The After Party (18 page)

1957

Y
ou wanted to wear something at least a little bit patriotic for the Fourth, but you didn't want to be tacky. I decided on a pale blue Swiss-dot dress that tied around my neck. It hit just below my knees: any shorter and you were tasteless; any longer and you looked like a Pentecostal from the panhandle.

Today was Thursday, the beginning of a very long weekend. Everything would be closed tomorrow, the day after the Fourth. Houston was good at holidays. There would be parties Friday and Saturday night, too, but tonight was the biggest one, thrown by Glenn McCarthy himself at the Shamrock. He was trying to be spectacular after the embarrassment of
Giant.

I slipped on a red Lucite bangle as a finishing touch; Ray wore
a soft red tie. We were a handsome couple. Maria took our photograph before we left.

“Say cheese,” she said, and we all smiled, even Tommy. Ray's hand was around my waist; his other hand was on Tommy's shoulder. He felt proud of us.
I
felt proud of us.

I still have that photograph—it's one of my favorites. The colors are garish. Tommy's grin is so wide his face is distorted. I look so happy I want to reach through the photograph and slap my tastefully rouged cheek.

Tommy had spoken again yesterday, called me Ma twice more, once in front of Ray. He'd said it first when I'd come to retrieve him from his nap. “Ma,” and pointed to me. Then again that afternoon, after I'd called Ray to tell him and he'd canceled meetings and rearranged his mysterious schedule and come home early in the hopes that Tommy might speak again, in his presence. And he did: in his nursery, playing with his ever-present blocks, Tommy had looked at Ray, pointed at me with a block in each hand, and said, “Ma,” as if telling Ray who I was. And just like that, what had seemed impossible for so long—what I had anticipated and hoped and wished for since it became clear that Tommy was behind—had become just another fact of life. Now that Tommy had said one thing, there was nothing stopping him from saying another, and another, and another. Until the “Ma” became “Mama”; then he would say “Father,” and “Maria,” maybe. Until the words became longer expressions: of desire, of want.

“Thank you,” I said to Maria as I took the camera from her. She nodded but would not look me in the eye.

“We're lucky with Maria,” Ray said as he backed the car down the drive. Maria and Tommy stood at the door, waving. “Tommy loves her.”

I nodded and patted his thigh. I felt like I was supposed to feel, is how I remember it. Pleased by my family. Pleased by the way my flower beds had been perfectly edged by the gardener yesterday. Pleased by the way my breasts felt beneath my dress: smooth and pert.

“This'll be fun,” I said, and I believed it: the first party Ray and I had been to in a long time that would not involve Joan. “Joan won't be there,” I said.

Ray nodded. “You've mentioned.”

I couldn't read his tone, not quite. But then he reached down and squeezed my thigh, gently, and I knew we were fine.

Our perfectly ordered world passed by as we drove. Our route would take us by Evergreen but not by Joan's house. In a few years we would move out of our house and into a bigger one. We might even buy a plot of land and build our own dream home. Ray was calling where we lived now our “starter home” more and more frequently; there was no reason to think he wouldn't continue rising through the ranks in his company, accruing greater degrees of influence and power and money. I would be right by Ray's side, of course. Did I care about a bigger house? A nicer car? More extravagant vacations? Of course I did.

We were getting closer and closer to Evergreen. I had called Joan on Monday, taken the phone into the pantry even though Tommy was upstairs, asleep, and Maria was folding laundry. I
had been so good! It had been nearly two weeks since I'd been by her house and talked to her by the pool. But it couldn't hurt, I'd reasoned, to talk to her for just a minute.

“Joan?” I said when she answered, and if I sounded incredulous it's because I was. Sari usually answered, especially—I checked my watch, 10:03 a.m.—this early.

She laughed. “Did you expect President Eisenhower? It's me, doll. I've been up for hours.”

“What have you been doing?”

I could picture her shrugging. “Wandering. Reading. Smoking.” And, as if that had reminded her, she inhaled deeply, then exhaled. She didn't bother holding her mouth away from the receiver, but that was okay, I was glad to hear her breathe. She was still Joan, still smoking and reading and wandering and talking to me, her best friend, on the phone.

“Tommy spoke,” I blurted.

“Did he?” she said, and she sounded distracted, and I felt as if she'd reached through the phone and slapped me across the face.

But then she seemed to gather herself. “That's wonderful, Cee. I'm so pleased.”

“We were pleased, too,” I said, and it was all I could do not to cry. I hadn't realized how pleased, how
relieved
we were until this very moment. That was what Joan did for me: she brought things out for me. Clarified my situation.

“Are you going to the Shamrock on Thursday?” I asked, though I knew the answer. Of course she was. She hadn't ever missed that party.

“Thursday? Oh, right. The Fourth. I don't think so, doll.”

Sid. They would go somewhere else. To Galveston, perhaps.

“But you always go,” I said, and I tried to silence the note of franticness I could feel creeping in.

“Well, that's the funny thing about always. Always until it's not.”

And then I heard her murmuring to someone. I pressed the phone to my ear but couldn't make out a word they were saying. I couldn't even tell if the voice was male or female.

Tommy cried out upstairs.

“Joan,” I said, “Joan? Are you there?”

“Hold on, Cece,” she said, annoyed, and then the muffled conversation again, and Tommy overhead, crying, and me in a pantry, talking in secret. I felt desperate, unmoored. Suddenly, I was a little girl, trying to get Joan's attention in the school lunchroom.

Then the pantry door swung open, and I was caught, the telephone cord wrapped around my wrist.

Maria stood there, Tommy on her hip. Her brow was furrowed. I took the phone away from my ear, unbraceleted the cord, stepped out of the pantry, and held out my arms for Tommy.

“I'll trade you,” I said, and handed her the phone. Once I held Tommy and Maria held the phone she looked at it, curiously.

“Ma'am?” She tried to give it back to me.

“I don't want it!” I said, and Maria stepped back in surprise. “Hang it up, please. Just hang it up.”

What else could she do but what I told her? I was jealous of her, in that instant. Of my Mexican housekeeper and babysitter. People told her to do things, and she did them. It was simple, easy.

Maria awkwardly replaced the phone in its cradle. Contacting
Maria when she left here required phoning a cousin; Maria phoned back an hour later, either from her cousin's house—I could hear the same dim cacophony in the background, children and adults yelling at children—or from a pay phone near a busy road, car horns in the background.

“You don't have a telephone, do you?”

Maria's face crumpled like a piece of tissue paper. It was so easy to hurt people. I understood exactly why I had done it: Joan had hurt me, and so I turned right around and hurt Maria, who looked so small now. It wasn't what I had said, exactly. It was how I had said it. It was easy to be cruel. Far more difficult to be kind. How did Joan feel, after she was cruel to me? Powerful? Regretful? But then I understood, Tommy's warm cheek on my shoulder—he wanted his milk now, was waiting patiently for it—that Joan felt none of these things. She did not know she was being cruel, not like I knew it now; she would not feel the powerful surge of regret that I felt at this instant.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and moved toward her.

But Maria stepped back. All those years of trust, built up so carefully—when Maria had come here, five years ago, she was so shy she would barely look me in the eye—destroyed in an instant.

“That is all?”

And I could do nothing but nod. “Yes,” I said. “That's all.”

And I had hung up on Joan! She had returned to the phone expecting me to be there, waiting. Always waiting, that was me, Cece, the most faithful of faithful friends. But instead of my voice she had met a dial tone.

She had not called back. She might not have cared that I had
hung up, might have blamed it on a faulty line or a bad connection. But she had to know, deep down, that I had been bold.

Once, before we were married, Ray had told me there was no point trying to figure out what made another person tick. “Maybe,” he'd conceded, “you can figure out what makes the person you're married to tick. But only if they want you to. Everyone else”—here he had held his hands up and shrugged—“it's impossible.”

I disagreed. We hadn't been speaking directly of Joan, but our conversation had occurred during that time when Joan was going off the rails, when I was spending most of my time trying to figure out where she, or I, had gone wrong.

I'd understood her once, when we were young, when I'd stood on the Galveston beach and watched her plunge into the sea. But that had been a long time ago.

Now I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to show her I could.

•   •   •

M
aria aside, I felt buoyant. Maria would not be at this party tonight; neither would Joan. Just me and Ray and the rest of our friends. Darlene would be there with her husband, and Kenna, too, and Ciela, along with everyone else in Houston. Ray was happy because I was happy, and because there would be dancing.

Evergreen was upon us, but I wasn't going to say anything. I was simply going to watch it pass from the window. Then Ray spoke.

“Furlow must have a thousand people working on that yard alone,” Ray said.

It was, I admit, a little bit of a fight, in my head, to decide
whether or not to correct Ray or leave it alone. Surely he knew Furlow wasn't capable of making decisions these days, that the days in which he had been in charge of anything were but a distant memory? He didn't even dress himself anymore. He certainly wasn't corralling lawn men and conferring with the head gardener over what might look best in the winter beds.

But then Ray turned on the radio and started to whistle along to the opening of “Love Letters in the Sand,” and it was clear that he didn't think very much about Evergreen, or Furlow's mind, or Mary's role in landscaping. He didn't think very much about the Fortiers at all, except that he wanted me to spend less time thinking about Joan.

There was pomade in his hair, and I spotted a little dried piece of it clinging to his temple. I brushed it away, and Ray grabbed my hand and kissed it, and then I expected him to let it go, but he held on to it, and I was moved. He held on to it all the way to the Shamrock, where he only let it go to pull into the valet line, which was backed up to the street.

“God almighty,” Ray said, as he took his place in line and put the car in neutral. “Elvis himself must be here.”

“No,” I said. “Just Diamond Glenn.”

We found, once inside—the line moved surprisingly quickly, the valets soaked with sweat and hustling—that Elvis was not there, but everyone else was. Diamond Glenn McCarthy was indeed in the corner, holding court at a cluster of tables. He was tossing his solid-gold lighter, dotted with a large diamond, from hand to hand. He never went anywhere without that lighter. The Shamrock, of course, didn't belong to McCarthy anymore—he'd
lost it during one of his financial lows—but he still owned the Cork Club. McCarthy had aged since our early days—his cheeks were looser, his hair thinner. The years had not been kind to him.

“Poor waiter,” Ray said, nodding his head toward the tall, tired-looking man taking orders at McCarthy's table. “I heard he doesn't tip.”

“A man as rich as that?”

Ray shrugged. “What you have and what you give don't always match up, darling.” He kissed my cheek. The sympathy I'd just felt for McCarthy vanished.

I saw Ciela and JJ right away, near the bar. Ciela waved us over and I led Ray through the crowd of glistening bodies. We were all a little sweaty; “gleaming” was a better way to think of it. I passed a heavy lady who was drawing a handkerchief over her forehead; I could see the orange smear of her foundation on the delicate fabric. The room was air-conditioned and the fans were on, but they were no match for the scores of people stuffed into the Cork Club.

“Are you burning up?” I whispered to Ray. “I don't envy you your coat.”

“Or my pants,” Ray said, as we reached the bar. “For once, I'm jealous of the ladies.” He grazed my collarbone with his finger, stopped at the dip in my dress. I thought, for the second time, that Ray was feeling forward tonight.

“A daiquiri and a G and T?” Louis asked. I was home.

Ciela slid into a tight spot next to me while Ray gathered our drinks.

“Ray's handsy tonight,” she said, and I blushed.

“He's feeling his oats a little bit.”

“And why shouldn't he? Tonight's the night, if ever there were one. I heard McCarthy spent ten grand on the fireworks display. There's enough liquor to fill the pool. JJ's already sloshed. And I'm on my way.”

I wanted, suddenly, to tell Ciela about Tommy, could feel the words already forming at the back of my throat.
He's spoken!
I'd say.
Took him a little longer than everyone else, that's all. But you know Einstein didn't speak until he was five
.

Ray had told me about Einstein yesterday.

Ciela leaned forward attentively. She wore an off-the-shoulder dress with a diamond brooch in the shape of a starburst pinned over her right breast.