“How could you get married for that reason?” I asked.
“Haven’t you ever done anything you didn’t want to do?” He’d virtually snarled the question.
“Not four times,” I’d snarled back.
Whenever I see him socially, I experience a violent psychic hiccup that finally makes me wave my arms and loudly tell him off, even though I’m alone in my apartment and it’s days later. Then when I see him again, the bodily memory of the disturbance is roused and starts feebly moving its little feelers, trying to engage the source of the problem and straighten it out. He grabs the tips of those little feelers and locks on. It’s an emotional bond, sort of.
I noticed that his two children, each from a different marriage, had come to the party and were standing around, as if presenting evidence of his good and fruitful life. The handsome teenage son lounged affably in a corner. The daughter, a stoic young woman from the particularly ugly first marriage, was serving hors d’oeuvres. A mournful tendril of brown hair played limply against her cheek. I felt a quiet throb of affection for her. I had met her before, at another party. She had gotten drunk and told me that her father had said to her, when she was fifteen, that if he ever found out she’d had an abortion, he’d kill her. “He’ll do that,” she said. “He’ll just spew shit out. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s pretty awful anyway.”
I said hello to her and selected a canapé with turmeric on it. Her father was standing nearby, railing at some people who were nodding in accord. He was complaining about how nobody wanted to be responsible anymore, particularly those people who went to “therapy” instead of squarely facing the truths of Freud. “They talk about ‘really getting to know themselves,’ as if they can come up with a little answer for everything,” he said fiercely. “As if any of us can know ourselves, as if any of us can ever explain the brutality of sex. If we ever ‘got to know’ ourselves, we would be sickened. It is the essence of decency to acknowledge that and keep going.” His jaw seemed about to split sideways in a rictus of frustration.
I turned away and fell into gossiping with a fellow who had made his reputation by proving that male and female genitals are really a social construct. He had once been quite a hotshot, but he had since gone to seed in the manner of an old cat who knows where to find the food dish. He entertained me with the details of a spat between two linguistics professors, one of whom had thrown a glass of wine at the other at a recent barbecue.
“We inhabit a nest of vipers,” he said, with a happy little movement of his neck and chin.
“Low-grade vipers,” I agreed. “But vipers nonetheless.”
He vaguely smiled and turned away. I walked through the room, having partial conversations. The public faces of these people were so familiar to me that they were as abstract as a word repeated too many times in rapid succession. Their half-expressions—the gradations of approval or attention or retraction in their eyes as they politely nodded or scratched their noses—were like the surface of quick-moving water, all shiny, slippery pieces. A woman’s bright dress flashed with her efficient strides. A department chair from yet another university tucked one arm protectively about her soft, protruding abdomen, while her other arm flailed the air valiantly to exaggerate the argument she made to a man apparently in complete agreement. He laughed with stiff, gaping jaws.
I was seeing them in pieces, and I knew it. I knew that under their words and gestures they must be whole and deep-rooted, with faces and voices I did not know. I stood still, my wineglass a prop in my tense hand, and tried to feel them more fully. I imagined the gesticulating department chair asleep in her bed, her face in the mild fur-rows of middle age, her body private and innocent as an almond in its special shell. I imagined her, even in sleep, tunneling her way through phantom problems, twisting and turning and valiantly arguing. I knew that she was divorced and that she had a young child; I thought of her at breakfast, touching her child’s upturned face with her palm. I pictured the child struggling to make sense of the conflicts surging under her mother’s absent, tender gesture.
Meanwhile, light ran and flirted on glass and silverware. Intellectual discussion rose and devolved. A salsa band had arrived and was assembling itself in a slow and professional manner. A pleasant fellow with a hirsute face replaced a part on his horn and frowned as if to frown were delicious. His bandmates moved behind him with sleek, sensory ease.
The classics professor made right by Prozac came up beside me and put an arm about my waist. “I wanted to tell you how good it is to see you,” she said. “I like you so much, Susan.”
I was surprised to hear this, as we barely knew each other. Still, I put my arm about her. There was a little roll of fat at her waist, which felt sweet as cake.
“You’re like me,” she continued. “You think for yourself. You see life as it is.”
“Life as it is?” My fingers rested gingerly on her sweet fat. “What do you mean?”
She faltered and slightly retracted her embrace. “You know, no bullshit. You aren’t fooled by bullshit.”
I furrowed my brow.
“Oh, I can’t tell you what I mean right now,” she said. “I’m a little drunk. But you know.”
Her face was uncertain and fractured, but that little fat roll was live and full of feeling. The hell of it was, she was probably on a diet. I withdrew my arm from her, and we changed the subject.
When I got home, my apartment felt pleasing and almost festive in comparison to the party. I lay on my red couch and ate ham and white bean soup from a Styrofoam container. My cats sat happily with their little chests out. I thought of Erin. I wished that I could ask her to visit and that we could lie on the floor together. I remembered her blunt, full-throttle kiss, and a tiny, grateful love flowered in my chest. It had been a month since our stumbling, drunken affair had ended, and Erin was, tentatively, my friend. I could call her, but she probably wouldn’t be home. She had just fallen in love with a rambunctious girl whom I had once glimpsed in a crowd, insouciantly bare-legged in a tiny skirt and cowboy boots. She had dumped a glass of ice down Erin’s shirt and hopped back laughing, switching her bossy skirt. I smiled and put down the empty soup container. I lay on my back and held a small maroon pillow against my chest. I relished the slight soreness of Erin’s memory overlaid with that giddy burst of glimpsed laughter and bare, dancing legs; I felt the laughter almost as if it were mine.
The next day the screenwriting philosophy professor called me to ask if he could give my phone number to a friend of his who had noticed me at the party, a sociologist named Kenneth.
“Normally I wouldn’t do this,” he said. “But he was quite taken with you.”
“How? I mean, we didn’t talk.”
“He loved your red high heels and your dress. And he . . . well, he noticed this little bruise on your leg, and he thought it was striking against your skin.”
“I don’t even remember him,” I said.
“Well, let me tell you. He’s extraordinary. He’s a brilliant sociologist, and he’s very influential, very respected. And he’s a lot of fun. Every weekend he drives around to flea markets and finds the most amazing things. He’s got a real gift for it; people beg to go with him on his runs because he can find things nobody else could unearth. He’s separated from his wife—”
“I don’t date married men.”
“He’s getting divorced.”
I rolled my eyes, but at the end of the conversation I said that the sociologist could have my number. I put the phone down, feeling flattered and at the same time slightly embarrassed by my willingness to talk to someone I didn’t remember whose attention had flattered me secondhand. I watched guiltily as the two feelings paired up and slunk off together like snakes. Well, maybe I would like him.