“Don’t forget a toothbrush,” said Quentin.
Cleo was silent, staring out of the window at the dark East River rushing past, the lights of Long Island City beyond, the art-deco Pepsi-Cola sign in its dramatic ruby-red script. She was thinking of the day she got out of the hospital. Frank had undressed her in the dark bathroom upstate, slipping her shirt over her uplifted arms as though she were a little girl. She’d put her hands on his shoulders as he’d knelt to pull her jeans off over her ankles and feet. She could feel the air whispering around her stitches. He slid off her underwear. She stepped out of them gingerly. Her body felt drained of all sex. She was back to being a child. He rested his forehead on the slope beneath her belly button. She took his skull in her hands, his lovely curly hair sprouting between her fingers. Devotional. That was the word for two bodies like that. They should have been more devoted; she understood that now.
“Cleo?” It was Quentin looking at her. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Carsick maybe.”
“I’m just checking, you know,” he said. “Being a good friend.”
She wanted to tell him that a really good friend wouldn’t feel the need to point out what a good friend he was being to her all the time, but she let it go. Quentin turned back to Alex, whose yellow eyes had stayed fixed on him. Without looking at him, Quentin pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and slid it into Alex’s lap. Inside were what looked like shards of ice. She could see, in her sliver of view between their seats, just the corner of Alex’s mouth twisting into a smile.
“Look, there’s Zoe!” said Audrey.
They were overtaking one of the other school buses heading to the party. Through the window they could see Zoe’s beautiful curled head resting on the shoulder of an older Asian man wearing a suit. Their bus sped up, and she disappeared behind them.
“That girl is an enigma,” said Audrey, shaking her head.
Quentin threw his arms above his head and shook out his hands.
“Are we there yet?” he yelled.
Audrey laughed. “You can’t seriously be bored already.”
“You know me,” said Quentin. “I’d rather be crying in a limo than laughing on a bus.”
Thirty minutes later they arrived at the entrance gates of the warehouse and parked near a large courtyard. Across the dark river the spiky Manhattan skyline winked at them. The revelers piled out and were shepherded up a walkway lined with burning torches toward two statuesque women holding clipboards. Either side of them was a line of stone-faced security guards. Each of them gave their names to the tall girls in front, all except Alex, who stood there staring defiantly at them.
“He’s not coming in,” the girl with the clipboard said.
“This is Danny’s ex-girlfriend,” Quentin said, pushing Cleo toward her. “He’s her guest.”
This was an exaggeration, but Cleo had slept with Danny on and off for over a year until, in what turned out to be the savviest move of his career, he began dating the daughter of one of the largest contemporary art gallery owners in New York. She brought her father to his graduate thesis show, and two years later Danny was the most commercially successful young artist in the city, selling a painting for a quarter of a million dollars when he was only twenty-six years old. But recently Danny’s career had taken a turn, and a series of strong-selling but critically panned shows had invited murmurs that he was becoming the latest example of how success too early can ruin the integrity of an artist’s career.
After Cleo had proven with a series of hastily pulled-up text messages that Danny had personally invited her, the clipboard girl grudgingly allowed them all to enter. They passed through to a cobbled dockyard lined by two large outdoor bars, along with food trucks and a photo station. In the center was an ice sculpture of Danny holding a bottle from one of the party’s liquor sponsors. The sculpture was comically petite, the size of a child, with only a few of his signature dreads sprouting from his head.
“They couldn’t splurge for life-size?” said Quentin, pointing at the sculpture. “I mean, they have gelato.”
As Cleo looked around, a liquid sensation of failure surged through her. What had she been doing these past years? She was already so far behind. Danny’s technique had been less developed than hers in school, yet he’d already achieved all this. She had done nothing, made nothing of herself.
“You know what I love about art parties?” said Quentin. “You can look around and see at least three people wearing black turtlenecks at any given time.”
“And at least one ridiculous hat,” said Audrey, as a man in a fez walked past.
“All right, let’s test this theory,” said Marshall. He craned around the crowd and then began laughing. “Yup, I’ve got three turtlenecks.”
Cleo looked around and counted one, two … And there, in the third, was Anders. She scanned the people either side of him. He was alone. No Frank. He looked, impossibly, younger than she’d ever seen him before, slim and tanned. Typical, Cleo thought. He was pushing through the crowd toward her. Then he was pulling her into him, wrapping his arms around her back and bumping his lips against the crown of her head. The smell of him. She couldn’t bear it. She pulled away. His arms fell limply to either side as a look of pained embarrassment passed over his face.
“I’m happy to see you,” he said, turning to her friends to greet them in his clipped Danish accent. “Hi, hi.”
“We were just seeing how many people in black turtlenecks we could count in this place,” said Quentin.
“Well,” said Anders, looking down at his torso as if only just realizing what it was clothed in. “You got me! What does it mean?”
“That you’re a cliché,” shot Quentin. “Just kidding.”
Cleo felt the familiar dual sensation of pride and humiliation; pride in Quentin’s protectiveness of her, humiliation in the snide way he went about demonstrating it.
“Have you ever noticed,” Anders said, turning to Cleo, “that whenever an American says ‘Just kidding,’ they are never really kidding?”
“Hello, I’m Polish,” said Quentin.
Anders took Cleo’s arm as he spoke to Quentin. “I am going to borrow your friend now.”
He pulled Cleo with him to a quiet area by the torches. They stood facing each other, firelight licking their faces. Up close, Cleo saw that beneath his suntan Anders’s face was not younger looking, in fact, but grooved by exhaustion. The light of the fire did not reach his eyes.
“How are you?” he asked. “You look good.”
“You too,” she said. “Very … Californian.”
“Ah yes,” he said, rubbing his cheek. “I live near the beach now. I even surf sometimes.”
“Jonah must love that,” she said.
“Actually, Jonah has not come out yet.” He looked down at his feet.