Leora’s penthouse loft was miserably packed, the trebley din of hundreds of overlapping conversations pinging and echoing off the parquet floors and the Wedgwood-dome false ceiling to create gnarled gibberish waves of disorienting sound that roared around Jen and Jim as soon as they stepped off the private elevator, as if Leora’s guests had been marshaled to replicate the debilitating effects of a long-range acoustic device.
“I’ve been here thirty seconds and I’ve already contracted an inner-ear infection from these people,” Jim shouted. These were the first words he’d spoken to Jen since the Deli of Death. He still hadn’t made eye contact with her. On the train ride over, he’d hustled to the opposite end of the carriage with his headphones jacked up all the way. On the walk from the train stop, he’d kept ahead of her.
It took them more than ten minutes to squeeze and nudge a path toward the drinks table. The only person Jen recognized on the slow, sweaty twenty-foot surge was Karina, who, upon seeing Jen, set her features in their familiar preemptive mode—eyes bugged out and sidelong, bottom lip pulling away from clenched teeth—and held out the palm of one hand as an additional deterrent, her arm window-wiping back and forth in a deflective parody of hello.
“Oh, hey, Karina, this is my husb—okay, hope to see you later,” Jen shouted as Karina turned away.
Toppling glass finally in hand, Jen intended to sidle back into the crowd to track down any friendly faces, but Jim had already retreated to a window at one corner of the loft, a glass of red in one hand and a glass of white in the other. Beside the window, in a heavy and intricately carved mahogany frame—plaster filigree and gold-leaf burnishing—hung a giant oil painting of Leora flanked by her daughters in a clothed reenactment of Raphael’s Three Graces. The figure of the older daughter smirked at her apple beneath Leora’s maternal beam, while the younger daughter ensorcelled her onlooker with round, dead doll eyes.
“You’re just going to stand in a corner?” Jen yelled.
“You do whatever you want,” Jim yelled, staring out the window and glugging from his glass of white. “I’m not going back in that.”
“You’re here!” Meg and Pam were by Jen’s side, and Meg had somehow located a sound frequency at which she could pitch her voice and be heard without shouting. “Mrs. Durbin was here for exactly twelve and a half minutes and she asked after you, Jen,” Meg said.
Pam’s mouth moved, but Jen couldn’t discern any of the words.
“I have some questions for Mrs. Durbin,” Jim shouted, turning away from the window toward Meg.
“I’ll have to continue communicating with Mrs. Durbin through the magic of the Internet,” Jen shouted over Jim’s shouting.
“There’s a Bluff Foundation board member here who is literally ninety-four years old,” Meg said, deftly switching subjects, “and it was so loud he started to cry, so we had to create a sort of satellite party in a back bedroom just for him.”
Pam’s mouth moved some more.
“I want to go to that party!” Jim shouted. Meg’s detection of an audible but discreet pitch made Jim’s shouting more embarrassing to Jen.
“Another issue is that both of his ex-wives are here tonight,” Meg continued in the same miraculously low confidential tone, “so what we really need are a couple of satellite parties. I have to keep rotating between them to make sure that proper distances are kept and further tears are not shed.”
“Oh, man,” Jim yelled. “Sounds like you’re really taking Tiger Canyon.”
Meg sipped from her wine, impassive. “What?”
Jen rolled her eyes and sighed. “It’s an inside joke,” she said. “It’s this thing about when things are difficult at work, or not going your way, you—never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“What was it?” Meg asked. “Tiger Caravan?”
Pam’s mouth moved some more.
“Forget it,” Jim yelled, addressing Meg, his eyes on Jen. Two empty glasses stood on the windowsill behind him. “It’s just a stupid joke. Stupid me and my stupid fucking jokes.” He was hollering loudly enough that a few people turned to look at Jim as he shoved back into the crowd.
“I’m sorry,” Jen said to Meg and Pam. “We are having a rough night.”
“Do what you need to do,” Meg said.
Jen pushed for ages toward points east, then north, then west through the crowd, finally locating Jim at a table of canapés and cheese. He was draining a third glass of wine—a fourth at the ready on the table beside him—and cramming cubes of cheddar into his mouth.
“Honey, that’s enough.”
“Enough what?” Jim was yelling louder than he needed to.
“You were rude to Meg and Pam.”
“So what?” Jim asked, popping another cube of cheese into his mouth.
“So stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop shoving the entire cheese plate into your mouth, for starters.”
“We’re at a rich people’s party, Jen,” Jim said, teething another cube of cheese and sliding it off its toothpick. “They’ll have more cheese in the fridge. They have a special number they can call and wham, look at all that new cheese spilling out of the fridge.”
“Can you just stop? Please.”
“Did you see the coffee table made out of broken china?” Jim asked through a mouthful of cheese. “Wouldn’t it be so empowering to women if we broke the broken-china table and found a fair-trade women’s cooperative and gave them a microloan to build a new one? Maybe you could build one for Pam’s next show? Or could that be an anchoring metaphor in one of those essays you publish? Something about destroying domesticity in order to reclaim it?”
“Honey—”
“Or something about broken cups and ‘reading the tea leaves’? From Breakdown to Breakthrough in the Time It Takes to Steep My Tea?” Jim picked up his fourth glass of wine and chugged.
“Maybe we should go.”
“How Decoupage Helped Heal My Shattered Heart?” Jim said. “How Smashing China Gave Me the Courage to Smash My Marriage?”
Sunny and her husband were a few feet away, staring at the shouting cheese-eater. Jen turned her back to them and pretended to deliberate over the cracker selection.
Jim stabbed another cube of cheese with the used toothpick and ate it. “You know, I’m doing these people a favor, eating all their stinkin’ cheese. And do I get any credit for it? Nope. All I get is more cheese.”
“I don’t care,” Jen hissed, a cracker crumbling in her hand. “I don’t care if they have more cheese in the fridge. I don’t care if the fridge is made of cheese. I don’t care if you win an award for eating the most cheese at this party and your prize is a fridge made of cheese. I want you to stop yelling and stop eating all the fucking cheese.”
“Why?” Jim asked, sliding three cubes of cheese into his mouth at once.
“Because you are embarrassing yourself.”
Jim ruminated. “You got your pronouns mixed up there,” he said past the cheese in his teeth. “You meant I am embarrassing you.”
“Yes, that, too!”
Jim drained his fourth glass and set it upside down on the ravaged cheese plate. “I’m leaving.” He maneuvered bluntly through the crowd toward the coat check. Meg and Pam were standing an arm’s length away from Jen, studying the floor. Trickles of red wine wound and seeped around cheese ashes.
“I should go—go with him,” Jen yelled apologetically to Meg and Pam.
Pam’s mouth moved some more.
“Pam, I’m sorry, but I haven’t heard a word you’ve said the whole time,” Jen yelled, and Pam turned away.
“Okay,” Meg said, pulling Jen into a hug. “Maybe you should go. Maybe not. Let’s just take a moment together to think about it. But either way, do you want me to wrap up some cheese in a go-bag for you?”
Jen laughed into Meg’s shoulder. They stood quietly in the din, Meg’s fingers rubbing Jen’s back as they watched the crowd, until Jen felt another hand grasping hers.
Pam was pulling Jen back to the cheese plate, where she had arranged the cheddar crumbs and cracker shards into letters that spelled out STAY WITH US.
Pam had coaxed the trickle of Jim’s wine into a little underlining flourish on her message.
One of Jen’s hands was held in Meg’s and the other was held in Pam’s.
“You know what, I will stay a bit longer,” Jen yelled. “He needs to be alone. Meg, maybe I’ll just go cry in a bedroom with your ancient charge until we fall asleep.”
“You’ll wake up as somebody’s new wife,” Meg said.