“For luck,” he said.
Later, sitting next to him on a bed, atop partygoers’ mixed-up coats, scarves, and hats, she told him that she’d worked in the film business for six years but hadn’t felt at home, that she’d wanted all along to paint. Her mother painted but had never made a career of it, though who knew what might have happened were it not for her mother’s drinking and drugging. Those were Jennifer’s words: drinking and drugging. She told him she felt sure that as a very young girl she’d probably been happy, but because of things that had happened when she was a bit older in her childhood, things that had influenced every aspect of her existence — did he follow her meaning? — those sweeter memories, whatever they might have been, were no longer playing. Her current project was self-acceptance, not an uncommon goal, she said, among the sorts of people she mainly hung out with, people who’d moved to the city from distant places because, as she put it, “they had no homes in their home towns.”
That last line sounded like something she’d said before, on more than one occasion. Nonetheless, her words were a mini-revelation to him. She’d expressed a condition that he’d known in life yet had been unable to articulate until it was figured forth concretely by her, in speech that sounded canned. “I’m enjoying myself,” he told her, and she said, “I’m having a nice time, too. I’m glad I came tonight,” and went on to tell him how much her painting meant to her — so much that it frightened her sometimes — even though she was only a beginner. She was interested in realism, she said. This was one area in which she differed from her mother, who, she confided to Christopher in a low whisper, was an abstract expressionist; and — she was getting excited again — the fact of her mother’s frustrated ambition obviously had everything to do with the anxieties that she, Jennifer, felt whenever she picked up a paintbrush. Breathlessly, she told him, “I need to make painting mine.”
“How about you?” she asked.
“Me?”
“Yes.” Flirting. “You.”
“I’m not an artist.”
He paused. She waited. Finally he said, “I used to scribble a few lines in college. Poetry. Does that count?”
“Count? What do you mean, count?” She laughed, and he said, “Oh, I just, I guess, I don’t know,” and then, against his will, he was laughing with her, because what else could he do? He gazed at the side of her face, wondering, absurdly, whether he would like what he saw — what he would see — as the years rolled by and she and he got older. Her nose, it seemed to him, was on the small side in relation to her wide mouth. Makeup did not completely conceal a slight dryness to her skin, and her hair, pulled tightly back, gave her forehead a stretched appearance — would she look less startled without the ponytail? And yet she was attractive in a prim, smart way that he found sexy. And who was he to find fault, he with his thin upper lip and jutting ears?
After they’d stayed a while longer in their hosts’ bedroom, she exclaimed, “I have to go now!” and leaped up and tugged her coat and scarf from the loose pile — he was forced to scramble when other guests’ clothes began shifting beneath him. Would he walk her out? In fact, would he mind saying goodbye to the others for her? Yes, he assured her, he’d be happy to. Where were her gloves, though? she wanted to know. “Did you check in your coat? Are the gloves in a pocket? Are there pockets in the lining? Could the gloves be in the lining?” he asked. But they weren’t there. Nor were they under the bed. “They’ll turn up,” she announced as she marched out of the bedroom. They sneaked past the clamorous guests in the dining room. “Sh-h-h,” he whispered in her ear, and she giggled. He could smell her hair, a sweet smell of — what? At the front door, they did not kiss.
This abruptness of hers during the moments leading to leave-taking (was it that parting produced anxiety, or that her mounting claustrophobia required a quick getaway?) was, as Christopher would witness again and again, part of a style characterized by a variety of impatient behaviors — dramatically rolling her eyes, for instance, whenever it seemed to her that he was being pathetic. They would be a wry couple. But a little sarcasm, even in fun — and the evening had turned out to be fun — a little sarcasm went a long way for Christopher, who, when they next met, at a Village café appropriate for a casual non-date (though it was, in fact, a big date for Christopher, in that it was his turn to risk a few remarks about his own origins), told her, “Everybody laughed at me.”
A week had passed since the dinner party.
“Everybody? Who’s everybody?” She crossed her arms. She was taking his measure. She wore a pink woolen scarf wrapped loosely about her shoulders, in the style of young Parisian women. At the rear of the café, a mother and her two small children were making a racket. Christopher spoke up. “My family. My family laughed at me,” and immediately she broke in, “I understand what you mean. Everybody who matters,” and he replied, “Yeah, right?” before continuing, in tones that she would learn to recognize as harbingers of a mild paranoia, “For example, let’s say I had something serious on my mind, something to say at the dinner table. I’m trying to think of an example. I can’t think of one. It doesn’t matter. I could have been talking about anything. They’d burst out laughing! It got so that I was afraid to speak! If I tried telling a joke or a funny story — and I didn’t often try that — they’d sit in their chairs and chew their food. But I could read the obituaries, well, maybe not the obituaries, and my father and mother and sisters would laugh!”
This made her laugh—he’d made her laugh. She could just see the awful scene around the family table. Christopher peeking over the top of the obituary page. She hoped her laughter would be taken conspiratorially, as evidence of her recognition of his mistreatment. And his shame.
At the back of the café, the mother struggled with her children. Crying had begun. Jennifer turned to look. When she finally turned back to Christopher, he said, “You see? You laughed. It’s so exasperating.”
That was when she rolled her eyes. Was she playing with him? He gazed down at his spoon and knife, at his empty cup set crookedly on its saucer, at the miniature milk pitcher and the sugar bowl. What was the use in telling her how bleak he felt when people found him funny? What if he were to reach across the table and touch her face? Right now. Would she understand, through his touch, that making people laugh felt to him like being hit? What made people want to hit him in this way?
He said, “It’s not your fault.”
“What’s not my fault?”
“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know.”
How red his hair was beneath the warm coffeehouse lights. He looked to her like a skinny, freckled, Scottish orphan. “You can tell me a joke,” she said.
“You’ll hate it.”
“I won’t hate it.”
“It’s not going to be funny.”
“Please?” she said.
The joke involved a horse, a carrot, and a man wearing a cap. A third of the way through the setup, he broke character and said, “The guy in the cap is Norwegian. I forgot to mention that.” He started over and, a moment later, paused again before saying — to himself? to her? — “Is it a carrot? It’s got to be a carrot, it’s a horse.” Looking across their small table, he could see her eyes narrowing. He sighed and — he was getting panicky now — said, “The reason the horse won’t give the Norwegian a ride is that he’s depressed. The horse is depressed, not the man.” At that point he lost the thread. What in the world was he doing? He had no tolerance for comedy. He said, “How’s your coffee?”