The Literary Party

While looking over the manuscript of a friend’s novel about the Los Angeles writing scene, I was reminded of a story out of my past: the late-1970’s, shortly after the publication of my first novel.  Never published, it’s pretty autobiographical, a party that a woman friend gave for me, “a gift of great generosity,” as the narrator puts it.

The Literary Party

Suzanne lives in a railroad apartment on the East Side in the lower eighties. It is generally well-regarded; indeed, one of her friends did a piece on it for House Beautiful a couple years ago. The rooms travel straight back from the street like cars on a track. This evening she is throwing a cocktail party for me, to which she has invited more than forty people. Packed into the apartment, we are to become fellow passengers rolling through the spring darkness, arranged splendidly in club car and diner, parlor car, smoker, sleeper, and coach.

The party is to me a gift of great generosity. Suzanne does not know me particularly well – visiting from Massachusetts a few months earlier, I met her through a friend; and she has never read a word I have written – yet the guest list she has compiled fairly effervesces, a heady brew of artists and agents and writers and editors and publishers: a Pulitzer-winning journalist, a ghostwriter for one of the Watergate principals, and (plum of plums!) the editor of a national magazine, interested in meeting me and possibly publishing some of my work. Her plan is to slip to each of the raters, the big cheeses, a copy of my novel. For my part, wary of faux pas, I am to step carefully among them, moving from one room to the next, trying shyly to charm these formidable birds out of their trees. All the while my shoes will be gleaming like jewels on my feet.

The shoes require explanation. Yesterday I arrived from the South on a ten-speed bicycle, having spent the previous week pedaling up from the Carolinas. Bicycle touring is a pastime that sometimes requires an apology; at Suzanne’s party it seemed a subject best left altogether unbroached. But it does explain why I appeared in Manhattan wearing a rugby shirt, Hagar Sta-Prest slacks, and blue-and-yellow Etonic KM running shoes.  Like the Queen, Suzanne was not amused.

“You can’t wear those clothes to my party. You can’t. You should have a tweed jacket, an old one. I guess we can borrow that, and a shirt. I suppose those pants will do. But you have to get new shoes.”

“New shoes? But these are excellent running shoes. Running is in.”

“You can’t wear them. You just can’t. Now, tomorrow I want you to go down to Gucci’s –”

“But –”

“It’s on Fifth Avenue. You should get some loafers.”

“Wait.”

“No, I mean it. You have to stop being so tight. Get the ones with tassels.”

“No tassels. Never. Tassels are out.”

“They are in, believe me.”

The upshot of this conversation was that this morning, in shock, I stepped out from under the grace of Gucci and into the warm Fifth Avenue sun, carrying a bag that contained two loafers, either one of which was more expensive than any pair of shoes I have ever before owned. They were, and still are, elegant: long, slim, toes not quite pointed, muted brown with a slightly more russet shade of leather piping that hides the seam joining the tip to the vamp. Seamless half-soles cover the bottom stitches. A cloth label – “Gucci: Made in Italy” – is glued into each sockliner. The inch-high heels are built of seven thin layers, like dark leather pousse-cafès. There are no tassels.

I carried them in a stiff paper bag marked “Gucci” held closed with a gold seal; through the tissue, the cardboard, the paper, they warmed my calf in brushing against it. I was utterly unable to believe I had bought them. I have never spent for clothes. My whole life has been led consuming little, owning less. It took Suzanne less than ten minutes of knowing me to recognize this trait. (It is why she calls me “tight,” though at other times she has changed this to “poor,” or once, when she was being charitable, to “stubborn.”) So this afternoon when I carried the Guccis back to her and laid them at her feet like dead mice, her dark eyes gleamed, for I don’t think she really expected I would ever go quite that far.

Here and now then, bright in the glory of the shoes and the glow of her approval, I take a position near the door, welcoming the first guests and directing them toward food and drink. The early birds are the small fry, out after worms of their own. (Suzanne and I previously went over the guest list so I would have some idea whom to be looking for and whom to be nicest to.) These first arrivals mostly speed right to the young Columbia student hired to bartend. When a woman enters carrying a wrapped canvas in frame, I remember that Suzanne has recently commissioned from a friend a portrait of herself to be unveiled tonight. This is the artist. I welcome the diversion, for it gives me a chance to retreat somewhat from any limelight, away from the scrutiny of the more intense guests yet to come.

So I scurry about with the artist, finding extension cords and wall sockets and a hammer and nails. Presently, illuminated by a frame lamp, the portrait is hanging on a wall in the first of the narrow rooms. It is three-quarters length, a competent likeness, I guess, but I don’t much care for it. For one thing, it pales beside its original, who – in her excitement over the party, my shoes, the painting itself – is strewing nervous vivacity about the place like confetti. For another, the painted figure seems slightly off balance, as if it is likely in the next instant to stagger backward through the wall. Nonetheless, it is no paltry item. I smile back at it and leave it there to overlook the gathering festivity.

For the rooms are rapidly filling. I begin systematically to range the apartment, holding my prudent glass of tonic water and lime, shaking hands and assessing them like a doctor taking a clinicful of pulses. A woman in black, highly groomed, slightly desiccated, speaks with me about the painting in the front room. “I loathe portraits. They’re so terribly tacky.” A well-tanned man in a checked vest offers me tickets to an opera tonight. “I don’t know what it is, but you can make it for the second act if you leave here by ten,” he says. “We have another party after this.” In quick succession I meet an editor from Viking Press, the Watergate ghostwriter, a dapperdan author of more than a hundred books, a publisher of the New York News.The process of being so quickly passed from one hand to the next recalls a hot dog being sold at a baseball park. Suddenly, Suzanne appears.

“Hi. How do you like my party?”

I smile. “Glitter. A lot of glitter.”

“The woman you were just talking to is an agent for several friends of mine.  She can do you a lot of good, believe me.”

“Oh? Oh.”

“Do you see the man who just came in? With the white hair? That’s Wolhaupter. The magazine editor I was telling you about. He wants to meet you. Come on.”

Wolhaupter is separated from us by perhaps fifteen feet and twenty people. When he sees Suzanne, he waves, but looks uncomfortable, a large brook trout unsure of the temperature of this shallow pool. The crowd is unyielding, forcing our introduction to be effected with several heads between us: “Hello.” “Good to see you.”

I can get no closer to him, although whether due to a lack of strength on my part or a psychic barrier on his I cannot tell. Whichever, I grin across the space between us (for we are too far apart to shake hands); he smiles back uncertainly until the distance between us widens, and he is drawn away.

I am standing at this moment in the dining area – with the exception of the bathroom, the rearmost room of the apartment – where a circular table is arrayed with circles of food, wheels within spinning wheels: large discs of Vermont cheddar and Jarlsberg, plates of rolled ham and roast beef, round loaves of dark breads, small round pots of condiments on a lazy susan, round arrangements of round pastries and crackers.  These, along with cut flowers, liquor, ice, mixers, and so on, have been arriving all afternoon from several nearby delicatessens and other shops. Vague awe and unworthiness wash over me at the sight of such plenty. Others, less abashed, cluster around the table with glasses and napkins. (“Watch them around the food,” Suzanne said earlier. “They’ll be stuffing things in their pockets. The pigs.” Sure enough, chunks of cheese and meat and bread become surreptitiously wrapped and slipped into pockets and purses. I watch them like a floorwalker at Macy’s, but say nothing.)

After a bit I become again set in motion. Working slowly forward through the guests, I reach the middle room, which functions as Suzanne’s bedroom. The bed, converted for now to a wide bolstered couch, holds several people, among whom I recognize the Watergate ghostwriter, who is holding intense conference with a sharp-faced, attractive, dark-skinned woman. I cannot distinguish what they are saying, but their words must be as sleek as their bodies. Suddenly a young man approaches them and speaks to the ghostwriter, earnestly and enthusiastically:

“I understand you are to be congratulated.”

He smiles graciously upward, teeth bared. “Thank you.”

The young man offers a hand, which is shaken. He asks, “Your first book?”

“Sorry?”

“Can I get you to sign it?” And he produces my novel, to thrust into the hands of the Watergate ghostwriter.

The gracious smile fades. Yet he laughs. “God, no. That isn’t mine.” Then he turns back to the woman.

I realize all at once that I have to go to the bathroom, so I start to press back through the babbling crowds, through the kitchen, past the hungry masses at the groaning board. On the way I see Wolhaupter, unmistakably leaving. I have not yet spoken to him. Our eyes meet. “Call me tomorrow,” he says.

“I will,” I call across the gulf, and he leaves.

I reach at last the bathroom door, which is ajar. Once inside, I sit on the commode and remove the loafers. They glitter in my hands like Dorothy’s ruby shoes, cutting at my heart, tearing out my eyes.

There are seven rooms in Suzanne’s apartment: bathroom, dining area, kitchen, bedroom, walk-through closet, living room, and foyer at the entrance. With great care I place the Guccis on the bathroom floor, where others will step around them, perhaps even engage them in conversation. Without them, I am able to go completely unnoticed among the company. Invisibility has been conferred upon me. I begin to flow like air through the apartment, silently upon my stockinged feet. Lamont Cranston, who years ago in the Orient learned the secret…. Light shines through me, unsullied by shadow; I am turned as transparent as glass. As I glide from dining room to kitchen to bedroom, any slight noise of my progress is masked by the sounds of the party, sounds with which the rooms are awash:

“I could have placed two others with her, but why should I feed a hand that bites?”

“As a critic, he should be shot in the head. As a human being, he should be shot somewhere else.”

“Some friend of Suzanne’s, I think.”

“I think it’s tacky. That’s all I can say about it. Tacky. It’s the principle of the thing.”

“He’s not worth that much. In fact, he’s not worth anything at all.”

Ariel drifting across the surface of this prosperous island, I in time pass from the bedroom, through the closet, into the living room, having thus come from one end of the apartment nearly to the other, where I find Suzanne standing beneath her portrait, speaking with an old friend, a woman whom I have met before and whom, indeed, I like. I approach close to them, still unseen, except perhaps by the portrait, which smiles proudly down on me from the wall.

“He’s a very good writer.”

“Well, I think it’s a shame that he can afford to buy those shoes, but he can’t afford to take you out to dinner.”

I look down at my hands, my legs, my shoeless feet: there is nothing there to be seen: ephemeral as fame or sorrow I have faded from even my own sight, have disappeared absolutely; and I can only presume that just the ghost of a smile flits across my invisible face.