The After Party (22 page)

“We can't keep this up.”

Keep what up?
I could have asked.
What do you mean?
But I knew what he meant.

“I know.”

“Do you remember when you married me?”

“Of course I remember, Ray.” His tone made me wary.

“Do you remember our witness's name?”

“No.” She was a nice, stooped old lady with white hair, but I did not remember her name. Maybe I had never known it. “She was a stranger.” Our wedding certificate was somewhere in my files. “I could look it up, though. I could—”

“Her name was Rhonda Fields. I still remember that. Strange, the things that stay with you.”

I squeezed Ray's hand. He was making me nervous. Ray wasn't nostalgic. He didn't sit around and remember for memory's sake.

“Rhonda Fields,” I repeated.

“We couldn't have any of my family there. Because Joan wasn't there. So we had Rhonda Fields.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“All the time I've known you I've played second fiddle to Joan Fortier. Haven't I?”

I wanted to turn the light on. Ray wouldn't say such things to my face. Or perhaps he would.

“Joan is more than a friend. Joan is—” I could not explain it. I would have traded a lifetime of friendship with Ciela for fifteen minutes with Joan, in a heartbeat. And I liked Ciela; I enjoyed her company. But no one made me feel like Joan.

“Joan is what?” His voice was eerily calm. “She's not everything, is she?”

“No!” I said. “No, of course she's not everything. You and Tommy are everything.”

“Are we?”

“You are!” I cried. “You are. But Joan . . .” I tried to think of how to phrase it. “She's a mystery,” I said, finally. “A mystery.”

“No more a mystery than you or I. No more a mystery than anyone in the world.”

Maybe that was true. I could not see myself as clearly as Ray could. I couldn't see Joan as clearly, either. I was too close to her. She was like something inside my skin and bones, something I could feel but not see.

She was my mother, my father, my sister, my friend. She was
everything that came before. But even then, in that moment, I wanted to keep Joan private. I wanted to keep what she meant to me hidden.
She's a mystery I've been trying to solve since we were little girls
, I could have said.
She's the great mystery of my life.

“I told you,” I said. “We won't be as close. It's been happening for a while. Joan has her own life. I have mine.”

“You've said things like that before.”

“I mean it this time.” And it was true, I did. “I can't help her anymore. I see that now. I can't help her anymore.”

Ray let go of my hand beneath the sheet. At first I thought he was angry, but he began to lightly rub my forearm, up and down, following a rhythm known only to him. It felt like the most tender gesture that had ever passed between us.

“I'm not lying,” I whispered.

“I know.”

“I'm done.”

“You have to be. Completely done, Cece. Not like the other times.”

I lay awake a long time after Ray had fallen asleep. What did it mean to be done with a person? What exactly did my life mean, without her? I touched my stomach, where another child might rest soon.

I used to think that if I told Ray what Joan had done for me so long ago, with my mother, he would understand what I owed her. But he would not. He would say we were children, that we had not known what we were doing. That things happened when you were young, that life went on, that I couldn't live forever in debt to a fifteen-year-old version of myself and a friend.

•   •   •

I
opened the
Chronicle
and flipped to the “Gadabout” section on Sunday morning and saw Joan, with Sid, smiling grandly from their perch above the Shamrock's pool. I stared at her long enough to burn a batch of pancakes.

Ray sniffed the air when he came down, still in his pajamas. I'd already tossed the pancakes into the trash, refolded the newspaper, and laid it by Ray's plate, already made a new batch of pancakes, heated the syrup in a saucepan on the stove.

“Everything's ready,” I said. “If you eat now it won't get cold.”

Ray kissed me on the cheek before he sat down. I cut a pancake into eighths and put it on Tommy's high chair tray.

“Mmm,” he said, and Ray and I looked at each other with the kind of pleasure unique to parents.
We
did this, the look said. There wasn't a Thomas Fitzgerald Buchanan before us, and now there was, and he did things that he hadn't done a week ago, like say “Mmm” when presented with a pancake.

Ray had surprised me when he'd told me to choose, between him, between our family, and Joan. I waited for him to surprise me again now. I sat down across from him and helped Tommy eat while Ray read the paper. He was a skimmer; he came to the women's section in no time. He turned the page as if a giant photograph of Joan had not confronted him. I felt strangely disappointed. But what had I wanted? For him to light a match and burn the paper? Ray wasn't going to make a spectacle. He was going to let Joan fade from our lives, so slowly you might not notice if you weren't paying attention.

He turned back to the front of the paper and went through it again more deliberately, as was his habit. What could he possibly be reading about that was more interesting than Joan? School desegregation, perhaps. Nuclear bombs, the Russians.

The truth was, I didn't care about school desegregation. I didn't care about the Russians. Joan did, or at least she pretended to: this winter she'd given me an article about disarmament she'd clipped from the paper. But who really knew what Joan cared about?

“Thank you for the pancakes,” Ray said, after he had finished the paper, and had turned his attention to his food, finished his short stack, like he did every Saturday and Sunday. He always waited to eat until he'd finished skimming the paper, which meant the pancakes weren't hot any longer, only warm. First he buttered them, every single one; then he poured syrup
around
the pancakes but not directly on them; then he sliced them into a dozen pieces; and then, finally, he ate. In fifty years he'd still be buttering and eating his pancakes in the same exact way. And I would be there to see it, every Saturday and Sunday for the rest of my life.

“I think I might meet JJ at the Houston Club today,” he said, and this did not surprise me, either. The Houston Club was a regular haunt, where men went to broker deals.

“And I'll be here, with Tommy. We'll go to the park, won't we, Tommy? We'll swim, when the sun's gone in a little bit.”

I would not surprise Ray. That was the new pact of our marriage. No surprises. The same version of yourself, day after day after day.

1957

A
week passed. I wondered if Joan would call. I hoped she'd call. I wondered if Mary would call. I wondered if I'd hear some news of Joan—from Ciela, from Darlene, from a neighbor. But I did not. Whenever I thought of Mary and all the things I'd said to her at Evergreen, I'd cringe, sing a little song to distract myself, convince myself that I had been correct, that Mary had needed to hear what I'd had to say.

What power did she have over me? I waited. Nothing happened. Gardenia Watson, who lived three streets over, did not call to tell me my Junior League membership had been rescinded for reasons she could not disclose. I did not receive a letter from the River Oaks homeowner's association informing me my hedges were not clipped to regulation height. I did not receive a letter
from Mary, listing all the things she and Furlow had done for me, page after page after page. I did not open the door to find Mary herself, begging me for help; only the postman, with a package too big for the mailbox.

I began to feel free. Magically, I was able to see us all as characters in another person's life. Mary as the sad old mother, trying to help a daughter who refused it. Furlow, the fading patriarch. Joan, the aging socialite, so high and drunk most of the time she didn't know which end was up. Sid, the wily businessman who thought he might sleep with Joan and get something else from her, too.

I saw it all. And I saw myself. An observer.

Separate from it all.

•   •   •

T
he next Sunday I invited JJ, Ciela, and Tina over for drinks and a cookout. “Just us?” Ciela asked. “We'd be delighted.”

And it was true, I didn't often entertain single families. Joan used to come over nearly every weekend night, and she wasn't interested in making small talk with a man like JJ. When I wanted to throw a party it was usually huge, like the Valentine's party I'd had earlier that year, where I'd tinted the pool water pink and invited twenty families for red gin and tonics and heart-shaped filets. The nannies had wrangled the children upstairs while the adults had gotten drunk by the pool.

This, by contrast, would be intimate and casual. I'd made potato salad that morning, had Maria make a lemon cake the day
before. A simple affair, but even simple affairs were twice as much work as you thought they would be.

When the doorbell rang that evening, I removed my apron, touched up my lipstick in the reflection of the stove, surveyed the kitchen.

“I'll get it,” Ray shouted, and I saw him go by the kitchen door in a blur, Tommy on his hip.

You're going to have fun
, I told myself.
You're going to enjoy yourself
.

•   •   •

A
nd I was having fun, after a few daiquiris. JJ had appointed himself bartender, which annoyed me a little, since it was Ray's house, but Ray didn't seem to mind so I resolved not to, either.

Ciela and I stood by the pool, smoking, watching Tina and Tommy play on the swing set. She'd brought her nanny, and so I was unexpectedly absolved of the responsibility of Tommy for the night.

“What's her day off?” I asked, gesturing toward the children.

“Tuesday. She'd prefer Sunday, church and all, but there's always something to do on Sunday, you know?”

I nodded.

“And,” she continued, “I have a little surprise. We're expecting again! Hopefully a little JJ. The doctor just called yesterday, though I already knew, of course.” She took a sip of her daiquiri, smoothed her palm over her stomach.

I'd known since she first walked in. She wore a figure-hugging
white sundress, no visible tummy yet, but she kept brushing her stomach with her fingertips, as only pregnant women do. And Tina was two, which was the age, around here, that you tried for another one.

“That's wonderful news,” I said. “Tina will be a wonderful big sister.” I couldn't think of any word besides “wonderful.”

Ciela laughed. “She'll be awful. She thinks the world revolves around her. And it does. That's the way of first children.” She paused, fanned her face with a napkin. “You and I were only children, so the world always revolved around us. Probably would have done me good to have a little brother or sister.”

“Probably,” I echoed. I'd never felt the world revolved around me. It revolved around my mother. And Joan.

I waited for Ciela to say that Joan was always like a sister to me.
Say it
, I thought,
say it
. But Ciela simply took a drag of her cigarette; when she spoke it had nothing to do with Joan.

“And a little sister for Tommy? When will she make an appearance?”

I patted my stomach, instinctively, and noticed that the thought of a second child didn't fill me with dread.

“Oh,” I said vaguely. “We're letting nature take its course. But hopefully sometime soon.”

I surprised myself with that admission; I could tell I'd surprised Ciela, too. I felt giddy with the possibility of it, suddenly. Another child! And maybe Ciela was right, maybe it would be a little girl.

Worrying about Joan had done my figure good: I wore high-waisted shorts, and a sleeveless top I'd knotted at my belly button.
“Skinny Minnie,” Ciela had said when she'd seen me, and Ray had looked at me appreciatively when I'd emerged from the bedroom.

Later, after we'd eaten our steaks—rare, all around—and the children had nibbled on hot dogs and large helpings of cake, and been taken upstairs by the nanny, we sat around the outside bar, lit only by the glow of tiki lanterns. I was drunk but not sloppy. I felt no pain. I was smoking my millionth cigarette, and in the soft light of the lanterns, everyone looked beautiful. Especially Ray, who kept touching my knee underneath the table. The heat, which had been a wet blanket all day, had turned cozy once the sun disappeared. There was even a faint breeze, though I might have been imagining it.

I could see glimpses of our neighbors' perfectly kept houses: A television set, a cat sitting in a window. A Spanish-tiled roof, an ivy-clad brick wall.

I felt good, is what I mean to say. Satisfied. I felt like Joan was very far away, doing what she would do with Sid Stark.
Her life is not my life
, I thought, and the phrase, pleasing in its simplicity, stayed with me as we sat there. I hadn't yet reached the point where I wanted Ciela and JJ to leave.

“Did you see the
Chronicle
?” Ciela asked.

I straightened, suddenly alert. I knew immediately. Not exactly what she would say, not precisely, but I knew from the tone of her voice it was going to be about Joan. I tried to send her a silent signal—
don't, don't, don't
.

Surely Ciela knew that Joan was a tense subject between me and Ray. I hadn't mentioned her the entire night. But perhaps she didn't know; perhaps she had no idea how deeply Joan
had threaded herself, or been threaded, by me, through our marriage.

“Skimmed it front to back,” Ray said, and JJ laughed. Ray was clueless. I thought Ciela was going to say that Joan's absence from the paper today was notable, because she hadn't been in the “Gadabout” column this morning—I had looked, first thing! My hackles rose. I tapped my cigarette on the ashtray. Ciela looked garish, too much eyeliner, and were those fake eyelashes?

Ray and JJ were talking about business, man stuff, and I wanted to hit them both. I needed to hear what Ciela had to say.

“I didn't,” I said, interrupting JJ. “I didn't get a chance.”

“It was a gigantic picture of Sid Stark! At the opening of a new place—the Hula Hoop.” Ciela laughed. “I wonder if the waitresses will wear grass skirts.”

“Stark?” Ray asked, stupidly, and I realized he had no idea who Sid was. I hadn't ever told him.

Ciela looked at me, then at Ray, and I could see it dawn on her: that I'd kept something from Ray. I felt ashamed; the guts of my marriage had spilled in front of her.

“Not from around here—he's in the gambling world,” JJ was saying. “Wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. I hear he's taken up with our Joan, lately,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Can't see that coming to any good.”

Our Joan? Men were so stupid. He was simply parroting what Ciela had told him; he wasn't capable of an original thought concerning Joan, or men and women, or all the complexities that existed between them.

I kept silent. Ray looked at me. He didn't seem angry, and for that I was grateful. But overriding my gratefulness was confusion: I hadn't seen any picture of Sid in the
Chronicle
that morning. Ciela must have been mistaken.

As if she'd read my mind, Ciela continued. “Joan was there, too.” I half wanted to slap her, for continuing the story and bringing Joan into it, front and center, and I half wanted to hug her. I ached for news. “Standing between the men, beaming. It must have been a hundred degrees but she isn't sweating at all.”

I nodded, trying to absorb and assemble this information, recast the events of last week in my mind.

Joan wasn't holed up in her house, high and drunk. Oh, she might have been high and drunk, but she was presentable enough to attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies. She was being seen; she was out and about.

“I guess things are still hot and heavy with Mr. Stark,” Ciela said.

“I wouldn't know,” I said, killing the conversation. My voice was harsher than I'd intended, but I wasn't sorry. I stubbed out my cigarette and leaned back in my chair. Now I wanted Ciela and JJ to leave.

JJ stared into his martini, and Ciela smoked her cigarette, and Ray—well, I didn't want to look at Ray. I heard a child scream upstairs, and I cocked my head toward the sound.

“That might be Tommy,” I said, rising, and Ciela stood in tandem.

“But it might be Tina.” And we were off.

•   •   •

W
hen we were in bed Ray turned to me, touched my breast, and I lay there and let him have sex with me. My mind was downstairs, in the trash can where Ray had already put the paper. My mind was with Joan, four streets over, or maybe she was out tonight, somewhere special with Sid. The Petroleum Club, cutting into a steak. By the pool at the Shamrock, laughing merrily while sipping champagne.

After Tommy was born I had no interest in sex for months. Not even the slightest urge. My mind was always with Tommy, then. But I never refused Ray. Not then, not now. Ray wasn't the kind of man to push himself on his unwilling wife, but I wanted him to think of himself as a man who was always desired.

Ray flipped me over, entered me from behind. I didn't particularly like this position. He'd not mentioned Joan after Ciela and JJ had departed. He'd acted like his normal self, chatting about a fishing trip he and JJ might take in August with some other men from Shell.

Now I wondered if he might be punishing me, unconsciously. It hurt, him behind me; I tried to change my position, lift my stomach up from the mattress, but he was pressed so hard against me I couldn't move an inch.

His mouth was on my ear, his hot breath, his smell of toothpaste and whiskey. And then he was done, the pressure of him, on top of me and inside me, suddenly gone.

He kissed my cheek, more tenderly than usual, and I knew: he
had been punishing me. But that was good. He had punished me and forgiven me. And now he could forget.

•   •   •

I
was elbow-deep in garbage when I found the paper down at the bottom of the kitchen trash, beneath all the old food from the past week. I'd felt such a satisfying sense of accomplishment when I was through cleaning the fridge, its shelves gleaming and orderly and clean.

Now I was on the floor, sitting next to a pile of noodles and wilted iceberg lettuce, clad in yellow plastic kitchen gloves, a smear of ketchup on my forehead from where I'd unthinkingly scratched an itch. The garbage overturned and open before me like a tunnel: I reconsidered.
Go to bed.
It was just a picture in the paper.

I couldn't.

And then there it was, dotted with eggshell and bacon grease.

I flipped through each page, first to last. I saw the picture nearly immediately, in the “Our City” column. No wonder I'd missed it. I don't think Joan had ever been in any section but the women's section. I laughed. Joan Fortier was either becoming less or more important, depending on how you looked at it.

Houston native and socialite Joan Fortier with friend Sidney Stark at the opening of a local Hawaiian-themed nightclub, the Hula Hoop, which promises “a genuine Hawaiian ambiance.”

That was all. Joan had gone to club openings before, a thousand of them.

I almost missed it: Sid's pinky ring, big and gold, on his finger—he was shaking someone's hand. The ring drew my attention to his hand, then to his arm; his arm drew my attention to a long, ugly scar.

I felt hot, too hot. I stood, clumsily, disrupting the pile of garbage near my knee.

I would have recognized that scar anywhere.

Joan had lied to me. The scar was proof. Had she ever been honest with me?

Sid was from the past, but not from Hollywood. What Joan had told me was a half-truth, one of many Joan had fed me over the years. But why lie about him?

It occurred to me, standing there in the detritus of our household, that Joan only fed me her lies because I wanted them. Because I was hungry for them. I would clean this mess and pray it didn't leave a stain. I would rinse off in Tommy's bathroom and return to bed, slip in beside my husband and forget Joan.

All those years ago, my mother dying, dead. But I had paid Joan what I owed her. I could give her no more. I would not let her rip me in two.