The After Party (23 page)

1957

I
woke to a splash in the pool. It was Tuesday, two nights after the cookout. I went to the window, peered through the blinds. Joan, in her bra and panties, floating on her back in the turquoise water.

“Ray,” I whispered. Mercifully, he did not respond. If he slept through this, I would start praying.

“I promise,” I whispered, and hurried downstairs.

“Joan,” I said, my voice low, as I stood at the edge of the pool. Her skin glistened in the moonlight; her hair floated behind her and framed her face. Most of us never got our hair wet, in the pool. Too much trouble. But Joan always did.

Her eyes were still closed. “Joan!” I said again.

She opened them, smiled at me like nothing about any of this
was unusual. As if she had just dropped by to say hi and have a drink and then would be on her merry way again.

“Have you lost your mind?” I asked, furious. “It's two o'clock in the morning.” I pointed to my watch. “Where are your clothes?”

But as I spoke I could feel my fury subsiding. Joan disappeared underwater, and I watched her blurry form swimming toward me across the length of the pool. She came up beside me, gasping for air. Despite everything, I was happy to see her.

“In the water is the only place I want to be these days,” she said, and she patted the concrete. “Sit.”

I sat. It was dark, and her eyes were bloodshot; I couldn't tell if it was the chlorine or if she had taken something. I wiped a piece of hair off her forehead, cool in the night air.

“Are you on something, Joan? Let's not—”
Play games
, I was going to say, but she cut me off.

“Yesterday,” she said, “yesterday, I think. But not today. And I haven't lost my mind. It's very much here, unfortunately.” She smiled ruefully. It was so rare that I saw Joan rueful.

Now that Joan was here I didn't want her to leave. She seemed easy around me, for the first time in a long time. My old friend. I never could stay mad at Joan.

She thrummed her fingers on the blue tile. There was a new ring on her right ring finger, an emerald-cut diamond between two diamond baguettes. I touched it.

“From Sid?”

“No.” She examined it. “Something Daddy gave me years ago.”

“Really?” I'd never seen it.

“Really. I should sell it.”

I laughed. “For what?”

“The money, what else?”

“You don't need money,” I said.

“You have no idea what I need. Anyway, it wouldn't be enough.” She twisted the ring around her finger. “Why have you stayed away, Cece? You've never stayed away like this before.”

“No,” I said. “No, I guess I haven't.”

“You're surprised I noticed? Of course I noticed. You're always there.”

She pushed off from the edge of the pool, floated on her back again. It was easier to talk to her like this, when I couldn't see her eyes.

“You told me you didn't want me there.”

Joan said nothing. Her silence made me bold. What did it matter, if I mortally offended her? She didn't want me anyway.

“I know who Sid is.”

“Do you?” Her voice had laughter in it, as if she were speaking to a child who had made an obvious discovery.

“He's not who you said he was,” I said. “
Nothing
is what you said it was.”

“I've told so many lies,” she said, after a minute had passed, after I was beginning to think she wouldn't answer me at all. She no longer spoke as if I were a child. “That I can't keep track. I knew you'd figure it out, eventually. That I was lying about Sid. That I was lying about everything. I wanted you to,” she added.

“Really? You could have just told me the truth.” I thought of
the way she had dangled Sid in front of me, meeting him in the most public of places. She hadn't tried very hard to keep him a secret. But I had not solved the mystery.

“No,” she said, and shook her head. “No. That would have been impossible. You know what I wish? I wish I weren't a Fortier.”

“Who would you be if you weren't a Fortier?”

Again, it took Joan a long time to answer. “I suppose I might be happy,” she said, finally.

I watched my friend float on her back. She wasn't happy, it was true, hadn't been that way for a very long time.

“That house, Joan.” I still didn't know how to phrase it.
That place. That horrible place.

She continued to float, five, six feet away from me.

“Where I found you with those men. And then your parents sent you away.”

“My
mother
sent me away,” Joan said, and her voice was hard. “And my father let her.”

“You were destroying yourself.” She did not disagree. “I found you with Sid, half-dead. And another man. Sid's scar.” I traced my forearm from wrist to elbow. “I saw it that time. And then I saw it again, in the paper on Sunday—he had his sleeves rolled up.”

“What if I wanted to destroy myself? Wasn't that my right?” She swam to the stairs. She emerged, gleaming and wet, her back to me.

“What are you playing at, Joan?”

Joan shook her head. Still I could not see her face.

“Sid's not a beautiful man,” Joan said, “but he's vain about
that scar. It was so hot. That's why his sleeves were rolled up. The only reason.” When she turned to face me there were tears in her eyes.

“Lucky you, Cece. Lucky you. You get to know everything,
now.”

1957

I
'd like to say I thought twice about following Joan out the side gate, into the front yard, where Fred waited next to the curb. He tipped his hat to me as I opened the door, and I understood that Fred knew everything, always had, much more than I. I'd like to say I thought about telling Fred to wait. I needed to at least make up a story for Ray. To leave a note. I could hedge my bets, that way, hope that we would return in time for me to destroy it. I needed not to go at all, I needed to think about all I risked by going wherever Joan led me.

I handed her the towel I'd grabbed from the stack I kept in the outdoor bar. She didn't even seem to notice the fact of her own wetness; she would have slid into the car half-naked had I not handed her the towel, waited while she dried off; had I not
taken her hair and twisted the water out before she slipped on her dress. She let me touch her. There was that. She said nothing, and I said nothing. I simply followed her.

“Glenwood,” she said to Fred, and he nodded.

“For?” I asked, but Joan shook her head, and my question disappeared in my throat.
For my mother
, I was going to say, because Glenwood was where my mother had been buried, ten years earlier. I'd visited her grave a handful of times. Once with Ray. I paid for fresh flowers to be placed near her headstone once a month, but that was all the sentimentality I could muster.

I lay back against the cool leather seat. This car was always a relief, always signaled a return home, a respite against the heat, quiet and order after a noisy night in a club. This car was a comfort.

I closed my eyes, and waited to be delivered to our destination.

We stepped outside the car, Joan first, shivering in her dress, even in the humid nighttime air. I reached back in the car and retrieved the blanket Fred kept by our feet; Joan let me cover her shoulders with it. When we started walking she pulled it tighter.

Glenwood was enormous and stately, where everyone in River Oaks was buried. Where I would be buried one day. Ray had already purchased two plots. Buffalo Bayou was nearby, and you could hear the water moving, always; I remembered it from my mother's funeral.

Fred called for Joan from the car. “Ma'am,” he said, “Miss Fortier,” and Joan turned, irritation on her face, but then he handed her a flashlight, and her look turned to gratitude. Fred did not meet my eye.
What are we doing here?
I wanted to ask him, because it was clear that he knew.

Joan walked through Glenwood's enormous iron gates, which had never in my memory been closed, and at first I didn't follow her, didn't want to follow her. I thought of Idie and I did not want to be there. I did not want to see my mother's grave, to recall her last night on earth. I looked back for Fred, but he was already in the car, and I couldn't make out his face in the darkness. Joan disappeared into the night, and I stood where I was. The cemetery was closed, of course—a small plaque next to the entrance said so:
Visitors welcome, from sunrise to sundown
. We weren't supposed to be in there. There were rules for every single thing in the world, some written, some simply understood, but it didn't matter: Joan broke all of them.

Then she came back for me.

“Come with me,” she said, and that was all she had to say.

As we walked, our path lit by the shaky beam of the flashlight, I tried not to think about Ray, at home; I tried not to think about Tommy. Surely I would be back by sunrise. I would insist. Yet I knew that I would be home whenever Joan took me there. No sooner, no later.

Two nights earlier I had been entertaining Ciela and JJ on my patio, drinking daiquiris and feeling sure that I had given up the habit that was Joan. I was pleased with myself, pleased with pleasing Ray. And now I was traipsing through Houston's finest cemetery after midnight, walking on the carefully groomed pathways between grave sites.

We were walking toward my mother's grave, on the south side. I didn't know exactly where to find it, but I supposed Joan did. Had she been coming here for years? Was she guilty over
what we had done? If anyone could make Joan feel guilty it would be Raynalda Beirne. She was a ghost who haunted, a ghost who demanded her pound of flesh.

I wasn't silly, I wasn't hysterical, but I was scared. I caught up with Joan, who was walking very quickly.

“Joan,” I said, “why are you taking me here?”

She shook her head. Her hand clutched the blanket beneath her chin; her diamond ring was the only adornment that hinted at her place in the world. Other than that she looked rough, a little insane: damp, sloppy, on a mission known only to her.

We walked. My mother was buried near a child, whose grave was adorned with a weeping angel. The angel was large, bigger, I imagined, than the child she protected. I noticed the angel now, off to our left.

“Joan,” I said, and pointed, “this way?”

She didn't bother to answer, just led me deeper and deeper into the cemetery. The air smelled fishy, a little swampy, thanks to the slow-moving river. Mother Bayou, we called her, the water a chocolate brown. It went all the way to Galveston, emptied into the bay. Joan had told me this, long ago. She'd read it somewhere.

Finally Joan slowed, brought her free hand out to signal we were turning. We were in a tiny enclosure, surrounded by bushes and low-lying tree branches. One small plaque was embedded in the dirt; it gleamed in the black earth, only sparsely dotted with grass.

I wanted to be home, with Ray, Tommy down the hall. I wanted to be there very badly. I felt like a child who'd gotten what she'd desired—the thing she'd coveted all her life—and
then, upon receiving it, wanted to return it. I could almost feel Ray's presence beside me, warm and substantial at night. I could reach out a hand and touch his back, his shoulder—and he would murmur, he would respond to my touch without ever waking up. I had made the wrong choice, coming here.

“Joan?” I asked, my voice loud and jarring in the quiet stillness. “Take me back.”

She was looking down at the plaque, the plaque I did not want to see. She looked up at me, but she was elsewhere, in a daze, a trance, somewhere unknown.

“You can't ever go back.”

She pointed, down. To the gleaming plaque embedded in the earth. “Look at it,” she said. “You wanted to know. You wanted to see.” Her voice had turned high, ugly. “Now you see. Now you know.”

I looked up at the flat night sky, bloodless, not a star in sight. Then I looked down at the earth, and I knew I was losing something.

David Furlow Fortier
Born August 19, 1950
Died May 10, 1957

“A child,” I said, staring at the dates. Then I turned cold, as the truth dawned on me. But that's not true. The truth had been dawning on me for years and years.

“My child,” Joan said.
“Mine.”

1957

I
knew Joan the best of anyone in the world—I still believe that, all these years later—but in the end Joan was a secret, a cipher, a myth. She did not want to be known.

That one night she told me everything. I don't know why. Perhaps the planets aligned. She didn't need to tell me, certainly. She had grown accustomed to lying. She was our most famous socialite, our most beautiful friend, our brightest star. She was a Fortier. I think she loved me.

Joan wasn't sad. She wasn't tragic. She was a woman with a dead child, a status that lent no intrigue, no glamour. A status that would have made her, in our circles, untouchable.

That night six years earlier, when Joan dove into the Shamrock's pool, stood on her tiptoes at the edge of the board,
suspended in time and space, my black gown clinging to her body like a coat of wet paint—you didn't know what would happen. But oh, you wanted to go there with her. You wanted to stand on the board, you wanted to feel the air at that height. You wanted to look down and see all the people, watching. You wanted not to be one of those people. You wanted to be Joan.

You didn't know if she would dive or die trying. It didn't matter. There was only that single moment: Joan, poised. That was Joan Fortier's greatest gift. She made a moment feel endless. She made you feel endless, too. You would never age, as long as Joan was nearby. Never grow old or experience sadness or wake up to the knowledge that someone you loved was no longer on this earth.

A tragedy would have ruined Joan. And so a secret was kept, for seven years.

Yet Joan told me. She let me be her friend, that one night. I was something else, too. I was her witness.

“I left because I was pregnant,” she began.

She told no one, at first.

“Not even the baby's father?”

“Especially him,” she said. She shrugged. “He was just some boy. He could have been anyone.”

She stared at her child's grave. I waited. This was what Joan required of me: my patience. I've never believed in ghosts but I could feel my mother, lingering somewhere nearby, and in those strange hours, I was pleased by her nearness. The idea of her brought me comfort.

Joan was silent for a long time.

“I let my mother have her way, like I always let her have her way,” she said. “I used to think that I would get used to it. Used to having a child but pretending I didn't. To keeping a secret. But I didn't. The secret became a part of me, until I didn't know what was a lie, what wasn't a lie. Which lies were important, which didn't matter.”

“They all mattered,” I murmured.

“I know that,” she said, sharply, and then she began to cry. To weep. I went to her. It was my instinct: to relieve Joan of her pain.

She was stiff in my arms, at first, but then she relented, and I understood, as I held her, that Joan Fortier was a stranger whom I loved.

“Look at me, Joan,” I said. She would not. “Please.”

Slowly she lifted her head. “I'm ashamed,” she whispered, her voice thick with grief. Even though I was right next to her, I could hardly understand her.

“Tell me why,” I said. “Tell me your story.”

It was all I'd ever really wanted, to hear Joan's story. For Joan to tell me the truth.

And so she did.

•   •   •

W
hen Joan discovered she was pregnant, her life was sliced in two: there was her old life, which still required her participation. It was March, and we would be graduating in a few short months. Lamar was wrapped in a celebratory spirit: boys were deciding where they would go to college. Girls were busy planning the senior prom. Mothers were reserving back rooms in restaurants for
graduation lunches. It was an ending, but we were young enough that endings felt like beginnings.

I felt something else. I knew that once we graduated, Evergreen would not be available to me in the same way. The safety of high school, the routine: the same halls, the same teachers, the same boys. That would be gone, too. Fred depositing us in the morning, picking us up in the afternoon. All of this would disappear. It would be a new world. But Joan would be there with me. I would see her each morning when I woke, each night before I fell asleep.

Joan participated in her old life. But her real life, she felt, was very far away from the halls of Lamar High School. Her clothes still fit. She had thought they would stop fitting immediately, and so she was relieved each time she zipped her cheerleading outfit, each time she buttoned a blouse over her breasts. She had never known a pregnant woman. She knew, vaguely, that Mary's pregnancy with her had been difficult, but she did not know how. She did not know what to expect from her own changing body.

The sudden intensity of the sickness was a surprise. She stayed home from school one day, sent me off with Fred, told me she had a bug. Mary was supposed to be at a Junior League meeting. She came home early. It would have happened sooner or later; Mary was always going to learn that Joan was pregnant. It was just a matter of when.

“My mother,” Joan said, “knew everything.”

Joan was surprised by her mother's kindness. She had expected fury. Instead Mary had quickly concocted a plan, and Joan was grateful. She had no feeling about the baby. It was, at this point,
an absence: of her regular cycle, of feeling well. The baby was not yet a baby to Joan. That would come later.

Joan wanted one thing from Mary: a promise that Furlow would never know. It was 1950. Furlow had been born in 1875. She had let a man have sex with her, and this man had not married her after she learned of the child. It would ruin Furlow. His Joan had always existed well above the rest of the world.

He'll be none the wiser, Mary told her, and Joan believed her. To have a baby out of wedlock, back then—there would have been nothing left of Joan. There wasn't any question of Joan marrying the father. The father was one of two boys, but there was no way to tell which one, and anyway, the thought of marrying either one of them, tying herself to him for life, going to him, begging him—it filled her with disgust. Mary seemed to understand that marriage wasn't an option; Mary seemed to understand everything.

“We decided I would leave when everyone would be busy. And you would be gone.” We were sitting now, on the hard ground. “That was another reason. You would be in Oklahoma.” Easter came and Joan disappeared.

I remembered returning from Oklahoma, Mary picking me up, Fred driving. It was all a farce.

“Did Dorie know?” I asked.

“If you didn't know,” she said, “then no one knew.”

And I was proud, sitting there in the dark cemetery. That I was the person, out of everyone, Mary and Joan had most wanted to fool.

Joan moved to Plano, outside of Dallas, and lived at a home for unwed mothers. The house was Victorian, winding. The old pine
floors were uneven, the windows narrow and tall. Joan's room overlooked the front yard, which was shaded by oak trees. The view reminded her of Evergreen. She thought of Furlow when she thought of Evergreen.

“I missed Evergreen,” she said. “I hadn't thought I would. I was glad to leave it. I had begun to hate it. But then I went away and I realized it was home. The place I went, in Plano—it wasn't so bad. There were other girls there, like me. We played cards. We ate meals together. We all got fatter and fatter. We wore loose, shapeless clothes. Rags. You would have hated it.”

She smiled, shyly, in a way completely uncharacteristic of Joan.

“I was grateful for their company. If the other girls hadn't been there, I might have lost my mind.”

But mainly, Joan read. There was a stack of old magazines:
Harper's Bazaar
,
Life
,
Modern Screen
,
National Geographic
. Joan read each one, cover to cover. She read about the place she was supposed to be. She read about other places, too. When she'd finished with these she asked Mary, who called once a week, for more. Mary sent the most recent issues and Joan disappeared into her bedroom.

“I'd never pretended I was anyone else,” she said. She rested her chin on her bent knees, a child's pose. “And now I pretended all the time.”

“Who did you pretend to be?” I asked.

“
Who
didn't matter,” she said. “
Where
mattered. I went to Hollywood, yes, but other places, too: London, Cairo. The places I saw in the pictures.” She laughed. “Can you imagine?”

I could imagine, that was the thing. I saw it so clearly now:
without a baby, Joan would have gone, eventually, to one of these places—not Cairo, but New York, LA, even Boston or Miami. She would have married a wealthy man—Joan wasn't meant for a life without money—a businessman, or maybe a successful writer. Someone who wouldn't have bored her, someone who could have given her a piece of the world: Taken her to Thailand to tour his textile factories. Taken her to Paris, to an artists' colony. Taken her away from me, and the life I had built so carefully. I loved the details of my life, most. That Maria arrived each morning precisely at eight. That Tommy would go to River Oaks Elementary, just as Joan and I had. That we all served the same pimiento sandwiches, from the same recipe, at luncheons. That our husbands disappeared onto patios to smoke cigars while we ladies cleared the table. In the end, the details weren't about beauty or status. They never had been, for me. They were about feeling at home in the world. And Joan hated these details. She thought my existence relentlessly tedious. What she couldn't see was that the details
were
life. That was how you loved someone: every day, without fail, over and over.

Joan waited for me to answer, but I couldn't speak. It felt like I was seeing her, and myself, clearly for the first time since we were children.

“Maybe you can't imagine. But I had a plan, Cece,” Joan continued. “For the first time in my life, I had a plan. Mama thought I was coming back to Houston. But I was never coming back. There was nothing left for me, here. I was going to go someplace where no one knew me. Where no one knew the Fortiers.”

I had thought Joan needed Houston,
needed
to be worshipped,
known, adored. Imagining her in Hollywood, seeking the adoration of strangers, had barely required any imagination at all. But Joan did not need to be adored. It was we who needed to adore her.

“You wanted to go where the ideas were,” I said, remembering what she had told me so long ago, as we stood on the steps outside Lamar.

“Yes,” Joan said. “Yes! That was exactly where I wanted to go. But I never quite made it, did I?” It wasn't a question I was meant to answer. “Instead I had a baby. Such a cliché: the unmarried girl who gets pregnant and ruins her life. But I wasn't going to let this baby ruin my life. There was one baby before mine. The girl—her name was Katherine, from St. Louis—labored for a very long time before she went to the hospital. And then we never saw her again. That was the promise of the place: you had a baby and then you left. It felt like a promise, anyway.”

The next time Houston saw Joan, this period in her life—this sleepy, unchanging routine she found herself in—would be a memory. It would be less than that, because her new life would be so different she would be unable to recall her old life. She would not be able to remember staring at a photograph of Ava Gardner for so long, with such intensity, she saw her face in her dreams. She would not remember asking her mother for a French dictionary over the phone, and her mother's response—a quick burst of laughter—which had been worse than no. She would not remember the way the girl from St. Louis had grabbed Joan's hand one morning and put it on her stomach; the undeniable movement she
felt beneath her hand, nor the guilty grin on the girl's face. She would not remember how her own baby felt within her.

“I would wake up in the middle of the night and he would be moving, constantly, as if he were trying to somersault out of the womb. He made me feel less alone.” She shook her head. “Isn't that foolish? He wasn't even a baby at that point. He was half a baby. And he comforted me. I tried not to feel comfort. I knew I would give birth with a cloth over my eyes. I wouldn't even know if he was a boy or a girl. He would be taken, given to his new parents, right away.”

She spent four months at the home for unwed mothers. She went into labor a month early, in August. When she woke, she was in a hospital in Dallas. Before she opened her eyes she heard a woman's voice say it was a shame, one of God's dirty tricks.

“The nurse said he wasn't right. That's how I knew he was a boy. And then they took me to him. I demanded it.” She looked at me. “I'd never wanted anything, until that point, in my entire life. All I wanted was my baby.”

The nurse took her to the nursery. Joan's baby was the only one there, and Joan understood, without anyone telling her, that it was where sick children went. His eyes were closed. He felt stiff against her hands. His hair was dark. Joan was surprised by its thickness. His cheeks were dotted with red spots.

The baby opened his eyes, and they were a color Joan had never seen: blue, nearly black. Joan reached inside his glass bassinet, touched his dark eyebrow, a smudge on his face. She felt she loved him more, because he wasn't right. She needed to protect him.

“There was a problem with his breathing, during the birth. Oxygen. He didn't have enough.” Her sentences were short, clipped. “He had a feeding tube.” She touched her nose, where, I understood, the tube had entered her child's body. “He had seizures. He shook, terribly. He was never going to be what we imagined him to be. And what did we imagine him to be?” She shrugged. “We imagined he would be perfect. That's what I imagined, anyway, all those hours in the home. I imagined I would have a perfect child and he would go to perfect parents and I would be able to leave, then, go to one coast or the other, or Europe maybe, and not ever have to think about him, because I knew his life would be perfect.” She made a strangled sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.