I need air, I said, and left the slowly spinning bar; I intended to walk home and pass out. While I was leaning against the wall of the bar collecting myself for the walk I was surprised to find Arturo and Teresa suddenly beside me, asking if I was all right. Yes, I said, and straightened myself abruptly, causing the spins to resume, redouble; I realized I would vomit. I walked across the street where there were fewer people and a public trash can and, just before I reached it, vomited indeed. When I finished being sick, I stood up and there they were just across the street, waiting for me, Teresa smoking and Arturo proffering a bottle of water, smiling. I crossed, washed out my mouth, drank some of the water, and thanked him. We’ll drive you home, he said, we’re going to another party anyway.
I was embarrassed to tell Arturo once we were in his car that I was a ten-minute walk from home, but, as it turned out, I didn’t have to tell him anything; the joint Teresa lit and passed back to me produced a cone of intense heat in my throat, which then migrated to my chest, where it unfurled against my rib cage. I realized my tongue was numb or at least tingling and I couldn’t summon the name of my street, a situation that struck me as horrifying and hilarious. I turned my head and watched the lights slide by and found it lovely and then I realized I was saying so in English, that several minutes had elapsed and I was enumerating everything I found beautiful as we passed; streetlights, fountains, plane trees, if that’s what those were. While in the first phase of my project I very rarely spoke Spanish, I had almost never had occasion to use my English, and the latter erupted as we left the city and merged onto a highway, Arturo and Teresa having decided to take me with them to the party; maybe I had asked. With what I thought was remarkable eloquence and rhythm I described Cyrus feeding bats at dusk in Providence and seeing myself from above; I elaborated something like a theory of poetry, deadest of all media, in cadences that rose and fell so movingly I imagined Arturo and Teresa would find themselves compelled to acknowledge my profundity, all the more compelled for not comprehending me, save for occasional cognates; they would experience the periodicity of my thinking without the distraction of particular thoughts. I was speaking grammar, pure and universal, but also suggesting a higher form of music: as I listened to myself I was amazed by the exquisite sonic patterning of my English, small changes rung on fricative and glide, and these subtle aural variations were little enactments of whatever the words denoted, language becoming the experience it described. At some point I passed out.
We were parked along with many other cars in a long circular driveway and Arturo and Teresa were discussing something, Teresa playing with Arturo’s hair, calling him Arturito. We sat in front of an aggressively modern house, low to the ground, expansive, white stone and acres of glass. I caught Teresa’s eyes in the rearview mirror and she asked how I was. Arturo opened his door and we all got out of the car; I asked where we were and Arturo said, my boyfriend’s. Teresa entered the house on my arm, whether out of irony because I was a drunken American idiot brought to the party as a joke, or because she felt a vague solicitude toward me after my strange performance in the car, I didn’t know, but I could hope. As we entered the party I reminded myself to breathe. There were a lot of handsome people in the sweeping white-carpeted living room with minimalist furniture and monumental paintings on the carefully lit walls. Various people greeted us and Teresa detached from me to kiss them and I was acutely aware of not being attractive enough for my surroundings; luckily I had a strategy for such situations, one I had developed over many visits to New York with the dim kids of the stars: I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile. I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings, a look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political, as insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null. The goal of this look was to make my insufficiencies appear chosen, to give my unstylish hair and clothes the force of protest; I was a figure for the outside to this life, I had known it and rejected it and now was back as an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.
Teresa took my arm again and led me to a bar in one corner of the giant room; when we’d fixed drinks, she walked me out onto a vast patio where there was another bar and a large teardrop-shaped pool, faintly illuminated, its floor blue tile, in which more handsome people, a few women topless, splashed around. As I tried to hold the look, Teresa led me beyond the pool into a rock garden of some sort where there was a smaller group of people organized around a central figure singing and playing the guitar, the performer on a stone bench, the others on the ground, Arturo already among them; we sat down.
There ensued a battle between the music and my face. I was at first put off and threatened by the handsome countenances of the other listeners, faces that displayed an absorption I refused to believe was felt, each face carefully positioned to imply a lively interior world, faces that invited others to admire their obliviousness to others. The men tended to look down, the women slightly up; the former as if in painful concentration, the latter beatific, half-smiling, but close to tears — everyone seemed to be having a profound experience of art. Several joints were being passed among these various private worlds and I was returning to my previous heights, losing coordination in my face, my eyes still wide but now a little too wide, the hint of smile lost and with it all suggestion of detachment.
As I struggled to recompose my aspect I began to hear the music, to hear it as addressing me and not just as an excuse for the other faces to assume their poses. He was an unmistakably good singer, his range and control bespeaking years of training, not that I would know, and his guitar competent and understated in a way that showed he was an experienced performer, not competing with himself. He was careful not to raise his voice, or to let it raise itself a little on its own, and he had a delicate lilt, his phrasing wavering between speech and song, mundanity and sorrow, the melody reasserting itself only to dissolve. The lyrics were composed almost entirely of vowels and it took me a while to realize the song was Portuguese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled. As I listened the day rewound, but not just my day: the drive, the bar, the roof of my apartment, seeing myself on the roof from a plane, boarding that plane in New York, leaving Providence, arriving in Providence when I was eighteen, etc., all the way back to Bright Circle Montessori, my dad gentle but insistent that I had to leave the car. Then Teresa was playing with my hair, as she’d been playing with Arturo’s, and I looked at her and felt an agitation I could not name. I stood quickly but quietly and left the group, walking farther away from the house and party and into the dark until I reached a wooden fence, the end of the property and the beginning of a downward slope, a few lights far below.