Parties and Their Consequences

“Watch out. That girl only tells the same three stories.”

I’m on the N train with my husband, holding a small bag that’s shaped like a taco. The taco is scratchy with gold glitter. Across the car from me, a girl leans over to her friend and says, “Oh my god, is that a taco?” And her friend says, “Oh my god, that is a taco.” I own the taco bag because a fashion editor friend called it in for a shoot and then gave it to me after I asked her about it every day for two weeks. I text her that I’m carrying the taco. She texts back, “That thing is meant for a child.” It’s December 31 at 9pm.

***

In the living room of a townhouse in the West Village, a girl in a gold dress that looks like plated armor says to me, “I’m a musician.” She is the youngest person here, and no one knows her name. Her date is a friend of our hosts. I say, “What kind of music do you play?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t found a band yet. I’m still looking on Craigslist.” 

The hosts are twins, both men. I’ve never met them before. I immediately recognize that they’re not actually identical, but their faces blur into a similar haze of blonde and beige. I find it helpful to note that one wears glasses and one does not. The townhouse belongs to their parents, who are in Europe or Asia or they’re skiing, but they’re definitely not in New York for the holiday. I am connected to the twins through mutual friends, another married couple. The wife, A, is a poet and my good friend, even though she’s secretive about her work and doesn’t tell anyone about her readings until after they’re over. Her husband, K, is a novelist and the twin of a journalist. He and his twin were once classmates of our host twins at a high school for the children of diplomats. The garden floor of the townhouse is a separate apartment occupied by the host twins’ older brother, a painter who appears in the main part of the house only once to put his bare feet on a coffee table for a few minutes before going back downstairs. His feet are filthy, he says very little, and he slips away when no one is looking—maybe to paint?

“We’ll go downtown soon,” the host twins say. I live in Queens, so I say, “But this is downtown.” It seems funny-adjacent in an oblique way. Everyone breaks eye contact with me.

In the living room, packed bookshelves reach up to the ceiling, but the more authentic reading material is in the bathroom, sitting on a board on top of the radiator opposite the toilet: issues of a glossy film magazine full of black-and-white stills from movies made in the 1950s that I’ve never seen. There are two Sharpies lying among the magazines. I take this as an invitation on the part of the homeowners: Here are some Sharpies. Please draw penises deep within the pages of the back issues of these magazines so that we may go on a Sharpie dick treasure hunt later. Every time I go to the bathroom at the townhouse, which is about four or five times, I flip to a still from an old movie where all the men have the same haircut and wear the same suit, and I draw dicks going into their mouths. Their hands grasping dicks. Their hands grasping each other’s dicks. Men who, at the height of their careers, would have found dick grasping distasteful.

The host twins argue about whether Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone is the greatest movie star of all time. The conclusion is that one of them definitely is, but they can’t decide which.

“It isn’t a question of who’s the better actor, mind you,” says the first twin.

“No, yeah, sure,” says the second. “But it’s Schwarzenegger. He would do any movie. As long as you paid him enough, he would do anything.”

“Same for Stallone,” says the first.

“No, Stallone wouldn’t do homosexual innuendo. But Schwarzenegger would. He did a lot of gay stuff.” All of the men in the room seem to agree that it is certainly possible Schwarzenegger’s oeuvre contains more homosexual innuendo than Stallone’s.

“Just look at Predator,” says the second twin. “There is blatant dick-sucking.”

“No one sucks dick in Predator,” says the first.

“There is blatant miming of dick-sucking.” 

One twin decides he must present visual proof to the other twin, to all of us, and that we should put it to a vote: Does the guy drinking water from bamboo look like he’s getting a facial? Do Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers have sexual chemistry? Does any of this verify that Schwarzenegger is the greatest movie star of all time, greater than Stallone? The twins turn on the TV. They can’t remember either of their Prime passwords.

***

I am determined not to drink a lot tonight. My friend A has seen me behave poorly while drunk enough that now, whenever I tell her a story that involves my saying, “And I was kind of drunk so I—” she interrupts to say, “Oh, I know what you’re like drunk.” It is important that she see me drink two cocktails very slowly, that I show her I refuse the third several, several times. 

Once, I heard a recording of Frank O’Hara reading “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” to a live audience. When he finishes—“oh Lana Turner we love you get up”—the audience laughs and laughs and claps. Mid-twentieth-century socializing seems to have involved a lot of reckless drunken behavior that was technically viewed as extremely appropriate. O’Hara called his own behavior at parties “perfectly disgraceful,” which I think is lovely. It’s technically perfectly fine to act perfectly disgraceful, because when it comes to perfect parties (hosting them, attending them, misremembering them), disgrace is a technique, and can be technically perfect and perfected.

***

I feel I should note that my fashion editor friend isn’t really my friend, but a co-worker. But I like her because she is the most guarded person I’ve ever met. Our first week working together (sitting next to each other, even), we don’t speak at all. The second week, I ask her where she got her coffee, and she says, “Balducci’s, but it’s trash.” Later, I find her on Twitter and see that three months prior she had tweeted, “My neighbors just bought a theremin, should I call 9-1-1?” I like her because she might actually be an ancient being trying to convince everyone she is human, and this is how I feel about myself most days at about 3pm. Sometime in the future, we are both fired from our jobs on the same day, and it is trash. 

***

The host twins announce it’s time to trek to the real party, and we all fall in line. My husband and I haven’t eaten dinner, and I’m only just now considering what this will mean for the rest of the night. I'm not wearing underwear. I'm not wearing tights. I'm wearing a dress so snug eating would be a fatal error anyway, at least until everyone is too drunk to see straight silhouettes. I'm wearing black lace-up Frye boots that I will never consider a waste. I'm wearing a down parka with fur around the hood so warm I know it's the first thing I'll grab when the End Times come. The parka dwarfs me. In the pocket glitters a taco.

***

It’s 35 degrees, and I’m walking down Wooster Street toward a party hosted by a man named Marcel whom no one in my group has ever met. To my left, across the street, is Mansur Gavriel. It glows. It glows pink and peach and coral. It is a plush, pulsing filter. I want to step inside Mansur Gavriel and touch all the walls. I want to be barefoot inside Mansur Gavriel. I want to lie down inside Mansur Gavriel and sleep forever. Mansur Gavriel on New Year’s Eve shines in soft focus, Vaseline rubbed on a lens. I post a photo to Instagram and caption it, “and then in the night, we came upon @mansurgavriel,” with two purse emoji. It gets 21 likes right away, and then no more.

I want more money. I have some, it’s true, but I want more. But I don’t just want more money, I want to be rich; but I don’t just want to be rich, I want to be super-wealthy; but I don’t want to just be super-wealthy. I want so much wealth that, if I choose, I could disappear into it until no one remembers my name or what my job was and eventually they forget I existed. I don’t much like waste, but it’s everywhere. People ought to stop buying fast fashion. The hoarding of shit goods isn’t the same as the building of wealth. I want to be so wealthy that I know the lived difference between accumulating wealth and accumulating money—that is, how money makes time pass with less physical and intellectual discomfort, and how wealth makes time a thing only people without wealth need to think about at all. I want to spend my money at Mansur Gavriel.

***

At Marcel’s party, no one can find Marcel. No one knows what Marcel looks like. This is a party without a leader, without a focus, without a linchpin to hold it together. Instead, there is a blonde woman who knows the former host twins, who grants them one-armed hugs like she can’t be bothered with more physical contact than that, like there are so many more people here who need physical contact with her and she can’t give it all away, not now, not so early. 

She wears a pink dress with an enormous skirt made of feathers and fuzz, a pink shrug jacket made of feathers and fuzz and felt. She wears every possible soft texture I can think of. “Why is Fraggle Rock dressed like this is her party,” my husband says. He makes the reference so fast and the comparison is so true I think there can’t be anyone in this room more in love than I am right now.

Near a table of half-full champagne bottles, I see a girl I know, an art critic who I interned with at a political magazine several years ago. I am ten feet away. I wave at her and she just squints in my direction. I wave more violently. I say her name.

“I’m sorry,” the art critic says. “I can’t see who you are. I’m not wearing my glasses.” I get closer. She recognizes me. “I like my job,” she tells me, “but I work with my boyfriend. I like my boyfriend, but I can’t work with my boyfriend anymore, you know?” I nod. I know. I tell her I know. “I need to find another job,” she says, “so that I can stop working with my boyfriend.”  Another girl appears next to the art critic. “This is my sister,” the art critic says, and the two stumble away.

Against one wall are three men, all in the same velvet jacket. They’re picking what looks like a Chuck Close print off the wall. They unbalance it and set it down on the floor. They look at it. Together, they lift it up again and put it back on the wall, askew.

If you leave your diary out and unattended at a party, I get to read it. I don’t make the rules. At Marcel’s party, I scan the bookshelf, which is what anyone would do when they feel lost at a party. I feel lost at parties often, which I recognize isn’t a terribly interesting or singular experience to report. Many people will stop inviting me to their parties after reading that I often feel lost at parties. Still, it must be said that after about an hour at Marcel’s party, I feel bored or something or really just need a refreshment that I don’t have to ingest or imbibe, and I scan the only bookshelf in the apartment. I spot the diary right away by its fake leather spine, the little polyester bookmark ribbon sticking out from the bottom. 

I open the diary to a random page and start reading the entry there, written in oversized, looping handwriting and bright blue pen: Today, I had four missed calls and a voicemail from a number I didn’t recognize, but the voicemail was only three seconds long, and it just sounded kind of like static!

“Do you think anyone would notice if I took this?” I say to A and my husband. A just laughs. “It should be clear that you can’t take someone’s diary,” my husband says, which I know is the kind of thing a husband is supposed to say. 

“But do you think anyone would notice?” I say again. I reason that this is clearly a woman’s diary, which was left behind in an apartment ostensibly belonging to a man named Marcel. To me, this means the diary lacks ownership. Though it may have sat untouched here for years, it’s only temporarily inhabiting this shelf. The diary doesn’t really belong to anyone, and therefore it might be said to not not belong to me.

“This isn’t as charming as you think it is,” my husband says gently. The thing about my husband is, his sincerity is never affected. He is sincerely sincere! He likes irony as much as the next heavy reader, sure, but finds it distasteful that so many of our peers seem to perform irony as a personality trait. In other words, he never sneers, and when I’m with him I don’t have to pretend someone we’ve just met isn’t insufferable. Cruelty isn’t charming, and sometimes, when I’m sullen, I have to be reminded of this. But when my husband reminds me, he’s never sullen or cruel.

***

I’m using the bathroom at this party, which I guess makes this Marcel’s bathroom. I don’t particularly like occupying spaces whose ownership can’t be clearly delineated. To put it another way, I’m uncomfortable going to parties when I’m not exactly sure who the host is. 

One of my oldest friends doesn’t have this problem at all. For years, she would lead me to bars after dinner by saying, “A friend is having a drink here. Mind stopping in to say hello?” And then it would turn out that “having a drink” really meant having a birthday party, a birthday party to which I was not invited, whose host I might have been only vaguely aware of before the party. Often we would stay for hours, and in that time I would only greet the host in passing. I suppose I deserved to get tricked, considering how many times my friend played this same game. Eventually, I had to tell her to cut it out. Then she moved to Philadelphia.

But I’m in the bathroom of Marcel’s party now. There are no magazines to draw in. There’s not much of anything, really. To get to the bathroom, I had to pass through a bedroom, and there wasn’t much of anything in there either. The furniture in the bedroom and the hardware in the bathroom all look expensive, but there’s no real decor, nothing to indicate that a man named Marcel lives and sleeps and shits in these rooms. Actually, I admire this about Marcel. I appreciate that a person can turn themselves into a living ghost. When they’re in a room, they’re really there and people know. But when they leave a room, they might as well not have been there at all. I’m in Marcel’s house, and I can’t be sure he’s real, since not even his home has any identifying details.

I do often feel like a ghost, moving from place to place with no identifying details of my own. But that’s not a trick I can control. I’m simply a very pale and thin woman of about 30 who might be interchangeable with any other pale and thin woman of about 30. I take a great deal of comfort in the idea that this would probably make me a good spy. 

When I leave the bathroom, my husband, who has been guarding the door (I couldn’t figure out the lock), looks nervous. “Two women tried to come in here,” he says. “I think they thought I was just some weird guy standing alone in the dark.”

***

It’s near midnight, and I feel mostly recovered. That is, I’m no longer in a mood to steal diaries, and standing in the crowd near the table of champagne doesn’t make my chest feel tight. One of the twins—the one with glasses—is in the crowd too, and he’s wild with the kind of excitement I know means he has something he wants to share with the first familiar face he sees.

“I’ve made a resolution, just in time,” he says. The music is loud, he’s drunk, and even though he’s yelling, I can only make out a few phrases: “I was just talking to—and, well, it’s something that you do every day, which I know might seem like a lot—I mean, it’s something that helps if you have chronic—but it’s not a lot at a time, just micro—but, yeah, you do it every day, just a little bit every day.”

The twin’s face is so earnest that I’m afraid he’ll be devastated if he learns I don’t fully know what he’s just said. I reply with everything I can glean from context clues: “Oh, well, everything in moderation, I guess!”

He shakes his head. “No, no,” he says. “It’s more than moderation—yeah, we’re talking actual daily doses of—but it’s just super tiny amounts, and you won’t feel out of control—a little bit all the time to help you.” 

***

My husband is talking to a man with a nape-of-the-neck ponytail. This is an increasingly rare kind of ponytail. But why did it ever exist at all? On its crudest, most practical level, the ponytail prevents hair from trapping body heat against a person’s neck. The higher the ponytail, the more unencumbered the wearer. The nape-of-the-neck ponytail is both confused and confusing.

My husband is wearing an Oxford and a blazer, which he would wear even if it weren’t winter because his low-grade body dysmorphia prevents him from seeing t-shirts as anything but undershirts. They’re unflattering, he tells me every summer, especially around the nipples, and then he walks around town sweating the aluminum of prescription-strength deodorant through all his layers. His conversation partner, however, has on an orange t-shirt with an illustration of a sloth riding a bicycle.

The man tells us about a livestream of something he calls a cat apartment. “Kitten-sized chairs! And the kittens fight over the recliners,” he says. “There’s a to-scale kitchen where their food bowls are.”

“Where is the cat apartment?” I say.

“I’d have to get you the link,” the man says.

“No, physically where in the world is it located.”

“Possibly—actually, almost certainly—in Iceland,” the man says. “When the kittens get a little bit older they’ll get adopted, and then the owners will put new kittens in the apartment.”

A man in a pea coat joins us. “Are you a Kiwi,” he asks me. He is disappointed when I say no. He was on a roll; he has just met three Kiwis, which is exciting to him, because he himself is a Kiwi.

“Are you originally from New York, then?” he asks.

I’m not, and the man in the pea coat doesn’t have anything else to say. I don’t know why, but if I couldn’t be a Kiwi, then he really wanted me to be from New York.

“In the ’80s my father briefly lived in an apartment in Manhattan that was owned by a Saudi prince,” I offer as a consolation. “Imelda Marcos was his neighbor.”

“Was your dad rich in the ’80s?” the man wants to know.

I give the most uncomfortable answer possible to a yes or no question: “Not really.” 

A young woman I’ve never seen before comes out of the bathroom and walks up to me. “It’s too loud in here,” she says. “We have to do something about the music.” She mimes lowering the volume by flattening her palms and pushing them down in the air. 

“Wow, I really don’t think you have any control there,” I say, but she’s already moved on, walking the perimeter of the room in search of an aux cord. My friend A passes me on her way to the bathroom, points, and says, “Watch out. That girl only tells the same three stories.”

***

It’s long after midnight. We’ve all kissed and greeted the new year. My husband, A, K, and I emerge onto the street to find it’s snowing the kind of light snow that doesn't stick. A group of teens pass us on the sidewalk. One rides a Razor scooter through dirty slush.

***

I’m sitting at a booth in a diner on Broadway and Astor Place at 2:30 a.m. that I was led to believe was called Super Burger. I’m disappointed to find I simply misheard Soup ‘n’ Burger. 

The host twins are long gone, but before we left Marcel’s party we picked up their replacements: a New Yorker writer and a French photographer. It remains unclear whether these two are a couple. The writer tells us she’s moving to Paris in a month. 

“Which arrondissement,” K asks.

“The 16th,” the writer says.

“Oh, that’s a good one.”

I have been to Paris several times, but I have no idea if this is actually a good arrondissement to live in.

The French photographer looks at the menu.

“What is American cheese,” he says.

“It’s like cheddar cheese,” A says.

“It’s nothing like cheddar cheese,” I say. “American cheese is not really even cheese.”

“But what is it,” the photographer says.

“It’s a synthetic cheese product,” I say.

A says to me, “Fine, but wouldn’t you say, if you had to compare color and texture, that American cheese most resembles a milky and very soft cheddar?”

I don’t want to say it, but, still, I say, “Sure, American cheese most resembles a soft, milky cheddar.” And then I lean back into my parka, let it shroud me like a sleeping bag, my body very warm as I find myself tipping even further backward, away from consciousness, glittering.