A Hefty Serving of Small Talk for Dinner

Here we are hosting our first dinner party of the new century, a small but elegant affair featuring candlelight and boneless chicken breasts and lots of sophisticated, adult conversation.

“Nice breasts,” my friend Hank says, leering at the chicken.

“Vons,” I say.

“Are they real?” Martha asks.

“They’re real,” says Hank, prodding them with a fork.

It’s one of those intimate dinner parties, just ourselves and one other couple. The adults talk in the kitchen. The children go to war at the far end of the house, which isn’t very far at all.

“How many kids do you have again?” I ask Hank.

“Forty,” he says.

“Sounds like more,” I say.

“Sounds like a hundred,” says his wife, Martha.

Every now and then, we hear the dull thud of a kid’s head hitting a closet door or the yelp of someone being tossed around like a pillow. Nice sounds. Frightening sounds. Under different circumstances, the sort of happy party sounds that precede a murder.

“Our kids play well together,” I say.

“I think I hear a siren,” Hank says.

“Settle down back there,” I yell.

*

Like a lot of elegant L.A. dinner parties, we start in the kitchen with margaritas and a bottle of wine. Martha offers to crush the ice with a metal mallet. Hank mixes the drinks. Then we all head to the bathroom.

In the bathroom, we close the door so the kids can’t find us, then we admire the grout.

It is like an old episode of “Knot’s Landing”--four adults in an L.A. bathroom, drinking and relaxing. Except that we are talking about tile and grout.

“Why did it crack like that?” Hank asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Could’ve been too dry,” he says.

“In the shower, it held up fine,” I say.

“These are nice towel bars,” Martha says.

We like the way our voices sound in the bathroom. For 10 minutes, we hang around the tub and discuss how well the brass faucet is holding up, not getting all brown the way brass often does.

“This is going well,” I whisper to my wife, relieved at how the dinner party is turning out.

“Don’t jinx it,” she says.

Moving to the patio, we admire the food cooking on the barbecue and breathe in the rich, thick smoke of the grill.

We revel in the open flames, Hank and I. The more the fire flares up, the happier we get, the flames reflecting off the margarita glasses and our wives’ teeth and jewelry.

“Want to eat outside?” my wife asks.

“Sure,” somebody says.

It has been the mildest of winters, good for barbecues and Saturday night dinner parties like this one, where we can sit outside in the sweaters we got for Christmas and savor the garlic and the smoke.

*

Mostly, we just talk. It’s the kind of adult conversation we can never get enough of--talk about the kids and schools and the auto show and how Marino should retire, better now than later, when he might be forced to limp away from football in disgrace.

We talk about movies and orthodontics and soccer games that ended badly. HMOs and kitchen renovations and dot-coms.

“It’s like a gold rush,” I say as we discuss the Internet.

“Or a house of cards,” Hank says.

What we don’t talk about is politics. Almost no one I know is talking about politics. I guess everyone has better things to discuss. Or they’re tired of it all.

In any case, politics has become almost invisible now. Which, in good times like these, is probably what politics should be. Invisible.

“Do you smell something burning?” my wife asks.

“I don’t know,” Martha says.

“I think I smell something burning,” she says, her nose to the air like a mother deer.

“It’s the candles,” Hank says.

“It’s the grill,” I say.

“No, really, I smell something else burning,” my wife says.

Like many women, my wife has an extraordinary sense of smell. She is always smelling something burning. At a ballgame. At the mall. At our wedding.

She smells refinery fires in Texas, truck blazes in Maine. A tugboat catches fire on the Mississippi River, she’s the first to notice. It’s a gift, really, this sense of smell.

“I smell something too,” Martha says.

“It’s the grill,” Hank says.

“I think she smells the rain forests,” I say.

And that’s how our first dinner party of the 21st century goes, much like dinner parties of the past, scented with barbecue smoke and just enough adult conversation to keep us going, to let us know that our problems are their problems and vice versa--that there are no new problems, just new parents.

On the other side of the house, a kid screams. A cat cusses. Heavy footsteps. Then silence. Somewhere, a bunch of kids is huddled together, coming up with an excuse.

“Our kids play so well together,” I say.

“I think something’s burning,” my wife says.

“Wanna go look at the grout again?” Hank asks.

“Sure,” I say.

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is [email protected].