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“If that’s what you think,”
Dick’s Fiancée says, “then why did you come?”

“Well, obviously, I was
curious.”

The man standing next to
Charlene says, “I’m glad you’re here, baby.”

“Oh, shut up, Rick.” She
stirs her drink. “I just wanted to get out of the
house.”

“And there’s nothing wrong
with that.”

“Thanks, but I wasn’t
looking for permission, or anything.”

“Of course you were,” says
the other man. Mick, or Marc.

New song, now, this one a
dance craze, and bodies crowd the space in a wave of claps and
twirls.

Dick’s Fiancée fills a
plastic cup with punch and says, adjusting her wrap, “Country and
reggae. I’d go out there if they would play something I can dance
to.”

“Anyway,” Charlene says, “I
don’t think you should talk to me like that while my husband is
deployed. What are you, anyway, a Judy?”

“A what?” Rick
laughs.

The other man says, “I think
you mean ‘Jody.’”

“Judy. Jody. Whatever.
Either way, I just want to have some fun. I’m not here for bad
reasons.”

“Neither am I,” Rick says.
“As soon as my shoulder heals, I’m off again to fight for your
right to turn me down. But, since I’m here now, how about a
dance?”

I fill my glass, which seems
to be emptying quickly. The punch is tasty, not too
sweet.

“I’ll find someone else,
thanks.” She stands on her toes, looks around, then comes back down
and stirs the ice cubes in her drink. “It’s just, everyone expects
me to, like, sit by the phone for a year, and be this…this…I don’t
know what. But he has his life over there, and I have my life over
here. That’s all I know. And it took me long enough to figure it
out.”

“Yes,” says the other man,
his eyes dull. “He can’t be expected to have all the fun, can
he?”

"Marc,” she says to him,
“Will you dance with me?”

“I think Rick
has—”

“I don’t want to dance with
Rick. Besides, he can’t be trusted.”

“What makes you think I
can?”

“Please?”

“Sorry, Char. My
knee.”

Rick waits, attention
shifting, then reaches past me for a cracker and says,
“Dance?”

“No, thanks.”

Charlene says, “I’ll be
gentle.”

Marc nods at the dance
floor, smiles thin, says, “I can’t keep up.”

“Oh, come on,” she says. “I
promise you won’t get hurt.”

“Charlene.” Marc shifts on
his bad leg. “You’re almost irresistible.”

She slumps, sagging in her
strapless top, and grabs Dick’s Fiancé by the hand. “Come on.” She
drags her through a cloud of poker-game smoke.

Rick salutes Marc. “Thanks
for tryin’, buddy.” He scoops two punches from the bowl, crosses
the floor, and hands a glass to a girl in a blue dress. Only Marc
and I are left staring out at the bodies randomly bonding and
separating.

My glass is empty again, so
I refill it, then tug Marc’s shirt sleeve. “What happened?” I say.
“To your knee.”

“Explosion,” he says,
like
flat tire
.

“So. It really happens,
then.” They—casualties—are real people, after all.

“As far as I know. It felt
real enough.”

“You must be happy to be
home.”

The dance ends and quiet
falls under laughter and dragging feet and somebody screams for a
DJ—“Who the hell is in control of the music, here?”—to play
something, anything, or everyone’ll go somewhere else.

“Not especially happy, no,”
he says.

“Are you going
back?”

“If I can.”

“What are your chances? Of
going back, I mean.”

“They don’t know, yet.” He
looks at his watch.

“Well, do you think they’re
pretty good?”

“Do you want a
refill?”

“I mean, how serious did
your injury have to be for them to send you home?”

“Refill, or no?”

“Yes, please.” The cup he
hands me is punch sticky. “Sloppy, but thank you. What were we
talking about?”

“We were talking about
you.”

“Nope,” I say. “We
weren’t.”

“Are you having a good
time?”

“That’s not
what—”

“I’m asking it
now.”

Where is Denise? Somewhere.
“I’m having a great time.” Marc’s aftershave smells like citrus.
“Delicious.”

“Excuse me?”

“You smell good. It doesn’t
mean anything.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He looks at his
watch.

“Going
somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” he says.
“I’m not sure.”

“How can you not be
sure?”

“Plenty of ways.”

“Tell me.”

“I’d rather—”

“You’re standing right next
to me and looking at your watch. What is that, if not an invitation
to me to…
for
me
to?…
to
me to. . .
ask what you’re doing?”

He says nothing.

“Are you meeting
someone?”

“No.”

“You like this. Don’t you?
You’re playing a game, right? You’re making me ask you questions in
some backward flirting thing.”

“No.” He looks down at me.
“Do you know your dress doesn’t fit you very well?”

“What?”

“First thing I noticed. It’s
tight.”

The punch is lovely and
sweet and poor Marc has hurt his leg. “It’s fucking stunning,” I
tell him.

“Maybe. On
someone.”

“I don’t. . .” I refill my
cup. “Why would you say that?”

He swirls his drink and
looks down into it. “I just thought you should know. In case
another party like this comes along and you consider wearing it
again.”

I slide my hands over the
material on my breasts and smooth the small wrinkles crossing my
hips and know he is wrong, the dress is wonderful, and I am
wonderful in it. “You’re an as—”

“Don’t bother. Listen, I’m
only standing here because this is where the food is. If you don’t
want to be bothered by me, there are plenty of other places for you
to stand.”

“I like it here.”

“Fine.”

“I like your wedding ring,
too. Where’s your wife?”

He sighs and looks at his
watch again.

“Why don’t you
leave?”

“Because,” he says. “She
won’t be asleep, yet.”

“Don’t want to wake up your
daughter?”

“I don’t have
kids.”

“Jesus. Never
mind.”

And there is Denise, and
there is Brian, both of them coming in from outside.

“Look,” he says. “If you had
a husband, and he stayed out until after you went to bed, would you
think he were having fun?”

“Depends on when I go to
bed.”

“Eleven,
usually.”

“When he comes home, is he
rumpled and smelling of another woman?”

“Rumpled, sure. I can do
that. And alcohol instead of another woman.”

“Then, yes. I would think he
had
oodles
of fun.
D’you like that word, ‘oodles’?”

Denise and Brian push
through the bodies on the floor and disappear down a hallway. I
empty my glass and fill my glass and drink from my glass and twirl
until my gown fans like a yellow umbrella.

“You’re going to make
yourself sick,” he says.

“Worry about her, not me,” I
say, and my shoes, the heels high, spin like ice skates and heads
blur by in a steady speckled stream and I’ve no control, anymore,
because my arms pull me around and around and I’m one
with—

He catches my hand and stops
me, holds me up, says, “I don’t want you to throw up on my
clothes,” then waits until I can stand on my own before releasing
me. “Don’t mean to ruin your fun,” he says, “but trust me, you’ll
have a better time without the spinning.”

I throw my drink at him,
thrilled because I’ve never thrown a drink at anyone, and a pastel
stain spreads on his white shirt and the hairs on his neck spring
up as the punch drips down his chest. “Sorry,” I say. “Not your
job.”

He holds his shirt away from
his skin and walks away toward the bathroom.

I move through the house.
Hallway wall sconces, floating wax discs in shallow bathtub water,
tea lights in holders on the windowsills and light strings nailed
around doorframes. No one else is in the kitchen when I find it,
and the clomping of my heels is lost in thudding techno.
Multicolored liquor bottles line the counter like a bar
display.

I check the refrigerator for
orange juice and find only beer and water and a single orange with
a spot of green mold. I mix something else, blue and clear and red
and soda, colorful and tasty and strong in a red plastic cup, and
take it back out to the living room.

Couples of one kind or
another fill the floor and hands slide over hips and pelvises
glide. Open mouths, almost kissing, fingers breast-stroking
blankets of air, all in dim light like afterglow, and they all know
each other, or seem to, laughing, touching shoulders. I inch around
the room with a smile, always a smile, alone without Denise or
Charlene or Dick’s Fiancé or Marc, until a plastic chair bumps the
backs of my knees and I sit, back straight, smile stuck on so I
look alone on purpose. A rest from all the dancing. My glass
empties fast and I skirt the floor to mix another, thinking I hear
someone say, “Who is
she
?” and remembering I look like a movie star—a goddamn movie
star—tonight, if nothing else.

________

I don’t dance, but I am, and
Denise is, too, monster with a red mouth and matching body all
beautiful and vaginal—she would love to be called vaginal, so I
shout it over the music, “You look vaginal!” and she shouts back,
“Damn straight!”—and in that instant we connect because we
get
one another and we
move closer and dance the way girls dance in movies, part-time
lesbians for show, her arms coming around me from behind and her
hands sliding down my waist and over my hips and we’re laughing and
watching the men watch us and she puts her mouth to my ear and
yells, “This’ll be good,” and runs her splayed fingers over my
pelvis, not touching me but almost—they think she’s touching me,
you can tell by their eyes—and we laugh and separate and move on
our own, in our own heads, until a man grabs her and a voice says
in my ear, “You’re something.” For a moment he is behind me and
we’re dancing the way Denise and I were dancing and then he touches
me and I spin and Marc is smiling and smelling faintly of punch and
watching his hips close the distance to mine.

I pull away. “Thirsty,” I
say, and he takes my hand and says, “It’s just dancing.”

“I’m done
dancing.”

“But you do it so
well.”

My heels are too high, so I
take them off and carry them to the kitchen and lean against the
counter. He follows me, just close enough, and stands between me
and the doorway with his arms crossed. “I didn’t mean to scare
you.”

“You don’t scare
me.”

“And I’m sorry about—all
that, what happened earlier.”

He says something else,
about his wife, about how she’s been strange since he came back
injured, “Broken, she said,” and in the middle of his kiss I tell
him to stop, get off, and he does, but his hands still touch my
back. I yank free to find Denise because it’s time to leave, it’s
been fun but it’s time to go. She and Brian stand across the bamboo
and her lips touch his neck. When I reach her, I yell, “Let’s
go.”

Her hair has fallen out of
its clip and hangs in loose strands and her lipstick has faded to a
sick pink stain.

“What are you doing?” She
pulls my hand away from her hair.

“Time to go.’

Her head dips and her eyes
blink slow. “No.”

“Yes.”

Brian strokes Denise’s
shoulder and she twists away.

I say, “I don’t feel
well.”

“The bathroom is down the
hall.”

My head spins and I reach
for her arm. “We have to go,” I say, and she says, “Mia, let
go.”

Brian says, “Throw up. Then
see how you feel.” He looks at Denise, but she does not look at
him. She tugs at a loose piece of hair and steps away from him and
it’s true, what people said. She was with someone the whole
time.

“I thought you loved
William.”

“You’re drunk,” she says.
“There’s nothing happening, here.”

________

Denise’s fingers twist into
a white braid on her lap.