Читать книгу The Arriviste - James Wallenstein - Страница 7

chapter two

Sometimes, when Frances was a pup, I would walk down with her for a late paper and a pack of smokes to a stationery shop in the village that stayed open on weekends. It was a nice ritual. The shopkeeper was cordial and the cigarette on the way back tasted especially good. But a shopping center opened, dozens of storefronts on the spine of a hill running almost a mile west to the center of the next town, and the supermarket at our end ran the village shop out of business.

I went out for cigarettes one Friday night. The moisture was licking the panes from below as much as drizzling from above, and the automatic garage-door opener sounded even more like a cement mixer than usual. I fumbled for the lights and wipers on the new station wagon I’d finally managed to come by.

The thought that I wouldn’t have walked to the old shop anyway on a cold damp November night couldn’t keep me from ruminating on the tendency of good things to yield to bad. My gloom expressed itself in haste—I raced down the driveway. When I saw the car blocking me in at the end, it was almost too late. Only by veering off the gravel and plowing over the shrubs on the margin was I able to avoid a collision. I jumped out of my car fit to smash the other, an Olds. Then I saw that that the Olds wasn’t the only car blocking me in. It was part of a long row parked on the edge of my property. I heard voices in the distance and car doors thudding shut and remembered the Youngers’ party.

I headed straight for Bud’s house, too angry to care that I was betraying my excuse for declining. I wasn’t going to be held captive while his guests used my lawn as their parking lot.

A pair of headlight beams hit a fire hydrant and an elm trunk before jumping a gap in the rhododendrons and blazing up the Youngers’ driveway. The light couldn’t travel far, though. The driveway was full. Guests milled around, wondering what to do with their cars.

“Norman!” a woman exclaimed to her husband. “It’s Nate and Nikki, for Pete’s sake.”

“Nancy!” exclaimed the other woman, Nikki presumably. They kissed, and their perfumes mingled with the scent of holly. I knew these people, knew their kind. Like creatures to the Ark, they had come in twos, north on the Meadowbrook, east across the Whitestone, or west down the Turnpike through Jericho. They had come in big sedans with heavy doors and heaters that heated faster than those in their houses and hooked exhaust pipes whose intoxicating benzene and oxide billows resembled their own exhalations misting into the frosty dark.

They had come in twos, but they wouldn’t stay in twos. They’d circulate individually and collide fortuitously, seeking each other out only when something could not wait to be told. One would otherwise know that they were a pair only because that was how they were known: not as Nate or Nikki or Norman or Nancy but as Norman and Nikki and Nate and Nancy. To compensate for their awkwardness, the men would be glib and the women would let the men’s glibness pass for wit. Everyone would kiss and squeeze and mock everyone else and feel proprietary about everyone else’s children. Even though they weren’t kids anymore themselves, the old college excitement would have survived their transformation. I knew them, all right.

A man in a beaver hat and cavalryman’s coat hurried up the driveway and jumped into the last in the line of cars. There’s the dunce who blocked me in, I thought, and started toward him. Before I reached him, he’d backed the car away.

“Guess he’s the valet,” said Nikki.

“Could be a thief,” Nate replied. “Let’s see whether he comes back.”

“Every time Nate gives his car to a valet, he panics as the guy drives off,” Nancy said. “If that guy went to the trouble of coming here and dressing up to steal a car, he wouldn’t choose our Pontiac.”

“It’s a Bonneville,” Nate protested.

The valet returned. “So much for that,” said Nancy.

The valet gave Norman his keys and left his hand extended for a tip, but the gesture betrayed him. Norman lifted the beaver hat off the valet’s head. “Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” his wife exclaimed and planted a kiss on Bud’s cheek.

“Buddy boy!” Nate cried.

I waited while Bud finished greeting his guests and sent them up the flagstone path to the house. The sounds of their glee trailed behind.

“Bud,” I said sharply.

“Who’s that?” he said. “It’s Neil! You’re here after all! How are you, fella? Don’t tell me you canceled your trip especially to come.”

“I’m afraid not. It was canceled for other reasons. But there’s been some kind of misunderstanding here. My driveway’s blocked. There are cars on my lawn.”

“Space got short. I remembered that you were gone and thought I’d make use of your frontage.”

“Well, that’s one thing, but the driveway—”

“I couldn’t very well block you in when you were out of town, could I?”

“Do I look like I’m out of town?”

“I wouldn’t say that, no. I’d say you’re here and, with a blocked driveway, won’t be going anywhere soon. Join the party!”

Another car pulled up, a Volkswagen. Its suspension was loose, and the beams from its headlamps bounced like spotlights following an acrobat. “I can leave it here?” the driver asked.

“I’ll take care of it,” Bud said, opening the door for her. She fiddled with a few things before getting out, and I took the opportunity to press my case.

“I’m really very busy,” I told him. “I was just running out for some cigarettes. I’ve got to get back to it.”

“Cigarettes? Help yourself—we’ve probably got one for every match in the place. I’ll tell you what. Go inside, have a drink and a smoke.” He lowered his voice. “There are women in there practically crying for a man like you. For that matter, here’s one you can cry for.”

The driver got out of her car before I could refuse. Bud introduced himself and me. She looked young in the torchlight, even for this crowd. She was willowy, with long wavy hair and earrings dangling like fobs on chains. “I’m here to meet Lee,” she said with a hint of Spanish in her pronunciation.

“Lucky man,” Bud said as she started up the path. “Lee,” he said to me, “it doesn’t ring a bell. She must be at the wrong party. Go on in. Maybe you can be Lee.”

“Not tonight. I’ve got to get some cigarettes and go back to work. Now if you’ll move those cars at the head of my driveway.”

“Think I know whose car is whose? Go on in and help yourself to all the smokes you can carry. You’ll be back at your desk in no time. It’ll be a perfect break for you.”

What could I do, threaten to have the cars towed? I went ahead, up the path and through the door, where a clamor of voices overwhelmed the sound of wind and rustle behind me.

One of the Younger boys came to take my overcoat. He was freckle-faced, with a mouthful of braces and a cowlick.

“Thanks,” I told him, “ but I think I’ll hold on to it.”

“What do you wanna walk around in your coat for? You’ll boil!”

“I’m only coming in for a few minutes.”

“A few minutes. Then why’d you come at all?” He tugged at my sleeve. “Listen,” he continued, “I’m supposed to take everyone’s coat.”

“Well, you’re not taking mine.” I tried to make him let go but he held on. Our tug-of-war continued. Heads turned.

The apple really hadn’t fallen far from the tree; he too was stubborn. “I see—you want it for yourself. If I give it to you, how will I know you won’t make off with it?”

“Make off with it? But I’ve already got a jacket. It’s a Mighty Mac. Wanna see it?”

“Not right now. Maybe some other—”

“—and I’ve got a bike and a go-cart and we’ve got two television sets. How many have you got?”

“One.”

“Only one? That’s too bad. At my friend’s house they have three. What kind is it?”

He was leading me through the house, to an upstairs bedroom where he kept the overcoats. He might have been taking me on a European grand tour, to judge from the decor: French tulle upholstery, Dutch muslin curtains, Flemish oils, German piano, Viennese wind-up clock, Scandinavian fur rug, Venetian cut-glass lamps, Roman cassone, Turkish runners—all from as far east as Third Avenue. But then, I wondered, where was England? England’s bounty had been excluded. I mulled that over till it struck me that there was something of England in the house. From England the Youngers had borrowed their name.

The pile of coats on the bed was higher than the boy himself. He draped mine over a bedpost and put my gloves and astrakhan on a shelf beside it. “I’ll need a chit for that coat.”

“A chit? What’s that?”

“Be on guard,” I said as I left him. “Could be some second-story men in this crowd.”

“Second what? You are strange.”

His reply followed me down the hall and at the top of the staircase—which lacked the grandeur that its wind suggested—gave me pause before my descent.

The crowd at the base of the stairs surged and I bumped a woman whose hair was wrapped in a tall bun. It was a tower, a Babylonian ziggurat. Her earrings were long too, like inverted lampposts, and made the bun seem even taller. She grabbed my wrist and said, “See my eyebrows—would you describe them as melodramatic?”

“The line, she means,” a man standing closer to her than he had to explained.

Her eyebrows were ordinary, nothing exceptional about them. Besides, with a hairdo like hers who would notice the eyebrows? “Come on,” she said, “be honest.”

“I don’t find them melodramatic,” I said. “Not at all. Dramatic but not melodramatic. They have the perfect amount of drama.”

I tried to head toward the bar, but everyone was standing toe to toe, women lifting themselves toward men’s ears, men bending toward women’s, pendants and neckties swinging. I made progress following an hors d’oeuvres server, her tray a horizontal shield before which the guests had to yield.

Someone grabbed me from behind. I turned and a walleyed woman said, “You’re not Stan!” in the accent—part Bronx, part Northumberland—for which people ridicule our island.

“And neither are you.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I saw Mina there next to you, and I thought you were Stan.” She nudged me to the side and leaned toward Mina. “Where’s Stan? I thought he was Stan.”

“He’s too tall to be Stan.”

She turned me around. “No, Stan’s about the same height.”

“As him?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Oh, come on—maybe when he’s erect.” Mina howled and mussed my hair.

“Are you done with me?” I asked.

A server offering mushroom canapés thrust her tray forward. The mushrooms rocked on their doilies and the guests parted before them. I saw my chance and followed in her wake. Though she didn’t lead me all the way to the bar, she got me close enough to push my way in. Nobody seemed to take it amiss, and when I’d gotten a drink I was pushed aside in turn.

I found myself face-to-face with a man wiping what appeared to be pâté from the deep, crumb-collecting corners of his mouth with a balled-up napkin. “I’m reading the most fascinating book,” he told me after he’d gotten every last crumb out. “It’s called The Greeks of the Middle Ages.”

“I’ve read that one too,” I said.

His eyes lit up—nothing to do with me, I realized. Something behind me had provoked his glimmer—somebody, that is. “Peeka-boo,” he exclaimed past me, then, lower, “Hello, lovelies.”

Another tray was passing behind me. He reached over my shoulder for what was on it, a morsel of gravlax napped in dill, as I discovered from the sauce he dripped on my sport jacket. “Sorry,” he said grudgingly, as though he’d been acting out of duty and had had no choice in the matter. “Will ya grab a napkin off that tray for me?” he asked after bolting the hors d’oeuvre. He balled that one up too and had at the spot on my jacket. “As good as new,” he said after a few dabs. “Better.”

I craned my neck to check the damage.

“New’s not all it’s cracked up ta be,” he added. He inspected the napkin he’d dabbed at me with. “When an item’s new, it’s anybody’s.”

“Or nobody’s.”

“Well, exactly. So you agree.” He clapped my shoulder. “That little spot, invisible to the naked eye, is like your signature.”

“Yours, you mean.”

“It was an accident, for Pete’s sake. So much for que sera, sera. Whaddya want me ta do about it?” He took out his wallet and flourished a few twenties at me. “Is this what you’re after?”

“Put that away.”

“Oh, so now it’s c’est la vie, eh? A little indelicacy always works wonders with your type.”

“My type?”

“Lighten up, pal. Just pulling your leg.” His laughter revealed a spanakopita remnant between his teeth. “To the victor goes the spoils,” I thought I heard him say. He offered me his hand.

“Excuse me?”

“Hector Spolz,” he said. “Pleased to meetch’.”

I gave him my name and said “Likewise.” He had a dealclosing sort of handshake.

A man appeared beside him. “You know Buddy a long time?” he asked me. He had hound-dog eyes and a mouth set in a frown that seemed to extend to his bow tie. A bushy mustache might have given him a hint of dapperness, but when he sipped his drink it collected froth at the corners and deepened the frown. “I’m Izzy, by the way.”

I introduced myself and said, “I met him only recently.”

“I hardly know him. Not that I haven’t seen him around. Anyhow, with a name like Bud it’s easy to feel like you know him, if you know what I mean. Hector knows him.”

“Sure I know him,” Hector said. “An advanced case of the fidgets.”

They started in on Bud. I might have left them to themselves if I’d had anywhere to go. I wasn’t so annoyed with my neighbor that I liked the idea of listening to a sourpuss and a sad sack dissect him. But I mustn’t have been wholly averse to it—I stayed put. Now that I’d made it to the bar, moving didn’t seem worth the trouble. Trays of strong pink cocktails were passing our way.

“The man can’t sit still,” Hector said. “He’s got a new scheme every couple of years. You can’t build a business so quick.”

“Not a real business,” said Izzy.

“To tell you the truth, with those suits of his . . . What is it they go for, two hundred?”

“Two-fifty. Two-fifty, easy.” The idea of the figures animated Izzy. He punctuated his utterance with karate chops, and grew pensive. “That’s what quality costs these days.”

“Quality nowadays? Don’t talk to me about quality. It’s only a slogan.” This may have been one of Hector’s own slogans—his mind was elsewhere, if his eyes were the vanguard.

I turned and saw what he did: the woman who’d come in the Beetle while I was talking to Bud in the driveway. One thing I hadn’t seen out there was her smile. It was like a schooner riding high on the water.

We helped ourselves to more cocktails.

“Are these pink squirrels?” I asked, holding up my glass.

“What’s surprising,” Hector resumed, “is that I’d always thought of him as a bit of a . . . a bit of a . . .”

“A Harry Horseshit?” An impish type with a cauliflower ear and pastel florets printed on his shirt turned around to supply the phrase, and turned back.

“Thank you, Garson,” Hector said over his shoulder. “A Harry Horseshit. But a place like this takes real money.”

“It’s a nice house,” Izzy added, “a nice town. Cornwallis decamped here, you know. There’s a plaque on the village green.”

“Decamped? What does that mean? Am I supposed to be impressed? The man camped everywhere.”

“It speaks to the age of the place. The village is old, is what’s impressive.”

“My grandma’s old too. Does she impress me?”

“Washington was here too,” Izzy interjected. “He came to secure the harbor.”

“George Washington, now there was a Harry Horseshit, first class. Couldn’t even keep his wig on his head. He was tall, was what he had going for him. That’s why they gave him his command.”

“What’s that, melba toast? Grab me a piece, will you?”

“How did they keep their wigs on their heads? I mean, if the wind came up while they were in battle?”

The group behind Hector disbanded, and Garson slipped into our midst. “Well, something must’ve worked out for him,” he said.

“I’d say so. You don’t become the father of the country—”

“For Bud, he means,” said Izzy.

“I’m always telling him to develop property. You know what they say about land,” Hector said. “But he just shrugs. A sure thing is beneath him. It has to be some new twist or he isn’t interested.”

“I heard that he made out so well selling lawn furniture on commission that he took home more than his boss. When they tried to give him a haircut, he quit.”

“It wasn’t lawn furniture, it was lawn sprinklers.”

“Sprinklers?” Garson twirled, adding sound effects in imitation of a revolving sprinkler. “You’d have to sell a lot of them to—”

“It was pie in the sky.”

“Then where does he get it?”

“My guess,” said Hector, “is, it comes from her side.”

“The old story. He marries his way onto third base and acts like he hit a triple.”

“Now let’s not get carried away—I wouldn’t exactly call this third base. I’d still rather be where I am. Did I tell you we’re—” As if on its own, Hector’s hand grabbed a miniature quiche from a passing tray and stuffed it into his mouth before he’d finished his sentence. He chewed frantically, eyes bulging. “I’m always burning my goddamned tongue,” he gasped.

We waited dumbly, Garson, Izzy, and I, watching him ingest his quiche, till a laugh, really a series of laughs knocking in bursts like a motor that refuses to turn over, made us turn around. Bud’s back was to us, and the heaving of his shoulders hazed the sheen of his gabardine jacket. When his laughter had subsided to the point that the pauses between laughs were longer than the laughs themselves, he must have sensed a vacuum behind him.

“You’ve been introduced?” he asked, turning from me to Hector and Garson and brushing back a Lionel-Barrymoreish curl.

“The way he was glowering at me,” Hector said, “I wasn’t sure about giving him my name. I drip a little sauce on his tweed, and he’s ready to twist my nuts off.” He brandished a plastic-cutlass toothpick. “Good thing I’m armed.”

“Don’t take it personally. I used to think he was glowering at me too, till I realized it’s his regular look!” Bud thumped me on the back.

“We haven’t met,” Garson said.

Bud hesitated, then said, “Neil Fox, Garson uh . . . Garson . . . ?”

“When your first name’s Garson, you don’t need a last name,” Hector said.

I started to sidle away but Bud grabbed me. “Enjoying yourself, Neil? I did tell you that this was a party, didn’t I?”

“I have been enjoying myself, but, you know, it’s time for me to be on my way. I told you I had work to do.”

“Now? Who’re you kidding? A friend with some real chops is about to sit down at the piano.”

A woman with Cleopatra eyeliner and a Peter Pan haircut darted between us and put her arms around Bud. “All this talk is hunky-dory,” she cried, “but after a while a girl needs to dance.” She swung him around.

I saw that it was past midnight and left to get my coat. Back downstairs, I waited for a chance to meet and thank Bud’s wife, Irene. It was the first time I’d been near enough to see the wave of her thick dark hair, the green of her eyes, or the cometary beauty mark splashed high on her cheekbone. This was as near as I’d get. She was in demand. A woman who’d struck a mock silent-movie pose, with one hand on her hip and the other behind her head, was saying, “You would not believe her, you really wouldn’t, an absolute diva”; the caterer was apologizing for cracking a lamp; her daughter tugged at her sleeve. I waved, mouthed a thank-you, and headed for the door.

Guests were still trickling in. They looked happy to be inside, and once I was out I saw why. The night had turned frigid, the kind of breathtaking chill that quickly detaches you from your own sensations. I could hardly feel myself walking. I heard the ground crunching underfoot and couldn’t be sure that my own steps were the cause. The burning in my fingertips and earlobes seemed far away.

A car’s hazard lights flashed against the hydrant at the bottom of the driveway. Someone shouted, “Can you give me a hand?” I fastened the top button of my coat and, going over to him, saw that it was Garson. There was no escaping him. “Oh, it’s you,” he muttered.

The car was running; his wife had slid behind the wheel. “Listen, we just need a quick shove—I got stuck in the ditch somehow. It doesn’t make any sense. If I’d turned the other way, I’d have creased my fender against that tree.”

“I left my gloves inside,” I told him. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“One good push should do it.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Hey man, thanks a lot. Remember, what goes around comes around. One day you’ll be in a fix like this.”

I told him again that I’d be right back, but he’d already given up on me and started up the driveway to look for help from someone else.

I really had left my hat and gloves behind, though I might have gone back the next day for them. But if only to keep to my story, I went back in.

It was like going to another party, and not only in that the drinks had been switched from pink to more familiar colors. I’d been pretty well anonymous before: now people I’d met twenty minutes earlier called out to me like old pals. “How’s tricks?” they cried, and “Take off your coat and stay awhile, chief.” It was the liquor talking in them, of course. But there was some of the same stuff in me, and it listened. I caught myself smiling my social smile in a genuine way, as tickled to see them as they apparently were to see me.

Bud’s pianist friend turned out to be Stan. His stubby fingers galloped over the keyboard and his eyes shone with a pixilated gleam. When he played “Everyone Says I Love You” and “Why Am I So Romantic?” and “Alone,” my new comrades puffed up their chests, lifted their chins, and sang; I was swept up in the general benevolence and between cascading arpeggios even chimed in myself. The fellow feeling ran so high that you could hardly distinguish your own voice, or anyone else’s. Only Bud’s, a baritone with plenty of carry, stood out. It was his recital if it was anyone’s. And he could sing, though to judge from his exuberance, maybe not quite so well as he thought.

The woman who’d caught Bud’s eye and Hector’s came out of the bathroom as I was going in. “I don’t know this music everyone is singing,” she said, presumably to cover her embarrassment.

“It’s from before your time,” I answered, and went in.

She was in the hallway, more or less where I’d left her, when I came out. Now the embarrassment was mine. “Did you ever catch up with Lee?”

“Lee? Oh, yes, he was here. But then he left.” If there was any sign of distress in her smile, I missed it. But I probably missed a good deal. The dangle of her earrings suggested imperceptible tremblings and vibrations.

“You didn’t quarrel?”

“No, no. He was just tired. But I have only two weeks here. I’ll sleep when I go home.”

“And home is where?”

“I come from Montevideo.”

“Uruguay?”

“You go Uruguay,” a man on his way past us and into the bathroom said.

“Your English is fluent.” I listened more closely for the trace of an accent.

“I went to an American school. My father’s an army officer. We know lots of Americans. Would you like to dance?” I wondered what she meant by it—she was already half dancing in place on her own, bobbing discretely to a private rhythm. Maybe I was supposed to curtsy every now and then in sympathy.

“You’re here on vacation?”

“For vacation, yes. And for the wedding of my half brother.”

“He’s getting married here?”

“At Valley Forge. He’s in an officer’s training program.” Her motions grew more restless—she hadn’t come to explain herself. “You’re a good dancer. I can tell.”

“And how can you tell?”

“Older men know how to dance.”

I knew what she meant, that she didn’t like the freestyle dancing that had come into fashion, but I winced all the same.

She smiled. “I didn’t mean to say that you’re old, I meant that you’re debonair, a gentleman.” After a minute change in the angle of incidence between her upper lip and lower, her smile became inviting. “I like a man who has a little gray around the temple.”

“Nice try.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, though it seemed that she did.

“Never mind,” I replied, and introduced myself. When I took my hand off the cover of a phone book I was leaning on, I found that it was clammy.

“I am Cecilia Marta Bernal.”

“Unfortunately, Cecilia Marta, there’s no music for us to dance to.” Stan had stopped playing. “You may not need music, but I do.”

As if on cue, someone put a record on, and the music led us to its source in the living room, where the crowd had thinned out enough to give us room to maneuver. It was a slow bossa nova number, not exactly my style, but Cecilia Marta helped me till I caught on, leading with her hips and following with her feet. A few other couples started dancing too, and all indications were that I was enjoying myself.

As we capered here and there, I started to see people I knew over her shoulder. Our up-and-coming county executive, John Nickelson, who’d had his right arm withered by polio and become a collegiate squash champ with his left. My orthopedist, who was chomping on an unlit cigar, and mouthed “How’s the knee?” to me across the room. A junior partner in my firm whose deference to me in person led me to suspect that he was a backstabber. A man who always seemed to be on my train no matter what time I took it. A slight, kinky-haired, tightly dressed stranger whom I disliked without knowing why, until a helmet-headed guest moved out of the way and revealed the person to whom he was gamely holding forth to be my wife.

It couldn’t be, I thought. Of course I’d mistake anyone who looked even the slightest bit like her. I hardly knew how she looked anymore—I had recalled her image too often not to distort it.

“Is something wrong?” Cecilia asked.

The woman not only had Joyce’s face, she had her things too: the bright silk blouse, the dark beads, the darker handbag, the cigarette perched at the base of the V of her fingers. It had to be Joyce.

“It is,” I said, and steered Cecilia aside.

As I made my way toward Joyce, I thought I saw her hand on the arm of the man beside her. She was leaning his way, her head cocked close to his, her mouth hardly moving as she spoke to him.

She had straightened up by the time I reached her.

“It’s nice to see you,” I said, which was understatement and overstatement in equal measure. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d venture so close to home.”

“And I wouldn’t have thought this was your scene.”

“It isn’t.” I glanced at her companion, and thought that I was reading too much into the situation, that she wouldn’t possibly take up with him. He was an irrelevance, whatever she might think of him. If his presence meant anything, the humiliation was hers, not mine.

“Or your time of night,” she continued. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“I’d say you’ve ceded your authority on that question.”

“And good riddance to it. I only meant that I wouldn’t have expected—”

“It doesn’t exactly sound like you were hoping to run into me.”

“Well, let’s be honest. It isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world.”

“And yet you went out of your way to turn up here.”

“I hardly went out of my way. I didn’t think there was any chance that you’d be here, especially at this hour. Besides, I’m not going to start letting what I do be decided by . . . I’m not going to start sneaking around.”

Her weedy friend had been making motions to excuse himself and was drifting away. “Hold on, Jules,” she said to him, her sneer becoming a smile before she turned back to me.

“Jules?”

“This has really gone far enough. I came to a party, not an inquisition.”

“Cut it out, Joyce, will you?” I said.

“Enjoy your evening, Neil,” she answered and moved on.

I’d have gone home to bed if I could, but leaving was beyond me as long as Joyce was there. For twenty years, her words and deeds had been as inevitable as the hours of the day. Then she’d gone, and when I wondered where she was and what she was doing, I had nothing to go on. Joyce, or, rather, the figure of her, went from being entirely familiar to utterly mysterious. Nothing could be confirmed or denied, and so the possibilities were endless. The rest of my life might have been spent guessing at the rest of hers.

And here she was. I could see her, might even have touched her if I’d chosen—though that would be quite another thing. I felt almost giddy at first. The Joyce I’d been imagining didn’t correspond to the flesh-and-blood Joyce I was looking at. This had nothing to do with her appearance, or with my memory of it. She looked the same as ever. The green of her eyes, the slenderness of her arms, the half-disdainful, half-amused curl at the corners of her mouth were as I remembered. She wasn’t taller or broader or more or less beautiful or imposing. She wasn’t the trouble. It was all in my mind, where her absence had spawned a surrogate that had taken on a life of its own. And this life had become more real to me than the original.

Why couldn’t I take my eyes off this Joyce, the one in the room with me? Maybe I was trying to lay the ghost, to bring the imaginary one back into line with her. Or maybe I was waiting for her to come to me in my dark corner with my replenished tumbler to tell me that her experiment was over and she was ready to come home.

I’m sure she felt my eyes on her. I’d never known her to carry on the way she was now. She was either drawing smoke in or puffing it out, speaking or poised to speak, laughing or poised to laugh. She pulled at Izzy’s mustache and mussed the county executive’s hair; he mussed hers back. She pretended to pick my orthopedist’s pocket, danced a few steps of the cha-cha with the Youngers’ little daughter, trotted out her imitation of Rita Hayworth singing “Put the Blame on Mame.” It was a tacky performance, and the fact that it was for my exclusive benefit made it worse. If I was implicated in this display, then it was within my rights to put a stop to it.

The time came to exercise those rights. I saw her new friend Jules touch one of the buttons on her blouse—the top button, it was. He mightn’t have meant much by it: the fingertip that touched the button extended from a hand that held a glass; they were standing with another couple and might have been discussing Joyce’s wardrobe for all I knew or cared. When you see your wife giving herself the appearance of availability, your interest in the finer details is not what it was. That touch had the look of a liberty. It was enough for me.

I closed on them quickly; the crowd was thinner now. Jules hadn’t let his hand linger on Joyce’s button for long. He was just lifting it as I reached them. It was already a little higher than her neckline when I grabbed it—grabbed his wrist, I mean. He tried to pull free of my grip and jerked his hand back hard. I heard his glass crack as it hit Joyce’s mouth.

“Get away from me!” she cried, reeling back and slurring her words. She covered her mouth, but from a slack corner peeking through the space between her index finger and thumb I saw a gleaming white shard and feared that the glass wasn’t the only thing that had cracked.

There was quiet, then confusion on as many sides as there were guests left to form, and the stirrings of an indignation that I withstood long enough to see that gleaming shard on Joyce’s lip melt to water. “You bastard, you sonofabitch,” Jules kept saying, but not so much to me as in some kind of tough-guy parody for the bystanders. He had a coward’s gift for advertising his affront. Shifting his weight from one leg to another, cocking his head this way and that—his kinky hair bouncing like the coils of a spring—balling up his fingers and opening them again before he’d closed them far enough to make a fist. I was hoping that he’d take a swing at me, but it didn’t take long to see that he wouldn’t. The crowd that had gathered knew it too and dispersed, and when Joyce went away, I was about the only one left to hear him muttering. There was nothing for me to do in the end but march off dismally to fetch the hat and gloves that had brought me back to the party in the first place.

On my way to the makeshift coatroom, I bumped into Cecilia again.

“I’m afraid I owe you an apology. That was a terrible way to end a dance.”

“It’s okay. We all get jealous sometimes.” I found the hint of an accent I’d been looking for in her pronunciation of “jealous.” She made jealousy sound especially poisonous.

“It’s good of you to forgive me. But, you know, it wasn’t a question of jealousy.”

“Of course not. No one admits to being jealous. It’s always more complicated. It’s more complicated, yes?”

“Well . . . yes, that’s right.”

“It was good to meet you.”

“I hope you’ll give me the pleasure of another dance sometime.” It was a quaint phrase, but it fit. She was like that.

“That would be nice.”

Charlie Younger had remained at his post, and lay fast asleep beneath a pile of coats on the bed with a cigarette tucked behind his ear. My things had gotten mixed up again in the heap, and while I was fishing them out, an older man waylaid me. He had shaggy eyebrows and a muffler that he had trouble keeping clear of his chin. “I’ll tell you something,” he said while I searched for my astrakhan. “Know what they say about power? It’s a very tricky thing, tricky, tricky, trickee.”

“What is?”

“Power.”

I don’t know what it was—just then my mind was churning: in the pile of coats I’d come across Joyce’s mink—but the word power sounded strange and unintelligible, like one of those nonsense words you’d hear in an exchange between a cowboy and his Indian guide in a Western.

“Power?”

“Maybe you don’t think so. I can see that you just waltzed around to the other side of the desk.”

“If you say so.”

“That’s all it takes as far as you’re concerned, isn’t it? You just walk to the other side of the desk.” I found my coat, and realized as I put it on that I was swaying on my feet. “You think that’s all there is to it. Well, it’s not like that, not for some of us. Some of us, we start on our way around, and what happens.” He was looking me in the eye, trying to get me to look back into his. Behind him, on a silent television, a man in a yellow mackintosh riding a tricycle in fast motion hit a curb and fell over.

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“I thought you might like to know.”

“Okay, what happens?”

“What happens? The desk vanishes. We’re on our way around it and it’s gone. Paff, into the ether. Just like that, paff.”

“No kidding,” I said, and pushed my way past him through the door. He might have knocked me over if he’d pushed back. I was suddenly that bleary. I crossed the landing to the head of the stairs and was about to start down when I ran into Bud going the other way. “I’m calling it a night,” I said.

“I won’t ask what kind of night you’re calling it.”

“Yeah, well, every party needs at least one good row. They’re what people remember.”

“Come with me. I want to show you something.”

“I’m really all in.”

“It won’t take a minute,” he said.

I was about to refuse when Joyce and Jules rounded a corner below and I remembered that she hadn’t collected her coat. I hoped they’d have gone by the time I looked at whatever Bud had to show me.

He led me quickly down the hall—too quickly, to tell the truth; his spryness at this time of night made me feel old and sodden—through the master bedroom to his dressing room. “Have a seat,” he said and went over to a bureau facing a window. He took an envelope from the top drawer. Then he looked up and, pointing at the window, said, “See that?” The twigs and branches outside the window were outlined against the scrim. “When the moon’s bright, I see this pattern against the shade and say to myself, it’s supposed to be plain.”

“What is?”

“This, these lines,” he said. “Their meaning is supposed to be clear. But it’s not. It looks like some kind of Eastern calligraphy on a parchment.”

I lit a cigarette, and gave another to him.

“I guess so. But why should it mean anything?”

“Because it’s the writing on the wall. And what’s the expression? It’s as plain as the writing on the wall.”

“I don’t think—”

“And haven’t you ever said, when some inevitable-seeming tragedy occurs, say a man’s business goes belly-up—”

Or his wife, I thought.

“—that the poor sap couldn’t see the writing on the wall? Well, maybe this is mine, or ours, in some crazy alphabet! What if our future is spelled out right here?”

“Ours?”

“It might foretell success or romance.”

“Sure,” I said. “Or both.”

“Let’s not get carried away.” His laughter broke out again, but I didn’t join in and he couldn’t go on alone for long.

“Here,” he said, handing me the envelope. “Mickey’s already got a copy. He said I shouldn’t be surprised if you were slow to warm up to the idea.”

“The idea?”

“The one we discussed a little while ago, when Mickey was here. It’s my proposal you’re holding. The confidentiality agreement’s in there too.”

The mention of his venture doubled my fatigue. I put down the envelope. “I thought I’d told you that I’m not in the business of backing new enterprises anymore.”

“Maybe you’re not seeking them out the way you once did, but when something like this comes along and bites you on the ass, I think it might be another story.” I was having trouble sitting up in my chair, but Bud’s eyes only got wider as he pressed his cause. “I’d think this is one that merits a good hard look anyway. I’d hate to see you kicking yourself later.”

We fell silent. The wind came up and the outline of the branches trembled on the scrim.

“Forgive me, Neil. I understand that it’s been a long night. We’d never have invited her if we’d known.”

The door shut hard downstairs. “You invited her when you’d also invited me?”

“We didn’t know who she was.”

“What do you mean—how could you not know?”

“She wasn’t introduced to us as ‘Fox.’ We didn’t make the connection.”

“You weren’t given a surname?”

“We were—‘Rose.’ She was introduced as ‘Joyce Rose.’”

“That’s her maiden name. So she doesn’t even go by ‘Fox’ anymore.” It was an odd surprise. I stood up from it.

“I hope you won’t mind my saying so, but I’m sorry for you, Neil. Truly sorry. I could tell ever since I moved in that things haven’t been right with you. But they will be again. And I’m not just saying that. These kinds of problems always work themselves out. They have to.”

These kinds of problems always work themselves out. They were about the first earnest words I’d heard from Bud, and they could hardly have been staler. They might have infuriated me if I hadn’t found comfort in them.

I turned to go. “You don’t want to forget this,” he said, extending the envelope to me again. “There’s no hurry. Look it over when you’re ready, if not for your sake then for mine. Mickey says you’ve got an uncanny business sense.”

I took it. Which philosopher is it who remarked on how much easier our lives would be if we could sit still and keep quiet? I’d thought I was doing a better job of it than most, yet here I was about to go over the top of another slide.

I’d outlasted all the other guests. I tried to check my watch but couldn’t see the numbers. The moon had gone down; the writing on the wall had faded. It was no longer late.