The After Party (13 page)

There were a hundred people scattered by the pool, upon which floated little green candles. I halfheartedly chatted with friends of Darlene, who'd just moved to the area.

“The heat is unbearable,” a woman—Bettie, I think her name was—said. She was slightly chubby and a little snobby, her patrician manner undercut by how she had squashed herself into a dress two sizes too small. There were women who could carry their weight—Kenna was a little on the heavy side, a little Marilyn Monroe–ish—and women who couldn't.

“You'll get used to it,” I said, and yawned. I checked my little watch. Three o'clock in the morning. “If you'll excuse me, I need to refresh.”

But I didn't need to refresh. I needed not to be having insipid conversations with insipid women from Connecticut. I searched
the deck for Joan but didn't see her. She must have been inside, either by design—avoiding me—or because that's where the night had carried her.

My feet had been aching all night, which was the price you paid for beautiful shoes. It was late, and I was drunk, so I took them off and sat on the edge of the pool, careful to lift my dress from the back of my thighs so it wouldn't catch on the concrete, and dangled my feet in the ice-cold water. The relief was so sudden, so pleasurable, I nearly moaned.

And then Joan was behind me. I could feel her before I saw her. I could smell her, her particular absence of perfume. Sometimes she wore perfume and sometimes she didn't. I always noticed. It's impossible to describe someone's scent but I'll try: she smelled like day-old citrus, the brace of vodka, and her mother's powder.

“I thought I'd lost you,” she said when she sat down. She slipped off her own shoes and placed her feet in the water. “Praise be to Jesus,” she said. “This feels heavenly.”

“I was out here the whole time,” I said. “You didn't lose me.”

“For God's sake, Cee. It's just something I was saying.” She sounded tired. “You shouldn't have ordered the steak.”

“It was just a steak.” I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks.

“I didn't want it.”

“But you needed it.”

“Did I? How strange, that you know what I need better than I do.”

“I've ordered food for you before,” I said finally. And I had. It didn't seem like something she would have minded a month ago.

“Maybe I'm different now.” She splashed her foot in the water, dimming a nearby candle. “Maybe things have changed.”

I laughed. “Things never change. I'm always here, you're always there. We're always at places like this, late at night when we should be asleep.”

And what I wanted to say, but did not:
I'm always waiting for you
.

I felt a large presence behind us. A man—I knew without looking. “Oh,” Joan said. Her voice changed, became higher, unserious. “You again!”

“I'm back,” he said, and something about the way he said it chilled me. But perhaps that's only now. I realized Joan had lied to me.
This
was the man I had seen her with at the Cork Club, the old friend she'd said was going back to Hollywood. The man I'd thought was gone for good.

He helped Joan stand. He dwarfed her. Joan was not a small woman, but he was even taller than Ray, with hands that made Joan's disappear.

He wasn't young—forty, maybe—but he still had his light brown hair; big, almost womanly lips; and the kind of ruddy complexion that suggests a constant state of too much sun or too much alcohol. His eyes were pale.

“This is Sid,” she said, and then she leaned into him, brushed something off his shoulder. It was true: they were, as she had put it, old friends. More than that, obviously. They knew each other well.

He gazed down at me. I reached my hand up to shake his and he took it, held it firmly for one second, two. “A pleasure,” he
said distractedly, and I knew he didn't have the faintest idea who I was. Just one of Joan's girlfriends.

As he held my hand I understood exactly the kind of man Sid was. He reeked of sex; he wasn't even interested in me and I could feel his appetite through the faint pressure of his skin.

“We're off?” Joan asked, and another piece of the puzzle slipped into place. She'd planned to meet him here, planned all along to go home with him.

“One second,” he said, and held up a cigar. “This needs smoking.”

Joan laughed. I hated how she sounded: like a silly, stupid girl.

“You said he'd left,” I said, once Sid was out of earshot. She shrugged; I wanted to slap her. “You said you hadn't fucked. Not that I believed you. But why lie, Joan? Why?” I'd provoked her again and this time I didn't care. I wanted a fight.

But when Joan spoke she didn't sound angry. She sounded sad.

“He did leave. But then he came back.” She held up her hands.

“And your plans? With him?”

“The fucking? You show entirely too much interest in that, Cece. You always have.” I thought of that day in high school, when I had seen her in the gymnasium with the strange boy. I looked down, embarrassed.

“I'm your friend,” I said.

“Woe be to you.”

“Joan?” It was Sid, calling her from the bar. Her sad, tired look vanished. She was the Joan everyone knew again: always ready for a good time, another drink, another party, another man.

I loved the other Joan, the Joan beneath the Joan.

Once they were gone I was tempted to submerge myself in the pool, dress be damned.

Instead I took my feet out of the pool and shook them off, one by one. Stood, slowly. Scanned the crowd for Darlene and Kenna. It occurred to me that Fred would have left with Joan, so we would have to find another way home.

I sighed. I wanted the other Joan back.

I
t was New Year's Eve. More precisely, the dawn of New Year's Day, a week after the Fortier Christmas party, 1951 tipping into 1952. Ray had just deposited us at our building, and after a sweet good-bye to my fiancé, Joan and I sat on the rooftop deck in our dresses and stoles with glasses of champagne, watching the sun light Houston's skyline. We'd had a good night together, a fun night. Ray had been there at my side, of course, along with our friends and Joan's ubiquitous suitors, yet she and I had finally slipped back into the easy relationship we'd shared before she had left. That's what it felt like to me. That sense, with a friend you love, that you could tell her anything, everything. That confidence that she would understand.

“Are you happy now?” I asked her.

“Happy?”

“Now,” I said, “this instant.” I gestured to the world beyond the rooftop. “There's all this to see.” I
wanted
to see it, in that moment. My father, my poor dead mother—they all seemed very far away right now, minor in their distance.

I turned to my friend, put both hands on her bare forearm. Her skin was dry beneath my palms.

She looked down at my hands, curiously, then up at me.

“Joan,” I said, “what happened when you were gone?”

Slowly, she gestured to the skyline. I looked, too. I tried to see what she saw. But all I saw were buildings bracketed by sky.

“What happened, Cee? A lot happened.”

I waited.
This
was the moment I had been waiting for since she had come back.

“I went away, and then Mama and Daddy brought me back, because I had been a very bad girl.”

I nearly stamped my foot in impatience.

“No, Joan. Tell me what happened.”

“I can't,” she said, and there were tears in her voice. “I don't know how to put what happened into words.”

My hand tightened on her forearm. “Try. Please, try.”

She nodded, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She did not look beautiful in this moment, or unbeautiful; she looked like herself.

“I thought the world would be different outside of Houston,” she said. “But it wasn't.”

“What was it like?”

“I saw Ingrid Bergman there.”

“Really?” I asked. “Isn't she in Italy?”

She shrugged. “She must have come back for a quick trip. She was walking into a café. I was sitting at a little table, drinking a cappuccino.”

A cappuccino. A café. Ingrid Bergman, back from Italy. I didn't know if Joan was fooling herself or just trying to fool me. She had seen a woman, likely, who resembled Ingrid Bergman, but the real Ingrid Bergman had been exiled from the entire country, had earned the wrath and ire of everyone, from senators to housewives, for her affair with Rossellini.

“You don't believe me?” Joan asked. She knew me so well.

“No, no,” I protested. “You just hadn't told me before. What did she look like?”

“She was gorgeous,” Joan said, sharply. “Of course.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I want to
be
her, Cece.”

“You want to be Ingrid Bergman? Everyone hates her.”

“Not in Italy. I bet they love her there.”

“Maybe.”

“You don't see it.” She sat back in her chair.

“No, I—”

“It's fine. I bet she meets a dozen interesting people a night, two dozen. I bet her house—her villa!—is covered in artwork. I bet she can hardly sleep her life is so exciting. Hop on a train to London at a moment's notice. Eat gelato at midnight next to the Trevi Fountain. Kiss a stranger in front of a movie camera.”

Her eyes were bright, and I understood.

“There are so many people who want to be famous,” I said.

She looked at me, uncomprehending.

“In Hollywood,” I went on. “But it's just luck, Joan. Lightning.”

“Lightning,” Joan repeated. “It doesn't matter, anyway.” She rose, sweeping my hands off her arm in a neat gesture. “It's all in the past.”

Joan was not Joan outside of Houston. The rest of us knew to stay here: we knew who we were, where we belonged. The problem was Joan's ambition, which was unfocused, silly. But she would settle down again. Mary had said so, and I knew she was right.

“It's not so far in the past. You left me.” It felt like I'd been waiting months to say this to her.

She nodded, considering. “I did. But we're not girls anymore. Do you want me to say sorry? I'm sorry.” But she didn't sound sorry. She sounded angry, though how could she have been angry at me? I had done nothing but wait. I had waited so faithfully.

“Did you think about me while you were gone?” I hated myself for asking, like some scorned lover. But I couldn't help it.

“I did,” Joan said. “Of course I did.”

“But not as much as I thought about you.” It slipped off my tongue like a greeting.

Joan's hand was on the sliding glass door; it was only a matter of time—minutes, seconds—before she left again.

“It's not long until you marry Ray, Cee. He loves you. You'll leave this place. You should leave this place.”

1957

I
woke the Saturday morning after our night at the Petroleum Club, certain I had dreamt of Joan. I was groggy, disoriented. It was half past ten when I emerged from our bedroom. Tommy grinned at me from the kitchen floor, where he was playing with mixing bowls. I had a headache the size of Texas, and my mouth felt like terry cloth.

“Hi, sweetheart,” I said, leaning down to kiss his forehead. And to Ray: “Maria?”

“Washing clothes.”

“Did everyone eat?”

Ray glanced at the red enamel clock that hung over the stove.

“Tommy and I have been up for three hours. Yes, we've eaten.
Toast.” There was an edge to his voice but I chose to ignore it. I was allowed to sleep in once in a blue moon. I was irritated, too, besides. We always had pancakes on weekends, but asking Ray to make pancakes was like asking the president to knit a sweater after he hung up with Nixon. Men didn't do those things, in those days. Yet I knew I was lucky that Ray enjoyed Tommy. It was a constant complaint, among other women, that their husbands treated their own children as if they were strangers.

I hated when Ray was moody. He wasn't, generally. He was quiet with other people—not the life of the party, by any stretch—but with me and Tommy he was open and friendly and kind. I don't think there was a mean bone in Ray Buchanan's body. I had plenty of mean bones, and he had none. Perhaps that's why I married him.

I poured cold coffee into a pot and put it on the stove. I harbored a small hope that Joan had called, that if she hadn't called yet she
would
call, and smooth over last night. What Ciela had said—that I was Joan's handmaiden—was a thread being stitched through my tired brain.

I went to the little yellow notepad we kept by the phone, decorated with bluebirds, and checked to see if there were any messages for me.

“She didn't call.” Ray licked a finger and turned a page of his newspaper.

“Who didn't call?”

“Your friend,” he said. I hated his tone, which was mocking, deliberate. “The great Joan Fortier.” Still he did not look at me. “The woman who keeps you out until three thirty in the
morning, and then occupies your thoughts the day after. The woman who kept you in a knot of worry for the past few weeks, when she was off doing who knows what—”

“Stop.” Tommy looked up at the sound of my voice. Watched me, solemnly.

“Stop?” He set his paper on the table, carefully. Ray was the most careful man I knew. I was taken aback by his anger, his handsome face distorted into a series of separate, ugly tensions. “I'll stop. But then maybe
you
should stop. Stop pretending you're twenty years old. You have a child at home, Cee.”

“I'm a good mother. A good wife.” I tried to keep my voice low. I didn't want Maria to hear. Tommy was still staring at me in his solemn way; I offered him a tight smile. “And you're upsetting Tommy, besides.”

“Don't use Tommy.”

“Don't you dare,” I said. My voice was shaking. “You like Joan,” I said. “Joan's our friend.”

He laughed. “God, Cee, this has nothing to do with Joan! It's you. She can manage herself. She's an adult.”

“She needs me.”

“Then you should have married her.” His voice was hard.

I gave a bark of laughter. “Don't be absurd. But she needs me,” I repeated. “She's always needed me.”

“
We
need you. Tommy needs you.” Tommy swung his head around to Ray. “And speaking of Tommy, when are we going to have another child? ‘The time isn't right, the time isn't right.'” He was mimicking me—I hated being mimicked. “When will the time be right, Cee? When Joan says it is?”

“We'll have another child,” I said, “when this one starts to speak.”

Ray stared at me. I'd gone too far. Even I could see that, furious as I was. He stood, picked up Tommy, who clutched a block in his little, perfect hand.

“In front of him?” Ray hissed, before he left the room.

The pan rattled; the scent of scalded coffee filled the room.

“Perfect timing,” I muttered, as I emptied the contents of the pan into a mug, then stirred in milk. I liked my coffee black but I needed it to cool down, quickly, so I could drink it and clear my head and start to put together where I had gone wrong, exactly.

•   •   •

H
e kept Tommy from me all day. Fed him lunch, dinner, bathed him, read him a story. All the things I normally did, as if to say,
Look, you're not the only one who can care for him
. Ray never spent time alone with Tommy other than our monthly girls' night. That Ray could do all the things I did made me feel useless. I was Tommy's mother, Ray's wife: my twin purposes in the world. I didn't like feeling as if I could be so easily replaced.

I spent the day in the bedroom. I wanted it to begin again. I wanted last night to never have happened. I considered calling Joan but she wouldn't have been helpful in her current state. And anyway, there was no one to whom I could confess the things I needed to confess. That I was afraid my son was damaged. That my husband was jealous of my best friend. That I could feel my best friend slipping away from me and I did not understand why.

Sometimes Tommy woke in the depths of the night. I went to
him, padded down the hall and took him from his crib and rocked him back to sleep. I knew he was awake by some animal instinct; Tommy did not cry, or call out for me, or even shake the sides of his crib. His not speaking was something deeper than simple silence: it seemed he did not want to be heard. I wondered how many times my animal instinct had failed me, and I'd slept while Tommy waited for me to come to him. I thought of my own mother, and the fear returned that some essential lack of warmth on my part was to blame for Tommy's silence.

Now I had said something that could not be unsaid. I couldn't help but think that I had shifted something between Ray and me irrevocably. It made me feel desperate. Late that afternoon I stood at my window and watched Ray outside with Tommy, in his sandbox.

Ray offered Tommy a shovel, and Tommy took it without looking up. I didn't think I'd ever felt so completely excluded from my child and husband's world. I pressed my forehead to the glass and felt like weeping.

I found Ray in his study late that night. He was drinking a glass of scotch, a thick book he wasn't reading set in front of him.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “About Tommy.”

He cocked his head. “I don't think Tommy understood you,” he said at last. “He's too young. He'll speak. It's just taking him longer than it takes other children.”

“I know.” In that moment, I believed him. I felt so sorry, so miserable, I would have believed anything he said.

“I'm not mad anymore. I just don't understand.” He took a sip of his drink. His face was relaxed, and I wondered how long he'd
been sipping scotch. Ray always seemed so knowable, so clear, but now I wondered about all the things he thought, all the secrets he kept from me.

I didn't want to wonder. I didn't want to be upset. I wanted to do something instead of thinking about doing something. I wanted to be clear about the difference between the two. I wanted to go back to last night and behave differently: behave more like Joan herself. What did I care if Joan ate poorly? What did I care if Joan wasn't always the nicest, the most understanding, the most polite?
She
didn't care.

“Understand what?” I asked.

“Understand you.”

I went to him. I kneeled beside him, put my hand on his chest. I wasn't usually so dramatic.

“You understand me,” I said. “You understand me the best of anyone in the world.”

He smiled faintly. “Do you think so?”

I put my hand on his thigh. Sex with Ray was the most familiar thing in the world, an old sweater. I wanted it to be different tonight. I wanted him to come back to me. I wanted to be a different woman for him. I wanted not to care. Most of all, I wanted not to care.

I unzipped Ray's pants before I could think about it. I felt shy, suddenly, and the idea excited me, that I could feel shy with a man I'd been with since I was eighteen years old. Ray put his hand on my forehead, and I thought he wanted me to stop but then I understood he was only brushing my bangs from my face. He wanted to see.

When I put him in my mouth he gasped. “Jesus, Cee.” I didn't want to hear my name. I didn't want to open my eyes and see Ray's study in all its ordinariness. I tried harder to pretend I was elsewhere. He was larger and larger in my mouth and I was less and less myself. I was giddy with the possibility of what we were doing. Hopeful.

•   •   •

T
he next day Ray loved me again. He was shy with me, and I with him; we didn't discuss what had happened in his study, the utter surprise of it, but it was there with us all day long, the way good sex makes you feel like a slightly different version of yourself. And perhaps you really were a different version of yourself; maybe sex had to change you.

Mercifully—mercifully!—he was out, running by his office to pick up a file, when the phone rang. It was Mary, speaking too loudly again.

She got right to it, which was her way. “Have you seen Joan recently?”

“Two nights ago,” I said.

“Oh.” She sounded relieved. “And?”

I was never exactly sure what Mary wanted from me. The truth, or a version of it that was compatible with her idea of Joan—or, rather, her hopes for Joan. When we lived in the Specimen Jar, had Mary truly wanted to know that Joan was taking shots of tequila from salt-rimmed glasses and popping Darlene's mother's old painkillers?

“She was fine,” I said, my voice neutral.

“Fine?”

“Fine.”

A pause. I could hear ice rattling in a glass and I knew Mary was drinking her afternoon tea: iced in the summer, hot in the winter, or what passed for a winter here.

She sighed. “I'm concerned, Cecilia. She's been off, gallivanting, and hasn't been in touch as much as I'd like. Do you think I need to worry?”

Mary never laid her cards on the table so quickly, so easily. Never made herself so completely available. She knew something.

“Worry about what, exactly?”

“Oh, Cecilia. I'm an old woman with a husband who doesn't recognize me half the time. I just want to know if my daughter is safe. I just want to know that she's being prudent.”

What must it be like, to have a mother who worried over you like this? I felt a brief surge of jealousy. And then sympathy, for Mary. Perhaps my sympathy had been carefully elicited, perhaps not. I no longer cared.

“She's dating a new man,” I said. “His name is Sid.”

I heard a small intake of air.

“Mrs. Fortier?”

The other end was silent. I leaned against the counter, a cold sweat on my forehead.

“Do you know him?” I ventured.

This time she answered. “Yes. Sid Stark,” she said. “Only by reputation.” She'd gathered herself.

“And his reputation?”

“Fine,” she said vaguely, taking my word. “Fine. And now I really must let you go, Cecilia. Thank you for your help. As always.”

After I hung up the phone I felt a tug on my skirt. Tommy, careful enough to wait until I was done speaking to solicit my attention. I felt a surge of love so great tears came to my eyes. I picked him up and held him, his warm breath against my neck, the sweet scent of him in my nostrils. I was terrified for Joan. But there was nothing I could do until she came to me.

•   •   •

I
lasted a day. On Tuesday I was up extra early to bake a chocolate buttermilk cake, Ray's favorite. Actually, I made two. By the time Tommy was awake the cakes were already in the oven.

I fried crispy hash browns and eggs over easy; my timing was perfect. Ray came downstairs, his tie in his hand, and kissed me softly—tenderly, even—on the cheek.

“Sit down,” I murmured, a thrill moving up my legs, the smell of him—his aftershave, his toothpaste, his essential oiliness—in my throat.

He sat and I slid his plate in front of him.

“Like Simpson's!” he said, delighted. Simpson's was the little café we had gone to for breakfast when we were first married.

“Right down to the slightly burned edges.”

And a smaller plate for Tommy, who studied the food, then picked up a chunk of hash browns between his thumb and pointer finger and delicately took a bite.

Usually this delicateness bothered me. I didn't like that Tommy
seemed, unlike other children, so unwilling to disturb the world. But in this instant his carefulness was charming; Ray and I watched our son together, taking equal pleasure in him.

Ray laughed. “And what's that smell?” he asked. “An after-breakfast treat?”

“Hardly,” I said. “Something for after dinner.”

“Just for me? No special occasion?” He caught me around the hips, pulled me into his lap.

“Just for you,” I said, letting myself settle into him. “Just for you.”

•   •   •

I
put together the layers of both cakes as Tommy played with his train on the floor, iced each one with buttercream frosting on my special cake stand that had been a wedding present. The plate spun on its stand, making icing a breeze. When I brought my homemade desserts to Junior League meetings the other girls asked where I'd bought them.

“There,” I said, and stood back to admire the cakes, each on a pale green platter. Out of loyalty to Ray I poked toothpicks into the top of the slightly lopsided one, then covered it in tinfoil.

I felt a small, smooth hand on my calf. Tommy, who looked up at me mournfully.

•   •   •

I
t was also out of loyalty to Ray that I left Tommy at home, with Maria. And, though it was impossible, Tommy seemed to
know
I was doing something I shouldn't. What did Ray care if I dropped
off a cake at Evergreen? I asked myself as I drove. But of course Ray would care. It would break the lovely feeling that had existed between us since Saturday night. But he wouldn't know, I told myself. Couldn't know, unless he'd suddenly developed a sixth sense. And he hadn't, because he was a man.