The After Party Page 6

  I flattened myself against the cold wall, next to the door. The gymnasium was huge, meant to seat hundreds, but today it held only two people: Joan, and me.

  I stepped out of the shadows.

  “Joan,” I said softly, and she cocked her head but then another figure rose from the bleachers. We were three, not two. John, I thought at first, the senior Joan had been dating for a few months; but John was taller than this boy, held himself differently. This was a boy I had never seen before.

  Joan went to him. I had a strange feeling in my stomach; I knew without knowing. Joan ascended the steps silently; when she reached him he kissed her hard, his hand behind her head. I’d never seen anyone kiss like that, openmouthed, the desire on both sides equal, clear. Joan wasn’t shying away—she was pushing back. She was hungry, too.

  “Let’s get rid of these,” he said, and though I could not see him, I could hear him clearly. His voice was low, tense. He took Joan’s books and dropped them on the metal seating. I felt sure someone would come—I held my breath for one second, two—but no one did.

  Joan wore a pink cashmere sweater, short-sleeved; he ran his hands over her breasts, lightly at first, then harder and harder until Joan moaned.

  I’d never heard a sound like that from her. And then she was kneeling, he was pushing her down, and she was still moaning. I thought of her bare knees on the bleachers, the pressure of his hands on her shoulders. He unzipped his pants, hurriedly, clumsily—I was shocked by what I saw—and put himself in her mouth and then he stroked her cheek, the gesture weirdly tender.

  I felt faint. His eyes were closed. I couldn’t see Joan’s face.

  When Joan stood up, I turned to leave but the boy spoke. “You, now,” and his words echoed around the empty gymnasium. He put his hand beneath Joan’s skirt—I’d chosen that skirt for Joan, at Battelstein’s, for the way it had complemented her waist—and Joan made another sound I had never heard her make before, and she made it again and again and she leaned her head back and he put his other hand behind her neck, and at first I thought he might hurt her but then I saw he was only helping her stand.

  I could see her taut throat, the curve of her breasts beneath the sweater. They were locked in a strange dance, and I didn’t understand it, who was leading whom, or maybe nobody was leading, maybe this was a dance that had no rules.

  There was a noise outside the door, an errant shout. Joan turned toward me. I closed my eyes as if closing them would make me invisible.

  But she turned away again and I slipped out the door, made my way down the empty hallway and back into the noise and bustle.

  A week later, in the aftermath of her absence, I would wonder if she had gone somewhere with this boy. I saw her over and over, sinking down to her knees. But I didn’t even know his name. I felt sure I’d never seen him before. I looked for him, in the lunchroom, between classes, but I didn’t know who I was looking for. A boy who was shorter than John. A boy who had been touched by Joan.

  • • •

  Joan ran away while I was in Oklahoma City for Easter, enduring a tense, awkward visit with my quiet father and his idiotic new wife, Melane. Melane, who had been his long-term mistress before she became his wife, laughed at everything she said, and everything he said, everything anyone said, and served silly little canapés instead of dinner. Their house was big and boxy, decorated with Melane’s knickknacks, with none of Evergreen’s solid walls or old family portraits or sense of history. But she was easy to be around, as my mother had not been.

  When I returned to Houston, Mary, not Joan, met me at the airport. I remained calm as she escorted me through the busy lobby, full of people arriving, people departing; I took deep, even breaths like Idie had taught me to do when I was a little girl and something had upset me.

  Fred stood next to the car, waiting for us in his black uniform; he tilted his head, gave me a small, sad smile, and my fear was confirmed: Joan had left.

  “Tell me right now,” Mary said, once we were in the backseat of the car, “tell me everything.”

  “Joan’s gone,” I said, almost to myself. I looked out the window, at all the travelers returning from their own unpleasant Easters. Weary women in pastel hats, men in suits, clutching the hands of their thrilled, happy children. Travel was still exciting for them; they didn’t know the people they loved would abandon them, eventually. They didn’t know that love was not a fact. I pressed my forehead to the window and swallowed a sob. Who did I have left?

  What did I know? I told Mary I knew nothing, wiping tears from my face that Mary pretended not to see. I tried to concentrate on her questions; I tried to understand what she was asking of me. But it wasn’t true that I knew nothing. I knew that Joan had drifted away from me. That her plans for the future had stopped involving me. The penthouse apartment we were to live in after graduation; the correspondence course we were to take, unseriously, that summer; the parties we were to throw: her heart hadn’t been in any of it lately. She had said she wanted to leave Houston, to go to where the ideas came from, and now she had succeeded.

  That night, I fell asleep surprisingly easily, exhausted from the day. I woke up and it was still dark through the curtains; I looked at Joan’s bed and for an exasperated moment thought she had sneaked out to meet a boy, and then I remembered.

  The panic was overwhelming. My throat tightened and I gasped for breath. My scalp and hands tingled. My lips went numb. I dug my fingernails into my cheeks, and the pain brought some relief.

  I went in the dim light to Joan’s closet and found the dress I had last seen her wear, a pretty purple-and-yellow plaid with capped sleeves. I put it on.

  The dress hung loose on me and smelled like Joan. I climbed into her bed, pulled the sheets over my head. Had she looked at my empty bed before she’d left this room? Had she imagined me in Oklahoma City, enduring my father and his wife, and felt sorry for me? Or was she glad that I wasn’t there to interfere with her plans? Had she thought of me at all?

  I fell asleep thinking of Joan. I woke thinking of Joan. I wore my own clothes downstairs, of course, but at the breakfast table Mary stared at me, startled, and I thought for a second I’d forgotten to change. I looked down, at my own hunter-green skirt.

  “Your face,” Mary said, and I felt my cheek.

  “Oh,” I said. “I must have scratched myself in my sleep.”

  “There’s blood on your face, Cecilia. You should wash it off.”

  The scratch was small; once the blood was gone you almost couldn’t see it. But it felt strangely satisfying, to see that I’d hurt myself. I wanted to show the world that Joan’s departure had scarred me.

  But I was too practical for that. The world would only think I’d lost my mind.

  After that, I slept in Joan’s clothes when I was particularly lonely. No one ever knew.

  • • •

  Every day, Stewart, the Fortiers’ butler, stacked the mail into a neat pile and left it on a silver tray in the foyer, and every day I looked for a letter from Joan. A month after she disappeared a postcard arrived, a picture of a field of bluebonnets on the front.

  I’m fine, it read. Don’t look for me. I love you all.

  I turned the postcard over. The postmark read Fort Worth, but I knew Joan was not in Texas any longer. She was in New York. She was in Hollywood. The rumors were varied. But I only knew she was nowhere near me.

  I wanted to rip the postcard in two but instead tucked it back into the sheaf of envelopes and slipped into the downstairs powder room before Stewart or Mary saw me snooping. The mirror in there was a Fortier antique, its surface dotted with black marks of age. I could hardly see my reflection in the dim light.

  Who would see me, now that Joan was gone?

  • • •

  I waited for my own postcard, my own signal. An acknowledgment at least. She couldn’t send it to Evergreen, so perhaps she would send it
to Ciela. “Gotten any unusual mail?” I asked Ciela one day, as we were leaving school. Fred waited for me at the bottom of the steps. “No,” she said slowly. She could see straight through me, but I couldn’t help myself.

  • • •

  There were hushed meetings between Mary and Furlow in Furlow’s office. A private detective was hired, then another when the first found nothing.

  I would never tell anyone else about what Joan had said to me about wanting to leave Houston. I would never tell anyone about what I had seen in the gymnasium. It became clear, in those months, that Mary’s plans for Joan had been more concrete, more realized and nuanced, than I had ever known. I once heard her say to Furlow that Joan was “meant to be something the likes of which the world has never seen.” But she didn’t mean the world. I knew that even then. She meant Houston, and her plans did not involve Joan living elsewhere, far from her parents, in an orbit they couldn’t influence and control.

  I sleepwalked through the next month and graduated from Lamar High School without Joan next to me. My father flew in from Oklahoma and we had a sad lunch at Sonny Look’s afterward, just the two of us. I missed Joan with a blinding intensity. I could not see my way forward without her. My father offered to take me back to Oklahoma City and I all but laughed in his face. What would I have done there? Served canapés with his wife? I needed to stay here for when Joan returned.

  “But what will you do, Cecilia?” my father asked, his forehead creased.

  “Is now the time to start worrying about me?” His face fell. I’d forgotten how sensitive he was. He wasn’t a good man but he wasn’t a bad man, either. Mainly, he had been no match for my mother.

  “I’ll manage,” I said, and patted his forearm, awkwardly. We took great pains to avoid touching each other. “I always have.”

  I wonder now how my life would have unfolded if I had moved back to Oklahoma with my father. Established a life for myself in a different world. A world without Joan.

  “Well, Cecilia,” Mary had said, one morning a month after graduation, as I ate my oatmeal alone at the breakfast table. I’d been spending my time as Joan and I would have spent it, had she been here: going every morning to the pool, shopping, seeing movies with the girls. Occasionally Mary, Furlow, and I had joyless cocktails before dinner. “I think it’s time.”

  I rested my spoon on the wide rim of the bowl, dabbed the corners of my mouth with my napkin before meeting Mary’s eye.

  “Time?” I asked, though I knew exactly what she meant.

  “Time,” Mary said. “Time to move on from Evergreen. I’m sure you’re tired of living with us old fuddy-duddies.” She laughed. And then, as if just noticing me, cut herself short. “You do know what I mean, don’t you, Cecilia? I mean move into the penthouse. Move into the penthouse and wait for Joan.” She pressed her finger to her lips. “She can’t stay gone forever.”

  I wanted to weep. I dumbly looked around the breakfast room, at the pine table where Joan and I had sat a hundred—no, a thousand—times. At the armoire that housed extra china. And then at Dorie, who stood at the door to the kitchen, watching me. I wanted Idie. I could smell her. I remembered how perfectly I had fit underneath her chin when I sat on her lap as a child. Dorie shook her head before she stepped back into the kitchen, the gesture nearly imperceptible, but I understood: the Fortiers were not my family.

  With Joan gone, it was easy to forget that Mary and Furlow weren’t my parents. I slept in their daughter’s room. I ate meals with them. They’d given me a gold charm bracelet for graduation, a gold “J” dangling from a link. “It’s your real name, is it not?” Mary asked, when I touched the letter with my finger. She’d kissed my cheek, and I’d felt loved. It was a rare moment of affection from Mary. Mary was kind to me, but I would not have called her affectionate. Yet I felt like I deserved her affection: I was behaving more like a daughter than Joan. I was good, as Joan was not.

  Mary stood over me—towered, a woman like that always towered—and I wanted her to touch me so desperately I could almost feel her hand on my shoulder. She did not.

  She remained standing longer than necessary. She gazed at me, not fondly, exactly, but not meanly, either. I couldn’t discern it. Things were not as they seemed, I felt, suddenly. Things were being kept from me. And then as quickly as the feeling had come over me, it disappeared, because Mary leaned down and kissed my cheek.

  Mary and Furlow were generous; where I would go was never in question. But now I understand that generosity had little to do with it. They wanted everything in Joan’s life to be the same, so that when she returned she could slip back into it as if she had never left in the first place.

  • • •

  By the next day I was in downtown Houston. It was July, blazing; before I mustered the energy to get dressed I sat in front of the window unit in my bra and panties to cool off. Ciela had come over to help me unpack—though there was nothing to unpack. All my clothes had been hung neatly in my closet, all my toiletries placed in the stainless-steel bathroom cabinet. I had been relieved to see that all Joan’s clothes were there, too.

  It never even occurred to me that I should spend my own money, waiting for me in a bank account downtown, and get my own place. My inheritance, already substantial, had grown since my mother’s death, due to the wise investments of faceless men. I wasn’t as wealthy as Joan, of course, but I could take care of myself for the rest of my life if I needed to, and live well. I hated the sight of the monthly statements that arrived in the mail from the Second National Bank of Houston, tucked them away, unopened, in the drawer of my nightstand. Instead of a mother binding me to the world, I had a stack of papers stamped with numbers I never read.

  Ciela walked in, took one look at the large glass windows, and dubbed the place the Specimen Jar.

  There had been whispers, lately, that the feds were going to try Ciela’s father for money laundering, but Ciela seemed impervious to them. She had grown into herself, as the saying went; she moved across a room like she had an audience, like Joan had. Like Joan still did, wherever she was, unless her magic was less potent outside of Houston.

  Ciela would blossom while Joan was gone. She would be featured in the Press every week; she would be Houston’s go-to girl. Then Joan would return and replace her.

  “You’ll never feel alone, at least,” Ciela said, with a smile, leaning her forehead against a window.

  That was true. I felt watched, though no one could possibly see me up there, on the fourteenth floor of one of Houston’s tallest buildings. And there was a live-in maid, too, Sari, though we mostly avoided each other.

  Ciela left and the doorbell buzzed again so quickly I was sure she’d forgotten something.

  “Come in,” I called.

  Instead of Ciela there was Furlow, standing hesitantly in the doorframe, even though he owned the place. I jumped up to welcome him and he kissed me on the cheek, tentatively.

  “How do you like it here?” he asked. His hat was still on his head; perhaps a sign that he wouldn’t stay long. I hoped so. I didn’t think I had ever been alone with Furlow.

  His skin had begun to show age, but the years had not clouded his blue eyes; it was easy to see the handsome man he had once been in the contours of his face, in his thick, silver hair. He had celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday before Joan left.

  “Cecilia?” he said, and I realized I hadn’t answered his question.

  “I like it,” I said, and nodded, though what else could I have said? Joan’s absence felt like a death. It felt worse than a death, because when my mother died I’d had Joan, and now I had no one. Furlow could have asked me anything, and I would have told him what I thought he wanted to hear.

  “May I?” he asked, and gestured to the sofa I’d just straightened, a sofa he had never laid eyes on before but had, nonetheless, bought. I nodded. I watched as he sat down on the low-slung sectional. A design
er had done the space in the newest style, and it was sleek and modern and utterly unlike any place I had ever lived. I felt like I was living in a hotel lobby, though it had only been a day. I would get used to it, just as I’d gotten used to Evergreen.

  Furlow looked out of place. He wasn’t a man made for the low proportions of modern furniture. He needed heft and weight to his furniture: a distressed leather chair with a tall back, a mahogany wardrobe in which to hang his cowboy hat.

  “Joan’s been gone for three months,” he said, and I nodded. This was a fact, though it seemed impossible. “I came here alone, without Mary, because I wanted to know if Joan had been in touch.”

  “The postcard,” I said. I cleared my throat. “With the flowers.” I understood him, but I wanted to buy myself time.

  “I meant privately.”

  I smiled, and tried not to cry.

  “She has not,” I said. And she should have! I should have been lying; Joan should have written me a letter, made a phone call. Sent a note for me to Ciela’s house. Something, anything. I should have received some signal, some sign that I still mattered to her. It had become harder and harder to take for granted that Joan loved me, that Joan was simply careless with her affections.

  Furlow studied Houston’s skyline. What a different view, I thought, than Evergreen’s copse of trees, which were visible from every window. Did he imagine Joan looking from a window? Did he wonder, as I did, what his daughter saw, wherever she was?

  “I had hoped she had. I had hoped you might be able to tell me something of her happiness.”

  Such an odd way to phrase it. “Her happiness?”

  “Her happiness has been the only thing I have ever concerned myself with. Unlike her mother.” He smiled faintly. This was a side of Furlow I had never seen before—quiet, contemplative—and it made me nervous. He continued to speak.