VII

The day of George’s book party lurched forward at a frustrating pace. The subject itself seemed to hang in the air, like a disruptive fog. It hovered over every one of Mrs. March’s conversations, waiting for her in every pause. The apartment seemed to agree with her—every room now primped and oddly spaced with new furniture arrangements, enduring the anticipation with something like reproach.

She was too agitated to eat anything but asked Martha to prepare her something light, “so as to avoid bloating.” She didn’t want Martha to know how anxious the party made her, how it took up all the space in her thoughts and relegated all other priorities to the background.

She picked at her vegetables languidly, swallowing bits with great gulps of water and breathing through her mouth, the way she had done as a little girl when forced to eat something she didn’t like. The grandfather clock tutted disapprovingly in the foyer, like some sort of wigged Victorian judge clicking his tongue and—when the clock struck the hour—tolling his bell on the court steps in proclamation of her guilt.

The cook and waiters, having organized everything, had left to change into their uniforms. Mrs. March considered suddenly, outrageously, that they had all come back already or had never even left and were hiding in the hallway, waiting to startle her. She pushed her plate of vegetables away and arranged her napkin on top of her plate in an attempt to mask how little she’d eaten.

She scampered off to her bedroom as Martha cleared the table. At this time of day, strips of direct sunlight perforated their suite like stabs. Mrs. March drew the drapes, afraid of a headache. She removed her shoes and lay on the bed, straightening her skirt and looking up at the ceiling, her hands resting on her stomach. She tried to nap, but her pulse, thudding in her ears, was too loud to ignore, as was the constant, hounding certainty that she had made some irredeemable mistake with the catering. Were her guests currently in a similar state of expectation? Did her party paralyze their every thought, dominate their every activity? Probably not. She swallowed, her throat scratchy and dry. She looked at her wristwatch, at the ticking, trembling hands, until they marked quarter to four, the earliest hour at which she had allowed herself to dress for the party.

She jumped up and opened the doors to the built-in closet. She had long been haunted by the suspicion that although her wardrobe was tasteful and of good quality, the way she arranged or styled her clothes made them come across as cheap and tacky. She suspected this of her furniture, indeed of all her belongings, but especially of her clothes. Clothing didn’t seem to suit her the way it suited other women; everything was either too tight or too short or it hung off her, shapeless and billowy—she always appeared to be wearing somebody else’s clothes.

She stood motionless in front of the closet, her eyes scanning the fabrics and patterns of her dresses, skirts, and pantsuits. How strange, she thought, that one day she would select the last ensemble she would ever wear. The last blouse that would heave as she breathed, the last skirt that would press against her gut when she ate. She might not die in them necessarily (flashes of hospital gowns came to mind), or be buried in them (her sister, a slave to protocol, would probably pick her most drab, least flattering outfit), but they would still be the last clothes she had ever chosen to wear. Would she die tonight, before she had a chance to host the party? As long as she actively imagined the scenario, it would not come to pass. This was a little game she often played with herself. If she wondered whether an outfit would be her last, it wouldn’t be. If she pictured herself dying today, she wouldn’t. It was a silly superstition, but really, what were the odds that something terrible would happen when you expected it to? Very low indeed. Nobody ever said, “My wife died today, as expected,” or “I was in a terrible accident, as I predicted.”

She made her way through the hangers, looking for the dress she’d had in mind for the party ever since it had been decided there was to be a party. It was a bottle green dress with long sleeves. Her upper arms had turned flabby with age, and she took care to conceal them.

She found the dress hiding between two houndstooth pantsuits and yanked it out. She recalled wearing it only once before, to a dinner months ago with George and his cousin Jared. Although she had pored over the invitation list for tonight, a nagging fear now surfaced as to whether Jared would be in attendance. Mrs. March had only met Jared twice, and she couldn’t possibly be seen wearing the same dress two out of three times. He would greet her warmly enough, surely expecting the wife of his illustrious cousin to impress him, but upon realizing she was wearing the same dress, jewelry, and hairstyle, his attention would no doubt flit to the more stylish women in the room.

Her eyes fell on a royal blue off-the-shoulder number hidden at the deep end of the closet. She had never worn it. In fact, the tag was still on. What a strong yet elegant color, she thought, and one unlikely to be worn by the other guests. Sadly, however, the dress was sleeveless. She pulled it out of the closet and inspected both dresses in each of her hands. The blue was certainly pretty, but she simply couldn’t take the risk of somebody with a camera capturing her bare arms. She thrust it right back into the closet.

Slipping the bottle green dress off its hanger, she carried it to the bed carefully, as if it were a sleeping child, and spread it out over the coverlet. Beside the dress, she placed a golden brooch and round gold earrings.

Next she started on her hair, wrapping locks tightly around rollers, strand by strand.

She filed and polished her nails, something she always did herself to avoid professional manicurists, lest they judge the state of her nails (which they often had in the past, asking her, “Why are your nails so yellow? Do you leave the polish on for too long?” in front of the other clients).

Waiting for her nails to dry, she looked steadily at her watch ticking the seconds away. Then she removed the hot rollers from her hair. As she unrolled a ringlet, the roller, still hot, grazed her skin, burning the back of an earlobe. She breathed in sharply and patted her stinging ear with a wet piece of toilet paper.

She undressed, taking care to avoid the sight of her naked body in the mirror. The skin on her stomach was dented, having never quite recovered from Jonathan. Her gut was scratched with stretch marks that branched out toward the thick dark patch of hair between her legs. She managed, with some difficulty, to scoop her sagging belly into the tight, flesh-colored girdle, before shimmying into the bottle green dress. When she finally allowed a good look at herself in the bathroom mirror, she smiled—unnaturally, as if posing for a photograph. Swaying, pretending to hold a glass in her hand, she mimed laughter. “Thank you for coming,” she said to the mirror. “Thank you, for coming.”

She tried on different lipsticks—all of them unused, hard and gleaming like candle wax—only to rub each one off angrily, staining her whole jaw, chafing her chin with paper towels and at one point furiously, purposefully, drawing a gash across her neck in vermilion—before returning, defeated, to the sensible cream-colored lipstick she always wore.

In a fit of indecision, she wiggled out of the bottle green dress, went back to the closet, and tried on the royal blue. In the mirror she winced at the protruding curve of her midriff; at her arms, somehow simultaneously tight and saggy. She tore the dress off with a stifled cry. She threw on a silk blouse—the one she usually wore with her mother’s old rhinestone cufflinks—and black skirt, only to end up back in the bottle green dress.

GEORGE ARRIVED HOME at twilight, just as Mrs. March was experimenting with the ceiling and floor lamps to determine which combination would inspire a cozy yet vibrant atmosphere. As she hummed softly to herself in a way only a calm and collected woman could, her performance went unnoticed by the waiters, who politely ignored her as she fiddled with the lights.

She glanced fretfully at her wristwatch. Some of the guests were probably already on their way: the married couples bickering in elevators and the backseats of cabs, the women so tightly coiffed they looked like they’d just undergone cosmetic surgery, the men pretending they still fit into ten-year-old Armani suits.

She was making one last halfhearted attempt to change her dress while George knotted his tie in the bathroom, when out of nowhere he said, “You know, Paulette called to congratulate me.”

“Oh?” she said.

“Now, now, don’t start.”

“Don’t start what? I was merely saying ‘oh.’ ”

“Well, it was very sweet of her to phone, especially as she’s so busy now with all her shoots—”

“Well, she’s very talented,” she said.

“Yes, she’s doing very well for herself.”

Mrs. March’s stomach dropped picturing George’s pride in Paula spilling over into the party. She had worked too hard and had fabricated hopes that were now too high (daydreams of George directing a loving speech at her, guests congratulating her impeccable taste, among others) to share George’s admiration this evening.

“So well, in fact,” continued George, now fastening a cufflink, “that she’s put in an offer on a townhouse in Kensington.”

“How lovely.”

“Yes. It’s beautiful apparently—and a landmark to boot. She says that we’re welcome to stay whenever we visit.”

To be a guest of Paula’s, to be thankful to her for anything, was so alien, such an anathema, that one of Mrs. March’s eyelids twitched. She steadied herself by focusing on George’s fingers as they worked on another cufflink. Had she seen these cufflinks before?

“She’s really done quite well for herself,” he repeated, distracted, under his breath.

She definitely hadn’t seen these cufflinks before, which troubled her. She was familiar with each and every one of George’s cufflinks and ties and pocket squares, as most of them were gifts from her over the years. Where were those cufflinks from? She took a step forward, opening her mouth to speak, when the doorbell rang.

The first guests arrived in a group of five, as if they all had conspired to meet up somewhere beforehand. “Oh God, who would want to be alone in that apartment, talking to her?” she envisioned one of them saying to the others. In any case, the prospect of making small talk with one or two early arrivals was enough to make the backs of her knees sweat. Relieved, she left them in the living room while she made a show of attending to a task, which in this instance involved hiding in her en suite bathroom, perched carefully on the lowered toilet lid so as to avoid rumpling her dress.

Soon, the apartment was thrumming with guests, the music—a livelier, jazzier version of The Nutcracker she considered a perfect choice for a winter cocktail party—in harmony with the throbbing bass of voices and occasional percussion of tinny laughter.

A few guests—old friends of George’s—gifted him with a framed black-and-white photograph of his grandfather, who posed gravely by his freckled English setter, one hand holding his rifle, the other dangling a dead duck by its feet. Mrs. March hated it immediately. The solemnity of it, the august expression on the man’s face—and on the dog’s—was absurd. That anyone believed the thing merited framing made it even more so. She made a mental note to hide it behind her hatboxes in the closet as soon as the guests left.

As the party progressed, the living room fattening with each new arrival, Mrs. March tasked Martha with attending to the guest bathroom regularly, to fold the towels and freshen the toilet seat and floor with a light ammonia solution. The sharp antiseptic vapors merged with the sticky, sappy scent of pine, creating a smell so distinct that guests would, on future visits to hospitals or upon passing a storekeeper emptying a bucket of mop water onto the street, instantly recall that last party at the Marches’.