2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas (11 page)

“Where?” Bella runs to the window. “I want to see.”

“There,” he points.

“Gross.” Georgie waves out a match.

“Not gross, Georgie. Inspiring.” He surveys the room—the smell of cinnamon, the sputtering candles, the friends he’s had since forever—through the eyes of strangers making out in a Honda. “Doesn’t it make you happy to be in the world?”

“Doesn’t what make you happy to be in the world?” Sarina Greene enters the room holding a salad. Ben’s coat gets stuck halfway off. It pins him, turns him around. She watches him flail. Finally he wrenches free. “That coat tried to kill me,” he says. “You’re a witness.”

She giggles.

Bella introduces Ben to her new girlfriend, Claudia, who works with crack-addicted war veterans. Claudia tells Ben about her recent obsession with Hitchcock. People with service jobs create a pang of guilt in Ben. When does she have time to watch movies?

“Where is Annie?” Georgie says.

Ben delivers the line he rehearsed. “Home sick, she sends this wine.” He produces a bottle of red that Georgie and Sarina inspect. “It’s from a town where she spent summers. I’d tell you, but she says I pronounce it wrong.”

“How nice.” Georgie hands the bottle to Sarina, who it seems has become Assistant to the Dinner. She disappears into the kitchen.

Sarina attended high school with Ben, Georgie, Bella, and Michael but wasn’t what they would call “core.” She was a misfit in their pasteurized, suburban school. A bright spot, dressed in black. Earlier in the afternoon, when Ben had made the customary do-you-need-anything phone call, Georgie told him Sarina had been invited because of an intersection of location, timing, and pie. Georgie said they had engaged in a dangerous fraction of conversation, marked by perceived insult and overaccommodation:
Would you like to come, sadly no, not that I don’t want to, well then you must, well then I absolutely will!

Michael whispers into Ben’s ear. “Did you happen to see my car? Brand-new. Silver. Custom rims.”

“Michael has finally come to terms with the fact that he’s in finance,” Georgie says.

“Didn’t see it,” Ben says. “Unless it has two people making out in it.”

“Two sunroofs,” Michael says.

“Two?”

Michael holds up two fingers. “Keeping up with the Joneses and all.”

“I see them!” Bella says. She and Michael and Ben and Georgie and Claudia peer out the window.

Georgie’s apartment hovers over the corner of Thirteenth and Spruce like a brick exclamation point, between Pine’s sleepy antique shops and the tattooed disinterest of South.
When she bought it, they toasted her new life: the boutique she was about to open, the marriage. The exclamation then was: the world is kind enough to allow all things! The boutique closed after ten months of vacuuming the carpet early. The marriage ended after five months of fretful sex. The exclamation now is: I am petrified!

“To life.” Michael lifts his glass.

To life
, the party replies.

Dinner begins. The plate of bread circumnavigates the table. The table is round, so no one sits at the head. Or everyone does, Michael thinks, slicing into the butter. Because it is a good dinner party, food is beside the point. Who cares what Georgie served? Vegetable lasagna and heirloom whatnot. A breathtaking salad.

Sarina taps salt from a reindeer shaker. “Salt,” she says, “is a combination of sodium and chloride. They are considered the bad boys of the periodic table. I learned that from our science teacher.”

“It is also what you give people who’ve recently moved into a house,” Ben says. “For luck in fertility. Or a seasoned life. One of those.”

Claudia gives a clipped ha-ha. “Who can afford a house?”

“I bought a house,” Michael says. “But it’s more to keep up with the Joneses.”

Bella wavers on her choice of bread but commits. “How long have you been back in the city, Sarina?”

“Not even a year.”

“Weren’t you living someplace fabulous and foreign?” Georgie says.

“Connecticut,” Sarina says.

“It’s no surprise you’re back.” Michael spoons potatoes onto his plate. “This city has the highest recidivism rate in America.”

“What does that word mean?” Georgie says.

“It means you have no options.” Ben salts his salad. “You can’t get away, no matter how hard you try.”

“Whatever happened to that guy you dated for so long, Sarina?” Bella says, as if the thought has just occurred to her.

“I married him.”

“You could have brought him,” Georgie pouts. “Where is he tonight?”

Sarina swallows a throatful of greens. “Divorced.”

The party flicks their eyes to her, to their plates. Georgie keeps Sarina’s gaze for the length of a curt, kind nod. Ben traces the lip of his wineglass. “Where did that come from, the whole keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing?”

“The saying?” Bella waves her knife as if this were an obvious question. “It’s a metaphor for consumerism.”

“But why is it so hard to keep up with them, specifically?”

“Because they keep buying new shit!” Bella says.

“But who are the Joneses?” he persists.

Michael wags an asparagus spear at Ben. “Everyone in my office.”

“Everyone is the Joneses,” Bella says. “Michael’s office, ex-boyfriends, even we are the Joneses.”

“So,” Georgie concludes, “we are all trying to keep up with ourselves!”

Claudia compliments Georgie on the meal. The table lifts
off to another topic, but Ben feels they’ve left the Joneses prematurely. Sarina watches him mull over ways to return to it. She innately knows his moods and tendencies, the way you know on a flight, even with your eyes closed, that a plane is banking.

Bella is a girl who doesn’t mean to be rude ever but is rude, always, and when she asks Sarina if she is still teaching fifth grade, she places on the word
still
a sour sound Claudia hastens to refurbish by saying, “Teaching is so …” Only Claudia is a girl who can never procure the right word in a timely manner and during each second she tries, everyone at the table treads water until Ben places his fork down and declares, “… noble.”

Sarina gazes at him as if he has just returned from war.

Georgie and Michael call out other things teaching is: underpaid, thankless, long-houred, which Michael insists is a word. Emboldened by the support, Sarina embarks on the First Story of the Night.

“It can be emotionally demanding,” she begins. “For example …” All heads swivel toward her. For the first time, she can see everyone’s face at once. The footing of her thoughts slips.

Tell it with confidence
, she thinks. Today they made caramel apples in class! Build expectation: How she visited several sweet shops to test caramel. How she double-checked that there was a meaty apple for every child, bought specially sized paper bags to wrap each one after it hardened. How her children took up their reading hour asking questions about the apples.
Do their voices
, she thinks. Sarina gathers the characters in her mind. Madeleine: the nine-year-old who recently
lost her mother. Denny: the entitled kid from a well-known family in the parish. She will point out contradictory traits in each kid to offset expectations and her own biases. How Madeleine can be blunt to the point of hurting other children. How Sarina spent an hour holding bawling Denny when the goldfish died. Some characters will play important roles. Some will seem unimportant until the end. If she tells it correctly, when she reaches the Crucial Moment, everyone at the table will feel sickened and satisfied. Sure, she’s back in her hometown teaching grade school and she can’t fill out the tops of most dresses, but she can tell stories, goddammit. Certainly that must mean something to Ben, she means, men, she means, the universe. Certainly she can cash in a little girl’s pain for respect at a dinner party. She will rise from the table, an eagle beating back a glorious pair of wings.

“Just today,” she begins, “one of my children got sent home with lice—”

“Lice!” Bella interrupts. “Uck!”

“Lots of children get lice,” Claudia says.

“Name one child you know that has lice.”

“Me,” says Claudia. “Me as a child had lice.”

Sarina attempts to regain control. “I can speak from someone who had personal experience as recently as today that lice is—”

Ben laughs. “Me had lice.”

Claudia thinks Ben is taunting her for the lice, not the grammar of her sentence. “It means I had thick hair,” she says.

Sarina, slipping, falling. “Madeleine has thick hair. The girl who had to be sent home today—”

The table splinters into two preoccupations. Bella asks if her school is the one on Christian with the mural of that sociopath Frank Rizzo. Ben and Michael rejoin the Joneses conversation.

Sarina speaks loudly to get everyone back. “It is a very sad story.”

“Would anyone mind if I ate the last of the potatoes?” Georgie says.

“Go right ahead, Georgie. They’re your potatoes in the first place.”

“They’re everyone’s potatoes,” says Michael.

“As long as no one thinks they’re small potatoes,” Georgie says.

The table laughs vigorously at what Sarina thinks is a dumb joke. A window closes. As if the party had only one available slot for a long story and her chance has been lost in chatter about shampoo and potatoes. She is striped with a familiar self-loathing around Georgie, left over from high school. Even though she has lived on three continents, Sarina has not progressed further than senior prom. Boys cross rooms for Georgie, who is full in the way they like.
Foxy
is the word for it, Sarina thinks, whereas she is foxless.

Sarina has a flicker of hope when Bella turns to her, taking in a deep breath signifying an important thought. “Isn’t teaching grade school not far off from babysitting?”

Sarina forks the last of her salad. “These greens are transcendent.”

“Arugula!” Georgie says.

“Let’s admit,” Ben says. “We keep up with the Joneses to distract us from the fact that we are all going to die!”

“Hear, hear,” says Michael.

Dinner is over.

Bella pushes herself away from the table. She has spent the meal wanting more of everything and not taking more of anything. She and Georgie carry empty plates to the kitchen.

Michael says, “I can’t keep my hands away from the piano any longer.”

Ben says, “Would anyone mind if I stepped outside to call Annie?”

Claudia receives directions to the bathroom.

The room reshuffles and when it stills, Sarina is alone. She hears Michael in the next room fumbling in the pockets of the piano bench, setting up sheet music, and then the first few measures of a splashy intro.

When she saw Ben unwinding his scarf at the front door, Sarina wanted to remove her glasses. She removes her glasses when anything wonderful or embarrassing happens, like earlier today when her principal forced her to discipline Madeleine. Which would have been the Crucial Moment of her story.

Sarina has rebuilt her life one element at a time. The apartment, the job, the easel. It might be a plain life (she occasionally worries she is hiding out in it), but at least it is forged out of what she wants.

She doesn’t know the particulars of Ben’s wife’s job, but it involves legally representing poor kids with leukemia.
Showoff. She’d hoped he wouldn’t marry the cardiganed girl he brought around four years ago. She’d hoped the girl would be one of the many partners his group rotated in and out. Certainly he would notice how Annie rolled her eyes at his ideas, especially the last idea, when he decided to quit law and pursue screenwriting. Certainly the girl with a flounder’s sense of style wouldn’t be the one he’d marry on an archipelago in the Caribbean, so Sarina had heard, accessible only by duck boat. But, he did. And, she wasn’t. And, he didn’t. So, she was.

Outside, the stars have been caught in the act. Ben paces the stoop “… later than I thought. More fun than I expected. No one thought it was strange. Well, yes, they asked how you were but they didn’t follow up.”

In the kitchen, Georgie and Bella pass a joint back and forth. Bella trains her eyes on the swinging door. “Claudia doesn’t know I still smoke. I’m sorry she’s acting like a bitch tonight.”

At the piano, Michael thinks, there should be words to classical songs.

In the bathroom, Claudia reads a newspaper article about a famous chef’s third restaurant opening.

Under the stars, Ben says, “I realize it doesn’t count as a separation if we talk on the phone, but you asked me to call you.”

In the kitchen, Bella says, “She cut out drama from her life. Now she gets dramatic about people being dramatic.”

Georgie says, “It’s like ex-smokers who hate smokers.”

“Exactly!” Bella says. “Have a cigarette and get over yourself.” She shakes her head and pretends to have a new thought. “Sarina has gotten so thin. Poor girl.” She wants Georgie to agree, but Georgie has outgrown camaraderie through cattiness.

At the piano, Michael sings,
The more I see you …

Upstairs, Claudia washes her hands with the no-shenanigans soap of a second bathroom. Her interest in the evening’s goings-on ranks as follows:

KITCHEN:
Georgie says, “I never thought I would get divorced. Never. Divorce is for sad people.”

PIANO:
Michael sings,
the more I want you …

FAMILY ROOM:
Sarina sits, orphaned by the dinner party. What she holds most against these people is how obvious it is that they love each other. A substantive love that caulks the cracks of their personalities; Georgie’s oblivion, Bella’s self-obsession, Michael’s namby-pamby-ness. Sarina hates the part of herself that wants inside that love. A gray, whiskered face appears by her elbow. She replaces her glasses. “Hello, Pepper.”