“You don’t want to know anything about me,” Sherwin pouted.
“Oh, I don’t,” Annabel said with great feeling.
“Well, we’re both great fans of Alice.”
“We are?” Annabel said.
Sherwin laughed.
“Alice can be so mean,” Annabel said. “Maybe you don’t know her mean side. Once I said to her, ‘You’re such a septic, Alice,’ and she was all over me because I said ‘septic.’ She’s so vain about language. It was just a little mispronunciation, and she was all over me.”
Sherwin laughed again.
“I don’t think Alice will ever have fans.” Annabel said. If Alice were here, she’d be having a fit about salmon being served. The whole thing about salmon was sort of pathetic. That need to return. And when they did succeed in returning to the place where they had been born or spawned or whatever, didn’t they just rot?… like immediately …
“If you’re not a fan by nature — I don’t mean just a fan of Alice’s, but a fan by nature — then you must be aware of the presence of God.”
“Oh, I can’t — I just can’t talk like this.” Annabel said.
“An awareness of the presence of God enables a person to resist the false values of mass communications, which create fans, enthusiasts, fantasists.”
“I think mass communication is wonderful,” Annabel said. “I think it’s done an awful lot of good.” She had turned quite pale.
“Hey, relax,” Sherwin said. “I’m just kidding around.”
The ponytail had returned to the kitchen, his platter of salmon puffs denuded.
“Jonathan!” she screamed.
“Will you tell Alice I’m sorry I missed her?” Sherwin said.
“Sorry you missed her,” Annabel said. “Certainly.” Is this what they did together, he and Alice? It was sick.
She picked up a little ceramic butter dish, took the top off, and then put it back on. The lid was in the shape of a little hen, and a chick was nestled in the hen’s wing. She had bought it for her mother for Christmas one year and of course her mother had hated it, wanting nothing with the merest whiff of domesticity as a gift. Annabel took the top off again; it fit back only one way. How absorbing this little dish was … she wished Sherwin would leave. She glanced up and saw with relief that he actually was walking away, twitching and rolling his shoulders in the dark tuxedo. He was so odious and incoherent. Someone else was playing the piano anyway. Was he even necessary?
Sherwin passed through the kitchen and slowed but did not stop his passage into the great room, where the guests were still striving toward the party’s high note, which it might not achieve. Madder music was required. He didn’t look at the piano. By the door there was a table in the shape of an elephant. Indian, Sherwin thought. Right? They’re the ones with the smaller ears, the longer face. On top of it was a glass of white wine with an hors d’oeuvre in it, looking for all the world like a turd in a toilet.
Outside, he moved away from the light of the party, down the length of the house. Below, cupped in the valley, the lights of the city trembled, and high up, in further darkness, a greenish wad of light burned solitary and bright — a mine reopened, working out its semiprecious stones. He stood and smoked. Sometimes we exist, he thought, and sometimes we pretend to exist, which takes considerably more effort. He walked to the end of the house. Metal animals were spiked into the decoratively inclined earth as one-dimensional entertainment. A troupe of quail. A life-sized javelina.
He hadn’t realized how big a house it was. One wing angled off westward. The house, subtly, seemed to go on and on. Sherwin grinned and shook his head. It was like the classic dream where you dream there’s one more room to your house — silly me, it’s been there all the while, and what? I’d forgotten? A whole other room! Of course it wasn’t his own house, it was his sometime employer’s house, the man who signed the checks. He touched the handle on a glass door, and it slid back on its tracks with a dry whisper. He patted the wall for a light switch.
It was a bedroom, ornate as the rest of the house but tousled and cold. Cold as a meat locker. There were silk sheets on the bed of a dark rose color. Long mirrors, the kind you attached to the backs of doors, leaned against the walls. Drinking glasses and books scattered about, a few table lamps, the ones with shades as tall as a child. An overhead fan rotated slowly, making the room colder still. Now, this was a room you could go out in, a room that made no bones about it. This would be a room to introduce to Alice.
“ ‘There shall be no sea, they say/On Nature’s great coronation day/when the Bridegroom comes to the Bride’ dum dum dum dum.” But what that meant, of course, was nullity, not the old in-and-out. Maybe he should make a few preparations and come back here to deal himself his blow. Clean his apartment, tell his few remaining acquaintances their failings, get a colonic irrigation.… He picked up the nearest reading material, The Worst Journey in the World, by one Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It had Carter’s bookplate in it. Carter might be a bit of a goose, Sherwin thought.
The Worst Journey in the World was polar in nature, as the worst-journey genre tended to be, and concerned the doomed Antarctic explorer Scott, a figure for whom Sherwin had little empathy. Scott had made it clear in his diaries that although he and his little group (a fateful asymmetrical seven rather than the originally planned-for six) had the means to take their own lives in an emergency, they decided when the last fatal blizzard descended to die naturally. Sort of the let-the-body-deal-with-it-rather-than-the-mind attitude. But their decision to consciously freeze to death was sort of an ultrasuicide. They got foxed.
Sherwin put the book down. He was surprised there wasn’t some porn or some other sign of innocent human diversion. The room eluded him, its destiny seeming a little vague. He couldn’t even hear the party from here.
He switched on the VCR on top of the television set, and Africa bloomed. The veldt. People with remarkable cheekbones. A Land Rover tearing along.
“This is the part that’s always supposed to bring a tear to your eye,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s when they’ve left the lioness for a week and it’s the rainy season and she isn’t able to get anything to eat and she’s half starved. But that’s not the real Elsa there. That’s her stand-in.”
“Jesus! You startled me,” Sherwin said. “My heart went skippety.”
“I loathe that movie,” the woman said. “It’s been in there for a month.” She smiled at him thinly, a hefty broad with sunken eyes wearing some sort of partygoing apparatus with gauzy overlays, the kind hefty broads ofttimes wore. She looked familiar, as though he’d seen her in a photograph somewhere, but a specific photograph, framed.
“So you slipped away from the party, too,” Sherwin said.
“Some time ago,” Ginger said. “Tell me, how did you find your way in here?”
“Yeah, I shouldn’t be here,” Sherwin said. “It’s just one of those nights when I don’t feel at home in my own skin. Whose room is this, anyway?”
“That boob Carter’s.”
“Yeah?” Sherwin said. “He likes Elsa the lioness?”
“If he were hip,” Ginger said, “he’d have a sci fi, horror, and B-and-C flicks library, but Carter is as unhip as it gets.”
She was hefty but rather remarkably bony, too. It sort of came and went.
“The mirrors are a kick.”
“It’s just one of his latest notions. He thinks they’ll bother me, but they don’t.” She bent toward him. “Hi,” she said.
He could see her breastbone, a bony wing. He had a quick recall of his sister, whom he hadn’t thought about in years. After she was diagnosed, his mother insisted she’d caught cancer from eating dirt when she was little, making little cakes and pies out of dirt and pebbles and berries in her playhouse. She’d caught it and held it for ten years and then died when she was seventeen. His mother had kept bees. There was a saying: bees don’t thrive unless they’re told the news. She’d talked to her bees, he remembered, even more after his sister died. She was good with bees, his mother, which was another way of saying she wasn’t all there.