1
Conchita always hated what she called Oscar Day: every year, Mr. and Mrs. Damiano fussed over their guest list with the glee of children torturing a frog—fussed more, and more contentiously, than they fussed at any other time, for months before host and hostessing their annual Oscar Party.
They scribbled invitation lists on scrolls of scratchy paper, then revised them in gales of malicious laughter. They negotiated the buffet as if catering the Paris Peace Talks. This year, they’d had the brainstorm that setting rented tables near the pool, with chimney-like space heaters planted among them like infernal metal palm trees, would add an especially soigné savor to what was, in Conchita’s view, a loud, cackling, escalatingly drunken evening of forced gaity and obscene gossip.
Of course they’d serve Ossetia, lumped like a malignant tumor into the backside of an ice swan. Mrs. Damiano’s chicken liver surprise wrapped in bacon, which she imagined was a secret recipe.
Some catered items, delivered that afternoon, crabmeat and orange caviar nestled in endive leaves, glued together with crème fraiche, teensy hockey pucks of chicken something, what Stella Damiano called an amuse guele. Kristal to start, then white wine, then red wine, plus whatever hard liquor their guests favored.
Later, the buffet. Chafing dishes supporting volcanoes of paella, rice salads sprinkled with shaved truffles, sliced beef in a fruit-sticky melange, tortellini something or other, swordfish steaks bursting with mercury, frisée ablob with baby veggies, a sideboard of cheeses and pastries climbing up pyramids of etched glass and embalmed under cake savers.
The extra work was not the reason for Conchita’s aversion to Oscar Day. She had Martina and Luis and the twins, Slavo and Ivic, to carry much of the added load, plus Ramon and Titus to do the food that wasn’t ordered in, and Fourquet, the butler or valet or whatever his official designation was.
No, thought Conchita, I am not one to shrink from extra work. What pulls my chain, as they say in El Norte, is the brainless animation of this unholy day. The way we must lavish flutters of excitement upon the arrival of the guests, as if we recognized them from the movies, and I would like to know when in our life of toil we find any hours to waste in movie theaters. These supposedly familiar faces whose idea of labor is putting on makeup and mouthing impious dialogues in front of cameras. And we are expected to pretend we are “big fans” of these people we have never seen in our lives, except at these wasteful and often disgusting festivities, and, leaving all that aside, something awful always happens on Oscar Day, it seems that the celestial bodies configure themselves every year in an unfortunate manner, as if to make mockery of our lives of incessant drudgery and even the lives of these hyenas who issue from the Kodak Theater and head directly here in their ridiculous limosines.
And tonight something extra bestirs the atmosphere of this house, Conchita thought, something that fills me with an urgent wish to leave this architectural monstrosity and all that it contains before the guests arrive….
2
Samantha Damiano derived enormous fun from her own inventiveness as an irrepressible prankster. Each year she contrived bizarre surprises for her Oscar party guests, often of a cruel and troubling nature: one year, she had flown in an entire kinship system of tapirs from the Amazon rain forest and released them into the dining room, where they rampaged with exasperating cuteness, gobbling up anything remotely edible, dislodging trolleys of warming trays and dishware with their prehensile paws, in some cases even attempting to mate with certain guests who, it had seemed, emitted some pheremonal scent the tapirs found irresistible.
The previous year, Samantha had Fourquet charge into the house mounted on a spotted Appaloosa gelding, which discharged greasy turds all over a vast Bokhara carpet—actually, an artful copy of the Bokhara carpet that normally covered the so-called parlor. Waste not want not, or whatnot.
Samantha and Dario’s guests got drunk in a swift determined fashion, sometimes blackout drunk, undergoing scary personality changes in the course of the Oscar Party, they also snorted wriggly lines of cocaine off the many glass tables in the house and shot up drugs in the many bathrooms, erupted into screaming diatribes against suddenly perceived enemies among their cohort of friends, tore off their clothing, dislodged valuable porcelain vases and threw heavy objets d’art at the chandeliers, hurled ashtrays and candleabra at the Venetian mirrors, and mauled one another in futile attempts at rape or jewelry pilferage.
Yet these self-same guests, on ordinary visits, behaved with impeccable decorum and sobriety. Samantha and Dario instigated this appalling behavior every year, craftily substituting convincing replicas for every object of value in the house—the mirrors, the dinnerware, the various elements of décor likely to sustain serious breakage and trashing on Oscar Night—which, though themselves somewhat costly, were worth less than a fraction of the originals, which were restored to their usual places the following day.
Slavo said he could not imagine a terrorist attack on the Oscar ceremonies. What use would these helicopters be in the event of such a catastrophe? He supposed they carried weapons attached to their pontoons, or whatever they were called, but the random patterns they flew in were more likely to produce midair collisions than interception of anything more menacing in the skies.
Ivic reminded his twin that nothing bad ever happened to film stars: this was a myth perpetrated by supermarket tabloids. A terrorist attack on the Kodak Theater was ridiculous and unthinkable, though it was an appealing thought. The helicopters, he told Slavo, just buzzed about like that to make the Oscar ceremonies look patriotic.
The Oscar officials, whomever they were, had waffled back and forth for weeks: one day they experimentally spread the traditional red carpet, the next day they rolled it up and carted it off, the day after they rolled it out again. The trades reported inside debate about whether or not to retain the spectator bleachers. The bleachers had been erected, dismantled, erected again. BLEACHERS OUT AT OSCAR GALA, read a headline below the fold one morning. BLEACHERS REASSEMBLED, another announced in the afternoon edition.
“Why do they call them bleachers,” Slavo wanted to know.
“All these years in America,” chided Ivic, “yet you still resist learning anything of the local customs. They are for throwing bleach on the people walking across the red carpet.”
The newspapers also reported an ongoing, spirited debate about whether the Academy Awards ceremonies should be ‘glamorous,’ given the war situation, or ‘patriotic,’ involving little of the usual fanfare. Some stars were reported to favor simple muted browns and grays, conservative suits from Fred Segal, American flag lapel pins, gowns and sheathe dresses costing less than $100,000, and only the most modest sprinkling of necklaces and other jewelry. Some felt the most patriotic adornment would be Native American turquoise but most felt this was going too far in the wrong direction, that a modicum of ostentation was absolutely indicated to send a message of defiant affluence to the enemy.
Stretch limos were out, however: the stars would arrive in black Mercedez sedans with bulletproof windows, and the crowd—it was by no means a certain thing that an actual crowd would gather, but just in case a mob scene evolved—would be kept at a considerable distance from the actual arrivals. There would be a police perimeter and anyone breaching it would be fired on with rubber bullets.
“Who cares about a bunch of movie stars?” Ignorant Slavo persisted, as always, in his populist sentiments, his contempt for show business.
“But show business is all that America is,” Ivic told him for the thousandth time. “It’s all that America has! Americans would be demoralized if its movie stars were ignored or, heaven forbid, fired upon by assassins.”
“Who do you imagine would attack these movie stars,” Slavo sneered, “unless it were another group of movie stars?”
Every year, Oscar Day summoned the same petty bickering between the twins.
“These people,” Slavo always griped, “have more money than God has fingernails, but they haven’t got two shits worth of common sense.” He meant the Damianos. “Why put these tables out under those flame heaters when it is obviously going to rain?”
Ivic shook his head in despair.
“Don’t you understand by this time,” he said, “Mrs. Damiano is counting on it to rain.”
Samantha Damiano would rejoice to see thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of luxury apparel drenched and the lavish dinner turned into sponge. Whatever she had in mind this year had something to do with those pigs in the potting shed, he insisted.
As if overhearing him, a snuffling cacaphony of rented swine started up outside near the swimming pool.
“Pigs and peacocks,” Slavo rolled his eyes. “Peacocks and pigs. Mrs. Damiano is really a pervert.”
“Yes, she really is,” Ivic said, his voice, unlike his brother’s, full of admiration. “She knows how to have a good time.”
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