Everything Happens Today (20 page)

“I feel like you've been avoiding me.”

“What? No, not at all. I just got, you know, caught up. Actually, I've been looking for you, now that you mention it.”

“You know, Wes, I came to this party to hang out with you.”

“You did?”

“It's not like there's anybody else interesting here, is it?”

“Guess not.”

“I only agreed to come because I thought Jillian would be here.”

“Who's Jillian?”

“Lucy's sister. I knew her at Dalton before she went to college. Then when she called to say she couldn't make it, it was too late to back out. I didn't want to hurt Lucy's feelings. So I asked her to invite you.”

“No, that was James.”

“That was me. You're here because of me. You were always here because of me.”

At that moment, the phone in Wes's back pocket chimed a text message, and Wes, only too glad for the distraction, retrieved it with a trembling hand.

“want 2 dance?”

Even as he read it, Wes raised his eyes to see if Delia had noticed, and found himself looking straight at Lucy, who stood in precisely the same spot in the doorway where he had been standing only a minute earlier, leaning against the jamb with Blackberry in hand, smiling warmly and wiggling the fingers of her free hand in invitation. In a panic, Wes tried to click himself out of the text application, but managed instead to swipe the keyboard with his thumb and send a reply, signaled by an identical chime. Lucy looked down at her phone and frowned, then back at Wes with a quizzical, wounded tilt of the head. Wes had absolutely no idea what he must look like to Lucy at that moment, with Delia maintaining a firm grip on his left hand, their bodies pressed together from shin to shoulder. It can't have been encouraging, but Wes felt himself powerless to rise and follow as she slipped away into the darkness of the hallway. Delia nudged his shoulder.

“Where are you?”

“Sorry. What was it?”

“What was what?”

“What were you saying?”

“Jesus, Wes, what's the matter with you tonight? Can you focus, please? I'm trying to tell you something important.”

“Right, sorry. You know what, though? It's so hot in here and I'm really, really thirsty. Can you just hold it for one second and I'll be right back, I promise. You want anything?”

“No, I don't want anything. But come right back, please.”

Lucy was not in the kitchen, and she was not waiting for him by the bathroom. He thought she might be in her parents' room, where she had taken him earlier to heap scorn on her mother's collection of designer shoes and handbags in the walk-in closet, but the lights were out and there was a rumble of perfunctory grunting from the direction of the bed in there. There were a number of closed doors down a secondary hallway, but Wes did not feel emboldened or entitled to try his luck. Finally, his head spinning, he paused for breath in the dark, the sounds of the party a distant murmur, like a memory perched just over the borderline of awareness. Wes had no idea what he was doing. He tried to identify the remains of any rational thought to cling to, but all he could find were random snippets. When Delia had asked “Where are you?” he had, for the briefest instant, interpreted the question as literal, and even then he had been at a loss to answer it. Now, with the words echoing in what felt like a vast, empty chamber, all he could think of was Dorothy looking into the crystal ball. I'm here in Oz and I'm trying to get back home! But the crystal ball was his mind, all its infinite number of rooms now howling with wind-swept vapors and half-glimpsed visions—Elvira Gulch, Delia, Natasha, Lucy, Sonia, Prince André, Nora, Pierre, myriad pages torn from myriad books from all the world's libraries or one great universal library, all tossed and turned on the storm with nothing to grab on to. “Where are you?” had no meaning in a place like that, no meaning at all for a person like Wes, if there even were such a person. But even putting it that way had an immediate calming effect on Wes, because if there were no such person as Wes there was no need to get exercised over his struggles and travails. It could be like suddenly realizing that you were in the middle of a dream, it was all nothing but a dream. This had never actually happened to Wes in real life, but he could sense how liberating it might be in the face of a disaster or an impossible task, a plane crash or stealing a witch's broomstick. Say this were a dream, this standing in a darkened hallway with your heart pounding, your hair reeking of second-hand smoke, flying monkeys around every corner, and an iPhone suddenly materializes in your hand, its many-colored screen pulsing like a heart, like a soul, like your own soul in the night. You need not even be in your own dream. You could be a mysterious figure, unknown even to yourself, in the dream of a character in a novel that has not yet been written. Where are you now? Wes raised the device to his chest and began to type.

Yellow: “Where r u?”

White: “bdrm”

Yellow: “Too many. Which?”

White: “find me”

Wes had found Lucy, in a room dark like the rest, with just a slash of light from the half-open door of an en-suite bathroom. A pink toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste stood in a white shaving mug on the rim of the sink, beside a disk of pink soap. Everything else was in blackness.

“Lucy?”

“Typo?”

Wes turned towards the sound of Lucy's voice, and as his eyes adjusted he was just able to pick out her silhouette, sitting upright with crossed legs against the headboard of a twin bed. He crossed the room, aware of thick pile carpeting beneath his feet that absorbed all sound, and sat at the foot of the bed, straddling the corner.

“What's ‘bnkdl'?”

“Bnkdl?”

“I said ‘want 2 dance' and you said ‘bnkdl.' I thought maybe it was some sort of code. Or maybe a joke, ‘cause you were talking about typos before. Or maybe, just, you know, ‘go away.'”

“It wasn't any of that. It was just a mistake. I didn't even mean to send it.”

“It's okay. It was just a little confusing, you know, when I saw you sitting like that, after we . . . ”

“I know, I'm really sorry. Delia's just having a hard time. She'll get over it.”

Lucy sat there, unmoving, at the far end of the bed. Wes didn't know what to do. This here, now, was precisely the moment he had been imagining, and trying not to imagine, all day long, but now that it was happening he thought that maybe what he liked better was when they were kissing in the hallway. It had been so simple, and her neck had smelled not of perfume but of some simple, fresh-scented soap, as if she alone of everyone at the party had not been steeped in a smog of tobacco and alcohol fumes. Somehow, her simply being fresh and clean had made her seem even younger than she was, and Wes had not been able to help himself—even as they were kissing and he felt her cool hand on the back of his neck, he had opened his eyes and seen her as Natasha, with her tank-top and jeans transformed into some vast crinoline ball gown and a black velvet choker around her throat, layer upon layer of fabric concealing and guarding her nudity. And because she was Natasha, he was Prince André, a fallen, middle-aged creep who lusted after teenage girls, and suddenly he had lost all desire to go any further. It wasn't that he was not aroused, but she was clearly not the voracious carnivore of his fantasies, so his fantasies changed to accommodate her. He wanted to protect her, and kissing her in the dark seemed like the best way to do that. All the lurid imagery of the day had evaporated in the puff of sweet warm breath from her nostrils on his cheek. And now that he was here in her room, all he wanted was for her to invite him to kiss her again. It made Wes wish he was twelve again, and that he didn't know everything he knew.

“Can I ask you something, Lucy?”

“Okay?”

“Why did you invite me to your party? I mean, we didn't even know each other.”

“I didn't invite you.”

“You didn't?”

“You're a gatecrasher, buddy.”

“I'm a gatecrasher? But James said you . . . ”

“So is James a gatecrasher. I mean, I don't care. You're welcome and all. I mean, obviously I'm glad you're here and everything. But I didn't invite any of you. I only invited my friends.”

“What about Delia?”

“She's a friend of my sister. I have no idea what she's doing here.”

“Huh.”

“But since you're already here, I suppose you might as well stay.”

Wes had stayed, only to wake up in an existential panic at four in the morning and walk home crying in the dark.

Wes stretched himself out on his bed with the song of the oriole in his ear. To Wes, that song had always sounded like an elaborate question spoken in a very terse language, and it did so now, except that he had no interest in trying to answer it because it clearly wasn't intended for him. Rather, he intended for the first time that day to luxuriate in the memories of last night's adventure that he had been so assiduously avoiding all day, but he fell into a deep sleep instead, dramatically dream-free, from which he awoke only because the phone had somehow worked its way up the bedsheets and was ringing almost directly into his ear. Just to shut it up, he grabbed the phone and answered.

“Yeah what?”

“Wezbo, it's James.”

“Okay.”

“Listen, I've got something to tell you, I'm not sure how you're gonna take it.”

“So?”

“So I just got off the phone with Jillian. She was really . . . ”

“Who's Jillian?”

“Your new sister-in-law, only.”

“What the fuck?”

“She's Lucy's sister. Lucy's older sister.”

“Go on.”

“Well Jillian's really good friends with Delia, and she told me that Delia's really pissed at you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Well, see, it turns out that Delia had dibs on you last night.”

“
Dibs
?”

“Well, see, it turns out that Delia had something planned to happen between you and her last night, and that's why she asked Jillian to ask Lucy to invite you.”

“I thought Lucy asked you to invite me.”

“Well, I kind of made that up. I just wanted to get you away from Delia. I figured if you thought it was going to happen you'd make it happen, and you did. How was I to know Delia was planning to jump your bones? I mean, she waits a whole year, and then that's the night she chooses? So anyway, she's mad as fuck that you ditched her. I thought you'd want to know that.”

“Thanks, fuckhead. Except you just happen to have got it all ass-backwards, as usual. See, Lucy told me that nobody invited us. She said you and me were gatecrashing, so Delia never could have asked Jillian to ask Lucy to ask me.”

“And you believe Lucy?”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“‘Cause how else would Jillian know you went to the party? Why else would she call me? She must've spoken to Lucy, right?”

“So you think Lucy knew why Delia was at the party?”

“Maybe. I think so.”

“And you think Delia knows I slept with Lucy?”

“Maybe. Delia's pretty tight with Jillian.”

“All right. All right. I'm gonna hang up now. I've got to think this through.”

“Listen, Wezbo, I . . . ” But Wes had already disconnected.

Wes lay there, not moving; even shifting an inch in any direction, even breathing too hard, could crack a bone or rupture some internal organ. Thinking, too, was a delicate endeavor; in circumstances like these, an uncontrolled attack of deep thinking could well prove fatal. Simple, baby steps were in order, the kind that could inch him away from the precipice without disturbing the frangible ground beneath him. If this were a book—but there was no such book, at least none that came to mind, unless maybe
Les Liaisons dangereuses
, but Wes could no more recall the plot, or which characters were the villains and which the dupes, than he could make sense of whether Lucy had lied to him, or of what part he himself had played in the deception, or even if any of that mattered anymore. There must be somewhere such a book, the book with the story that had just unfolded, or the book with a stupid boy like him, just like him—a book that disintegrates at the very instant you become aware of it. That was Wes—a boy who vanishes the moment you look at him. And even as this thought occurred to him, he realized that it was not true, because there was a book, and it was sitting on his desk. He rose to retrieve it, then returned to his bed and began to read intently, flipping randomly through the pages.

 

“By order of the Secretary of the Army: CARL E. VUONO, General, United States Army Chief of Staff.”

 

“Page 2-7. Change the fourth sentence from ‘Release the trigger.' to ‘Slowly release the trigger.' Add the following NOTE: For the purpose of this test, ‘SLOW' is defined as 1/4 to 1/2 the normal ratio of trigger release.”

 

“
Warning
: With the bolt carrier assembly locked to the rear or in its forward position, if the weapon is dropped or jarred with a loaded magazine in place, it could chamber a round.”

 

“Do not expose ammunition to the direct rays of the sun. If the powder is hot, excessive pressure may develop when the rifle is fired.”

 

“The radioactive material used in these instruments is tritium gas (H-3) sealed in pyrex tubes. It poses no significant hazard to the repairman when intact.”

 

“If there's water in the barrel, don't fire the rifle. It could explode.”

 

“Squeeze the trigger and fire.”

 

“Hot, dry climates are usually dusty and sandy areas. They are hot during daylight hours and cool during the night hours.”