker one. The two couples were now on their feet again, as were most of the other guests, and circulating from tent to pool deck and lanai.

"Really sorry about that, hon." As in fact he was, and promised her and himself to try to be more "up." For in truth he had enjoyed meeting and talking with the Barneses, and had had a good postdinner conversation with young Joe out by the pool while Susan and Judy visited the WC—"on the jolly subject of that Common Disaster provision in our wills."

"You didn't."

"Sure did — because he happened to mention that his clients often review their estate statements with him so he can help coordinate their investment strategies with their estate lawyer's advice, to reduce inheritance taxes and such."

"O joy."

"So naturally I asked him whether he'd heard of that 'each survives the other' business, and he not only knew right off what I was talking about but explained it simply and clearly, which Betsy Furman" — their estate lawyer—"never managed to do." What it came down to, he explained in turn to not-awfully-interested Susan, was that should they die "simultaneously," their jointly owned assets would be divided fifty-fifty, one half passing by the terms of his will, as if he had outlived her, and the other half by hers, as if she'd outlived him. "So you make us up another computer spreadsheet along those lines, and we can estimate each beneficiary's take."

"O very joy." But she would do that, she agreed, ASAP — and she appreciated his finally clarifying that little mystery. Nor had she herself, she would have him know, been talking only girlie stuff: When Pat Hardison had happened to speak of "her house" and "Tom's boat," upon Sue's questioning their hostess had explained that like most people she knew, the Hardisons titled their assets separately, for "death tax" reasons: Their Annapolis place was in Tom's name, this Stratford one in hers; same with the boat and the RV, the Lexus and the Cadillac Escalade, their various bank accounts and securities holdings. So much more practical, taxwise: Why give your hard-earned assets to the government instead of to your children? Weren't Sue and her husband set up that way?