The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  She called her mother a couple of times a week, as much out of boredom as out of love. Of course, she’d told her mother about Abbie right after that first dinner that first night at Barry’s, and her mom still asked her if she’d spoken to “that man.”

  “No, mom.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve met his son, though.”

  “His son,” Cathy said. “My God.”

  • • •

  Then Jenny and Penny, two graduate students whose unlikely rhyming names had compelled them to become friends, who both interned at the Institute while pursuing nebulous graduate degrees at Carnegie Mellon and texting a lot, invited Isabel out. She’d hardly spoken a dozen words to either of them. She never understood why they’d decided to hang out with her. She assumed that they saw her as a charity case, not yet old enough to be irredeemably adult: de-radicalized and conventional beyond all hope of reform or reprieve, but not yet over the hill, not yet socially irredeemable, maybe a little tragic in her inexplicable flight from a more glamorous life in a bigger city, but still from that city, and therefore in some way cool enough to bother with. They were, in their mid-twenties, still able to believe that a city offers up a career rather than the other way around. “We’re going to, like, this party,” they said. “It’s like this dance party. It’s pretty gay. Like gay gay, not gay gay. Anyway, you should come, maybe? It’s definitely the best party in the city. And The Eastern Front is playing. He’s a DJ from like Miami or San Diego, I can’t remember which. It’s kind of late though, but maybe we’ll have drinks and then go over? If you want.”

  If Isabel never did quite puzzle out why the girls asked her to go out with them, then she was even less sure why she agreed: maybe the same loneliness that she was keeping secret from herself; maybe the boredom; maybe it was that, with the exception of one more dinner—this time at Imlak’s downtown apartment—she hadn’t managed to find any coke since she’d come to the city, and a gay dance party seemed like a good opportunity.

  The Imlak dinner had been quite an absurd event involving many cases of Veuve carelessly wasted on mere drunkenness. He occupied half a floor in a new downtown skyscraper above the Fairmont hotel, an immense glass cube like something out of a science fiction movie, a near but imaginary future. Afterward, after most of the other guests had drifted away, he’d sidled up to her, grinning his rich man’s grin, and asked her if she wanted a blast. This time she said yes, and he beckoned her to follow him toward a distant bathroom. He locked the door behind them and removed a small jewelry box from a drawer in the vanity. There was a lot of coke in the box. They did a few blasts. “Good, isn’t it?” he said. It was rhetorical. Arthur Imlak wasn’t a man who required that you agree with his opinions; he assumed you already did.

  “I get it from Miami,” he told her. “Same guy who sells to Donatella Versace.”

  “Oh?” Isabel said.

  “I can only do very high quality coke,” he told her. “All the shit they put in the rest of it makes my feet swell up.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. It was good coke, and she really felt it.

  “Well, all right,” he said. “Back we go.” He slapped her ass collegially, as if she’d just made a game-saving tackle.

  “Arthur,” she warned, although she was also grinning, mostly because she felt obliged to.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not my type.” But he patted her ass again as he unlocked the door, and she wondered if it was true.

  Jenny lived only a few streets away from her in Regent Square, so she picked Isabel up, and they headed off to get Penny. Jenny drove a mid-nineties Nissan that sounded as if it had only three working cylinders. It was a 5-speed, which seemed like an affectation, but then, Isabel thought, Jenny was affected. Penny lived between Oakland and the Hill District, on a narrow street above Schenley Farms that cut horizontally across a steep hillside with houses on the uphill side and a near-vertical drop on the other. It was one of the charms of the city: no one in his right mind would have built a city there. The street was so narrow that even Jenny’s tiny car could barely pass the cars that were parallel parked on the other side, all of them with two wheels canted onto the sidewalk or sunk in the mud of someone’s front yard. The city of Pittsburgh insisted that all such streets must remain two-way. Just before they got to Penny’s place, another car came from around the bend, and they sat for a while in a standoff, the other driver and Jenny gesticulating at each other through their respective windshields until the guy in the other car, with one last baleful laying-on of his horn, backed up and pulled into a little driveway to let them by. Jenny cranked down the window to scream a parting “fuck you!” as they passed. Isabel later learned that the car belonged to one of Penny’s roommates. “He’s from Ohio,” Penny would say, as if it were something slightly distasteful. “He’s a grad student.”

  “You’re a grad student,” Isabel reminded her.

  “Yeah,” she said, “but he studies, like, chemistry or some shit.”

  The dance party was a monthly affair that was called Midnight Mass. First held two years earlier on an actual Christmas Eve, an orphans’ event for students and hipsters who didn’t or couldn’t go home for the holidays, it had started out with a fairly even mix of sexes and genders and sexualities before becoming, as these things did, a largely, though not exclusively, gay event. Isabel generally found the prospect of bouncing into a gay club with a bunch of other women as slightly gross, a bit past its sell-by date, but they’d assured her that this was in no way officially a gay event and there would be plenty of women and possibly even a few straight guys. The party, having spent its first year migrating around the city, was now regularly held in the vast backroom of a bar in Lawrenceville, a recently cool neighborhood of old row houses and steep, parallel streets. The bar had been an Owls or an AmVets or some such in a past incarnation. The front was narrow and fetid; it smelled as if it deserved its own nature documentary in which some giddy Brit would describe the fungal agriculture of an immense colony of ants. The back was big enough to hold two basketball courts, although a low, stained ceiling gave it a perversely claustrophobic feeling. It smelled mostly of the many varieties of human sweat.

  It was loud. The girls had been nattering about the event on the way over. “It’s always a different theme,” they said. “Sometimes there are, like, projections. Once they actually tried to fill the place up with, like, bubbles, but they used the wrong kind or whatever, like, the wrong kind of bubble mix I mean, and they had to cancel that one because it just turned into a bunch of absolutely disgusting water on the floor.”

  In their defense, by the way, these were two very smart and intellectually competent girls; it’s only a sign of the democratization of the era that everyone sounded like exactly the same idiot. But being told how good a party is going to be is like listening to someone explain the punch line of a joke, and Isabel was glad to be momentarily free of it. There was a jukebox playing a punk song that she recognized but couldn’t place, and despite the party’s supposed sexual provenance, the dudes actually drinking at the bar out front were a collection of thoroughly straight crust punks and bike messengers, the former in that sort of seventies bondage look that punks had adopted for whatever reason, the latter in short, cut-off jeans with elaborate tattoos on their calves. She socked this info away for later. Before Ben, she’d had a bit of a thing for bike boys: their silly hypertrophied thighs and skinny arms and hard asses. If she got sick of the party, then she could find one to take home, even if it meant convincing some half-fluent Uber driver to let them try to jam a fixed gear in his trunk.

  The sound emanating from the back was something else altogether, a quirky, repeating cadence of deep, concussive beats. The bartender was a fat man with a red face and tiny ears who wore a Steelers sweatshirt and a Penguins ball cap. He had the bored efficiency of a real bartender. He’d tended that same bar since before the steel mills closed, but he viewed the changing clientele with the utter equanimity th
at was also the mark of his vocation. He called women sweetheart and men brother, and he drank Bacardi from a plastic cup throughout his shifts.

  Isabel bought a round and followed the girls through the narrow hall that led to the party in the back. They were stopped at the doorway at the far end by a familiar boy on a tall stool behind a cocktail table. There was a cover. The boy was taking cash. He was wearing something skintight that, when Isabel got closer, revealed itself as cycling bib with no shirt. She didn’t even recognize him as Isaac at first. With his chest exposed, he was even more painfully thin and pale than he’d seemed that night at Barry’s, but there was also something about his prematurely gristly arms and the tight, smooth skin on his chest that intimated strength and elasticity. It was only when he spoke that she recognized him from Barry’s dinner all those months ago. Isaac had a remarkably specific voice, surprisingly deep, like a lot of skinny guys, but with a choked, sinusy timbre that made it seem higher pitched than it was and a habit of overly correct pronunciation—like, for instance, how he’d say, “Tyoosday.” If he recognized Isabel, he didn’t give it away, but he was smiling, and he shouted something that she couldn’t hear through the noise. “What?” she yelled. She leaned closer.

  “Nice shoes!” he yelled back.

  “Thanks! They’re Louboutin.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m going to give you the good shoe discount!”

  Isabel raised an eyebrow and he said, “That means you can go in for free.”

  “Thanks!” she screamed.

  “But you have to tell me your name for your sign,” he said.

  “My sign?” she replied. She noticed that beside the cash box the table was spread with construction paper and markers.

  “Yeah!” he yelled. “It’s a dance competition! You have to get a sign so we can tell who you are! I’m the judge! Well, one of the judges. The preeminent judge! The Russian who ruins the Americans’ chances!”

  “That’s okay,” Isabel told him. “I’m good!”

  He just grinned and shouted again, “What’s your name?”

  “Isabel,” she shouted back.

  “Isabel,” he repeated. He laughed. “That’s gay!” he said. “G-H-EY gay!” Then he scrawled MISS HELL on the paper and checked a list beside him and added the numeral 76 beneath it. He pinned these to the back of her dress and sent her and her vodka into the party.

  An hour and several drinks later, she found herself on the edge of an undeniable and now surely unavoidable drunkenness. There was another bar in the back room, and that bartender, a guy about her age with a little gut beneath a black tee-shirt and a pair of impossibly large, round glasses clinging to the last inch of his handsome nose, slung under-mixed drinks in her direction and seemed to enjoy her company. He was surely gay, but they were among the few people in the room over thirty, and they shared the quality of being amused. He asked her name and told her that his was Ryan. He asked where she’d come from and where she worked and where she lived and who she’d come with.

  Isabel said, “These two girls. Penny and Jenny.”

  He laughed—he laughed at everything, funny or not—and said, “Oh, those two.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said, and he laughed again. Unlike Isaac, whose constant giggling seemed fraught with significance, Ryan-the-bartender’s seemed as specifically meaningful as a dog’s happy bark. “Just—those two.” A younger man came to the bar and they exchanged a quick kiss and a whispered conference before the man went back to the party, where he was dancing against a tall boy with the alien beauty of a fashion model. Ryan the bartender said that was his boyfriend, Steven.

  “The tall one or the short one?”

  “The short one.”

  “Who’s the tall guy?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know his name,” said Ryan. “He’s a model or something. I guess that probably means he works in a store.” He grinned and laughed some more. “We’re gonna fuck him tonight, I guess.” He laughed again.

  Then Jenny and Penny can over, sweating and loose-eyed, and grabbed Isabel’s wrists and pulled her toward the dance floor. “I’ll be back!” she shouted over her shoulder.

  “Sure thing, Miss Hell,” he said.

  Isabel danced with those girls for a while in a sea of boys with mustaches, all of them by now in various states of undress. There were no straight guys back there; the straight men were out front drinking shots of whiskey and smoking American Spirits and glancing at the hockey game on the one little TV. It kept occurring to her that she ought to ditch these girls and try to get laid, but Jenny kept saying, “I love this song, I love this song,” no matter what the song was, and Penny kept grabbing one boy after another and pulling him over to dance with them and saying, “Oh my god! It’s Aaron; I love Aaron!” or, “Oh my God! It’s Kwame; I love Kwame!” and these boys did or did not dance with them for long. The dancing was largely bobbing up and down, up and down, because the place was by then too crowded to do much else. Then Isabel was spinning around through a small clearing, and Isaac was standing behind her with a drink. His mouth moved.

  “What?” she yelled.

  “Vodka tonic!” He was near her ear. “Ryan said you were drinking vodka tonic.”

  “Thanks!”

  He’d slung the suspenders of his bib off. He shook his head and hopped up and down and sweat hit Isabel’s face and mouth. “What do you think of my party?” he screamed.

  “Your party?”

  “Mine!” he said.

  She didn’t answer because he didn’t seem to expect her to answer. They danced together for a while, then he drifted over to Steven and the model and insinuated himself between them. The model was rubbing his jeans-bound dick on Isaac’s ass; Steven rubbed his head in an oddly feline gesture on Isaac’s chest. Isabel glanced toward the bar, where she caught Ryan the bartender looking in their direction and laughing some more. He was at the end of the bar, standing beside another somewhat older guy, broad-shouldered and severely handsome, dressed unlike anyone else in a crisp and expensive-looking white shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned and loose around his wrists. He was not smiling. He was not laughing. He appeared thoroughly self-contained.

  Around one-thirty, the music trailed off and Isaac was up on the stage kissing the DJ on the lips and announcing the winners of the dance competition; he said, “Second place, MISS HELL!” and Penny said, “Oh my God! It’s you! Izzy!” as if Isabel had really won something. (In fact, she’d won a bar tab worth twelve bucks, which she used to buy drinks for Jenny and Penny.) After the announcements, the music resumed, quieter and less singularly insistent now that a body move in time to it, and people began drifting out. By last call, Isabel was back at the bar, where Ryan introduced her to Sawyer. He asked if they’d met before. “I feel like we’ve met before,” he said.

  Isabel said that they hadn’t.

  “Sawyer is Isaac’s boyfriend,” Ryan explained.

  “Yes,” Sawyer said. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “A manner of speaking,” Ryan repeated, laughing.

  “What manner of speaking?” Isabel asked.

  “Ours,” Sawyer said, “is a very modern relationship.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He didn’t answer. “So what do you do?” he asked instead.

  “Oh,” she said, “I work for a nonprofit.”

  “What nonprofit?”

  “It’s called the Future Cities Institute.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, “Barry Fitzpatrick’s outfit.”

  “Outfit. Ha. You know him?”

  “Isaac knows him,” Sawyer said.

  “Isaac knows everyone,” Ryan said as he passed carrying a bag of trash.

  “He knows a lot of people,” said Sawyer. “This is true.” He seemed to roll his eyes no matter what he said.

  Isabel asked him what he did.

  “What do I do or where do I work?” he replied.

  “Eithe
r.”

  “I’m just giving you a hard time,” he told her. He glanced once over his shoulder, then he observed with a droll smile that Isabel looked like she could stand to sober up.

  “Haha,” she said.

  “No,” he said, and then he repeated himself more deliberately. “You could stand to sober up.”

  “Ohhh,” she said. “Sober up.”

  Ryan was returning to the bar, and Sawyer flicked his head toward wherever he’d just returned from. Ryan nodded, and Sawyer led Isabel past the bar and past some restrooms and through a door and down a flight of smooth-worn creaking basement stairs and through the tubular underground tangles of a tap system and past cases of booze to a little office set up in a corner with an old metal desk and some filing cabinets and a couple of computers and a little white dog sleeping placidly on a little plaid doggie bed. “Cute dog,” she said. The dog raised its head and made the sort of contented peep that only a small and immeasurable happy dog is able to make and curled back about himself.