Now there was a pause. On the screen, the woman sipped from her drink. She fingered the pearls of her necklace. I watched the clasp move, clockwise, from the nape of her neck to the base of her throat, then back around to the nape. Two circuits in, the sound of throat clearing from offscreen. “You were talking about”—a cough—“if we could maybe get back to—”
“The party, right. It was a birthday party. Roger somebody or other. Of course Bill acknowledged Norman had his eccentricities. Sure he was a little free with his hands, cheated on his wife, liked his bourbon, liked his dope, who didn’t. I liked my bourbon, didn’t I? Sure I did.” She raised her glass, took another sip, a longer sip, swallowed hard. “If you’re rich it’s not called getting drunk, it’s called having a good time. Norman had grown up poor but now he was rich and he was having a hell of a time. His last two novels, sure they’d been panned but that was because the press was against him, he was too radical, they were afraid of him but what the hell, who cared, because Norman could make your party, that’s what everybody said. He’d show up with Adele, two or three friends, drunk already, on his third or fourth party of the night, slugging from a fifth of whiskey, and he’d find the prettiest girl in the room and start a staring contest with her. Find a big guy and start thumb wrestling with him. Find a bigger guy and start head-butting him. I remember the skulls coming together, crashing, once”—she clenched her hands into fists, knocked her knuckles together—“twice, three times, four times, until someone fell down. Pick the guy up, pick himself up, start the game over. He’d clear out the living room, get down on the carpet, play bongos with his feet while waxing lyrical about, oh, marijuana or jazz or the hipster or Western literature and his place in it. The orgy as existential act. Was he better or worse than Bill Styron, than Jim Jones, than Scott Fitzgerald. Bill thumb wrestled him at a party once and the next day he couldn’t hold a pencil.” She laughed. “Once, at a party, Norman put on a record—we were back at his place, an apartment on the East Side—and it wasn’t music, it was Norman talking. Norman mid-monologue in this fake Texas accent. Someone giggled. I turned to the girl next to me and I started to say—and Norman turned to me and he said, Shut the fuck up.”
On the screen the woman leaned forward. “If anyone else were doing it, man, what a drag. But Norman, well, he was brilliant, he was a genius”—the veins on her neck visible—“you could listen to him talk all night and boy sometimes that was exactly what you did. Bill would tell me all about it on those nights when he went out to see Norman and I stayed in. He’d come home at four, high or stoned or both, puffed up with Norman, Norman, Norman. Sometimes I wondered that wasn’t the name he cried out when we were fucking.” I flinched. I think the camera operator did too, because the picture sort of wiggled. “Those nights he’d paw at me and I’d roll over so my back was to him. Some of us, I’d say, have to get up in the morning. And that was true, hell, never mind me, Bill had a job to get to too, but mostly I didn’t want Bill to touch me with the stench of Norman on him. Sometimes I turned my back, shook my head, said, Come on, Bill, and still he flipped me so I was flat on my back, pinned my shoulders. Never no, couldn’t quite figure out how to say that.” Another kind of laugh, mirthless. “And anyway, Bill couldn’t hold his liquor and the fight would tire him out and so it was only ever a few minutes. Usually he’d fall asleep with one hand stuck in my panties, the struggle to remove them having proven too exhausting, his dick only half hard.” Every word carefully enunciated. “How he thought he was going to get it in.” She shook her head, settled back into her chair. Hint of a smile. “Anyway, that’s how it usually went, easy enough, once he was snoring, to roll out from under him, take a quarter Seconal, or half, be up by seven, powder under the eyes to cover the circles.”
She shook her head again, recrossed her legs. A pause, but this time there was nothing from offscreen. “I didn’t want to go to the party but by then I’d stayed home too many nights and this wasn’t just any party it was a birthday party and not only a birthday party but also somehow connected to Norman’s mayoral campaign. He launched it, two days later, on Mike Wallace’s television show. Wallace didn’t even ask him about the stabbing, I guess he hadn’t heard the news. I read, after, that Norman invited everyone he could find, the grungier the better, druggies and drunks, punks and hustlers, his constituents he called them, said they would be the ones to vote for him, the ones he intended to represent. Like they were registered. I’ll say this, he was a good salesman. He had a nose for—scandal, maybe, or opportunity. Press. Later I read that Norman liked to surround himself with sycophants, you know, second-raters, has-beens, never-would-bes. They meant the boxers and the bullfighters, the nobody knockabouts he picked up in bars, guys who could match him drink for drink, punch for punch, and that wasn’t—I mean Bill was, like I said, a lightweight, but reading sycophants, reading second-raters, well, I thought of Bill. He was the very first person who came to mind.” She was silent for a moment, one hand touching the pearls of her necklace, the beads shifting beneath her fingers.
“It was close to midnight when we got there.” Relaxed in her armchair, her body turned away from the camera, one hand on the pearls, the other cradling the glass, almost empty. “I’d dragged my feet, done my hair and then brushed it out and then done it again, ordered two martinis at dinner, some kind of dessert liqueur. Plus the apartment was on the Upper West Side, so it took a while to get there on the IRT.” The beads of the rosary, that’s what the pearls reminded me of. “It was a big place, but glum, the walls dark green, and so packed with people, still, that to get to the bar you had to push your way through the crowd. I sent Bill for drinks and fought my way to the bathroom, crumbs and ashes on the carpet, sweet smoke in the air, an elbow in the ribs, a hand on my ass. A woman, a stranger, opened the door as I was trying the handle. She was tall, taller than me, and blond, her blunt bangs gone stringy, clinging, sweat-smeared, to her forehead. The stranger pushed past me and then I was face-to-face with Adele. Her name’s gone now, the stranger’s, but I must have known it at some point because I can remember hearing, later, that the fight started because she’d been in the bathroom with Adele, the implication being that they were”—the woman’s lip curled—“you know, making it, what you would call hooking up. She looked old, Adele did. I remember thinking she looked old. And that wasn’t just the cruelty of my youth”—smiling now, the lines that framed the corners of her face deepening—“she had aged in the six months since I’d last seen her, her eyes were small and beady, red-rimmed, swollen. I mean it was obvious what they’d been, what Adele had been doing, she’d been crying, that other rumor,” the woman scoffed, lifted her left hand from her neck so she could wave it dismissively. “Clumps of mascara in her eyelashes and black smudges on her cheekbones. She looked, for a second, less startled than afraid. Just for a moment. Then she composed herself, she smiled, and she did this—this sort of shimmy—and she said, You haven’t seen Norman, have you? I shook my head. She frowned, drained her martini glass, brought a hand to her chest, giggled. I suppose, she said, I shall have to track him down myself. Her voice rose as she pronounced myself, rose and caught. She handed me her empty glass, winked, smoothed her dress. Husbands, she said, rolling her eyes. Her cheeks were puffy and I saw, as she turned, disappeared into the crowd”—the woman’s voice was low now—“she was wearing this black velvet dress, the back cut low in a V, and as she turned I saw that above the V, the skin of her back was blushing this deep, painful-looking red. Anxiety, maybe. Embarrassment. I read, later, that the kids, two girls, were upstairs the whole time.”