The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  “Rubes, Rubes.” Caroline reached for Ruby’s arm and pulled her onto the couch. They both sank into the cushions. “I’m so sorry, babe. I didn’t think you’d react like this.”

  “Are you going to tell your dad about my dad?” Ruby whispered. “About the stone?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You promise?”

  “I won’t say anything.” Caroline reached out and dabbed at Ruby’s cheeks with a tissue, the same pink color as Lily’s cousin’s tissues, and oh, oh, she’d forgotten about Lily’s cousin. Ruby cried even harder. Caroline sighed. “It’s been a long day, huh? Shh. Breathe, kiddo.”

  “People are always telling me to do that,” Ruby said. “They want me to breathe and go to Starbucks.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Ruby just took a long, unsteady breath.

  “Listen, in your own words, what happened with Andy?” Caroline stroked Ruby’s hair. “That’s what I came to talk about. Not the semantics of job versus internship.”

  “Your friend Andy’s a creep.” She was shaking a little, the way she had after she’d thrown the rhino head. “What did he tell you?”

  “He said you came over. He said he showed you the rhino, and you did a photo shoot, and then you hit him across the face and stole the rhino head. That rhino head means a lot to him, Ruby. He hates his whole family, except for his grandfather, and that head belonged to—”

  “I know. His grandfather.”

  “I told him you just didn’t understand what you were stealing. Right? And that you’ll give it back? Look, it’s an incredible honor that he asked you to collaborate with him in the first place.”

  Important that her voice remain quaver-free. “You don’t understand, Caroline.” There was that elevator feeling again, the sense of bored-out chutes inside her very bones. “He put the rhino head on my chest for the photo shoot. But when I was under the rhino head, he was kind of putting his hand up my skirt.” It was like someone else was telling the story. She had stopped crying. Now her voice sounded too placid, too distant.

  “Kind of putting his hand up your skirt?”

  “I mean, it didn’t go all the way up.”

  “He told me he made a move on you.” Caroline waved her own hand as if to demonstrate the body part’s harmlessness. “He told me all of this, Ruby, and he said he backed off once he wasn’t sure where you were at.”

  “He didn’t back off.” The words came out loudly. “He was pinning me down.”

  “He’s not that strong, Ruby. Have you seen his arms? He has chicken arms.”

  “The rhino head was pinning me down, too.” She could feel its weight again.

  “So what happened when Andy and the rhino head were pinning you down?”

  “I threw the rhino head at his head before he could really do anything. That’s how he got a bloody nose.”

  “But he wasn’t trying to hurt you in the first place.” Caroline rubbed Ruby’s arm. “Andy and I have talked a lot about his issues with traditional courtship rituals. He’s got an interest in radically undermining false sentiment, is all. Not only in relationships. You see that concern in his art, too, right?”

  Ruby stiffened.

  “Listen, Ruby.” Caroline scooted closer. “Probably some progressive-education-teacher type got Andy to read Story of the Eye at too young an age and it’s corrupted his conception of what flirtation should look like. But if I thought for a second he would really hurt you, or try to play some misogynistic mind games with you, I’d kill him. I’m really sensitive to this stuff. Remember when I kicked Scooter out of my party last June? But I know Andy. We’ve been friends since high school. It’s a misunderstanding.” Caroline squeezed Ruby’s hand. “He’s a superhuge feminist.”

  A superhuge feminist. Ruby looked down at the fat of her own arms. The waggle-bag of her biceps. Caroline was smaller and thinner than Ruby. She sat there, smaller and thinner than Ruby, yet holding her face so heavy, heavy, heavy with concern.

  “You know I’d be outraged if I thought Andy would really try anything,” Caroline went on. “I wouldn’t defend him for a second.”

  “You’re defending him now.”

  “No. I’m telling you the truth, which is a good truth. He wasn’t going to do anything. Now you don’t have to go around with the weight of feeling like a victim. I’m giving you the gift of knowing. When it comes to Andy, nothing would have happened. I wouldn’t lie about that or be delusional. You’re my oldest friend.”

  Her oldest friend. In that moment, it was as if Ruby’s entire universe was made up of the shadows of all the things Caroline had that Ruby did not: financial security, an apartment, a studio, so many dresses, a clear sense of moral certitude, several boyfriends from foreign countries, a sunny, optimistic outlook that turned solemn and grief-stricken at the appropriate times. Their friendship had once seemed to stretch a great distance, but Ruby suddenly feared that if she looked too hard, if she really investigated, she would find that she and Caroline were simply trapped together in a diorama and that great distance was the work of some scientist-artist, a flat, two-dimensional rendering. Lovingly crafted, deeply illusory, a lifelike depiction of something already extinct.

  She pushed Caroline away and looked at the place where Caroline’s beauty mark had been, as if the ruffle of scar was some kind of eye to gaze into. “If you don’t believe me about Andy, if you’re taking his side on all this, then I can’t talk to you right now.”

  “I’m not taking sides,” Caroline said. “Don’t make this about me not believing you, like I’m some asshole male football coach and you’re the sorority girl or whatever. I’m the one with context into Andy’s life and worldview. If you just throw out accusations like that, it hurts women who really need to say something.”

  Ruby stood up from the couch.

  “I want to help you,” Caroline said. “I’ve been trying to help you, and it’s like you won’t let me in.”

  “Because it’s not me you want to help. It’s some idea you have of me.”

  “What idea do I have of you?”

  This, Ruby did not know.

  Caroline, too, stood up. “I’m noticing a pattern.”

  “What pattern?”

  “Your whole problem is follow-through, Ruby. You make grand gestures and you don’t think about them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Caroline headed for the door. “I’m getting out of here.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “I’m not trying to lecture you, is the thing.”

  “Just say what you want to say.”

  In the doorway, Caroline turned and looked at Ruby. She crossed her arms over her chest. “You go to an expensive college to study some bizarre mix of studio art and art history and writing and you don’t think about what you’ll do afterward, you don’t take internships or anything, you just work summers at that coffee shop. You move in with John—too quickly, Rube, obviously—and you don’t think about if you two are really compatible until it’s too late. You let a lost, scared woman into this building, you don’t think for a second about really helping her, about where she’ll go next. And now this, with the rhino head. You’re barely touched, there’s a misunderstanding, and you react by stealing a meaningful object from someone who’s been through a lot in his life, accusing him along the way of what could be some serious reputation-destroying stuff, and you don’t think about the follow-through, you don’t even think.”

  Caroline exhaled mightily.

  The oldest friends. The fish going back and forth and back. How nice it would feel to dip Caroline’s head into that glowing tank, to wash her face with the fish water. That would be a grand gesture.

  “Well,” Caroline said, “are you just planning on glaring at me? Do you have, like, some sort of thing to say? I’ll listen, Ruby, because
I actually care.”

  Ruby pretended to think. Then she pointed to the Lucite table. “Do you have any idea how to fix that?” she asked. “I sprayed some Windex on it and fucked it up.”

  “Wow.”

  “What? You have much more expensive tables in your dad’s apartment than we do.”

  “I have more expensive tables.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what you want to say to me. You want to make me feel guilty because of how I grew up.”

  “I’m just stating the facts.” Ruby smiled with enough sweetness to hit, hopefully, the nervy center of each of Caroline’s teeth. “Your dad’s rich. You have more expensive tables.”

  “And you have mustard all over your wet skirt, kiddo. Did you know that?”

  “I know about the mustard,” Ruby said. “I know all about the mustard.” Still, she looked down at her skirt. The mustard stain had streaked almost the exact area where Andy’s hand had crept. Or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe she was remembering his touch wrong. Under the force of Caroline’s doubt, her own memories began to feel like fabrications.

  “You shouldn’t worry about my dad being rich,” Caroline said. “Worry about your dad being violent.”

  “Leave.” Ruby looked up. “Get out. Okay?”

  “I was already going.”

  The fish went back and forth, back and forth. Their bulgy little eyes like buttons now, something to be undone.

  It would have been nicer, more satisfying, if Caroline slammed the door. But she didn’t. She closed it like a normal guest, politely leaving a space that was not her own home. Everything in Ruby felt very hot. Her blouse was too tight. The professional skirt was wrecked with condiments. She was having trouble breathing. The table, the rhino head, Andy’s hand. And then the way Caroline’s own hand had fluttered dismissively in the air—that had felt like stealing, like something had been taken from Ruby. Caroline had had a short but efficient shoplifting streak in their adolescence, one that Ruby had halfway admired. But she wanted to take something from Caroline now. She wanted to run upstairs, head for Caroline’s closet, take her nicest clothes and squirt mustard across all of them. She wanted to take 2D’s payment of Starbucks gift cards and throw them at Caroline’s feet.

  How would 2D look at Ruby when she learned about the table? How much would Ruby owe her?

  Her feet began to move before she was aware of telling them to go. Suddenly she was in 2D’s bedroom. Its speckled beige walls gave her the sense of being inside one of the organic eggs John scrambled for breakfast. The carpet, soft underfoot, swallowed Ruby’s ankles. The big bed was so plush, it looked like it could consume entire people. When 2D had sex, when someone was on top of her, did she sink into some alternative uterine mattress dimension? How could Ruby get there? She flopped onto the bed. She sank but did not disappear. No new dimension. Just this world.

  She rolled off the bed. To the right of the bed was the walk-in closet. Ruby opened the closet door, which unfolded in pieces, its joints oiled into silence. No rainbow workout clothes kept in here. This space was for the articles of clothing in danger of wrinkling. The small column of dust that wafted up with the opening of the closet doors looked almost curated, the motes drifting equidistantly from one another. 2D was the kind of person who had arranged her walk-in closets so the clothes didn’t touch. No silken sleeve brushed up sensually against a gown’s cinched waist. No skirt hem ever grazed a pressed pant leg. Even the individual units of a pair of shoes were denied intimacy, not jumbled up but placed in a line at the closet’s entrance with half an inch between heels. It was as if 2D’s mission was to safeguard the personal space of each and every article of clothing.

  Ruby reached out and touched the long soft sleeve of a cashmere sweater.

  Those pits the Windex made in 2D’s see-through table—they had actually been kind of low-key pretty, hadn’t they? Beautiful, really. Like ice that had been chipped at by children on skates. Like a new constellation of stars born to a blank and glassy sky. Although she had damaged the table (plus maybe destroyed her friendship with Caroline), Ruby felt the rush of energy she usually associated with creating something or looking at art, the same rush she had felt as a kid, painting the back of a shoebox so that it looked like Central Park, the same rush she had felt in art history classes in college as some new style of stillness was projected onto the screen: a Vermeer, an Ellsworth Kelly, an Alice Neel.

  She moved farther into the walk-in closet. Long black dresses that were swoopy and dramatic. Short red dresses trying their damnedest to seem effortless enough. At the very back of the closet hung a silk chiffon dress in dark blue—the color probably had a name like “dark cove”—with a beaded illusion neckline, pleats in the skirt, and on-seam pockets similar to the ones on the dress Caroline had worn this morning. The dress, hemmed to just above knee-length, seemed too young for 2D. Had she ever even worn it?

  Ruby took her hair out of its ponytail and unbuttoned her blouse and removed her professional skirt and her tights. After another moment she removed her bra and her underwear, just so she could have the experience of standing naked right there in 2D’s walk-in closet. Another painting plunged back into her brain: an Edward Hopper, with a woman standing naked, her curvy body lit by the sturdy linear rays of light let in by a rectangular pane of glass. He had done a few paintings of naked women alone in their rooms, but this one had hung out an especially long time in Ruby’s mind. Everything in the painting that should have seemed soft—the woman’s body, the morning light, the olive greens of the room and of the woman’s skin—seemed strong and hard. Some of the students in class said the woman looked lost and lonely and passive. To Ruby, the woman’s loneliness looked like strength, like she could step out of that morning light and, in an Edward-Hopper-meets-Godzilla moment, rip down a skyscraper with her bare hands.

  Her skin still felt far too hot.

  She closed her eyes, tried to keep that Hopper woman in her head. Except as soon as Ruby attempted to pin her there, she vanished. Instead what floated up was the Alaska brown bear diorama in the Museum of Natural History. In the diorama, there were two bears, one on all fours, one standing on its hind legs. But Ruby really only ever noticed the one standing up. That bear stared like it was seeing past the glass, trying to figure out what the penumbral shapes on the other side might be—predators or prey? There were almost always people gathered in front of this display, but the people looked more like shadows than the bears did, the way they were silhouetted by all the diorama’s bright faux-Alaskan light.

  Naked in front of 2D’s closet, Ruby felt not like the Hopper woman, but like that bear standing up. Outside her diorama space, through the glass that sealed off this moment, she could make out the silhouettes of younger selves, Rubys of all ages. They watched her from the other side of the pane. They were hushed and observant and all such good girls, all so grateful for what they had been given, eager to learn, eager to laugh in the right way at the right things.

  She put on her bra and underwear again. Then she grabbed the dark blue dress and stepped back from the closet, as if edging away from an incoming tide. At last she put on 2D’s blue dress, which fit perfectly.

  And what about shoes? She couldn’t wear her own dirty, ugly flats with this clean, lovely garment. That wouldn’t do for the party tonight. Yes, now she wanted to go to Caroline’s stupid party, just to show John she was okay, just to show Andy that he could not scare her away, just to show Caroline what a grand gesture really looked like.

  She crouched down and looked at 2D’s shoes, lined up at the bottom of the closet. She pulled out a pair of sparkly ballet flats, a scalloped pattern of glittering rhinestones. She took some experimental steps back out to 2D’s living room. She walked over to the table and examined the pits again. She didn’t feel guilty but closer to exhilarated. There was the sign of Ruby’s exhalation, now preserved in something like glass. Her error hadn’t b
een in breathing on 2D’s table, but in trying to erase her breath. She didn’t want to fix the table now. Still, she could conceal the damage she’d caused for at least a little while. She moved the vintage pool balls over slightly to the left. They covered up the pits. Ruby stepped back from the table and examined her work. She squeezed her toes in. The sparkly shoes were a bit small, yes, but she’d keep them on. They didn’t hurt much at all.

  11 GINKGO TREE WITH GARBAGE BIRD

  Martin was never completely off work—the building’s demands didn’t follow a normal schedule—but at five every day, if he could, he liked to go for a walk in Central Park and look at birds and trees and stuff that it wasn’t his job to manage. He was in the apartment grabbing his binoculars when Ruby came home at last, her coat over her arm. She was decked out in some Academy Awards–ish silky blue dress and glittering shoes, as though she had just won something, like in one of Martin’s dreams. Ruby looked at the binoculars in Martin’s hands. She was glowing, but in a way that reminded him of a child about to come down with the flu. He wanted to ask her where she got that dress and those shoes, but he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know, and he wanted to ask her what had happened with the job interview, but he already knew the answer.

  Maybe between parents and their grown children this was normal—this little shared universe of unsaid things, largely made up of what you didn’t want to talk about and what you guessed you shouldn’t ask. The dark matter of familial bonds. Ruby tugged at the right sleeve of her dress, her face reddening. Martin comforts his daughter in distress. The Lily voice. He has advice! He has ideas!

  Martin said, “Ruby. Breathe.”

  She said, “I know about the stone.”

  He sat down heavily on the couch, the sad cow faces on the sad cow print elongating from his weight.

  “Caroline told me.”

  “It was an accident.” He looked down at the cushion, at the curve of a windmill. “Can you tell that to Caroline?”