The Dinner Party

by Joshua Ferris

  In the bathroom on sixty, he tries to work down sleep’s cowlick like a cat, but it’s a stubborn little fucker, and he gives up. The hallways are starting to crackle with the day’s coping banter. He takes a seat behind his desk, swipes the screen saver away with his mouse, and answers a few final emails. Then he sits back in the swivel chair, spins around to face the sun in the window, and waits.

  Fragments

  Here’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask. When you’re up there, are there coordinates you have to follow, or are you free to go anywhere you like?”

  “Depends on where in the city you are. If you come near any of the airports, obviously—”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Which you need clearance to do, anyway.”

  “I’m just talking about, like, say you’re over Midtown.”

  “I don’t do Midtown. There’s another guy does Midtown.”

  “I’m saying, what if you just happened to find yourself there?”

  “Let me tell you,” the second man said, laughing. “You never just find yourself inside a chopper in Midtown.”

  He stopped eavesdropping on them when the call from Katy came in. He picked up, hoping that her deadline had been pushed back, that she’d changed her mind, that she’d be joining him after all.

  “Hey,” he answered.

  No reply. Static. A physical thing, a trail of it. Static heading somewhere, progressing down a hallway.

  “Katy?” he said.

  Static crumpling and ironing itself out. A quick vacuum silence, then more jostle. “Katy,” he said again. “Helloooo.” He stepped out of the bar, knowing by then that his wife hadn’t intended to call him. “Kaaa-teee!” he sang. Static shifting, churning, then lifting suddenly. He hollered to be heard. “Yoo-hoo, Katy!”

  “…no, he thinks I’m…”

  More static.

  “…just wish…could spend the night…”

  Then a man’s voice. “…too bad you live…have an extra hour…”

  More static. He plugged his other ear and listened intently. The words were torn before they reached him, irrecoverable. He was no longer saying her name, just listening.

  “…dinner, but if you’re not…”

  “…hungry all right, but not for…”

  He listened for who knows how long. Only fragments came through. Amplified, then muted. He strained to identify the man’s voice. It was low and familiar. Long periods of static gave way to discrete words, occasional phrases.

  He stood in the cold trying to interpret them. By then, he knew his life was over.

  He hung up, then called her back almost immediately. It went straight to voicemail. It went to voicemail a second time. Finally, it rang, but rang and rang.

  He went back inside the bar. The indiscriminate noise of the other patrons registered as a murmur. He didn’t take a seat but hovered over his drink, staring at it without touching it. He’d known. That was the thing. Somehow he’d known.

  When Katy came in that night, it was late and he was asleep. And she was gone again long before he woke. That was how it was most nights, now that the case was going to trial.

  He showered and had coffee. He took his time leaving the apartment. He drifted through the rooms, looking at their many things. What a pain in the ass it would be to sort through it all.

  Out on the street, he fell in step with a girl on the phone. “No, he already graduated from law school,” she said. “He’s getting his master’s degree in real estate from NYU.”

  There was a long pause. “A master’s degree in…I think real estate. Why are you laughing?”

  There was another pause. “Why would he lie about something so— Stop laughing!”

  The subway was packed. The black kid said to his friend, “The scope was fat. She was at it for like an hour.”

  “How many shots?” his friend asked.

  One of the seated women peered over.

  “Who cares when it’s dead?” the first kid said.

  On his lunch hour, he left the office and walked around. He went to Central Park and back, a full mile. He watched the ground but remained oblivious of the pennies, the gum stamps, the pigeons twitching in the cold. For long passages, nothing penetrated the roar in his head.

  He stood at the crosswalk.

  “So we’re like a fund of funds, because we take a stake, but we can’t, you know, we have, what, a ten, maybe twenty percent—”

  “Right,” the other guy said.

  “Anyway, he’s an asshole, but he makes money.”

  “Best kind of asshole.”

  He passed two women without coats smoking outside a building.

  “Seriously, girl,” the one said.

  “I know, I know—but can I just tell you what he does?”

  The second woman drew closer and whispered into the ear of her companion, who gasped. “Get out!” she cried.

  He slogged through the day. After work he went to the gym. He sat down in the locker room and was removing his shoes as two guys he knew by sight were on their way out.

  “But not female masturbation, just male masturbation.”

  “So you fap yourself?”

  “But just dudes. The word for female’s, like…no, I don’t remember it.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to undress, so he sat there. Three young guys came in, smelling of recently smoked cigarettes, and waited for the one to change out of his street clothes. “But what are you going to eat at a buffet?” the first guy asked. “I mean, are you going to eat the sushi, or are you going to go straight for the fucking…you know, the fucking—”

  “Not the fucking sushi.”

  “I’ll tell you why she wants to go there.”

  “Yeah, did she lose weight?”

  “Thirty pounds.”

  “Yeah, she looks good.”

  “Why do you think we’re…?”

  The first guy quickly punched his fist in and out.

  He abandoned the smelly clothes in his gym bag, the gym bag itself, everything, and left the locker room.

  “Goodbye,” the woman at the front desk said to him on his way out. “Have a good night.”

  He ate at a diner uptown, far from the apartment. He sat alone, listening to the conversation going on in the booth behind him.

  “Like, he found a day job that makes him happy,” the hipster said. “He genuinely likes coffee. Where it’s from, what the blend is, shit like that.”

  The Asian girl on the far side said something he couldn’t hear.

  “Because I don’t want to go back to Lafayette. Or Tulsa.”

  That night, Katy came home later than usual. He was up but feigned sleep. With the lights off, she tiptoed into the bedroom, making no effort to wake him. He wanted her to. He wanted her to say something, anything, but she slid in lightly and was asleep in no time. What hurt more—her peaceful sleep, or the silence that preceded it? He got up and walked to the couch. It was late when he woke. She was gone, of course.

  On the street, the free a.m. newspaper was shouting about the coming blizzard. The flakes were just starting to whiten shoulders, driving in a pattern not always easy to make sense of.

  “Excuse me,” he cried out on the platform. “Excuse me!”

  The man ahead of him had dropped a glove.

  “Oh, thanks,” the man said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I do that all the time,” the man said, turning away from him, back to his companion.

  “Anyway, I don’t know if he bought it or not,” his companion continued.

  “Why would a scarf cost fifteen hundred dollars?”

  “Why would he buy it? That’s the question.”

  They all climbed up the subway stairs together. The man was still happy to have his gloves. “I swear I lose these things all the time,” he said, swatting the glove on his leg as he walked. “I’ve probably lost a hundred pairs.”

  On his lunch hour, another walk. This time, he made it down to
Union Square. The sky was a sheet of tin hanging low. He walked north, past Meatball Obsession. “Home of the Original Meatball in a Cup.” He passed Sol Moscot Opticians and all the chains along Sixth. He passed a former church, now Heavenly Laser and Beauty Lounge.

  “Scrubs!” the first man cried. “Can you imagine needing scrubs?”

  “Hey, with that one there’s nothing more important than making sure everything’s sterile.”

  The first man howled with laughter.

  Another long afternoon at work, during which there was no call or email from his wife. On his way home, in the corridors of the subway, he overheard the woman tell the man to slow down. “Where we sitting at?” the woman asked. They were far from any bench and far from the platform. The man turned.

  “Why I’m sitting? Where?”

  “You ain’t sitting?”

  “Why I’m sitting for? Sitting for what?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “I’m not sitting nowhere. I’m trying to get to the train. What I’m sitting for?”

  Again he lay in bed, waiting for her, but it was one, two in the morning and impossible to stay awake. When he woke in the dark, she was deadweight beside him, facing away, still dressed in her work clothes. He wondered what to do. Should he wake her? Sooner or later, something had to be done.

  The next morning, he stopped for a bagel. The espresso machines were crying bloody murder. The man in line behind him said, “Hey, it was her idea…I sleep just fine, thank you…That’s not for me to worry about, that’s the husband’s deal. And don’t tell me you’d have done anything different…”

  When he glanced back, he discovered that the man wasn’t on a cell phone but was talking to an old woman who could barely raise her voice above a whisper.

  Back on the street, he realized he wasn’t hungry and threw the bagel away. He walked to work, all thirty-eight blocks.

  The blizzard had been canceled. Only a light dusting had fallen after all. Still, it was slippery, and he felt out of control with every step.

  “I need to place an order,” the man at the corner said. “Forsythe. Newark. Forty-two hundred gallons of crude.”

  He went into Brooklyn on his lunch hour, all the way to Coney Island on the train. It was cold on the boardwalk. The sky was overcast, clotted with bruised clouds. They turned the nearer distances blue. He didn’t go back in to work but called in sick.

  “I was under the illusion that if I just kept moving from one to the other, I’d never die.”

  “That just makes it easier for death to sneak up on you,” the second man said.

  Guys were working on the track. They wore reflector vests and hard hats. One of them said, “You got the numbers written down? Clear it out. Clear it out—we’ll go to the other side. Was there a roll? Never mind, we’ll just go to the other side.”

  At home, he looked away from their things and out the window, at the city, and saw almost nothing: fading light, a growing density, shadows walking below. That was the night she didn’t come home.

  The blizzard was back on. The snow fell in an unrelieved trance. It slanted across every street-lamp glow. In the morning, there was nothing, only white. The flakes came hissing to the ground, disappearing like ash. People walked like they were on the moon.

  He stopped for coffee. Everyone was talking about the blizzard.

  “No cab nowhere. I’m looking at two o’clock in the morning. By then, I swear to God, I’m going out of my mind.”

  “How is he now?”

  “Not good. Maybe…I don’t know, Cheryl, maybe I should have just put him down last week.”

  The second counter girl said, “Hello, can I take your order?”

  He didn’t go in to work that day. His breath in his ears, the scraping of a shovel in the distance, the crunch of every cumbered step—these were the only sounds, and they filled the silence of the snowbound world. The man with the sparking shovel whistled a tune as he passed.

  Then the taxis started to move. The snow got stamped down. At the corners, the slush churned.

  When night fell, he stopped at a bodega near the apartment, looking for something to eat.

  The man said, “They taking them?”

  “Over my dead body they taking them. Them my two little girls, man.”

  When they realized he was there, they clammed up. He went home and ate what he’d bought and then he went to the bar.

  “Everybody wants him,” the man nearest him said. “Everybody.”

  “B.L.A.?”

  “Everybody.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “If I could kill myself without dying, if I could kill myself and instead of dying he died, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  “Wouldn’t that be murder?”

  On his way home, the woman threw her arms down, out of the man’s grasp. “No!” she cried. “It is not that easy! It is not that easy!”

  “Shh, shh, shh.”

  “Hands off me!”

  He went around them a little wide, then stopped and looked back. The man had turned her and lifted her off the ground while she struggled to free herself, legs kicking. He was prepared to step in if the man went any further, but he let go, and the woman dropped to the ground. She hit him with both fists over and over, blows he took laughing.

  “Fucking suck it, Dom!” she cried, and walked off.

  The man kicked a garbage bin, and the sound echoed. The man turned almost immediately and shouted at him. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  He moved on.

  He kept the lights off in the apartment. He was sitting on the sofa, snow melting at his feet, when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey!” she said. “So, I’m going to be late again tonight.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Cooke wants all the new discovery done by Monday morning. So…I don’t know, around midnight, maybe?”

  “How come you didn’t come home last night?”

  “No, no—not the McKinley docs. The Byrne docs, the Byrne docs!”

  “Katy?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Idiots.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “What did you say?”

  “You didn’t come home last night.”

  “I know. This case. It’s driving everyone crazy.”

  He remained silent.

  “Hello?” she said.

  He hung up. He leaned over and turned on the light.

  He went around turning on all the lights. They had a lot of stuff. There were books and magazines and travel guides and framed prints on the wall. There were lamps and stockpots and beds. There were stacks of CDs and milk crates of shoes and the bikes they rode in the summer.

  There were things that were “his” and things that were “hers,” a distinction from long ago that now reasserted itself with cruel haste. Every “her” thing was a reminder. She was “her” now, just that, no longer Katy, no longer his wife. He would call her “her” for the rest of his life.

  He walked through the apartment. He’d done this two nights in a row. He was sick of doing it. Everything that was “hers” hurt one way. Things that were “theirs” hurt differently. The last thing he wanted was to have to divide it all up. He wanted things to go back to the way they had been, whole, undifferentiated. But there was no going back. It was broken. Everything mocked him and made him sad.

  He took out his phone, intending to call someone, one of his friends. He could no longer keep it to himself. But he put the phone away, as he had before. He couldn’t face it. And yet he needed to talk.

  He went to the window. He looked down on the people passing below. Except for a patch in front of the church, most of the sidewalk on both sides of the street had been cleared of snow, and people moved freely. To his surprise, he called out. “Hey,” he said. It wasn’t loud enough. “Hey!” The man looked up without slowing down but couldn’t locate him. He refrained from calling out a third time, and the
man moved on. He hadn’t anticipated calling out at all.

  A minute later, a woman walking her dog came down the street. “Hey!” he said to her. She looked directly up at him. Well? she and the dog seemed to be asking. “Sorry,” he said, and closed the window.

  A few minutes later, he was back, head leaning over the ledge. He called out to a man and a woman. This time, he said, “Hey, you! Yeah, you! Stop, will you? Just for a sec?” The couple went quiet but continued walking. “I have something to tell you!” he continued. The man stopped and said, “Is everything okay?” He wanted to be honest with the man. “No,” he said. “Nothing is okay.”

  He climbed up and crouched in the open window, steadying the tips of his shoes and most of his weight on the jutting brick. “My life’s over,” he said. The man took a step in his direction and removed his hands from his pockets.

  “What are you doing up there?” After a while, the man said, “It’s dangerous up there.”

  Eventually, he stepped back inside.

  “What the hell?” the man said as they resumed walking.

  “Some kind of joke?” his companion replied.

  He was back at the window a few minutes later. Now he said, “My wife’s having an affair.” The man he addressed was trying to make it over the icy patch in front of the church. The affair was embarrassing to admit out loud, but he wanted to stop the man, make him understand. After clearing the ice, the man slowed and raised his head to the window. “Did you hear me?” he hollered. “My wife’s having an affair!” It was easier to say the second time. “Good for you,” the man said, and kept moving.

  A minute later, he said, “Hey!” and that man didn’t stop, but the next one did. “My wife’s having an affair!” he said. “Yeah?” the man said. He was almost directly below him and really had to crane his neck. “What are you going to do to her?” the man asked. He didn’t like the way the man was just standing there looking up at him, smiling. He’d picked the wrong man. “You gonna kill her?” the man asked. He stayed away from the window until the man was gone.