He wondered what Olivia was doing now. She hadn’t tried to call back, although if she had he would probably have weakened and taken the call. Maybe she had stayed in Vegas just long enough to get the money and had then caught a bus for… where? Maine? Did anyone leave Las Vegas for Maine in the middle of winter? Surely not.
Product four, they call it. Very heavy stuff.
He snuggled the wagon up to the cuff behind a sporty red GTX with a black racing stripe and got out. New Year’s Eve was clear but bitterly cold. A frigid rind of moon hung in the sky overhead like a child’s paper cutout. Stars were spangled around it in lavish profusion. The mucus in his nose froze to a glaze that crackled when he flared his nostrils. His breath plumed out on the dark air.
Three houses away from Walter’s he picked up the bass line from the stereo. They really had it cranked. There was something about Wally’s parties, he reflected, Pleasure Principle or no. The most well-intentioned of just-thought-we’d-drop-bys ended up staying and drinking until their heads were full of silver chimes that would turn to leaden church bells the next day. The most dyed-in-the-wool rock-music haters ended up boogying in the living room to the endless golden gassers that Wally trotted out when everybody got blind drunk enough to look back upon the late fifties and early sixties as the plateau of their lives. They drank and boogied, boogied and drank, until they were panting like little yellow dogs on the Fourth of July. There were more kisses in the kitchen by halves of differing wholes, more feel-ups per square inch, more wallflowers jerked rudely out of the woodwork, more normally sober folk who would wake up on New Year’s Day with groaning hangovers and horridly clear memories of prancing around with lampshades on their heads or of finally deciding to tell the boss a few home truths. Wally seemed to inspire these things, not by any conscious effort, but just by being Wally-and of course there was no party like a New Year’s Eve party.
He found himself scanning the parked cars for Steve Ordner’s bottle-green Delta 88, but didn’t see it anywhere.
Closer to the house, the rest of the rock band coalesced around the persistent bass signature, and Mick Jagger screaming:
Ooooh, children-
It’s just a kiss away,
Kiss away, kiss away…
Every light in the house was blazing-fuck the energy crisis-except, of course in the living room, where rub-your-peepees would be going on during the slow numbers. Even over the heavy drive of the amplified music he could hear a hundred voices raised in fifty different conversations, as if Babel had fallen only seconds ago.
He thought that, had it been summer (or even fall), it would have been more fun to just stand outside, listening to the circus, charting its progress toward its zenith, and then its gradual fall-off. He had a sudden vision-startling, frightening-of himself standing on Wally Hammer’s lawn and holding a roll of EEG graph paper in his hands, covered with the irregular spikes and dips of damaged mental function: the monitored record of a gigantic, tumored Party Brain. He shuddered a little and stuck his hands in his overcoat pockets to warm them.
His right hand encountered the small foil packet again and he took it out. Curious, he unfolded it, regardless of the cold that bit his fingertips with dull teeth. There was a small purple pill inside the foil, small enough to lie on the nail of his pinky finger without touching the edges. Much smaller than, say, a walnut. Could something as small as that make him clinically insane, cause him to see things that weren’t there, think in a way he had never thought? Could it, in short, mime all the conditions of his son’s mortal illness?
Casually, almost absently, he put the pill in his mouth. It had no taste. He swallowed it.
“BART!” The woman screamed. “BART DAWES!” It was a woman in a black off-the-shoulder evening dress with a martini in one hand. She had dark hair, put up for the occasion and held with a glittering rope spangled with imitation diamonds.
He had walked in through the kitchen door. The kitchen was choked, clogged with people. It was only eight-thirty; the Tidal Effect hadn’t gotten far yet, then. The Tidal Effect was another part of Walter’s theory; as a party continued, he contended, people would migrate to the four corners of the house. “The center does not hold,” Wally said, blinking wisely. “T. S. Eliot said that.” Once, according to Wally, he had found a guy wandering around in the attic eighteen hours after a party ended.
The woman in the black dress kissed him warmly on the lips, her ample breasts pushing against his chest. Some of her martini fell on the floor between them.
“Hi,” he said. “Who’s you?”
“Tina Howard, Bart. Don’t you remember the class trip?” She waggled a long, spade-shaped fingernail under his nose. “NAUGH-ty BOY.”
“That Tina? By God, you are!” A stunned grin spread his mouth. That was another thing about Walter’s parties; people from your past kept turning up like old photographs. Your best friend on the block thirty years ago; the girl you almost laid once in college; some guy you had worked with for a month on a summer job eighteen years ago.
“Except I’m Tina Howard Wallace now,” the woman in the black dress said. “My husband’s around here… somewhere…” She looked around vaguely, spilled some more of her drink, and swallowed the rest before it could get away from her. “Isn’t it AWFUL, I seem to have lost him.”
She looked at him warmly, speculatively, and Bart could barely believe that this woman had given him his first touch of female flesh-the sophomore class trip at Grover Cleveland High School, a hundred and nine years ago. Rubbing her breast through her white cotton sailor blouse beside…
“Cotter’s Stream,” he said aloud.
She blushed and giggled. “You remember, all right.”
His eyes dropped in a perfect, involuntary reflex to the front of her dress and she shrieked with laughter. He grinned that helpless grin again. “I guess time goes by faster than we-”
“Bart!” Wally Hamner yelled over the general patty babble. “Hey buddy, really glad you could make it!”
He cut across the room to them with the also-to-be-patented Walter Hamner Party Zigzag, a thin man, now mostly bald, wearing an impeccable 1962-vintage pinstriped shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He shook Walter’s outstretched hand, and Walter’s grip was as hard as he remembered.
“I see you met Tina Wallace,” Walter said.
“Hell, we go way back when,” he said, and smiled uncomfortably at Tina.
“Don’t you tell my husband that, you naughty boy,” Tina giggled.” ’scuse, please. I’ll see you later, Bart?”
“Sure,” he said.
She disappeared around a clump of people gathered by a table loaded with chips and dips and went on into the living room. He nodded after her and said, “How do you pick them, Walter? That girl was my first feel. It’s like 'This Is Your Life.'”
Walter shrugged modestly. “All a part of the Pleasure Push, Barton my boy.” He nodded at the paper bag tucked under his arm. “What’s in that plain brown wrapper?”
“Southern Comfort. You’ve got ginger ale, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Walter said, but grimaced. “Are you really going to drink that down-by-de-Swanee-Ribber stuff? I always thought you were a scotch man.”
“I was always a private Comfort-and-ginger-ale man. I’ve come out of the closet.”