Life of the Party

I hadn’t been living there long when I began to disappear for days at a time. Every Sunday, they had dinner together, and invited me to join, but the thought shook through me with a bitter, cold chill- what would I even say? When I first went to stay with them, my uncle and the woman who was not my aunt cooked for me every day. I think that they must have felt bad, thinking somehow, as families do, that what had happened couldn’t possibly have been my fault. But it was. And I knew it. So I didn’t eat any of the stuff they left out for me: the watercress salad, the whole-grain waffles, surreptitiously left out for me the way one feeds a stray cat, eclipsing oneself so as to give it privacy. The steaming mugs of herbal tea, the crepes stuffed with warm nutella- it disgusted me, made me want to throw up, and usually, if I ate any of it, I did. So I began to avoid the kitchen altogether, easing myself limb by limb out the bathroom window, pretending to be liquid smooth, like a shadow folding over on itself. And they never saw me or came after me, at least as far as I knew. And if they did, they never told me about it.  

I came to them at first because I had been stuck in Belgium for a few weeks, having lost my passport somehow during a long and painful weekend of drinking and debauchery, and I didn’t exactly have many options. I suppose they had figured that because I was young and a girl that I would babysit or do the dishes, that the worst I might do was light candles in the bathroom and drink a bottle of wine, or cry myself to sleep maybe. I’d been kicked out of the Ivy League prison in which I’d discovered drugs, too fucked up to care by then. I’d lost most of my friends anyway- that or they’d graduated. And I’d tried to sleep with a professor once, over some stupid miscommunication about a couple of vials of ether gone missing from the chem lab. So it was no wonder they’d kicked me out, even though I was barely passing any of my classes. A persistent liability, is what they’d said. 

Really, they had suggested I drop out, after the girl tried to swallow a razor blade in the communal bathroom of her campus dorm. I’m in love with you- she had said it once the night before, passing me by at a party like a fluttering insect in the night- I’m sorry, take me back. I turned slowly, just in time to catch her sullen, yellow eyes before she was swept up in the crowd, moving like a tidal wave towards the patio, where someone had set down a keg of beer. 

I’d already met with the disciplinary committee by then, already admitted to everything. Her soft, hiccuping sounds of protest, the wetness between her legs conflicting with the welling in her eyes, the feeling that if I held anything back, I might burn up at the sight of her. There was a psychiatrist there, his face contorted in a painful display of pity and fear. I hadn’t meant to hurt her; she kissed me first, the day before; she gave me the ketamine and took her shirt off in the empty office of the abandoned dorm. But it made little difference. Besides, I wasn’t interested in staying. I had some money and was planning on using my family as an excuse to get to Europe. Except once I got there, I saw no one until I ran out of money. Which brought me to Pierre-Henri and Adrienne, who cooked me food because they knew only the parts of the story that I had typed up in an e-mail, and probably wouldn’t have heard the rest, even if I tried. 

They had only been married a few years, and I’d met her just a handful of times. Her features were sharp and her skin shone tightly against her face, as though she were a metal. She wore big, airy clothing in desert colors; olive brown and azur blue and sand beige. She sucked her cheeks in when she saw me coming at family reunions, Christmas parties. Perhaps she knew that I knew that they’d been fucking long before he left my aunt. Not that I particularly cared. My uncle was as angry on the outside as most men are on the inside, and he wore it like a blanket of heat wrapped around his short, squat body. He would kiss the side of my face forcefully and with a painful puckering sound, mash his lips into my jaw and say mwahhh. He was the only person with a hyphenated name that I knew that went by his full name only. Everyone called him “Pierre-Henri” and cashiers called him monsieur. The only memory that I had of him was of being helped into some sort of princess getup as a child, gazing up at him through the collar of my sweater as he pulled it up above my head. The way I remember it, we were alone. He watched me as I danced around the picnic table, barefoot and panting. He watched me as one does another adult, with apprehension and maybe something else. 

I watched him now, barking and salivating into an old flip phone, pacing around on the back patio. I’d come back in through the front door, sure I’d find the house empty. But the French inexplicably seem to refuse to pack lunches, or to spend money on any food other than groceries, and so he came home during the day to eat whatever had been left out for me. His blue and white checkered shirt had rectangular wrinkles on it, as though he’d just taken it out of the package. I could see him clenching and unclenching his buttocks as whoever it was on the other line put him on hold. I imagined him saying: “don’t you know who I am!” I supposed he felt entitled to be angry all the time, because his wife had left him for an Italian architect with two perfect daughters who spoke Swahili and took pictures swaddling spindly orphans in their white, freckled arms. I heard him say: “But I told you it was a half day! How many fucking times? Just get in the car before I come find you.” So he was talking to Adrienne then. I pictured her puckered mouth and slippery cheekbones hollowed out by the deep breath she was probably taking. She seemed to always pretend that he wasn’t yelling at her. 

The house is easy enough to imagine: a suburban house like any other on this side of the equator, with two bedrooms and a third that was being used as someone’s “office” but really just held boxes of Christmas decorations and baby clothes. There was a back patio and a carefully manicured yard, with a fence so tall it could have marked a national border. The front door gave straight into the kitchen, and on the marble countertop was a half eaten apple. The apple struck me as an afterthought- they increasingly appeared to forget that I lived with them still, and when they remembered, they left chocolate biscuits or fruit to stave me over. I took a bite of the apple; a cold, acidic taste filled my mouth. I wondered for a moment if Pierre-Henri had poisoned me, or if perhaps I was having a stroke. But the watering of my eyes and the unmistakable bitterness of bile drove me to the sink, where I threw up the last three whiskey-gingers I had purchased for nine euros each. “Damn it!” Through the kitchen window, I watched Pierre-Henri turn sharply and squint, peering into the relative darkness of the kitchen. From the gaping mouth and searching eyes, lip curled at the right corner, I could tell that he hadn’t seen me yet. I wasn’t too worried about him though; still drunk and high from a string of nights spent in the city, I felt calm, implacable, as one strangely does in the most inopportune moments. I turned on the garbage disposal. The sink made a coughing noise, and the animal smell of vomit swept through the room like a nuclear blast. I put the now soft, brown apple in my mouth and climbed the stairs one by one, gripping the banisters to keep my head from spinning. 

My routine was the same; once in my room at the top of the stairs, I would dig up the palette of pain pills I’d purchased in Belgrade and wash a few down with whatever bottle was sitting around. Sometimes, I brushed my hair and picked at the flaring sores on the corners of my lips. I ate the butter crackers that I’d stolen in bulk from the flight to Paris, dispersing crumbs in the tangled, moth-bitten sheets. I masturbated with just my fingers, allowing violent, fleeting images of writhing limbs and long, slippery hair to nudge me along. When I came I thought about children- my children- scratching impatiently at the walls of my womb, rubbing their noses against my knees. I looked out the window as one does, waiting for something to happen, wanting to bear witness in some way. 

I never felt like I was able to construct a complete picture of the city and its environs. By the time I left the house, I’d have taken a couple of my uncle’s pain pills and a half a bottle of old French whiskey, and was vaguely aware of the drawn-out journey cab drivers took into the city, careful to avoid the sprawling encampments of chattering, curious Mediterranean travelers and the brothels that rimmed the city gates. Drinking, it seemed, obfuscated my sense of proprioception, of locating myself in geographic space and sometimes time as well. I never could read a map, and relied dangerously on others to lead me around. I took taxis from warehouse to the occasional bar or club, sometimes hopping in the back of someone’s hiccuping Peugeot, pretending like it was the 60s and I was on my way to Woodstock with fellow spiritual seekers. The people at those parties were all the same, and I took great pains not to look at them too closely. I didn’t want to recognize them next time, or to think about them somewhere down the line. The girls always asked to do my makeup, ran their fingers through my hair when I rested my head on their bare, glistening thighs. Sometimes they brought me drinks: vodka and Diet Coke, pineapple juice and tequila- and asked me questions to which it seemed they already knew the answers: will you come back out tomorrow? Can I come visit you in Los Angeles? Will you go back to school? They had names I didn’t care to pronounce, wore bracelets with brightly colored plastic beads that seemed to suggest a zest for life that only small-town suburban teenagers embrace nowadays. We danced outside mostly, where it was cooler and people didn’t look so much like props in a haunted house. We lay on the ground in the parking lot, watching the sun rise over the steaming paper mills and oil refineries in the distance. In the bleaching, ghostly early-morning glare, they all looked like paper dolls to me. I wanted to tear them to pieces, to make them fade with the flush of amphetamines from my quivering, exhausted limbs. They always wanted to follow me home. I took a cab alone and promised to call if I ever returned. 

Girls back home didn’t love me in the same way, but I also did things differently there, hooked up with division three athletes-boys- and wore makeup that made my eyes watery and small. It’s true what they say about American girls: that they are repressed and prudish and bound by scrap-book dreams of Vera Wang wedding dresses and careers cut short by good old-fashioned romance. Besides, I didn’t want the same things then. In my first year of college, I gravitated viscerally towards the inner-city girls, the gritty, angry girls with shadows in their hair and little tattoos like burrowing insects in the crook of their arms. We called ourselves something, to make it clear we were a gang of some sort, and kissed triumphantly at the end of each night, standing on bar-tops and picnic tables. I took classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, and sometimes early on Friday, and spent every other night wandering around campus with a bag of cheap wine in hand, metal canisters of nitrous clinking in my pockets like so many magic beans. I began to stay up later and later, venturing off campus into the local dive bars, dark and stale and humming with the sounds of middle America. I met a few older guys- engineers who worked on music festival stages- and started shooting up on the weekends, hanging out in overgrown backyards in Rancho, smoking weed even though it made me feel swollen shut and speechless. Everywhere, the people are the same: the cheap dyed hair like the crests of tropical birds, brown teeth ground down to little stubs, hands that never stay clean. Paris, like L.A. county, gathers its brightest, whitest people by the water, and as you walk further and further out from the center, through the still, dusty streets, past the spray-painted houses and exposed copper pipes, the people grow darker and more furtive, their animal eyes flashing as though faced with a forest fire. These are the people with whom I liked to party; they gathered in empty warehouses or open parking lots, ghost faces twitching and contorting, gnashing teeth and dark, open eyes pulsing with amphetamines, phantom limbs moving mechanically to the music. Amongst them I was exotic, mysterious, eclipsing myself behind my refusal to share intimate details and local addresses. I could spend days in these empty, boarded-up towns, smoking meth on someone’s hardwood floor, eating candy and ice cream and biting my nails. I pretended to be asleep while skinny girls wrapped their arms around me, slid their fingers down the front of my shorts while their boyfriends slept in the other room, whispered hoarsely in a language only yearning women know. 

I came quickly and hard, collapsing on the bed with a thump that undoubtedly gave away my presence, trying to slow my breathing with a hand pressed up against my throat. The doorbell rang. Adrienne always rang the doorbell when she came home, as if to alert the entire house to her presence- I’m home! I could hear her sharp plastic heels clicking and scratching on the kitchen tiles. Her voice warbled with wrinkled desperation: “Pierre-Henri? Are you here?” Then, the shushing sound of the sliding door, the punctuated silence of a perfunctory embrace, the saccharine lilt of their voices lulling me to sleep as though I were a child, sleeping on my mother’s fur coat beneath the dinner table, waiting for the grown-ups to bring me home. 

I guess they must have been calling for me for awhile, because Noam, the youngest, was home from soccer practice, and I could hear him shouting my name as though he were standing beside me. When I managed to crack open my sticky eyes, I could see his long, lithe fingers curling underneath the door, his eyelashes catching the filmy light. I opened my mouth to answer- the corners of my lips split like desiccated soil: “the door’s not locked.” He leapt up from the ground in one movement, as though I could see his effortless fear, and jiggled the doorknob, preparing me for his entry. Never mind now, it was too late. And besides, he was not a child- almost fifteen- and we were basically cousins. Noam, a Jewish name, after some grandfather who had survived the concentration camps only to die on his way out of Poland. Quickly, I brought the nearly empty bottle to my mouth, watched the little fruit flies caught in the merciless tide of liquor, closed my eyes as the warmth of it dribbled down my throat, onto the tops of my bare thighs. When I opened them again, there was Noam, wearing some kind of white leather glove on his right hand- perhaps he was a goalkeeper?- and gnawing on the inside of his cheek, black eyes wide with something like surprise. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Were you going to come to dinner?” His gaze seemed tangled up in the sheets; I wondered if he could see the moisture on my underwear, if he knew the smell that lingered in the room. 

“It’s okay.” I was amused at his reaction; he appeared frozen with his gloved hand up in a sort of casual greeting. I pulled my knees up to my chest and smiled. “You know, I’m definitely hungry. What are we eating tonight?” His dark hair was matted with sweat, whether from the sport or the situation; I was definitely drunk again, in a delirious morning-after sort of way, and enjoying myself immensely. 

“I think it’s fish. There’s salad too, if you don’t want that.” I made up my mind to go, if only to make the kid happy. It felt important somehow, like his understanding of the world depended somehow on seeing me outside of the musty room. The alcohol had made me lighter, entranced with myself-  I wanted to share it with the world, to put myself on display. I figured too that it would satisfy something for Pierre-Henri and Adrienne, would let them know that I could choose to participate in their rituals, I just mostly chose not to. 

He dropped the gloved hand slowly, gripped the door and stared intently at a point just past my right shoulder: “So I guess I’ll just see you down there.” He stood there a moment, his eyes darting around the room. I stretched my legs out over the side of the bed, one by one, and watched him turn away and run, taking the stairs two at a time. 

Because they insisted, I sat at the head of the table, on a wicker chair that had been pulled up to accomodate me. Adrienne had covered the picnic table with a plastic tablecloth, orange and red checkers smeared with dark halos of spilt wine. It was too small to cover the whole table, and I felt a splinter slide underneath the skin on my forearm as I sat down. I forgot about it quickly- I’m not one to fuss over things like that. It would be days before I pulled it out with tweezers, the skin blooming with infection, hot to the touch.

I thought to myself, I must look pretty beat right now. I wore dark sunglasses that covered half of my face, imagining myself a movie star hiding out in the Parisian suburbs. My hair was piled and clipped on top of my head and still it gave off an oily, acrid smell of cigarette smoke and hot cement. It was nice out; sharp sparks of honey-colored light shot between the wood panels of the fence, the air was still and soft like pond water. Everywhere families just like this one were eating dinner. I was an anthropologist, a voyeur, extrapolating generalities from this strange and performative experience. I would tell them about themselves, and reintroduce romance and intrigue into their tame and tiresome routine. 

My mother, before she killed herself, talked about other people killing themselves. She said it happened slowly, in little chunks at a time. No one ever meant to fade and fritter away, like old paint on abandoned houses. But it happened just like that. I remembered her leaning against the doorway, slicing ladybugs in half with the sharp tips of her acrylic nails, making a futile effort to blow cigarette smoke out into the open air. She said, “is this what you want? A man to keep you safe and comfortable?” And although I was nine or ten years old at the time, I said “probably not.” She laughed then and put the cigarette out softly on the inside of her wrist without making a sound. I thought about this when I looked at Adrienne and Pierre-Henri, eating in silence side by side.

The conversation was about horoscopes, and Adrienne was saying something about making big decisions. Noam sat beside me, picking at the fish with his hands, rolling his eyes and scoffing with his mouth full. Peter, the eldest, sat on my left, and seemed to sink further and further down the plastic green chair, as though he were drowning. Peter was a manager at Burger King, though he read voraciously and had done decently well in school. There was something wrong with him, though no one ever talked about it. The family kept an implicit pact on the subject, and kept their questions light as families do. His occasional misplaced laughter pierced the fabric of conversation like a rogue needle drawing blood. I laughed with him. 

“What do you think, Sabine? Of horoscopes I mean?” Adrienne was looking at me expectantly, her frigid face stretched like a canvas, her Botoxed eyebrows straining to appear inquisitive. A pale, glowing stripe of skin surrounded her face like a halo- presumably a bad spray tan. She was a commercial real estate agent, she told me, and people always expected her to be younger when they met her. I imagined the looks of disappointment that folded her like a piece of compressed garbage. She carried that with her, even here.

“I think it’s bullshit, of course. I mean I don’t doubt that planets and stuff have an impact on our behavior, but what’s so special about the moment you’re born? I mean, why would that moment be in any way more meaningful than any other, like how could it shape your whole personality? I think people mostly need help making decisions.” Noam nodded in approval, salad dressing dribbling down his chin. 

“Maybe,” said Pierre-Henri. “Young people are so uncertain, so fearful of making the wrong choices. That would explain astrology’s rising popularity. You know, I’ve never seen so many young people walking around with copies of Le Monde. That’s one way to get folks reading the paper.”

By then, I’d finished my glass of wine. I felt much better; I had hit a certain threshold, typically hidden under the seventh or eighth drink, beyond which there was something like serenity, a warm, floral blooming across my chest and arms. I felt luminous, unhinged, untethered, and hungry. I could feel the earth thrumming beneath my bare feet. I gently tapped at Noam’s ankle with the tips of my toes. I expected a reaction- I wanted him to pass the wine, really- but he continued to pick the bones from the carcass on his plate, his face swelling with color. I looked at him intently, the contours of his face blurring and shimmering beneath the wine. Again I touched him, this time edging my bare foot up the leg of his pants, caressing his fuzzy ankles with my toes. His silence seemed complicit with my own projection of indifference. At last I whispered: “Pass the wine, please.” Pierre-Henri leaned across the table and poured the glass. Too small, I thought. I wriggled my toes again. 

 In between college anecdotes chronicling the ignorance of my classmates, I ate six pieces of bread and all of my potatoes. “Mostly, they seem to all be looking for something spiritual to keep them distracted, like horoscopes, you know?” The conversation, by this point, had become unbearably boring. I decided that I was going to puke again. I stood up quickly and the wicker chair tipped over backwards. If Adrienne’s eyebrows could have moved, they would have been raised at me. She said nothing. As I walked away, my hip brushed up against Noam’s shoulder, and I lost my balance briefly. I could feel the heat rising from his sticky hair, his sunburnt shoulders. The conversation had turned to the subject of college. 

The kitchen was messy, suspended in the liminal space between two meals. A few empty beer cans, a soccer ball, the white glove, and a few Burger King receipts  littered the counter. I picked up one of the receipts. On the back, with a silver gel pen, I wrote: man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. I drew a heart. In the bathroom, I threw up once and drank water from the sink. Then, I threw up again. A clear jet of water poured out from someplace deep within me- I’m never sure how much is left. I did it again for good measure. 

Back in the kitchen, I tucked the receipt into the soccer glove and poured the remnants of all the beer cans into one cup. I don’t remember much after that, though I led a scintillating debate on the merits of a liberal arts education, and volunteered to bring out the deserts. Noam and Peter excused themselves, eclipsing into the dark, dank hollows of their respective bedrooms, and my uncle and his wife began to argue about the cost of private school. The sun folded over itself and left the birds speechless. I stood up to vomit again.