We were all pretty drunk. We had eaten, but dinner had been heavy on Greek salad and phyllo pastries with spinach and feta, served by candlelight in the villa’s formal dining room: good, but light. I was still hungry, which meant I shouldn’t be drinking, but I was. We all were.
We had moved back to the living room, since its circuits were on the generator’s power supply, and were lounging around after abandoning a game of charades because Melissa was weirdly crap at it. She was fine at guessing other people’s clues, but when it was her turn, she either couldn’t think of any suitable hints and just sat there fretting and complaining or made unintelligible hand signals and then got mad when no one could figure out what the hell she was doing. It had been funny at first, hilarious in fact, but when it went on for a while, she got irritated and sour, which pretty much killed the fun of the game. I was disappointed because I’d been paired with Marcus and it was, for a moment, kind of like old times, but once Melissa has decided she’s not having fun anymore, that’s pretty much it, and if you insist on continuing you can expect to be on the receiving end of all the passive-aggressive weapons at her disposal. If she could harness that creativity for other things, she’d be a lot better at charades.
Anyway, we had abandoned the game, which was already getting fuzzy with drink, and had somehow fallen into this nonsense conversation about what we would all be doing if we were a band. I hated stuff like this. It always made me feel inadequate and unwanted. People with strong personalities love this kind of shit because everyone immediately knows how to peg them in ways that remind everyone how cool they are. Of course Melissa was the lead singer. Of course Brad was lead guitar. What about me? The Pluto of the group. The black hole. Everyone would forget me until the end and then pretend it was really great to be the band’s accountant or ticket taker or some damn thing.
I felt the heat in my face. I really shouldn’t have accepted another glass of whatever precious wine Brad had insisted on bringing with him.
“Kristen’s backing vocals and bass,” said Brad. “All sultry and hot.”
“See?” said Melissa. “Bad boy.”
“She is my wife,” said Brad.
“Oh, like that matters,” said Simon. There was a fractional, shocked hesitation, as if time had stopped, and then he added, “Bass and backing vocals sound good to you, Kristen?”
“I’ll take that,” said Kristen, not missing a beat. Since our chat at the fortress she had gone right back to being her old self, composed and easygoing, so I thought it again: she really was a better actress than I had assumed. “What about Gretchen?”
There was quite a different kind of hesitation, which Gretchen pretended not to find embarrassing. We didn’t know her and, frankly, there didn’t seem like there was that much to know. And that’s coming from the group’s black hole.
“Drums,” said Melissa, seemingly at random.
“Yeah!” said Gretchen, delighted, starting immediately to bang away sloppily on the edge of the coffee table.
“Careful,” said Brad. “You’ll spill the bottle.”
Gretchen looked crestfallen, but Simon came to her rescue.
“What about Marcus?” he mused aloud. “Roadie? Producer? The guy who gets the sound just right . . .”
“Sitting in the booth in the dark with a headset,” said Brad, liking this more and more.
“Sure,” said Marcus. “Fine.”
“And then there’s Jan,” said Brad.
“Can we just play cards or something?” I said. “Something grown-up, like poker?”
I’m a good poker player, but then you’d expect that, wouldn’t you?
“No, little Janice,” said Brad. “Everyone is in the band. You wouldn’t want to be left out, would you?”
I braced myself. There was something sharp in his face, something wolfish that made me want to disappear. When he was drinking and dropped his sardonic guard, he could be like a kid on the playground: maybe not the gang leader, but its principal enforcer, a master of minor cruelties, even if they were only manifested in comments and sneers.
“Rhythm guitar,” said Marcus quickly, “and,” he added before anyone could comment, “songwriter.”
“Huh,” said Simon. “Yeah, that’ll work. I think we’re all set to play the Grammys.”
“Woo!” said Gretchen, raising her glass predictably.
I shot Marcus a sideways look and smiled, but I couldn’t help noting the way Gretchen had squeezed up next to him on the couch. And the way he didn’t seem to mind.
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Gretchen. “I didn’t show you the bags we got!”
She leaped to her feet and began rummaging in a holdall behind the couch.
“Wait, wait!” said Melissa, also getting up and mouthing something at Gretchen, who dutifully stopped what she was doing and stood there, grinning about whatever was about to happen.
“You bought a bag,” said Brad, deadpan. “How shall I contain my excitement?”
“Wait, Mr. Snarky,” said Gretchen in a little-girl voice. Melissa had ducked out of the room at a run and was now shouting, “Hold on! I’ll be right back,” from somewhere upstairs. We waited. A door banged. You couldn’t hear her footsteps because she was barefoot, and the floors were ancient and solid, so her breathless reappearance was a minor surprise. She was dangling a boxy red leather purse like a runway model, her face a mask of haughty indifference for a posed second.
“Oh, that’s cute!” said Kristen.
“Wait, wait,” said Gretchen, frustrated by how Melissa had upstaged her moment. “See?”
She stood up, arms outstretched in a version of Melissa’s model pose. It was the same purse. Exactly the same in every respect. Gretchen scuttled over to the doorway and arranged herself next to Melissa to make the point, the two purses suspended side by side.
“Besties forever!” said Gretchen.
This was too much. I turned an eye-rolling look toward Marcus, but he was smiling at her and didn’t see me, though I wanted to grab him and shake him and say, “Oh my God, now she IS dressing like her! She is so fucking odd!”
Instead I looked away and, by way of cover, said the first thing that came into my head.
“So, Brad, what did you get up to this afternoon?”
“What do you mean ‘get up to’?” he said, giving me a hard look. “I didn’t get up to anything. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” I said, backing off hurriedly. I had assumed he was over whatever snit he had gotten into after the restaurant fiasco, but I was clearly wrong. “The fortress was pretty cool.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, his tone mocking and dismissive. “Got yourself a personal tour from Professor Marcus, no doubt. Next thing, you’ll be writing his name with little hearts around it in your exam book. You know, you two really should get together. Oh wait . . .”
He stared unblinking at me, his eyes showing none of the smile that pulled at his lips.
For a second I just looked at him, keeping my own eyes open in case blinking would release a tear.
“You can be a real son of bitch, Brad, you know that?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s quite the popular opinion of late. Still, I’m going to open another bottle of this rather excellent Shiraz and just for that remark, Janice, you won’t be getting any.”