by Jeff Hobbs
“Is China going to fit in somewhere?” I asked. “I mean, like, the whole Peggy Randall thing?”
“You’re drunk and adorable.” He motioned for a second carafe.
I didn’t think I could listen to this anymore. But Stanton didn’t care because he was, like, going through this renaissance, y’know, and maybe it was the weather, this gorgeous, rejuvenating early summer weather even though it was cold out today, but maybe it was something else, too, but Stanton had been thinking all this time about acting because he missed it so much and even though he had promised himself to never think about acting he couldn’t help looking back on his life—y’know?—and there was something that was just churning inside of him and that something was—ta da!—his life and all the things he had to bury along the way: football, his dad, small-town hypocrisy, coming out, and all this time he was carrying around index cards so he could jot down the random memories that were churning inside of him.
We finished the second carafe in a matter of minutes, and Stanton ordered a third.
I envisioned with pleasure Ethan breaking up with Stanton the moment this thing went into rehearsal.
And then there was the screenplay Stanton had finished and it was really good and it, too, was sort of a memoir, another return to his roots in Clarksdale and the plan was to direct it but not star in it since he was new to the scene and all—y’know?—but once he got some investor interest he would get going on the casting of this piece of drivel and again he would delve into the football scene and the quarterback he blew and all the coke he snorted while modeling. I was seriously wasted by this time and trying hard to sit up straight and concentrate while Stanton told me how his character—the character of Stanton Vaughn—was remolded in a series of dream sequences throughout the movie into a “trannie-slut” which was really so taboo in places like Clarksdale but “interesting taboo” everywhere else, and her name was Lucy but her nickname was “Luce” and then Stanton was asking do ya get it? do ya get it? and elbowing my ribs as I was trying to knock the last orange wedge off the bottom of my jam jar.
And then he shut up, considering something, and turned to me.
“And this is where you come in,” he said.
“What?” The orange rind wasn’t coming off.
“Well, I want to ask you something.”
I paused and returned his gaze. “Yes?”
“Since I don’t want to star in this thing—I mean, shit, I’ll be too busy directing the fucker—I wanted to know something.”
“What is it, Stanton?” I asked, teeth gritted, lifting the jam jar back to my mouth.
He breathed in and smiled widely, as if granting me a favor. “I wanted to know if you’ll play my first lover in the movie of my life.”
He winked and elbowed me again, harder this time, which caused the glass to crack against my tooth and the last orange rind to fall into my lap. It only took a second to understand that the tooth was broken—there was a hard fragment under my tongue. I cried out—a reaction delayed by the gleam in Stanton’s eyes—which caused the waiter mopping the floor behind us to rush over. Stanton finally stopped talking, and as the pain set in moments later—waves of it pulsing through my mouth—Stanton put his hand on my back and caressed it in widening circles.
“What happened?” he asked. “Does that mean no? I’m just asking you to consider.”
We took a taxi to Stanton’s dentist, and because I was so drunk the pain settled into a dull ache. Stanton had wrapped the broken half of my tooth in a napkin and carried it in one of the myriad pockets of his leather jacket, and as I leaned forward in the lurching cab, he started rubbing my back and I couldn’t sober up enough to tell him to stop. In the waiting room of Stanton’s dentist, whom he had called on his cell while we were stuck in rush-hour traffic on Sixth Avenue (“It is an emergency, Dr. Nadler”), I watched a little boy playing in the “children’s corner.” He was running a plastic yellow school bus across bookshelves and walls and his mother’s leg and it was driving me crazy, but it was the only thing I could concentrate on. Stanton was still rubbing my back with one hand and turning the pages in Town & Country with the other. I just kept nodding my head, wondering why I wasn’t a little boy in the children’s corner anymore. Why was I in this place aching with pain? And did the pain really have anything to do with a broken tooth? How did I get to be twenty-nine?
Stanton went on about the screenplay while reading the magazine.
“Then—in the dream sequence—Luce meets the right man and learns how to love him. But it’s sad because her family is all screwed up. But she changes. That’s the point. It’s really a story about how one person can change another person.”
“No, they can’t, Stanton.” These were muffled, broken, slurred syllables.
“My, my—what a cute little pessimist you are.”
“People don’t change.” I was on the verge of tears.
“Look.” Stanton pointed to a page in the magazine and rolled his eyes. Ethan’s picture was there—the same picture that had been reproduced in so many periodicals, with the deep sad eyes and the half smile. “A superstar, right?” Stanton sighed before flipping the page.
As if inspired by Ethan’s picture, Stanton rubbed my back more firmly and his hand moved lower until the receptionist announced my name. Stanton made arrangements for Ethan to pay for the cap, and then he told me he had to go shower and change for a distributor’s meeting at Arqua.
“Dr. Nadler will take care of you,” he said, nudging me along gingerly.
“What about Ethan?” I asked. “You wanted to talk about Ethan.”
Stanton crinkled his brow as if he were trying hard to remember something. He was also targeting the sangria stain splattered across the crotch of my pants.
“Nothing,” he finally said. “Or I forgot.”
“What did you want to tell me about Ethan, goddammit?” I needed to know.
Stanton looked around the waiting room and then, whispering loud enough for the hygienist to overhear, “It was the only way to get your cute little ass sloppy drunk.”
With a theatrical flourish he turned away. But then he remembered something. He unzipped one of the pockets in his leather jacket and pulled out the napkin with the broken tooth.
“We almost forgot this.”
He took my hand and pressed the yellowed ivory into it.
5
THE NOVOCAIN WORE off quickly and even with the Vicodin the dentist prescribed my tooth still felt sensitive—it throbbed when I tried to say anything, but I couldn’t talk anyway because my tongue wouldn’t touch the roof of my mouth and I experienced an explosion of pain if anything went in that wasn’t room temperature. I had expected Ethan to call and check up on me since I was sure Stanton would have told him about the incident at Xunta—with a grin to insinuate that maybe it was something more, the grin that would stir the pangs of jealousy—but he never did. I drank a cup of unheated rice soup and two warm beers and popped three of the white tablets, and then—thinking it couldn’t hurt—an old Percocet from my medicine cabinet. And suddenly it was night and I was lying in bed murmuring out loud how much I loved everyone and how much I wanted to tell everyone this and I finally decided to look up David Taylor’s invitation to the cocktail party. Soon it was glowing on the computer screen, but when I was about to switch it off—since there was no way I was going—I noticed a new message waiting for me.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, June 2, 4:18 PM
Subject: Party Tonight
How r u?! David mentioned your name the othr day and it brought back all these memories. Do u believe we’re almost 30? Do u believe we graduated 7 years ago? Wow. Its all happening! Anyway, don’t know if you’ll get this note in time but D told me u got an invitation for 2night and I hpe you can come—it’s been a long time since I’ve seen u.
Thinking of U,
SAT
And
a blurry confidence grew inside me as I read her words over and over.
Her voice whispered Thinking of U through a haze as I put on a brown corduroy suit.
The scent of her hair, ingrained in my mind years ago, was pungent as I splurged on a cab up to 988 Fifth Avenue (I was so out of it, the subway didn’t even present itself as an alternative).
The image of her lithe body stood specterlike beside me, beckoning, as the doorman asked if I was here for the Randolph Torrance party and had me sign a register, and since the Vicodin was impairing my speech—I felt great but couldn’t say anything—he finally shrugged. “The party’s almost over anyway.”
The first thing I saw when I entered 12D was the light screaming from a high-wattage bulb over the subject of tonight’s celebration: a wall-size canvas of fifteen monkeys sitting around a table in formal attire, their simian faces expressionless. I spaced out on the painting as the mumble of conversation from another room drifted toward me. A dull pain brought everything back into focus and I shuffled into the room the voices were coming from. There were about twenty-five people standing around while seventies rock (“Brandy, you’re a fine girl…what a good wife you would be…”) was coming from somewhere hidden and it took longer than I liked for my presence to become known. There was a subtle lull in the conversation and a few people turned my way.
I immediately noticed the woman standing next to James Gutterson.
She was the only caramel-skinned person in 12D.
Samona Ashley had always been so exotic and graceful that whenever I was in close proximity to her the room would bend in her direction—like it was doing now. Thinking of U flashed through my mind.
With heels she was an inch or two taller than James, and she was smiling at something he was saying and the smile drew me in and yet was so enigmatic that it showed me absolutely nothing—I couldn’t tell if she was sincere or humoring James Gutterson or mocking him. This vantage point—trying to decipher what Samona Ashley was thinking and being hopelessly incapable—brought me back to all those nights in college. Meanwhile Gutterson’s hand kept moving to Samona’s back and she kept brushing it aside with increasing annoyance until she muttered something and turned away and James gruesomely mouthed the word bitch.
She glanced over at me briefly—but there was no recognition—and a Vicodin-fueled sigh streamed through my lips coupled with a low, insuppressible moan. Because the effect of Samona Ashley hadn’t diminished in the eight years since I’d last seen her on graduation day. A meaningless glance—the flash of those black eyes, the way her coiled strands of glossy hair swept gently over her shoulder, her skin a smooth shadow in the dim light—and I was instilled with a dazed but overwhelming urge to possess her.
The fact that she didn’t recognize me did nothing to quell this urge.
When she turned away, the urge remained and became more severe.
Which was when an image broke through the Vicodin cloud: Ethan Hoevel fucking her.
And as she joined another group of people it seemed as if the rest of the room lost interest in me as well, which drove me to the bar for a double Scotch—the only thing that was going to move me farther into the party. A hand lightly touched my shoulder—David Taylor’s hand—which reminded me of Stanton’s hand before it had moved down to the small of my back in Dr. Nadler’s office. David squeezed my shoulder muscle like he used to do before we raced and asked, “What are you drinking?”
I held up my Scotch.
“Scotch? Jesus, what are you? Seventy-six?” David grabbed an Amstel.
“I have this toothache and—”
“Let me introduce you to our host.”
David guided me toward a group of guys standing in a darkened corner. I finished the Scotch in about ten steps and noticed that David had put his hand on my back while leading me to his friends. I was quickly introduced as an old classmate, a writer who might be able to help the lit department with his downtown flair. The Leonard Company guys—young and tall and blandly handsome, sucking on Heineken bottles, sipping martinis—all nodded uninterestedly, and then David introduced me to our host standing in their midst, Randolph Torrance, a flamboyant man in his late fifties who was one of David’s biggest clients (which was why so many Leonard Company guys were at the cocktail party) and who took an immediate interest in me, shaking my hand with an irritatingly firm grip. His eyes gleamed with intent, but the Scotch and Vicodin obliterated my unease. I was floating with a smile plastered on my face, able to field questions from Randolph Torrance like “And whom do you write for?” with answers like “I casually employ myself,” which amused the old queen, causing him to lean into me until I stepped back and gestured at the room where the painting of the monkeys was hanging, and asked, “So you bought that, huh?”
“That’s why we’re all here.” How Randolph Torrance managed to make that sound like a come-on was a mystery to me.
He moved closer as I backed away—it was a dance—when suddenly a glass broke somewhere in the darkness. The sound of it shattering caused Randolph to flinch and excuse himself.
The moment Randolph Torrance left, a conversation ensued about the painting, but the corner was too dark to tell who was saying what.
“Jesus, two-point-five for that piece of shit? And he’s celebrating?”
“It’s an investment.”
“It’s retarded.”
“Fuck you—he’s eccentric.”
“He’s a crazy old faggot with too much money.”
“Yeah, like you wouldn’t suck his dick to get the commissions—”
“Wait, is that what Taylor had to do?”
Raucous laughter.
“Come on, pal.” This was David, deadpan.
The talk reminded me of why I’d never joined a fraternity, and smugly resented the friends of mine who had (including David Taylor)—the backslapping, the rough embraces, the constant cock-talking, the intense drinking that led to tears and hugs and “I love ya, dude’s,” and the sitting around the common room in boxer shorts, legs intertwined—it all seemed more homoerotic than anything you’d see in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and with a thicker veneer of hypocrisy. The Leonard Company guys continued talking about the horrible painting.
“I mean, in ten years what’s that thing gonna go for?”
“Depends on the market for monkey art.” This was said soberly and no one laughed. “Who’s the artist?”
“A German. Reinhardt. He paints monkeys, I guess.” This was a British accent.
“That is the creepiest shit, man.”
“Doesn’t he get it? The more monkeys he paints, the less this thing is gonna be worth. Didn’t anyone take Econ 115?”
“Torrance could still turn a profit. Take a little boy down to the Caribbean in his Gulfstream and party for the weekend.”
“No leverage potential. High risk. Doesn’t merit.” This was the British accent again.
The Vicodin was moved to speak.
“Merit what?” I asked in the direction of his silhouette.
“Investment,” he answered back flatly.
“What if it’s not?” I said.
“What if it’s not what?” He seemed confused, but he was sincerely trying to stay with me.
“An investment.”
I felt the stunned silence. And then one of the shadows ended it with: “Well, then it’s a positively shitty painting to hang on your fucking wall.”
I was floating in the kind of space where I could just turn away from people and move back to the bar without saying anything. I grabbed another Scotch and glanced over at Samona, and when I did the slow burn of pain in my tooth returned. I started walking toward her. James Gutterson had been replaced by Randolph Torrance, and he seemed very uninterested in Samona even though there was a kind of longing in her voice as she told him things, and through the space in which I was floating I could see that although she was working for her husband, trying to charm the host-client, she was also failing at it. She couldn’t break t
hrough because Randolph Torrance had his eyes on me.
When she started following his gaze to see what was distracting him, I quickly walked to the opposite side of the room and stared at a wall.
There were photos of a recent skiing vacation Randolph Torrance had taken with a short, portly man, and there was a painting of a chapel at Williams College, presumably his alma mater, and a large watercolor of a Hamptons beach house with the title Water Mill, 1978. I started humming to myself and couldn’t stop.
When I turned around again, David had replaced Randolph Torrance at Samona’s side and they were now alone, staring at each other. High heels made her exactly his height, and from my vantage point across the vast and ornate room, I saw him put his hand against the small of her back—where there was a break in the dress, an opening, skin—and as he leaned toward her, she leaned into his hand, and it was another kind of dance. He said something, and there was tension. She turned away from him. He tried to pull her back with his hand, which had moved to her hip, and he said something else. She shook her head tersely. And then she laughed. I couldn’t hear it—there was too much going on—but from the expression on her face it was bitter, presumably because David Taylor had never said an intentionally funny thing in his entire craven life. Then she recoiled and started walking toward the bar. David did not follow.
I was going to talk to her. I was going to see if she remembered me.
Her back was facing me from the bar, that diamond of dark skin gazing out through the opening of her dress where David Taylor had placed his hand.
Another surge went through me, but I fought it because jealousy was useless, destructive (but undeniable, right?) and then the image appeared once again like a flashback—in color and very clear—of Samona in Ethan’s bed in the round pod in the middle of his loft, and she was naked with Ethan kneeling behind her, moaning, and Ethan was staring down at where the curve of her back became her ass. I had to finish the Scotch in a gulp.