I hadn’t paid enough attention to my instincts to stay away from this party. As my mother was trying
to convince me to come, I’d known that I should explain to her that it didn’t feel right. But I’d been more reluctant to turn her down about anything lately, feeling like I’d done a little too much of that since I got back to Amber. I should have been more insistent. I didn’t need more frustration at this stage.
When I got back to the house, I thought about getting in my car and driving off. I’d at least had the presence of mind to drive here in my own car rather than going with my parents. But I knew that disappearing from the party would be more insulting to them than not going in the first place.
In the backyard, some of the partygoers were organizing a game of volleyball. Rita and Chad’s son, Marshall, called out to me to join them. I wanted to play volleyball about as much as I wanted to monitor my father’s conversations with Thomas, but again I didn’t feel I could refuse. I took a place in the middle row and hoped things would be over quickly.
Our team was awful. It included my aunt, someone’s six-year-old son, and Chad’s lumbering brother Marlon, among others. The only athletic-looking person on the team was a girl I imagined to be somewhere in her mid-teens.
None of this mattered when we were just batting the ball around and none of it should have mattered at all. But when we started playing a game and we started losing badly, I became very agitated. Several people were watching and laughing over our ineptitude and I found myself taking this personally. When the score reached 15 – 4, I decided to do something about it. I ran from the back row to spike a ball over the net. I stopped passing to anyone other than the
teen girl. I exhorted my teammates like Michael Jordan in the NBA finals, even as I did everything I could to prevent them from touching the ball. Marshall was drinking a beer while setting up shots on the other side, but I was prowling the court, pent on ramming the ball back at him. We scored nine consecutive points until a shot ricocheted off Marlon’s considerable belly. We took back the serve immediately, though, and won every point after that even as most of my teammates moved toward the boundaries. On the game-winning point, the teen girl set me up with a great pass and I spiked it right into Preston’s face. His sunglasses came flying off and he sat down on the grass.
“Jeez, Hugh, did you have money on this game?” Marshall said angrily, while going to his uncle’s side. Liz knelt down next to her father and then she and Marshall helped him up. As she did so, she turned to me with an expression that read, “This is what you’re doing with your life?”
I stood on the other side of the net as everyone left the volleyball court. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want anyone to see me leave. As the action swirled around me, my aunt walked over and took me by the arm.
“Had those competitive juices really flowing, huh?” she said.
My embarrassment inched up. “I guess so.”
“Preston’s fine. His idea of physical exertion is pressing the intercom button for his secretary. I think you just caught him by surprise.”
We started walking away from the patio and toward a bench overlooking the river. When we sat
down, my aunt released my arm and patted me on the leg.
“I haven’t seen much of you since you’ve been back,” she said. In fact, I’d only seen her once, when she visited my father after he came home.
“I’ve been pretty busy,” I said, though I hardly ever felt busy.
“It’s good of you to help your father out.”
“It came at the right time.”
She patted my leg again. “It’s still good of you to do it. I feel so badly for Richard.”
I nodded and looked around. There wasn’t anyone within fifty yards of us.
“So what are you doing with yourself these days?” she said.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time in the store. Other than that, I don’t know, some time with Mom and Dad, some time with John Updike, a couple of long drives.”
“I meant what are you
doing
? Anna told me that you aren’t going back to Springfield. What are you going to do once they sell the store?”
I’m sure it had something to do with the setting, that my aunt was a financially successful woman married to a financially successful man who had four financially successful brothers, but the afternoon’s preoccupation with what one (and more specifically, what I) did had worn me ragged. “I haven’t really focused on that yet,” I said dismissively.
“When will it be time to focus?”
I turned my body to face her, which also moved her hand from my leg. “It’ll be time to focus when it’s time. I’ve managed to get by so far.”
“The firm would have had my ass if I’d ever approached my work that way,” she said, looking out toward the water.
“That’s one of the reasons I don’t work for a firm.”
“I didn’t realize that had to do with ‘reasons.’”
I could have continued to defend myself, though I was certain I could never convinced her to see the world from my perspective. Instead, I decided to turn my attention to a sailboat out on the river.
“I was thinking this morning about all of the mischief your brother used to cause at this function,” she said. “He was such a ball of fire. Chad and I would actually try to guess what kind of prank he was going to pull. He was such an electric soul. Both of you were back then.”
A pair of geese flew across the river and I looked up at them.
“Do you think Chase would have figured out what to focus on by now?” she said.
I watched the geese recede into the distance. “I’m sure he would have, Aunt Rita.”
She stood up. “I’m sure he would have, too.”
She walked away while I continued to look out on the river. I was as alien to this environment as a komodo dragon. The lizard, however, would be regarded as a curiosity and at least generate some fascination. I seemed only to generate contempt, disappointment, and a modicum of unwanted pity.
A ball came toward my bench and a young boy raced after it. When I looked at him, he offered me a nervous smile and then ran back to his playmates. A short while later, without saying good-bye to my parents or my aunt, or any of the cousins, I left the party.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Still Alive
The New Year’s Eve after Chase and Iris started dating, the three of us went to Jim Krieger’s house for a party. Jim went to high school with me, and his brother was a classmate of Chase’s. About forty of our peers were there as well. Jim’s parents were in the Caribbean until January third and it was his intention to keep the party rolling in some fashion or other until the evening of the second. The three of us had committed to hanging on until New Year’s morning, but we wouldn’t agree to anything more than that in advance. While Jim had a great reputation for his taste in exotic beers and unusual spirits, and while his parents’ huge home was an expensively appointed playground, the notion of spending nearly three days in this high-ticket frat house felt a great deal like overkill.
I had expected to be there with Thalia Merritt. We’d gone to high school together and hooked up again at the beginning of the winter break. But by our fourth date, we were straining for conversation and I was beginning to lose interest. Which was just as well, because the day after Christmas she told me
that she was heading down to Florida with some of her friends for the New Year and that she didn’t think it was a good idea for us to get together again when she got back.
I was surprised that I didn’t mind being at this party without a date. Most of the other people there were paired off (with a notable exception being Jim himself, who “didn’t do the couples thing”) and when I’d been in situations like this before I’d felt conspicuous. But with Chase and Iris as companions, I was fine. I’d spent a great deal of time with them since returning from Boston and, as we drove to the party, I felt a little like I would be “sharing” Iris with Chase, at least until the point when they went off to bed, if any of us were going to get much sleep during this bacchanal.
When we arrived, there were fewer than a dozen people there, though you wouldn’t know from the volume. The house was a center hall Colonial and Jim informed us that the living room was the “alternative rock room” while the den was the “punk room.” Stone Temple Pilots was bursting from the speakers in the former while the Sex Pistols blared from the latter, and they converged in a three-chord train wreck in the foyer. We chose the living room, where there was an enormous buffet of alcohol along with a bowl of Doritos. As soon as he got into the room and before he’d even poured himself a drink, Chase started slam dancing with some guy he knew.
“I don’t suppose you want to . . .” I said to Iris, nodding in their direction.
“Hmm, maybe later,” she said as we walked over to the bar.
“If he’s going to do that, he really should be in the punk room, you know.”
“Oh, you know Chase, always spitting in the face of convention.”
I watched my brother in action. Even throwing his muscular body against the doughy shape of his friend, there was a certain grace to his actions. I couldn’t recall a single time when Chase looked clumsy to me, even when he was at his most incautious. I found some pride in the fact that when the two slammed together, the friend bounced backward even though he had to be forty pounds heavier than Chase.
Within the hour, partiers filled both the alt-rock room and the punk room and were spreading to the kitchen, the sunroom, and the screened in porch. Some were outside building an anatomically correct snowman while others were wandering off to one of the bedrooms. I’d decided to make ouzo my drink of choice, and by the third I felt like a bit of slam-dancing myself, though I managed to resist the temptation. I spent some time talking with a woman named Christine who told me that she was “with Steve, but not
with
Steve.” Since I didn’t know who Steve was, this hardly mattered to me and it registered that there might be some advantages to coming to this party unattached.
Chase had been drinking with abandon and he was quite obviously feeling the effects. He ping-ponged around the room, doing his Harpo Marx imitation, singing – for reasons known only to him – a ludicrously dramatic version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” during a break in the music, and dropping
into the conversations of others, only to leave in midsentence. Iris watched this amusedly, making laughing side-comments, inaudible to me, to a pair of female friends.
Around 10:30, there was a roar from the foyer and Chase broke away from what he was doing to see what was happening. Intrigued to see what could cause him to shift gears so quickly, I walked out after him. He was performing an elaborate hand-shaking routine (complete with the bellowing of nonsense syllables) with four guys I recognized as lacrosse teammates. The five blasted into the living room and a palpable shock wave accompanied them. They descended upon the bar and, as they did, one of the group shouted yet another nonsense syllable. This caused all five to reach for various bottles and carry them to a corner of the room.
I watched Chase curiously. In the past couple of years, he had become fond of drinking whenever he found the opportunity, but I’d never before seen him take to alcohol with this much fervor. With his four teammates, he embarked on some elaborate drinking game, the rules of which eluded me. It seemed to entail the performance of a variety of stunts (saying things backward, balancing in awkward positions, lifting things) and the seemingly random mixing of the various forms of liquor in one glass. One of the contestants regularly drained this glass, though it wasn’t clear to me whether this person had won or lost the previous competition.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked Iris, who had come to stand next to me to watch.
“Pahzoo,” she said.
I’d heard that word exclaimed as the group approached the bar, though it meant nothing to me at the time (which is not to say that it meant much to me now).
“Pahzoo?”
“Don’t ask me to explain the rules. I’m not sure there are any. The object seems to be to get totally wasted in record time.”
“You’ve seen Chase play this game before?”
“With those guys at the end-of-season party. I drove home. He moaned.”
The boys were babbling even more incoherently now, which suggested that they were reaching their goal. After one last trick, which none of them could perform, they collapsed on the floor laughing. Slowly, Chase got up, searched aimlessly around the room, and then stumbled in our direction. When I asked him if he had won, he looked at me as though he didn’t understand the question. He then put his hands on both my shoulder and Iris’ and, without another word, turned back to lie down with his buddies. After a while, it became clear that he wasn’t going to move.
I’d never seen Chase quite like this before and was in fact a little disappointed that he’d succumbed to drink like a mere mortal. I didn’t care whether we left the other guys passed out on the floor, but I wasn’t going to have people stepping around my brother for the rest of the night. With Jim’s help, I carried him to one of the bedrooms and threw a blanket over him.
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing Chase for the rest of the year,” I said to Iris when I returned to the living room.
“I’m sure he’ll be okay,” she said.
“Yeah, he’ll wake up in the morning wanting a dozen eggs for breakfast. Chase doesn’t get hung over. He gets ravenous.”
I expected Iris to go back to her friends, but she stayed by my side. I liked having her there and the entire party took on a more human scale when she was next to me. About a half hour after I put him to bed, Iris asked me to check on Chase “just to make sure he’s breathing.” He hadn’t moved, but he looked utterly comfortable.
Ultimately, Iris and I left the living room for the relative quiet of the sunroom. When it was nearly midnight, we counted down the final seconds together, and then she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, the first time she had done either. It caught me by surprise and I’m sure I looked as dumbfounded as I did at the end of ninth grade when Ellen Aspen did a similar thing on the last day of school.