Even more than he worries over what could go wrong at dinner, Albie fears what could go wrong at the Frankenhoffs’ after-party. The Frankenhoffs are Lizzie Frank and Jack Hoffman. Yes, the same Lizzie Frank who sent Bunny the Get-Well-Quit-Sniveling email. Everyone calls them the Frankenhoffs. The origin of the portmanteau is long forgotten, except Bunny remembers because she was the one who coined it. But to make mention of that, no matter how off the cuff, would be embarrassing, like bragging about a big nothing, and she might not even be believed, like when Al Gore said he invented the Internet, and everyone laughed at him.
“If we do go to the dinner,” Albie ventures, “let’s at least skip the party.”
“What party?” Bunny asks.
“The Fankenhoffs’ party,” he reminds her.
The Frankenhoffs live on the forty-fourth floor of a vacuous building in an apartment with walls that are mostly windows. It was the sunlight and the view that the windows offered that convinced the Frankenhoffs to buy an apartment too easily mistaken for a suite in the Park Lane Hotel. The bedroom windows look out over the river, which is nice enough, but from the wall-to-wall living room window, although a dozen blocks uptown and two avenues west, they have a panoramic view of the eyesore that is Times Square, which is why every year beginning in 1998, when they first moved into their over-priced Trump Dump, the Frankenhoffs have hosted an after-party. What better place for all their friends to gather together to watch the ball drop?
Their friends. Again, Bunny would make quotation marks with her fingers. Their “friends.” Bunny is a fan of air quotes. Air kisses, too.
Bunny and Albie go to the Frankenhoffs’ after-party because Elliot and Trudy and Julian and Lydia go, and they feel obligated to go with them; a reason which is sufficiently inane and made worse by the insufferable tedium of being there. The Frankenhoffs’ party mixes their old friends with their new friends, which means an interminable hour or two of making small talk with exclusive people who are, and will remain, strangers, and catching up with people they’ve not seen since the New Year’s Eve before because who would want to see these people by choice? Catching up boils down to verbal updates of curricula vitae. The Frankenhoffs’ friends, old and new, are people who define themselves by their professions: film producers, editors, architects, professors in theory-dominated English departments, neuroscientists, museum curators, something-in-the-theater, and administrators for non-profit organizations, none of which get Bunny’s charitable contributions because she tends to give to organizations dedicated to the reduction of suffering.
This year, Bunny defines herself as nothing.
The Frankenhoffs’ new friends are people with whom they became acquainted throughout the year, people they cultivate like winter annuals in the hope that a friendship will bloom, people whom Bunny refers to as ornamental cabbage. Ornamental cabbage cycles, from germination to death, in a mere eight weeks of the growing season.
“Not always,” Albie had told her. “Mostly it does. But often, the ornamental cabbage winds up as a biennial.”
Bunny shrugged. It is the same with the Frankenhoffs’ new friends. With particularly rich fertilizer, some of them will hang in there for another year, which is why they fuss and fawn over their new friends, compliment their clothes or hair color or the brilliance of their accomplishments, while keeping a watchful eye, taking care that their glasses are full, and have they tried the pastries? Lizzie baked them herself. Lizzie bakes pastries that span the globe. Tacked to her kitchen wall is a map of the world. Each year she bakes pastries of a different nation, noted with a push-pin. The pastries of some nations taste like Silly Putty.
Because what’s to be gained by gushing over friends you’ve had for years? Friends you’ve had for years are practically losers. Inevitably, Bunny was to be found standing alone in a corner of the Frankenhoffs’ minimalistically furnished living room, sipping her wine, her pastry wrapped in a napkin until she could locate a trash can. Eventually someone would approach her, someone like that filmmaker who had a mustache, one that arched like an eyebrow, which was sufficiently disturbing. He wanted to know what she had written, had she written something he might’ve read, or something he might’ve heard about.
“Probably not,” Bunny said.
“Are you someone I should know?” he asked.
“Probably not,” Bunny said, to which he said, “Well, good luck to you.”
Good luck to you.
Equally predetermined would be the conversation about her name, such as it was a conversation and not a prosecutorial inquiry: On your birth certificate, it says Bunny? For real, your parents named you Bunny? As if, if the question were reworded and asked often enough, she’d be tricked into confessing that her real name is Amanda or Jeanne. “Why would they name you Bunny?”
“Because,” Bunny would say, “they raised rabbits. For food.”
An irritating but harmless exchange, except for last year’s after-party when Bunny was approached by a professor of Gender Studies at Yale—“at Yale,” she emphasized. “Bunny?” she asked. “That can’t be your real name. What is your given name?”
“Bunny is my given name. It’s on my birth certificate. Any other questions?”
The professor wore black-framed eyeglasses to announce her fierce intelligence, and her haircut was as sharp and ugly as her tone of voice. “Bunny is a pet name for a child. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when you have a child’s name? I strongly urge you to change it,” she said.
Bunny thanked the professor of Gender Studies at Yale for her advice, and then offered up some of her own. “A mint. Or a piece of gum. Something. Because it’s bad. Offensive, really.”
The professor of Gender Studies at Yale recoiled as if Bunny were the one in need of a mint, and asked, “What exactly is your problem?” Then, she brushed at her shoulder as if she thought she might have dandruff, too, as if bad breath and dandruff go hand in hand. “Because something is wrong with you,” she said. “Very wrong.”
Now, Albie again urges they don’t go to the party. “Let’s do ourselves a favor and skip it. It’s not as if we want to watch the ball drop.” In fact, Bunny has never seen the ball drop. Not on television, and she’d have scooped out an eyeball rather than go, in person, on the ground, to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. And in previous years at the Frankenhoffs’ parties, in those few minutes before midnight, when everyone crowded by the window, the anticipation gathering like static electricity, rising in preparation to assuredly fall, just the same as the ball will drop in its sixty calibrated seconds, Bunny would slip away and lock herself in the bathroom, where she’d sit on the edge of the tub, light a cigarette, and wait for it to be over.