“Where were you?”
He shrugged. “Out for a walk. I called Henry.”
“What did he say?”
“He’ll call me. He may be able to set up an audition for next week.”
“That’s good.”
She sounded as concerned as if he had said that the sun was shining. It could be big, an audition with Comet.
He hadn’t told Jan about it and hardly wanted to think about it himself, but he could tell Saundra easily enough. It didn’t count with her. She wouldn’t remember. She wouldn’t mention it again, and if he got the audition and left the pad that day she would ask him where he was going. And when he told her, she would say, “That’s good,” in the same tone of voice.
“I’m glad you’re home,” she said suddenly, holding out her arms for him.
This isn’t home, he thought.
But he went to her.
7
The party was in full swing when she arrived at nine-fifteen. She walked in timidly, unsure of herself in a roomful of strangers, her eyes scanning the room, looking for Mike. All she could see was a group of people her own age sitting on the floor and on the bed on the other side of the room. For a moment she wanted to turn around and leave without speaking to anyone.
Then she heard the guitar and saw Mike in the middle of the crowd, sitting on the floor with a girl beside him. She walked in slowly, wondering whether she ought to say hello to him first or if she should just make herself at home.
He was playing the guitar — not singing, but banging out a hard blues chorus and drinking periodically from a bottle of chianti. Once while she was standing by the door he looked up at her, but he didn’t seem to see her. There was a glaze in his eyes, and she guessed that he had been drinking fairly steadily since the party began.
She decided to wait. If anyone bothered her, she could say that Mike had invited her, but in the meanwhile she just wanted to sit and listen and watch. She looked around briefly for a chair; finding none, she sat down on the floor. She was wearing blue jeans and a light blue blouse, and she saw that she had selected the right outfit.
The other girls were dressed more or less the same. Some of them — the girl with Mike, for example — seemed to her to be deliberately trying to look sloppy. Jan remembered the story of the Communist girls during the 30’s who used to look in the mirror to make sure their stocking-seams were crooked. That was the impression these girls gave her. If they wore lipstick it was too thick and applied lopsidedly. More often they left off the lipstick entirely and plastered on purple eye-shadow with a trowel.
The boys, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be putting on as much of an act. Their dress was less stylized and they seemed more at home in the general messiness of the apartment. The girls were obviously pretending that they didn’t notice any disorder; the boys acted as though they were genuinely accustomed to it.
Impressions.
LIFE Goes to a Village Party, she thought. I should have brought my camera. A camera and a notebook.
“Have a beer,” someone said. Janet started. She turned around and took a can of beer from a short boy with red hair and a slight growth of red beard, who disappeared again as soon as she had the can in her hand. The beer was good and cold and she took a deep drink of it, spilling a little down her chin.
The night was still warm although the sun had set a while ago. Thirty-odd people in one room made the night even warmer and beer taste even better. She sat back and drank again, no longer caring that she didn’t know anyone. It was a nice party.
She didn’t have to look up to know that it was Mike singing. There was something very distinctive about his voice, about the way he picked the strings of the guitar and sang with it. And there was an intangible quality, too — someone else could play the same chords and sing the same notes and it would come out weak and pale by comparison.
She liked the way he sang.
She liked his name, too. Mike was blunt and strong and honest and rugged, and Michael was music and poetry and something tranquil. It suited him, matched the odd and intense combination of tough and tender which she could feel in him.
The beer was gone suddenly and she was drinking wine from a bottle and passing the bottle to a thin young man with a shock of black hair that hung limp over his forehead. The young man looked a little like Hitler, and he was trying to talk to her but she liked being all alone in the group, all alone with herself, and she didn’t answer him.
There were more people in the room. There were at least fifty by now, and others kept arriving. Everybody who came seemed to have a bottle, and the bottles kept passing back and forth around the room. And she kept sampling them.
Smoking a cigarette, she realized abruptly that she was drunk. It was nice. It was very nice being drunk, especially when it didn’t cost anything. She felt the side of her face and it was numb to her touch, her skin feeling even cooler and smoother than usual. She was a little bit dizzy, and she drew more deeply on the cigarette as if that would stop the dizziness. She smiled quickly at no one in particular and her face felt funny. She let the muscles in her face relax slowly.
There were more guitars going now and she didn’t hear Mike singing any more, but heard instead a deep-voiced boy singing about a bad man named Stackolee. Another boy passed her another bottle and she put it to her mouth and drank. It was wine, but she couldn’t tell what kind of wine it was or even whether it was good or bad. It was wet and her mouth was dry so she kept on drinking until the young man shook his head strangely and took the bottle away from her.
You’re drunk, she whispered to herself. LIFE Goes to a Village Party and Gets Smashed. Poor little Life gets tight as a kite. Or was it high as a kite? Tight as something, but she couldn’t remember.
A hand touched her shoulder and she turned, ready to take another drink from another nice young man’s bottle. Mike was standing beside her.
She saw that he was sober, and that was funny because she was drunk now, and when she had come in he had been drunk and she had been sober. It was funny.
She started to giggle.
“How long have you been here?”
It was a silly question, because she had been there so long. It was so silly that she started to giggle again.
“I guess you’ve been here awhile, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
He smiled. “Why didn’t you say hello? I didn’t even see you come in. I just got up to take a break and saw you sitting here, so I came over. Having fun?”
“Uh-huh.”
She thought that he was nice, very nice, and very funny because she was drunk and he wasn’t.
“You’re drunk.” It wasn’t an accusation but a simple statement of fact.
“I was for awhile but I sang myself sober. Do you like the party?”
“Uh-huh. It’s a beautiful party.”
“It’s a terrible party. I suppose you like the apartment?”
She made a face.
“Good. It’s a terrible apartment, too, and I’m glad you don’t like it. I’d introduce you to some people, but they’re pretty awful, too.”