Free The Receptionist by Janet Groth Page A

four-letter words if I’m to stay in the room with her.” She looked at us fiercely: “And she just manages to do it.” Th e Italians were all right, she said, because Italians “always allow for a court of appeal.”
    We had drinks, Irish whiskey and water for me, red wine for Muriel, and gin and tonic for Penelope. Muriel gave me a little present wrapped in stiff, brownish-maroon paper. Inside was a pottery dish, heart shaped, with a blue-and-white figure of a bird on a heart-shaped branch. “It was just a little something I saw in an antiques shop in Arezzo that I thought you might like,” said Muriel.
    “I love it,” I said. And I did.
    Th ere were to be just two other guests, I was told. An English architect and collector of art named Frederick Fuchs (Freddie) and his friend, a young Italian named Dario, arrived bearing huge pots of pink geraniums. After a tour of the house, we gathered around a table set up in Penelope’s bedroom and feasted on a four-course dinner: guinea fowl served with good local Chianti, followed by Christmas pudding and champagne.
    Art was, naturally, a recurrent topic. Freddie was soon telling us how the Japanese—“the big buyers nowadays”—were making it possible for collectors like him to own works by Italian masters; it seemed the masters were experiencing a depressed market because the Japanese didn’t care for religious subjects. What was being bought, said Freddie, were “these scribbles by Twombly,” an action painter of the fifties; they were going for hundreds of thousands. Th is brought up other action painters; Arshile Gorky was mentioned. Freddie wondered if anybody had seen the nasty crack Gorky’s daughter Maro had made about Muriel in a piece on the artists of the Chianti valley for Harper’s & Queen, the October issue, he thought it was.
    “What nasty crack?” asked Muriel, sharply on the alert. “What did she say about me?” But Freddie was mum. Only later, when I was in the sitting room and the others were in the kitchen preparing the coffee and Muriel was upstairs, did Penelope succeed in getting it out of Freddie that the nasty crack consisted of Maro Gorky’s referring to Muriel as “that old crone in the red wig.” At the dinner table, however, it was already clear that Muriel was furious: “She’s never met me; I can’t think what she can have to say about me.” Penelope said, “She’d better watch out. Muriel may sue.”
    Earlier in the evening, Italy had been spared, but after the reference to Maro’s “nasty crack,” Muriel burst out, “I shall leave Tuscany; I will, if rude things are going to be said about me. I’ll get right out.”
    Freddie tried to downplay what he now saw had been an indiscretion, and Dario denounced Maro as a hateful woman who was only being nasty because she couldn’t stand it that she owed every little scrap of importance she could claim in the world to the fact that she had a famous father. But Muriel was not sidetracked. She went upstairs to her office to telephone Maro Gorky in an effort to confront her on the spot.
    When Muriel came down into the kitchen, Penelope matter-of-factly reported what Freddie had been reluctant to say, that the crack was a reference to Muriel as “that old crone in a red wig,” to which Muriel cried, “I’ve never owned a wig. And I don’t dye my hair red. What does she know about it anyway? She’s never even met me!”
    Once again, Freddie said he was sorry he’d ever brought it up.
    We finally settled in the sitting room with coffee, and the conversation turned to other things. Still Muriel was glum. At one point she asked, quite out of the blue, if Maro had children, and being told she had “a boy and a girl,” such a strange look came over her face that I feared for their well-being. I remembered that earlier, when Penelope, having opened the bottle, was just preparing to pour us all champagne, Muriel had said to the room at large, “Never pour with your left