After we said goodbye to the kids (Robby was flopped in front of the giant plasma screen watching 1941 and barely acknowledged us, while Sarah sat with Wendy on the other side of the room, going over the CliffsNotes for Lord of the Flies) Jayne and I stepped out onto Elsinore Lane and on the brief walk to the Allens’ she patiently reminded me who everyone was and what they did since I always seemed to forget, which in this circle was considered bad form. Mitchell was, of all things, a member of the investment banking community, while Mark Huntington was a golf course developer and Adam Gardner was yet another semimobster whose supposed career in waste management was clouded with fuzz—just a group of regular dads, living in the soft dreamlight of wealth we had all created, joined by our generically beautiful wives in trying to secure our perfect children’s ascension in the world. A slight wind caused leaves to scratch along the pavement as Jayne and I walked from our house to the Allens’. Jayne held my hand and leaned into me. I moved away slightly so she couldn’t feel the bulge of the cell phone in my pocket.
Mitchell opened the door and hugged Jayne tightly before remembering to shake the hand I was holding out in midair. We were the last couple to arrive, and Mitchell ushered us in quickly since Zoe and Ashton were about to perform the yoga poses they had learned the previous week for the adults. In the living room we nodded at Adam and Mimi Gardner and at Mark and Sheila Huntington, all of us standing in that vast space while Zoe pretended to be a tree for something like five minutes and her brother demonstrated his impressive breathing exercises in a downward dog stretch. (Ashton looked as if he’d been crying—his eyes red, his face flushed and swollen—and he obediently went through his routine as if forced, though at the time I blamed his apparent misery on the ear infection.) They both did the “sideways plank” and then they curled up into a “rock pose.” This was all capped off by Zoe and Ashton’s balancing beanbag pillows on their heads until the adults applauded. “How cute,” I murmured to a delighted Nadine Allen, who I hadn’t realized was standing beside me and whose hand was resting on my lower back. She smiled generously at me (a Klonopin rictus) and then reached out for Ashton, who abruptly turned away and stalked out of the room. Nadine’s face flickered with worry—but only for a second—and then became the smiling mask of a hostess again. It was a significant moment. I was already stricken and exhausted.
The Allens’ house was an almost exact replica of our place—palatial and minimalist and immaculate. There was even the same chandelier in the high-ceilinged foyer and the same curving staircase connecting the two floors, and Mitchell started taking drink orders once the kids had gone to their rooms and Jayne glanced at me when I asked for a vodka on the rocks and I returned the glance jokingly when she demurred and decided on a glass of white wine I knew she really didn’t want, and we settled into cocktail chatter with a Burt Bacharach CD playing in the background—a knowing, kitschy touch presented with an ironic formality, operating not only as a dig at our parents’ tastes, a way of commenting on how bourgeois and middlebrow they were, but also as something comforting; it was supposed to take us back to the safety of our childhoods, and I suppose that for some it worked like a balm, as did a menu that updated the meals our mothers had served: chicken Kiev (but with a Jamaican touch—I could not imagine what that would taste like) and au gratin potatoes (but made with manchego cheese) and that seventies stalwart sangria, which like so many artifacts from that era had made a comeback.
When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them—the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms—and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples gave off and that permeated the air—the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere—despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this. I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, that doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there. And I assumed—since I was the most recent addition to this group and had not yet let myself be fully initiated into its rituals and habits—that I was the loner, the outsider, the one whose solitude seemed endless. My wonderment at how I had arrived in this world still hadn’t deserted me. Everything was formal and constricted. The polite conversation that carried over from cocktails into dinner was so stifling that it carried a certain ruthlessness, so I honed in on the women, carefully weighing Mimi versus Sheila versus Nadine, all of whom I found attractive (though Jayne outshone them all). Mitchell was leaning into my wife and Nadine kept pouring me sangria that I was positive had no alcohol in it, and everywhere I glimpsed the withholding of a once casual promiscuity and it made me feel old. I briefly imagined all of us involved in an orgy (not a disagreeable fantasy considering how well put together the women were) until I heard that Mimi Gardner owned a Pomeranian named Basket.
