The After Party (16 page)

“Leave,” she said, and paused. “Leave me alone. Get out of here. I'll find my own way home.”

I felt my face flame. She could be petulant at the end of a night, but she'd never spoken to me like this, certainly not in front of strangers.

Her eyes were bright, her pupils strangely large. Joan did not look like a woman who had been slamming drinks all night. She looked like a woman who could go on for hours.

I recognized the strangeness of her eyes and left anyway. “You left her there?” Mary would ask later. “All alone?”

Yes. I left her there. All alone.

“Fine,” I said, and gathered my clutch, my stole. I took Fred away, told him to go home after he'd opened my door, that Joan could find her own way back.

I woke at eleven the next morning. I brushed my teeth; dabbed a cream Kenna had given me underneath my eyes, something she
said was from Paris; took a pill that was supposed to make my hair thicker; and when I finally emerged from the bathroom, dressed in capris that hit my waist at just the right point and a soft blouse that exposed exactly the right amount of my collarbone, I felt better than I had in a long time. I'd made up my mind before I fell asleep to confront Joan: things needed to change. She needed to come home at a decent hour, she needed to drink less and be careful with whatever else she was doing or taking. And she needed never to raise her voice at me again among strangers. I was used to Joan's moods, but I could not tolerate a stranger seeing the private bits of our relationship. That moment last night now belonged to Sam and the man from Austin and the few people scattered at the bar. Joan had given it to them.

The light in the Specimen Jar was blinding; sometimes, during the brightest parts of the day, Joan and I wore sunglasses. I shielded my eyes and made my way to the kitchen, where Sari had set out my bowl of oatmeal.

I heard her thick-soled shoes against the tile before I saw her.

“Do you want anything else with your oatmeal? An egg?”

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

She asked me every morning; every morning I said no, thank you. There were so many rituals, with live-in servants. Joan, when she emerged from her room—I glanced at the door, shut firmly against the light of the living room—would want something greasy, with meat, “to soak up the poisons.”

Sari measured out coffee, poured a neat glass of orange juice, which she squeezed fresh every morning.

“Thank you,” I said when Sari placed the small, pretty glass to the right of my cereal bowl; Sari made a low, aggressive noise.

Now I expected her to leave. This was our routine, when Joan wasn't here. When Joan was here, she stayed, and tended to Joan, who needed tending.

She stood beyond my frame of vision, waiting, it seemed, for something.

“Yes?”

“Remember Mrs. Fortier is coming to dinner tonight,” she said. “With Mr. Fortier.”

I'd completely forgotten. Mary never came to the Specimen Jar. It was Furlow who stopped by bearing gifts, to have a glass of champagne and sit on the rooftop deck, admiring Houston's hazy skyline. Instead, Joan went to Mary. Something had changed in their dynamic; Joan was more in thrall to Mary than she ever had been, a change I mistook for closeness: I thought Joan needed her mother now, depended on her in a way that signaled their relationship was better. I knew nothing. Joan
did
need Mary, but not in the way I thought.

At five o'clock, two hours before Mary and Furlow were set to arrive, I knocked on Joan's door. There was no answer, and instead of knocking again I turned the knob and blinked; gradually the dark room revealed itself and I saw that Joan's bed was undisturbed. The books that had lived on her bureau since she'd returned were gone.

I thought she might be dead in the bathroom. I don't know what sense of dread compelled my brain to the worst possible outcome—but I was in the bathroom, the light flipped on,
nothing but bright white porcelain and my own reflection before I realized how absurd the idea was. Of course Joan wasn't dead.

But she was gone, which presented two problems. The first: Mary and Furlow. The second: Joan's whereabouts.

Oh, I knew where she was. With a man, in his bed; or if not his bed, then a bed through the stage door, down the warren of halls, and up the stairs in the Shamrock. The man from Austin. I sat down on the edge of her white bed and put my head in my hands. He wasn't even her type. He was old, too old to deserve a body like hers, too old to even be in the same room with her. But it didn't matter. Any man would do these days.

•   •   •

I
went to call Mary, for I knew that wherever Joan was, I would not locate her, then retrieve her, then bring her back here and make her presentable, within two hours.

I had been planning to go to Ray's after dinner, spend the night at his apartment. Now that was out of the question. He seemed irritated when I told him, but I didn't have time to placate him. I would deal with him later.

I would find her, but I didn't know that. If only all the people who searched in the world could know whether or not their looking would end in a reunion. I stayed up that entire night, after speaking to a reticent Mary—“She's gone, dear? I'm not alarmed, exactly, but I'm a little put out.” I didn't know if I believed her. I could never read Mary. All that night and into the next day I heard Ciela echoing in my brain like an ache that occasionally dulled but never quite disappeared.
She's in trouble, Cece.

•   •   •

I
t was six o'clock in the morning and I sat at the dining room table, staring at the beef tenderloin and roasted carrots resting in their own congealed fat.

The phone rang. I was waiting for Joan to call, hoping she would do so before I had to begin to search for her in earnest. I couldn't run from club to club, asking if anyone had seen her; I couldn't stop by Sam's and ask whom Joan had left with, and where they had gone; to do this would be to risk Joan's reputation, and though it was understood that Joan was wild and fast, a party girl, she was still a respectable woman who returned home after her nights out. It was my job to protect her from herself; it was for this that the Fortiers needed me, and loved me.

I snatched up the receiver. “Miss Cecilia,” an unfamiliar voice said, “I need to take you somewhere.”

I looked out the window into the black night, terrified. I wanted to hang up yet I could not, because this person might know something about Joan.

“Where?” I asked, in a trembling voice.

“This is Fred,” the voice said.

“Oh,” I gasped. “Thank God.”

“Can you come downstairs in half an hour?” he asked.

“Do you know where Joan is?”

Silence. “I might,” he said.

I hurried downstairs and waited in the lobby before I saw the silver of the Fortiers' car.

We left downtown. The address was in Sugar Land, so we
would be there soon. The sun had not yet risen, and the buildings' outlines were ghostly in the predawn light. The familiar sight of Fred's coarse gray hair, the stiff black collar that covered his neck—it calmed me. He wore his uniform even now.

“Not too long,” he said. He had a Southern accent, but not a Texas drawl. He'd probably grown up on a farm somewhere, in the South, then moved to the big city in his youth.

Houston fell away quickly: high-rises gave way to large houses; then smaller houses with wide porches and dusty, dry yards; then empty land, purple spiderwort and violets just starting to bloom. I wrapped myself in my cashmere shawl and leaned my forehead against the cool window.

I wondered what Joan had seen as she'd driven this same route last night, or if she'd seen anything at all. I would ask her, I decided. A surge of hopefulness sparked its way through my limbs and I felt electric. I would make her understand why she had to be different, be better.

After another twenty minutes I saw a sign for Sugar Land, Texas, on the side of the road. One of Darlene's cousins lived here. We weren't that far outside of Houston, but it felt like another world.

It was not what I thought it would be. Is anything ever? We turned off the main road onto a dirt road and drove deeper and deeper into a vast expanse of what appeared to be a farm with no crops. The sun was almost out, now.

The car shimmied and swayed over the rocky path so violently I thought I might be sick.

“Rough territory,” Fred said, and I knew he was trying to be
kind, and I wondered what he must think of me, of this. He had his sources, clearly. I assumed another chauffeur had told Fred where Joan had gone. But I didn't really know, and I never would, because I couldn't ask him. Fred had ferried Joan from place to place for years, from the time she was a little girl. He knew, I realized, suddenly. He knew more than I. But I couldn't ask him, either, if he knew who Joan really was. Last month the
Press
had called her Houston's most eligible bachelorette, and printed a photo of her leaving the Cork Club, a man on either side of her. You could see me, too—not my face, of course. Just the side of my figure, clothed in a skirt made of netting and lace, dotted with crystals. It was one of my favorite pieces. When I wore it I felt like a person who could go anywhere, be anyone.

The road leveled out and we were on asphalt; it took a second for the dust to clear and the house to emerge: ranch-style, long and beige. Its plainness made me nervous. I had not expected to find Joan somewhere so ordinary.

There were no signs of life: I noted a carport, where the car would have been parked. The flower beds that edged the house were gutted, filled with dirt and gravel to keep the dust down. Curtains were drawn tightly against the windows. The house was nondescript and neatly kept. There was neither grass nor weeds, no shingles missing from the roof, and the brown trim around the windows looked fresh. It was clear someone tended to the place.

Fred turned the car off and looked back at me; for the first time that morning I saw his entire face. He looked tired. He must not have slept, either. I wondered if Mary had called him. “Do
you want me to come with you?” he asked. “It's no trouble.” And I knew we both saw the same thing in the house: it was menacing in its blankness, dead against the horizon.

“Just please wait for me,” I said, even though of course he would.

The door was unlocked. I stepped into a carpeted foyer; to my left was a sitting room, with a brown sofa covered in plastic. A vase of artificial flowers sat on the coffee table, next to an open newspaper with a small glass of water resting beside it, on a coaster.

The house smelled like potpourri, and something burned, and—I almost cried with relief when the scent hit me—Joan. Her perfume first, and then her hair spray, which I had applied the night before, when I'd done up her hair in a French twist, then again right before we'd left the house, as a touch-up, to make sure she would remain exquisite throughout the night.

Joan had been here for hours now. Over a day.

“Joan?” I called. I walked down a dim hallway, beige, lined with beige doors. I imagined empty rooms lay behind them.

When I came to the door at the end of the hall I hesitated. I knew Joan was behind it, I knew it was a bedroom, but I didn't know who else was with her. The man from Austin, maybe. But maybe not. I knocked, lightly at first, then harder. Last night I'd thought she might be dead in the bathroom, but now she really could have been dead. She could have taken too many of her pills. A girl we'd known of in high school—she hadn't run in our circle—had locked herself in her bedroom with her mother's prescription and a bottle of vodka; she'd died a week later. Joan might not have been trying to kill herself, but she'd been so wild lately
she might have hurt herself accidentally. I pictured Mary's face, Furlow's. “Please be fine,” I whispered. “Please.”

The door was locked. I would have laughed if I weren't terrified. The lock was cheap—I found a nickel in my purse and opened it in one twist.

The room was bright, and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. The source of light was an open window that looked out onto the backyard.

I saw only Joan, at first: her cheek pressed into the pillow, her neck turned at an odd angle, her blond hair still in its twist. My head spun.
She is dead
, I thought,
dead and gone
. But then the flutter of an eyelid: she was only sleeping. Her hair looked nearly perfect. I took quick, misplaced pleasure in my handiwork before I remembered that I had a job to do, that Joan's hair mattered not at all.

The room smelled of sex, and I noticed the fact of her nakedness and the two other bodies in the bed almost simultaneously. I tiptoed closer. On one side of Joan lay a man draped with a bedsheet; on her other side lay a man as exposed as Joan was, but facedown. I couldn't see either of their faces. The man who was covered had an arm flung over his face, and a long, purplish scar ran from his elbow to his wrist. I raised my hand to my mouth and stared at all of it. Tried to fit the pieces in front of me into a picture I could understand. The three bodies were inert, their sleep so deep it seemed unnatural.

I couldn't tell how tall these men were, or how much money they had, or if they were from Houston or somewhere else. I
couldn't tell if they mattered—and which was worse, that they did or did not? I reached out to steady myself with the wall.

They had both touched Joan, at the same time. Used her. And she had been willing, she had presented herself up to them like an offering, a gift.
Have me any way you like me, boys
, I imagined her saying.
I'm Joan Fortier, and I don't care.

Fred had known the address, but had he known what happened here? No. He would have stopped it had he known.

The room was bare except for a large painting of a herd of cattle surrounding a cowboy with his lasso raised, which hung above the bed. I wondered if Joan had looked at this painting, considered it. But Joan had not looked anywhere beyond herself, not for a long time.