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Back from Vermont.

The trip was… interesting. I had adventures.

Did I have fun?

That I don’t actually know.

###

Aimee

Aimee is utterly miserable.

I don’t think she knows how miserable she is. I couldn’t figure out whether that’s because she’s in complete denial or is singularly deficient in emotional intelligence, or possibly both.

But the plush landing seems to have come at a cost, and that cost is this: She is finally installed in the lavish mansion of her dreams—with its three bedroom suites and its Rosa Porrino marble kitchen backsplashes—surrounded by wealthy neighbors. But the neighbors all have other homes in New York or Boston, often more than one other home: They come up occasionally for long extended weekends, during which time (Aimee told me gaily) it’s a mad dash of dinner parties and closet cleaning. (Oh, Aimee! I never wear that Chanel! Would you like it?)

The rest of the time, she is in that house alone with her first husband, whom she recently remarried and whom I didn’t dislike but who certainly is—a charitable description!—very odd.

And they only have one car! The car is a Mercedes, but I am thinking, Who the fuck wants a Mercedes in rural Vermont! Do Mercedes have four-wheel drives? Can you even put snow tires on a Mercedes?

The one-car thing means they either go out together or one of them goes out, and the other stays home in total isolation in the grand house.

Peter, the husband, goes out daily to walk four miles along the Battenkill River, a walk that often spreads across late mornings and entire afternoons, leaving Aimee utterly alone.

On the second of the nights I’d stayed there, Peter had actually left the house early in the morning to help out a relative who lives in New Hampshire—a mitzvah! Peter is a weird guy but not a bad guy.

I arrived late in the afternoon.

Aimee had apparently spent the entire day fuming because they were out of milk.

Now! There is a small country store maybe half a mile down the road from La Grande Maison, and if milk was the only thing in the world that would make Aimee happy, I didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t walk down the hill to buy some. Gorgeous day, invigorating exercise.

But after listening to her complain for five minutes, I got it.

Formulating such bitter, bordering on spiteful complaints has actually become Aimee’s hobby.

Peter

Peter has a bizarre accent.

Since Aimee is a Brit, and I knew they had married in the U.K. the first time, I’d assumed he was British, too.

“Where did you grow up?” I asked merrily over dinner.

When I’m visiting people who don’t love me, I assume—not unnaturally—that my function is to entertain, which, lemme tell you, in La Grande Maison was hard work! My only party trick is a ceaseless stream of (hopefully) amusing and engaging babble. But Peter was such a silent human that I felt almost reproachful directing the beams of the babble machine in his direction, rather as though I was extracting one of his molars without going to dentistry school for four years first.

The alternative, though, was to leave Peter out of the conversation entirely. Which Aimee seemed perfectly comfortable doing.

“In New Jersey,” Peter replied.

“Ah! That explains it,” I said. “It’s such an interesting hybrid of American and English—”

The corner of Peter's mouth gave a small twitch.

OmyGAWD, I thought. Have I offended him?

After the twitch died down, I realized that this was the closest Peter ever comes to smiling.

###

Peter and Aimee had first married billions of years ago when the Earth was still young, and dinosaurs paraded up and down Carnaby in Beatles haircuts and minidresses.

They divorced—I have no idea after how long—when Aimee correctly intuited Peter is gay and set him free to follow his sexual preference.

The first time I heard him mentioned was two years ago when I was visiting Aimee in Claverack. Her first husband had rediscovered Judaism, had decided they should never have divorced, wanted to remarry her, Aimee told me gaily.

“I’m considering it,” she added.

“Why?” I asked. “Is he conversion therapy’s one big success story?”

Aimee has no sense of humor.

“He has a lot of money,” she replied.

As it turns out, it wasn’t all that much money.

Or rather, it was enough money to buy La Grande Maison outright without a mortgage and to sink half a million or so into an extensive remodeling.

But now they are broke! Living on their combined social security checks, Aimee told me glumly. Which works out to a little under $35,000 a year.

“My excellent credit rating is now in the toilet,” she added bitterly.

###

Gay + Judaism = Bear in my mind.

But as is so often the case, my mind was wrong.

Peter is very slight, mostly bald, wears what’s left of his hair in an unattractive queue sticking out from the back of his head.

Aimee and Peter live in separate bedroom suites.

With his permission, Aimee took me upstairs to tour his suite.

His bedroom had the most beautiful wallpaper I have ever seen! A kind of linen texture, royal blue, shot with violet and deep green strands.

They both have these enormous closets, the likes of which I have only seen before on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, huge rooms lined with racks and racks of clothes, shoes, accessories.

I wouldn’t know an impeccably tailored man’s suit if I saw one, but I assume the fifty or so suits hanging from Peter’s racks would fit that description. As would the crisp, mostly white shirts.

His bathroom was immense, surfaced in white marble.

His bathtub could have comfortably accommodated an orgy for six.

But the weirdest thing were his plush, luxurious towels. All of which were embroidered “Peter.”

Now! I have seen bespoke towels before. But adults use their initials. The only towels I have ever seen monogrammed with a first name were kiddy towels.

So the towels struck me as distinctly odd. Regressive, even.

Aimee’s Love Life

When I arrived the first night, Aimee was in a snit. Because of her love life.

As you may have surmised, Aimee’s love life has nothing to do with Peter.

And I am quite nonjudgmental and okay with that.

She’d been conducting some sort of opening courtship ritual with a man on one of the half-a-dozen dating sites she subscribes to.

And the courtship had gone swimmingly to date—glowing descriptions of lifestyles, coy innuendoes, mutual aspirations, invisible handshakes across the ether. The first phone call had been set up for earlier that afternoon.

But then, Aimee had been called out to do errands in the car with Peter. Had messaged the prospective suitor that the phone call would have to be rescheduled.

And the prospective suitor had gotten peevish. Informed Aimee that he had gone to some trouble to carve out the time to speak to her.

Harsh words were exchanged. (I wish I could remember them! I must get back into the habit of carrying around a notebook at all times into which I can scribble “found” dialogue on the sly!)

“So, did you reschedule the phone call?” I asked.

“Certainly not!” she sniffed.

And then began telling me about another love affair she had conducted the previous year. “I loved him,” she said. “He loved me. We met regularly in Albany. Once, we spent a weekend in Boston. I was heartbroken when it ended.”

“Why did he end it?” I asked.

“Oh, I ended it,” she said. “His wife simply would not stop calling when we were together. He could not control her. Or would not control her.”

I blinked rapidly several times. What was there to say?

Had it been me, I would have naturally assumed that the wife did not know that she and her husband were in an open relationship.

But instead, I said—‘cause let’s be honest: I enjoy provoking people, and if Aimee decided never to speak to me again, it would be no great loss—“You know, I think the underlying issue, Aimee, is that your relationship style is transactional whereas most people’s style is emotional—”

“What does that mean?” she snapped.

I tried to think of ways I could put a positive spin on this. You only give where you can take was out for obvious reasons.

“Well, you’re looking for—ummmm—symbiosis! Whereas most people are looking for that little dopamine hit one gets from a positive emotional exchange.”

Since Aimee knows relatively little about neurophysiology or prolonged relationships between different biological species, this seemed to placate her.

“How does Peter handle his relationships?” I asked.

“Peter has no interest in relationships,” she retorted disdainfully.

Changing the subject seemed the safest thing at this point.

“What was the follow-up with Felix in London?” I asked.

“Felix?” she said, frowning. She didn’t recognize the name.

“Felix!” I said. “The charming little academic on a book tour with whom you set me up on a blind date?”

“Oh, him,” she said. “No, I didn’t see him in London. I didn’t see any point to it.”

Breaking the Sacred Covenant




As I noted, when I am a houseguest unattached to my host by bonds of true affection, I see my guestly obligation as the provision of entertainment.

And as the afternoon eased into evening, I was more and more uncertain what I was doing in Aimee’s house since she is unlikely to respond to any of my more positive qualities.

In fact, I strongly suspect that my chief attraction in Aimee’s eyes is my close friendship with BB who spurned Aimee romantically several years ago considerably to her annoyance. She is constantly dropping insinuations about that friendship, as though my explanation—“We’re like brother and sister!”—is just some Country Mouse-ish ruse from someone who isn’t adventurous the way she is.

So, I sang for my supper by providing an unending stream of blandishments.

Aimee namedrops that she once entertained Prince Philip at her house in LA?

Me (breathless): Oh, Aimee! Wow! Wow! Tell me all about it!

Which she did. Effectively killing another 20 minutes. (I checked my watch.)

It was actually a pretty good story.

“And I looked at the Palace menu the week afterward, and I saw that the bread-and-butter pudding I had served him and his retinue for dessert was on the menu. Though I doubt it was as good as mine.”

It may not have been. Aimee is an awfully good cook.

“You know, you should write a cookbook! Part recipes, part memoir!” I gushed.

Her eyes widened. “That is a perfectly brilliant recommendation. Brilliant! I must write that down.”

Pretty obvious recommendation, I thought, beaming. And since you cannot write a single sentence, you can hire me as a ghost writer! I’ll charge you $10,000. You can sell some of Peter’s towels.

There followed a couple of stories about Freddie Mercury and Ringo Starr. They were not as good as the one about Prince Philip.

After that fell a silence that stretched uncomfortably toward the 90-second mark.

“And you know, we can also include the time you entertained your cat for tea—”

“Entertained my cat for tea?” she said, frowning.

“Yes, I have the photograph!” I said, hastily searching through the 38,000 photographs on my phone for the photograph above. And miraculously finding it. (Must. Do. SOMETHING. About the 38,000 photographs on my phone.)

“Oh, that cat,” Aimee said. “Yes, I had to have that cat put down.”

“Oh?” I said, preparing to be sympathetic, my heartbreak over Sybyl still so fresh.

“Yes, he started peeing outside the box. And I simply could not have that. So, I had him put to sleep.”

Did my mouth fall open?

It must have.

You had your pet cat euthanized because he peed outside his box?

You did not take him to the vet to see if he had health issues? A urinary tract infection, kidney disease, diabetes? And if it turned out to be none of those things, you did not think about rehoming him?

I was horrified.

When you take an animal into your home, you enter into a covenant with that animal. You assume a duty of care for that animal. If you don’t want that duty of care, you don’t take the animal into your home. It’s that simple.

Of course, I know I’m goofy about animals. Probably overly sentimental.

And I also know enough about Aimee’s personal history to understand why she is the way she is.

When she was 10 years old, her mother walked out on her.

Her father, a middlingly successful British film producer, couldn’t be bothered to take care of her and her two-years-younger sister, so she was shunted between relatives who liked the handsome stipend her father provided for her care but who didn’t actually like her.

Aimee isn’t capable of entering into a covenant of love.

She may not even be capable of love.

The whole interaction was particularly creepy in context: If someone showed me a cute photograph of me with an adorable animal, my next response would not be, “Yes, I had him killed.”

“Inappropriate” is too insipid a word to use here.

A Dilemma


I didn’t say anything.

Should I have?

Over the years, I’ve ruined dinner parties when hateful things became part of the cocktail banter, forcibly declaring, “I will not have things like that said in my presence,” and stalking out.

I remember one particular dinner party at April Grey’s house.

April Grey was one of my U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Public Policy pals.

She had a really obnoxious X-boyfriend. I can’t even remember his name now! He was obscenely wealthy, and April had remained friends with him ostensibly as evidence of how K00L she was but really, I suspect, so she could borrow money from him to finance her house-flipping aspirations.

His date at the party was a beautiful young Black woman.

And the obnoxious X kept making all these blatantly sexual comments about his date. About how much better she was in the sack than white girls. “Once you’ve tasted Black, you never go back,” he announced with a grin.

This was the point at which I rose to tell him off.

He enjoyed my indignation greatly! “What’s your problem?” he laughed. “She doesn’t mind it”—and it was true, the Black girl was sitting there smiling. Though she didn’t meet my eyes.

“Her problems are her affair,” I said. “I have a problem with it.”

Are the two situations really in any way comparable?

In my mind, they are. I guess because like Aimee, I would describe April as “transactional.”

I stalked out of the dinner party that night.

But April and I went on being friends. In fact, she hosted the baby shower I had when I was pregnant with RTT some years afterward.

And we never discussed the dinner party.

I said nothing to Aimee because it was dark, and I was in fuckin’ Vermont and 120 miles away down curving, badly paved country roads from my own bed.

And anyway, what would it have accomplished if I had said something?

Could I have effected some miraculous transformation in Aimee? Yes, yes, thanks to you, I now see the error of my ways and henceforth ever after will be a veritable St. Frances!!!!

I would only be satisfying my own Joan of Arc complex.

The cat would still be dead.

But I am thinking I can no longer be friends with Aimee.

Who emailed me just this morning: I want to give you that beret I was knitting.

I’d modeled that beret as a goof when she’d tossed it over so I could admire the stitchwork.

And it had looked great on me. What Jane Austen would have described as “cunning.”

But I don’t think I can accept it.

And will now have to think of a cordial way to refuse it as well as effusive words to put it my thank-you-for-your-hospitality note that will not invite future intimacy.

###

I see I have scribbled far, far longer than I had intended and haven’t even gotten to the puppets or the stunningly beautiful and staggeringly economically depressed Northeast Kingdom parts of the trip.

But have a hideous amount of Real Work to do.

And must stop now.