The After Party (2 page)

That night we were all in attendance: the aforementioned Darlene, dressed in a lavender dress with, I had to admit, a beautiful sweetheart neckline; Kenna, Darlene's best friend, who was very nice and very boring; and Graciela, who went by Ciela. Ciela had been a scandal when she was born, the product of her father's affair with a beautiful Mexican girl he'd met while working in the oil refineries down in Tampico. His ex-wife had been rewarded for his sin—she'd received the biggest divorce settlement in Texas history. All of this was old news, though. There had been bigger divorce settlements since then, much bigger. It was Texas: everything bigger, all the time.

Ciela's father had married the señorita, was still married to the
señorita, which perhaps would have been the greater scandal, if he weren't already so powerful. We all had that in common, save me: powerful fathers. And husbands who would become powerful. And we were going to go there with them.

Darlene kissed Joan on both cheeks and then turned to me, “Long time no see, Cece,” and then laughed uproariously at the repetition. She was already loaded. “You look like Leslie Lynnton herself,” she said, and even though I looked nothing like Liz Taylor, aside from the dark hair, I was pleased. We'd all seen
Giant
at least three times, were titillated by the fact that the James Dean character was based on Glenn McCarthy himself, even though we publicly hated Edna Ferber and her portrayal of Texas.

Ciela, whose hair was now so blond and coiffed she looked as Mexican as Marilyn Monroe, was on the arm of her husband, and Darlene's and Kenna's husbands were across the room, smoking. My own husband was at my side; Ray was quiet, a little bit reserved, most comfortable near me. He wasn't shy, exactly, but he didn't feel the need to be the center of anything, a rarity in our crowd.

The night wasn't full of possibility for us wives, like it used to be, like it still must have been for Joan. Yet the champagne was crisp and cheerful, the men were handsome and strong, and the music buoyed our spirits. I was wearing a beautiful silver dress, strapless, cinched at the waist. (Ray made a good living at Shell but my mother had left her small fortune to me, and because of it I wore astonishing clothes. My one extravagance. My mother had always refused to touch the money, thought my father should earn more. And so it was mine, granted to me in a legacy of bitterness, in lieu of parental attention. I was determined to spend it all.) My
wrist was encircled by my fourteenth-birthday present, a delicate diamond watch I only took out when I was feeling hopeful. Later tonight we might venture outside, to the Shamrock's pool, which happened to be the biggest outdoor pool in the world, built to accommodate waterskiing exhibitions. Joan loved to dive from their high board, said it felt like flying. Or maybe we'd make our way to the Emerald Room, the Shamrock's nightclub.

I chatted with Ciela, who had a daughter, Tina, the same age as Tommy, about whether or not we'd send our children to preschool in the fall (I wouldn't—I couldn't imagine throwing Tommy to the wolves like that) as we watched Joan hold court ten feet away, laughing and smiling and acting like it all came so easily to her. Which it did. Ray stood next to me and he watched her, too, and I wondered what he thought of Joan Fortier underneath his unvarying calmness.

“What do you think she's saying?” Ciela asked, following my gaze. Her scent was a combination of Chanel No. 5, which all our husbands gave us once a year, on Valentine's Day, and hair spray. I'm sure I smelled much the same, with a little bit of Tommy's bubble bath mixed in. Ciela's husband, JJ, a tall, gregarious man from Lubbock whom I found a little forward, was at the bar, getting a drink.

Joan was a little
too
bright, tonight, for my taste. A little wired, a little too close to out of control.

“Who knows with Joan,” I said, and took another sip of champagne.

JJ came up behind Ciela and kissed her cheek. She acted surprised, as if he'd come from nowhere. I smiled, allowed JJ to kiss
my hand; then Ray's arm was around my waist, and he was pulling me toward the floor. Ray would never kiss a woman's hand. That was one of the things I liked about him: he wasn't interested in pageantry.

“Would you care to dance?” he asked, and I smiled, let him lead me to the shiny wooden floor. He put me instantly in a better mood. A four-piece band played something slow; I didn't recognize the music but that was beside the point. I finished my champagne and deposited the empty flute onto a silver tray balanced on the white-gloved hand of a colored waiter.

Ray loved to dance. It was the reason he tolerated these nights out. If not for dancing he'd have liked to be at home, sipping a neat scotch, reading one of his presidential biographies. But on the dance floor he was a different man. I felt small in his arms, though I was nearly as tall as Joan, who was five foot eight; but Ray was six foot three and broadly built. I fit neatly into his embrace. I was attractive but not beautiful, and I was honest enough with myself to acknowledge the distinction. I was still slender, but pregnancy had softened my edges, made my face fuller, given me more weight and heft, anchored me to the world. My hair was a fight, eternally swollen by the Texas humidity, but after hot rollers and my weekly salon appointment it tended to frame my face becomingly. My dark brown eyes were my best feature, almond shaped and bright; Ciela had once said they were the envy of us all, and though she had been drunk when she said it, and probably didn't remember saying it in the first place, I did.

“This is
fun
,” I said, and Ray gathered me to him. The Cork Club was filling up, with people we knew and people we didn't.
That was the fun of this place: only the richest and the brightest were granted admission, and you never knew who you'd see.

The band started playing something fast and Ray twirled me out the length of his arm, and in the second before he brought me back in I saw Joan out of the corner of my eye. Joan, with a man I didn't recognize. I rested my chin on Ray's firm shoulder and watched them. Joan had turned her back to the room, which was unlike her. It seemed as if she were hiding her companion.

The rest of us wanted true love and a husband, and if not true love then a husband would do, but Joan had always been content to spring from one man to the next. The papers adored Joan: she was featured regularly in their gossip columns—the
Houston Press
's “The Town Crier,” the
Chronicle
's “Gadabout”—usually with a man and a photo. But those men weren't serious, and they weren't strangers.

“Stop watching Joan,” Ray whispered in my ear, and I turned my attention back to him. Joan, if I'm being honest, was a minor tension in our marriage, mainly unspoken.

“I'll only look at you for the rest of the night,” I said.

“Now you're talking,” Ray said, and twirled me out again onto the floor in response.

Ray had promised the night we were engaged that he would never leave me. And he had asked I promise the same thing, which I thought was absurd. Men left women; women never left men, not unless they were stupid, and I wasn't stupid.

Now he spun me out and grinned a little crookedly, as he did when he'd had a drink, his big hand warm and firm as he caught me again. He continued to watch my face. Ray often surprised me
with the things he noticed. He was attentive in a way I'd had to get used to. He could walk into a room and read me in a second. Half a second.

“Cee,” he said now, “have I lost you?”

“I'm here,” I said, and leaned in closer to Ray so I could watch my friend without Ray's noticing. She wasn't right tonight; I'd known it since this afternoon. I could see the man better now. He was tall and meaty. And he was certainly a stranger. He wasn't handsome. But handsome didn't matter to Joan. “I'm like Jesus,” she said one time, when I asked her how she could date men so clearly unsuitable for her. “I love them all.”

A pair of dancers swung into our path, blocking Joan and her stranger. Ray kissed my cheek and I closed my eyes and I was lost in the music, in the press of bodies, in Ray, for a moment or two.

When I opened my eyes I was dizzy, but I had a perfect view of the tall man leaving through the door next to the stage, which led through the bowels of the club and hotel, straight to a stairwell; the stairs rose to the Shamrock's rooms.

I scanned the club for Joan, and spotted her near the bar, smoking a cigarette, laughing. I was relieved to be wrong.

Then Joan extinguished her cigarette in an ashtray, dropped her lighter into her satin clutch, and followed the stranger through the door. I wasn't wrong.

Life should have shown me by now that I was powerless against Joan. She was a grown woman, a grown woman who was used to getting her way. Nobody had ever told her no: Not her parents, certainly. Not a teacher. Certainly not a man. Joan Fortier did as she liked. I was only her
friend.

I
was fifteen when my mother died. It was December, nearly Christmas. A week after the funeral, Joan and I were still in my mother's house, skipping school, sleeping until noon each morning, falling asleep as the sun rose. Joan had already told me I would come to live with the Fortiers at Evergreen. I wanted to, fervently, but I didn't quite believe her. Joan loved me, and I loved Joan, but Mary and Furlow were not my parents.

Furlow had come to Texas from Louisiana to make his fortune when he was a young man, and decided to stay. Texas could do that to a person: you came for a visit, then looked up one day and found you'd never left. He'd built Evergreen for Mary's wedding gift. It was a graceful plantation-style mansion with enormous columns
flanking the porch, replete with rocking chairs and black-shuttered windows. He'd named it after his beloved magnolias, which lined the driveway.

Furlow and Mary wanted me to live with them because I took care of Joan. I had access to places they did not. But I didn't know that then. Then, it was second nature to follow Joan around at parties, to make sure she met curfew, to cut styles I thought would suit her from
Harper's Bazaar
and give them to Mary to order.

I was asleep in the home I'd known since birth, Joan next to me, lightly snoring (you wouldn't think a girl like Joan would snore, but she did), when the doorbell rang. At first I thought it was my mother. I sat up in bed, disoriented, my mouth dry from the sweet white wine we'd drunk late into the evening. The line from the song we'd been listening to all fall circled my brain:
That's when I'll be there always, not for just an hour, not for just a day.

Of course it wasn't my mother. My mother was dead.

“Cece?” Joan sat up beside me. Her voice was slurred from sleep. She rested her warm cheek on my shoulder, and for a moment we were still. The doorbell rang again, but I made no move to stand. There was no one in the world I wanted to see. I just wanted to sit there, with Joan next to me, and forget all the things that awaited me. My mother's lawyer had been calling to make an appointment. There were her things—things upon things upon things, Limoges boxes and antique perfume bottles and an endless wardrobe—to sort through. My father, at his permanent room at the Warwick, might as well have been in Switzerland. He
was with his mistress, I knew. A woman named Melane, whom he would marry and take to Oklahoma as soon as the ink had dried on my mother's death certificate. I didn't blame him, but I didn't want to see him, either.

Joan rose at the third chime. “Let me,” she said, and picked up her robe from the floor.

She returned a moment later with Mary, who surveyed the room, lifted the empty bottle of wine from my bureau, and made a face. Joan, out of Mary's line of vision, imitated her, and I stifled a laugh.

Mary was now the secretary of the Junior League; next year, my mother had said, she would be president. My mother didn't understand Mary Fortier: Mary wasn't beautiful, didn't come from money, and yet she was powerful. A woman like Mary didn't fit into my mother's worldview. Mary should have been uncertain, full of doubt.

“It's time to go,” Mary said. Of course I didn't call her Mary. After I'd lived in her home for a few weeks she would tell me to call her by her first name, tell me that we no longer needed to stand on ceremony. But the offer didn't strike me as genuine, so I avoided saying her name at all.

I sat on the bed like a child and watched them sort through my things, nodded or shook my head when Joan held up a purse, a blouse, a pair of flats.

“Of course we'll come back later,” Mary said, “and pack up the rest, but this will do, for now.”

I knew that I would never come back. Strangers would box
up my remaining possessions and bring them to me; everything else, except for the family Bible and my mother's jewelry, would be sold at an estate sale.

“Fred's day off,” Mary said, when she opened the driver's-side door, which was what she always said when she drove. It might or might not have been true.

Mary liked to drive, even though it was far more acceptable for a woman of her station to be driven.

I got into the backseat, and Joan, instead of riding up front with her mother, sat next to me. I closed my eyes and didn't open them again until Joan touched my knee.

We were turning onto Evergreen's red gravel drive; I felt the crunch of the pebbles beneath the tires.

“Your new life,” Joan said.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

Joan laughed, but when she spoke, her voice was serious.

“You don't ever have to thank me, Cee.”

•   •   •

A
week later Joan convinced me to go out. I hadn't been around anyone my own age besides her for months. Darlene, Kenna, and Ciela had come to my mother's funeral, but I'd barely spoken to them.

“It'll be good for you,” Joan said, dabbing on the lightest coating of lipstick—any heavier and Mary might notice.

Joan, as a sophomore at Lamar High School, had already been asked to be on the homecoming court. She was a cheerleader, too, one of two underclassmen on the squad. She ate at the center table
of the cafeteria, surrounded by the football team. She was invited to every party, every dance. Without Joan I would have been no one, a girl on the fringes of the popular group by virtue of the fact that her family had money, that she lived in River Oaks: a girl with a forgettable face, a forgettable name. But I was saved from this fate because I was Joan's best friend. I ate lunch with her, went to parties with her, generally benefited from standing at her side. I might have been jealous but I didn't want the spotlight, didn't need it. I needed Joan, and I had her.

Puberty struck some girls like a match. At fourteen years old, a freshman, Joan had breasts the size of melons. That's what I'd overheard a boy saying, one day after school. She was already the most beautiful, the richest, the most charming, the most everything. Now she had a figure like Carole Landis, too. A figure most of us knew, even then, we would never come close to having.

Joan had grown right into her body. Other girls who developed early stooped their shoulders, carried their books in front of their chests, but Joan? Our first day of high school Joan wore a brassiere with pointed cups, like the movie stars did. She hid it in her purse and changed in the bathroom.

This particular night she wore a familiar dress, baby blue with a flared skirt. I'd never seen her necklace before, though. It was a tiny gold star with a diamond chip in its center. It hung in the dip between her collarbones like a glimmer.

I touched it on the doorstep of the house where Fred had deposited us.

“What's this?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “Daddy gave it to me.”

“For what?”

She shrugged, and I understood she was embarrassed, to have a father who gave her gifts for no reason—for being Joan—when my own father, for all intents and purposes, might as well have not existed.

Joan rang the bell. When nobody came to the door, she finally opened it, revealing a throng of high schoolers. A boy Joan had been seeing, Fitz, snagged her and they headed upstairs almost as soon as we were inside, while I stood by the punch bowl until I mercifully spotted Ciela. We chatted about nothing and tried to pretend we weren't watching to see who was watching us.

“Joan's been up there for a long time,” Ciela said. She was wearing a short-sleeved plaid dress with a collar. It almost looked like a school uniform, except it was skintight. Ciela dressed like a siren but wouldn't even let her boyfriend, a senior, touch beneath her bra. I felt a little flare of jealousy—she looked like Lana Turner tonight.

I was drunk on grenadine and whiskey; the house, in Tanglewood, was gauche and brand-new. You could practically feel the light blue rug turning brown beneath all our feet.

“She and Fitzy are talking,” I said.

Ciela eyed me. “You really don't know what they're doing up there?”

“They're doing whatever they want,” I said. “Joan's doing whatever she wants.” Defending Joan was a sharp reflex.

Ciela nodded, took a measured sip of her punch. “She sure is,” she said finally. She smiled at me. “She sure is.”

Just then Fitz appeared at the head of the stairs and motioned to me; I left Ciela there like we hadn't been in the middle of a conversation.

“Joanie's a little upset,” he said when I reached him. I grabbed the stair rail for balance—I was drunker than I thought—and watched Fitz run a hand through his thick black hair, lick his chapped lips. This close I could see little bits of dead skin clinging to them.

“Where is she?” I asked.

He nodded in the direction of a closed door at the top of the stairs, which turned out to be a bathroom.

Joan was sitting on the edge of the tub. A candle was burning on a shelf over the sink, an awful cloying smell. The room was dark except for the flare of the wick but I knew it was Joan, sitting in silence. The dark had unnerved me since my mother died.

I flipped on the light and Joan turned her face from me, an unusual, somehow terrible gesture. I noticed right away her necklace was gone.

“What happened?”

She shrugged. Her shrug seemed exaggerated, sloppy, but still somehow elegant. She was drunk, too.

“Nothing,” she said.

I sat on the toilet lid, so close to Joan our bare calves touched.

“You've lost your necklace.” I tapped between her collarbones, the hollow where it had sat, and she jumped. When she looked at me her eyes were unfocused.

“Where were you last?” At first she wouldn't answer, acted as if she hadn't heard me.

“The room at the end of the hall,” she finally said. “It looks like somebody's little brother's room.”

It
was
somebody's little brother's room, done up to look like the Wild West, with horse-shaped pillows on a bunk bed. The bottom bunk was unmade, though the rest of the room was neat as a pin. I spotted Joan's necklace on the pillow, its clasp broken.

I went back to the bathroom, knelt down, and held her chin between my pointer finger and thumb and made her look me in the eye.

“Did he hurt you?” I asked.

For a moment it seemed as though she was on the verge of telling me something. But then she shook her head. Smiled.

“Fitzy? God, no. I'm just tired and sozzled. Help me up.” She held out her hands and I took them; when we were standing I folded the necklace into her palm. I never saw her wear it again.

That was the first time I remember being aware that Joan had secrets. At first, Joan told me about her private life: The boys she kissed; the first time, in eighth grade, she let a boy touch her bra. The way Fitz had turned hard beneath her hand. But she told me less and less, as we grew up. Sex became Joan's private world.

That night I fell asleep next to Joan, to the familiar sound of her breathing. I woke in the middle of the night and sat straight up in bed. I couldn't shake the feeling that something bad had happened to Joan in that little boy's bedroom, something she was keeping from me.

“It's okay,” Joan said, sleepily, from the bed next to mine. “It'll be okay, Cee. It'll be okay.”

•   •   •

I
grew accustomed to life at Evergreen. At first it seemed strange; within a month it was home. How quickly the young forget. And though I never quite felt like Mary and Furlow's daughter, I grew to love them. I like to think they grew to love
me.