Shadow Traffic

The Group

223 The Group It wasn’t until he’d finished coloring his hair that he realized he really was going to the group’s latest party.Throughout the afternoon , and for days before that, Summers had thought of various excuses he could make to Morton, who at this point hosted more parties per year than he wrote stories, yet he didn’t make the call. But why? Was he simply a glutton for punishment? Did he want to once more return to his apartment after the party feeling his mediocrity again confirmed in a public setting (though his career and overall life was no more mediocre than most of the group’s)? Perhaps it was a kind of programmed curiosity unconsciously motivating him. The fear that if he didn’t go, this would be the one party where something noteworthy would really happen, something along the lines of meeting a smart, successful literary agent who would take a sudden interest in him, ask him to send his few books, and eventually take him on and radically turn around his floundering career. Rationally he knew it wouldn’t happen, but apparently the irrational part of him was stronger. It was disappointing to have to once more realize this about himself, that he’d go to something like this party on a raw, shadow traffic 224 rainy November night, having to take a cab from West Philly to Center City and then having to take another cab back when it was over (his soon to be ex-wife now had possession of their car), unless he could bring himself to ride back with someone from the group, probably Aaron—who would be self-promoting the whole ride or worse still, Lucas, the biggest, most self-deluded braggart in the group. What contempt he felt for the group, albeit mixed with pity, as he pictured them “networking” at their latest party. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and finished applying a few dabs of cologne, realizing that he also harbored the secret hope of meeting an appealing woman there as well—something even more unlikely than his agent fantasy. Another deep breath, followed by another closing and opening of his heavily lidded eyes. He felt calmer now. There was no point in thinking at all if he wasn’t going to be honest with himself , and to be honest he had to admit he also somewhat liked the group as well, or some of the members, though at the same time he found them unbearable, of course. There was Emir, who could be warm and witty, sometimes even generous in praising the work of his peers. But once he turned to the subject of his thwarted career he quickly became obnoxious. How he’d hold forth with his exasperating, elevated eyebrows, which always rose paternalistically as he’d expound on his latest theory about how a country’s (by which he meant the United States) literary influence reflects its political influence and so dominates less powerful countries (by which he meant his native Argentina) in the literary marketplace. In reality, Summers thought, Emir’s theory was but the most recent explanation to account for his lack of success. That was the only literary/ political issue that really interested Emir—though he never con- The Group 225 sidered any purely aesthetic reasons for it, such as the arcane, precious, tediously academic quality of his prose. As Emir grew older and his failure (though he’d published a few novels with second-rate university presses) became more solidified, his theories became more grand, comprehensive, and conspiratorial. For some years now Emir’s true art form had, in fact, become his theories, always cloaked in international intrigue, not his writing , which he rarely attempted now. With his pitifully transparent self-love and ill-disguised disappointment in his life, Emir was reason enough not to attend the party, Summers thought, but there were even more compelling reasons. There would be at least five to ten other blowhards there, who were even more exasperating than Emir (Emir was capable, at least, in the midst of one of his tirades, of being intermittently amusing). There was, for instance, Aaron, the self-proclaimed literary avant-gardist, who would tell you with a straight face that his writing had forever altered human consciousness. He’d published only with tiny presses that Summers suspected were partially or wholly...