Summer home theatricals

Having made the decision that all his guests this Summer would assist in choreographing the theatricals of the final weekend, Gérard had rather hoped to recreate his heroic morning in the loading dock of the Pierre, starkers, when Betty Commilfaux pointed out the narrative deficiency of nothing having happened, until the great 61st Street portcullis shudderingly rose to admit the neighborhood rodents, which she categorically refused to portray. But Gérard, having dined out all season on the story of his nakedness, spontaneous and pristine as it had been, observed that perhaps she had overlooked its valiant existential side.

Quietly enough, it fell to Thorny to broker a triumphal niche for Betty, having been seeing to that necessity for her, ever since his childhood inheritance of the leeward side of Commilfaux Point presented her with a Summer playmate some 10 years her junior, a part for which recruitment had not grown any easier. Inevitably, as Thorny saw it, there would be a meter maid, for Betty to reprise her girlhood Clara to his dashing trucker Prince, tripping Gérard's Grétrian car alarm to frighten the Knickerbocker's porters into the hotel dock, Clara ethereal in Alice Bradian oblivion, as Thorny and Gérard unobtrusively shared civilities and saw to his basics: Petipa's own manuscript and a ribbon for its keeping.

And yet, of Thornhill, what? Ever the guest to pull his neighbor's fat from the fire, for every host they met; of a gravity specific enough to touch base with ground but assuring flotation by the mildest exertion; and yet, of promise, too, as Betty more than once alluded, of the entire crapshoot of Noggin's Neck with one shrewd matrimonial stroke, of self-evident facility. Commilfaux Point was scarcely the half of it; but take it, for are its altitudes and slope not impervious to damp, and its microclimate abjectly panting for Chablisienne development, the occasional anachronistic riding easement no more than an air right's swap away, between gentlemen in town?

And no one else (weighed it not upon Thorny to remember?), owned this environment-redeeming, Bet-ty-mollifying, intriguingly a-musingly complicating, even faintly ribaldly folkloric setting for his life, as no one else ever would. Thorny hadn't the time to sell things; they aggrandised, as it was, too speedily. All he could do, was to spend heroically, and hope for the best. Still, he figured himself in the mix, and was there time to be sure if he would not disappear, even to himself, in this elegant recon-ciliation of accidents of birth? Timing, he didn't read as a market player, but as one of many tonalities in time, itself: prejudicial, possibly, to dis-turb with untoward emphasis. Was it discernible then, that he was close to musing as any groom might 
do, thinking he could be thinking 
for himself?