The Dinner Party

by Joshua Ferris

  The next man who stopped listened for a while. He told him about his long nights and drifting days. Then he said, “Hey, you want something of hers?” The man seemed confused. “Come up, take something of hers. Take whatever you want.”

  “No, thanks,” the man said. He started to move on. “But good luck to you.”

  “Hey!” he cried out to the next guy. “You want something from up here?” Without stopping, the man said, “Huh?” “Come up! Come up, take some­thing.” To his surprise, the man stopped. “I’m serious, come up. I’ll buzz you up.”

  “What for?”

  “Just to take. Whatever belongs to my wife you can have. She’s having an affair. She’s cheating on me.” The man continued to stand there. He explained to him that there were “her” things and “his” things now, and “their” things, too, and that none of it, nothing in the apartment, was worth keeping. It was just a pile of stuff now, and had to go in one direction or another. A life that had once been, with every added thing, full of hope and purpose, was lost. The man seemed to understand.

  He buzzed the man in and heard him on the stairs.

  “This place belong to you?”

  “It’s my apartment,” he said. “Go ahead, take what you want. Take whatever you can carry.”

  The man looked around. “This lamp?” he asked.

  The lamp was a “their” thing. What were they going to do, saw it in half? “The lamp’s fine,” he said. “Take the lamp.”

  “You sure this stuff is yours?”

  “All mine,” he said. “Mine and hers.”

  “This pillow?”

  “Take it.”

  “All these pillows?”

  The man headed down the stairs with the lamp and the pillows.

  He went back to the window.

  An hour later, Katy came down the street.

  “You think there’s nothing you ain’t seen before,” one of the men coming toward her said.

  “Then you got a guy giving out free luggage,” the second man said.

  She thought she recognized the polka-dot roller bag that the first man was pulling behind him. When she reached the landing, he was standing in the open doorway, going through the pictures in their wedding al­bum with another woman.

  The Stepchild

  He circled around again to the bagel place. There was the usual line, but his hope dwindled further with every face that wasn’t hers. He went around the block for the dozenth time. After that, he came untethered and wandered south.

  Heedless at the corners, he was nearly hit by a cab. He turned right for no reason, and on that block, as he walked, some invisible industrial fan seemed to whir violently, sending up grit and trash. Suddenly, before his eyes, there was an aircraft carrier.

  On the outskirts of Times Square he paid the Busking Poetess, dreadlocked and fresh from a stint in Denver, one dollar to peck out a poem on a Smith Corona. He read it for some pressing instruction or sign of relief, but, finding only mock profundity there, he stuck the thing under the windshield of a police cruiser. At the Empire State Building, they tried to get him to take a tour.

  There was motion and transition everywhere, the urgent churning city, the cry of a siren fading around the block. Three blue birds suspended before stardust, two astrolabes perched on the gray arms of a wing chair, and a seated shark’s jaw all worked together to better display a child’s tutu for sale in a shopwindow, before which passersby might have thought him utterly seduced—until he turned and they glimpsed that he was crying. Then they knew they were in one of those city moments, a public audience to a stranger’s despair. Long a former smoker, he stopped into the drugstore for cigarettes.

  He and Naomi, his wife, had married in Cuba (by way of Nicaragua) four years earlier, long before the embargo was lifted. Nick had thrilled to the risk, the style, of kicking off their days under staid old matrimony in such rebel fashion. There was a priest, and the beach, and the punto band, and the northern wind, and everything about that night was emblematic of how they hoped to shape the years. Now they would divorce. Well, of course they would. So what? Sooner or later, everyone got divorced.

  Knowing it was useless, she was gone, he threw his cell phone into a mesh bin at the corner. When he came to his senses and returned for it, he searched and searched, but it was no use. He had the wrong corner.

  Cyclists yelled at him across the Brooklyn Bridge. He found himself gripping something with fierce resolve. Looking down, he discovered a glossy postcard advertising two-for-one drinks during happy hour at a gentlemen’s club. He had no memory of it being handed to him. What did it matter? It was over. Nothing mattered. He walked down Flatbush and into Park Slope.

  He had known better than to marry. He’d seen his parents hurt each other, and leave, and hurt and leave others, the casual lovers, the stepparents. But he gave it a shot anyway, and it ended pretty much as he’d imagined, with him wandering the streets in tears.

  It was no surprise where he wound up. He hoped to find her there. How he loved her—her face, her smile. He took a deep breath and entered the lobby.

  “Who is it?” she asked through an ancient intercom.

  “It’s Nick,” he said, and there followed the longest pause of his life. He had second thoughts. Was he presentable enough? Could he make the right impression? Another minute went by before she buzzed him in.

  The elevator, an old cat hibernating on some upper floor, rattled to life when he called it and roared down to him. The doors opened, and he stepped forward with his head down…and a second later stepped back with his head up, as a family of four charged out—the father first, with the stride of a band leader, then an excitable boy in a Viking hat blasting enemies with a caulk gun, then a German shepherd, then an older brother wearing athletic knee-highs and a soccer jersey as long as a gown, followed at last by Mom, stuck, with her rumpled flannel shirt and sweatpants, in the wrong family in the wrong season, crying out for Bill to be careful with the tomatoes.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, and stopped and stared. They had switched places: he was inside the elevator, and she was looking at him from the lobby. “I thought that was you.” She was gawking. She was tongue tied. “You are just…awesome.”

  “Thank you,” he said, pressing the button to hurry the door along.

  “I mean it—I just love you.”

  “Thanks.”

  She finally came to her senses, and a hand shot up to her mouth. “Oh, I’m so embarrassed!” she said. The door began to close. She waved. “Bye!”

  On his way up, he put the family out of mind and returned to thinking about her—her face, her smile.

  He stepped off the elevator, and there she was, on the phone, propping the apartment door open. One strap of her denim overalls hung off her shoulder, and when she saw him, she smiled happily. Then he neared, and her happiness faded. She palmed the mouthpiece. “Is something wrong?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Who’s gone?”

  “My wife,” he said.

  She frowned, waved him in, and hurried to get off the phone.

  He moved inside, out of the way of the closing door. He took in the Santa Claus welcome mat many months out of season, the wicker basket against the far wall spilling over with sandals and tennis shoes, the lacquered console table on which the house keys and loose change had been tossed…and all the many colors, and vibes, and impressions, and the hundred other ways these perfect strangers chose to live. How many times in the past had he stood like this, on the brink, with the merciless eyes of a child? On, astonishingly, six other occasions, when his parents met other people, and fell in love, and married, and ordered the instant integration of two families’ lives, their laundry, and their lore (and, to often disastrous effect, their DNA)—the Morgans, followed by the Dinardos and the Teahans, on his mother’s side; the Winklows, the Andersons, and that insufferable Lee clan, on his father’s—he had stood like this, appraising and rejecting, and wanting nothing more than to ret
urn to the bunk bed in his first room, where all the linens and the wall shadows had been under a single, steady proprietorship. For as soon as his parents were married and moved in, and all the painful adjustments were made, they were divorcing again and moving out.

  She apologized for being on the phone. “This will just take another minute,” she said.

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  She raised a finger and looked away as she wrapped things up with customer service.

  A different stranger might have fled, but, as he was easy in unfamiliar surroundings—one of the virtues of his childhood—he made himself at home and continued to take in the state of the apartment. It was a mess. There were toys everywhere, puzzle pieces communing with cereal flakes under the table, and a pink knit blanket on the hardwood floor, which she presently swooped down on with furious efficiency (pocketing the cell phone at last) and folded as they approached the door leading into the next room.

  “I can’t believe it,” she resumed saying. “It’s really you!”

  “It’s really me,” he said. “Were you painting?”

  “Oh, trying to.” She put her finger to her lips. “We have to go through the baby’s room to get to the living room,” she whispered. “It’s the crazy way this apartment was designed. Try not to wake her!”

  More clutter awaited them in the living room. The table lamp was on in daylight, and there were cups on top of coasters. Wheeled toys on leads had been dropped midpull. She hurried to clear a spot for him, heaping stray items on top of a toy bin. He sat down and came up holding a yo-yo.

  “So what happened?” she asked.

  “She went out this morning for bagels,” he said. “We have this routine on Sunday mornings—one of us runs out for bagels and the newspaper, and we spend the morning in bed.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “People still do that?”

  “But she never came home. I called and I called. She never picked up. She didn’t reply to my texts. I waited—I thought maybe she was taking a walk, you know, to clear her head, or whatever. But I don’t think so.”

  “Did you guys have a fight or something?”

  “This has been a long time coming,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Marriage is so hard.”

  “And, who knows, maybe she is out on a walk.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Four hours?” he said. “Maybe five?”

  “That’s kind of a long walk,” she said.

  He had met her at the arts fund annual gala, in a d.j.’d ballroom in the Paramount Hotel, in Midtown. Two grown women in diapers and pigtails were led around the crowd on a leash before dinner, and men in mascara shook hands with spiky rings on all ten fingers. They were seated next to each other at a table that included Stephanie Savage and Ryan McGinley. She was Calarusso’s sometime assistant, there that night to see that the great man ate his soup. During appetizers, Nick learned that she painted in her spare time. By dessert, she was showing him thumbnails of her most recent work and promising to watch his series (if she could find the time to stream it on Netflix). It was not one of the shows that her friends were always telling her she just had to watch.

  After the thanks were doled out and the speeches concluded, Calarusso demanded to go home, and she went off to find him a car. The enormous painter, to whom Nick had not been introduced, turned to him and said, with tasteless relish, “The poor girl. She’s about to burn her life to the ground and she doesn’t even know it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Calarusso’s eyes got wider and gleamed with mischief. “The husband’s grown fat.”

  An hour later, with Calarusso gone, she suddenly confessed that it had been a little more than a million years since she was last out of the house, and she had overdone it. She had had too much to drink and needed to get home.

  “Let me drop you off,” he said.

  “No, it’s okay. I can take the subway.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “I have a car waiting outside.”

  He had hoped that they would continue their conversation, but she fell asleep and slept straight through the sudden stops, the thundering starts, the potholes exploding beneath them like mortar bombs. Waiting for her at home, he imagined, was everything anyone could ever want, and she no longer saw much appeal in a stranger. She was above that now. He admired her for it. Her only vice these days? Stolen sleep.

  When the car pulled up to her building, he woke her gently, and she opened her eyes and took a deep breath. For a split second, she probably wondered where on earth she was and how she had gotten there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Since Midtown, more or less.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very sweet.”

  She said good night and stepped out of the car. That was four days ago.

  “I knew it was coming,” he said to her now. “I predicted it: eventually, she would leave me. She had to. Day to day, things were just too…too…”

  “What? Awful?”

  “Do you know what she does?” he asked incredulously. “First of all, there are flowers. She brings flowers into the house, just to have them around. Then, when they die, instead of just tossing them, she hangs them up to dry and then takes the petals off and puts the petals in these Japanese bowls and then places the bowls here and there around the house.”

  She waited.

  “Who does that?” he asked her.

  She laughed in agreement. “I don’t know,” she said. “I take it you guys don’t have kids!”

  “No.”

  “Nobody’s drying flowers around here,” she said. “Dried flowers wouldn’t make it past breakfast.”

  “And then she makes everything smell nice. There are pleasant little pockets everywhere you go. A little pocket of lemon here in the foyer. A little sachet of lavender near the bathtub. A little candle of verbena in the kitchen. Do you know what that’s like?”

  “We have pockets like that around here,” she said, “but of rotten milk and urine, usually.” She laughed.

  “I love your apartment,” he said.

  She looked around, mock startled. “Why?” she asked. She laughed again. “No, it is a nice apartment. It’s just too small for us. But rent is so crazy.”

  “I love how lived in it is.”

  “Oh, it’s lived in, all right. Sometimes it feels like Homer and Langley decided to have children.” She picked up a squeeze toy—for a child? a pet?—and made it squeak before tossing it over to a beanbag.

  “This is also where you work?”

  “Every free minute of every day,” she replied.

  “You’re very driven.”

  “No,” she said. “Just terrified.”

  “Of?”

  “Of never finishing another painting. Of losing myself to motherhood. Of going completely out of my fucking mind.”

  “I’m so sorry to barge in on you like this,” he said. “You’re probably trying to get some work done while the baby naps, and here I show up without even calling.”

  “Please,” she said. “I’m happy to see you.”

  “You have a nice home,” he said. “So full of life. Nothing at all like my apartment.”

  “Where it’s clean, you mean? And everything smells nice? And it’s quiet? And you can hear yourself think?”

  She laughed at herself, or perhaps for his sake, to reassure him, but the mirth drained from her face soon enough, and then she looked around again at the disarray.

  “From the outside,” she said, “it must look like a pretty good life, like a fulfilled life—which it is. But when you’re plunked down in the middle of it, sometimes it just feels like time fleeing.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  She pulled back. “Pardon?”

  “No, just this life, I mean. Your apartment
. The mess, even. I love the…I really love rooms like this one, where you can practically hear the children playing, and the washing machine going, and you can smell the banana bread baking in the oven. You really feel the love in this room, that’s all I meant. You and your husband have three kids, is that right?”

  She nodded.

  “Where is he now?”

  But she had gone silent.

  She was the real thing. He could not simply say “I love you” and look at her until she melted. Calarusso was wrong. She had resolve, and self-respect. She would not just run off with the latest man who flattered her, as his mother had done, taping the children up for transport in a used box, to test the advantages of a different address.

  “Listen, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. Naomi—that’s my wife—she’s not some insane person who needs to have everything perfectly in place all the time. Our apartment gets plenty messy. But let me tell you something she does do without fail every day. She makes the bed. Now, I wasn’t taught to make the bed every day. Some of my stepparents hated that about me, and I didn’t make the bed on purpose half the time just to get back at them. But then I got married, and for some reason, I’d look at the bed Naomi had made and I’d see, you know, not kindness, not…whatever. I’d see spite! I’d think she’d made the bed deliberately to criticize me, or to prove how much more considerate she was than me, or some other stupid thing, and I resented her for it. For making the bed! We’d get into these fights, I’d bring up the bed, she’d look at me like, ‘What are you talking about? What does making the bed have to do with anything?’ And then, one day, it just dawned on me. She’s not making the bed to get back at me. She’s making the bed because she likes a made bed. She wants our lives, our shared life together, to be pleasant. I had never thought about that before, the fact that I had a shared life.”

  “You should have kids,” she said. “Then you know it’s shared.”

  “I was telling you about how my apartment smells good,” he said. “Well, when I was a kid, right, and into my teens, and into my twenties, even, I was surrounded—this will sound weird, now that I’m about to say it out loud—by all of these strange people’s smells, the different odors of different families. I mean the soaps they had in their bathrooms. Their coat closets, their family recipes. The breath their sofas let out when you sat down on them. And then the grosser things—how they left the bathroom, what they gave off when you got too close. It wasn’t always repugnant, just foreign, and I didn’t want the foreign. I wanted the familiar. That’s what family is: what’s familiar. And every new house I went to, every new family I joined, they had all these scents that weren’t familiar. I could no longer say what would have been familiar. I just knew that it was nowhere present in those houses. So when Naomi and I got married, and I had to adjust to a whole new set of scents—and, you know, things, possessions, wall hangings, whatever—I was just like, no. What was the point of being married if I just had to keep adjusting? I wouldn’t do it, I refused. In my head, I mean. Those were Naomi’s things, not mine. What was mine? I had no idea, really. I just knew, in my head, I would not give in. So we fought. We fought like cats and dogs. Until one day I realized that her scents had become my scents. They were my scents. This was my life. Why was I sabotaging it? I finally knew what was mine.”