The Rules of Attraction (Page 52)
“Bisexual,” he said and stared at his glass.
“Oh,” I said.
I liked my son very much. We were in a bar together and he was being polite and I wanted to hold his hand, but I breathed in and exhaled. It was too dark where we sat. I touched my hair and then looked at Paul. And for a very brief moment there it seemed as if I never had known this child. He sat there, his face placid, expressionless. My son—a cipher. How did it end up this way, I wondered.
“Your father and I are getting a divorce,” I said.
“Why?” Paul asked, after a while.
“Because…” I stalled. Then said, “We don’t love each other anymore.”
“Your father and I have been living apart since you left for school,” I told him.
“Where does he live now?” he asked.
“In the city.”
“Oh,” Paul said.
“Are you upset?” I asked. I thought I was going to cry but it passed.
Paul took another sip and uncrossed his legs. “Upset?” he asked. “No. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later.” He smiled as if he remembered something private and humorous and it made me sad, and all I could say was, “We’re signing the papers next Wednesday afternoon.” And then I wondered why I told him this, why I gave him this detail, this piece of information. I wondered where Paul was going to be next Wednesday afternoon. With that friend, Michael, at lunch? And I wanted badly to know what he did at school—if he was popular, if he went to parties, who he slept with even. I wondered if he was still seeing that girl from Cairo, was it? Or Connecticut? He had mentioned something about her at the beginning of the year. I was sorry I brought him to Boston for the weekend and made him sit through that dinner. And I could have told him this in the hotel room. Being in the bar did not matter.
“What do you think?” I asked my son.
“Does it matter?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Yes.” I finished the champagne. There was nothing left to do.
“Is there anything else?” he asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I suppose not.”
“Okay.” He put the cigarette out and did not light another one.
STUART I don’t know what gets into me but I go to The Dressed To Get Screwed party in only my underwear, thinking my body looks okay, thinking I want to get Paul Denton’s attention. So I do some coke with Jenkins and get completely f**ked-up drinking that sickly sweet, sticky alcohol punch and when Billy Idol comes on I just go crazy and do this great number. The whole party loves it and they’re all in a circle and I’m in the middle twirling and gyrating and jumping around, hoping he was watching me. I looked for him afterwards, turned on, dizzy and a little sick from dancing so hard, drunk, stoned, Dance majors coming on to me, and feeling pretty good. But, of course, I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t anywhere. He probably thought it was too uncool to come to these things anyway. But who doesn’t go to The Dressed To Get Screwed party, besides that weird Classics group (and they’re probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals)? I ended up going home alone. Not really, I fooled around with Dennis a little while, but I fell asleep like I usually do on Friday nights: unscrewed.
It’s party time and she is ready. The party is swirling and miraculous-seeming and she has dressed so carefully that she tries to avoid the living room and dance floor because if she gets messed up she thinks she will never see you, or you will never see her. This is why she is very careful as she roams the party looking for you. She enters the living room of this house, this tomb of destruction, songs she loves being danced out by sweat-drenched captives of the room’s embrace. She is shocked not happy to see how many have decided to come wrapped in white sheets. Should she have? It is so very dark that she can only make out the paleness of unclothed bodies, a camera, a video crew in one corner capturing this night’s images, other images, less graphic, flickering above them on the upperwalls, below the ceiling, a skinny boybody dancing enthusiastically in a circle made of those same sweat-drenched captives, near-naked people seem everywhere but it is not, strangely enough, or maybe it is strangely enough, erotic, and she walks by them, through the living tomb and into an area where pink beverage is being scooped from a cylindrical gray bin by a girl so fleshy that it makes her titter and she still doesn’t see you. She searches hallways and bathrooms, finds couples f**king under the October moon on the lawn, upstair bathrooms, upstair bedrooms, roams the hallway, even the kitchen for god’s sake, but she does not see you until she is back under the killing blue lights of the living room now illuminated. As fate has it you are dancing, swaying, with a beautiful girl she does recognize, but she does not think that you like her, but the music is too loud to feel anything really except—that you will give yourself to her. She stands next to a black box bigger than herself where music pours from, holding a pink drink and she loves the way your head is thrown back, moving, trying to keep the beat (you are not a good dancer) and the song ends, a new one overlaps it and it makes no sense at all. She follows you out of the room, you look back at the girl and decide to take her arm and the blue light makes your white sheets glow beneath the jacket you are taking off and she follows you to the light at the door and says … “Hello” … and never has a second hurt and ruptured, blistered so harshly because the music’s too loud and you can’t hear, don’t even notice, and you take her hand instead and you are both leaving. You smiled, she thinks, at her. But by then she was hiding in the corner of the room, standing on the rolled-up carpet, the room a black-blue mass moving to the songs, her love still silent and undeclared and it was time to make a decision. What can she do? Can she go to you and tell you things without you thinking of her as a crazy love maniac? No. Maybe it’s not even that, but it is over. And she will not be with you. It’s simple. But your smile actually echoes still, and it is too late. She stands in the corner, waiting, listening to the music, music that tells her nothing, doesn’t even offer a clue as to what to do, just playing loudly, the same, excruciating, dumb beat that traps her, doesn’t move her, and on the way out of this place, alone, she bumps into someone who has shaved their head and he sticks his tongue out at her, wagging it, yelling orgyinboothorgyin-booth but she doesn’t listen, her face, still hot but numb with rejection, down, staring at the floor—its over. It is time. Baldboy laughs at her. She walks away, by End of the World, looks down at the lights of the town. There won’t be any more notes. It’s last call.