eyes of bitterness. The chicken was indeed delicious. We ate at an ovular dining table—Leon, Vivian Goyette, little Emily Goyette, and myself. I sat across from Emily and Leon sat across from Vivian. Little Emily and I were both a little nervous and out of sorts. Our eyes kept darting to the other two and then back to each other to trade looks of uncertainty. Over dinner, at first we all talked about the upcoming production of The Tempest. We toasted to the production. We toasted to our success. We toasted to little Emily’s preordained fate as a celebrated actress of stage and screen. Then talk became general. Much wine was drunk and all pretenses of table manners were soon discarded. Leon and Mrs. Goyette planted their elbows on the table and slurped the chicken from the bones with noisy, lustful abandon. Leon ate with his hands, smacked his jaws, licked his fingers, gulped his wine and roared between bites with thunderous eructation, and the more grotesque his table manners became, the more directly they were mirrored across the table in the behavior of little Emily’s mother. Leon and Vivian Goyette locked eyes as they slurped the juicy meat from the slick slender chicken bones, frequently knocking their glasses together to toast (often forgetting entirely to include little Emily and me), refilling one another’s wineglasses with increasing frequency throughout the meal, uncorking one bottle of wine after another, often uncorking another bottle even before the previous had been depleted of its contents. Leon grew flushed, unbuttoned his collar, whipped off his necktie and threw it over his shoulder. Vivian unpinned her hair and undid the first two buttons of her blouse. Both of them ate and drank to bubbling crapulous excess. Vivian grew as pink as a carnation and sticky with perspiration. Leon’s rosaceous face beneath his beard grew deeply enflamed, and his shirt became glued to his torso with sweat. Both of them were exploding and melting at the same time with laughter, sweat, and glee. More wine was opened and drunk. Little Emily and I were ordered to the kitchen to wash up while Leon and Vivian ate chocolate cake.
Little Emily sullenly passed the dishes, glasses, and silverware under hot water at the kitchen sink and handed them to me to put in the dishwashing machine. Leon and Vivian finished their cake and retired to the living room, where we heard their mirth continue.
“So you live with that big fat douchebag?” said little Emily. I had taken off my suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of my shirt.
“We’ve been performing Shakespeare in the subways and doing magic shows.”
When we finished washing the dishes, Leon and little Emily’s mother had disappeared from the living room.
Little Emily plopped down on the couch, snatched up a remote control and turned on the TV in a single fluid motion, with the muscle-memory of a well-practiced hand.
“Where is your mother?” I said. Little Emily shrugged and rolled her eyes.
“Ptf. Dunno.”
I sat down next to her on the couch.
“What are you watching?” I said. I scooted a little closer to her.
“Friends,” she said.
We watched the program for a while. I had never really seen much “grown-up” TV before. Lydia would only let me watch educational programming on PBS, or cartoons sometimes. Leon only liked golden-age Hollywood movies, or else he liked to turn on the news and yell at it. But this? Something new to me. People were doing things on the screen, and it didn’t make any sense to me. There seemed to be an electric current in the air in the universe where these people lived, a gathering of invisible voices that would laugh at them, sometimes at such mysterious points in time that it was very difficult to determine what these disembodied voices found so funny. It also seemed that the people who lived in this world were themselves unaware of these voices—or if they were, they had grown so used to them that they no longer found it strange. What would it be like to grow up in the world of prime-time sitcoms? To come of age under the watchful eyes of these audible but invisible