Cleopatra and Frankenstein(9)

“I thought you were Korean?” said Frank.

Audrey rolled her eyes. Cleo covered Frank’s mouth with her hand.

“Do Tibetan monks drink champagne?” she asked and handed Audrey a glass.

Audrey protruded her tongue again and pressed a pill onto it.

“Only when mixed with Klonopin.” She swallowed it with a gulp, then went to find Santiago, whose restaurant she was a hostess at.

Next, Cleo’s closest friend Quentin arrived. The two had met during Cleo’s first weeks in New York and become inseparable, each as lonely and adrift as the other. Quentin had grown up between Warsaw and New York; his grandmother was a Polish heiress who believed gay people didn’t exist in her country, which meant that Quentin would never have to work a day in his life but must also stay in the closet for the remainder of it. As far as his family was concerned, Cleo had been his girlfriend for the past two years.

“I still haven’t forgiven you for not asking me to be your maid of honor,” he said, kissing Cleo. “But I did get you a wedding present. It’s very expensive.”

“Honey, I don’t think you’re meant to tell them that.”

This was Quentin’s sometime boyfriend, Johnny. Johnny had the complexion of a naked mole rat and the same furtive expression, as though constantly looking for a hole through which to disappear. He was an odd choice of partner for Quentin, whose nature was like one extended grand entrance.

“I always thought you’d be the first to marry her,” Frank said.

“So did I,” said Quentin sadly.

The rest of the guests arrived, and Cleo took her place at the head of the table. She handed around plates and introduced acquaintances and accepted congratulations as the room became loud and gay. Most were friends of Frank’s; advertisers and architects and designers, people who had found the intersection between creativity and economy, who made beautiful things but did not suffer for it. She smiled and filled glasses and tried to focus on the conversations happening around her.

“People don’t know it, but Polish is a very poetic language,” a bald academic, who did not speak Polish, was telling Quentin, who did. “You know when they translated The Flintstones, they put it all in rhyme?”

“Sorry I never called you back,” exclaimed one guest to another across the room. “I threw my phone out the window after a bad haircut!”

Cleo stood up and tried making her way past the guests to the bathroom.

“… And now all he wants to talk about is doing ayahuasca,” a woman wearing a turban was saying to Zoe. “He goes down to Peru for the ceremonies and acts like it’s some rare skill he’s learned. I’m like, honey, it’s a drug, not a degree.”

“My acting teacher did say it completely neutralized his ego,” said Zoe. “At least for a few weeks.”

Zoe was the only family member they had invited. At nineteen she was also the youngest person there. Frank and Zoe looked almost nothing alike, despite being half siblings, in part because of the age difference, in part because Zoe’s father was Black and Frank’s, like their mother, was white. Bespectacled, freckled, and curly-haired, Frank was charmingly handsome, but he was rarely the best-looking person in the room. Zoe, on the other hand, was breathtaking. Her face had the symmetry of a Brancu?i sculpture. Her hair was a tumble of curls streaked with copper and gold. She did not appear to have pores. Every time Cleo looked at her, she couldn’t help searching for a flaw.

The turbaned woman turned to include Cleo in the conversation. Cleo could recall her job, food critic, but not her name. This was, she thought, a type of memory lapse common to New Yorkers.

“Cleo, you create,” she declared briskly. “Do you think taking ayahuasca would enhance your painting?”

“I think I need my ego.” Cleo laughed. “It’s pretty much the only thing getting me to the canvas these days.”

“Well, Frank says you’re very talented,” sniffed the turbaned food critic. “Perhaps your generation will restore the prominence of painting to the art world finally.”

Cleo smiled graciously. Even in her writing, this critic had a way of giving compliments with an air of unwillingness, as though she had only a finite number and was never quite sure if now was the occasion to surrender one.

“Here’s hoping,” said Cleo.

“Not that Frank would be biased or anything,” shot Zoe.

Cleo felt her face fall. Every time she met Zoe, she was left with the bruised feeling that the younger girl did not like her. Of course, this only made her more desperate for Zoe’s good opinion, while uncomfortably aware that she was courting the approval of a sulky teenager. She had brought the tension up to Frank before, but he sidestepped the conflict with his usual light-footedness.

The food critic appeared to have lost interest in the conversation now that she was no longer speaking, and an awkward silence descended between Cleo, who was still straining to look unbothered, and Zoe, whose golden eyes were resting on her with predacious calm. Thankfully, Frank soon began calling Cleo’s name from across the room.

“Cley, you’ve got to hear this story of Anders’s!” he yelled, still mid-laugh. “You too, Zo!”

Frank had abandoned his top hat and jacket but left his napkin tucked into his shirt. His glasses were slightly askew, a telltale sign that he was already well on his way to being drunk. Zoe bounded over, leaving Cleo to follow behind her.