Why Don’t Fools Fall in Love?
Ira is attending the wedding of his cousin Sheila with whom he’s always been especially close. Sheila wants to pair her cousin up with Carmen who needs to meet a nice man. Distant relation Donna is taken aback by the idea since Carmen is clearly older than Ira. But Ira has so far not been terribly lucky with love and his ruminations over that gap in his life so far is conveyed through absurdly out of touch romantic imagery:
“He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declarations veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or jonquils, nor haunted a mailbox or a phone booth or a certain café, nor screamed his beloved’s name in the streets at three in the morning, heedless of the neighbors, and it seemed possible that to fall for a woman who had been around the block a few times might be to rob himself of much of the purely ornamental elements, the swags and antimacassars of first love.”
“The Halloween Party”
The titular celebratory event of this story is another one in which the potential relationship between a younger male and older female is at stake. Nathan is still a teenager and Eleanor Parnell an older friend of the family with large breasts, a smoking habit, and a reputation for gambling and baking desserts containing extra special ingredients. But none of that matters to Nathan in a world that also contains humor:
“Her laugh, which was the first thing Nathan remembered noticing about Eleanor, had always been odd— raucous and dark, like a cartoon magpie’s or spider’s—but lately it had come for Nathan to be invested with the darkness of sex and the raucousness of having survived misfortune.”
Nathan’s Costume Idea
A different sort of example of imagery occurs later in “The Halloween Party” when Nathan’s choice for a costume is revealed and described. The imagery conveying what first brought Eleanor to his attention is intensely personal while the description of his costume is primarily utilitarian—it is there to provide illumination into what he looks like and what he thinks like:
“He had made a coat hanger into a wire ring that sat like a diadem on his brow, bent the end of it so that it would stand up over the back of his head, then made a small loop into which he could screw a light bulb. When he wore this contraption the light bulb seemed to hang suspended a few inches above him, and the wire was, in a dim room, practically invisible. He was...a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume...it bothered him that the light bulb would never actually be lit up, and would just bob there gray and dull, atop his head, as though he were really going to Eleanor’s party as a guy in the process of having a bad idea for a costume.”
She…Sheila
There is more to the story of Ira and Sheila than his somewhat goofy explication of what being in love must be like. The real reason that Ira has yet to find love has far less to do with book and movie fictions which might confuse stalking with romance, but then Ira is definitely confused on the issue of where in his life stands this girl named Sheila, this cousin Sheila...she who has just professed her undying vows of love in a public wedding ceremony.
“Things had gotten a little wiggly, Ira now recalled, in the car on the way home from Westwood that night. Sheila drove one of those tiny Italian two-seaters capable of filling very rapidly with sexual tension, in particular at a stop light, with Marvin Gaye coming over the radio and a pretty cousin in the driver’s seat, chewing thoughtfully on a strand of hair.”
