Dennis sat beside me, sweating from his sunburn. He really was cooked, couldn’t bend his arms without gasping, kept patting his forehead with a cocktail napkin. The napkins had been printed up for this event; on each of them was the year and the name of the conference, with a tiny reproduction of my drawing of the girl, like a logo, typing on her laptop under an umbrella. A has-been, a never-was, but my drawing had some iconic power.
Roberta sat by Dennis, and Happy and the Tennessee toad sat across from us. The toad wore a ring that might’ve been from some plundered civilization. Vicky Capodanno appeared, scraping her chair on the patio, and sat on the other side of me, spilling her drink on both of us. She raised her lighter, with the cigarette backward, staring into the wrong end. She liked to follow me around when she got drunk, with the understanding that she was helpless and alone, couldn’t take care of anyone else, too fucked up to have her own kids, although a little obsessed with mine, sending them origami swans and disturbing tween novels they wouldn’t be able to read for ten years. When I looked again, the filter was on fire and she was trying to take a drag. Still, I was subordinate to her fame and biennials and whatnot, works in major permanent collections like MoMA and the Tate.
“Hey, pal,” I said, hitting her on the shoulder. “I love you.”
“Hey, pal,” she said, and tipped her chin up and winked, sucking hard, blowing smoke. “I know who you love.”
I ignored her. People around me futzed and chattered as though they’d never seen these things before, as though these lobsters had just hopped off a spaceship from Mars. I ripped out the tail with my hands and ate it with butter running down my arms. A guy named Conrad gallantly wielded his nutcracker, shattering the claws for the women around him, telling us about a recent trip to Finland, including a special someone he’d met named Kaspar: “Poet, musician, diplomat, doctor, and I said to myself, ‘If this guy’s queer, I’ll cream my mushrooms.’?”
Everybody laughed. I cracked a claw. It shot a stream of warm lobster juice right into my face. A waiter went around, pouring white and rosé. I got both. I took a second lobster and went at it like a badger. At the center table, Carl stood and gave the fundraising speech. I’d already heard it eighty-five times. All around me, they went through stacks of napkins, wiping their faces, sopping up puddles on the table, ruining my drawing, leaving shredded piles of what looked like oatmeal.
Reports funneled down from the other end of the table that Burt had tripped on the sandstone path. There was a head wound and blood. Edna was with him. The party kept going. Paramedics arrived from the wrong side of the pool and had to pass by us to reach him. I flagged the sommelier, who poured me a Riesling.
Vicky put her cigarette out in the middle of her lobster and yawned and winked at me. Trudy Miller warned us not to eat the green goop because of the sewage in the bay. Winston Doyoyo, an old man from South Africa who happened to be a Nobel Prize–winning playwright, emptied the contents of his mouth into a napkin. Everywhere I looked, people were doing disgusting things to my drawing. Trudy said that at her daughter’s high school prom, girls were allowed to bend over no more than ninety degrees on the dance floor while pressing their asses against the crotch of a boy’s pants. More than ninety degrees was forbidden. Tabitha said her daughter’s orthodontia cost six grand. The wind came up and flung tablecloths and silverware, coffee cups and a tray of cookies onto the ground. They discussed their kids’ soccer injuries, calculus, piano lessons, and abortions. I’d have to raise Kaya and Beanie and launch them out into the world. It hadn’t even started yet, and then they’d leave and I’d miss them forever and they’d hate me like kids do.
Whatsherface, Bonnie Raitt, got up and played a song, kissing Marty’s ass when she finished, telling us how he’d revolutionized the music industry. Marty took the microphone and told her to sit down, and made us clap for his boyfriend for founding the conference. Bruce stood and in his trembling voice thanked the faculty: “For the blessing you give our strident struggle to voice the silence clotting our throats.”
“I wish I were back in the dorm,” Tabitha said, “reading my students’ garbage.”
“Do you know how much a billion is?” Dennis said. “It’s a thousand million.” He’d gotten to the party early, so Bruce had taken him for a spin around the main house. “?‘I designed this kitchen myself. I designed this ocean myself.’ Give me a break, you fucking phony.”
The house tour had wounded him. I knew how he felt. The place was so gorgeous you wanted to start ripping planks out of the floor with your teeth. Maybe you’d dreamed of royalty as a child, or you’d fantasized about living in a castle or flying in a private plane, but either way it triggered what you never got or gave up on long ago, something sad and personal, and it was subconsciously exhausting. The house was designed to make you feel awful.
Summer will end, fall will come, then winter, when everything dies. Back home, I’ll be doodling in my basement, recalling this lobster feast in the silken air in kerosene lamplight, and the beautiful glimpses of Amy from earlier, our endless afternoon, spliced, assembled, and preserved. I’d been fine until now, but the hours had passed. The further I drifted from her, from our moments, the harder it was to live. But unless she’d hired a tow truck, her car was still here, and so was she.
“Cartoonists must enjoy doing illustration,” Heather said, holding a now decomposing napkin that featured my work.
“Sure,” I said. “If they want to eat.” It was one of those polite, slightly forced, heartfelt exchanges we had when we were stuck together at a fancy thing. Heather said good illustration had certain intangibles. I more or less agreed. The piece I’d started that afternoon would accompany an investigation of suicides at a cellphone factory in China, with 430,000 employees crammed into a dozen giant buildings over a square mile, on three shifts, twenty-five cafeterias running twenty-four hours a day. One guy killed himself after a thirty-two-hour shift, and another one jumped off the roof after working 112 straight days. Average age of suicide: nineteen. Labor cost to build a cellphone: eighty cents. Try drawing that.
Vicky slumped in her chair, eyes narrowed, head back. I winked at her. We were communicating nonverbally about artistic integrity. Then I realized she’d passed out.