Lee plucked a loose blue feather from Naomi’s Mardi Gras mask and brushed her blushing cheek with it. Lee wore a mask too, as did Peyton and Tate, masks sold in a cellophane bag, four for a dollar. On the way to the swingers’ party, they’d stopped at an About a Buck because Tate had insisted on showing up at the party reeking of cheap aftershave.
The many footsteps in the snow on the front walk at 14812 W. Josephine Lane were fading away, dusted over. Lee tickled her cheek with the feather to cheer her up, Naomi knew. It hadn’t entered her mind that they’d actually end up at the party—Peyton rarely followed through on anything. Naomi figured they’d detour to the basement of Agent 99, where they’d all gain entrance without fake IDs because Lee was friendly with the doorman, a husky drag queen with one of those drag-queeny names that are part classic B-list celebrity, part serial killer or assassin. (Was he Squeaky Van Doren? Or Zsa Zsa Wayne Gacy?) Lee served as a mascot—they’d dubbed him the Marble Faun, after the young handyman adopted by the Bouviers in Grey Gardens—for a whole motley kingdom of queens, all of them jowly and only half plucked, their wigs full of rats’ nests, runs rampant up and down their glittery pantyhose.
As Tate opened the door, Naomi blushed so hard that her eyes watered. She wanted nothing to do with any of the men who might be there, but she wouldn’t have objected to being noticed. Lee’s attention had been focused all evening on Tate—though Lee and Tate had sat just inches from each other in the car, they’d text-messaged back and forth for the whole ride like a couple of fourteen-year-old Japanese girls, giggling and muttering as they thumbed at their cell phones, making sure Peyton and Naomi knew they were excluded.
Peyton strolled into the living room, her hips swinging, clearly having rehearsed the moment in her mind, tossing some confetti up into the air that smelled of a sea-breezy deodorizer. But only a few people witnessed her grand entrance, fully dressed middle-aged women reading each other’s tarot, sitting on the floor by the fireplace with large goblets of red wine cupped in their hands. The women were strangely unmoved by the appearance of four young people in bad tuxedos and tattered prom dresses and owl-eye masks. Were the women high? The kids could’ve been rapists and thieves, copycatting A Clockwork Orange, Naomi thought. Peyton’s confetti fell without ceremony onto a carpet the color of raspberry sorbet.
Then suddenly a handsome man, fiftyish possibly, possibly older, mustached and with thick and curly salt-and-pepper hair, stepped into the room from the kitchen, wearing only his underwear and carrying two highballs of a dark liquor, the swing of his dick making the silk of his boxers shiver. He was so exactly what Naomi expected to see—looking like a millionaire from a 1980s TV soap—that the effect was somehow shocking. When the man winked at them, then disappeared down a hallway, all the children were tempted to follow this mythical creature into the dark woods.
And Peyton seemed about to do just that. But she stopped at the end of the hallway and bowed her head, multicolored confetti caught in the white crepe and crocheted rose petals of her dress. She’d likely pictured her confrontation taking place in a crowded room of timid people in the act of building up their nerve. At the most, she would’ve caught her father knotted up in a game of pre-coital Twister, or licking salt off the fist of a woman while prepping for a tequila shot. Peyton might have imagined herself wrecking the party with her sarcastic confetti and ironic ball gown and youthful condescension. She probably hadn’t considered the possibility of arriving too late, her father having moved on to one of the back-room dog piles.
Tate had apparently found himself unable to hide his beauty a second longer and had pulled off his mask in order to romance the tarot ladies. Lee followed him, and Naomi went to Peyton’s side. “I’ll go with you,” Naomi whispered. “We can go find him.”
Peyton took a deep breath. “Gross,” she said. She took Naomi’s arm, sisterly, in hers. “Walk with me to the bar,” she said, and they strolled across the living room to an antique sideboard. “I’m going to have a little whiskey first because I feel a cold coming on,” Peyton said, and Naomi poured herself some rosé. They linked arms again and went into the room that the man in the silk boxers had just abandoned, a room, empty and shag-carpeted, where a board game had been set up and left behind. Naomi could feel Peyton’s arm shivering against her own.
“Let’s just sit a minute,” Naomi suggested. “Drink a little.”
Tate and Lee came into the room too, and they all stretched out on the floor to play the game, a drinking game called Happy Hours. The fly-specked, roughed-up cardboard box, something from the early ’60s, featured cartoonish partygoers dressed splendidly.
They picked up where the previous players had left off, even drinking the amber liquid left over in the highball glasses that lined the game board. Peyton rolled a five, moved her little plastic pink elephant across the board, then drew a Cocktail Napkin card. “You’ve been arrested for driving drunk,” she read aloud. “Dry out in the clink and skip a round.” She moved her elephant to the corner of the board, into the jail space.
“You’re a menace to society,” Tate said with a wink.
Lee rolled the dice and moved his mini–martini glass two spaces. He too drew a Cocktail Napkin card, and read, “Take a drink and make a drunken confession.” Naomi could tell by the way Lee drained the glass, then took a deep breath, that quite the confession was on its way. But before he could say anything, Peyton shot back the rest of her own drink, stood, and pinched Tate’s collar to tug at him to stand up. “I need your help, lover,” she said, and she led him from the room, the two of them moving purposefully into the forbidden corridor.
“I think I’m in love,” Lee said, sitting just behind Naomi, his lips at her ear. “No, I know I’m in love. Definitely.” He toyed with Naomi’s zipper at the back of her dress, inching it up and down, up and down. Don’t say another word, she wanted to say to him, wanting to stay in the impossible moment as long as she could. “I’m in love with Tate,” Lee said. “But I can’t tell anybody. If he finds out, then maybe he’ll never flirt with me again. Every time he kind of touches me, even though I know it doesn’t mean anything really, it just feeds me, you know? Every little touch, that he probably doesn’t think twice about, I can be distracted by for days. I want that distraction more than anything.”
Lee still played with her zipper, and Naomi reached back to slap at his hand, like shooing away a mosquito. “You can’t tell anybody?” she said, turning his words back on him, her accusatory tone lost with a break in her voice.
“No, of course I can’t tell anybody,” Lee said.
“That’s not what I mean,” Naomi said. “What about me? I’m anybody. I mean, I’m not nobody. Do you hear yourself? You say you can’t tell anybody, and you’re saying it to me, right to my face. Like I don’t matter.”
“Dude,” Lee said, reaching out to run his fingers lightly over the back of her neck. “You’re definitely anybody. You’re everybody. You’re being a freak.”
Naomi would’ve left the room, but she feared stumbling into becoming a fourth wheel in somebody’s ménage à trois. She decided she’d say nothing. She’d pout, forcing him into being overly affectionate. Maybe she’d even seduce him by telling him she’d never have sex with him again.
In all honesty, she didn’t know if she could bear the intimacy anymore. When they were in bed together, he was in love with her, she had no doubt. On top of her, he’d look right into her eyes, and he’d put his hands in hers. Sometimes he even actually said it—I love you—and she sometimes actually said it back. Then afterward they were just friends again, and Naomi politely pretended she hadn’t heard a word.
Naomi now heard laughter in the street and car doors slamming. She heard singing. She heard lousy renditions of snippets of Elton John songs and some shoddy Cher impressions, all sucked-in cheeks and warbly throats.
“Ah, they found the place,” Lee said as he and Naomi went to the window to watch the queens. All Lee had to do was call, and no matter what the weather, they arrived, freshly lipsticked and squeezed into loose tights. They twirled up the walk beneath the fat, soft snow-flakes, graceless on stilettos. They spun and danced like dumb children, their tongues out, their palms up. They were a walking holiday wherever they went, Naomi thought. Part party doll, part happy accident, each queen thought herself the most stunningly decadent by far.
Naomi leaned her cheek on Lee’s shoulder, the slick sleeve of his cheap suit smooth against her skin. Was I your first love, at least? Naomi would ask him, but later, when they were alone again in his room and he was feeling affectionate, when the chances were better that his answer would be yes.