“Gin and tonic! Gin and tonic!” This abruptly from Albert in his old-fashioned horsehair chair shoved hard against a far wall. The companion pair of earless caribou heads stared vacantly down as Albert swung that retractable cane of his, rapping things and creating a fuss. Three loud raps, then: “I wonder if one of you gentlemen might bring me my Gilbey’s. Jack! Is that Jack I hear? A Gilbey’s and tonic with a twist. Don’t sip any on the way back, Jack. I can tell when people have been drinking my drink. Jack, speak up. Where did you go?” Albert called more or less in the direction of the young man who stood only a foot or so outside the reach of Albert’s red-tipped cane. As always, the blind man had heard correctly: it was Jack beside him. Albert thrashed around with the cane. Jack held back. Jack is one of those ridiculous men who wear safari outfits in town and at home. Albert chastised, “I know you’re near, Jack. I smell you,” and Jack raised a finger to his lips—playful silent warning for the rest of us to remain quiet and go along with the old mischief of seeing how close you can get to Albert before he hits you with the cane.

Jack has been willing on occasion to stalk Albert for over an hour at a stretch. Everybody knows it’s all in good fun. Back and forth crept Jack, keeping safe distance while waiting for the right moment to close in on Albert waving the cane feebly and begging for someone to please make his brother go away and leave him alone.

And here came Hiram rattling across the carpet toward where the action was. At Hiram’s rate of travel he could expect to arrive at the porno cabinet in roughly two to four minutes, depending on variations in clearance between chairs and tables, and the speed with which other men could remove lamps and ashtrays and cachepots from the tabletops before relocating the furniture sufficiently for Hiram’s walker to squeeze by as he shouted, “Where’s dinner? It’s time for dinner! Which of you gentlemen is in charge of our dinner?”

Who else but Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah? Already these three were folding the napkins (Jason), counting out knives (Joshua), and polishing, with a dry cloth, the surface of the extremely long, rectangular, oak table (Jeremiah). We can’t quite all fit around that table, but with enough folding card tables and petit writing desks appended at corners, and with our chairs pulled in tight or angled out just so, we can manage. No person has to feel banished to a chaise lounge, and everyone can pretty much get at the food, and no one is forced to eat off his lap. The downside is the Seating Plan in its particulars—the who-sits-next-to-whom of it all—with its impossible problems of left- and right-handed eaters placed in elbow-knocking proximity; of belligerent vegetarians always wanting to sit at a remove from meat; of equitable distribution of the red and the white wines; of the distasteful cliques—twins and young fathers come to mind—who insist on confederation to the point of pressuring others out of chairs; of old bitter hatreds and severe grain allergies and who drinks tea and who won’t bear salt and how long it will take before some drunken comedian at the end of the table throws the first dinner roll. No ideal Plan has ever been devised. We would dispense with the Seating Plan altogether, but this has been tried and the outcome was not good. So the Seating Plan exists, is drawn up then drawn again, modified then reviewed, edited then erased, smudged, annotated, corrected, and drawn up one more time, in colored pencil on construction paper, by Jeremiah with his velvet-covered box of silver place cards engraved with names. You’re supposed to sit where your place card tells you to sit. If you don’t want to sit where your place card tells you to sit, you’re supposed to inform Jeremiah, so that he can say, “Well, then, sit wherever the fuck you want.”