The necking couple at Thirteenth and Spruce has fogged up most of the Honda’s windows. The man presses his lips against the woman’s neck, her earlobe. Her eyes are closed, but she leans forward as if straining to see something through the misted window, Ben Allen perhaps, who is several yards away coaxing the last drag from his cigarette. Ben had been about to leap the stairs to Georgie’s house when he caught sight of the pawing couple. He watches until nostalgia forms in his lower gut — he once made slow work of someone’s neck, but whose? Certainly not Annie’s — but not long enough to be a cad. He takes Georgie’s steps in two leaps, as usual the last to arrive. His sanctified role in this group is showing up unforgivably late but armed with a story of what kept him that is so compelling he is at once forgiven. He shakes himself out of his coat in Georgie’s entryway. “You will not believe what is happening on your very street, Georgie.” He waits until she pauses in her work lighting candles and Bella and Claudia turn, to announce, “A couple is making out in a car.”
“Where?” Bella runs to the window. “I want to see.”
“There,” he points.
“Gross.” Georgie waves out a match.
“Not gross, Georgie. Inspiring.” He surveys the room — the smell of cinnamon, the sputtering candles, the friends he’s had since forever — through the eyes of strangers making out in a Honda. “Doesn’t it make you happy to be in the world?”
“Doesn’t what make you happy to be in the world?” Sarina Greene enters the room holding a salad. Ben’s coat gets stuck halfway off. It pins him, turns him around. She watches him flail. Finally he wrenches free. “That coat tried to kill me,” he says. “You’re a witness.”
She giggles.
Bella introduces Ben to her new girlfriend, Claudia, who works with crack-addicted war veterans. Claudia tells Ben about her recent obsession with Hitchcock. People with service jobs create a pang of guilt in Ben. When does she have time to watch movies?
“Where is Annie?” Georgie says.
Ben delivers the line he rehearsed. “Home sick, she sends this wine.” He produces a bottle of red that Georgie and Sarina inspect. “It’s from a town where she spent summers. I’d tell you, but she says I pronounce it wrong.”
“How nice.” Georgie hands the bottle to Sarina, who it seems has become Assistant to the Dinner. She disappears into the kitchen.
Sarina attended high school with Ben, Georgie, Bella, and Michael but wasn’t what they would call “core.” She was a misfit in their pasteurized, suburban school. A bright spot, dressed in black. Earlier in the afternoon, when Ben had made the customary do-you-need-anything phone call, Georgie told him Sarina had been invited because of an intersection of location, timing, and pie. Georgie said they had engaged in a dangerous fraction of conversation, marked by perceived insult and overaccommodation: Would you like to come, sadly no, not that I don’t want to, well then you must, well then I absolutely will!
Michael whispers into Ben’s ear. “Did you happen to see my car? Brand-new. Silver. Custom rims.”
“Michael has finally come to terms with the fact that he’s in finance,” Georgie says.
“Didn’t see it,” Ben says. “Unless it has two people making out in it.”
“Two sunroofs,” Michael says.
“Two?”
Michael holds up two fingers. “Keeping up with the Joneses and all.”
“I see them!” Bella says. She and Michael and Ben and Georgie and Claudia peer out the window.
Georgie’s apartment hovers over the corner of Thirteenth and Spruce like a brick exclamation point, between Pine’s sleepy antique shops and the tattooed disinterest of South. When she bought it, they toasted her new life: the boutique she was about to open, the marriage. The exclamation then was: the world is kind enough to allow all things! The boutique closed after ten months of vacuuming the carpet early. The marriage ended after five months of fretful sex. The exclamation now is: I am petrified!
“To life.” Michael lifts his glass.
To life, the party replies.
Dinner begins. The plate of bread circumnavigates the table. The table is round, so no one sits at the head. Or everyone does, Michael thinks, slicing into the butter. Because it is a good dinner party, food is beside the point. Who cares what Georgie served? Vegetable lasagna and heirloom whatnot. A breathtaking salad.
Sarina taps salt from a reindeer shaker. “Salt,” she says, “is a combination of sodium and chloride. They are considered the bad boys of the periodic table. I learned that from our science teacher.”
“It is also what you give people who’ve recently moved into a house,” Ben says. “For luck in fertility. Or a seasoned life. One of those.”
Claudia gives a clipped ha-ha. “Who can afford a house?”
“I bought a house,” Michael says. “But it’s more to keep up with the Joneses.”
Bella wavers on her choice of bread but commits. “How long have you been back in the city, Sarina?”
“Not even a year.”
“Weren’t you living someplace fabulous and foreign?” Georgie says.
“Connecticut,” Sarina says.
“It’s no surprise you’re back.” Michael spoons potatoes onto his plate. “This city has the highest recidivism rate in America.”
“What does that word mean?” Georgie says.
“It means you have no options.” Ben salts his salad. “You can’t get away, no matter how hard you try.”
“Whatever happened to that guy you dated for so long, Sarina?” Bella says, as if the thought has just occurred to her.
“I married him.”
“You could have brought him,” Georgie pouts. “Where is he tonight?”
Sarina swallows a throatful of greens. “Divorced.”
The party flicks their eyes to her, to their plates. Georgie keeps Sarina’s gaze for the length of a curt, kind nod. Ben traces the lip of his wineglass. “Where did that come from, the whole keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing?”
“The saying?” Bella waves her knife as if this were an obvious question. “It’s a metaphor for consumerism.”
“But why is it so hard to keep up with them, specifically?”
“Because they keep buying new shit!” Bella says.
“But who are the Joneses?” he persists.
Michael wags an asparagus spear at Ben. “Everyone in my office.”
“Everyone is the Joneses,” Bella says. “Michael’s office, ex-boyfriends, even we are the Joneses.”
“So,” Georgie concludes, “we are all trying to keep up with ourselves!”
Claudia compliments Georgie on the meal. The table lifts off to another topic, but Ben feels they’ve left the Joneses prematurely. Sarina watches him mull over ways to return to it. She innately knows his moods and tendencies, the way you know on a flight, even with your eyes closed, that a plane is banking.
Bella is a girl who doesn’t mean to be rude ever but is rude, always, and when she asks Sarina if she is still teaching fifth grade, she places on the word still a sour sound Claudia hastens to refurbish by saying, “Teaching is so …” Only Claudia is a girl who can never procure the right word in a timely manner and during each second she tries, everyone at the table treads water until Ben places his fork down and declares, “… noble.”
Sarina gazes at him as if he has just returned from war.
Georgie and Michael call out other things teaching is: underpaid, thankless, long-houred, which Michael insists is a word. Emboldened by the support, Sarina embarks on the First Story of the Night.
“It can be emotionally demanding,” she begins. “For example …” All heads swivel toward her. For the first time, she can see everyone’s face at once. The footing of her thoughts slips.