The Last Book Party(48)

Lil smiled, showing a perfect set of little teeth.

“Look who I found! It’s Goodbye Columbus!” she said.

“No,” Jeremy said slowly, as if he were talking to a child. “It’s Neil Klugman, the protagonist of the novel Goodbye, Columbus.” Franny and Lil looked at Jeremy and then looked at each other and laughed.

“The once-and-always know-it-all,” Franny said. He gave Jeremy a playful jab in the arm.

“Neil Klugman. I should have guessed it,” I said.

Franny introduced me and Lil, who gave me a quick hello. She pinched Franny’s cheeks and kissed him on the lips.

“Doesn’t Franny make an adorable Winnie the Pooh?” she said.

Jeremy looked at me, confused.

“Christopher Robin,” I whispered to Jeremy.

“Got it.”

Lil reached out both hands to Franny.

“Come,” she said, giggling. “We must find you some honey!”

I watched them walk away.

“Are they high?” I said.

Jeremy shook his head.

“They’re always like that.”

“Good costume,” I said, nodding at his outfit.

Jeremy shrugged. “I hate dressing up and this was easy,” he said. “I mean—I’m not trying to draw parallels between myself and Roth.”

I couldn’t help smiling.

“Are you aware of your tendency to emphatically deny your innermost thoughts, thereby revealing them?”

“Do I do that?” he asked. He looked at my long dress and the bows in my hair. “And who are you dressed as? Laura Ingalls grown up and gone to a fancy party?”

“Cute,” I said. “But slightly more obscure. Think British.”

I was about to give him another clue when I felt a hand on my lower back and whipped around to see Henry walking by, whistling with exaggerated nonchalance and heading for the drinks table. When he got there, he turned and winked at me. I was a bit annoyed at his indiscretion, and at how his attention gave me a rush. I was relieved he hadn’t approached me while I was talking to Franny. I wasn’t ready to be around both of them at once.

Before I could ask Jeremy to get me a drink, a woman in a honey-colored gown with voluminous skirts and a bodice so low-cut her nipples threatened to make a cameo twirled beside Jeremy and curtsied slowly, managing not to spill champagne from her glass. I looked at her blond wig, dark lips, and the wide pearl choker around her long neck and was astonished to realize that it was Tillie. She was always striking, but she had utterly transformed herself. Presumably playing the part of whoever she was—Caroline Bingley? The Marquise de Merteuil?—she stretched her arm toward Jeremy and watched him with an eyebrow raised until he took her hand and kissed it. Only then did she acknowledge me with a nod and an obvious once-over, from the ringlets in my hair and my pink cheeks to the length of my frilly dress and the bows on my shoes.

“Now here’s a perfectly appropriate couple,” she said. “Allow me to extend my warmest congratulations on your union. Mazel Tov!”

Jeremy watched her twirl her way to the side porch.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Jeremy said.

I thought about some of Tillie’s remarks to me, including this latest, and suddenly saw it clearly.

“Is Tillie a little bit anti-Semitic?” I asked.

Jeremy gave me a knowing look.

“Isn’t everyone?”





42





The party was not unfolding as I’d hoped. Franny was completely unbothered by my presence, acting as if he barely remembered me. Together with Lil, he was spritely and free to the point of annoyance. Tillie continued to treat me coldly. And Henry was confusing me with his on-again, off-again flirtation. I even felt slightly betrayed by Malcolm, who had never mentioned that he knew Lane’s father, which I suspected played a part in his eagerness to come to the party. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t brought the latest edits of Henry’s manuscript as promised.

I asked Jeremy to get me something strong to drink. Watching him weave his way through the crowd, the drabness of his costume came as a relief. He hadn’t overreached with an impressive and obscure outfit, but had hewed close to his comfort zone, fulfilling the task at hand and leaving it at that.

What had seemed so pretentious back in New York—his disavowal of his suburban Jewish background and determination to overcome it, his attraction to Franny’s world in hopes of siphoning off some of Henry and Tillie’s creativity—had reminded me, unflatteringly, of myself. I didn’t like to acknowledge how we shared both a discomfort with who we were and a need to be part of a different, better place. But now that he had opened up about his family and his youthful angst, I was more forgiving. Jeremy could be prickly and arrogant, but he was honest. He was betraying no one, in his life or in his fiction. His imagination was all that much more powerful for catapulting him away from his repressed upbringing and creating the incredible world of his novel. Thinking of it now, I was puzzled that I’d discounted the man who had written a story that had made me cry.

Jeremy handed me a drink, and without asking what it was, I drank down the whole glass. Jeremy asked if I’d eaten anything. I shook my head.

“Well, then, have at it,” he said. “Better late than never.” He bent his head forward and leaned in toward me, his hair nearly brushing my face. It took me a moment to understand what he was doing. It was the trick he had shown me at the progressive party, to take a sniff of hair while drinking on an empty stomach. That night, and the idea I’d had of Jeremy at the time, felt long ago. How quickly I’d judged him. I set down my glass and took his head in both hands. With my fingers resting on his thick curls, I smelled the warmth of his hair. Jeremy looked up, his face inches from mine. Before he could say or do anything, I took him by the hand and led him into the middle of the crowd dancing on the back porch.