The After Party (10 page)

•   •   •

I
dropped my mother on a Friday, and Idie was picked up at dawn on Sunday by Dorie and Dorie's husband for church in their big blue Lincoln, a hand-me-down from the Fortiers. She would not return until the following morning. My mother stopped speaking after that night. She moaned, and screamed, and made other sounds, but the last words I heard from her were her request to go to sleep.

Joan came over that evening so I wouldn't be alone with my
mother, and I made peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, and then Joan poured us each a glass of my mother's sweet white wine, and we sipped that in my room while listening to Frank Sinatra's “Always” over and over on the record player—Joan, half propped up on pillows, repositioning the needle just as the song ended. I fell asleep on top of my bedspread. I woke up once, briefly, to find Joan covering me with a blanket. I should have risen, then, and gone to my mother. I should not have left her alone. But I did.

The next time I woke up, it was to my mother's screams.

“What in the world?” Joan gasped, though it was not really a question.

I knew what I needed to do. I needed to jog down the hallway into my mother's room and tend to her. She was in pain; that much was clear from her screams, which were subsiding now. But I did none of those things. I didn't even sit up.

“Listen,” I said, and put my finger to my lips. “She doesn't have the strength to scream for very long.” And then I closed my eyes and shook my head. “I can't do it, Joan.”

Joan said nothing. She was sitting up, so I only saw her back, not her face.

“She wants me to give her more pills.” There—I had said it. “She wants the pills to kill her,” I said, searching for the correct words.

“I knew what you meant,” Joan said, and turned so I could see her handsome profile, lit by moonlight. “And?”

“And,” I murmured. My mother's screams had stopped. I began to sob. Hysteria rose in my throat. “I dropped her. She wanted a bath and I dropped her. She was so slippery in my arms. Like a baby. I wanted to hold her but I dropped her. I—”

“Hush,” Joan said. She turned so I could see her completely. “Mama says she'll be gone within a week.”

“A week,” I repeated, and swallowed a sob. It seemed like an interminable amount of time. “I tried to grind up the pills, but I couldn't do it. I took them to the bathroom and emptied them into the mortar but I couldn't make myself.” I shook my head. “I could not.”

Joan studied me for a long time. “I don't think,” she said finally, “that a week makes any difference.”

And is this what I had wanted all along? I don't know. I can't say, even now.

“It will be a terrible week,” I said, just to make sure I was understanding her.

“Then let's make it tonight.”

It was easy after that. I did not think of Idie, of how fervently she would disapprove of what I—of what we were doing. I thought only of the task at hand. I went to my mother's room and retrieved the mortar and pestle, the pills. I handed them to Joan, who stood just outside the door, then went to my mother, who was watching me. Her gaze seemed alert. I like to think that she understood. Her covers were around her waist, and she was shivering. I went to pull them up, to cover her arms, which she liked, and she gave a low, wild warning sound. I understood it meant I would hurt her if I touched her.

“I won't touch you,” I said. “I promise.”

My mother was terrified. She sounded like an animal and watched me like an animal.

“I promise,” I said again.

Joan knocked on the door. It had happened faster than I thought it would.

“Joan is going to come in. She's going to feed you. And you'll let her, won't you? You'll let her do what I can't.” I laid my hand over my mother's as lightly as I could. She tolerated my touch. It was cold, and covered with tiny grains. Her skin, sloughing itself. “Come in,” I called to Joan.

There was an instant—when Joan held the first spoonful to my mother's mouth—when I did not know if my mother would eat from Joan, but then she opened her mouth, proof that she understood. That was how it seemed to me, anyway.

After it was finished Joan left. I retrieved the cashmere throw from the chaise longue and climbed onto the bed, very, very carefully. My mother had told me all my life to move more quietly, to walk more softly, to speak in a more subdued voice. To move through her house in a way that did not call attention to myself.

That night I was so quiet I don't think she knew I was
there.

B
y December of 1950, Joan had been gone for over eight months. Some days I woke and it was as if she had died. The world was less interesting now that she was not in it. Occasionally I mustered the energy to put in an appearance at a party, meet the girls for lunch, but mostly I rose at noon and wandered around the apartment until the television programming started at five. Once a week, or so, when I felt Sari watching me too closely, I left and went to the movies: the Majestic or the Tower, caught the matinee. I closed my eyes in the cool theater and imagined Joan into the films: Rubbing shoulders with Patricia Neal. Being held by Humphrey Bogart.

I was starting to accept that she might never come back. I hadn't slept in her clothes in months. I was starting to see my life,
my future, without Joan, and I did not know what that future held. I didn't know how long the Fortiers would allow me to stay in the Specimen Jar. I didn't know where I would go once I left. I could have bought my own house. I could have bought three of them. But I didn't want to live anywhere without Joan.

Ciela begged me to come out on New Year's Eve. “You can't stay cooped up in here,” she said. “It's not healthy. And it's the best night of the year!”

I shrugged.

“Cece,” Ciela said, pulling me off the sofa. I'd been sitting there nearly all day, staring into space and paging through old copies of
Vogue
. I couldn't concentrate enough to read anything. “I insist.”

The party was at a junior's house in Galveston. I pretended to sleep on the drive down, so I wouldn't have to talk. I opened my eyes as we crossed the bridge onto the island, in hopes we might pass by the Fortiers' beach house, but we did not.

I regretted agreeing to go as soon as I stepped out of the car. The old gang was all there, and I didn't like how they looked at me.

“Long time no see,” Kenna said, and from Darlene: “Has Joan been cast yet?”

“She has a better chance than any of us,” I snapped, and wrapped my fur stole around my shoulders. The air had a chill to it.

“Easy,” Darlene said, in a tone that was meant to mollify but only served to further infuriate me.

“Come on,” Ciela said, shooting a glare I was not meant to see in Darlene's direction. “Let's go outside.”

I followed her to the beach. I was drinking a very potent gin and tonic, though I'd been drinking so much lately, alone, late into the night, that I barely felt it. A crowd of boys smoked cigarettes around a bonfire; I recognized some of them but couldn't bring myself to care.

“Got a light?” Ciela asked, and Danny, a football player with sculpted sideburns, swooped in and lit her cigarette.

I stood there, content to listen, while Ciela flirted and held court.

I shook my head when another boy approached and offered me a beer. I held up my gin and tonic, annoyed. I didn't want to talk to anyone tonight. I wanted the world to leave me alone.

But he didn't leave, instead stood next to me and looked out over the water.

“It's nice here, tonight, huh?”

I turned to him.

“Say something else,” I said.

He laughed. He thought I was flirting. “Something else,” he said, and then I was sure: this was the boy from the gymnasium, the boy who had touched—done more than touch—Joan.

“You're him,” I said.

He stopped smiling. “Who? Do we know each other? I go to Lamar, I moved here last year . . .” He was rambling. He had no idea who I was. Just a strange girl who was making him nervous.

I shook my head. “Never mind.” I touched his forearm, and he looked at my hand, curiously. He took a step backward, but I moved with him.

His skin felt smooth beneath my hand. His arm was nearly
hairless, scattered faintly with freckles. He wasn't particularly attractive. He was average. Average height, average looks. Like a million other boys.

“Why you?” I asked.

“Hey,” he said, and held up his hands. “I've gotta split.” He hurried away, back up to the house, and I watched him go, watched the boy who had made Joan feel such pleasure.

He was no one. He had meant nothing to Joan. She had not gone anywhere with him. Somewhere in the back of my mind I'd thought maybe she had. I laughed out loud. I knew nothing, about Joan or anything else. Only that she'd run away by herself. She was so brave, Joan, so daring. The only place I went by myself was an empty movie theater in the middle of the day, and even then I felt embarrassed.

I took off down the beach. “Cece?” Ciela called, but I waved her off.

“I'm going to take a walk. I'll be back,” I called. “I promise.”

The shoreline was littered with bonfires; I was probably trespassing. But I didn't care. “Miss,” a man called, as I passed by a cluster of men and women smoking cigarettes by the water's edge. “Miss!”

I ignored him. I imagined myself at this time tomorrow, still walking, on the side of some highway, my heels digging blisters into my feet. I didn't know Joan Fortier at all, and so much of my life hinged upon her. What did anyone care if I walked forever? I was a girl with a father in Oklahoma whom I hadn't seen in months. A girl without a mother. A girl with no real purchase in the world.

A tap on my shoulder; then the ragged breath of the man who had tried to get my attention a moment earlier.

“You're one fast walker,” he said, and I was about to turn away—I wanted nothing but to keep moving forward—when he held up my stole.

“You dropped this.”

I stared at the fur. I could live without it. But I was suddenly grateful to have it, grateful to this man for noticing.

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.” He leaned forward, seemed to take an accounting of my face. I felt tender toward this handsome man who watched me like he had all the time in the world. Like I was the most important girl in the world.

“I'm Cecilia. Cece.” I held out my hand.

He took it. “And I'm Ray. Ray Buchanan. Why don't you come over here for a moment and catch your breath?” He gestured up the shore, to a pair of Adirondack chairs that looked, in that instant, very inviting. He had dark brown eyes and thick, almost feminine eyelashes. He stood aside, swept his arm out in a signal that I should go first. That he would follow me.

I went.

•   •   •

R
ay was enough to make me believe in God. He appeared and I stopped being lonely. He occupied my mind, my body.

Three days after we met we were fooling around on the couch in his small brick house in Bellaire. The Specimen Jar was nicer, but it wasn't more comfortable, and anyway, Sari was always there.
Ray was kissing my neck, his arms around me, his hands in my hair, when I suddenly spoke.

“I have no one,” I blurted. I'd never said those words before, not to anyone.

Ray pulled back to look at me. “What do you mean?” he asked. He was still fully clothed, but my top was off, crumpled beneath the coffee table, my bra straps around my elbows. Ray touched my breast, gently. “You're—” he said, and then paused, as if he didn't have words for what I was.

“I'm beautiful?” I asked, a smile on my lips. It was what men said, when they were moved: that the woman they were with was beautiful.

“I mean, yes—but no.” He shook his head. He needed a haircut. He wore his hair short, in the fashion of the day, slicked back with a little pomade. It was an unforgiving style, but Ray had a jawline like an ax. I'd already thought of how our children would benefit from that jawline. My curls, his bone structure.

“You're not alone,” he finished.

•   •   •

J
oan left, and Ray swooped in to fill the void. “He's a good match,” Ciela said. My father came through on business and took us to lunch. “A good man,” he said. Darlene drunkenly gave me her approval: “You've found the last good man in Houston!”

Good. That was the word everyone used to describe Ray. And it was true.

He'd never done anything truly bad. He told me the saddest moment in his life was when his childhood dog died, when Ray
was sixteen. He loved his mother, went fishing with his father, kept in touch with both his high school and college friends. He never talked about work, even though he worked like an animal, said he preferred to leave that world at the office. I knew all the big things about Ray, but it was the little things that moved me: The way he asked gas station attendants how their day was going, and meant it. He was the first man in a room to stand when a lady walked in, but not in a lascivious way. He pulled her chair out before she even knew she wanted to sit. He smiled benignly at conversations I knew didn't interest him.

He mixed a mean Manhattan, looked great in a pair of swim trunks, kept quiet about politics in mixed company. And he wasn't scared off by my odd circumstances, the way a lot of men would have been. Men wanted their wives to be saints, not orphans with fathers who had open affairs.

Almost as soon as I'd met him I wanted to marry him. I wanted to start a life with Ray Buchanan. He would propose soon—I was sure. I'd already met his parents. We'd stopped by a display window of rings at Lechenger's, and he'd asked which one was my favorite. I'd pointed to a pear-shaped diamond.

The facts of our lives matched up, too: We both couldn't imagine living anywhere but Houston. Ray, because he worked in oil; me, because nowhere else felt like home. We both ran in roughly the same crowd. Ray's crowd was older, but Ciela had, of course, heard of him. He made a good living. He had to work, but his job combined with my money meant we would always live well.

The four months we spent together while Joan was gone are a happy blur, mostly. Sex, four times a day. Once, I'd put my hand
on his lap, underneath his jacket, during a matinee of
Sunset Boulevard
. Our love had felt immediate, powerful. I missed Joan—I composed letters to her in my head, telling her all about my new life—but I learned to turn all the attention I had spent on Joan toward Ray. He didn't understand my relationship with Joan, with the Fortiers—“You mean this place is owned by the Fortiers?” he asked once, when I'd made dinner for him at the Specimen Jar, on Sari's day off. “And you live here alone?” But I suppose it was easy for him not to press the issue while Joan was gone. Easy to ignore a person you'd never met. It must have seemed to Ray—as it did to me—as if she would never come back.

And as for my part: I kept quiet about Joan. I told Ray she was my best friend since infancy, that she'd run away to Hollywood. If he asked whether I was in on the plan, I was going to lie, I was going to tell him yes, just as I'd told Ciela.

“She wanted to see the world beyond Houston.”

“But you don't need to see that world, too, do you, Cece?” he asked, taking my hand, and I realized he cared nothing about Joan Fortier. He cared only for me.

I smiled and shook my head. “No,” I said. “I have all I need right here.” And it was true.