time they played with Bo and Jonny, Jonny’s nonchalant response to this stupid question (“Of course you don’t tell. That’s the guy code.”) so infuriated Bo, they had to take a break from the relationship. Which was difficult considering they continued to live together in an apartment that belonged to Jonny.
When the card was flipped over and read this Saturday night, Ezra and Maggie laughed, Larissa groaned, and Jared said, “You know what I’m going to do from now on? Give a different answer each time it’s asked, to drive you all crazy and maybe next time we can just play Risk.”
“What do you mean from now on?” said Maggie. “That’s what you always do.”
“Jared,” Larissa said to her husband, “just answer the dumb question.”
“No,” said Jared. “The entreaty is clear. Do not end marriages, cause family rifts, or destroy friendships by revealing something totally inappropriate. And that’s by the guys who designed the game!”
Larissa sipped her drink, the salt on the rim deliciously swelling her lime mouth. “Jared’s right. We should heed their rules. Besides,” she added, “I think we’re overlooking the obvious here. How come the only one not in any trouble is the actual adulterer? It’s all about the friends, the secrets, the obligations to the friendship. What about the obligations to the marriage?”
“Yeah, but that’s too obvious,” replied Jared. “That’s why it’s not a Scruples question. It’s not even an ethical dilemma.”
“It is a question, however,” Ezra said. “A question, among many others,” he added pointedly, “that a certain Larissa is refusing to answer. She’s doing that a lot tonight. Not answering questions.”
“Oh, calm down, Ezra,” said Larissa. “Have another drink.”
“Are you a relativist or an absolutist, Larissa?” asked Maggie.
“Well, it depends,” Larissa replied to the raucous laughter of everyone, and she laughed herself, though she couldn’t quite tell what was so funny.
“All right, Miss I-absolutely-shouldn’t-have-made-my-’ritas-so-strong,” said Ezra, watching Larissa who was busy squeezing more lime into what was left of his drink. “Can we talk about business for a sec? Don’t avoid me.”
Larissa pulled out a card. “Let’s play Invent a Question of Scruples instead,” she said.
“Fine,” agreed Ezra. “But I ask first.”
Larissa had two Margaritas and six partitas in her. She smiled, unafraid, tipping her glass in a toast. “Yes, Ezra. What’s your question?”
“Denise goes on maternity leave after Othello. That’s next month.”
This was all he said, like a riddle.
“Is this part of Invent a Question?” Larissa wanted to know. “Denise goes on maternity leave. But she’s ambivalent about the baby, being forty-four and a first-time mom. I believe Denise’s feelings are justified. She doesn’t seem very maternal. You’re asking if should I try to dissuade her from having the child and stay on as director?”
“Larissa.”
“Yes, Ezra?”
“Stop being deliberately obtuse.”
“How am I obtuse?” She loved her Saturday nights with her friends. They were like family.
“Why do you make me tell it to you twice? You know I want you to become the new director for the Pingry Theater Department.”
Larissa swayed while sitting down. She and Jared exchanged a brief but conflicted look.
She painted background murals. She was the set decorator. Which described her life at home too. And every once in a while, when she was working, she’d hear in the nuance of the rehearsals of the sixteen-year-old’s interpretation of Othello something that would catch her ear, and she’d clear her throat and say quietly, but loud enough so that Moor of Venice could hear: “Try it again, Linus, but this time with the emphasis on must as in, ‘And yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.’”
The paint she used for the sets sometimes needed to be thinned with turps, which gave her a vicious, delicious headache, because secretly she loved the smell even as she suffered, and she listened more intently to the last act as she stirred the paint, the black and white to make a stormy gray, and waited for the thickened paint to thin so she could paint the walls behind Desdemona’s bed, on which lay the fifteen-year-old siren Tiffany from Chatham, still in braces but with a Coach purse, straight from the Swim Club, waiting for her lover in the form of Linus from Summit in Birkenstocks to persuade himself of her unthinkable, of his unthinkable.
“That death’s unnatural that kills for loving.
Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?
Some bloody passion shakes your very frame:
These are portents; but yet I hope, I hope,
They do not point on me.”
“Do you ever plan to answer me?” Ezra demanded.
“Yes.” Larissa picked up another Scruples card. “Ezra, would you be willing to eat a bowl of live crickets for $40,000?”
“Lar,” Jared said, “if you want it, you should take it.”
“Want what?” she said innocently. They were getting undressed in the bedroom.
“Come on. Seriously.”
But she had too much to drink for seriously. She fell on the bed in her black bra and underwear, her hair loose, her made-up eyes half closing. Pulling up her casted leg, she motioned for Jared with her index finger, and he fell on top of her, in his clothes, also having had a little too much to drink.
“We’ll work out the kids,” he muttered, kissing her. “Take the job. You know Ezra will be thrilled.”
“What, I’m now accepting work to make Ezra happy?” Her arms flung around him.
“No, to make you happy.” They nestled, rumbled to an inebriated rhythm of a married Saturday night with nowhere to go on Sunday morning.
“I’m happy,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“I know how much you used to love it. Directing.”
“Yes.” Her eyes remained closed. The true unspoken inquiry hung in the air, the real issue, the only one worth having an answer to, the thirsty dilemma at the crux of each human heart: How it best for me to live?
Soon Larissa would be asleep. She felt herself drifting, even as excitement built up in her from the feel of his man’s body on top of her, from the smell of his liquored-up breath, from his lips on her lips, on her throat. “I’ll think about it,” she said. It was like a placeholder to end the conversation. I’ll think about it meant she would endeavor never to give it another thought. Theatrically she moaned. Jared forgot about theater, as she hoped he would.
The cast came off a few days later and Larissa limped with a walking stick to her car, like Uriah Heep, like her grandmother who had died aged ninety-eight, and then drove to Pingry and finished painting black the backdrop for Desdemona’s death, went to the library, got some books for Asher’s school project on Abraham Lincoln, and then dropped by Nee Dells to see if there were any new boots (there