Lee came not as Jay Gatsby, as you might have expected, but wearing jodhpurs and knee-high black leather riding boots, and carrying a polo stick: Tom Buchanan, Daisy's rich, polo-playing, washed-up playboy husband. I said nothing about the odd irony of their characters. What was there to say? But it was like the costumes were a bad omen.
The party was going swimmingly, maybe a dozen couples filling our living room and dining room and entry hall, Danny mixing drinks as everyone chatted about the costumes. Some of the fellows Danny worked with were already clinging together, slipping into shop talk, but Danny and I were working hard to introduce people to each other so that neighbors would mingle with Danny's work cohorts and nobody would be hanging at the edges of the rooms. Music was playing on the record player—a Beatles song, “Come Together”—but not too loudly, so people could converse, and we'd launched the first game, an icebreaker called “Adam and Eve” in which each guest has the name of one character from a pair pinned to his back (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, say, or President and Mrs. Nixon), and everyone asks each other yes-or-no questions—Am I male? Dead? A movie star?—the object being to be the first to figure out who you are and to find your mate.
The room was buzzing, lively, when the doorbell rang and I opened it to Ally and Jim—he in a long, embroidered white tunic and gathered white pants, she in a gauzy, old-fashioned dress with a sun hat and, incongruously, an umbrella opened over her head. She took one look at the crowded room and said in a bad British accent, “Not much sun this evening, is there, Doctor? Perhaps I shall fold my parasol?” and Jim answered, “I do think that is a fine idea, Miss Quested,” the lyrical Indian accent his own. Dr. Aziz from Forster's A Passage to India, and his Englishwoman friend-turned-accuser, Adela Quested. Could the English and Indian ever be friends?
I told Jim how happy I was to finally meet him, and I was so busy gathering the next two Adam and Eve labels and some safety pins and explaining the game to them that I didn't realize the lull of conversation around the room, people turning and looking, staring, then remembering their manners and turning away, still stealing glances.
Ally slipped her hand into Jim's as Danny handed one of his co-workers a drink and headed toward us, excusing himself to get through the crowd, intent on defusing the situation although he had no idea how.
Across the room, a neighbor Kath and Lee had been trying to make feel welcome whispered to them, “Is she with him?”
Lee, without missing a beat, said, “That's my li'l sis and her husband. Would y'all like to meet them?” The look on the fellow's face, Kath said later, was so dried-apple darn funny she nearly spit out a whole mouthful of bourbon.
The doorbell rang again, and Linda, dressed as Charlotte the Spider, complete with “Some Pig” written on her accompanying web, opened the door herself as Danny was still working his way toward us and I was pinning “Cleopatra” on Jim's back. She stepped inside, looking pretty hot even with eight hairy black legs. Jeff, who followed her in, was the most ridiculous pillow-fat Wilbur you have ever seen.
“Jim!” Linda said, oblivious to the awkwardness they'd stumbled into. “I'm so glad you're here. I'm Linda. And this is my husband, Jeff. But do call him Wilbur tonight.” Then to Ally, “Ally, you haven't met Wilbur, either! Wilbur, this is Ally.”
Jeff, as if he intuited the tension in the room, looked at them both and said, “Oink.”
People all across the room laughed despite themselves.
Jeff shook Jim's hand and cuffed him on the shoulder, as if they'd been pals forever. “Linda tells me you were a first-year at Michigan Law the year my brother-in-law graduated,” he said, and you could practically hear the minds in the room reconsidering Jim: he was a Michigan Law grad, and someone like Jeff wanted to be his friend. Even in that pig costume, Jeff was the kind of guy people instinctively admired.
“Oh,” Brett exclaimed. “I'm Marilyn Monroe! And Kath, I saw, you're Joe DiMaggio! We win!”
“We're in love, honey!” Kath said.
And again, everyone laughed, and after that we settled into a party that was blessedly lighthearted, blessedly fun.
KATH AND LEE had planned to go to the hospital party the next night in the same Gatsby costumes they'd worn to our party, so Kath was already in her Daisy dress again when Lee called to say there was a problem with one of his patients and he couldn't leave the hospital yet. He didn't think he'd be able to leave for hours. “We'll just skip the party. You don't mind, do you, Kath?” he said, and she said no, of course not, they were his friends anyway. The truth, though, was that she'd been looking forward to showing off her newly Weight Watchered figure to the men with whom Lee worked, to having them admire her in front of Lee.