Chapter Thirty-two

Phil was feeling really good. Really, really good. The champagne had made him sort of . . . no, not sort of, but definitively, hahaha, ecstatic . . .

Hahahaha.

He actually heard the sound in his head like there was a bubble in his brain with the cartoon word “hahahahaha,” and what was really far out was that he, Phil (that would be him, Phil, Philly, Philster, his own self), could see the bubble that was attached to his brain by an invisible string and which now floated above his head. Was that amazing or what?

“Happy floating bubble,” he said to Annie.

She looked at him and smiled. Such a sweet smile. Of course, she had no idea what he was talking about because he had failed to finish his complete thought.

Suddenly that seemed hysterically funny to him, too. The concept of complete thought seemed highly silly in the extreme.

He thought of a giant professor in the sky who was marking him down, like one of his old teachers in college, for failing to deliver a complete thought.

He wanted somehow to convey this idea to Annie but she had taken him somewhere in the back of the condo, into a third room that seemed much bigger than he had first thought it was.

This was an odd room to be in because the party was happening out in the other rooms . . . haha . . . so, maybe, Phil thought, she was going to give him a little sex right here.

But, now he saw he was wrong. There was another woman here in the new room, and she was standing with a man over in the corner and they were laughing it up. Well, no, that wasn’t quite right.

She, the woman, whose back was to him, was laughing it up, giggling in a high-pitched way, and suddenly Philly got a terrible case of the horrors.

Shit! No way! It couldn’t be! But as he walked (stumbled, actually) forward, he realized that yes, sirree-bob-a-rootie there was no doubt that the giggling, hysterical woman whose back was to him was none other than his wife, Dee Dee. He knew that back, and he knew that dyed blonde hair, and he especially knew that high-pitched giggle.

And it occurred to him that she was drinking from a fluted glass the same as he was.

Wasn’t that odd?

Champagne. Cold, bubbling, sparkly champagne.

And she was just as ecstatically loaded as he was.

And she was just as unsteady on her feet.

And now she was turning to see who was approaching her here in the back room.

This back room with no windows. It seemed more like a storeroom than part of a condo.

Now Dee Dee was looking at him and her mouth was open in some kind of mixture of embarrassment and horror, and she was saying, “Oh, no. How did you get here?”

And he felt the same thing but with a monster dose of shame, too.

“I was just about to say the same . . .” But he couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out. He couldn’t do the complete thought but somehow that wasn’t amusing anymore, nor was cute, button-nosed Annie’s witty, youthful grin.

No, it wasn’t what you would call an affectionate or amused grin. More like a predatory grin, a “Gotcha” grin.

Definitely a “Gotcha” grin, and he was feeling really dizzy.

Phil wanted to cry out to the other people at the party, but then he had a nearly complete thought, which was, No, the other party-goers weren’t going to help. Not at all. Because they weren’t really partygoers at all, were they?

Because they were actors somehow, hired by someone, like the old people who had been staring at him with the knowing smile, and none of them were going to help him or Dee Dee one bit.

In short, Phil thought, as he fell into a trancelike sleep, he had been played, and so had Dee Dee, and wasn’t it funny that as he fell off the shelf of consciousness, he suddenly felt an old, familiar love for his wife blooming in his very stoned soul.