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She paid no attention. She folded one arm on the edge of the table and gave them her dazzling wait-until-you-hear-this smile. “A friend of my mother's opened this lovely new lodge near Nairobi,” she began. When she saw a vague blahkness on several faces, she amended, “Nairobi... in Kenya. Africa. A group of us flew down to spend a week or so there. It was a super place. A lovely long veranda looked out on this beautiful swimming pool, and they served the best rum punches you can imagine.” She sketched out a pool and a platter of rum punches with a graceful gesture of her hand.
“The second day there, some of us piled into one of the Land-Rovers with our cameras and drove outside the city to take photographs. We'd been gone for about an hour when the driver rounded a bend—not going all that fast, actually —and this ridiculous warthog leaped out in front of us.” She paused for effect. “Well, there was this awful thump as the Land-Rover hit the poor creature and it dropped to the road. We all jumped out, of course, and one of the men, a really odious French cellist named Raoul”—she rolled her eyes so they would all understand exactly the sort of person Raoul had been—“brought his camera with him and took a photograph of that poor, ugly warthog lying in the road. Then, I don't know what made her do it, but my mother said to Raoul, ‘Wouldn't it be funny if we took a picture of the warthog wearing your Gucci jacket!’” Francesca laughed at the memory. “Naturally, everyone thought this was amusing, and since there was no blood on the warthog to ruin the jacket, Raoul agreed. Anyway, he and two of the other men put the jacket on the animal. It was dreadfully insensitive, of course, but everyone laughed at the sight of this poor dead warthog in this marvelous jacket.”
She grew vaguely aware that the area around them had fallen completely silent and that the slight blankness in the expressions of the people around the table hadn't altered. Their lack of response made her more determined to force them to love her story, to love her. Her voice grew more animated, her hands more descriptive. “So there we were, standing on the road looking down at this poor creature. Except—” She paused for a moment, caught her bottom lip between her teeth to build the suspense, and then went on, “Just as Raoul lifted his camera to take the picture, the warthog leaped to his feet, shook himself, and ran off into the trees.” She laughed triumphantly at the punch line, tilted her head to the side, and waited for them to join her.
They smiled politely.
Her own laughter faded as she realized they had missed the point. “Don't you see?” she exclaimed with a touch of desperation. “Somewhere in Kenya today there's this poor warthog running around a game preserve, and he's wearing Gucci!”
Dallie's voice finally floated above the dead silence that had irreparably fallen. “Yep, that sure is some story, Francie. What do you say you and me dance?” Before she could protest, he'd grabbed her none too gently by the arm and pulled her toward a small square of linoleum in front of the jukebox. As he began to move to the music, he said softly, “A general rule of living life with real people, Francie, is not to end any sentences with the word ‘Gucci.’”
Her chest seemed to fill up with a terrible heaviness. She had wanted to make them like her, and she'd only made a fool of herself. She had told a story that they hadn't found funny, a story that she suddenly saw through their eyes and realized she should never have told in the first place.
Her composure had been held together by only the lightest thread and now it broke. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice sounding thick even to her own ears. Before Dallie could try to stop her, she pushed her way through the maze of tables and out the screen door. The fresh air invaded her nostrils, its moist nighttime scent mingling with the smell of diesel fuel, creosote, and fried food from the kitchen at the back. She stumbled, still light-headed from the wine, and steadied herself by leaning against the side of a pickup truck with mud-encrusted tires and a gun rack on the back. The sounds of “Behind Closed Doors” drifted out from the jukebox.
What was happening to her? She remembered how hard Nicky had laughed when she'd told him the warthog story, how Cissy Kavendish had wiped the tears from her eyes with Nigel MacAllister's handkerchief. A wave of homesickness swept over her. She'd attempted to get through to Nicky again today on the telephone, but no one had answered, not even the houseboy. She tried to imagine Nicky sitting in the Cajun Bar and Grill, and failed miserably. Then she tried to imagine herself sitting at the foot of the Hepplewhite table in Nicky's dining room wearing the Gwynwyck family emeralds, and succeeded admirably. But when she imagined the other end of the table—the place where Nicky should have been sitting—she saw Dallie Beaudine instead. Dallie, with his faded blue jeans, too-tight T-shirts, and movie star face, lording it over Nicky Gwynwyck's eighteenth-century dinner table.
The screen door banged, and Dallie came out. He walked to her side and held out her purse. “Hey, Francie,” he said quietly.
“Hey, Dallie.” She took the purse and looked up at the night sky spangled with floating stars.
“You did real fine in there.”
She gave a soft, bitter laugh.
He inserted a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “No, I mean it. Once you realized you'd made a jackass of yourself, you behaved with a little dignity for a change. No scenes on the dance floor, just a quiet exit. Everybody was real impressed. They want you to come back in.”
She deliberately mocked him. “Not hardly.”
He chuckled just as the screen door banged and two men appeared. “Hey, Dallie,” they called out.
“Hey, K.C., Charlie.”
The men climbed into a battered Jeep Cherokee and Dallie turned back to her. “I think, Francie, that I don't not like you as much as I used to. I mean, you're still pretty much a pain in the ass most of the time and not, strictly speaking
, my kind of woman, but you do have your moments. You really went after that warthog story in there. I liked the way you gave it everything you had, even after it was pretty obvious that you were digging a real deep grave for yourself.”
A clatter of dishes sounded from inside as the jukebox launched into the final chorus of “Behind Closed Doors.” She dug the heel of her sandal into the hard-packed gravel. “I want to go home,” she said abruptly. “I despise it here. I want to go back to England where I understand things. I want my clothes and my house and my Aston Martin. I want to have money again and friends who like me.” She wanted her mother, too, but she didn't say that.
“Feeling real sorry for yourself, aren't you?”
“Wouldn't you if you were in my position?”
“Hard to say. I guess I can't imagine being real happy living that kind of sybaritic life.”
She didn't precisely know what “sybaritic” meant, but she got the general idea, and it irritated her that someone whose spoken grammar could most charitably be described as substandard was using a word she didn't entirely understand.
He propped his elbow on the side of the pickup. “Tell me something, Francie. Do you have anything remotely resembling a life plan stored away in that head of yours?”
“I intend to marry Nicky, of course. I've already told you that.” Why did the prospect depress her so?
He pulled out the toothpick and tossed it away. “Aw, come off it, Francie. You don't any more want to marry Nicky than you want to get your hair mussed up.”
She rounded on him. “I don't have much choice in the matter, do I, since I don't have two shillings left to rub together! I have to marry him.” She saw him opening his mouth, getting ready to spew out another one of his odious lower-class platitudes, and she cut him off. “Don't say it, Dallie! Some people were brought into this world to earn money and others were meant to spend it, and I'm one of the latter. To be brutally honest, I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to support myself. You've already heard what happened when I tried acting, and I'm too short to make any money at fashion modeling. If it comes down to a choice between working in a factory and marrying Nicky Gwynwyck, you can bloody well be certain which one I'm going to choose.”
He thought about that for a moment and then said, “If I can make two or three birdies in the final round tomorrow, it looks like I'll pick up a little spare change. You want me to buy you that plane ticket home?”
She looked at him standing so close to her, arms crossed over his chest, only that fabulous mouth visible beneath the shadowing bill of his cap. “You'd do that for me?”
