If Danielle had been keeping better track, she would have realized that she had said a grand total of 34 words during the entire meal up to this point. The majority of those words had been spent when they first sat down Mrs. White, her mother’s friend from college, asked Danielle the obligatory questions about where she lived on campus and what she studied.
“I think I am going to study history…” Danielle said (words 26-34).
Moments later she sincerely wished she had invented a major—Folklore and Mythology, the Study of International Water Systems, Ancient Sanskrit—anything that Mrs. White would not have known anything about.
Perhaps this would have kept her mother’s friend from catapulting the conversation back into the monologue it had been for the past hour.
“History!” Mrs. White exclaimed, “Oh one of my Sisters in college studied history. She was very petite, you see, and she always…”
At this point Danielle glanced over at Mr. White, who appeared to be more or less tuning his wife out. An ally! She thought.
Then Mrs. White turned to her husband, “And do you know who Suzy is now married to? The producer of that play—oh gosh, what is the name of it?”
“The Silence of Men.”
“Yes! Yes, that is it.”
Now Mr. White turned to Danielle, and Danielle knew her only hope for an ally in the conversation was gone, “You’ve heard of the play the Silence of Men? By George Jameson?”
Danielle thought for a second about the name George Jameson, and how she was always amused by last names that were more commonly first names. Jameson was close enough to a first name to pull the corners of her mouth into a smile. Jameson, ha! she thought.
Then she snapped out of her reverie, a little concerned that the conversation so dull that the she had fallen into her typical last-names-as-first-names entertainment.
She shook her head back into the conversation.
“Oh, well George is a close friend of mine.” Mr. White said, tugging on his mustache, “We used to take these boat trips together out on Lake Michigan. He’s quite a sailor.”
It occurred to her that “used to take these boat trips” perhaps actually meant “took a boat trip one time, with several other people who knew George a hell of a lot better than I did, but who dragged me along for the day.”
“Well,” Mrs. White said, turning back to Danielle, “Suzy and George have this beautiful house now. It is out on Cape Cod, right along the water. It is one of those old Victorian style houses—actually it is right near where the Kennedy’s Compound used to be.”
“Is that so?” Mr. White chimed in, “Well, I’ll have to call George up and go visit sometime. It sounds like a great place.”
Danielle doubted that Mr. White would actually call this not-so-close-acquaintance of his up and go for a visit after all. She wondered what a man with a last name that almost sounded like a first name like “George Jameson” thought about all these people who now considered themselves to be close friends only after he had acquired his fame.
“It is a great place,” Mrs. White was speaking now.
“You’ve been there?” Mr. White said, turning to his wife.
“Yes, remember that trip up the East Coast I took a few years ago with some of the gals?”
“Was that the one in November?”
“No, it was in the summer. Remember, I flew out, went on the road trip and you met me in Maine for the Paulson’s wedding?”
“Oh yes! I do remember now! Ah, this wedding,” Mr. White said, turning to Danielle.
Danielle wasn’t sure whether or not she was glad to be included in the conversation once more. She hadn’t the faintest idea who the Paulson’s were, but she had a creeping suspicion she was about to learn a lot about their taste in weddings.
“This wedding was fantastic,” Mrs. White said.
“Fantastic,” Mr. White repeated, “The bride’s father is a client of mine—actually, he’s a quite a famous historian. Samson Mills?”
(Danielle shook her head)
“No? Oh, well he’s written a few books that you might have heard of, including one that he said is coming out soon about Davy Crocket. He sent me the manuscript the other day, and said, ‘You know, Bill, there is no one else I would rather have read this than you.’ Really touching.”
Danielle didn’t point out that a lawyer was probably a good person have look over any manuscript, and that it probably had less to do with Mr. White’s status as close friend than Mr. White’s skill with proofreading and wordsmithing.
“Anyway, this wedding was incredible,” Mrs. White said, picking up where her husband left off.
“Incredible.” Mr. White agreed, nodding his head and staring off for a second as if he could taste the fresh Maine lobster they had served, the light buttery sauce that was so perfectly accented by the fresh parsley they had had shipped in from the finest organic parsley farm in all of Italy.
“You would not believe it,” Mrs. White said, leaning forward.
Danielle wasn’t sure if she cared enough to not believe it, whatever it was. Nevertheless, she raised her eyebrows a half a centimeter and leaned forward ever so slightly in her chair.
It was the least she could do to seem engaged.
“Well, they were planning on having the lobster brought in fresh from the sea that morning, and since it was so local it was very inexpensive.”
Danielle knew that lobster is at best not expensive. But she kept that thought to herself, and instead mused upon the reasons why one would refer to something that is generally regarded as mid-range to quite pricey as “very inexpensive.” She mused about the way people construct their images, and half-smiled thinking about the image the Whites were clearly trying to construct for her now.
Mrs. White interpreted Danielle’s half-smile as the implicit admiration of the wealth and prestige of the people who Mrs. White held so closely.
Or, held closely enough to be invited to the occasional wedding in Maine at least.
“So they had a lot of extra money left in the budget for this wedding. So they decided to,” Mrs. White put one hand on her husband’s forearm and rocked back in her chair to draw out the suspense.
Danielle wasn’t sure if she was excited or dreading to hear what these Paulsons had decided to do with the surplus money.
“…fly in a chef from Spain to cater the meal. From Spain! Ha!” Mrs. White laughed, but it wasn’t the kind of laugh Danielle found normally proceeds funny incidents, it was more of a laugh of joy, pride, and showy approval.
“Isn’t wealth great?” Mr. White said. He may have actually said “Isn’t that great?” Danielle wasn’t sure and wasn’t sure that it actually mattered.
“Where in Maine was this wedding?” She asked, adding six words to bring her total to 40 words.
“Oh, the house!” Mrs. White said, giving her husband a glance out of the corner of her eye as if to say, How could we have forgotten to brag about the house!
Brag, or explain—Danielle wasn’t sure which one Mrs. White meant with her eye-glance. Again, she wasn’t sure it mattered.
While Mr. and Mrs. White proceeded to tell Danielle in detail about the house that was the largest mansion in this small seaside Maine town (“Four floors, and a full ballroom!”) Danielle hatched up a plan.
At first she felt a little guilty for even thinking of a plan such as this one.
At first.
She soon recovered from this bout of pre-emptive guilt when Mr. and Mrs. White began to tell her the significant people who had vacationed or “summered” in this town over the past 150 years.
By the time Mr. White had finished the list with an “… and Fredrick Santeri, you know, the Atlantic Monthly columnist?” Danielle knew what she must do.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of that town.” She said (word count, 46 with contractions counting as one word).
“Really?” the Whites asked, in an almost disinterested way.
“New Portville, right? The one where T.S. Eliot stayed?” she was literally just repeating the information they had just fed her, but they nodded hooked.
“The one with that long main street…” Danielle continued.
They nodded, unaware that she was just spouting words that could have been true of any town by the sea in Maine.
“And the port…”
They nodded more vigorously, not aware she had guessed this fact based off of the town’s name.
She saw that she had successfully convinced them that she had in fact, heard of New Portsville prior to sitting down to dine with them so long ago.
“Yeah, that town is actually really famous because of the whole Abraham Livingston thing.”
Mr. White, who was well read and well versed in current events (and supposedly history) raised an eyebrow, then two. “Abraham Livingston?”
“Yeah, you know, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world?”
They shook their heads.
“Wow, ok. I guess you probably wouldn’t have heard of this incident.”
She said it in the same tone that they had used when telling her about the names of the various Broadway producers whose names she “might not recognize” but are “very influential in Showbusiness.”
She started sipping her water as if there was no more to the story—and as if she hadn’t just made up that name but a few moments ago.
“What about Livingston?”
“Oh, well he’s very wealthy, and some say he has too much time on his hands, if you know what I mean. Well, the past few years he’s devoted to exploring the inlets in Maine. You know how most of that area is untamed territory.”
The Whites nodded as if they had, in fact, known this fact as any educated, worldly person with the right connections would.
“Well, much of that land, especially the forest inland has never been mapped out fully. They’ve built roads through the major cities, sure, but there are vast stretched of Maine which are thought to be uninhabitable for man.”
“Uninhabitable, really?” Mrs. White said, in the same way she passed gossip (or “news” as she liked to call it) from person to person.
Danielle nodded—and so did Mr. White, who seemed to be following Danielle’s story as if it were something he was merely confirming something he had already known. As if it was information he had read somewhere in a book or series of articles in the New Yorker.
“Well, Mr. Livingston has bought this boat and he’s sailed it into the harbor in New Portsville and has declared that he is going to map the uncharted territory. Pretty cool, right?”
“Wow. Mr. Livingston is a modern day explorer, isn’t he?” Mrs. White said, awe riding the arches of her eyebrows as she turned to her husband.
Mr. White remained frozen in his seat for a moment, leaning over his elbows and staring thoughtfully and piercingly at Danielle.
Oh shoot. She thought, he’s on to me.
But then he sat back and folded his arms across his chest. Turning to his wife, he said, “We should see if we can meet up with this Livingston fellow when we go up there next. I bet the Paulsons probably lunch with him from time to time.”
Then to Danielle, “You know, they lunch with practically everyone of importance in that small town.”
Danielle wasn’t sure why the image of Mr. and Mrs. White casually referring to “this guy Mr. Livingston, you know, the one who is taking his boat up all those rivers” to the Paulsons gave her such secret pleasure.
And she didn’t feel bad about the enjoyment she leeched from the irony of imagining how that (hypothetical?) situation would play out. After all, she figured she had earned it sitting through an entire two hour only allowed two hundred measly words.
“I think I am going to study history…” Danielle said (words 26-34).
Moments later she sincerely wished she had invented a major—Folklore and Mythology, the Study of International Water Systems, Ancient Sanskrit—anything that Mrs. White would not have known anything about.
Perhaps this would have kept her mother’s friend from catapulting the conversation back into the monologue it had been for the past hour.
“History!” Mrs. White exclaimed, “Oh one of my Sisters in college studied history. She was very petite, you see, and she always…”
At this point Danielle glanced over at Mr. White, who appeared to be more or less tuning his wife out. An ally! She thought.
Then Mrs. White turned to her husband, “And do you know who Suzy is now married to? The producer of that play—oh gosh, what is the name of it?”
“The Silence of Men.”
“Yes! Yes, that is it.”
Now Mr. White turned to Danielle, and Danielle knew her only hope for an ally in the conversation was gone, “You’ve heard of the play the Silence of Men? By George Jameson?”
Danielle thought for a second about the name George Jameson, and how she was always amused by last names that were more commonly first names. Jameson was close enough to a first name to pull the corners of her mouth into a smile. Jameson, ha! she thought.
Then she snapped out of her reverie, a little concerned that the conversation so dull that the she had fallen into her typical last-names-as-first-names entertainment.
She shook her head back into the conversation.
“Oh, well George is a close friend of mine.” Mr. White said, tugging on his mustache, “We used to take these boat trips together out on Lake Michigan. He’s quite a sailor.”
It occurred to her that “used to take these boat trips” perhaps actually meant “took a boat trip one time, with several other people who knew George a hell of a lot better than I did, but who dragged me along for the day.”
“Well,” Mrs. White said, turning back to Danielle, “Suzy and George have this beautiful house now. It is out on Cape Cod, right along the water. It is one of those old Victorian style houses—actually it is right near where the Kennedy’s Compound used to be.”
“Is that so?” Mr. White chimed in, “Well, I’ll have to call George up and go visit sometime. It sounds like a great place.”
Danielle doubted that Mr. White would actually call this not-so-close-acquaintance of his up and go for a visit after all. She wondered what a man with a last name that almost sounded like a first name like “George Jameson” thought about all these people who now considered themselves to be close friends only after he had acquired his fame.
“It is a great place,” Mrs. White was speaking now.
“You’ve been there?” Mr. White said, turning to his wife.
“Yes, remember that trip up the East Coast I took a few years ago with some of the gals?”
“Was that the one in November?”
“No, it was in the summer. Remember, I flew out, went on the road trip and you met me in Maine for the Paulson’s wedding?”
“Oh yes! I do remember now! Ah, this wedding,” Mr. White said, turning to Danielle.
Danielle wasn’t sure whether or not she was glad to be included in the conversation once more. She hadn’t the faintest idea who the Paulson’s were, but she had a creeping suspicion she was about to learn a lot about their taste in weddings.
“This wedding was fantastic,” Mrs. White said.
“Fantastic,” Mr. White repeated, “The bride’s father is a client of mine—actually, he’s a quite a famous historian. Samson Mills?”
(Danielle shook her head)
“No? Oh, well he’s written a few books that you might have heard of, including one that he said is coming out soon about Davy Crocket. He sent me the manuscript the other day, and said, ‘You know, Bill, there is no one else I would rather have read this than you.’ Really touching.”
Danielle didn’t point out that a lawyer was probably a good person have look over any manuscript, and that it probably had less to do with Mr. White’s status as close friend than Mr. White’s skill with proofreading and wordsmithing.
“Anyway, this wedding was incredible,” Mrs. White said, picking up where her husband left off.
“Incredible.” Mr. White agreed, nodding his head and staring off for a second as if he could taste the fresh Maine lobster they had served, the light buttery sauce that was so perfectly accented by the fresh parsley they had had shipped in from the finest organic parsley farm in all of Italy.
“You would not believe it,” Mrs. White said, leaning forward.
Danielle wasn’t sure if she cared enough to not believe it, whatever it was. Nevertheless, she raised her eyebrows a half a centimeter and leaned forward ever so slightly in her chair.
It was the least she could do to seem engaged.
“Well, they were planning on having the lobster brought in fresh from the sea that morning, and since it was so local it was very inexpensive.”
Danielle knew that lobster is at best not expensive. But she kept that thought to herself, and instead mused upon the reasons why one would refer to something that is generally regarded as mid-range to quite pricey as “very inexpensive.” She mused about the way people construct their images, and half-smiled thinking about the image the Whites were clearly trying to construct for her now.
Mrs. White interpreted Danielle’s half-smile as the implicit admiration of the wealth and prestige of the people who Mrs. White held so closely.
Or, held closely enough to be invited to the occasional wedding in Maine at least.
“So they had a lot of extra money left in the budget for this wedding. So they decided to,” Mrs. White put one hand on her husband’s forearm and rocked back in her chair to draw out the suspense.
Danielle wasn’t sure if she was excited or dreading to hear what these Paulsons had decided to do with the surplus money.
“…fly in a chef from Spain to cater the meal. From Spain! Ha!” Mrs. White laughed, but it wasn’t the kind of laugh Danielle found normally proceeds funny incidents, it was more of a laugh of joy, pride, and showy approval.
“Isn’t wealth great?” Mr. White said. He may have actually said “Isn’t that great?” Danielle wasn’t sure and wasn’t sure that it actually mattered.
“Where in Maine was this wedding?” She asked, adding six words to bring her total to 40 words.
“Oh, the house!” Mrs. White said, giving her husband a glance out of the corner of her eye as if to say, How could we have forgotten to brag about the house!
Brag, or explain—Danielle wasn’t sure which one Mrs. White meant with her eye-glance. Again, she wasn’t sure it mattered.
While Mr. and Mrs. White proceeded to tell Danielle in detail about the house that was the largest mansion in this small seaside Maine town (“Four floors, and a full ballroom!”) Danielle hatched up a plan.
At first she felt a little guilty for even thinking of a plan such as this one.
At first.
She soon recovered from this bout of pre-emptive guilt when Mr. and Mrs. White began to tell her the significant people who had vacationed or “summered” in this town over the past 150 years.
By the time Mr. White had finished the list with an “… and Fredrick Santeri, you know, the Atlantic Monthly columnist?” Danielle knew what she must do.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of that town.” She said (word count, 46 with contractions counting as one word).
“Really?” the Whites asked, in an almost disinterested way.
“New Portville, right? The one where T.S. Eliot stayed?” she was literally just repeating the information they had just fed her, but they nodded hooked.
“The one with that long main street…” Danielle continued.
They nodded, unaware that she was just spouting words that could have been true of any town by the sea in Maine.
“And the port…”
They nodded more vigorously, not aware she had guessed this fact based off of the town’s name.
She saw that she had successfully convinced them that she had in fact, heard of New Portsville prior to sitting down to dine with them so long ago.
“Yeah, that town is actually really famous because of the whole Abraham Livingston thing.”
Mr. White, who was well read and well versed in current events (and supposedly history) raised an eyebrow, then two. “Abraham Livingston?”
“Yeah, you know, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world?”
They shook their heads.
“Wow, ok. I guess you probably wouldn’t have heard of this incident.”
She said it in the same tone that they had used when telling her about the names of the various Broadway producers whose names she “might not recognize” but are “very influential in Showbusiness.”
She started sipping her water as if there was no more to the story—and as if she hadn’t just made up that name but a few moments ago.
“What about Livingston?”
“Oh, well he’s very wealthy, and some say he has too much time on his hands, if you know what I mean. Well, the past few years he’s devoted to exploring the inlets in Maine. You know how most of that area is untamed territory.”
The Whites nodded as if they had, in fact, known this fact as any educated, worldly person with the right connections would.
“Well, much of that land, especially the forest inland has never been mapped out fully. They’ve built roads through the major cities, sure, but there are vast stretched of Maine which are thought to be uninhabitable for man.”
“Uninhabitable, really?” Mrs. White said, in the same way she passed gossip (or “news” as she liked to call it) from person to person.
Danielle nodded—and so did Mr. White, who seemed to be following Danielle’s story as if it were something he was merely confirming something he had already known. As if it was information he had read somewhere in a book or series of articles in the New Yorker.
“Well, Mr. Livingston has bought this boat and he’s sailed it into the harbor in New Portsville and has declared that he is going to map the uncharted territory. Pretty cool, right?”
“Wow. Mr. Livingston is a modern day explorer, isn’t he?” Mrs. White said, awe riding the arches of her eyebrows as she turned to her husband.
Mr. White remained frozen in his seat for a moment, leaning over his elbows and staring thoughtfully and piercingly at Danielle.
Oh shoot. She thought, he’s on to me.
But then he sat back and folded his arms across his chest. Turning to his wife, he said, “We should see if we can meet up with this Livingston fellow when we go up there next. I bet the Paulsons probably lunch with him from time to time.”
Then to Danielle, “You know, they lunch with practically everyone of importance in that small town.”
Danielle wasn’t sure why the image of Mr. and Mrs. White casually referring to “this guy Mr. Livingston, you know, the one who is taking his boat up all those rivers” to the Paulsons gave her such secret pleasure.
And she didn’t feel bad about the enjoyment she leeched from the irony of imagining how that (hypothetical?) situation would play out. After all, she figured she had earned it sitting through an entire two hour only allowed two hundred measly words.
