Without my husband.
Who is actually having a CARD GAME instead.
He's sitting in the living room in a red-and-white striped shirt, suspenders still looped over his shoulders, drinking a beer with his buddies from the network whose names I still can't be bothered to remember, when I come down the stairs, wearing a white brocade dress with gray mink trim and long gray gloves. My mother is married to a fishmonger. My father is gay and lives in Paris. I am going to the ballet.
Doesn't anyone understand how TERRIBLE life is? I used to beg to go to these events. I used to connive and cadge an extra ticket, suck up to gay men who wanted to help me, buy a dress and tuck the tags in and arrogantly return it the next day, all with the specific ambition of landing myself in the position I'm in tonight.
"Hello," Hubert says nervously, putting down his beer as he stands. "I ... I wouldn't have recognized you.”
I smile mournfully. "Is D.W. here yet?" I shake my head.
He looks at his buddies. "I guess we'd know it if he were. D.W. He's Cecelia's friend. He's—”
“An escort," I say quickly.
The buddies nod uncomfortably.
"Listen," he says, approaching to take my arm, leading me a little bit out of the room, "I really appreciate this, you know?”
I stand with my head bowed. "I don't know why you're making me do this.”
"Because," he says. "We've been over this before, and ifs a good thing.”
"It's not a good thing for me.”
"Listen," he says, nodding at his buddies over his shoulder while pulling me deeper into the library, "you've always said you wanted to be an actress. Just pretend you're an actress and you're in a movie. That’s what I always do.”
I look at him pityingly.
"Hey," he says, touching my shoulder, "ifs not like you don't know how to do this. When I met you ...”
What?
He stops, seeing that he has said the wrong thing. When he met me, I had crashed the event. Looking for him. He found out six months later, over pillow talk, and thought it was funny; but then he realized the story would make me look bad, so ifs one of the many awful truths about my past that we have to keep hidden.
I am standing stiffly, my eyes wide, staring into space.
"Oh no," he says. "Oh no, Cecelia, I'm sorry, I love you." He grabs for me, but it is too late. I gather up my skirts and run out the door, run down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, panting for a second, looking around, wondering what I should do, and then I see a cab, run to the street and hail it, and as I get in and slam the door and look back I see the photographer in the camouflage outfit, who stares at me with a sort of muted curiosity on his face and then shrugs.
"Where to?" the cab driver says.
I sit back on the seat. I touch my hair. "Lincoln Center," I say.
"Are you an actress?" he says. I say yes, and he lets me smoke.
I consciously think of nothing as my heels click briskly across the plaza at Lincoln Center. I hurry slightly because of the February drizzle and flow into the crowd that gathers at the door, laughing, stomping their feet, shaking umbrellas. I somehow manage to blend in, passing the photographers, who look at me and then turn away to take someone else's picture, and I am relieved until a short young woman, dressed in black and wearing a black headset, approaches and says, "Can I help you?”
I look around in confusion and open my mouth and then close it and look at the girl again (who is smiling at me, not unkindly), and I narrow my eyes, not believing that she doesn't know who I am.
I m ...
"Yes?" she says, and I suddenly realize that she doesn't recognize me. If s the short white hair. I look around, lower my voice. "I'm Cecelia Kelly's cousin. Rebecca Kelly. Cecelia wanted to come, but she's ... sick ... and she felt so bad about it, she insisted I go in her place. I know if s an inconvenience and all, but I've been in Paris for the past five years and—”
"Don't worry about it," she says cozily, reaching across a table and picking up a card that reads PRINCESS CECELIA LUXENSTEIN. " N O one ever objected to a beautiful woman, you know, and you're sitting at a table with Nevil Mouse, who has been bugging and bugging and bugging me to set him up with some 'eligible woman' even though he's here with that model, Nandy, and, well, I hope Cecelia feels better, you know?" She hands me the card. "She seems to be sick a lot. Which is really too bad, because"— the girl leans in conspiratorially—"she's kind of our secret hero in the office. I mean, our boss is such an asshole, but the thing about Cecelia is that you can tell she thinks it's all such a bunch of ... crap ... and after you've done this for a couple of years, I can tell you that it is.”
"Well, um, thank you. Thank you very much," I say.
"Oh. And watch out for Maurice Tristam. That actor? He's at your table too. He's married, but he cheats on his wife. Constantly.”
I nod and move away, making my way into the theater, passing more photographers (one of whom lamely lifts his camera and takes one picture, in case I might be someone important they don't know about), and I cross over knees and ankles to my place, Row C, seat 125, in the middle of the third row. The seat next to me is empty, and a man nearby smiles at me as the lights dim and I nod imperceptibly, and the music starts.
I begin to drift away. I'm thinking.
About days and days of lying on a dirty sleeping bag on a dirty mattress on the floor, staring out the window at the bare branches of trees turned black from the endless drip, drip, drip of rain. It was Maine and the sky was always steel gray and the temperature was always 33 degrees with 100 percent chance of precipitation and the insulation was coming out of the walls. There were too many people in the house or too few, there was no food or too much bags of potato chips and cans of chicken soup and ice cream in paper cartons—and I had a rotten tooth that someone pulled out by tying one end of a string around the tooth and the other end around a door handle and then slamming the door. I was six years old, and we were making an important political statement. We were rejecting society, we were rejecting Mother's family and Mother's husband's family and the kind of person they expected Mother to be. We were rejecting false values and the evils of capitalism (although we didn't reject the tiny bits of money when they came), and we were running, running, running, but all we were running away from was clean linens and blue water in the toilet bowl and Sunkist oranges in winter.
But Mother never did figure that out. Not even after she "reformed" and we went to live in Lawrenceville. Where we tried to act "normal.”
The ballet ends. I sit.
Long after the audience has leaped cheering to their feet, the champagne has been poured, and the cloud of balloons has descended on the crowd, I remain seated in the theater. Row C, seat 125. The crowd swells then falls back, thins out, and eventually disappears for dinner. Ushers shift through the theater, picking up discarded programs.
"Are you all right, Miss? They'll be starting dinner soon. Lobster quadrilles. You don't want to miss that.”
"Thank you," I say. But I remain, thinking about my dirty Barbie doll, stained and naked with matted hair, which I took everywhere, crying once when someone's dog tried to take it away. "She's a little princess, isn't she," people had said as they picked me up in my worn flowered skirt, and I howled even louder, tears streaking my face.
Even back then I couldn't believe that I'd never have a pony.
I look up and am not astonished to see the beautiful boy from my dream threading his way through the rows until he stands above me, smiles, and sits down.
"Memory is just an alternate version of reality," he says.
We stare at the empty stage.