Against the far wall, a cornucopia of vibrant produce spilled across a table. Chef, in her toque and apron, stood at the ready with two juicers and two blenders, her burly tattooed forearms pressed against her sternum. She eyed the guests from under overgrown bangs.
“Smile, will you?” Anna said. “ I think you’re scaring them away.”
“It’s the wine.” Indeed, most of the women held ice-cold straw-colored goblets, which looked extra delicious since they were off limits to Anna. Mrs. Von Bizmark toasted her wine glass with three of her club friends. Julie approached them with Principal Sellers, whom Mrs. Von Bizmark embraced and introduced all around. Anna watched Julie interject something, pointing at her watch. Mrs. Von Bizmark took Principal Sellers’s arm and headed for the house, leaning in and chatting with Sellers. Good, this would get everyone moving toward lunch.
“Have you seen Phil?” Anna was supposed to check in with him before everyone sat down, but she had not laid eyes on him yet.
“No,” Chef said and, marking how the guests began drifting inside, marched off to start lunch. Fifteen minutes behind schedule. Anna got out her walkie-talkie and tucked behind the side of the house.
“Phil! Phil! Come in, Phil!” Nothing. Great. “Phil?”
After thirty seconds, she got a response that was almost entirely loud static: “Problem . . . heating . . .” And then he was gone. Anna thought briefly about trying to find him in the subterranean “control room” of the house, but for what? Phil had tried to explain to her many times the complexity of the new interior climate system; she knew the installation had not been completely smooth but had long ago assumed Phil had remedied it.
In any case, it was time to sit for lunch. Instead of the usual furniture in the Castle’s great room, ten round tables swathed in white linen filled every inch of floor space. Flowers dripped from the double-story window casings, and sunlight poured in through the skylights. Phil had said it would be crowded, but this was maximum capacity. A two-foot dais at the front held a microphone on its stand, waiting for Mrs. Von Bizmark and Principal Sellers. Meanwhile, most of the women clustered at the entryway, greeting Mrs. Von Bizmark like she was the president entering Congress for a State of the Union address.
Once she and Principal Sellers were seated next to one another, ninety-eight other women attempted to trickle into the seating area, wine glasses aloft, sliding their way through the tiny spaces left between the chairs. Inevitably, a glass tumbled to the floor, where it shattered. Several waiters rushed to clean it up. A guest used this distraction to switch place cards from table to table. In short, chaos was breaking out in the dining room, which meant a jam at the door. Anna took a deep breath, pulled out the seating chart, and started picking off guests to drag them, in a respectful way, to their seats.
By the time everyone had their butt in a chair, they were twenty minutes behind schedule, so Max pushed Mrs. Von Bizmark’s speech to after Chef had served the main course. Despite the noise and heat level rising steadily, everyone appeared to be having an unusually good time. Anna surveyed the key media players, seated strategically around the room. There was STT in between Pippy Petzer and Opal. The Women’s Wear Daily guy had ended up between two grandes dames. And Lanuit . . . where was she? There was the CEO of Chanel and one of those glittering ascendant socialites, and in between them sat . . . Miriam Rosenbaum, an Exeter mommy friend who was an outsider to this group. Wait a second . . .
With a shudder, Anna realized that the place card–moving culprit was none other than the dreadful Dallas dressmaker who promoted her “own line” of evening gowns at every inappropriate opportunity. Anna edged closer to the distant corner of the dining room, where Lanuit had ended up stranded. She looked on politely as Dallas scrolled through images on her phone, pointing out design details with hot-pink endless nails, forcing a response to each: “We have this lace handmade in Spain. You been to Spain?” Lanuit smiled tightly. Nothing to be done about it now. Anna sighed to herself. Max laid eyes on Anna and bulleted over.
“First of all, it’s hot in here.”
“Phil’s working on it.”
“Can’t we just open the windows?”
“Apparently, that would trigger the heat, and it would be like an oven.” She remembered only snippets of what Phil had said; something about the sensors in the wrong place, and he didn’t have time to move them . . . Anna wiped the back of her neck with her sleeve.
“OK, well, I went over the speech with Kissy again. Should be super brief. Like five sentences. Wait, why’s Vivienne all the way over there?”
“Place card switcher from Dallas.”
“Shit,” Max said. They surveyed the dining room together. The ten-vegetable salads enjoyed the usual picking over while the servers spent all their energy aggressively refilling everyone’s wine. Was the room getting warmer still, were guests getting drunker, or was Anna herself just growing more and more anxious to the point of sweating? Probably all of the above. Across the room by the kitchen door, poor Julie looked like she might melt.
Another glass shattered on the ground, and this time a drunken nasal voice shouted, “It’s a party!”
“Something seems a little weird, right?” Max said. “A little . . . off.” He went to open the front double doors to let a little air in, but the breeze only triggered the heating system to kick up. Anna could feel hot air blowing from a nearby vent. And where was the rest of the food?
Keeping a tight smile carefully plastered on her face, Anna traversed the great room and its many tables of increasingly raucous women to the kitchen, where she found a half dozen servers all waiting with two dozen plates of side dishes under warmers and no Chef in sight. She caught a glimpse of the buzzed back side of her head over the grill out the back door, which Anna quickly banged through.
“What the?”
“Phil says I can’t use the oven,” Chef said. “Something about the climate . . .”
“Will that feed everyone?” Anna asked, gesturing at about twenty-five large chicken breasts.
“What else can we do?”
Anna rushed back inside to tell Julie, who looked like she might actually burst into tears or throw up at any moment.
“Are you OK?” Anna whispered.
“Yes, just . . . I’ll just resign, OK? You don’t have to worry. I’ll just quit.” Oh, boy, was this heatstroke? A regular stroke? A psychotic break?
“What are you talking about?” Anna said, truly panicked.
Julie lifted a wine bottle out of the ice bucket. The label read VIDA. “I ordered the wrong wine,” she said.
“Not the . . .”
“Grain alcohol.”
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” Anna said as quietly as possible, her mind racing ahead. It was way, way, way too far along to do anything about it.
“I’m so sorry!” Julie whispered, sweaty and wild eyed.
Anna surveyed the room, the flushed faces, the women laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe, others looking like they might be starting not to feel so well, and Mrs. Von Bizmark, never one to wait patiently, at that very moment rising unsteadily to her feet to make her speech. Under any set of circumstances, traversing this tight space would prove challenging. Given that she was probably very drunk along with everyone else in the room, Mrs. Von Bizmark’s approach of the microphone was shaky at best. She gripped the back of friends’ chairs and their shoulders, taking care to avoid legs, feet, and bags.