They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

V

139 V If, for instance, I were to go to a party. This is something that really happens; I am invited to them. I wear the right dresses, and later I dab traces of the evening out—red wine; a sauce that slipped through the fingers and smelled of fish; other people’s perfumes, freesia, bay rum. I might be invited to read. My voice always shakes, I can’t help it, I keep water or wine close at hand, but my voice quivers. The air quivers with it, it descends, I look at the audience. Their faces and the shadows beneath their gestures, the flesh beneath the jaw just loose enough to allow speech—this is how it seems. At a party, for instance, I might cross the room to admire a grandfather clock in the corner. The hour has passed but the clock doesn’t chime; no one sits on the couches. We skim hands over each other: the back in first greeting, the forearm when, after several interruptions, we discover one another in conversation again. My agent is here, a handful of publishers, writers I’ve met many times: friends. I take a glass from a tray. When I look at 140 my agent, I think: we used to talk on the phone every day. This was just after Z died. She squeezes my hand warmly in passing. She won’t stop for me, she’s going to make small talk here and there, but she does this on my behalf, Your mission: to tolerate, she whispers as she passes, her earrings swinging forward. It’s possible I’m too drunk. It was a beautiful reading, someone says to me. I have a beautiful mind, I want to say. I have no patience for any of it. I ought to find the kitchen, be useful. Wipe lipstick off glasses and eat the broken spinach pies, something. It wasn’t that Z was good at these events; one couldn’t say that. He was stiff; he was blunt; he disagreed. People learned to be wary of him, how he would turn his full power on any small remark, anything anyone would say idly. Their politics were nothing next to his, just what one would expect, thin and soggy. He could talk to anyone, though, his head tipped slightly to the side. I spent hours keeping an eye on him wondering when he might be offending. I think I loved it, people’s variations of discomfort, but their feeling—palpable from across a room, palpable because I knew it—that they weren’t free to leave, that it wouldn’t be right not to listen, to endure. • Of course this isn’t true exactly; there would only have been one or two such events in that time, when he was with me; neither of us was well known then, we weren’t invited to many things. We went to a handful of places, but clung to each other in the corners, mouselike in the brightness. To shake hands Z had to slip his hand free of my elbow. 141 We would have been something else now. People would recognize my name when introduced. People would know his work. He would argue less; he could be beatific. No one asks me outright about him; I don’t know who even knows of him, sometimes an old acquaintance might venture something. Perhaps after a few more years they’ll be bolder. But—how people watch me. Tipsy in conversation I turn my head too quickly then must pause. Blood rises and pulses in the ears, in the delicate pouching under the eye it twitches. She is older, they think, she is getting on. Perhaps they explain to the new arrivals: She is the one whose lover—would they use this word?—and they’d point. This must be one reason people know me, though they don’t admit it. Isn’t she…? someone might ask. Or perhaps they don’t talk about me at all, perhaps they invite me only out of obligation and hope that I’ll say one clever thing lightly. But they shouldn’t expect this of me; Z was the light. Laughing I was still the shadow to him, how branches when backlit are cut so clear. This is the truth of me standing anywhere with anyone, shifting my weight and smiling, waiting to throw...