“Hey,” came a voice across the garden, and they all turned to see Ed Slikowski making his way toward them, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes. “I put some beer in the fridge, man,” he told Dave, shaking his hand. “This is a great place.”
“Thanks, man.” Ed Slikowski flummoxed Dave. He was always just a little too nice. From Dave’s experience, someone like Ed—for whom doors seemed to open as he walked by (he was making a movie? How?)—should be a complete ass.
“Ed!” cried Lil, rising up to kiss his cheek.
“Ed!” called Tuck, putting down his tongs and striding over to them. He handed Lil a hot dog and shook Ed’s hand. Great, thought Dave, now I’ve gotta cook again. A small crowd had formed around Ed, including Will Chase—it killed Dave, the way he glanced at Beth proprietarily—and those odious Green-Golds, whom Lil had indeed brought along. Um, this is my party, he thought sullenly. Fuck it, he thought. The hot dogs can burn.
But then, across the garden, Curtis and Emily moved from the table to the grill, where they stood companionably, shoulder to shoulder, prodding the hot dogs. Emily’s breasts were rather in evidence, pooching out of the low neck of her dress, and it made Dave a little embarrassed to see it. The girls all thought Emily’s problem was that she wasn’t willing to give anyone a chance. She’d go out on one or two dates, then decide the guy was wrong for her. But Dave—who spent a lot of time at parties with Emily and who was, after all, a guy—thought that the trouble was, in fact, the exact opposite. That she tried too hard. Introduce her to some guy she might really like and suddenly she became coy and flirtatious, pouting her lips and putting on what Lil called her “stage face,” which meant that she arranged her features in such a way as to indicate “happy” and “upbeat” and “sexy.” But when she spoke to men she didn’t care about she was her sweet, cool self. And of course these men pursued her, to no avail.
Which category would Curtis fall into? It didn’t really matter, because there was no way Curtis would be interested in Emily. Dave knew guys like Curtis. They dated androgynous elfin girls who worked in record stores and could spout music trivia on command, or tall, skinny, model types, with long, sleek hair and overly visible midriffs. And sure enough, as Dave watched, Curtis strode across the stone patio, and kissed Marco’s sister Paola—a smiling sylph, with shiny black hair to her waist—on both cheeks, holding her thin shoulders in his hands rather intimately. He heard a faint echo of her hoarse “Ciao.” The crowd had thinned a bit and sounds were starting to float across the patio, snatches of conversation. His upstairs neighbors—Katherine and Matt—walked out the back door, grabbed beers from the ice bucket, and waved at him.
Just then, Emily snuck up behind him and proffered a hot dog. “I grabbed the last one for you,” she said. He took the thing, not sure if he should eat it now—he feared dribbling food on himself, in his inebriated state—or make his way to someplace private before he wolfed it down.
“Thanks,” he told Emily.
“De nada,” she replied, crouching down beside him and fidgeting with the ties of her dress. “Listen, I’m gonna take off. Is it okay if I grab some of the ceviche? I told Mr. Gonzalez I’d bring him some. He has his own recipe and he’s curious about my dad’s.” Dave’s ears turned hot. This was so like Emily, to offer him something, then take it away. She barely knew Mr. Gonzalez. He was just her neighbor—an old man, dwarflike, with a brown wrinkled face—not a real friend. Why should she bring food to him, Dave’s food, particularly when Dave himself was fucking starving, and, more important, too fucking tired to go rummaging through his messy kitchen cupboards for a piece of Tupperware.
“There isn’t any left,” he said.
“There’s a whole bowl in the fridge that you didn’t put out. I wasn’t sure if you were saving it for something or what.” Scratching his head, Dave looked around, then remembered the hot dog, cooling in his hand. There were still a lot of people around, showing no signs of leaving. He wanted, more than anything, to go inside his cool, dark apartment and shove the entire hot dog in his mouth, alone.
“It’s not going to keep,” offered Lil, annoyingly. She was in some sort of mood today.
“You know what?” said Emily, standing up. “Forget it. It’s too much trouble. Listen, I’m going to head.” Her voice had a wounded tone that Dave thought just too much. He hoisted himself up.
“No, no,” he said, “let me grab something for you to put it in.” Emily shrugged.
“Okay,” she said, “thanks,” and followed Dave to the kitchen. Without too much trouble, he found a wobbly cottage cheese container and handed it silently to Emily, who grabbed the blue mixing bowl and spooned ceviche from the large container to the small, purple octopus arms waving in the air. Dave grabbed a cigarette from a pack somebody had left on the counter and lit it with a kitchen match. “The G is running weird after six, isn’t it?” Dave asked her. “Do you have money for a cab? You don’t want to wait for Lil and Tuck? You could split one?” Emily put the blue bowl back in the fridge and shook her head.
From the dark little hallway stepped Curtis, brown eyes blinking owlishly behind his glasses. “I’m going to take her home,” he said. “I brought Carmen. I was heading that way anyway. We can grab some dinner. All I’ve eaten today is that hot dog.” Carmen was Curtis’s highly impractical vehicle, an orange Karmann Ghia convertible, courtesy of his father, who bought and restored old cars. Dave took an odd pleasure in the absurdity of Curtis’s existence: he didn’t have an apartment, was still living in the practice space (in a tent and a sleeping bag, no less), but he did have a restored-to-mint collector’s car, which he parked on Front Street, apparently unworried about someone stealing it, or stripping it, or bashing in its front window with a tire iron, as had been the fate of every car ever owned by Dave’s parents.
“Cool,” Dave said, holding out the found pack—Marlboro Lights—to Curtis, who pulled out a cigarette and lit it with his old Zippo, cupping his hand protectively around the flame as though caught in a heavy wind.
“I’ll be right back,” Emily said, disappearing around the corner, presumably to the bathroom.
“Excuse me for one sec,” Dave said to Curtis, and, without waiting for a response, trailed Emily down the hall, placing his foot in the bathroom door as she shut it.
“What the—” she said, then opened the door. “What’s up?” she asked him. He slid past her and sat down on the toilet. Slitting her eyes at him, she closed the door with a firm click. “Dave, what’s the deal?” I don’t know what the fucking deal is, he wanted to say. How do you expect me to know what the fucking deal is? A peculiar feeling was spreading through his abdomen, as though some particular organ—stomach? intestine?—were dropping into a deep pit. Like those dreams he had—maybe everyone had them—just as he slid into sleep, dreams in which he fell into a black void, rousing himself (suddenly, frighteningly) by pressing down on the mattress with an arm or a leg to break the imagined fall.
“So where are you guys going for dinner?” he asked, his words slurring just as he’d feared. He was still, to his surprise, clutching a lit cigarette in his left hand. How nice. He took a long, invigorating drag and watched, through a haze of smoke, as Emily splashed water on her face. She was so fresh and clean. For a moment, he felt the urge to bury his hot head in the cool, white stretch of her neck, to put his arms around her and fall asleep. Then he wondered where he’d put his hot dog. He hadn’t eaten it, that much he knew. “Bean, I guess, if it’s open and we can get a table.” Bean did a nice shitake and spinach burrito, which sounded pretty good to Dave at the moment, and he had the fleeting thought that he should join them for dinner and simply let his party continue on without him. Only his close friends would notice if he left, really, and he doubted they’d mind. But Carmen only seated two. And, of course, they didn’t want him to come along. There was that.