I wondered what she could possibly be saying to him, her profile puzzling into the space between his jaw and shoulder. Maybe she was wowing him with an ability to recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places, which I secretly thought would be sort of electrifying if some kid heatedly whispered it into my ear (“3.14159265…”). Or maybe she was repeating a Shakespearean sonnet, #116, Dad’s favorite (“If there are authentic words of love that exist in this English language, these are the ones people with any real affection should say, rather than the shopworn, ‘I love you,’ which can be uttered by any hebetudinous Tom, Dick or Moe”): “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…”
Whatever it was, the man was mesmerized. He looked as if he couldn’t wait for her to garnish him with fresh bay leaves, slice him, pour him all over with gravy.
They were three stairs away now, passing the cheerleader, the woman dressed as Liza Minnelli leaning against the wall with makeup clogging her eyes like rotten leaves in old gutters.
And then she saw us.
There was a skid of her eyes, a brief suspension of smile, a catch, a soft sweater snagging a tree branch. All Nigel and I could do was stand with lousy smiles safety-pinned to our faces like HELLO MY NAME IS name tags. She didn’t say anything until she was next to us.
“Shame on you,” she said.
“Hi,” said Nigel brightly, as if he thought she’d said, “Overjoyed to see you,” and to my horror, he was now extending his hand to the man, who’d turned his large, soggy face curiously in our direction. “I’m Nigel Creech.”
The man raised one white eyebrow and tilted his head, smiling good-naturedly. “Smoke,” he said. His eyes were a crisp seersucker blue, and shrewd — surprisingly so. Dad said you could tell how sharp someone was by the tempo of his/her eyes on your face when you were introduced. If they barely did the box step or took to being wallflowers somewhere between your eyebrows, the person had “the IQ of caribou,” but if they waltzed from your eyes to your shoes, not nervously, but with easy, untroubled curiosity, then the person had “a respectable acumen.” Well, Smoke’s eyes macumbaed from Nigel to me back to Nigel and I felt in that simple movement he grasped every embarrassment of our lives. I couldn’t help but like him. Laugh lines parenthesized his mouth.
“You’re visiting for the weekend?” Nigel asked.
Smoke glanced at Hannah before he answered. “Yes. Hannah’s been kind enough to show me around.”
“Where are you from?”
Nigel’s aggressive curiosity wasn’t lost on Smoke. Again, he looked at Hannah. “West Virginia,” he said.
And then it was horrifying because Hannah didn’t say a word. I could see she was angry: redness soaked her cheeks, her forehead. She smiled, somewhat shyly, and then (and I noticed this because I was one step up from Nigel and could see her entirely, her too-long cuff and sleeve, the cane in her hand) she squeezed, tightly, Smoke’s bicep. This seemed to be a signal of sorts, because he smiled again, and said in his bear-hug voice: “Well, nice meeting you. So long.”
They continued on, passing the sheikh and the tourists (“Not many people realize the electric chair’s not a bad way to go,” shouted one) and some private dancer, a dancer for money in a tiny silver dress and white go-go boots.
At the top of the stairs, they turned down the hall, out of sight.
“Shit,” said Nigel, grinning.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. I wanted to slap the smile off his face.
“What?”
“How could you do that?”
He shrugged. “I wanted to know who her boyfriend was. Could have been Valerio.”
Doc do-si-doed into my head. “I’m not sure Valerio exists.”
“Well, you, doll face, may be an atheist but I’m a believer. Let’s get some air,” he said, and then he grabbed my hand and yanked me down the stairs after him, stepping around Tarzan and Jane (Jane pressed against the wall, Tarzan leaning way in) and outside onto the patio.
Jade and the others had joined the crowd by now, which hadn’t thinned, but buzzed like a porch wasp nest after a housewife stabs it with a broom. Leulah and Jade shared a deck chair talking to two men who wore their swollen, fleshy masks as hats. (They depicted Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Clark Gable, or any renowned man over fifty with formidable ears.) I didn’t see Milton (Black could come and go like stormy weather) but Charles was by the barbecue flirting with a woman in a lioness costume who’d pulled her mane down around her neck and casually stroked it every time Charles said something. Abraham Lincoln threw himself against a jackrabbit, banging into the picnic table so a platter of wilted lettuce fireworked into the air. Rock music screamed from speakers rigged by the hanging plants, and the electric guitar, the roars of the singer, so many shrieks and laughs, the moon, a sickle stabbing the pine trees off to the right — it all fused into a strange suffocating violence. Maybe it was because I was a little drunk and my thoughts moved slowly like blobs in a lava lamp, but I felt it was a crowd that could attack, loot, rape, cause a “violent uprising that detonated like a bomb, and ended a day later with the whimper of a silk scarf pulled from the flabby neck of an old lady — as all rebellions do, if they arise purely from emotion and no forethought” (see “The Last of the Summer Whine: A Study of the Novgorod Rebellion, USSR, August 1965,” Van Meer, The SINE Review, Spring, 1985).
Sharp light from the tiki torches cut into the masks, turning even the sweet costumes, the cute black cats and tutu angels into ghouls with buried eyes and dagger chins.
And then, my heart stopped.
On the brick wall, staring out over the crowd, stood a man. He wore a black hooded cloak and a gold mask with a hooked nose. Not a centimeter of human was visible. It was that horrible Brighella mask, worn during carnivals in Venice and Mardi Gras — Brighella, the lascivious villain from the Commedia dell’arte — but the sick thing, the thing that made the rest of the beasts at the party shiver out of focus, was not that the mask was demonic, that it turned eyes to bullet holes, but the fact that it was Dad’s costume. In Erie, Louisiana, June Bug Karen Sawyer had coerced him into participating in her Junior League Halloween Fashion Show and she’d brought the outfit back for him from her trip to New Orleans. (“Is it me or do I look robustly absurd?” Dad had asked when he’d first tried on the velvet robe.) And the figure opposite me, far across the patio, as tall as Dad so he rose out of the crowd like a crucifix, what he wore was identical, down to the bronze color of the mask, the blistered nose, the satin trim around the hood, the tiny fish-eye buttons down the front. The man didn’t move. He seemed to watch me. I could see cigarette cinders in his eyes.
“Retch?”
“I see — my dad—” I managed to say. My heart rolling in my chest, I pushed through the Flintstones, red-faced Rapunzel, squeezing past shoulders and tinseled backs and elbows and stuffed tails stabbing me in the stomach. The wire edge of an angel wing knifed my cheek. “I — excuse me.” I pushed a caterpillar. “Screw you!” it shouted, its bloodshot eyes infected with glitter. I was shoved hard and fell onto the brick, snaring in sneakers and fishnet stockings and plastic cups.
Seconds later, Nigel was crouching next to me. “What a beaatch. I’d shout ‘catfight,’ but I don’t think you want to go there.”
“The man,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Standing on the wall. A tall man. I — is he there?”