They embraced for several seconds. Timkin had watched this.
It could happen just like that, he thought.
“How’s work?” Willis asked, and Timkin, who taught history at City College and wrote biographies, told him his prepared answer, that he was around halfway through the book, that the research was mostly done and now he had follow-up interviews and a good chunk of writing ahead. He might try to get out of the city to do it, upstate somewhere.
“Amy’s going to let you get away?”
“What’s good for the goose,” he said.
“I suppose,” Sabrina said. “You guys must go crazy spending that much time apart.”
“I don’t like it,” Timkin said. “It’s just a fact of life.”
He took another belt of scotch and then the doorbell rang. It was the Schwabackers from the fourth floor, Eric and Dana, sporty and blond. He was a lawyer and she was a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, something with fruit flies. Every time she explained her work to Timkin his mind drifted out the window and across the park where it sat down at a restaurant somewhere on the East Side. A lot of people’s stories about their work bored him, but he always asked about it anyway — better to never ask, no?
Now came a few of his old college friends, Seth, and Jordan and Lilia and their whole crowd who tended to stay by themselves at one side of the apartment, in the kitchen usually, rarely branching out to talk with anyone else, though they’d seen these same people here every year. His aunt Eileen arrived then with his cousins, Monique and Andrew. Kisses all around and each time he had to tell them, “She couldn’t get out of it, she’s absolutely miserable about it.”
“She couldn’t get someone else to go?” Eileen asked.
“I guess it doesn’t work that way. Anyhow, Amy said we shouldn’t have too much fun or she’ll be horribly jealous.”
“The hell with that,” said Lilia who’d been listening in. “Let’s make her miserably and inconsolably jealous.”
“How would we do that?” asked Eric.
“Use your imagination,” Lilia said.
A woman Timkin didn’t know was walking about taking drink orders, and then a whole group of people he’d never set eyes on before entered his apartment. This was the chaos of Balloon Night. Everyone in every building on the block that ran along the south side of the Museum of Natural History was having a party, and the guests roamed from floor to floor like fish into diverging streams. The doormen had lists, and beyond that, the cops at the corner crossing blocks had lists to determine whom they’d allow onto the block itself.
Still, with all this security, there were always twenty or so people at Timkin’s party he didn’t know, and often they would be the ones who stayed the longest.
“Come on in,” he said graciously to four strangers, wondering who they knew. “Is Jordan here?” one of them eventually said, and Timkin pointed the way.
Timkin had downed three decent-size scotches by the time Snoopy sprouted limbs. He peered down at the street at the lot of them, Garfield, and some dinosaur he couldn’t name, and Big Bird, and Kermit and two M&M’s and some newer cartoon characters whose names he had yet to learn (some yellow Pokémon thing), illuminated by klieg lights in the dark night. As a child it had looked like an army of giant aliens had taken over his street.
Back inside he started to inventory the guests. There were more of his friends here than hers now, but a few high school and college chums of Amy’s had entered the party without his noticing, and he would have to tell them his story about her being away.
From conversational snippets he could hear things like, “Poor thing. In an awful hotel at a sales conference.” Or “I heard they cancelled her flight.”
“I haven’t talked to Amy in so long,” said her friend from Middlebury College, Melanie, whom Timkin had always had a thing for. “I can’t believe she’d miss this.”
“She was so heartbroken over it,” Timkin said, and then maybe too quickly switching the subject, “You look healthy and happy.”
“It’s what joblessness and poverty do to you.”
“What happened?”
“It’s too long a story. Part of that oppressive cloud that’s been hanging over the New York theater world. I’m sleeping on someone’s floor right now. How about you?”
“I’m good,” Timkin said.
“How so?”
He tried to think of an answer.
“Because the world can still produce things like this.” He gestured around the room.
“A bunch of irritatingly bourgeois people holding drinks?”
“The whole thing. I depend on it.”
“It’s good fun if you look at it the right way,” Melanie said. “You know, I never really thought that Amy liked this.”
“Oh, she does,” Timkin said. “It’s her favorite night of the year.”
She looked at him. “If you say so.”
Timkin noticed Melanie’s empty drink glass. As he went to fill her order, someone slapped his back — Malcolm from his Saturday-morning basketball game.
“I love these parties. And you know why?” Malcolm was looking at Melanie as he pondered this. Timkin didn’t wait for the answer because he saw three older couples walk into his apartment, business associates of his father’s and their wives, all of whom would stay for around forty-five minutes and then leave for another party in the building. Happened every year. They brought expensive wine and spent most of their time talking to Amy, who had a way with the older set.
Malcolm was attempting to corner Melanie who managed to slip away and across the apartment. There were several people leaning their heads and torsos out of the window like kids and yelling at the cartoon characters below.
The Svenvolds were still in their coats, and so Timkin helped remove them and carried them into his bedroom, hers a fitted trench with a plaid inlay, and his, a long, gray cashmere coat that Timkin would love to own.
He liked the style of his parents’ friends, their breadth of experience and flowery elegance; their love of old jazz standards and good stiff drinks. Not infrequently Timkin wished that he’d lived in their day because he didn’t always feel suited to his own. Especially not now after what had happened.
“Here comes the Road Runner,” someone yelled.
“That isn’t the Road Runner,” Malcolm yelled back. “There’s no fucking Road Runner.”
There were now well-entrenched crowds in the kitchen, the foyer, in the dining room and living room — and in all three bedrooms were smaller circles, friends catching up after years of not seeing one another. The party was on cruise control and Timkin thought — as he did every year at around this point — that he could just up and leave and the party would take care of itself. They wouldn’t even know he’d left.
He held up his hands like a camera lens and looked around. If you wanted a photograph or a movie scene about New Yorkers in the new millennium, you could do worse than to shoot this group, he thought.
“What are you doing?” Mr. Svenvold asked him.
“I’m thinking of my father,” he said, which wasn’t true until he said it. “And that little Instamatic he used to bring out.”