Free Ordinary People by Judith Guest

is he doing?” Ann asks. “I heard the boys say he’s swimming.”
    “He’s fine,” Beth says. There is something final and forbidding about the answer, but Sara doesn’t hear it. They are still newcomers here, and she wants to be polite. Inquiring after people’s children is accepted form everywhere.
    She asks, “Has he been sick?”
    “He was sick for a while,” Beth says. “He’s fine, now.”
    “Another drink, Cal?”
    “Yes, sure. Is there time before dinner?” He crosses to the bar, the skin on the backs of his hands tightening, as if from an electric shock.
     
     
     
    He sits between Ann Kline and Marty Genthe at the table, with Sara across from him.
    “Sara, what a meall” Marty says. “This is a tough act to follow, dear.”
    “Oh, no,” she protests, “it’s just plain food. I can’t cook fancy, honestly. No, Beth is the artist in that department. I don’t know how she does it!”
    “The cheese sauce is great,” Ed says. “Marty, get that recipe, will you?”
    After the main course comes strawberry mousse; it is flawless. Then the children are served up. They enter the living room on cue, to say their good nights. A command performance for all. The guests are politely impressed. Cal cannot help being touched at their grave good manners. All four of them are beautiful children, having surpassed their models. No mere reproductions, but stunning originals. Their handsome, dark-eyed fourteen-year-old daughter supervises her younger brother and sister, while the eldest boy stands, shy and solemn, in the background. He reminds Cal of Conrad at that age. So earnest, so polite. Adults and children beam awkwardly at one another until Sara’s motherly pride is satisfied, and they are dismissed.
    “Good-looking children,” Cal says.
    “Thank you.” She beams him a grateful smile.
    In knots of two and three, they sit in the living room. Beth and Mac are in one corner, consulting earnestly about books, he is sure. Mac Kline is an English professor at Lake Forest College, who loves to talk about his subject. Beth would talk books to a deaf person, needing nothing more than an encouraging nod, now and then. He catches her eye and she smiles at him. Across the room, Ann and Phil and Ed are horsing around, Ed giving a lecture on the perfect tennis serve to Ann and Phil, the inept, giggling pupils. Cal sits on the couch between Sara and Marty, feeling pleasantly high, and full.
    “Great dinner,” he tells Sara.
    “Thank you.”
    “When are we going to play some bridge, Cal?” Marty asks.
    “Yeah, we ought to do that.”
    He has an arm around each of them, and has to disengage one from Sara to sip his drink.
    “I mean, now that you two are social, again,” Marty says. “How are things, really? Going all right?”
    Marty is looking at him. A brittle, attractive redhead, she lost out on beauty through the accident of a razor-planed, imperious nose. One New Year’s Eve, he remembers kissing her. A long, warm embrace. He was drunk. No one said anything about it afterward, not Ed, or Beth. He was surprised. He had felt guilty and embarrassed, he would have said something, he was sure, if it had been Ed and Beth.
    “Yes, pretty well,” he says. “Only I miss the kids who used to hang around. What’s Don doing these days? I haven’t seen him in a while.”
    “Oh, the same old things. Girls. Swimming. You know how boys are, they don’t tell you anything unless you back them into a corner and bulldoze it out of them.” She laughs. “To tell you the truth, Donald says Conrad isn’t very—isn’t as friendly as he used to be. I suppose he feels a little, I don’t know, self-conscious—”
    “About what?” Sara asks. “I’m sorry, maybe it’s none of my business.”
    “No, it’s nothing,” Cal says. He is suddenly uncomfortable. The drinks have made him fuzzy. He shouldn’t have said that, about the boys not coming around. It sounded as if he were annoyed; put her on the