It had been a rainy morning, and all through the afternoon the sky remained opaque, bleached and unreadable. Alison wasn’t sure until the last minute whether she would even go to Claire’s book party in the city. The kids were whiny and bored, and she was feeling guilty that her latest freelance assignment, “Sparking the Flame of Your Child’s Creativity,” which involved extra interviews and rewrites, had made her distracted and short-tempered with them. She’d asked the babysitter to stay late twice that week already, and had shut herself away in her tiny study—mudroom, really—trying to finish the piece. “Dolores, would you mind distracting him, please?” she’d called with a shrill edge of panic when three-year-old Noah pounded his small fists on the door.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” she said when Charlie called from work to find out when she was leaving. “The kids are needy. I’m tired.”
“But you’ve been looking forward to this,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Dolores seems out of sorts. I can hear her out there snapping at the kids.”
“Look,” he said. “I’ll come home. I have a lot of work to do tonight anyway. I’ll take over for Dolores, and then you won’t have to worry.”
“But I want you there,” she said obstinately. “I don’t want to go alone. I probably won’t even know anybody.”
“You know Claire,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that what matters? It’ll be good to show your support.”
“It’s not like she’s gone out of her way to get in touch with me.”
“She did send you an invitation.”
“Well, her publicist.”
“So Claire put your name on the list. Come on, Alison—I’m not going to debate this with you. Clearly you want to go, or you wouldn’t be agonizing over it.”
He was right. She didn’t answer. Sometime back in the fall, Claire’s feelings had gotten hurt—something about an article she’d submitted to the magazine Alison worked for that wasn’t right, that Alison’s boss had brusquely criticized and then rejected, leaving her to do the work of explaining. It was Alison’s first major assignment as a freelance editor, and she hadn’t wanted to screw it up. So she’d let her boss’s displeasure (which, after all, had eked out as annoyance at her, too: “I do wonder, Alison, if you defined the assignment well enough in the first place … ”) color her response. She’d hinted that Claire might be taking on too many things at once, and that the piece wasn’t up to the magazine’s usual standards. She was harsher than she should have been. And yet—the article was sloppy; it appeared to have been hastily written. There were typos and transition problems. Claire seemed to have misunderstood the assignment. Frankly, Alison was annoyed at her for turning in the piece as she did—she should have taken more time with it, been more particular. It pointed to something larger in their friendship, Alison thought, a kind of carelessness on Claire’s part, a taking for granted. It had been that way since they were young. Claire was the impetuous, brilliant one, and Alison was the compass that kept her on course.
Now Claire had finished her novel, a slim, thinly disguised roman à clef called Blue Martinis, about a girl’s coming-of-age in the South. Alison couldn’t bear to read it; the little she’d gleaned from the blurb by a bestselling writer on the postcard invitation Claire’s publicist had sent—“Every woman who has ever been a girl will relate to this searingly honest, heartbreakingly funny novel about a girl’s sexual awakening in a repressive southern town”—made her stomach twist into a knot. Claire’s story was, after all, Alison’s story, too; she hadn’t been asked or even consulted, but she had little doubt that her own past was now on view. And Claire hadn’t let her see the manuscript in advance; she’d told Alison that she didn’t want to feel inhibited by what people from Bluestone might think. Anyway, Claire insisted, it was a novel. Despite this disclaimer, from what Alison could gather, she was “Jill,” the main character’s introverted if strong-willed sidekick.
“Ben will be there, won’t he?” Charlie said.
“Probably. Yes.”
“So hang out with him. You’ll be fine.”
Alison nodded into the phone. Ben, Claire’s husband, was effortlessly sociable—wry and intimate and inclusive. Alison had a mental picture of him from countless cocktail parties, standing in the middle of a group with a drink in one hand, stooping his tall frame slightly to accommodate.
“Tell them I’m sorry I can’t be there,” Charlie said. “And let Dolores know I’ll be home around seven. And remember—this is part of your job, to schmooze and make contacts. You’ll be glad you went.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, thinking, oh right, my job, mentally adding up how much she’d earned over the past year: two $50 checks for whimsical personal essays on smart-mommy Web sites, $500 for a parenting magazine “service” piece called “50 Ways for New Moms to Relieve Stress,” a $1,000 kill fee for a big feature on sibling rivalry that the competition scooped just before Alison’s story went to press. The freelance editing assignment with Claire had never panned out.
“The party’s on East End Avenue, right?” he said. “You should probably take the bridge. The tunnel might be backed up, with this rain. Drive slow; the roads’ll be wet.”
They talked about logistics for a few minutes—how much to pay Dolores, what Charlie might find to eat in the fridge. As they were talking, Alison slipped out of her study, shutting the door quietly behind her. She could hear the kids in the living room with Dolores, and she made her way upstairs quietly, avoiding the creaky steps so they wouldn’t be alerted to her presence. In the master bedroom she riffled through the hangers on her side of the closet and pulled out one shirt and then another for inspection. She yanked off the jeans she’d been wearing for three days and tried on a pair of black wool pants she hadn’t worn in months, then stood back and inspected herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. The pants zipped easily enough, but the top button was tight. She put a hand over her tummy, unzipped the pants, and callipered a little fat roll with her fingers. She sighed.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Listen, Dolores will feed the kids, you just have to give them a bath. And honey, try not to look at your BlackBerry until you get them in bed. They see so little of you as it is.” She yanked down her pants and, back in the closet, found a more forgiving pair.
When Alison was finally dressed she felt awkward and unnatural, like a child pretending to be a grown-up, or a character in a play. In her mommy role she wore flat, comfortable shoes, small gold hoops, soft T-shirts, jeans or khakis. Now it felt as if she were wearing a costume: black high-heeled boots, a jangling bracelet, earrings that pulled on her lobes, bright (too bright?) lipstick she’d been pressed into buying at the Bobbi Brown counter by a salesgirl half her age. She went downstairs and greeted the children stiffly, motioning to Dolores to keep them away so she could maintain the illusion that she always dressed like this.
She went out to the garage, got into the car, remembered her cell phone, clattered back into the house, returned to the car, remembered her umbrella, made it back to the house in time to answer the ringing phone in the kitchen. It was her mother in North Carolina.
“Hi, Mom, look, I’ll have to call you later. I’m running out the door.”
“You sound tense,” her mother said. “Where are you going?”
“To a party for Claire’s book.”
“In the city?”
“Yes. And I’m late.”
“I read her book,” her mother said. “Have you?”
“Not yet.”
“Well. You might want to.”
“I will, one of these days,” Alison said, consciously ignoring her mother’s insinuating tone. Then the children were on her. Six-year-old Annie dissolved in tears, and Dolores had to peel Noah off Alison’s legs like starfish from a rock. Alison made it out to the car again, calling, “I’ll be home soon!” and madly blowing kisses, and realized when she turned on the engine that she didn’t have a bottle of water, which was annoying, because you never knew how long it would take to get into the city, but fuck it. There was no way she could go inside again. Halfway down the driveway she saw Annie and Noah in the front window, frantically waving at her and jumping up and down. Alison pressed the button to roll down her window and waved back. As she pulled the car into the street she could see Noah’s cheek mashed up against the glass, his hand outstretched, his small form resigned and motionless as he watched her drive away.
EAST END AVENUE was quiet and damp in the shadows of early evening. Several blocks over, traffic swished and rumbled, but here Alison was the only one on the street. After easily finding a parking spot—just in time for the changing of the guard from metered to free, a rare lucky break—she locked the car doors and pulled her coat tightly around her. It wasn’t raining now, but the air was chilly; bare trees creaked in the sharp wind like old bedsprings. The avenue, the buildings, even the cars parked along the street, were washed in dull tones. Early March—not yet spring, though not still winter. A purgatorial season, Alison thought, when the manufactured cheer of the holidays has worn off, and desolation feels palpable. Or maybe just to her. She wasn’t sure, and had so little confidence anymore, in ascribing opinions to other adults. She seemed to have lost the ability to gauge what they might be feeling and thinking. (Children were a different story; she had developed an uncanny ability to decipher their moods—even those of the ones that weren’t hers.) She wondered if such an ability, which she used to pride herself on, was a social skill you could lose without practice.
The doorman, dressed in a navy blue uniform and standing just inside the small vestibule leading to the lobby, inclined his head and said, “Good evening, miss,” as Alison approached. “Miss”—she liked that.
“Apartment five-twelve?” she asked, waving the invitation.
Holding the door open, he ushered her in. “Elevator straight ahead.”
“Thank you.” She nodded, thinking, Oh yes, it’s like this; it’s this easy, and walked through the gleaming, harlequin-tiled lobby, past marble columns and inset mirrors, glancing at her reflection as she passed. Her hair was windblown; she was wearing last year’s coat—or did she buy it two years ago? It hardly mattered—the cut was conservative, tasteful, unexceptional, made to last for years without drawing undue attention. Under the coat she wore the loose black pants and a heather gray ribbed turtleneck she’d bought at the Bendel’s end-of-season sale on a rare foray into the city a few weeks earlier. At home, in front of the mirror in the bedroom, she had toyed with a scarf, a Christmas gift from her mother in the luminous shades of a medieval stained-glass window, but ultimately decided against it: too … suburban. She’d tucked it back in the drawer.
When Alison had lived in the city and worked as a magazine editor, she’d observed the fashion editors for ideas about what to wear. She’d never been particularly creative herself, but their example wasn’t hard to emulate: a wardrobe of black basics, with several fresh pieces mixed in each season to keep it current. A short pleated plaid skirt, a plum-colored poncho, round-toed satin shoes. But now that she no longer knew which trends to follow, even these small flourishes were risky. And besides, the person she’d become had little use for them. When was the last time she’d worn a short pleated skirt or satin shoes? Now she dressed in clothes that didn’t gap or expose too much, that absorbed mess and fuss and a child’s handprints, that could as easily be worn at a playdate as at a meeting of the planning committee of the preschool fund-raiser. After they’d moved to the suburbs she’d added a little color to her wardrobe so she wouldn’t come off as too “New York”—unfriendly, severe—but she balked at the bright costumes some women wore, holiday-themed sweaters and socks, matching headbands. These women scared her as much as the trendiest New Yorkers did, at the opposite end of the spectrum—possibly more. She was less afraid of being judged by them than she was of becoming them. She didn’t know how that might happen, but she feared it could be as simple as prolonged exposure, a wearing down of discernment and a fun house– mirror questioning of her own judgment. It was happening already, in so many ways. Here she was, at the threshold of this party, doubting the drab cut of her coat, her risk-averse turtleneck, whether she had a right to be there at all.
As the button flashed and the elevator doors finally opened—it had taken forever; she might as well have walked up the stairs—Alison heard the clickclickclick of high heels on the tile floor of the lobby. She turned to see a woman striding toward her, her flapping coat exposing a lime green lining. “Hold it!” the woman commanded.
Alison stepped into the elevator and pushed the door open button. The clicking sped up, and then, in a staccato clatter, the woman was inside the elevator, too. “Thank you,” she said without looking at Alison, one polished fingernail poised over the panel of small circles designating the floors. She paused over 5, and then, seeing that it was lighted, dropped her hand. Out of the corner of her eye, Alison watched the woman compose herself. Like a preening bird, she made fine adjustments: she touched the back of her head, unfastened the buttons of her quilted silk jacket. She slipped a finger into the waistband of her skirt and smoothed it. Alison observed all of this with a benign curiosity. So this is how a woman prepares for a party, she thought; these are the small modulations that give her shape and identity.
Since she was a child, Alison had made these kinds of minute assessments of other females, searching for clues that would show her how to act, how to carry herself, how to pull off being a woman. Her own mother was uninterested in social niceties; when Alison was growing up her mother wore paint-spattered T-shirts for days in a row and tied her hair back with rubber bands. She went barefoot all summer and wore sneakers when it got cool. It was almost worse that she was effortlessly beautiful; she had no tricks or techniques to pass along to a shy and insecure daughter. In fact, it puzzled her that Alison was interested in learning those things she so assiduously avoided. “Why do you buy these trashy rags?” she’d ask, pausing over a stack of Seventeens and Glamours on the floor of Alison’s bedroom. “They perpetuate such absurd stereotypes.”
“I like them,” Alison would say, snatching the magazines from under her mother’s inquisitive gaze. “There’s a lot of information—”
“About the crap they want you to buy.”
“Not only that,” Alison would say, without the tools or the fortitude to make a reasoned defense. Her mother was right, but it wasn’t the point. However unrealistic or unattainable, the paint-by-numbers makeup guides and ugly-duckling before-and-afters gave Alison a sense of possibility. They made her feel that she might one day transform herself into the kind of woman she dreamed of being—confident, savvy, sure.
How ironic, she thought now, fleetingly, as the elevator ground to a hesitant stop at the fifth floor before it settled into the right notch and its doors lurched open, that for a while, when she lived in New York, she actually was that woman—or a reasonable imitation—and now she was feeling as vulnerable and insecure as she had back in high school. It takes so little to strip the gears, she thought, to find yourself pedaling in place when you thought you were moving forward.
“Are you a friend of Colm’s?” the peacock said suddenly, turning around as they stepped out into the hall.
Colms. Colm. Alison panicked for a moment; the word sounded made up, like the name of a Star Trek alien. Oh, yes, Colm—the name on the invitation, Colm Maynard; it was his apartment. “No,” she said. “I’m an old friend of Claire’s.”
“From Bluestone?”
Alison nodded.
The peacock narrowed her eyes and gave Alison a once-over. “Fascinating.”
Even from halfway down the hall, the buzz of the party was audible, with an occasional shriek of laughter rising above the din. Pushing open the door to 512, the peacock exclaimed, “Darling!” in the general vicinity of a cluster of twentysomething publishing types, throwing up her hands and disappearing into the crowd.
In the long entry corridor, people were juggling drinks and business cards. They barely acknowledged Alison muttering “Excuse me—pardon—excuse me” as she nudged past, inching her way into a large, dimly lit room. Stepping back against the beige linen-covered wall, she looked around. The apartment was enormous, rooms leading into other rooms, all of which seemed to be filled with people. She could see a bar at the far end of the living room, set against the panoramic backdrop of the East River, with a young man in a starched white shirt with rolled-up sleeves mixing drinks. Several fresh-faced women—moonlighting college students, Alison suspected—were circulating trays of teeny-tiny brightly colored hors d’oeuvres. The crowd was dense and animated, densely animated; for a moment Alison saw it as one breathing organism. She shook her head, dispelling the illusion. That was an old trick from childhood, a way to transform an intimidating situation into something remote and featureless that she could observe from a distance.
Claire’s hardcovers were piled in stacks on tables around the room. The cover, hot pink with white letters, featured a slightly blurry photo of a martini glass, tipping sideways, splashing droplets of blue liquid around the spine and on the back. This wraparound style was, Alison knew, the signature of Rick Mann, a graphic designer whose book jackets were everywhere this season. Sidling over to a table, she flipped the book open to see the author photo. Claire was half in shadow, her molten hair as timelessly sculpted as an Irving Penn landscape, her expression a pensive gaze into the middle distance. The photographer, Astrid Encarte, was another trendy name. Evidently the publisher had spared no expense.
Turning the book over, Alison skimmed the names on the back cover—a roster of young, self-consciously renegade authors delivering a predictable staccato of lush adjectives and arcane phrasings— “Nebulously brilliant wanderings of an incandescent mind over the pitted minefield of an American childhood,” one said. Another exclaimed simply, “Wow. Yes. Hello!”
Across the room, Claire was holding court. Wearing a sheer lace dress over a spaghetti-strapped black sheath that accentuated her toned biceps, the toes of her pointy green heels poking out from under the hem like the snouts of baby crocodiles, she bent forward with the flat of her hand across her stomach, her other hand flapping theatrically in the air. “Oh, behave!” she exclaimed. The man who’d provoked this admonishment whispered in her ear, and she looked up at him flirtatiously, in that flagrant way that is only possible with a gay man, and said, “Trevor, you are terrible.”
Despite their long history, Alison was hesitant about approaching her. Several months ago she had extended an olive branch by inviting Claire and Ben to dinner in Rockwell, but Claire remained as distant as ever. It occurred to Alison that their falling-out was somehow bigger than she’d realized; it seemed unlikely that a trivial magazine assignment alone could have ruptured a lifelong friendship. But Alison was afraid to ask.
For years, growing up, the two of them had spent much of their time together exploring provocative questions and ambivalent answers—about the world, about other people, about themselves. But the better you get to know another person, the more you risk with each revelation. More than once, as teenagers, when Claire was passing along gossip about somebody else, Alison wondered if all this time spent together might be insurance against Claire’s hating her someday. At the time, Alison didn’t know why she even imagined it—she just had the feeling, deep down in some barely acknowledged place, that Claire’s friendship might be provisional.
Why are you so distant? Sometimes, Alison thought, you don’t ask the obvious question because you don’t want to know the answer. And it’s not only that she might not tell you—it’s that the truth is layered and complex; it is no single thing. Perhaps she does believe, as Claire had said, that you don’t have much in common anymore; she doesn’t want to intrude in your busy life; your children are so present and take up so much of your energy. But what she means by saying that you don’t have much in common is that you are inconvenient to get to and clueless about the latest movies, and you hold your child over your head to sniff his diaper. She means that she is ambivalent about having children, and the simultaneous mundanity and chaos of your life repels her. She finds your daughter’s constant questions tiresome; she is sick of those dinners in the city when you become skittish and distracted around ten-thirty and start looking at your watch because you have to get home for the babysitter’s midnight curfew. The truth is, she can sense your impatience with the details of her life, too—her quest to find the best dim sum in Chinatown, her exhaustion from jetting off to Amsterdam for the weekend, her analysis of the latest off-Broadway play. What good did it do to articulate the ambivalence? In therapy, maybe a lot. In real life Alison wasn’t sure.
Claire had a glamorous future to look forward to, at least for the next few months, and she also had an intriguing, and now very public, past. Alison was just an anonymous suburban housewife who’d grown up in a small southern town—nothing special about that.
It wasn’t that Alison wanted to be Claire—she didn’t. But she admired her tenacity and clarity and single-mindedness, particularly compared with her own indecisiveness. Alison had been living for other people for so long that she could barely identify what she wanted for herself anymore. She’d find herself paralyzed with indecision in the strangest places—the grocery store, for instance, where she roamed the aisles with a rising panic, even as she clutched a list in her hand: What would her kids eat? What would her husband want? She rarely asked herself what she wanted. It seemed irrelevant.
In front of Alison, now, was the drinks table. Martini glasses stood in rows like cartoon soldiers; on the other side of the table stood the second unit, ordinary wineglasses for the spoilers who weren’t in the spirit. Alison wasn’t at all sure that she was in the spirit, and she’d never really liked martinis; but to ask for a chardonnay or, worse, a club soda, seemed cowardly. She watched as the bartender poured a midrange Swedish vodka, in its distinctive ink blue bottle, into a large shaker of ice. He added Curaçao and shook it, then strained the liquid into a martini glass and added a twist of lemon peel.
“One of those, please,” she said, and the student-bartender, more charming than experienced, flashed her a grin and sloshed blue-tinted alcohol all over the tablecloth before handing her the sticky glass. She took a sip. The martini tasted lemony, with a medicinal aftertaste, mouthwash fresh. The next sip was sweet; the taste of the Curaçao melted away, overwhelmed by the alcohol. She was beginning to like it.
Emboldened now, holding her glass out like a calling card, Alison made her way over to a group of strangers and introduced herself.