The After Party

by Anton Disclafani

  “I’m not in the eating mood, tonight, not especially. I’m in the champagne mood. A magnum,” she pronounced, and smiled brilliantly at the table. “I want to do something special for my girls.” Philip was gray-haired and quietly capable, had been our particular waiter for as long as we’d been coming here. He didn’t have to ask Joan what kind of champagne she wanted. The most expensive kind.

  “What a treat!” Darlene exclaimed, even though we were already drinking cocktails, had martinis and Manhattans and, for those of us who drank more moderately, daiquiris lined up in front of us in a neat row. I wanted so badly to roll my eyes. Darlene wore a white strapless dress with a gold lamé belt, a choker of pearls around her tan throat. I thought she looked like a snake, one of those nonpoisonous ones with rings around their necks.

  I turned as Philip passed behind me—“Miss Fortier will have a steak, too. Rare,” I said, and he nodded and I was grateful that the transaction had passed so quietly between us.

  I myself was drinking a daiquiri, because Joan had clearly been loaded when she’d arrived at the restaurant and I’d wanted to set a good example. A lot of good that had done: Joan had already had two martinis, and was generally drinking like there was no end in sight. She could hold her liquor but sometimes it seemed like she didn’t want to. Tonight was one of those nights.

  The room was watching us. This was a place you came because you wanted to be seen. And we did, I suppose. Want to be seen, I mean. It wasn’t even a question, where we would go each month, where we would sit once we were there. We would elicit murmurs and glances as we paraded through the room. Each of us, but Joan especially, and she would say her own hellos and darlings and can you believe it’s been so longs. Joan basked in the attention, of course, we all did, but it was Joan that everyone wanted to see. Her recent dalliance seemed not to have affected her reputation; neither Darlene nor the other girls made any mention of it. Joan had gotten lucky.

  “She’s on tonight,” Ciela murmured.

  I turned to her, glad that she had not heard me order a meal for Joan. I knew that I worried over her too much, fussed over her like she was a child. But someone had to.

  I smiled, took a sip of my daiquiri. “She’s just happy,” I said. “She likes it when we’re all together.”

  Ciela shook her head, gazed at me for a moment. “Everyone should have a friend like you, Cece.”

  Joan heard that last part. “Everyone should have a friend like Cece! I’ll toast to that!” And she raised her martini and clinked glasses with Darlene and Kenna, who sat to her right and left, spilling a bit of her drink as she did it, not bothering to wipe it up; then they were off, bantering, talking and laughing about nothing.

  I wasn’t feeling particularly festive. Tommy hadn’t wanted me to leave, and for that matter, neither had Ray. “Joan beckons, I assume,” he had said when I told him I couldn’t back out. Joan had returned to her old self since that rainy afternoon in my kitchen, a brighter version, even, but I hadn’t quite caught up with her. Her absence over the last two weeks had changed something in me; her absences always did.

  Ciela and I were idly chatting about our children, our fallback conversation, when Darlene brought up the Daisy Dillingworth divorce. It had gotten nastier, last week—pictures of Edwin Mintz and his mistress leaving a Broadway play had been published in the Chronicle.

  “Nothing about it’s natural,” Darlene said. “She didn’t stick with her kind. And now she’s reaping what she sowed, isn’t she?”

  “Well, she sure is,” Joan said, in a falsetto voice, and Darlene beamed before she realized Joan was mocking her.

  “Daisy will bring the boy back here, I bet,” I said, hoping to ease the tension that had settled over the table. “River Oaks is the perfect place to come back to, the perfect place to raise a child.” I was rambling, but I believed it: Daisy needed to be near her family. A place where she and her child would never be alone.

  “I think River Oaks would be hell to come back to after New York,” Joan said. “And that child? He should stay with his daddy in the city. At least there nobody would care he was a half Jew.” She looked at us evenly, as if daring us to disagree. And she seemed as if she wanted to say more. Tell us what fools we were, how vapid and provincial we had all become.

  Darlene laughed—a high-strung poodle, barking.

  “River Oaks isn’t hell.” I paused. I could feel the table watching me as I tried to regain my composure. “And I think people would be kind. He’s a child—he doesn’t belong in New York. He needs his mother.” It was true I didn’t know many, or any, Jewish people, but I knew Daisy. And I knew without a doubt that River Oaks was a better place for a child than an anonymous, dirty city.

  Joan lit a cigarette, took a drag before responding.

  “Does he? In some cultures children are raised communally, by the whole tribe. A thousand people to tuck you in at night.”

  “Did you read that in National Geographic?” I asked.

  Joan tilted her head, gauging me. I didn’t usually bite back.

  “Yes, yes I did.” Joan wasn’t sitting where she could see Ciela roll her eyes, but I wished she were. I wished she could see how mentioning the articles she read, the places she wanted to go—all the ways in which we were not enough—won her no favors among us. “We had Dorie and Idie,” she continued. “They were like mothers to us. Better than our mothers.”

  I gasped, stunned that she would mention Idie so casually, in front of all these people. Part of me wanted to fight Joan, say something nasty, not let her get away with it. But the bigger part of me wanted to pacify her.

  “It sounds hard to manage, doesn’t it?” I asked lightly. “A thousand parents.”

  Joan twisted her cigarette into her ashtray.

  “Oh, Cee, don’t be such a bore. I was just teasing.”

  Just then an army of white-coated waiters filed over, sliding plates with their balloonlike silver lids in front of us. I heard Joan murmur as the lids came off and revealed our bloody steaks, the trails of fat glistening in the candlelight.

  “Oh, Phil,” she said, playacting at disappointment. “Honey, I didn’t order a steak. Take it back, will you? Give it to a more deserving soul.”

  “Of course,” he said. And he was moving to take the plate when I spoke.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not a mistake. You need to eat something.”

  “You ordered me a steak?” Joan asked brightly, her face stretched into a smile that looked hideous to me.

  “I did. You need something to soak up the poisons, don’t you?” This was an old joke, something Sari had always said before we left for a night out, when we were living in the Specimen Jar.

  Joan gazed at me and I stared back. Darlene fingered the pearls of her choker excitedly; Kenna pressed her hand to her mouth as if to suppress a smile. I was furious, suddenly, that Joan was antagonizing me when she should have been going to great lengths to make sure I was happy. She’d ignored us all, including the Fortiers, for two weeks! None of us behaved that way, not me nor Ciela nor Kenna nor Darlene. None of us but Joan. I thought of Ray, at home. Tommy sleeping soundly in his crib. You didn’t marry and have children for pleasure, for fun; you married and had children so you could be an adult, so you could have something to worry about besides yourself. But not Joan.

  “Take it away, Phil,” she demanded. And so he did. I watched him as he held out his hand; another waiter soundlessly placed a silver cover onto it; he re-covered the steak, whisked it from Joan’s presence, as if it were a nuclear threat.

  But then the rest of us were still faced with our nuclear threats, quickly losing heat; hot, tasty fat turning cold and chewy.

  We needed a word to break the tension. From Joan, Joan who would not provide such a word in a million years. I don’t think, truly, that it would have occurred to her. She was used to making messes, not cleaning them up.<
br />
  “I, for one,” said Ciela, “am absolutely ravenous. Tina was busy throwing a temper tantrum during lunch and I barely had a thing to eat.” She held up a gold fork, a piece of steak stabbed through its tines. “It looks delicious.” She tasted it. “And it is.”

  I was so grateful. Joan wouldn’t look at me but the pall of tension that had settled over the table disintegrated, almost instantly. The alcohol helped. So did the anticipation of our evening. No one wanted it ruined.

  The steak in my own mouth tasted like tears. After I had sat for an acceptable amount of time, and everyone else was chatting, I quietly excused myself and made my way to the bathroom. The attendant, mercifully, was on a break, so I sat on the little brocaded settee and tried not to cry. I tried to focus on the gold fixtures, to distract myself from Joan.

  I should have left her alone. I shouldn’t have fussed, shouldn’t have worried, shouldn’t have made a scene.

  I went to the mirror and opened my mint-green clutch, fished around for my powder and lipstick. I was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, made of netting. I’d ordered it from New York; no one would have it here for at least a season. I had matching shoes on, too, high heels covered in the same mint-green silk as my clutch. I had felt like a million bucks when I’d left the house, and now? Now I felt like nothing, no one.

  I was pretty enough, as my mother had said, and I knew how to put myself together. I wondered, not for the first time, what my life would have been like had I been outrageously beautiful. Ciela was nearly as beautiful as Joan but she was missing something, that special, final spark. Darlene, Kenna, the rest of us—we were all pretty enough. Well, Darlene was, as my mother liked to say, half homely, but she knew her way around makeup.

  Perhaps, I thought, as I patted powder on the circles beneath my eyes, the hollows of my temples, my life would be exactly the same. I didn’t have it in me, to act like Joan. But who knew. Perhaps beauty would have changed me.

  The door groaned and I put a little smile on my face. I was expecting the bathroom attendant, hoping for Joan. Instead I got Ciela.

  “Hello,” I said to her reflection as she came and stood next to me.

  “Such a waste,” she said, and tapped the faucet. “Think of the pretty gold earrings you could have instead.”

  I laughed, though I wasn’t in the mood.

  “I’m sorry I made such a fuss,” I said.

  “Did you?” Ciela asked. “Make a fuss, I mean?”

  “I should have known better.” I studied Ciela in the mirror, bold and blond with a hint of something exotic in her lips and eyes. She licked her finger and gave each of her eyebrows a swipe. I could tell she wanted to say something. That was why she had come in here, wasn’t it? But I didn’t want to talk about Joan. Ciela would not understand.

  “Sometimes,” Ciela said, “I try to imagine your life. Joan Fortier’s handmaiden. It gets exhausting, I imagine.”

  I watched my face crumple; I tried to relax it, tried to smooth my expression, but Ciela saw.

  “Is that what people say about me?” I asked. “I’m not. I’m not Joan’s handmaiden. I’m her friend.”

  Ciela looked at my hand. I hadn’t realized I’d been fiddling with my compact. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just meant—” She hesitated. “I just meant that sometimes Joan can be cruel. Or maybe ‘cruel’ is too strong a word. Insensitive. Sometimes Joan can be insensitive.”

  I almost laughed.

  “Cruel? Insensitive? You have no idea what Joan is like, not really. Do you know how kind she is to Tommy? She hides that part of herself. She’s different with me.” I gathered up the contents of my purse. “I know her the best of anyone in the world.”

  “I don’t doubt you do.”

  “Then don’t presume other things,” I said. “Don’t presume you know me. That you know Joan.”

  Ciela’s expression was mild. She played her cards close to her chest, always had. My hand was on the door when she spoke again.

  “Do you know what she’s acting like, tonight?” She gestured, as if at something beyond the walls of the ladies’ room. As if at Joan.

  I needed—I had—to hear what she thought.

  “She’s acting like she did when she came back from Hollywood.”

  “When she became Houston’s star, you mean?” Ciela was jealous.

  “When she was wild, Cece. When she was high as a kite and slept with anything within walking distance.”

  “When she was young and beautiful,” I countered. “When she had Houston by the tail.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” I heard Ciela say, but I was already out the door.

  • • •

  Later that evening we all went back to the Shamrock and sat outside, by the pool. Ciela had begged off when we left the Petroleum Club, and I thought about doing the same thing but hadn’t. I watched Ciela go and envied her a little bit: she wasn’t worried she might miss something. It was like this: What was at home was known. My sleeping husband and child. And what was out here, in the great big world of the night, was yet to be revealed.

  Fred drove us all over and Joan had taken the front seat, and whether she did this so she wouldn’t chance sitting next to me, whether Joan thought that far in advance, or if that was something only women like me did—well, I couldn’t quite read her mind.

  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.