bow tie and put on grungy shorts and a T-shirt, no shoes. Back in the kitchen, he opened two cold bottles of beer, gave one to the chef, and took the other one to the veranda to set the table.
At these moments he really missed Noelle. She imported antiques from the South of France and was a master at decorating. Her favorite chore was preparing a table for a dinner party. Her collection of vintage china, glasses, and flatware was astonishing and still growing. Some she bought to stock her store, but the rarest stuff, and the most beautiful, she kept for their private use. In Noelle’s book, a gorgeous table was a gift to their guests, and no one could do it like her. She often photographed them both before and during the dinners, and framed the best ones to hang for her customers to admire.
The table was twelve feet long and for centuries had been used in a winery in Languedoc. They had found it together a year earlier when they spent a month on a shopping spree. Flush with ill-gotten cash, they had virtually raided Provence and bought so much stuff that they rented space in a warehouse in Avignon.
On a sideboard in the dining room, Noelle had carefully laid out the perfect dishes. Twelve vintage porcelain plates that had been hand-painted for a minor count in the 1700s. Lots of silverware, six pieces for each setting. And dozens of glasses for water and wine and digestifs.
The wineglasses were often problematic. Evidently Noelle’s French ancestors didn’t drink as much as Bruce’s American writers, and the old glasses held barely three ounces when fully loaded. At a rowdy dinner party years earlier, Bruce and his guests had become frustrated with the need to refill the dainty glasses every ten minutes or so. Since then, he insisted on more modern versions that held eight ounces of red, six for white. Noelle, who drank little, had acquiesced and found a collection of goblets from Burgundy that would impress an Irish rugby team.
Next to the dishes was a detailed diagram of the proper setting that she had prepared three days earlier when she left town. Bruce went about the business of arranging the linen placemats, the silk table runners, the candelabras, and then the dishes and glasses. The florist arrived and fussed over the table as she rearranged things and bickered with Bruce. When the table was perfect, according to her, Bruce took a photo and sent it to Noelle, who was somewhere in the Alps with her other companion. It was of magazine quality and ready for a dozen guests, though with their dinners the exact number was never certain until the food was served. Strays often materialized at the last moment and added to the fun.
Bruce went to the fridge for another beer.
6.
Cocktails were scheduled for 6:00 p.m. However, the guests were a bunch of writers and none would dare arrive before seven. Myra Beckwith and Leigh Trane showed up first and entered without knocking. Bruce met them on the veranda and mixed a rum and soda for Leigh and poured a stout ale for Myra.
The ladies had been a couple for over thirty years. As writers, they had struggled to pay the bills until they discovered the genre of soft porn romance novels. They cranked out a hundred of them under a dozen pseudonyms and made enough money to retire to the island and live in a quaint old house just around the corner from Bruce. Now, in their mid-seventies, they wrote little. Leigh fancied herself a tortured literary artist but her writing was impenetrable and her novels, the few she got published, sold next to nothing. She was always working on a novel but never finishing one. She claimed to be embarrassed by the junk they’d published but enjoyed the money. Myra, on the other hand, was proud of their work and longed for the glory days creating steamy sex scenes with pirates and young virgins and such.
Myra was a large woman with a crew cut dyed lavender. In a lame effort to hide some of her bulk, she wore loud flowing robes that would work