The After Party

by Anton Disclafani

  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.

  • • •

  Ray 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.

  • • •

  Joan 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.

  Chapter Thirteen

  And then, spring of 1951, one year after Joan disappeared, she was back. She returned with little fanfare. I opened the door one evening to go out—to meet Ray for dinner at the Confederate House—and there she stood, a slim red purse hanging from her forearm, a delicate hat perched on her head.

  I had known she was coming. Two weeks before Easter, Mary and Furlow had called me to Evergreen and informed me that Joan’s adventure was over. They had tried, Furlow especially, to make light of the situation. “She wanted to be a star,” Mary said, her voice arch, and though I wouldn’t have said she was mocking Joan, she was coming close. “But then she learned the world has enough stars,” Furlow said, forcing a laugh. “And I think she also learned that a life without money is no fun.”

  So Joan had been cut off. I only wondered why it had taken so long.

  “I know you’ve been waiting a long time,” Mary said, as she showed me to the door. “But now she’s coming! Are you excited?” Her voice was falsely bright, as if I were a child to whom she’d given a long-anticipated treat.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course.” The answer left my lips immediately, but the truth was more complicated. It was like being excited to see a ghost. Waiting suggested hope, and I had stopped hoping a long time ago that Joan would return. I moved around the Specimen Jar with her things—her maid, even—greeting me at every turn. It reminded me of living at my mother’s house that week after she died, before I went to Evergreen. Now that Joan was returning, it felt impossible, like she was rising from the dead: how could a person, a person I had loved more than anyone else on earth, disappear so completely from my life, only to reappear a year later? It felt like magic, like sorcery. The idea of her scared me. How would I act in her presence? I no longer understood what she expected of me, nor I of her. I didn’t know which way she would tip the delicate new balance of my life: I was in love. I had learned to love someone besides Joan.

  But of course I wanted her desperately. I wanted to see her: to sit next to her, to touch her shoulder. Her shoulder that had surely been brushed by a dozen strangers since I had last seen her.

  I wanted these things like you want to be held when you are a child: I wanted them instinctively. I wanted them from some deep place I could not name.

  Sari and I had been waiting for days. I just didn’t know exactly when Joan would arrive.

  “You’re here,” I said, staring at her, standing there uselessly, my arms at my sides. I was struck by how unchanged Joan appeared. The moment could have gone on forever—but then she stepped through the door and wrapped her arms around me. That was all it took. Joan wanted me.

  She pulled away and surveyed the room. “Quite a place,” she murmured, and there was some awe in her voice, at least.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. I had to slip away, call Ray, tell him I couldn’t meet him. “I had plans. But I don’t need to go anywhere, tonight.” I took Joan’s hand between mine. I needed to feel her skin; I needed to convince myself that my ghost was actually here. Joan didn’t seem to notice my nervousness. Or my happiness. She had removed her hand from mine and was introducing herself to Sari, whom she had never met; now she was sitting on the couch, smoothing the leather beneath her palm, smiling grandly, then standing up again, opening the sliding glass door and stepping out onto the balcony, gasping theatrically.

  “Oh my,” she said, “this view!” She stood, and spoke, as if she were in front of an audience.

  I’m not an audience, I wanted to say. It’s just me, Cece, your friend from birth.

  I called Ray and then joined Joan back out on the balcony. “We’re not staying here,” she pronounced. “Let’s go out, just the two of us. To Maxim’s.”

  I called Ray again after we returned home, standing at the counter while Joan undressed in her room, the phone pressed to my ear. I was still drunk on what had seemed like gallons of wine from Maxim’s famous, never-ending wine list. I wanted to hear Ray’s voice. I’d wanted all night to be with him. It hadn’t just been the two of us, like Joan had said; by the end of the night, a dozen other people were clustered around our table.

  “She’s in fine spirits,” I said. “She’s happy to be back, I think.”

  “And you?” he asked. “You sound a little down in the mouth.” This was what it meant to have someone in my life who loved me. Joan had been the star all night. Furlow and Mary had been finishing up their meal when we’d entered, and they’d lingered a little bit, watched Joan say hi and chat with all the people who came up to our table, watched her tell them that Hollywood had been fun, but not as fun as Houston. But Ray only wanted to hear about me.

  Joan meant nothing to him. Now I was the star.

  “It was nice,” I said, “but I wished the whole time I was with you.”

  • • •

  I don’t know what I had expected. An apology, perhaps? I tried to tell myself that Joan had her reasons, that surely they were good ones.

  I had imagined the conversation we would have—I would be hurt, a little angry, and Joan would say she was sorry, she was so, so sorry, and explain herself. Reveal the reason that could possibly make her departure and absence and silence understandable. But that had not happened. Joan spent most of her mornings in her room, with books—reading was a habit she seemed to have picked up in LA—then, as evening approached, she would emerge, and move around the Specimen Jar with greater and greater animation. This Joan would give no explanation. Nor would I ask. I felt lucky to h
ave her back, and that would have to be enough.

  A few days after she had gotten back, though, she opened her bedroom door and called me in. The books rested in a neat stack on her bureau.

  “Help me get dressed?” she asked. “Let’s go out tonight.” She wore a pale pink robe and sipped a gin martini, which was now, apparently, her drink of choice. Before she’d left she hadn’t had a drink of choice.

  “In Hollywood,” she said as she stood, her voice faraway, “we went out every single night. Even Sundays. We had so much fun, Cece. I felt alive.”

  Tell me what you did, I wanted to say, tell me what took you away from me for so long.

  “Ray’s excited to meet you,” I said instead. It seemed important to say his name. I missed him, even when it had only been a short time since I’d seen him.

  I dressed her in my clothes, a black gown that was a little too big for me. She filled it out in a way I never could. It wasn’t something I would have worn anyway—I had probably bought it for Joan in the first place.

  In the car, Joan watched Houston pass by our window.

  “It’s the same,” I said. “It waited for you.”

  I wondered as I said it. Had Houston waited for Joan? Was it capable of waiting for Joan? Tonight, at the Cork Club—how would she be received? All our old gang would be there, along with Ray. I wanted Houston to be the same for Joan. I wanted Joan to be the same for Houston.

  The closer we got, the brighter Joan seemed to burn. She was sipping whiskey from a flask like the ones boys used to bring to high school dances.

  She offered it to me and I took a sip, because I wanted to please her. I was relieved to see, if not quite the old Joan—this Joan held herself at a remove—some version of her returning to me, as if the ghost of Joan were now clothing herself in flesh.