IN THE LIVING room, two couples sit on opposite leather couches, one hand-in-hand, fingers laced around fingers, the other slightly apart, shoe heels touching on the shag carpet below. Another dinner party of friends and coworkers has ended, and the couples carry on even as they begin to forget their words. The women finish off tall glasses of champagne; the men gulp down warm bottles of beer. It is after ten. Everyone has gone home for the evening, with the exception of Alice and Trevor Jackson, who do not overstay their welcome. On the contrary, the hosts, Allen and Jane Mitchell, are pleased to have friends linger behind. Between the marriages of the Jacksons and Mitchells there are three girls and a boy, two children per couple, who are upstairs sleeping in the case of the Mitchells, or, for the Jacksons, a few miles east, watching a movie with a babysitter who has been told that things could end at any hour.
Allen Mitchell takes a final sip of his beer and squeezes his wife’s hand. It has been a long day for them both, and now they can relax and enjoy a drink or two, maybe a slice of cake. They worked hard to entertain twenty people in their home, and things went well—very well, in fact. The guests arrived on time; dinner was served without complaint; the thunderstorm, once predicted to ruin the evening, postponed itself for another day. Allen looks across the room to Trevor, who is telling a story about two of his students, one he has told before, about a spontaneous wrestling match. Allen appreciates that his friend of many years can enjoy this night with him. He has known Trevor through their graduations, high school and college, and their weddings, and tonight the celebration of his own promotion registers another victory. In a way, he thinks, they are like brothers. He has seen Trevor grow from a young boy with a thin frame to a towering man, a father, with large arms and a sizeable stomach. And, much like brothers, their relationship has changed over time, too. Last week, after discussing Trevor’s upcoming thirty-sixth birthday over lunch, he became conscious of a pause in their conversation—a lull—as the two of them looked out the window and chewed their sandwiches. He found comfort in the familiarity of their friendship, a friendship that eliminated the need to say anything at all. The silence itself was full.
Jane laughs at Trevor’s story, one that gets funnier each time he tells it. She looks from Trevor to Alice, who grins uncomfortably, perhaps worried that her husband’s old joke will fall flat. Jane is not fond of Alice Jackson but appreciates how her own husband gets along with Trevor. Trevor is taller than Allen, better at sports, the one prone to overdrinking at gatherings like this. Allen is smarter and handsomer, his hair showing no signs of thinning. Trevor is a gym teacher and Allen is, now, a vice president. Unlike the two men, however, Jane and Alice do not complement each other. Their friendship was not formed organically, and instead they met out of an expectation for spouses. As she knows many people do, Jane maintains her friendship with Alice out of convenience: for the sake of their husbands, it is simply easier to be friends than adversaries. Not for the first time this evening, she wonders what a man like Trevor sees in a woman like Alice, a woman whose nose bends at the tip and whose cheeks engulf her small eyes. She is a good mother, Jane thinks, but a hostile woman.
Allen removes his hand from Jane’s manicured fingers and secures two more beers from the outdoor cooler. Under the white container lid, the bottles float in tepid water, their labels peeling off like dead skin. He searches for lime wedges and grows frustrated in the dim light. He turns and knocks on the window, but Jane calls out and shakes her head, pointing across the house. The limes are in the kitchen—he is too lazy to retrieve them. Trevor won’t mind. Allen closes the door to the patio and re-enters the house, watching a few moths flutter to the light fixture above. Even when they leave the screen door closed, the moths find their way inside. His wife is right: if the bugs will intrude regardless, better to remove the wire mesh entirely. It is ugly.
Alice tacitly agrees to stay late so that her husband can have a good time. He works hard, and, unlike her, has only one close friend in Allen. Trevor is introverted until he drinks, so she takes it upon herself to find new restaurants and outings when things get slow. There are a few reservations and parties lined up in the coming weeks, but the Mitchells are their closest friends. Alice doesn’t like Jane, but company is company. Like her, Jane is an only child, and both their fathers have died. There is some comfort in their histories, though not much else. Alice is unyielding, hardworking, disciplined. Jane is carefree, less organized, and equally happy. For their husbands, they sometimes meet for walks and always exchange gifts on birthdays.
“Wouldn’t you rather go on a nice vacation once or twice a year,” Jane asks, twirling the stem of her champagne glass, “than buy a cabin—a cabin!—that doesn’t let you go anywhere else and forces you to spend money on repairs and upkeep?”
Alice looks at her watch, a Timex purchased on sale. She realizes that Allen must have gotten a fairly big raise at work. She wonders what it means to go from regional manager to vice president. She dislikes the Mitchells for this arrogance; it was typical of them to make it hard to say congratulations. Allen may have been promoted, but nothing fundamental has changed. Tonight is business as usual for the Mitchells as they brag of their own successes and prevent the nice evening from speaking for itself.
“Wouldn’t you rather go,” Jane continues, “to Paris, London, Tokyo?”
Alice wants to reply with the frankness that a question like that deserves: of course she’d rather travel! Of course she’d rather have a cabin in the woods! For her and her husband, it isn’t a matter of preference. It is a matter of having the opportunity for preference. But, to at once challenge Jane and keep up their façade, she tells her that she’d rather have a cabin. Because if the Mitchells invited them for a weekend, they would be able to go. She thinks to add that they should make sure to have a guest bedroom, but that’s a little on the nose. Besides, she doesn’t actually want to go on vacation with the Mitchells.
Allen decides not to hold Jane’s hand when he sits back down. She brought up the new house even though he told her to wait for another night. He genuinely wants to know the Jacksons’ opinion, but this is too much. They held a dinner party to celebrate, and his wife just gave away the extent of his new salary. It’s a significant raise but not an unexpected one. His boss told him to be proud of the promotion, of the achievement. To mark the occasion more permanently, he already bought a new grill, a Weber, the expensive kind with six burners. He understands that a second house is so much more than a grill, almost like having another child. He can see Alice growing uncomfortable. He spies the straightening of her spine, the smoothing of her dress across her lap.
Jane doesn’t know why she brought up the new house. She often compares drinking to getting in the pool: she’s cold for a moment and then warm all over. She admits that she shouldn’t have said anything, and that Allen specifically warned her of this, but Alice was sitting there, smugly, making her silent criticisms. Soon, Jane knows, Alice will make a comment that provokes them all. So there is something satisfying about a preemptive strike, about flipping the script, even if it is too easy, even if tomorrow she will regret embarrassing herself. She can never point to the exact moment in the night when Alice spoils the fun, but like the light outside, there is a slow change in color, from a warm yellow to a cold black, until the only sources of light are the individual flashes from fireflies: Trevor, Allen, and her. And though she doesn’t know how it got to be so dark, she knows who is responsible.
Trevor is surprised by his happiness for Allen. On some level, he feels that he, too, has been given a promotion, though on what merit he can’t say. Maybe for being a good friend. Maybe for pretending that he doesn’t know his wife hates the Mitchells. Alice says she hates Jane only because of her coyness, but he knows the truth: his wife hates the successes of others. Hate, he realizes, is too strong a word, but he likes to deal in extremes. It is why he always drinks too much, works too hard, angers too easily; why he was the best linebacker in high school and college, while simultaneously at risk for losing his scholarship; why he has only one very good friend.
“We were discussing, you know, the issue again last week,” Alice says, placing her hand on her husband’s leg and noticing the tiniest stain just below his knee.
“Babe, not now,” Trevor says. “And it’s not an ‘issue.’”
“No, no. I want to know what they think. What do you think now about us having another baby?”
“Well,” says Jane.
“Oh,” says Allen.
Jane wants to know why she has had this conversation three times in two years. Twice on Alice’s birthday and once on a dinner date. There is no more she can say, but so much more she feels she must: Alice and Trevor do not have enough money; their marriage seems just stable enough to maintain the status quo; their two kids will be out of the house in fewer than ten years. Why would they start over now? Deep down, she knows that this has nothing to do with children. For Alice, children, and any other topic pulled from an imaginary catalogue she might call “Family,” are but an excuse to have a conversation with others, a dialogue so that she feels present and acknowledged. Jane’s mother, a psychiatrist, told her so during a visit a few months ago. Her mother has many theories about many people but this one is particularly insightful. Jane has mentioned this to Allen in passing only once, worried that her mother will come across worse than Alice. Tomorrow—and she hopes she will remember the precise way to say it—her husband will learn more of what she really thinks of Alice Jackson. She will say that Alice ruins these dinners with her questions, suffocating conversation with a thick blanket of too-personal topics, all under the guise of lighthearted intimacy. She will try to speak without hyperbole, to restrain herself as best she can, out of respect for Trevor. But Alice has embarrassed herself tonight, far more than her own comment, however calculated, about a new house. Alice talks as though her family inhabits a filing cabinet, color-coded by age and sex. These are not issues for the company of others. They are issues for—a therapist.
Allen makes an effort not to look amused, taking as many sips of his beer as he can manage. Trevor, he now remembers, warned him on a recent run that Alice might make a fool of herself: “When she asks, if she asks, say something about the kids being out of the house in a few years. Don’t mention money. Never mention that.” Allen promised that he would toe the party line. He thinks the Jacksons certainly could have another baby, but something has stayed with him since that conversation. He was sure he heard a tremor in his friend’s voice, one that betrayed a great resistance to the notion of renewed parenthood. It was an almost biological response, and if Trevor had not already had two children, Allen would question his ability to conceive at all. Trevor had once been so adamant about having kids, about becoming a dad. Allen knows these ongoing troubles stem from a common source: the Jackson marriage, two people deeply at odds with each other. Through his wife, he has learned that Alice is happy as a mother, content with the ordinariness of her life and reluctantly accepting of the ordinariness of her partner. But Trevor, living under the same roof, seems caught in a long-lived jet lag, fatigued by something without remedy. “A kid can’t solve problems,” Trevor told him. “It only adds more.”
Trevor feels himself loosening up, caring a little less about his wife’s behavior. He knows it’s the alcohol, and for a fleeting moment he wonders how he will be able to drive home. It is not so much a matter of falling asleep behind the wheel, or even feeling dizzy or lightheaded. He is simply not meant to drive this evening, to return home, but he will anyway, because he has made the trip before under worse circumstances and influences. He is almost finished with his beer and knows that the time has come for another. He steps outside onto the patio and lifts the lid of the cooler. They are drinking his favorite beer tonight, a grapefruit IPA, which means his friend bought it specifically for him. How nice, he thinks—who would not want to promote this man, who hosts these parties, spends so much money on his friends, and asks for little in return? Only his wife would object, out of envy.
“Maybe we can save this conversation for a different time,” Allen proposes.
“You’re right. Let’s change the subject,” Alice replies.
Alice doesn’t want another baby. She frustrates herself and puts her marriage and friendships on edge for—she can’t identify an immediate purpose. It just seems like the right way to fill the gap, like when she cuts the line at the store because the person in front of her is distracted and won’t notice. She mentioned getting pregnant last week with her husband, just so that they could talk about something. She didn’t see his face as he nodded uneasily, his fingers fumbling with the laces of his sneakers. She picked that moment deliberately so Trevor would have something to think and talk about on his run. She knows he tells Allen all the details of their relationship, the details the way he sees them, those things she would never confide in Jane. She brought up a topic, serious-seeming—a baby—because they have become a couple that remains silent at dinner, allowing their children to explain every thought in their heads, as though the things an eight- and ten-year-old have to say are somehow more meaningful and therefore worthier of conversation. She can’t imagine what gets discussed in the Mitchell house, but they are the more cerebral couple. Allen and Jane both read the same books, watch the same shows, finish each other’s thoughts. Alice isn’t jealous, however. She tries to keep up, but Jane reads too much fiction. Alice sees her mouth in the reflection of her glass, her lips curling upward: the Mitchells read fiction because their lives need to be thrown into relief.
Jane tries to mention a new show that she and Allen are watching, a docuseries about a murder, but she remembers that Trevor does not watch television in the way that they do. He watches basketball and football, at the professional and college level, and sometimes pays attention to the news, because, she assumes, he feels that’s what a person should do. She thinks he could have been a sports announcer, instead of a gym teacher. He has managed to stay fit, and despite filling out in the middle, he has never lost that look of a tight end. She wishes her own husband dressed like a commentator. Allen likes nice things (look at the grill he just bought), but his taste in clothes upsets her. Tonight Alice made a comment about his shirt not matching his jacket, a comment Jane could not disagree with, no matter its rudeness. Next week she will pick out what he wears to dinner when they all go out to celebrate Trevor’s birthday. She should remember to arrange for the babysitter and to buy a gift, one that Allen will suggest. She is not looking forward to the dinner because the Jackson children will be there. They are nine and ten years old, the age when chatting with adults suddenly becomes appealing. She herself just had her second baby a few months ago, and her first two years before that, so she knows her children and the Jacksons’ will not be friends. This is, of course, only true if Alice does not get pregnant again—though, who knows? By then, maybe they will have moved away or found new best friends.
Allen wonders how many beers are left the cooler; he worries that Trevor has had too much to drink. Not too much to drink given his height and weight, but too much to drink to drive home safely. Trevor can be reckless at parties, and if Allen tries to stop him from driving, there will be an argument and Trevor will win. Allen knows that his friend will yell, threaten to wake the neighbors in the houses next door, and that he himself will shake his head and close the front door, disappointed that it should always come to this. When Trevor drinks, he changes into a different person, no less likeable, possibly more likeable, but altogether different. More abrasive and intrusive. His size becomes apparent, because he becomes physical, harder to overlook. Alice, Allen has noticed, welcomes the difference, encourages it even, perhaps because the drunk Trevor becomes more the man she wishes he were: open and sociable, brutish and assertive. He would never tell that to Jane; he would never give her a reason to dislike Alice. He appreciates their friendship, admires it, because it makes these parties and dinners so much better. In truth, he has never understood how the two women get along. A few years ago he asked Trevor how they would manage with two wives so fundamentally different from each other. Trevor said that women could surprise you.
“Any new crazy students, Mr. Jackson?” Jane asks.
Trevor smiles. He looks at Jane with appreciation, as sincerely as possible, though the beers have relaxed the muscles in his face. No one in the world appreciates his job as a teacher more than she does. At every meal, she asks about the students and the football team. It was Jane who saw when his name appeared in the local paper, who knew when the team had amassed a record number of points for their division, who attended the ceremony when he won an award for coaching. Allen, he admits, also supports him in this way, but for him there is a certain expectation. Jane, as far as he can tell, does not even like sports. She simply cares about him as a friend, as a good person, the kind of person Allen deserves.
Alice refills her glass, disappointed that the bubbles fail to spill over the rim. Does each sip of champagne toast Allen? She digs her feet into the shag carpet and stretches her legs forward. They have been at the Mitchells’ house for almost five hours, and her husband has spoken about school too many times to count. She loves that he is a teacher, that he teaches students how to run, how to hit, how to throw a ball. But it’s not as if Allen has nothing to talk about. Clearly he has stories of his own, stories of success worth celebrating with dinner parties. She does not want to hear about management at his financial firm or about Jane’s work as a hospital administrator, but she knows that either topic is what they should be discussing. She is wearing nice shoes and drinking champagne. School is a topic that she hears about every day from her children. In time, the Mitchells will come to agree with her, when their own children ride the bus each morning. And, she thinks, they will wish they had spent these moments, moments of peace that come too infrequently, talking about something else.
“Did you hear about—I’m sure you know about it—but did you hear about that teacher at Ammons?” asks Allen.
“Oh, you know I hate that stuff,” Jane replies.
“How old did they say the girl was?”
Jane watches Alice purse her lips. This has happened before, though she has never been too sure of the implications. Whenever a school scandal is brought up, Alice tries to redirect the conversation, as though she and Trevor are somehow involved. It must be a fear of Alice’s, Jane thinks, that Trevor will have an affair with a female student and leave her alone to take care of their family. Jane’s own fears are far different. She worries constantly about getting fired, about making an error that makes her look less competent than her peers. She waited weeks before announcing her second pregnancy despite the tightness of her clothes, her more measured gait. It was a silly thing to worry about because there were so many laws to protect her. But, to her disappointment, she has become far more self-conscious in the past year, particularly in the months since giving birth a second time. There has been a change in the way she moves, in the way she handles things, in the way she functions in their little world. She is now more grounded, more stable, but she wants to feel powerful again, carefree, like she can do anything at a moment’s notice. She wants the added weight in her hips to fall away with a single stomp of her foot. “You just don’t want responsibilities,” her mother said. “You’re describing youth, being young.”
Alice tries hard not to think about these school scandals. Trevor would never do such a thing, would never think of doing such a thing, but still she worries. She worries more about what a young girl might say than what an older man might do. Her husband is exactly the kind of teacher that she would have found alluring as a high school student: tall, strong, married with children. Teenagers, she thinks, are not drawn immediately to people or physical features; they are drawn to ideas that lead to mistakes. She has overheard her husband and Allen discussing a teacher they once found attractive, a teacher with whom Trevor now works. The woman is no longer young enough to be the object of students’ fantasies, though Alice has difficulty placing her in an attractive light at any age. It was merely the idea of sleeping with a teacher that had enticed Trevor and Allen twenty years ago. When she closes her eyes, she imagines a young girl, with breasts just large enough to be called breasts, looking at her husband and concocting a simple lie, the type of lie that can end a family, a marriage, your place in the community.
Allen holds Jane’s hand once more, stroking the back of her thumb with his own. Her skin is always softer than his, no matter how much of her moisturizer he borrows. For many years, he assumed that this was a difference between men and women, that men have rough hands and women soft ones. But at work he has met women with hands rougher than his own. He laces his fingers with Jane’s, tucking his thumb inside and stroking the inside of this makeshift pocket, her palm. How much longer will Trevor and Alice stay? He lets go of Jane’s hand and moves his arm slowly, cautiously, to her back, careful not to distract her while she speaks. He makes figure eights against her dress with his forefinger, before dragging his hand up to her neck where he lightly pinches her nape. He hears a lilt in Jane’s voice when he tickles her, though she gives no indication for him to stop. He hopes the Jacksons decide to leave.
“Listen to that thunder!” Trevor says. “The storm is coming after all. Better bring those beers inside.”
“You just want an excuse for another drink,” Alice replies.
“So what?”
“I’ll grab you a lime,” says Jane.
“I’ll help you,” says Allen.
Trevor pulls back the screen door and steps outside. He feels the wind picking up, shaking the vinyl cover of Allen’s new grill. It’s a large grill, sturdy, one that he would like to own himself. He picks up the cooler with both hands, more quickly than he should, and the water inside sloshes over the edge and onto his pants. That’s all right, he thinks. Better than a bottle of wine! He walks back through the screen door and closes it behind him, cradling the container awkwardly in his arms. He realizes that he should drain the water out in the grass, so he opens the screen door once more, steps down the brick steps, and unplugs the white plastic spout. The water rushes out quickly. He tilts the container to let out the final drops. There are two beers left: one for him and one for Allen. They will try to get him to stop drinking, but it’s September. He needs to enjoy these last days of summer. Let him have his fun.
Alice watches Trevor through the window, fumbling with the cooler like a little boy carrying something too big for his body. He has had too much to drink. Here is the proof: this wetness on his pants, so much wetness that in any other circumstance one would assume he poured water on himself intentionally, or even more embarrassing . . . How much longer will they stay? She checks her watch. It is close to midnight; they have been here longer than any other time, longer even than the time when Trevor passed out on the couch. She wonders if her husband drinks because that is what people do at parties like this, or because he needs to. The only test would be for Allen and Jane to have a dinner party every day. Then she could keep track of his behavior with a mental checklist, gauging his interactions with others, his liberal sips of beer.
“Do you think they’ll leave sometime soon?” Allen asks in the kitchen.
“Shh, a minute. I’m listening to the monitor,” says Jane.
“I told you we could have kept the babysitter longer.”
“It was late, and she shouldn’t have to stay just because of them.”
“Well, what about us? What about, you know?”
Allen reaches over Jane’s shoulder and pulls the monitor from her ear. He wraps his hand around her waist, pulling her body against his own. He feels the warmth between them, the arousal, the end of the night arriving on cue. How many years has he known her? She has had just enough to drink; he knows what comes next. Why has it become so hard to be parents and lovers? There are two babies upstairs, each a part of him, like limbs that ache and stir, parts that keep him from sleeping through the night. He often thinks of how simple they are, how animalistic: they eat, they sleep, they cry. He and Jane have joked about the way kids play in the park, shouting out half commands, falling over, hurting themselves. “They look drunk,” Jane said last week. Allen holds the monitor close to his ear, waiting for the rise and fall of breath. There is always a moment of panic when he or Jane wants to run upstairs or into the next room, but if they wait long enough, the monitor will produce that sign of life, and they will know that all is well. Suddenly he hears music. He lets go of Jane, and they walk toward the living room. Trevor is swaying with Alice, who laughs and tries to keep his big shoes off her bare toes.
“I’m sorry, he said he wanted music!” says Alice.
Jane curls her arm around Allen’s neck. She closes her eyes. This is what the night needed. A little night music! She smiles to herself. They are listening to an album she left in the stereo, an old CD she found at a yard sale. She hears the jazz, the buzz of the woman’s voice, the thrum of fingers against the wooden bass. Caramel, she thinks. Rich, dark sugar swirling in the bottom of a pan. She can almost smell it.
“I love you,” Allen whispers in her ear.
“Who is singing, Jane?” Alice asks.
“Her name is Etta Jones.”
“Etta James, you mean.”
“No, Etta James sings ‘At Last.’ This is Etta Jones. She’s less known. Here, listen to this.”
Jane pulls away from her husband and picks up the remote from the table. She bites her lip and changes the song. She can’t remember the title or any of the lyrics. She never used to be this aware of alcohol, this conscious of a change in body temperature. She feels little bursts of heat rising under her skin, trapped pockets of warm air that she can’t let out even as she presses against her face. She sees herself drinking, being drunk, as though there are two versions of her, the one changing the music with clicks of the remote and the one thinking of how difficult it is to make these tiny clicks. At what point should she stop drinking? Are there still rules for quantity, even after breastfeeding? No, there are no more rules besides those she sets for herself. She flips through the album, listening to each track for some thirty seconds. Alice sits down on the couch and sighs at the brief disruption in the music. It wouldn’t be a proper party if she didn’t give Alice something to complain about. But she will win this exchange, and the wait will have been worth it. Finally, she finds it. She hears the piano twinkling.
“This one. Listen to this one.”
Trevor has not heard the song before but trusts Jane’s taste in music. She has an ear for this sort of thing, more than Allen or his own wife. They have all gone to the theater before, and Jane is always the one who explains the backstory, why something is important, why they should be more appreciative than they are. She could have been a teacher, Trevor thinks. The song is beautiful; he can hear it now. What a voice this woman—not Etta James—had. He takes another sip of his beer, frowning at its flatness. Alice used to be a singer, he remembers. In college, he met many women who sang in the chorus or onstage, but Alice was different. She sang because she wanted to, not because she needed to be heard and wanted others to listen. She used to sing to their kids; she used to sing, softly, after they had sex and he would play with her hair.
“You’re not gonna join me for this one?” Trevor asks.
“Maybe in a minute. I feel woozy,” Alice answers.
“I won’t leave you like that!” Allen jokes.
Jane sits down on the couch next to Alice, pleased that the song is as lovely as she remembers. She laughs when her husband puts his arm behind Trevor’s back, so that they dance together like a couple. She looks at Alice and catches her smiling. They nod at each other in a silent exchange, a mutual understanding that this closeness between their husbands, formed through childhood, is why they are still up, though it’s already past midnight. Trevor is the bigger man in the embrace, though it’s unclear which of them, if either, is leading. Her husband leans against Trevor for support, a man propped against a wall. Trevor, despite having drunk the most, is now in control. His hand rests on the back of Allen’s head. How funny, Jane thinks, that she has seen him toss her husband into the pool with ease. They are such different sizes, such different people. Her mother once told her to watch out for Trevor Jackson. She would never do such a thing—she isn’t that kind of person. Besides, what would an affair look like, sound like? “Half my patients have had affairs,” her mother told her, “and none of them thought they ever would.” A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable, but now Jane knows that moments do arise when a simple look or remark can mean so much more at thirty-five than it did at twenty-five. At twenty-five, everyone made those remarks, those flirtations, because that was what you did to show the world who you were becoming, who you would become. But now she has lost the ability to hide behind herself. She is a mother. Her first child tells her to sit, to come, to read a book. Alcohol brings back that bygone confidence for an hour until she remembers the truth. It is the exception that proves the rule. She wishes she could live her life two drinks in.
Alice hangs her head over her lap. She hopes that if she pretends to fall asleep, the night will end and she can return home to pay the babysitter, who has earned too much money for a single night. But no one notices her. She looks up at the dancing, if that is the right word. Her husband is whispering in Allen’s ear, probably encouraging him to get to sleep. She knows that her eyes have widened, that her cheeks are stretched upward, that she feels something light inside, as though the night has decided to restart itself. It is the music, the alcohol, the end of a long day. She danced with Trevor for the first time in many months. But why does it feel like one dance can brighten the color of the walls, exaggerate the tickle of champagne bubbles against her upper lip? She loves this feeling, this lightness, more than anything else. Trevor will be thirty-six years old next week. They have been married for ten years, a decade. And, as everyone told her on her wedding day, the years really do start to go by faster. She tells herself not to be so sappy. She knows that wine and champagne have given, only to take away; this kind of happiness is false and short. She has compared it to when she nursed her children, to when they hug her, to when she sees them sing in the choir. Those feelings are the pure thing. Tonight she has danced and laughed under a spell, a cheap magic trick.
“‘Make your mark for your friends to see. But when you need more than company, don’t go to strangers. Come on to me.’ God, I just love that,” says Jane, squeezing Alice’s hand.
“Yes, I heard it. Thank you for playing the song,” Alice replies, smiling.
Allen smells Trevor’s deodorant. It is crisp, wintry, like the middle of a forest. “Just another minute,” he wants to say. The room spins and spins around him, and he looks for his wife. She is across the room, a world away, though he can number the steps between them. He hopes she will not forgo their plans for later. The night and its thunderstorm, music, and conversation have suddenly become too much. He needs to separate the room into segments before he can continue: Alice sits on the couch, smiling to herself, aglow; Jane is next to her, laughing at him and his inability to stand up straight; the music plays over their ears, under their feet; and Trevor, his friend, his brother, holds him because he can no longer hold himself. He tells himself to focus, to count the beats in the music. Why did Alice have to sit down on the couch? He saw the way the Jacksons danced, the way they stumbled together. Don’t give up hope! Suddenly he feels a racing against his skin. It is Trevor’s heart, beating faster than the music, chasing something that will not be outpaced. He worries that Trevor will fall over, but there is no change in their balance. They are still moving, turning in place.
Trevor strokes the back of Allen’s head, brushing against the grain of his hairline. Allen is suddenly very drunk, much drunker than any of them conceived. Trevor realizes that if he steps away, even for a brief pause, Allen will topple over, like a newly felled tree. He remembers the water at the bottom of his shirt, his soaked pants. Surely Allen can feel this dampness against his own clothes. Trevor sways to the music, to the song chosen by Jane, whispering in Allen’s ear whatever words come to mind. In this embrace, Allen is the vulnerable one, the one ready to collapse, the one lost in drunken reverie. There is an intimacy between them, far greater than the one Trevor has imagined during their runs and conversations at dinner. He is so small, Trevor thinks. Like a kid who has come running. Allen says nothing, but Trevor understands that this is merely part of the dance. His heart begins to race, at first arrhythmically to the music, then in double time. He thinks of an agility drill, how his heart punches against his chest the way two cleats shuffle up and down against the ground. Can Allen feel it? They have never been so close to each other. He looks down, but Allen’s eyes are closed, his face clean-shaven and relaxed. He wants his friend to smile, to give some indication that this dance will continue, if not now, then later, when they can acknowledge the current traveling between them, this current they have avoided for years. The music fades. He feels something sink. Tomorrow, he realizes, they will wake up as though nothing has happened.
Allen waits for the music to restart, but Jane has already turned off the stereo. He feels helpless, naked, though Trevor continues to turn them on the floor. Here is another lull. But no, something has changed. The atmosphere isn’t the same—this is nothing like a quiet lunch. He pushes Trevor away with a nudge, feeling the cushion of flesh against his knuckles. Did that hurt him? But Trevor is a strong man, capable of picking him up and tossing him in the pool. He looks up. Will Trevor retaliate and shove him back, harder, so his head hits the ground with a thud? But his friend has already returned to his beer. Allen raises his chest.
Alice takes the music stopping as an invitation to leave. It seems that Trevor will not notice her many sighs, the glances at her watch, the quiet pleas she makes with her eyes. She rises from her seat and slips back into her shoes. She will offer to drive and her husband will, of course, refuse. Tonight he has behaved differently, and tomorrow it will take time for her to sort everything out. Instead of rowdy, he has been calm, subdued in a way she doesn’t recognize. Maybe it was the mixture of champagne, whiskey, and beer, a cocktail that has tampered with his constitution. Maybe he feels what she felt for that short instant on the couch. She has also seen another side of Allen, the drunk and helpless side. He needs to go lie down and fall asleep. He’s had a long day.
Jane lets the Jacksons out of the house, closing the door behind them with a flick of her wrist and swish of her hair. She turns around and walks back into the living room. Her husband is lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling. She watches his eyes widen and shift back and forth under his glasses. “Look who’s tired now!” she says.
No more after-party fun for them then. It was unlike him to make plans and not follow through, but he, like she, is exhausted. There is always tomorrow for more celebration in the privacy and comfort of their bedroom. It will be Saturday, which means that she will wake up, still early because of her babies, and nap throughout the day whenever she has the chance.
“Good night,” says Jane. “I love you.”
Allen closes his eyes without replying, pretending to be asleep. Those words, simple ones spoken thousands of times per day, are different tonight. Tonight they were whispered by someone else.
Matthew Jeffrey Vegari has published fiction in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, and Epiphany. He holds an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard College and a master’s degree in economics and management from the London School of Economics. He is at work on his first novel.