The Dinner Party

  A Night Out

  Tom and Sophie waited twenty minutes in a ripe sauna for a transfer at West Fourth Street. When at last the train rolled into the station, they boarded a car full of infernal heat. They went through the doors to the next car over, but it, too, lacked air-conditioning. The whole train did. There was a rancid smell. They returned to the first car. It seemed cooler there, somehow. But there was no escape.

  Slogging out of the subway, they passed a fat woman on the stairs, begging help from anyone willing. Tom absentmindedly rubbed the downy dollar bill folded in fourths between his fingertips. A found thing: He had been worrying it since they left Cobble Hill.

  “That one’s not well,” he said, eager to change subjects as they reached the street. “What was that on her face, a staph infection?”

  “Who was that woman?” Sophie asked.

  “The homeless woman?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh, you mean Clara,” Tom said. “Just now? Clara.”

  “Who is Clara?”

  “Clara? I’ve told you about her,” he said. “The analyst? Who they weren’t going to fire, but then they did?”

  Sophie made no reply. Tom, out of the corner of his eye, glanced at his wife who, head down, arms folded, walked at a slant as if into a winter wind. She was chilled. They were passing over a steaming subway grate, the panting crosstown bus shedding exhaust at curbside—and yet there was Sophie, chilled to the bone. Tom sighed. “Look,” he said a minute later. But she was no longer beside him.

  He turned. “Sophie?”

  She was ten feet away, at a dead stop on the sidewalk. He thought at first she was staring at him, boring into him. But no, her eyes weren’t looking at anything, really. She was in her own world.

  “Sophie,” he said.

  And that was when she turned and walked away.

  “Sophie!”

  What the hell? He stood there, uncomprehending, hot, annoyed: a man abruptly in the middle of something. She walked past the subway entrance, turned at the street corner and disappeared.

  It would be the lost minute, the hesitation that would cost him. When finally he started after her, turning at the corner where she had turned, he caught only a glimpse of her—white thighs, black boots—just as she was turning again. How had she gained ground so quickly? At the next corner, an absence of streetlights conspired with an abundance of trees to cast shadows everywhere. He squeezed past the cars packed tight at the curb and crossed over while calling out her name. Halfway down the block, he quickened his pace. He reached the corner in a run just as a taxi was pulling out, sweat pricking at him. He looked both ways. He looked behind him. She was gone.

  She watched from the top of the stoop as he ran past, then doubled back the way she came until she reached the bright entrance to the subway.

  Aside from a seated woman with a stroller, the northbound platform was empty. A busker’s song grew louder as she went down the stairs to the southbound. Here no train had come for a while, and all the riders, sunk in a torpor with drawn faces, were thickly assembled. But she couldn’t miss Clara, the analyst: knife-blade thin with jet-black hair, she pulled a paperback book from her leopard-print handbag. Sophie had spotted her just at the moment a shirtless man had had enough and yanked a final leg from his sweatpants. “Too hot!” he cried out, balling up the pants and throwing them down. “Wouldn’t happen in France!” Sophie slipped past him while everyone else stared. He wedged his feet inside his high-tops and, naked now but for his boxers, resumed a shuffle down the platform.

  As Clara, the analyst, turned from the man and began to read her book, Sophie drew up behind her.

  She didn’t know how she knew. She just knew. Tom wanted not to have seen her, then he shifted with a smile and a loud, “Clara!” Clara was surprised to see him, or acted so. Tom introduced his wife. Clara complimented Sophie’s handbag. Their little conference inconvenienced those trying to pass on the stairs, so they soon said goodbye. Clara continued down to the subway, and Tom and Sophie joined the crowd on the street. In the silence that followed, Sophie realized that this, too, was another thing she would have to endure and then assimilate into their reconciliation.

  The train pulled in. Those waiting to get on bottlenecked at the open doors, teased by the cold air, as the departing passengers stepped off. Clara was among the first to board. Sophie followed her with her eyes until she disappeared inside the car, then she strained for a final glimpse through the inadequate window. But for what? Greater understanding? Proof of her continuing right to come unhinged?

  They were having dinner with her parents. Stupid to have run away. They would be late now. All the same, just as the doors were closing, Sophie got on.

  Tom muttered to himself. He threw up his hands. For a moment he seemed determined in his stride, only to stop, turn, and stand, arms akimbo, before drifting back the way he’d come. He removed a tissue from his pocket—machine dried, like the dollar bill, and now soft and stiff—which collapsed completely at the first wipe across his brow. Tossing it into the bin at the corner and missing, he tried her cell phone again, but she wasn’t picking up.

  He returned to the subway. He used the last swipe on his card to go through the turnstile, glanced down the northbound platform (steadily filling up now) before taking the stairs to the southbound. He arrived just as the taillights of a departing train flashed red in the dark tunnel.

  They rattled along at top speed.

  The three boys with the boom box circled one another before the center doors, full of a nervous energy. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the handsome one, dark and lean in his overlong wifebeater, “ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the interruption.” The other two whooped and clapped to whip up a wearied crowd that was also a captive audience. Their clapping fell into a rhythm when the music started, and the first boy dropped to the floor to break-dance. When the shorty took center stage, he made a flying leap onto the support bar and hung there with so little effort, he might have remained horizontal all the way to Far Rockaway.

  Sophie stared past them. Clara, the analyst, was sitting beside a man who, having dragged a floor lamp onto the train with him, was holding it steady with a fist. The pull switch swung around and around as the car shuddered along the tracks.

  Okay, so she was prettier. That was settled. What else?

  On the subway again after that long struggle just to get to the Upper West Side—that was never part of the plan. What was next? Ordinarily Sophie was unsurprising, an Oberlin and a Harvard Medical School grad in her first year at Lenox Hill. An emergency-room doctor frequently on call who, when not on call or at the hospital, was with Tom, her husband. Familiar, predictable, dependable Sophie.

  The show ended with the shorty going around the car for tips. The train pulled into the station and the boys got off. A man boarded with a mountain bike, steadying himself on the support bar with his fingertips while holding his bike by the seat. The front tire appeared to leer at the standing lamp until, in tandem with the handlebars, it turned away in an attitude of contempt. By the time the train pulled out again, Sophie had taken a seat next to Clara.

  She really was pretty, wasn’t she? Even in profile. Cute little button nose, nice skin, dark, swanlike neck. She looked special. What should Sophie do now that she could do anything? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she should ask Clara a question. But what? Nothing too complicated. For instance: “Do you feel special?”

  Some errands a man runs without taking much notice of the world around him. The weather, or what’s outside the cab window. What’s outside the window is life, rioting life, but the man experiences only his own blind impatience to get past it all and on to the errand at hand. A man is a monster. He turns away from the crowds, the buildings, the bridges, as if this alone will speed things up, urging the cabbie on in all sorts of ways.

  That was how Tom traveled whenever he paid a visit to Melissa.

  Melissa was an aspiring actress (waiting tables to pay the bi
lls) who lived just over the bridge, in Queens. From Tom’s office in Midtown, it was a twenty-minute ride to Melissa’s one-bedroom, depending on traffic, during which time he failed to see a thing. In retrospect, it was like traveling by portal. One minute he was in his office on the eighteenth floor, then whoosh…he was on rumpled bedsheets taking Melissa from behind. Huddled with colleagues in the lobby of a law firm…whoosh…fucking Melissa on the sink of a dive bar in the East Village. Walking through Central Park with Melissa before she had to start her shift…whoosh…back on the bed he shared with Sophie, calling out hello when she came through the door.

  Something a man cares about even less than what’s out the window when he’s traveling by portal: the feelings of others.

  Now Tom was what was outside the window, as taxi after taxi passed him by on Columbus. He was no longer traveling by portal; he was going around in a circle. A circle of hell, in this heat.

  Still, he noticed as little as he did in the portal, only now it wasn’t pleasure he was after. It was an old perception of himself. Tom wasn’t just some animal on the street. It was never his right to go around fucking whomever he wanted to fuck. He was a married man. His marriage vows had bound him to his wife and to the world of decent men. There were just some things decent men did not do.

  “Hey, it’s me,” he said into his cell, planting a foot on top of a fire hydrant at the same instant a fire truck blew past. “Look, it’s not her. The woman you’re thinking of wasn’t a colleague. She worked for a caterer. Call me.”

  She hadn’t wanted any of the details when he came clean, and he obliged.

  He thought it would end in one of two ways. She’d hate him and leave. Or she’d forgive him and stay. He never imagined it would somehow be both.

  Tom ended the call, looked off, and ran the cuff of his shirtsleeve over his sweaty brow. The guy on the bucket outside the bodega was looking at him. Tom sensed it and went back to worrying the dollar bill in his pocket.

  “Could be you,” the man said.

  There was no mistaking who the man was addressing. “Pardon?” said Tom.

  “Could be you,” the man repeated. Then he pointed.

  Behind Tom, on the the window of the bus-stop shelter, was an ad for the current Powerball. The jackpot was up to $347 million. Could be Tom. Why not?

  “Sure,” Tom said. “Could be any of us.”

  “Not me,” said the man. “Never been lucky.”

  When the company he worked for had announced the first round of layoffs, they’d let go of one analyst out of every five. That had seemed enough to make a second round unlikely, but a few months later they’d let go of the same percentage, only now from a smaller pool. His colleague Clara had been part of that round. Tom had held on until the fifth. He’d always been lucky.

  He looked down the street both ways once more, then walked up to the corner and peered in all four directions. The hot white lights of the taxis came at him unevenly, as if the streets were wilting. He gave up and went inside a bar.

  He put his elbows down and gestured to the bartender. The stale smell of old beer, the stadium array of bottles and the booths sunk in darkness in back had had the effect of reminding him of illicit afternoons with Melissa. He did not want to be reminded. He wanted to be out of the portal and headed to dinner with Sophie, meeting Sophie’s parents in a pleasant little place on the Upper West Side. When the bartender came forward, Tom ordered a beer and then asked the name and address of the bar. There was a time when the very last thing he would have done when entering a place like this one was text the details to his wife.

  The bartender set the drink down delicately and whisked away the damp money. She made change with one hand while pouring seltzer with the other.

  A single room on the small side, the bar was intimate, with crowded red walls dimly lit by votive candles. It had the effect of a boudoir. Above the bar sat suspended a distressed mirror raked at an angle. Glancing up at it, Sophie could make out most of what was going on behind her. A man at the far left kept moving in and out of the frame, depending on whether he was talking (sitting back) or listening (leaning forward). In the opposite corner, at a small, round table for two, Clara sat alone before a golden glass of wine, her back to the plate-glass window and the Brooklyn street. Sophie had to lean to the left to see more than her hand on the stem of the wineglass.

  The bartender came back with Sophie’s change and set it down on the bar, but not before soaking up all that dampness with a disintegrating white rag.

  So this was it. Alone in the dark, drink in hand, waiting for a stranger. She could see the allure.

  Now he was calling, texting. So attentive.

  Another round of brief and frantic texts came in. She could delete the voicemails. but the texts were harder to ignore. She slipped off the bar stool and stepped outside.

  Hello, Tom

  S! where are you? What happened? Did you get my vm?

  Where are u

  In a bar. Can you meet me or ill come to you

  What did you order?

  Just a beer but don’t have to drink it just tell me where you are

  In a bar with a beer. Well, she thought. Not that attentive.

  Tom’s phone went dark; Sophie had popped up out of hiding and just as quickly disappeared again. Nevertheless, he sat glued to the bar for the next twenty minutes, trying to engage her, cajole her, coax her back into an exchange so that he might have some idea how this nightmare would end. The in-laws were waiting.

  The volume on the anthem overhead grew noticeably louder midsong. The door opened and another party came in. The bartender was joined by a bar back, and a waitress began going around with a cork tray, taking orders for shots. She asked Tom if he needed anything. “No, thank you,” he said. She smiled politely as she turned away. “Actually,” he said. “Shot of Jameson, please. Put it on my tab.” She went away, and Tom stood up. The seats along the bar, once so plentiful, had nearly filled up now, and Tom felt himself to be in a different bar altogether than the one he had entered. He leaned his stool against the bar as a way to protect his seat—he was debating whether to pay up and resume his search or wait around with another beer—and went outside into the terrible city heat once more, to search in vain for Sophie. The feeling of dislocation continued when he noticed that the front of the bar—really, the whole building before which he stood—was covered in scaffolding he didn’t remember seeing on the way in. He had to look hard for the name of the bar, as Sophie would if she ever arrived, and when at last he found it, obscured behind some orange netting, it was not the name the bartender had given him and that he in turn had texted to Sophie. On his way in again, he was held up by at least a dozen people entering at the start of a bachelorette party.

  He took up his seat but found himself pressed in on both sides. He shot down his Jameson and resolved to get out of there. He got the bartender’s attention, but instead of asking for his tab, he questioned him about the name of the bar. Shrugging nonchalantly, the bartender offered the correct name this time. Tom asked to settle up.

  The bartender returned with his credit card, saying it had been declined.

  “Declined? No, it can’t be,” he said, yet he was already reaching for another card.

  That one came back declined, too, and when he searched his billfold, he found he had no cash.

  In the past, when Sophie discovered that someone she knew was having an affair, she expressed a sincere shock. Then Tom had his affair, and, perhaps to justify his behavior, he didn’t just grovel; he pressed on her news of the countless others having affairs, the colleagues and acquaintances, and the friends they shared in common. She began paying closer attention. At the hospital, nurses were having flings with doctors, EMTs with orderlies, and administrators with pharmaceutical reps. Old high school friends back home were divorcing at a clip on account of these same shenanigans. How naive she had been. Within a few weeks, Tom’s affair had convinced her that behind the decorum of everyday life,
everyone was fucking everyone else. The whole world was conducting one continuous orgy, and the only one fool enough to play by the rules was Sophie.

  She had wanted to play by the rules. Hadn’t she? The rules kept things safe and orderly.

  She watched through the window as her husband’s mistress stood and shook hands with the man she was there to meet, perhaps, eventually, to fuck. What had Sophie—innocent, predictable Sophie—been missing out on all this time? What was it like to fuck a stranger? She wondered. She was not herself. She did not ordinarily act vindictively, as she had over the last ten minutes as she stood outside the bar where Clara had led her, canceling their shared credit cards. Tom was without any means of his own anymore, and now he was cut off; she had separated herself from him at last. She should have done it a month ago. Who was Tom when his wife disappeared and his money dried up and his lover was meeting another man in a bar?

  Not her problem. She went back inside and ordered another martini.

  Tom’s father-in-law left his wife sitting alone at a table for four, walked six blocks to a crowded bar on Columbus, and paid to release his son-in-law from the strange bind he was in. Sid was a big man with a small fortune, ill disposed toward the unforeseen, who never appreciated having to leave behind his cocktail. Tom had been trying to win his favor from the first day he met him.