“Here,” Rachel said as she and Toby returned to the kitchen. She pointed at the bottles on the marble counters—beer, vodka, gin, whiskey, and a single drained bottle of rosé. “He had set out all the alcohol before we arrived. And there—” She pointed at a tiled island that was smeared with guacamole, tortilla-chip crumbs, and crusty smears of soft cheese and cigarette ash. “The hors d’oeuvres.”
Bright flashes as Toby took photos. “A dinner party,” he suggested.
“A dinner party in hell,” she countered, but when she said those words she thought instead of another dinner party from last year. Out in the D.C. suburbs, Gregg had called over friends—his friends, really—and all that day, as he prepared the meats for grilling and julienned the vegetables, they’d argued continuously. About an hour before the guests arrived, they passed each other in the kitchen, him clutching a pair of tongs, her a bowl of steaming black beans, and he slammed his hip into her kidney hard enough for her to stumble into the counter and send the beans flying. Porcelain shattered, and she clutched the edge of the counter to keep from falling to the floor. When she looked up, ready to lash out, he was disappearing out of the room.
The funny thing, looking back, was that it wasn’t a particularly violent moment, not for Gregg. He’d kept his fists to himself for a whole day. In his world, knocking his wife against the kitchen counter was the height of civility.
When the guests trickled in with their hearty grins, Gregg stationed himself behind the bar to serve up wine and martinis, and she withdrew into silence. She smiled as she took their coats and answered the few questions that were thrown her way, but in reality she had become an observer, like an anthropologist dropped into the middle of a native ritual that she had only read about in books.
There was the music, that incongruous Gregg mix—eighties hits and the American Songbook—that no one paid attention to. There was the boisterous storyteller that her husband became whenever he got the chance, spilling not-quite-believable secrets about the world of the Washington lobbyist in the age of the first black president. Then Gregg the confidante, who pulled this or that friend aside to whisper lines that always ended with a laugh and a slap on the back. And the drinking.
Quickly, though, it dawned on her that the way their guests drained their glasses had less to do with joie de vivre than anxiety. How had she not noticed this before? How had she not seen how, after one of Gregg’s particularly raunchy jokes, Ben would look over at his wife, Emily, eyebrows raised in patronizing surprise, and she would look down into her glass before both drank deeply? Yet they, and all of them, eagerly accepted his dinner invitations, because for all his plentiful flaws Gregg Wills had connections. He knew people. Most importantly, he had access to all kinds of influence. It was remarkable how many indignities people were willing to suffer.
The clarity of that night had been overwhelming, and as she moved further back in time, thinking over the too-long course of their relationship, she had seen that nothing had ever been right. She’d never really known happiness with him, at least no happiness lasting more than twenty-four hours. All this came to her with a cold, sober thud that momentarily deafened her, and she looked up to find at their long dining table ten sets of eyes focused on her.
“Oh. Excuse me?”
Gregg frowned from the far end, his face full of that you’re embarrassing me expression, while Ben said, “Just trying to remember something you said about tax cuts, I can’t recall the exact words.”
“Her mind is elsewhere, Ben,” Gregg said with a hint of disgust.
“Yeah,” she said finally, turning to Ben. “Sorry. I was just realizing that I’m going to divorce this asshole.”
But that was then, and now, for Toby, she described an entirely different kind of dinner party. There was the first-person-shooter played on an Xbox connected to a fifty-inch TV. Another TV in another room played testosterone-heavy movies end on end. Music streamed in everywhere: Nation of Ulysses dovetailed into the Pixies and Sonic Youth and Black Flag, a choice mix of high-adrenaline bands that, when accompanied by the alcohol and skunk weed and some mysterious blue pills that Rachel only palmed, kept everyone amped up and on edge. If she’d thought they’d have another chill night talking about proletarian revolution, she was wrong. Tonight, Peter told them as he entered the room carrying a cardboard box of spray-paint cans, was about rocking the fuck out. Then he took a canister of red, walked to the eggshell wall, and wrote THIS IS OURS NOW in huge letters.
Layla snatched a canister of blue, and Gary green.
Layla danced like a pogo stick, bouncing around; Gary waved his arms in a swaying, stoned prance. Even Rachel danced, because to not dance was to stand out, and Peter swept her up in his arms and spun, singing about a creature in the sky who got sucked in a hole. And though she didn’t tell Toby, as she danced with Peter she tried to remember if she had ever felt this relaxed with Gregg, relaxed enough to give herself over to her dance partner and actually follow him without hesitation.
Toby took snapshots of the multicolored slogans on the wall—
PROPERTY IS THEFT
IF IT AIN’T BROKE, BREAK IT
MARXISM-VANDALISM
NO MORE THRONE, NO MORE CROWN
FUCK SHIT UP AND BURN IT DOWN
Toby said, “No one felt all this was crossing a line?”
“By then the pills had kicked in.”
“What were they?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but they had an effect. The giggles and the shouting and the antics skyrocketed. Over here,” she said, leading him back into the living room and pointing at a painting of a boy with an apple that had been ripped down from the wall and sliced up. Toby photographed it. “Layla did that,” she said. “And everyone laughed.”
“You too?”
“I played along. Peter seemed to be egging them on. He pulled down that china cabinet in the hallway. It shocked us, but then he said, ‘Let the Chinese clean it up,’ and that was his sign to us that we really could do as we pleased.”
“Is that when you called me?”
She shook her head. “They were having fun. Why would I call you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you didn’t feel safe.”
“I’m a woman, Toby. I never feel safe.”
He took that in. “You didn’t take the blue pills. The weed?”
“Couple hits. Really just wine.”
“So you were drunk.”
“A bottle over the space of four hours—I was buzzed. And I wanted more. The three of them were busy destroying the living room—Peter had cranked the music and they’d made an impromptu mosh pit—so I went downstairs to search for the wine cellar.”
Toby crouched to photograph pieces of stained glass from a shattered vase, as if he were working on a high school photo assignment. He looked up at her. “Want to go down there now?”
“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”