The Party Goers
I was back up against the wall, trying to look like I belonged, when Julian Gould walked in. I’d heard stories of his own parties, late night and lawless, where he made people feel, with his disregard for tomorrow, like the hard work they were doing was not only serious and worthwhile but that it had desserts. We’d met once before—our introduction so brief I doubted he’d remember. I watched him notice me.
Within ten minutes he was handing me a drink. He wanted to know everything, where I came from, where I worked, why he hadn’t seen me before. I didn’t correct him. He asked my opinion of each writer in the room and either changed the subject or passed on my compliments when that writer, who had inevitably been published in Julian’s magazine, came to greet him. He introduced me as “a promising young editor” even though I was only an assistant.
When the crowd began to thin, Julian invited me for dinner. He didn’t bother with pretense. He said after we ate he’d take me to bed, and in the morning we’d have breakfast and read the paper.
I told him I couldn’t, that I was technically working and had to stay until the end of the party. “After,” he said. “I’ll wait.” It was only then that I mentioned my boyfriend, Teddy, the one I’d dragged with me to New York six months ago because I was afraid to move alone. I offered Julian my phone number as a consolation.
After the restaurant had been paid and the staff properly tipped, after everyone had left but me, I found my boss, Ethan, smoking by the door. He allowed himself one cigarette per day but often had none. I was moved to find him waiting even though I had ignored him all night. I asked him for a cigarette. He grinned like I was a child asking for a sip of beer but gave it to me anyway. “Be careful about Julian, Holly,” he said. “He has a reputation.”
Ethan and Julian looked to be about the same age, maybe a decade and a half older than me. By then I was twenty-five, the exact age when the distance of years seemed to collapse before it opened back up again.
I told Ethan not to worry; Julian had made a pass but I said I had a boyfriend.
“Men like Julian don’t care about boyfriends,” Ethan said. He flicked his cigarette into the street. “How is the elusive Teddy?” No one I worked with had ever met him. “The genius struggling in obscurity.”
“Something like that,” I said, tired of giving excuses for his absence.
“Everyone wants to be a writer,” Ethan said, his voice full of regret. “Even you, probably.”
He was right, though I’d never said a word about it. My cigarette was almost finished and I looked south toward the subway to hide my face.
“Don’t bother with that,” Ethan said, stepping off the curb with his arm in the air, and for a second I thought he meant the writing. When the cab pulled up he told me to expense it. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said over the door. “Don’t be late.”
Teddy left early for his family’s beach house in Maine. It would be our first Christmas apart in the three years we’d been together. I told him I wanted to visit my family, now that I no longer lived close by, and catch up on reading manuscripts for Ethan.
I was sitting on the couch, watching It’s a Wonderful Life and ignoring the stack of pages next to me, when my phone rang. It was Julian, calling to invite me to an early dinner party in Westchester the next day. I could tell by the way he said the hostess’ name—Marisol Esposito Donoghue—that I was supposed to know who she was.
The invitation was so convenient, the circumstances so uncannily aligned, that the possibility of saying no crossed my mind only briefly, a whiff of Ethan’s warning and Teddy’s innocence.
Marisol, Google told me, was an important artist and graphic novelist married to a much older publisher-turned-media-executive, Bradley Donoghue, and they were pictured many times on Page Six looking glamorous and at least a little bit seasonally incompatible, him with his tailored suits and papering skin, her in an ironic beehive and designer vintage dresses.
The next day I’d worked myself into a full panic about what to wear and ended up in a short black skirt, black tights, brown knee-high boots, and a black long sleeve shirt my mom had bought in a three-pack from Costco and given me last Christmas. I finished it off with a mustard colored pashmina, which, as long as I kept it looped around my neck, disguised the province of my shirt. And then over it all, to hide the timidity of the rest of the ensemble, a shearling-trimmed coat which had more attitude in its fluffy collar and rotund cuffs than anything else I owned.
It was snowing, the first of the year, when I left the apartment. Despite its bravado, my coat wasn’t even warm. The shearling, like the plumage of a male bird, didn’t serve any practical function. But there was no time to change; I was supposed to meet Julian in thirty-five minutes at the clock at the center of Grand Central Station.
I saw him before he saw me, craning his neck to search for me in the holiday crush. He was wearing a giant rabbit-fur hat and a good cashmere sweater under his camel hair overcoat. Between the two of us, it appeared we’d slaughtered a petting zoo.
“Don’t look now,” Julian said, after we’d boarded the train. “I know that couple.” Of course I looked, discretely. The man was short and bald, but fit, and the woman was tall and stern, but chic. “I bet they’re having dinner with us. Shit. I can’t remember their names.”
“I’ll introduce myself when we get off,” I said.
Julian patted my knee. “Good girl.”
I flinched; his big boy condescension gave me an erotic charge. It also emboldened me. “What is it you want?” I asked.
He smiled; the start of a game. “I want to taste you,” he said. “I want to gulp you down.”
The image of him gulping me—where?—left me without a rejoinder. I didn’t ask what I really wanted to know, which was why me. “I taste best when stored at room temperature and kept in a cool, dry place.”
It wasn’t a sexy thing to say, but Julian’s eyebrows, bushy and in need of a trim, seemed entertained. They were still halfway up his forehead when he said, “How do you like working with Ethan?”
I blushed, and the eyebrows came down. “For him, really,” I said. “I like him. He’s super smart. I mean, he has incredible taste.”
“You have a crush on him, don’t you,” Julian said, opening a bottle of Perrier he had removed from his tote. “Don’t worry, I won’t be jealous.” That smile again. Everything he said felt like a set up, as if we were reciting a script I was supposed to have already memorized. “We worked together at Random House years ago. Assistant editors, if you can believe it.” The Perrier fizzed as he took a swig.
When we arrived in Westchester, a place I knew only as the setting of John Cheever stories, it was really snowing, inches upon inches. Marisol’s husband Bradley was on his way to get us from the station. I introduced myself to the other couple as we waited and immediately forgot their names. Julian gave my arm an appreciative squeeze and I felt the charge pulse through me again.
Bradley showed up in a red sports car that sat four adults, not five. The obvious solution was for me to sit on Julian’s lap; there was no need to even discuss it. Bradley apologized to me more than once, making eye contact through the rearview mirror, but nonetheless took the turns on the country roads aggressively—this place was much more bucolic than Cheever had led me to believe—and Julian gripped me tightly across the waist, a human seatbelt.
I chatted with our companions as best I could, trying to act like Julian and I were in close quarters all the time and that this wasn't the most we had ever touched. I learned the man whose name I had forgotten was a staff writer for the kind of magazine that still had staff writers. I would have known which, except he literally told me he was a staff writer for “the magazine,” as if there were only one. I counted on my fingers, pressing them one at a time against my hip inside my shearling-tufted pocket. There were a least six possibilities—I could look through the mastheads later. From what I gathered, his wife, who had an unplaceable international accent, was a food critic and had just gotten back from a trip to Auckland where she was writing about “the new Polynesian cuisine.”
We arrived at Marisol and Bradley’s very large country house giddy from the perilous roads and ready to drink champagne. My knuckles were still white from where I’d gripped the passenger seat headrest, my waist still warm where Julian had held it. When I entered the kitchen Marisol looked at me strangely—perhaps it was the coat or perhaps she’d expected Julian to arrive alone. Her clothes did not give me any clues about what I should have been wearing; she had on jeans and a fisherman’s sweater, full makeup, the beehive. Regardless she took my presence in stride and served Bellinis with fresh peach juice that left yellow marks like daffodil pollen on our noses.
When it was time for refills she assigned me the task of writing the place cards. “I have a different guest do it for each of my parties and then display them over there. See?”
I looked at the kitchen wall beside the mudroom and saw at least a dozen sets of framed place cards. There were likely some impressive names hanging there, but I wasn’t about to go over and look.
I couldn’t tell if the assignment was meant to include or undermine me, and not only because the internet had said Marisol was known for doing her own lettering. More troublingly, I didn’t know the names of nearly the half the people we were with, plus I wasn’t sure of the vowels in “Marisol” and suspected that she sensed this.
She sat me down at the kitchen table with a calligraphy pen and a set of die cut place cards. I started with myself, then Julian, then Bradley. Under the table I Googled Marisol for the second time. To stall on the remaining two, I asked Marisol to direct me to the restroom.
“In the back,” she said, gesturing vaguely from the stove where she stood flirting with Julian and supervising something she called “winter stew.”
On my way I encountered Bradley coming in from the front porch with his arms full of firewood. Though he was mathematically more than twice my age, he seemed most compassionate to my situation as the age-inappropriate date than his wife, even though it was she, not him, who held the analogous position.
“Oh Bradley, thank God,” I said conspiratorially, talking the way I thought Julian talked. “Marisol has me doing these place cards and, this is embarrassing, but what are—”
“Ben and Priya—with a y,” he said, grinning.
“Thank you,” I whispered, though it wouldn’t help me figure out which magazine Ben wrote for, or the title of Priya’s book. No last names in this house.
While the stew simmered, no longer needing to be supervised, Marisol suggested we go for a walk in the fresh snow. In the mudroom she kept enough hats, gloves and muck boots for a small militia of party guests, and, judging my smooth-soled leather boots unsuitable, offered me a pair.
I paused. My boots would be fine, probably, slippery but they’d keep out the wet long enough, and I didn’t want to take them off, that awkward cross leg maneuver in my short skirt, with everyone evaluating my socks and crotch.
“Or will they ruin your outfit?” she asked. The question was delivered innocently, like it was self-deprecating—like her boots were ugly and would ruin my outfit—but it was clear to me and probably the three other people crammed into the mudroom that the target of her comment was not her boots but my so-called outfit. I had not previously considered what I wore an “outfit” in the comprehensive, intentional way that an outfit is meant to communicate a message of personal style while also preparing the wearer for a specific occasion and climate, so much as I considered it an amalgamation of cheap and ill-advised garments I had assembled under duress. Because unbeknownst to her—and also, arguably, to me—attending her dinner party was yet another step I had taken to fulfill a long-held desire to reorient my life.
I accepted the muck boots. And a hat, and gloves, and then, why not, a different coat all together, and at last I was permitted outside.
The five of us, Bradley stayed in, walked off the front lawn straight into the forest, where Marisol told us there was trail that led to an old springhouse. The season made the hillside clear and open, the trees bare and severe. We could see the springhouse long before we reached it. Julian and I lingered there while the others started back. It was obvious what we were doing but any fucks I had given about what Marisol thought of me had been removed along with my boots and outerwear.
The air inside the springhouse was damp and smelled of dirt and metal. Julian found a way between the toggles of my loaner coat and hooked an arm around my waist, pulled me close.
His tongue was too aggressive, and, as I had in the car sitting on his lap, I was reminded of being teenager. And it was with a teenager’s enthusiasm that I kissed him back, unbelieving that this was happening, floored to be kissing someone new.
“Apricots,” he said, and kissed me again. “Yes, you taste like apricots. It’s a very rare flavor in a woman.” An answer to my question: I was special, but only just.
We ate the winter stew in front of our place cards, which Marisol had arranged around the circular table. She’d put herself next to Julian and me on the opposite side between Bradley and Ben. Priya sat between Julian and Bradley so that the couples were separated. Once the stew was served, the rustic bread torn, and the salted French butter passed, Marisol turned her gaze to me. What did I do, where was I from, where did Julian and I meet? Her attention was autocratic; I was at her table and I would be interviewed for my place there.
“A week ago!” Marisol exclaimed when I told her about my job and the party.
“This is our first date,” Julian said. Though I had conveyed only facts, his tone was mocking. Behind his words I heard the secret he was keeping on my behalf. It was, of course, that I had a boyfriend, a boyfriend about whom Julian had asked no questions, a boyfriend who was currently oblivious to my whereabouts, hunkered down without me on the craggy coast of Maine.
“Ethan’s a good guy,” said Bradley. “I was his boss at one point. Julian’s too.”
Though she hadn’t been speaking Marisol seemed to grow quieter. This comment, I realized, concerned a period when Bradley was married to someone else. “Those boys were ridiculous,” Bradley continued. “Arch rivals.”
“And I thought Ethan and I were friends,” Julian said.
Bradley ignored him and turned to me. “Years ago, Julian gave me a chapter of Ethan’s novel to read,” he said. “As a blind submission. I had no idea who had written it. We had these little editorial meetings, just the three of us. The two of them were so intelligent; I considered them both my protégés.”
The men around the table were smiling, while the women’s expressions were of delighted horror. “Oh God,” Priya said. “What happened?”
“Exactly what you’d think. I eviscerated Julian for wasting my time with such crap. Ethan was clueless. I described the pages, and his expression told me everything.”
“Julian!” Priya said. “You’re terrible.” Her elegant face cracked into a grin.
“Anyway, I fired him.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You fired Ethan?” I asked.
“Of course not! I fired Julian!” Bradley’s tone was one of reckoning, but it had the effect of a punch line, the joke being that the man who had been fired had become the more famous and successful one, the one who had been invited to this dinner, and everyone around the table burst out laughing, everyone except Bradley. The story was so painful, so outrageous, that even I gave myself over to the sinister pleasure of it—of laughing at someone else’s expense.
Julian laughed the hardest of all. “Everyone wants to be a writer,” he said, barely getting the words out. And then, looking right at me: “Even you, probably.”
When dinner was finished we moved to the living room to play charades. Marisol had whisked my purse to some remote closet; I hadn’t seen it or my phone since and had no concept what time it was. I finally located a clock in the main hall. By now it was almost eight; the last train left for the city at 11:54 p.m.
I doubted the party would last another four hours, but I also doubted Bradley would be in a condition to drive us anywhere whenever it concluded. In the wake of Bradley’s story, something was off, almost awkward. I blamed the place cards, separating those who had arrived together. Who were these people to one another, besides former colleagues and professional acquaintances? But as soon as we entered the living room, the mood changed. Bradley had the fire going and the light was better and we could sit wherever we wanted.
We were going through lots of wine but new bottles kept emerging from the cellar, Bradley was getting them, and each time he entered the room he said something about what he had chosen. The drunker Bradley got, the older, and I assumed the more expensive, the bottles became.
Bradley placed his latest selection on the table and settled into a mid-century canvas chair that was very low to the ground—all the furniture was very low to the ground, so low, in fact, that I had opted to sit on a cushion on the floor. Bradley’s shirt bunched up behind him and a slice of his belly was revealed—smooth and white, like a baby’s. Marisol eyed him disapprovingly and a wave of affection came over me as I realized they would argue later, after everyone left.
But for now, the wine was working. The slips of paper in the bowl were souvenirs of the widely traveled and the well educated; paintings they had visited, films they’d seen on 35mm. Either they were trying to one-up each other or they had channeled their resentment of my youth into challenging clues they assumed would go over my head, but I couldn’t be stumped. I had entered a window of excellence in our game of charades like one does with cheap beer and darts. I was guessing their obscure films and translated novels like I was telepathically connected to whomever was acting them out, making full use of my own expensive education.
When it was my turn, I reached into the bowl and prayed. I stood behind the enormous square coffee table with my back to the fireplace and unfolded the scrap. Jean Paul-Sartre. Fuck. Marisol started the timer. I knew who he was but had no idea how to act it out. I could not think of a single word that even rhymed with Jean, or Paul, and definitely not Sartre, which I wasn’t entirely confident how to pronounce. I made the signals for person, three words, biding my time. At a total loss, I did the only thing I could think of and preformed a mime in a box, hoping someone would somehow guess No Exit.
“Mime. Box!” Julian shouted.
I persisted, pushed harder on the invisible walls. Looked around me, to the left, right, front, back, up and down, and resumed my push.
“Do something else!” Priya commanded, which only deepened my commitment to the performance. I worried Marisol’s miniature hourglass had gotten stuck—my time in the invisible box seemed to stretch much longer than allowed. I passed it by making sure my palms were flat and parallel, my expression one of true panic and frustration.
“No Exit!” Julian exploded, finally, in a burst of inspiration. I made a beckoning gesture, like keep going. “Sartre!” he yelled.
“Yes!” My fist shot into the air. Julian jumped to his feet and kissed me on the mouth, more affectionately this time, in front of Marisol, Bradley, Priya, and Ben.
I excused myself to use the restroom but really to look at the clock, maybe also to find my phone, and pitched into the hall with the full force of my triumph. The clock told me it was now after ten. I meandered to the mudroom, touching objects as I went, and opened the closet. When my purse wasn’t there, I tried another in the hall and found my shearling coat crumpled on the floor—either never hung or fallen there—and beneath it, my purse. There was a missed call from Teddy, but my eyes skipped over it and went straight to a text message from Ethan: “I hear you’re out reminiscing with my old friends…” it read, the ellipses chosen over an exclamation point, which would have been convivial, or a question mark, which would have been doubtful, or a period, which would have been accusatory. No, Ethan had chosen dot, dot, dot, a search beacon sent out into the cold night.
The thought of that beacon going unacknowledged gave me a spike of guilt and I put the phone away, shut it behind the closet door.
When I returned to the living room there was a bottle of scotch on the table and a set of crystal cut tumblers, a two-finger pour in each. “Come, come,” Julian said, and patted the couch next to him.
Priya stood up and carried her scotch to the window. “Wow,” it’s really snowing out there,” she said. “Come see.”
“Hold on,” said Marisol, who wobbled as she stood. “I’ll turn the lights off.”
With the room dark, the six of us gathered at the bay window and saw a cobalt world spotted with fat flakes and a sparkling carpet of snow.
“It’s too… bluetiful… beautiful out.” Marisol giggled at her mistake. Now that she was drunk, she had turned into a little girl. Bradley shot her a look, and I wondered if anyone noticed it beside me.
If this wasn’t the end of the party, I didn’t know what was. “We better leave extra time to get to the train,” I said.
“No! You should stay forever,” said Marisol. “All of you. We have plenty of room.”
Julian took her face between his hands and kissed her cheeks one at a time like it was her wedding day. “Marisol! You are a darling,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want—”
“Who wants to get into a car now,” said Priya, interrupting him.
“We’ll never make it to the station alive,” said Ben.
Julian looked at me, raised a shaggy eyebrow. I nodded.
Bradley shrugged.
“All right, Marisol,” Julian said, holding her shoulders now. “You’ve gotten your wish.”
“Wonderful!” she said, clapping her hands together. Then, turning confessional: “I already bought everything for a full English breakfast tomorrow, just in case.” She announced she would show us our rooms, that way we could “disappear” when we were ready. She began up the stairs and the rest of us paraded after, scotches in hand.
I was at the back of the line, with Bradley bringing up the rear. At the foot of the stairs he touched my elbow and said, “This house has six bedrooms. You can have your own if you want. Just find one and take it.”
His thoughtfulness, the fact that he had been paying this close attention—tonight and for years prior, years before Julian and I had met, years before I’d even considered moving to New York—unnerved me. I understood then that he had been the one who texted Ethan.
“I’m fine,” I said, too sharply. Bradley removed his hand from my elbow. “I mean, thank you. But I’m fine.”
The floors creaked above me and I could hear Marisol swinging open the doors, explaining that there were pajamas in the dressers and fresh toiletries in the en suite bathrooms.
I turned around but Bradley was no longer behind me, and at the top of the stairs I found myself alone with Julian in what Marisol had called “the blue room,” a bedroom that seemed to have fabric for wallpaper. “Isn’t it bluetiful?” Julian said, and burst out laughing, like it was the first joke he’d ever told.
I laughed too, real and well earned. Still laughing, I kissed him, our bodies warm with alcohol and inertia. I hadn’t planned to sleep with him that night but when we reached the bed I was relieved to find there was no decision to be made. I’d already made it, not when I agreed to stay over or even when I agreed to come to the party, but earlier, when I answered the phone. And if that was true then I’d made it even earlier than that; it had happened when I gave him my number.
Julian kissed my neck and I removed my shirt, threw it across the room so he would never see the tag. He pulled my bra down just below my nipple and ran his thumb over it. “I hate these padded bras,” he said. “You should get a nice lace one. I’ll take you.” I was in fact wearing my very best underwear, but I liked what he was doing with his thumb so I ignored him. Instead, I moaned. He put his other hand between my legs, just in the spot I wanted, and the sound carried deeper and longer. “All you young girls put on such a show,” he whispered into my ear.
Until then I had forgotten myself, my edges flared by wine, but with that remark my mind and body snapped back into alignment and I thought of Teddy, who never inspired me to moan, performatively or otherwise. “I was enjoying myself,” I said. “And now I’m self-conscious.”
Julian removed my bra and held it in his hands. He was no longer touching me, just looking. It all seemed—suddenly, uncomfortably—honest and sober. “You should never be self-conscious,” he said. “You’re gorgeous.”
He kissed my left breast, opposite from the one Teddy favored. We lay down and pressed our bodies together, my bare skin against his cashmere sweater. Our hands traveled dutifully around and across each other until I reached between his legs and felt the absence of an erection. I’d taken his desire for granted, and now the thought of doing what was required to make him hard, the thought of trying and failing, of what I would have to say to compensate for that failure, exhausted me. It was all too familiar, a role I would have my entire life unless I refused, every day, to play it. I sat up, found my unsatisfactory bra, and suggested we go downstairs for a nightcap.
“You go, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m bushed.” The idea that I would have a drink by myself in a stranger’s home at this time of night was ridiculous, but, if we weren’t going to have sex, the idea of us changing into pajamas and climbing side by side under a toile comforter was so ridiculous as to be unbearable.
Downstairs, I found Bradley illuminated under a single lamp at the end of the twenty-foot sofa. I settled into the armchair across from him and poured myself a drink into whatever glass was closest.
“Marisol and I are getting a divorce,” he said, looking into his scotch.
I tried to sound surprised when I told him I was sorry to hear it.
“I can’t get married again. I can’t have had three wives,” he said. He put his glass down and looked at me. “What are you doing here, Holly? Don’t you have a nice boyfriend or something?”
“I have a boyfriend,” I admitted. “But he’s not very nice.” I smiled. Bradley didn’t.
“So get rid of him and get a new one. Or get rid of him and don’t.” He turned away from me, toward the window, no longer charmed by my presence in his home.
I found my way back to the blue room, where Julian was already asleep, flat on his back in the middle of the bed. And because I didn’t want to give Bradley the satisfaction of discovering I had used another one of his bedrooms, or even a second set of guest pajamas, I stripped down to my underwear and climbed into the cold sheets.
When I woke, Julian was already dressed and downstairs. “There she is!” he said when I appeared in the kitchen, stood, and kissed me on the cheek. “You must be hungry.”
Marisol winced at the sound of his voice—her hangover was written all over her face. On the table there was cold toast and bowl of wilted scrambled eggs; nothing of the full English she had advertised. Bradley had already taken Ben and Priya to an early train and planned to do some errands after, she explained. Would we mind taking a taxi?
I said of course I wouldn’t mind, which was good, because it had already been called. Julian helped me across the icy driveway, holding my hand, touching the small of my back. But once we were inside he withdrew to his side of the cab. I looked out the window at the snow-covered woods that had gone from blue to gray, the stately houses set back from the road. The taxi dropped us without time to spare and Julian and I had to run across the bridge to the other side of the platform as the train approached beneath us.
When we stepped into the near empty car our pounding hearts were at odds with our circumstances, which had been notably diminished. “Well, Holly,” he said in the seat. “Let’s get you back to that boyfriend of yours.” He suggested I get some rest and offered his coat as a blanket before pulling out a stack of manuscript pages. I closed my eyes and woke up slumped against his shoulder, our train pulling into Grand Central Station.
We said goodbye at the clock where we had met almost exactly twenty-four hours before. I didn’t want to kiss him there, not even to keep up the charade that we had both had a good time, that we might try to see each other again. Last night’s game was over; now I faced anonymous crowds hiding acquaintances, decisions of which subway to take, Christmas without Teddy, and Monday morning with Ethan.
“Maybe I’ll submit to your magazine under a pseudonym someday,” I said, as a joke.
His frown told me that would be a very bad idea. “Get home safely,” he said, and turned away.
Outside on 43rd Street it was the exact right hour for the sun to come between the buildings. What little snow had fallen was already melted and the pavement shone. The air was so warm it was as if winter had lasted only a day. I decided to walk until I felt like stopping; the blocks passed but the desire to rest never came. When I reached the reservoir I thought of the place cards and wondered if Marisol would frame my name on her wall next to Julian’s, belonging as it did to a person she had not invited or particularly liked, to a dinner party she had hosted to distract from a marriage that was ending. I wondered if the place cards would remain on her wall, and if they did, if anyone I knew would ever go to her house and see me there.