The After Party

by Anton Disclafani

  It was only after she drove off—was driven off—that I realized Joan had been blowing me a kiss.

  Joan was done with me. And I with her. I tried to memorize her face, the last time I would ever see it. Her hair, her arms, the way she had walked into the Cork Club tonight.

  But all I could see was Joan’s back. We were six years old and she was running into Furlow’s arms. We were thirteen years old and she was disappearing into the ocean. We were fourteen years old and she was climbing out a window. We were fifteen years old and she was closing the door to my mother’s room a final time. We were seventeen years old and she was walking off the dance floor on a boy’s arm. We were eighteen years old and she was slipping into a bedroom at a party. We were twenty-two years old and she was exiting a club, this time on a man’s arm. We were twenty-four years old and she was leaving my house with a promise to be back soon.

  We were twenty-five years old now, and Joan was looking for something else. This time I hoped she would find it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  1957

  Our front door was unlocked, as I had left it; perhaps Ray was inviting me back inside. This is my home, I thought as I stepped through the foyer, and rested my keys beside the green vase I had purchased before Tommy was born and still took pleasure in every day. I picked it up now, admired it: it was small but heavy, unadorned, with none of the fussiness of an object from my mother’s home. It was meant to hold nothing. Meant only to exist on my entryway table as a thing to admire.

  I went to Tommy’s room first. I could feel Ray’s presence; he was in the house with me, but I didn’t know where.

  Tommy was fast asleep, as he always was at this hour. He could be counted on for so many things: to sleep and wake at certain times, to eat what I fed him. To convey himself as a sweet weight against my chest, his damp cheek against mine, his breath in my ear. To bring pleasure to Ray and me without trying, simply by existing. That was what being a mother was, or should be, I thought, as I combed Tommy’s hair behind his ear: existing as a resting spot for your child. Acting as a tether between him and the world. Joan had not wanted to be tethered to anyone or anything. She would stay with Sid as long as he helped her. And then she would leave him, too, as she left everyone.

  I had been a burden to my mother, as David had been a burden to Joan. And I had made myself a burden to Joan, too. But I was twenty-five years old, a wife, a mother. I was no one’s burden any longer.

  I felt Ray enter the room behind me. I wanted to stand here like this forever: Ray behind me, Tommy in front of me.

  “Cece,” Ray said, and his voice was soft, because Tommy was sleeping, but it wasn’t kind. “Look at me.”

  All my certainty vanished. I had nothing without Ray.

  “I can’t,” I whispered. I thought, If I don’t look at him, he can’t tell me what he wants to tell me. If I don’t look at him, he’ll leave, and I can steal into bed beside him, later, and when we wake in the morning he’ll have forgiven me. He’ll have forgotten.

  It was two o’clock; I felt as if I were moving through a dream.

  “Leave,” he said loudly, and Tommy stirred in his sleep. Ray sounded close to hysteria. I’d never heard his voice like this before.

  Ray was angry, but angry because he was hurt. This insight made me brave, and I turned and went to him. I stood very close but stopped short of touching him; it was clear he didn’t want me to touch him.

  The first night I’d slept over at Ray’s bachelor pad I’d woken in the early morning and Ray had been standing at the foot of the bed. It seemed like he had been there awhile. I’d said nothing, simply closed my eyes again. No one had ever watched me sleep before.

  We were young. We were newly in love. Ray was trying to know me, observing me in my most unguarded state. When Joan and I were teenagers we thought relationships were a vehicle for passion and romance. We knew nothing of marriage and domesticity. Men were still that, for Joan: Passion, sex. A thirst for something she could not name.

  But I knew what I wanted. I wanted this. I wanted to be with the man who had wanted to know me so badly he had watched me sleep. I wanted what I already had.

  “Ray,” I said, and I stared at the soft, navy blue rug I’d splurged on after Tommy was born. I’d waited until he was born—until I’d known if I had a son or a daughter—to buy it. “I want to have another child.”

  He wasn’t rough exactly, but he wasn’t gentle, either, as he grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Say it again.”

  “I want a child.” I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  “Say it and look me in the eye.”

  There wasn’t any liquor on his breath. He wasn’t the kind of man who tried to soften things by drinking. He wasn’t the kind of man who made idle threats, either. He wasn’t the kind of man who should have ended up with me as his wife. I had lied to him, more times than I cared to remember. I had given him no reason to trust me.

  “I want a child,” I repeated.

  “It seems convenient,” Ray said.

  It did seem convenient, and perhaps it was. But it was true. The want was deep in my bones.

  By this time my eyes had adjusted completely to the darkness. I could see hollows beneath Ray’s eyes, evidence he hadn’t slept. Something shifted between us; Ray believed me.

  “Is it different this time?” Ray asked. His voice was plaintive instead of hard. He still wanted me. Still needed me.

  “I’m all yours now,” I said. “I promise.”

  A promise from a woman like me meant nothing. I needed to prove it, somehow. I went to Tommy’s crib, put my arm through the slats, and touched his head. It was still, after all these years, always a relief to find he was breathing. When he was a newborn I would come into his room in the middle of the night, certain that I would touch his cheek and find coldness instead of warmth. I’d thought I was the only mother who did this, because I couldn’t imagine my own mother wondering whether or not I was still among the living. I had slept in Idie’s room as an infant. One day I’d mentioned checking on Tommy to Ciela and she’d laughed, told me she had done the same exact thing a dozen times a night when Tina was a newborn. I used to think Joan was exempt from all the worries of motherhood. I had felt sorry for her, and sometimes, when I’d had a particularly bad day with Tommy, I was jealous of her. But of course Joan had checked on David, too.

  I could feel Ray watching me. I took his hand and led him from our son’s room and into ours.

  “Come here,” I said, and patted the space next to me. “Come sit.”

  He came.

  The mattress shifted under his weight. The bed was unmade—it seemed impossible that I’d slept in it hours ago. I ran my hand over the smooth sheet between us, our sheets that had been changed every week, like clockwork, since we’d married.

  “Ray,” I said, “I want to tell you everything.” My voice caught. Outside the window, the sky was still dark, but it would become lighter, soon. Tommy would wake. I only had so much time. Who’s to say what we deserve, what we do not, in this life? I did not deserve Ray. He deserved more than me, a wife so willing to go where he could not follow.

  “Joan,” I began. “I thought I knew her completely. I thought I understood her.”

  Ray asked no questions. He simply listened.

  I told him about Evergreen, the strange tension that I always sensed between Mary and Joan; about how fervently Furlow had doted on his only child. I told him how generous the Fortiers had been with me, but how I had always suspected that, in certain ways, I was Joan’s handmaiden: half as beautiful, half as lucky. He knew some of this, of course, the facts, but I’d never been this honest with Ray, with anyone, about Joan.

  He winced when I called myself half as beautiful as Joan. He made as if to correct me but I shushed him. It was a fact, that I was not as beautiful as Joan. And what had her bea
uty earned her, in the end? Her mother’s pride. The attention of every man, including the wrong kind. The spite of every woman.

  If he was surprised when I told him that Joan had taken me to Glenwood on Tuesday night, he did not show it. Nor did he express shock, or wonder, at the fact of David: his life or his death.

  Finally, I told him of Joan’s plan: to take Mary’s money, and run. Or, more precisely, to run, and then take Mary’s money. By the time Mary sent the money, Joan would be long gone.

  I almost stopped there.

  “Cee?”

  I went on. “You know my mother died,” I said, “but you don’t know how.”

  When I was done he took my hand. His palm was as cool as mine was hot.

  “I loved her,” I said. “But I never knew her.”

  “Loving and knowing aren’t the same thing,” he said, with a rueful smile. “You can’t know someone who doesn’t want to be known.”

  He was talking about me, not Joan.

  “She left him,” he said.

  I tried to see the world as simply as my husband did. I had exhausted both of us. I pressed my hand to his chin, rough with stubble. Ray was what I wanted. And I had almost given him up.

  “It wasn’t that simple,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “It never is. But I don’t care, Cece. She helped you, but it was a long time ago. I want you back.”

  “You can have me,” I said. “If you want me.”

  “I want you. I’ve always wanted you.” He stroked my hair. “You know what you have to do,” he said, and it was not a question.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And what is that?”

  “I have to do nothing at all. I have to let her go.”

  Ray nodded. I smiled; I couldn’t help it. “You and Joan want the same thing.”

  Ray kissed my forehead, and I bit back tears.

  • • •

  Ray let me sleep that morning. He waited with Tommy, fed him breakfast and played with him while I dozed in our bed. I left the door open so I could hear them. My sweet son and his doting father. Ray’s voice, Tommy’s noises—once he even laughed—almost lulled me to sleep.

  What was Joan doing in that exact moment? I’d done this all my life. I am here, I would think, eating pancakes with Idie, and Joan is at home, washing her face with a washcloth, Mary nearby, making sure she does a thorough job. I am here, in bed at Evergreen, while Joan is breaking curfew with John. I am here, eating tuna fish sandwiches with Ray, while Joan is lounging by the pool, a drink in her hand. I could taste the vodka as it slid down her throat. I could feel the heat of the sun as it hit her oiled shins.

  But now I found I could not imagine what Joan was doing. I saw her with Sid, in a car somewhere, driving toward—well, I did not know. The pain I felt, as I lay in bed, was physical: in my stomach, in my shoulders. I felt it everywhere.

  I would never see my friend again. I told myself this, silently repeating the words until they felt like a prayer. But I couldn’t quite believe them. Surely I had not seen the last of Joan Fortier.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  1957

  This time, Joan’s disappearance was a scandal of the highest order. Three days after I’d last seen her, I rose early and walked outside in my bare feet. The driveway was already hot, though it was barely five o’clock and the sun had not yet risen. I opened the Chronicle to a picture of Joan’s face and a headline: JOAN FORTIER VANISHES. It was an old photograph, one of my favorites: we were at the Cork Club, and Joan was looking over her shoulder. Had she been looking at me? I could not remember.

  I’d been waiting for this. I read the article while I stood outside, the concrete warming my feet; I hadn’t even put on a robe. The article was brief. Joan’s maid had contacted the police after Joan had not come home on Wednesday night. I thought of Sari, making Joan’s bed, smoothing the sheets with her practiced hand. I wondered how much she had guessed.

  Joan’s clothes were still in her closet. I lingered on this detail. It made sense, of course—if you were going to stage a kidnapping, you wouldn’t pack a suitcase—but the detail made me unspeakably sad. I had assembled Joan’s wardrobe. Most of it, anyway. When she wore a skirt I’d chosen, a dress I’d had made for her, I liked to think she thought of me.

  I wondered if Mary was looking at the paper at this very moment. She was an early riser, especially as she’d aged. I wondered if Mary slept at all now, or if sleep, when it came, was fretful and brief, like my own.

  Sid would have told Mary not to contact the police. Maybe she had told Sari to do it. Maybe she had already sent the money, was hoping Joan would reappear any day now, as perfect and unblemished as the day she disappeared. Maybe Mary suspected that Joan was deceiving her. Mary was nothing if not shrewd. But if anyone could trick Mary, if anyone could make her act ardently instead of judiciously, it was Joan.

  I brought the paper inside, left it on the kitchen table while I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom.

  I stood in the shower until the hot water ran out. I leaned my head against the tile while the freezing water hit my face. I wept. It felt like another death: first my mother, then Joan. For this death, I did not have Joan here to comfort me.

  • • •

  The day the story broke the police came. They were kind. They were treating Joan’s disappearance as a kidnapping, with Sid, of course, as the prime suspect. It was all unfolding just as Joan had wished.

  I told them that Sid seemed a little rough, that Joan seemed not entirely herself. But that was all I knew, I said. I didn’t know Sid Stark very well at all.

  “But you knew Joan,” a policeman—the older one—said. “Was she aware that she was in danger?”

  “She brought out the best bottle of champagne from her father’s locker. That was unusual.” They watched me, eagerly. “But I can’t say why she did it.”

  They would return periodically in the weeks and months that followed, and then they would stop.

  • • •

  The first time Joan had disappeared, we weren’t worried. I’d wanted her back, but I knew she was safe. She’d sent a postcard. We thought she’d gone to Hollywood. A rumor that Mary had planted herself, but still, we believed it. Joan was somewhere glamorous, being glamorous. It all made sense, and, of course, Mary was in on it.

  This time, her disappearance was ominous. She wasn’t eighteen years old anymore, ripe, ready to be plucked: by a studio head, a rich businessman. Joan’s world was no longer limitless. And there was Sid, an outsider, with an unpleasant reputation. No one trusted an outsider.

  In some moments I hoped the police would show up on my doorstep and catch my lie. But regardless, Joan would never come back. Money or no money, she had found a pocket of the world and slipped into it.

  • • •

  A week and a half after Joan disappeared, Ciela came by. She’d called several times, but I hadn’t answered the telephone since Joan’s disappearance. I skipped the Garden Club meeting, sent Maria to Jamail’s in my stead. The Chronicle had called for a quote from me, Joan’s best friend. I didn’t return the call. Darlene had left a coffee cake on my doorstep, surprising me with her sensitivity. I’d expected her to knock, to barge in and demand gossip. I didn’t want to talk to her, or Ciela—I didn’t want to talk to anyone except Ray—but mostly I didn’t want to talk to Mary. I wasn’t sure I could lie to her. I wasn’t sure my heart would allow it, tied as it was to Evergreen. Twice, a woman had called and declined to leave a message—her words. Ray had answered both times. He said the voice could have belonged to anyone, seemed irritated by my certainty, my insistence that he repeat the exact words the caller had used. But who else would have declined to leave a message but Mary Fortier?

  I was swimming laps in the pool when I opened my eyes and saw a woman looming over me. For an instant I thought she was Joan. But my eyes
adjusted and the thrill—of dread? joy?—disappeared. It was only Ciela, peering down at me.

  I didn’t glide through the water, like Joan had. My stroke was sloppy, unpracticed. I’d never swum laps before. The pool was for lounging, for dipping your toes in. For sitting beside with a drink. But I had to distract myself. The sitting still, the waiting for news, the daily ritual of unfolding the Chronicle in the driveway—I couldn’t bear it.

  And yet I knew it would be worse when Houston began to forget, when the news of Joan migrated from the front page to the last; when some other, newer scandal took up our attention.

  “What are you doing here?” I hadn’t meant to sound hostile, but the sight of Ciela, here when I had clearly wanted to be left alone, disarmed me. “I mean,” I said, “I didn’t know you’d be stopping by.” I tried to make my voice nicer, smoother.

  “I haven’t been able to get ahold of you,” she said, lightly. “I thought I’d swing by. Maria said you were outside.”

  I climbed out of the pool. I took my time drying off, twisting the water out of my hair, smoothing oil on my legs. The coconut scent reminded me of Joan.

  “Do you mind sitting out here?” I asked. “I want to get a little sun.”

  I wanted no such thing. I hated tanning. The oil was for when Joan came over. I wasn’t sure why I was using it, except that I didn’t want to go into the house with Ciela.

  Ciela waited until we had perched ourselves, awkwardly, on the red plastic lounge chairs. Though Ciela didn’t look awkward, even dressed as she was, in a slim-fitting yellow dress. She wasn’t showing yet.

  “You must be falling to pieces,” she began. I hadn’t expected sympathy.

  I began to cry, and she sat down next to me.

  “You’ll ruin your dress,” I said, and pointed to the oily spot blooming on the fabric above her hip.