by Greg Johnson
“I’d better go,” she’d told her mother. “Thom will be here any minute, and I want to make his dinner.”
Lucille laughed sharply. “He’s got you doing the housework, does he?”
No, her brother had been taking her out most days to expensive restaurants, lunch and dinner, gallantly deflecting her attempts to pay her share. She’d barely lifted a finger since she arrived. So she’d decided to surprise him. Shortly after Thom left for work, Carter had stopped by, saying he was headed to Kroger’s. She’d made out a quick list, and half an hour later Carter returned with the makings for baked pesto lasagna and sweet-potato pie, two of Thorn’s favorite dishes. She was grateful when Carter declined her invitation to join them. “No, you guys need some time together, just the two of you,” he said. He looked drawn and pale, though his wan handsomeness and ghostly smile heightened his appeal, as though he were on the verge of disappearing altogether; even the brief trip to the grocery store had exhausted him. He added, “But thanks, Abby.” So he’d left, and Abby hoped to have everything in the oven by the time her brother got home. But there was no point in explaining to Lucille.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Abby had said.
“First thing in the morning, OK, honey? And if he happens to be there, maybe you can put him on, too. But don’t say I asked you to.”
Lucille continued referring to Thom as “he,” as though it were a point of pride not to use his name.
“OK, Mom,” Abby had said. “We’ll see.”
As Thom slowed for the turn onto Montgomery Ferry Road, Abby vowed that she would call Lucille in the morning, get the apologies over with, discuss the flight home; and yes, she would put Thom on the phone, and let him explain how much he was looking forward to their visit.
That would settle the matter, she thought. Tomorrow.
While Thom struggled to parallel park, cursing softly, Abby understood that she’d become excited about this evening out. She saw other cars lining the street, brake lights glowing in the damp air; people bundled in jackets and scarves rushed along the sidewalk, heads bowed under the cascade of wet flakes. At the corner of Montgomery Ferry and Beverly Drive, Thom had pointed to an imposing, brightly lit, multilevel contemporary structure of stucco and glass looming into the snow-strewn night.
“That’s Pace’s house,” he said.
They hurried along the damp sidewalks, heads ducked against the snowflakes. Entering through Pace’s big double doors, Abby saw the front rooms were thronged with people, their chattering softened by the mildly plaintive jazz muffling the room like invisible gauze, the air spiced with the guests’ eager talk and the aroma of warm hors d’oeuvre trays borne by young men in white dress shirts and black trousers. The guests were dressed more colorfully. On the second-floor loft, Abby glimpsed Connie leaning against the rail, wearing a diagonally striped white-and-aqua sweater and sipping from a glass of white wine, chatting and laughing with several men. Other such groups clustered through the living and dining areas, a bobbing, gesturing sea of brightly hued sweaters. There were a few women, too, some with short haircuts and wearing jeans but more of them, Abby noted with relief, in dressy outfits not too different from her own. Thom had mentioned that Pace had a number of straight friends who would be attending, too, no matter that the benefit was for “Gay People Stopping Violence.” None of Pace’s friends liked to miss one of his parties, Thom had observed.
“Come on,” Thom said eagerly. He’d shrugged out of his leather jacket and now reached out to help Abby with her coat. “Let me dump these down in the guest room, then I’ll introduce you around.”
Before she could answer, he’d taken the coats, maneuvered through the crowded living room, and begun descending some stairs, calling out to several people along the way. Feeling stranded, Abby glanced around for the bar. Near the kitchen, a handsome young man with curly auburn hair stood vigorously shaking a pitcher of amber-colored liquid and cubed ice. Among the ceaselessly roving guests, she saw a small line of four or five men waiting patiently as the bartender poured two Manhattans and handed them to a dark-haired man, very handsome, in a red cashmere sweater. Abby wandered toward the end of the line. She’d been standing there a few seconds, craning her neck toward the stairway and looking for Thom, when she felt a stirring of warm breath against her ear.
A male voice said, “… What you’re thinking? I can tell.”
She looked around, startled; a slender olive-skinned man with thick, glossy-black hair waited beside her, smiling.
“Excuse me?” she said. She’d put one hand to her throat, an instinctive gesture when anyone caught her by surprise. The man’s gaze fell briefly to her hand (her left, she would later recall, pondering this moment: her ringless left) and he blinked slowly, and smiled slowly, then held her startled glance with his placid dark eyes. They must have been a deep brown, but they looked black, all pupil. The same glossy black as his hair, his collarless silk shirt.
She must have misheard, she thought, the man’s words distorted by the ceaseless buzzing of the guests and by the music, an esoteric arrangement of random blips and caroming, dipping wails from a plaintive horn.
The man bent close to her ear; this time he enunciated more clearly, and she detected a posh-sounding British accent.
“I was trying to guess what you’re drinking,” he repeated. “White Zinfandel? My name is Philip, by the way. Philip DeMunn.”
Abby smiled, relieved, and shook his extended hand. It was slender but strong-looking, the fingers exquisitely long, like a pianist’s; the nails appeared recently manicured, gleaming with a transparent lacquer. Abby offered her name and said that she’d just arrived.
“I know. I saw you come in.” He reached out, dabbed at something on her collar. “A bit of snow. Melted,” he added with a smile, touching the edge of his forefinger to his lips.
“Yes, it’s started again,” she said, awkwardly. When he’d touched her sleeve, she became aware that alone among the guests, or so it seemed, she and Philip were dressed in black. Yet she felt self-conscious in her outfit, whereas he appeared so sleek and well-groomed that she supposed him a performer of some kind. An actor, perhaps; or a classical musician. His good looks were almost alarming. Even his skin had a waxen gloss, as though he’d just stepped from the shower, and she detected the faint but musky-sweet odor of his cologne, which reminded her of incense: that heavy, sweetish incense from the endless masses she’d endured as a young girl. It had a pleasant, faintly ashen smell. Strong but alluring, the scent had mingled with his warm breath from the moment he’d bent to whisper in Abby’s ear.
Now they’d reached the front of the line, and the bartender looked up inquiringly. She started to speak, but Philip DeMunn made a quick V with his fingers. “Two champagnes, please.”
Abby watched the bartender pour the foaming liquid into flutes. She disliked champagne, but Philip’s gesture intrigued her. From nowhere the image of Graham Northwood’s earnest, concerned expression floated through her mind. “Is the wine all right, honey? And how about the food? We can send it back if it’s not.” From their first date, he’d been so attentive and solicitous and smothering that she’d often longed to get up and rush out of the restaurant.
“I think you’ll like the champagne,” Philip said, taking the flutes from the bartender and offering her one. “It’s Moët, my favorite.”
“I do, thanks,” Abby lied. She sipped at the champagne, oddly pleased with herself. She supposed she should be looking around for Thom, but she reasoned he would find her, eventually. She glanced toward the stairway and saw the guests drifting incessantly up and down, but Thom was not among them. She kept being distracted by the spare but elegant design of the house’s interior, all white walls and pale hardwoods and tall rectangles of glass. The floors were bleached oak or pine, their gleaming expanses broken occasionally by dark rugs in geometrical designs that looked vaguely Indian, or Oriental; the vaulted ceiling had matching beams on one side and slanted panes of glass on th
e other. The furniture was dark and plain. An occasional sofa, a simple table, a row of straight-backed chairs, so the eye kept moving toward the abstract paintings and sculptures—most of them, like the rugs, in monochromatic dark red or brown—that were placed with a kind of impersonal deliberateness through the open, high-ceilinged rooms.
There were few personal touches, Abby thought. Perhaps there were no personal touches. She’d noticed there was no Christmas tree, no decoration of any kind. Along one wall of the upstairs loft, near a white laminate computer station, she glimpsed a row of bookshelves and, she thought, a grouping of photographs, though it might simply have been another artwork, a collage meant to suggest photographs. The house had the feel of a contemporary museum, one normally hushed but tonight, for this special occasion, enlivened by the piping, enveloping jazz, the ceaseless laughter and hilarity of the sipping, chattering guests.
A sudden chill ran through Abby. Briefly she closed her eyes.
“Have you seen the upstairs?” Philip asked.
“The upstairs?”
“Pace’s playroom, as he calls it.” He grinned, showing a row of even, perfectly white teeth. “It’s quite something.”
He’d grasped the crook of her arm and was leading her toward the steps.
“But my brother—”
“He ran into some old friends, downstairs. I just left him there.”
So he knew Thom, then. Guided up the weightless-looking stairway by Philip DeMunn—the steps were pale slats of wood suspended in air, extending two more floors above Abby’s head—she felt an unpleasant sense of vertigo. She knew this had nothing to do with climbing stairs. Immediately, she’d recognized the same emotion she felt whenever she pondered her brother’s private life, as she’d done so often during the years of their separation. Like some harsh, unnameable force striking her abdomen, a brief but decisive twist of her insides. She knew Thom, but she did not know him. Had she supposed that Philip DeMunn was not gay, then? And what did it matter, really? He was merely being considerate and kind, like all of Thorn’s friends. When they reached the next floor, Abby paused and glanced around, disoriented, glimpsing a large bedroom with a stone fireplace near which another cluster of men in colorful sweaters stood drinking and chatting. When she glanced back, she saw that Philip was halfway up the last flight of steps, casting a tilted smile over his shoulder.
“Come on up,” he said, crooking one finger. “We’re almost there.”
She followed. The top floor consisted of an enormous mirrored room with another vaulted glass ceiling above which she saw, amid beams of the outdoor lights, great coils of snow eddying through the bare, forked trees. In two of the room’s upper corners were speakers piping in the unpredictable, slightly unnerving piece of jazz she’d heard downstairs. She stood with Philip near the center of the room, catching her breath after their hurried climb, glancing around her. The room did suggest, in fact, a “playroom”: along one wall she saw a wet bar, a glass-doored sauna, a walk-in tiled shower large enough for several people. Dominating another corner was an enormous, raised hot tub of cream-colored marble, and ranged along a nearby wall was a daybed covered with overstuffed Indian-print pillows of earthy browns and deep reds, the color of dried blood. The only other furniture was a scattering of gym equipment looking isolated and unused, placed in odd corners of the room like eccentric pieces of sculpture. A stationary bike, a treadmill. A huge contraption of white metal and silver that featured a padded seat and dozens of weights, metal cords, pulleys. With a quiet, ironic smile Philip watched her surveying the room, as if reading her thoughts.
“I don’t think the equipment gets much use. But the hot tub does.”
Abby smiled, shaking her head. “It’s amazing. I didn’t expect—” but Philip interrupted by grasping her hand and, with that gentle but insistent tug he’d used to urge her upstairs, pulling her into one corner of the room, near the daybed. Abby heard voices ascending toward them, and she understood that Philip wanted privacy. A group of seven or eight people had thundered up the stairs, one a shrill-voiced woman who began exclaiming histrionically over the room. The others laughed, scarcely glancing at Philip and Abby.
His back to them, Philip took a sip of champagne and said, “This is better, isn’t it?”
He’d braced himself with one hand against the wall, his black-sleeved arm isolating her in this far corner of the room, preventing her escape if she had wanted to escape. She did not. She found his gesture oddly incongruous and charming, for he was standing in the same posture the high school boys had always used when talking to a girl back in the corridors of St. Jude’s High School, the boy keeping one arm braced firmly against a wall or a row of lockers, as in some atavistic display of physical size, dominance; the girl smiling and nodding with her arms around the books she clasped to her breast. Through such whispered “private” conversations (for when a boy and girl were standing that way, not even their most boisterous classmates would dare to interrupt them) had the complicated high school romances at St. Jude’s been conducted. All at once the image had struck Abby as funny and she laughed aloud, one hand fluttering to her mouth. She must have looked as giggly and surprised as any high school girl.
“What?” Philip asked, with a pleased-looking grin.
Again she sipped the champagne. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking of…I don’t know what I was thinking. It must be the champagne.”
From across the room came a raucous burst of laughter from the other guests, who had clustered near the stationary bicycle. At first it seemed to Abby they’d laughed at her remark, but of course they were paying no attention to her and Philip, and she quickly gathered they were exchanging jokes. There were two women in the group, a heavy-set blonde with frizzy-permed hair who wore a clinging Chinese-red silk dress and laughed constantly—it was her shrill, grating laugh that Abby had first heard when the group came up the stairs—and a quiet, spidery-thin woman with a pale pocked face and thin but carefully painted red lips. The others were men in their thirties and forties, all well-dressed, one of them rather short, his back to Abby. She saw a bald spot the size of a silver dollar gleaming underneath the track-lighting as he bent forward, with a conspiratorial hunching of his shoulders, to offer his own joke: “The rallying cry at the million-man march?” he asked, then pursed his lips and emitted a parody of black dialect. “Fried chicken, watah-melon, Cadillac cah! We ain’t as dumb as you thinks we is!”
“Oh, Brock, that’s awful!” the blond woman cried, shivering with laughter.
Abby glanced back at Philip, who had paused to listen, too. “Charming, isn’t it?” he murmured, with a rueful twist of his mouth.
She decided to change the subject and began asking Philip the usual questions one asked at parties—what he did, where he lived, how long he had known Thom and Pace. Abby listened to the answers but not closely; she kept thinking about Thom, who must be wondering where she was. She supposed it was inconsiderate to indulge herself with this handsome man and a glass of champagne, which she’d decided she liked, after all. She did listen vaguely to Philip. He was a securities analyst and worked mostly from home on his computer, and he lived near Emory, and he’d known her brother and other people here for more years than he cared to recall. His avocation was theater, however, and he’d acted in plays locally for quite a while. Abby smiled but did not say she’d guessed he might be an actor; somehow the remark would have sounded rude. Instead, she encouraged him to talk about his background, quietly enjoying his urbane-sounding British accent, the ironic lilt of his voice. In his early twenties, he told her, he’d come to Atlanta from London for college and had liked the city so well that he’d stayed on for his MBA. He’d met Pace at Emory, in fact, and after “a brief misunderstanding” they’d become friends.
“A misunderstanding?” she said. He’d left the phrase dangling, clearly waiting for her to ask.
Lowering his voice Philip said, “I’m not gay, you know. Though obviously, I’ve got no
problem with it.”
And Abby, not knowing what to say, said quickly, “Or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”
Flustered, she took another sip of champagne, surprised to find that she’d almost emptied the flute. She’d begun to feel the alcohol, which gave her a pleasant swirling lightness not unlike the circling gusts of snowflakes she kept glimpsing outside, through the glass roof above her head.
“I wanted to make that clear, right away,” Philip said. Again he had that oddly solemn look, his arm braced against the wall, but this time he seemed nothing like a high school kid. He was older than she’d first thought, perhaps in his late thirties, but he had the smooth olive-pale skin of a younger man, and his dark eyes were clear and shining as a boy’s. He’d spoken earnestly, bending toward her, his voice lowered to a whisper. Briefly she closed her eyes, again enveloped by that pungent musk-like scent of his cologne, and she found the moment unexpectedly pleasurable, savoring his deep-toned voice with its British intonation. But when she opened her eyes she thought firmly that enough was enough. She’d make her excuses to Philip and go find her brother.
