We Are Not Ourselves(48)

“Well, you can’t. Everyone’s here. We have to make the best of it. I’m sorry I did this.”

“You don’t need to be sorry.”

“I am. This was a stupid idea. Stupid, stupid.”

“I just need the school year to end,” he said. “That’s it. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to vacation. No summer classes for me this year, that’s for sure. I’m just going to stay put.”

Another day, she might have hissed at him to get off his ass and get down there, but something prevented her. She was about to say she’d come back and get him in five minutes when he slapped his knees and stood.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Before they reentered the party, she ran down to the basement to grab a bottle from the rack.

“Wave this around when we get in there,” she said. “In case anyone noticed you were gone.”

Frank McGuire had the camera around his neck and called Ed over, as relieved as a retriever reassembling the pack. She watched him arrange the guys in a row in the dining room, the group waiting for him to focus, and then a moment of stillness that seemed to expand and breathe. She tried to memorize the scene—not the visual details, which she could recall later by looking at the photograph, but the mood, the nimble camaraderie, the way they clutched each other, the hint of annoyance at having to pose, the way afterward they laughed off the brush with intimacy. Every picture of men in a row, she thought, ended as this one did, with them expelled as if by force, dispersing into separate corners to get a drink, a plate of food, to smoke a cigarette. Ed looked vulnerable standing there in the lee tide. She decided not to leave his side for the rest of the party, and ushered him around with a subtle steering of her arm. He was a perfect sailboat, responding to the slightest tug on the line, tacking when she wanted him to tack, coming about when she wanted him to come about. She could feel him relax with her there, and soon she was having fun again. She had to resist her impulse to leave him and head to where the good conversations were taking place. She’d always considered it a luxury that she could count on her husband to entertain himself at parties. From across the room they would check in with each other with a wave, a nod, a wink, and a charge of desire would run through her as she watched the way women’s eyes danced when they were near him. It was hard to see him as well up close; something was lost in the foreshortening.

Cindy Coakley brought the cake in. They sang “Happy Birthday” and Eileen put her hand on his back as he blew out the candles with a remarkable lack of wind, so that a few stray flames survived his second and even third attempts. The lights came on and Cindy passed him the knife. He stood for a moment brandishing it before him, and Eileen couldn’t help finding something menacing in the image. She put her hand over his in what she hoped would look like an evocation of the gesture of unity with which they’d cut their wedding cake, and she pressed his hand down into the thin layer of frosting and the forbidding brick of ice cream beneath it. When she released her hand he struggled to free the knife from that frozen denseness and, failing, threw up his palms in defeat and took a step back from the cake. She laughed with an expression she hoped said something universal and vague about the uselessness of men and took his face in her hands and gave him a big, unrestrained kiss. To do so in front of all those people went against every ounce of culture she’d ever absorbed. He stiffened at first, but then he relaxed and let her kiss him. People began hooting and cheering. She let him go and pulled the knife from the cake and started serving little slices.

? ? ?

She hated to wake up to a messy house; it felt like paying a bill for something consumed without being savored. Still, when the last guest left, she went straight to bed. Ed slept on his back, inexorably flat. It was nearly her favorite thing about him. She’d read that it took confidence to sleep on one’s back, because it exposed the internal organs. He’d always been confident in bed. She loved how small he made her feel, how she could nestle up to him and be enveloped in his reach. She thought of the first time they’d danced, her surprise at his size, which he had hidden in his overlarge jacket. He had a rangy athleticism that put him at ease in the company of men who made their living with their hands. He allowed her to bridge two worlds, the earthbound one she’d come from and the rarefied one she aspired to. And he was the only man in whose arms she’d ever been able to fall asleep.

In the morning, she fixed herself tea and got to work dispatching the pots and pans. When she’d cleaned the countertops and cabinet doors, she ran the mop over the kitchen floor, but her usual feeling of pride at the glossy shine and the piney scent didn’t come. How had she tolerated the floor’s permanently dingy linoleum this long? The wallpaper had bubbled up in places, and the joints in the window frames were so slack that the glass shifted like a loose tooth when the window was lifted. In the dining room she felt better for a while as she ran the rag over those stately pieces and breathed in the easy astringency of Murphy’s Oil Soap, but soon the tarnish along the bottom edge of the wall-length mirror was all she could see. In the bathroom, she noticed places where the enamel had worn away in the tub, exposing the black beneath it.

She began to obsess over the details of her guests’ attentions. Had they seen the stains on the rug under the ottoman? The evidence of rot on the vanity? She imagined them picking up objects and finding a layer of dust beneath.