“How do you know?” Noah had asked him, three years earlier.
“I just know,” he’d said, tapping his breast pocket, “I know it right here.”
Noah’d teased him. “Well, that rules out being president.”
“Bet he didn’t like that,” Jane said.
His somberness had seemed almost touching to Noah that day, but then Owens added, “A lot of the best people die young. And a lot more should’ve. Like if I were Bob Dylan, I’d rather have died while I was still in love with Joan Baez, you know, and she was still beautiful.”
“But he’s not Dylan,” Mary said, “and when he’s thirty, he won’t want to be dead either.”
“And she is too still beautiful,” Jane insisted. “We saw her, Noah. At the nursery. She was buying geraniums. Red ones.”
And Mary was right: at the time of the party, they heard no more about the best people dying young.
Noah Kaskie wanted a date for the party. He wished his sister were around. He’d long known the advantages of having a pretty sister, and with her it would be fun. But she was in the Peace Corps now, in Togo, Africa, building latrines.
“Yup, the big three-oh,” Owens said, slapping a hand on what was beginning to become a belly.
Noah and he were sitting at the Café Pantheon. A woman was reading at a table near them, a glass of wine in her left hand and a cup of coffee by her right. Though she was small, there was nothing girlish about her. She seemed entirely adult, alternating beverages, a pencil behind her right ear. Despite this activity, there was a neatness to her, as if her bookbag, by the leg of her chair, contained many compartments. Noah recognized her first by her trademark earrings, longer than her hair. He had never seen that before Louise. It seemed to defy everything he had absorbed from years of listening to his mother and sister: big earrings went with long hair, studs with short. This earring hung long and slender, a good inch below her white hair.
“That’s my postdoc over there,” he whispered. This was the first time he’d seen her outside the lab, and he’d noticed, not her beauty (he found her odd-looking), but her earring. And her self-administration.
“Why are we whispering,” Owens whispered back. “Hey, have you ever thought of asking her out?”
“No, not really.” Noah hadn’t until just this minute. “And I can’t. It’d be wrong.”
“I bet she’d really like you,” Owens said. “I’ve got an idea. You could go over and ask her if she’d like to come to my birthday party. That’s not a date. It’s a party.”
She was biting her nails, as she often did in the lab. She somehow made this look intelligent, a purposeful woman’s anxiety honed down to a delicate activity.
After Owens left, Noah did wheel over and invite Louise to the party, knowing full well she wouldn’t go. So he was stunned when she said yes—a result that mildly thrilled but did not altogether please him.
He didn’t have tenure. You couldn’t date people in your lab. That was not only improper but probably illegal. For another thing, Rachel, the crystallographer from upstairs, had picked up the invitation from his desk and toyed with it. “Black tie,” she’d said. “Sounds kind of fun.” Kaskie most definitely did not own a tuxedo. The one suit Kaskie did own was dark, and several friends had suggested he could “probably get away with it.” Or, Rachel explained seriously, he could rent evening clothes. But Owens in a tuxedo? He had never seen his friend in anything but jeans.
Olivia and Owens moved together in the twilight room. He stood at the dresser, picking out socks. The black garment bag with his tuxedo hung on the closet door. This reminded him of his parents dressing to go out on a Saturday night—the impending dread of the baby-sitter, hurried happy tension in the house while it was still light outside. His parents would drive away in the car his father most recently fixed, a long rose from the garden on the seat.
“Oh, no,” Owens said. “I didn’t invite Pony.”
“Call her now,” Olivia said.
He found his small book in his jeans pocket and sank to the futon to dial.
Her friends Karen and Dave weren’t invited either. Olivia almost said something. Now she could get them added too, but Karen would refuse out of pride. She’d know other people had been invited before.
“Pony, hi,” he said, standing in his underwear. He gave clear directions, not only to the hotel but where to park. “Just tell them your name when you go in.”
His mother and dad wouldn’t be there, though he wished again they would be. But his mother wanted to see the lilacs of her childhood one more time.
Olivia stood in the closet, putting on a black silk dress that seemed to Owens a little bit too shiny. But Olivia always looked worse dressed up, and he shook his head. He’d asked her to do one thing for this party, and that was to get something good to wear. She was tall, as tall as he was, and could look great in clothes. He should have bought her something.
Olivia lifted up the price tag from the sleeve and bit it off with her teeth. “I guess you don’t like it,” she said. Now she didn’t want him to see how much it had cost.
Owens had not had money for very long, but he’d had it long enough so that things which had seemed nice before didn’t seem nice at all now. Things to eat, things for the house, things to wear. If he had to characterize this quality of discrimination, he would have said he thought he had good taste. He would vehemently deny that this was connected with any notion of “class,” a word he never used and that in fact gave him the creeps. It was nevertheless true that more details occupied his conscious life now than when he was twenty. Italian track lights, nurseries for old roses. He had even begun to notice doorknobs.
Even so, since he and Olivia would wear Levi’s and tee shirts ninety-nine out of one hundred nights, it seemed to him that the hundredth should be wand-tipped.
But whatever Olivia was wearing, Owens took pleasure in his own clothes. He opened the drawer where he kept cufflinks. The iron studs were there, in a little box, with an old note from Olivia, a scrap of yellow paper that said LOML.
There was once when it was earlier, when Olivia was new to love and unafraid, drunk with the first arrogance of feeling, the conviction that all joy is matched and somehow protected. The LOML days: Love of My Life. Owens had come home late from work one night and found she’d safety-pinned that piece of paper to his pajamas.
On the way to the party, Owens slowed the car to show her the mansion where his biological mother had grown up. Eliot had found the address, reporting that the house had changed owners several times since then.
“Have you ever been inside?” Olivia asked. By then he had been a guest in many mansions.
“No, I never have. I have no idea who lives there.”
His mother had been an only child. Her parents, who had retired to Arizona, were now dead. “They probably wanted their daughter to marry some rich guy and go out dancing every night.” Owens laughed, hollowly but with a rind of bitterness, because fog was coming in and they were on their way to a party and they were rich.
Even as a child, Owens had considered birthdays a waste of time and bargained with his parents to give him the money instead. He turned off the ignition and waited before getting out. “I was just thinking there probably aren’t many people my age who’ve never had a birthday party or a surprise party or, really, any kind of party. And now I’m wrecking my streak.” He touched her hand. When they stepped out, the cool air uplifted their breath and the lit palace tilted vertical over them.
He’d spent some money and some time on this small attempt at happiness. He’d taken more than a day on the invitation list. Frank had not RSVPed.
Olivia smiled. “So here we are. Happy birthday.”
The first people he saw in the ballroom were his two cooks, who were wearing what he recognized as his old clothes. Eliot Hanson was talking to Albertine. The guys from the team at work looked a lot different in formal clothes. Owens glanced at the band in the corner, the lit chandeliers, the high
windows reflecting the winks of table candles, spots of flowers. The five bald men in tuxedoes sat huddled at one table. Nobody at Genesis went to many parties like this; that Owens knew for a fact. With one hand in their pockets, the other holding drinks, they looked even younger here, shier, but they were laughing. He smiled with a tender, custodial feeling. As the band started a hopping tune, he thought of Jane, jumping up and down the way she did with her legs straight, never bending her knees. It was a jump a woman would never do. She did it whenever she got something from luck: out of the blue, she called it. She had jumped when she saw the coat Noah had bought her. She thought her out-of-the-blue quotient was way below average. He wished she were here right now, but it was late already, who would take her home, people were drinking. No, he liked the thought of her safe in the bungalow. His cooks, Susan and Stephen, were talking now with the accountant, while Albertine’s hands made excited rectangles. They were all having a good time. He felt glad, watching.
Noah Kaskie did not buy or rent a tuxedo. He hated anything to do with dressing rooms. His sister could sew, and most of his life she’d tailored down his clothes for him. But Michelle was in Africa, and he wasn’t about to call his mother. So when he picked up Louise, he was wearing his one dark suit, which dated from a growth spurt not long after his bar mitzvah. She was waiting outside for him, in a small black dress that somehow made her limbs seem nicely joined. Although she still didn’t seem beautiful, Noah liked to look at her. There was something coherent about her body.
But when they entered the party, it was immediately obvious that he was the only man in a suit. After twenty minutes he’d spotted two more, both sorry people, one a kid with acne and the other probably a caterer. Better to be wearing a jeans jacket, he thought, like the tall woman with cornrows who’d thrown one over a long white dress. He’d always thought he didn’t need clothes, he was an academic scientist. Now he remembered what his sister said about having been a bridesmaid. “You get this awful little fuchsia dress you’re too big for and you think, Well, she’s my friend and I love her and of course I can wear this. But you forget you walk into a room full of other people, even interesting other people, and that’s the only way they’ll see you.”
“Do you know many people here?” Louise asked him.
“Hardly anybody.” He picked up their cards and vaguely scanned the crowded room for their table.
“Good. I like parties where I don’t know anyone.” She was always saying something that yanked him back for a double take.
Most people were standing and talking or wandering around, while waiters, also in dinner clothes, served champagne. Kaskie wanted to find his table, fast.
“Is something wrong?”
She always sounded ironic and possibly critical. “Nothing,” he said. “Just a lot of butts in my face.”
“Should I leave?”
“Oh, no. It’s only—I’m one of the only men here who’s not in a tuxedo.”
She made a dismissive sound with her mouth. “People spend too much money on clothes,” she said with authority.
If this is a date, Noah thought, it isn’t going particularly well.
I’m flying back tomorrow, Albertine reminded herself, with another sip of wine. She was sitting at her assigned place, adding up the money it had cost to come and thinking, I have so much to do. The drudges in her class were probably working right now, up in their garrets, windows open, flute music ribboning through.
“You have to come,” Owens had said on the telephone. But now that she was here, she wondered. She sat, chin on fist, talking amiably to the people on either side of her. To her left was a cute guy in a wheelchair, who ate everything with great relish; on her right was a man who seemed to be Owens’ accountant. Olivia, whom Owens had described long-distance as not that serious, stood next to him on the dance floor, like a wife. What she was wearing, Albertine noticed with a pouting satisfaction, made her look clumsy. Big. Albertine sighed, accepting her fish from the young waiter, who was beginning to seem like the most interesting man here. The guy in the wheelchair had finished her soup, and she now handed him the plate of pasta directly. It wasn’t just the money; it was the time: eleven hours, round trip, in the air. And the day lost to shopping with Ash. Albertine didn’t just happen to have something in her closet suitable for spring black tie. Ash trooped her through the good stores, where they discovered they’d come a month and a half too late. The spring selection was all but gone. Finally, Ash plucked something off a small rack in Bergdorf’s. “Show a little,” he said, slapping Albertine’s flat bust. The price was impossible, but Ash promised to take it back the day she got home. “They’ll credit your card before you even get the bill. Just don’t spill,” he’d said. And now I owe him a favor, Albertine thought, some little gift. She sighed in the exhaustion of befriending the rich. Gifts from the rich were never free. But Albertine didn’t seriously consider an alternative. She was a young woman perfectly adjusted to her society.
Just then, Owens lifted her hair off her neck. “I like your dress very much.” He led her to the edge of the floor near the windows, where they danced. They kissed for a while—she didn’t know how dark it was—and he was pulling her embarrassingly close.
Then a man with a clipboard tapped Owens’ shoulder, and he said, “Oh, excuse me for a minute. I’ve got to get my sister in.”
Albertine then had to make the painful walk all alone across the floor, as if this were a runway and everyone watching was deciding whether to clap or boo.
Owens had forgotten to put Pony’s name on the list, and she’d been turned away at the door. But she kept telling them she was Colleen Owens, Pony, his own sister, and as a small group of waiters gathered, Eliot Hanson noticed and intervened.
“Help yourself to everything,” Owens gestured, throwing an arm around her, once she was securely inside, realizing only at that moment that there would be no place set for her at any table.
“They told me I couldn’t get in if I wasn’t on the list. Hmph,” she said, looking back over her shoulder.
He put her down in his own seat, next to Olivia.
As they passed her table, Julie whispered to Peter, “There he is. Should I go and introduce myself?” She had a mild voice with an easy laugh in it. She was often the first and the last one laughing.
“Man, it’s incredible—the guy invites you and they’re not even here.”
Julie had come to the party just because she wanted to so much. She’d meant to explain to Mary ahead of time, but whenever she was about to bring it up, she lost her nerve. She thought that when she saw Mary and Jane here, they might assume Peter had somehow been invited. She made Peter promise to be mysterious. But it was even stranger now that they weren’t here. Now, Julie thought, she could never tell them.
Intrigued by the idea of meeting Owens, she felt a little evil bringing Peter along on her adventure. If tonight did lead to something, she didn’t see that Peter really had to know. Julie considered herself to be near the end of her dating years. It seemed appealing and somehow proportional now to date a famous man. It would be something to have done, to put in the box that was her youth, for her daughters to take out and examine, as they ransacked the dress-up trunk for her hats and gloves and fine pointed shoes. They would find an old magazine cover with Tom Owens’ face on it.
“Guy wants to meet you something bad,” Peter said. For him, too, there was something not altogether unpleasant in the famous man’s enchantment with his girlfriend.
“Well, that wouldn’t be too hard. He could come and introduce himself. I feel like someone at a Gatsby party.”
“Albertine, hey, how’re you doing,” Peter said. “Julie, this is my cousin Al.”
A narrow-shouldered girl in a sleek dress sat down, gracefully arranging her limbs. They talked, full of animation, and Julie saw Peter a little differently. She was uncomfortable here, but he eased back in his chair, looking straight at his cousin, talking about some old woman who’d taken care of
them, whom they both called Tante Elise.
Without moving her head, Albertine kept track of Owens’ movements, his arm around Olivia again. Oh, well, she thought, I’ve done it and he’ll appreciate it and now it’s over with. Too much of her life was a matter of getting things over with.
Olivia and her cousin were fighting in hushed voices, as they had a hundred times before.
“He invites her neighbor but not them?”
“Huck, it’s his party. I can’t help who he asks. He probably thought Jane’s too young.”
“Well, what about Mary?”
“They’re not that close, Huck. Besides, most people don’t invite their ex-girlfriends.”
“I’ve met Julie and Peter a bunch of times with her; now what am I going to say?”
“I don’t know. Say hello, I suppose.”
Huck laughed in alarming spurts, so hard he began to choke and Olivia had to slap his back.
The tall woman with cornrows had shed her jeans jacket and was now hopping, slapping the dance floor. When she reeled past, she winked at Owens. She was a clarinetist. She’d played once on his bed, beautifully and nude.
A couple waited in line to talk to Owens. “Shep and Lamb,” he cried, when the crowd cleared and they stepped up to say goodbye. Seeing them dancing together across the room had given a deep accent to his pleasure. They had to leave now, something about the baby-sitter, but they wanted to have him to dinner. Yes, of course he’d come, he said, bending down to kiss Lamb, whose gown had stars on it, like Merlin’s.
“But before you leave,” he said, “you’ve got to do one thing for me.” Trailing behind them, he found the photographer sitting next to Noah, eating cake. He made the man stand up, napkin still in his collar, and take a picture of the three of them: Owens, Shep and Lamb.
Noah and Louise had discovered that the waiter controlled a great store of ice cream, which he now brought out in stemmed silver goblets. Noah was drinking his third glass of champagne.