My Education (9 page)

Careful logic had been brought to bear on this party, of the sort that is strictly female. Nicholas hadn't assembled these guests, hadn't thoughtfully balanced and tagged every chair. Martha had meant for this party to happen. But at some point, perhaps mere hours ago, her intention had changed.

We were still, in our increasingly louche drunkenness, cracking bad jokes about boy-girl seating, as there were half as many women as men, when Martha sliced in again and said impatiently, in her first utterance to the room, “Would you sit
please? The soup's getting cold.” We scrambled into nearest seats with beating hearts, as if spurred by the silence in musical chairs, and Martha returned from the kitchen again with a long baguette under her arm and went around the table twisting chunks off and actually flinging them one after the other, pitching roughly for each of our plates.

Shamefacedly we gathered our bread chunks, and passed the tureen.

The soup was strangely textured but good. It tasted of spring, the real, true spring that yet lay ahead—of little shoots and a nice sourness. “No, not fresh—I had favas in the freezer,” Martha said over her shoulder to someone, leaving for the kitchen again, as if she would shortly return and relate something more, but she didn't return. Her words, which had seemed so mercifully mundane, as if she, herself, was the savior we'd all been awaiting, the one who would throw herself onto the rudder and steer us all back into harbor, hung for too long in the air, until they twisted and stretched and dissolved, like the ribbons of smoke issuing from the two candlesticks, upon which the two candles, so recently hopefully lit, had devoured themselves. More empty wine bottles than glasses were crowding the table. “That's a rich thing to say, considering the French in Algeria,” Lois shouted at Gilles.

“Oh, so you excuse slavery? Everybody does it so I do it as well?”

“Good Christ, the Federation of Suffering Souls. Is there a single dark-skinned people on the planet for whom I might not take up arms? It would be so refreshing. Or perhaps I could do a subscription. Ten dollars a month and you, Gareth, Need Not Give a Shit. Wouldn't that be terrific?”

“That is an incredibly racist statement.”

“Yours was the subscription to nonracist statements? Forgive me, I've got all the subscriptions fucked up.”

“Do you have any
fucking
idea how many black men are locked up in this country—”

“I suppose you have seen the movie and as a result it has made you an expert. This is a miraculous movie, you only need to sit through it and you are better qualified to judge than the people themselves! I am waiting for someone to make such a movie about the Palestinians.”

“I hear a lot of derision directed at
me
and not a lot of justification for what your government's doing—”

Laurence was missing. As soon as I noticed I felt myself perspiring from my scalp to the soles of my feet. I didn't think Laurence had left me but it seemed possible he'd been kidnapped or killed. I was drinking compulsively from my wineglass, and not tasting the wine. I heard
glog
and a patter of drops on the cloth as Joe tipped a fresh bottle to fill it—I had somehow wound up with Joe close by my left yet again, heard him distantly saying, “More like
Un Chien Andalou
.” There was a case of wine torn open on the floor in a corner, which perhaps had just been carried in. The table bucked at me as if I had tripped. At its farthest end I saw Nicholas, with whom I'd exchanged not a word, blankly smiling as Vivienne spoke in his ear. Larry Kornblatt had changed Martha's congealed bowl of soup for his scraped one and set to work on it. Frank had inserted himself between Lois and Gareth and now was shouting at and being shouted at by both. Karim and Joe were missing also, the chair to my left was empty. And then two roast chickens appeared on the table, being not carved so much as torn up. Laurence caught my eye from his chair, which he had reclaimed though perhaps he had never vacated. When the chickens reached me they were stripped carcasses. I shoved back my chair and plunged into the darkness beyond the archway, and found myself in a maze of objects I kept pushing behind me as if climbing sideways through some sort of jungle, yet with the heightened coordination of extreme drunkenness I somehow upset nothing, and emerged in a part of the house that was dimly familiar. I found the powder room, locked myself in, and threw up.

Right away I felt sober, though it might have been only by contrast. I leaned on the sink until I had my breath back. On impulse I opened the undersink cabinet. Empty. No stack of clean towels anymore. Now, as I hadn't the first time I'd been there, I closely examined the miniature room. It was very tastefully, thoughtlessly done. Striped wallpaper, chrome and porcelain fixtures. In the tall oval mirror I saw a sprinkling of minute purple markings in the soft skin just under my eyes where I'd exploded blood vessels while retching, but I hadn't brought my bag and so couldn't use makeup to hide it. I washed my face and rinsed my mouth, and tried to govern my hair. Reassessing my face it occurred to me, for the first time, that I hadn't seen photographs anywhere in the house. Of Nicholas and Martha, singly or together; of their extended families; of their child. The absence of photographs was of a piece with a broader absence of personal objects of which I now took a sort of reverse inventory. There was nothing in the house that seemed chosen.

Outside the bathroom again, where I'd spoken with Martha that day, the tide of raucous voices splashed down just in earshot, but I couldn't discern individual words, only spikes here and there of dissent or derision. I was determined to make contact with Laurence without going back in the room. The open windows I'd faced from my side of the table were just behind Laurence's back, and surely I could get his attention through these without anyone else noticing. Too resolutely I rushed down the hall. Before I had seemed to myself like an arrow. Now my shoulder was bumping the wall. I thought with longing of Dutra. If I could just find a phone he would come rescue me. He would even enjoy it. He might enjoy it too much. Vividly I pictured him crashing the party, and throwing fuel on the various ideological fires. No, it was Laurence I must reach at once. The plush carpet yanked itself out from beneath me and the soles of my boots came down loudly on flagstones; I'd arrived somehow in the solarium, which was pumped full of savory smoke. At the far end was the door to the driveway, blocked by Martha and Joe and Karim, who were smoking a joint.

“There you are,” I said to Martha, and all three of them looked up at me. My voice had struck a note of accusation no one had expected, including myself.

“Were you looking for me?” Martha said.

I hadn't been, yet it came to me now that in fact I'd been looking for her the whole evening. In the startling disorder of her kitchen, on the dining room's shrill battleground, it hadn't been possible or even conceivable to take her remote rudeness personally. Now, I felt retroactively stung. “Yes, I was,” I replied, as if she ought to have known. My tone seemed to tell Joe and Karim they'd intruded on Martha and me, and not the other way around. Karim in haste accepted the joint from Martha and applied himself, gorging on smoke; as he did he held his other arm outstretched, toward Joe, to keep him in wait or to send him a signal; then the procedure was finished, he'd passed the joint to Joe, and together they'd slipped back inside, with an adequate air of apology, while Martha and I, gazing curiously at each other, failed to note their departure.

“Were you going to say I should come back inside?” she asked after a moment, but now that we were alone, an unruly sprite seemed to be leaping about the solarium, which we both watched slantwise while pretending it didn't exist. I knew she no more meant to go back inside than I did.

“I was going to say this party has about run its course. It feels like time to leave.”

“I'll be sorry to see you go.”

“I mean, it feels like time for both of us to leave. We could go somewhere else.”

She considered the proposal gravely. “It's tempting, but my car is blocked in.”

“We could walk. It's a beautiful night.”

“Also, though I probably shouldn't admit it, I'm the host of this party.”

“All the more reason to leave,” I said reasonably.

“You know, Miss Gottlieb—may I call you Miss Gottlieb?—you're interesting. I could almost think you're trying to corrupt me. After the day you were here grading papers, I realized I'd seen you before.”

“At the farmers' market.”

“Why didn't you remind me?”

“We didn't talk to each other that day at the market. There was nothing to remind you about.”

“You and your boyfriend were drinking the coffee-iced coffee.”

“Not my boyfriend,” I corrected, more sharply than I had intended.

“Oh?”

“My housemate.”

“But you're not involved?”

“No.”

“The very lovely Miss Gottlieb and the more-than-adequately handsome Mr. X are . . . just friends? He
is
very good-looking,” she persisted, as if doubting my truthfulness, or my judgment. Then I saw that half smile again, as she lifted one side of her beautiful mouth.

“I suppose,” I said brusquely. All at once she annoyed me. Despite the sloshing of my innards, and the lightness of my head, and the alcohol fumes steaming out of my pores, and the neutered residue of panic—of my newly irrelevant need to find Laurence—now washing away through my veins, I understood something that Martha, like a coy child, seemed determined not to recognize. The very moment I admitted we were flirting, I lost patience for it. All women are powerfully affected by examples of beauty among their own kind. Those who claim they can't appraise another woman's allure because they're of the same sex are embarrassed, or lying. Like almost any woman I had extensive experience of idolatrous attraction to beautiful women, dating roughly from the tender age of six, but these love affairs were a form of fantastical self-transformation; they belonged to imagination, not the pragmatic realm of appetite. Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. It tends not to waste any time laying hold of its tools. That was the thing I had recognized here: appetite. I recognized it precisely because, in a context like this, it was so unfamiliar. It had forced me to rule out everything else. And there was a second reason for my recognition, which because unprecedented was not recognition at all, but astounding discovery: Martha's face told me. I saw appetite there, even more as she dithered, even more as she festooned our electrification with bunting and baffles and coy indirection like throwing so much laundry onto the line.

“You're not involved—but you're hoping you might be?” she asked, making a great solemn show of attempting to root out my meaning, for of course such an effort of deferral is its own exquisite pleasure, and the chance for it comes only once; it can't be re-created but only prolonged. Martha's own talent for putting off pleasure being very impaired, as in time I would learn, she now hoped for assistance from me, but she didn't receive it.

“Perhaps you're interested in him, but I'm
not,” I concluded, to whisk this irrelevancy from my path.

“And if you're not, I shouldn't be, either?”

“You can do what you want, I suppose!”

“What are
you
doing?” she said, through her uneven smile, for having had enough I'd closed the gap, and each of my toes now confronted its opposite number, and my kneecaps their sightless reflections, and the points of my hip bones collided with hers and the points of our breasts shocked together, hard as thumbs, through the unimpeding layers of our thin party clothes. It was cold in the solarium, the still-wintry air ceaselessly insinuating through the seams between the hundred panes of glass, and I could feel the fragile nimbus of heat baking out from her skin, before the drafts snatched it away. I was trembling violently, with surprise at myself and with counteracting furious resolve, and my teeth were chattering, and my fingertips were numb, but none of these impairments counseled anything but speed, as if the more I delayed, the more the impairments might be permanent.

“You know exactly what I'm doing,” I said crossly, so irked by her tone that for a moment my fear was forgotten and sinking my hand in her heavy blond hair I took hold of the hot, perspiration-damp slope of the nape of her neck, and raised my chin slightly and drew her toward me, for she was the slightest bit, perhaps a finger's width, taller—I'd been right, she had known—the thought came to me but could not be completed as my tongue filled her mouth and we bloomed smoothly out of our skins as if some gorgeous fruit that aspires to devour itself. Her answering kiss was unstinting; it excavated me down to my bowels, and I uttered a long susurration, more vibration than sound. My hand that did not have her nape roughly seized a fistful of her blouse, and we fell back against the cold spine of the solarium's metal doorframe. She broke away and whispered urgently, “Shh!” but her legs scissored open just slightly and my upper thigh notched between them and felt the shuddering grip of her hotly drenched crotch through her jeans; like mine her breasts seemed to be linked, by conductive short wires, to the node of her sex that was hopelessly hidden from me in her clothes, so that when I slipped a palm under her blouse and brushed over one nipple she gasped, as I would, and pushed the breast hard against me, as I would, not to rush but to muddle the progress, to blur the high note and attenuate pleasure . . . all this while our mouths fed on each other, their sameness so shocking as to be somehow sweetly inevitable, and for all the urgent thunder the length of our veins I knew we stood there almost silently, gently entwined. Had it truly been spring in that chamber of glass a vine might have scaled our bodies and unfurled its pink trumpet-shaped blooms. Who knows what we looked like—but from Laurence's face I'd guess lovers, of more than five minutes' standing, gratefully closing our seams after long separation.