You'd be lucky to get your bus fare home.

But I wished that it could be as easy as that to get the James and Claire "us" back.

Or if all I had to do would be to put an announcement on the evening news that said something like "Would the James and Claire `us,' last known to be touring the [let's just say] Kerry area please contact the police in Dublin for an urgent message."

But it looked like the "us" wasn't just missing. It was dead. Killed by James.

And it died intestate.

In theory the state inherits all the possessions belonging to "us."

In practice, of course, nothing so surreal and ridiculous as that was going to happen.

Now pass me that saw, would you?

You see, I firmly believe that there was only one way to deal with unpleas- ant situations--and what was my current situation if not unpleasant? And that was to take a deep breath, face them fairly and squarely, look them in the eye, stare them down and show them who's boss.

I really believed very strongly in this.

And perhaps one day I might even take my own advice and actually do it.

To sum up my attitude, let me just tell you that I don't think I have ever, in my whole life, done the dishes on the actual night of a dinner party.

I always promised myself that I would. That waking up, with a hangover, to filthy plates and a kitchen that looked like a battleground was too horrible to contemplate. But you know what it's like.

The end of the evening has rolled around and the table is

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strewn with half-full dishes of melting baked Alaska, which I have more or less abandoned.

Now I must say, in my defense, that up to this point I am usually a model hostess, positively dancing attendance on my guests, ferrying plates and dishes and cutlery to and from the kitchen as though I was on a con- veyor belt. However, my sense of hospitality decreases in direct proportion to the number of glasses of wine that I've had, so by dessert and coffee time I am usually far too relaxed (all right then, far too drunk, if you will insist on calling a spade a spade) and no longer feel any need to clear the table. If the table had collapsed in front of me under the weight of the uncleared dishes, I would have just laughed.

If my guests wanted a clean table I'm afraid that they'd have had to do it themselves. They knew where the kitchen was. Were they waiting for an engraved invitation?

In the middle of the table there always was a completely untouched bowl of fruit.

I mean, what's the problem? Fruit is lovely.

I always bought fruit and no one ever ate it. Protestant dessert, Judy called it. My friends said that it was bad enough for me to insult them by offering them something like a banana or an orange for dessert. That their idea of a decent dessert--nay, their only idea of a dessert--was something positively bursting with saturated fats and refined sugar and double cream and alcohol and egg whites and cholesterol. The kind of dessert that your arteries con- tract an inch or two just from looking at. I was sure that they developed such attitudes in their deprived childhoods.

So the upshot was that I always bought fruit and my guests always never ate it. If you follow me.

And the view of the table was always obscured by about a thousand glasses, several of them overturned, with their contents, be it white wine, gin and tonic, Irish coffees or Baileys, fast spreading out and intermingling and making friends with each other on the tablecloth, forming little seas around the islands of salt, which some conscientious poor soul (usually James) had thrown down to halt the trail of devastation wreaked by the advancing hordes of spilled red wine.

And I would be on my twenty-second Sambucca and reclin-

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ing on the two back legs of my chair, or sitting on James's knee telling anyone who'd listen how much I love him.

I had no shame.

My sobriety was less than judgelike, but I was at one with the universe.

Every morning after a party I staggered down to the kitchen and for a second I paused with my hand on the kitchen doorknob and had a beautiful warm fantasy that when I flung wide the door the place would be gleaming, the sun glinting off the polished surfaces, all the cups and plates and bowls and pots and pans scrubbed and put away (in the correct cupboards).

Instead, as I gingerly picked my way through the debris, I was hard- pressed to find even an unbroken glass for my much-needed couple of as- pirin, never mind a clean one.

And while we're on the subject of dinner parties, I'd like the answer to a couple of questions.

Why, at dinner parties, does someone always tear all the paper off the labels on all the bottles of wine, so that when you come down in the morning the table is covered with little annoying sticky scraps of paper that stick to everything?

Why do I always use the butter dish as an ashtray?

Why does at least one person always say--usually fairly late in the evening--"I wonder what Dubonnet and Guinness would taste like?" or "What would happen if I lit my glass of Jack Daniels?"

And then proceed to find out.

Just for the record, the Guinness causes the Dubonnet to curdle in the most disgusting fashion and the Jack Daniels goes up like a Kuwaiti oil well, blistering the paint on the dining room ceiling.

To be fair to James--although why should I, the bastard--he was always very good about housework and especially about cleaning up after said dinner parties. He never got as drunk as I did, so at the very least he was in a fit condition to move most of the carnage from the dining table to the kitchen so that in the morning one room was fairly presentable. Apart from, of course, the Jack Daniels scorch marks on the ceiling. But at least I knew I could paint over them.

Again.

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I had some paint left from the last dinner party.

And the inevitable couple of hungover bodies usually to be found in an unshaven and disheveled state (and that's just the women) on the living room couch. In fact, they were nearly harder to get rid of than said scorch marks on the ceiling. Or the cigarette burns on the carpet.

Lying around for half the day, groaning and demanding cups of tea and aspirin and saying that they'll vomit if they move.

Anyway, I was doing it again.

Procrastinating, that is.

Trying to make myself think about the practicalities of no longer being with James was like trying to make myself look directly at the sun on a really bright day. Hard to do either, and they both made my eyes water.

I suppose I'd better think about the custody of Kate problem. Although was it a problem? James hadn't shown the slightest bit of interest in her. And, after all, he was the (boo, hiss!) adulterer. And because of this, what with him being the wrongdoer and everything, I supposed custody would be automatically awarded to me.