Page 45 of The Last Book Party

When the music slowed, Jeremy pulled me toward him. My head on his chest, I closed my eyes, breathless from the dancing and dizzy from the drink. I let myself relax in his arms as wemoved in small circles around the porch. After a few minutes, I looked up at Jeremy, expecting to meet his eyes. But he was looking at something across the porch. I followed his gaze.

Tillie and Lane made an odd tableau, swaying their bodies to the music, their eyes locked, Tillie in her eighteenth-century finery and Lane a sleek Holly Golightly. Tillie held up a cloth napkin and Lane clasped the end of it with her long fingers, turning her body beneath it and stepping in and away like in a Greek dance, until Tillie pulled it taut and drew Lane closer to her. They never touched, the napkin keeping them apart, but the raw intimacy of their dance, between them as a pair, was palpable. Others were watching them too, slowing their own dances and backing toward the edge of the porch to cede the floor to Tillie and Lane.

There was no mistaking this declaration. This was not just a light flirtation; this was far more serious. I had never seen Tillie look at Henry the way she was looking at Lane, and had never seen Lane look so sincere, or so beautiful. They were connected in a way I had never imagined. They were in love.

Henry stood alone by the screen door, watching his wife dance with Lane, and it was obvious that he saw their love too. Henry’s arms were limp by his side, the tips of the fingers of one hand holding a small notebook that looked as if it was about to drop to the floor. I assumed this was where he had recorded his guesses of everyone’s costumes. Henry’s eyes shifted around the porch, not seeming to focus on anything or anyone. At this moment, Henry didn’t look middle-aged. He looked old.

Watching Tillie and Lane, it started to sink in that Henry and I had been played for fools. Tillie’s coolness to me may have been genuine, but it had also served a purpose. Without the burden of worrying about Tillie’s feelings, I had been free to become the distraction that Henry wanted and, more important, thatTillie needed him to have so she could tend to what had been brewing with Lane. Poor Henry. He had thought that he was the tortured one, that the only ambivalence to resolve was his own. What he’d probably thought had been a reconciliation with Tillie that morning I’d found them amicably doing the crossword, a coming together, or at least a coming to terms, after another meaningless summer dalliance, had perhaps for Tillie been a fond farewell. A last burst of companionship, or love, before making her break.

Henry must have sensed people looking at him. He flipped through the pages of his notebook as though he was searching for something in particular. He looked up and right at me, but without recognition or tenderness. At that moment, I understood how deeply Henry loved his wife and how lost he would be without her. All along, the stakes of what we were doing had been so much higher than I imagined.

“I need some air,” I said. I walked out of the porch and across the back lawn to the Adirondack chairs by the tennis courts. Jeremy followed.

“I am such a fool,” I said, dropping into one of the chairs.

“You mean about Tillie and Lane? How could you have known?”

He sat beside me. I let him think that the revelation of Tillie and Lane’s relationship was the only thing troubling me.

“I never would have guessed either,” he said, “but it does explain why Tillie and Henry both seemed so strange this afternoon. I thought it was me, but I guess they’ve been having a difficult summer.”

We sat in silence for a moment, until Jeremy said, “There’s something I have to ask you.”

Oh God, I thought,he knows about Henry.

I took a deep breath and waited.

“Who are you dressed as?”

I had forgotten about my costume, how carefully I had chosen it. I had first considered dressing as Zuleika Dobson as soon as I had finished the book. Henry and I had put our work aside to recite to each other our favorite lines, Henry’s in a laughably bad British accent. At first, I was reluctant to dress up as the coquettish Zuleika. It seemed too daunting and presumptuous, a step too far, but after everything that had happened with Henry, my confidence had grown and I had warmed to the idea, not only as an inside joke that would please Henry, but because I wanted to play a femme fatale. It would be the perfect climax to my summer, not only to attend the book party, but to be beautiful and elegant and bewitch the guests as Zuleika would. I told Jeremy about Max Beerbohm and the Edwardian heroine of his satiric novel.

“Zuleika Dobson? That’s the first I’ve ever heard of it. I doubt anyone will guess that one,” Jeremy said.

“Henry would have figured it out,” I said, and sighed.

“Would he?” he said, sounding a bit wary.

“It’s one of his favorite books—he talks about it all the time,” I said quickly. “It’s not Zuleika he loves; it’s Max Beerbohm. He idolizes him: his wit, his satire, his Britishness. Anyone who knows Henry knows that.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness—for Henry as much as for myself. The past few weeks had been so incredible, so liberating. It had made me so happy to make Henry laugh, but also to make him gasp with pleasure. I had known it would end eventually, as sure as I had known the days would get shorter and the nights cooler, but to see it end like this, so unexpectedly, and with Henry so dejected, and so unaware of me, felt hurtful and wrong. Feeling as if I might cry, I told Jeremy I had to find a bathroom.

“I’ll be right back.”

Inside, the raucousness of the party was jolting, an affront after the scene that had just unfolded on the dance floor. I could barely move in the kitchen, where a bunch of people surrounded a shaggy-haired guy wearing black Ray-Bans and a dark suit, trying to guess what character he was dressed as. “Here’s a big hint,” the guy said. “I have no name. Here’s another one.” He bent over the kitchen counter and took a big sniff, miming snorting cocaine. As I pushed my way through the crowd toward the front hall, someone shouted, “I’ve got it! You’re the guy fromBright Lights, Big City!”

The bathroom door was locked, so I headed up the stairs, maneuvering around a couple sitting on the steps holding hands and whispering. Their costumes were the most obvious I’d seen all night, but it was still disorienting to witness what appeared to be a romantic tryst between Sherlock Holmes and Hester Prynne ofThe Scarlet Letter. Upstairs, I was dismayed to find the door to the hall bathroom closed and to hear laughter from inside. By now, I not only wanted a moment alone, but needed to find a toilet.

The door to Henry and Tillie’s bedroom was closed. I knocked lightly. When no one answered, I walked through the room to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet and rested my head in my hands. How had I missed all the signs of what really had been going on in Tillie and Henry’s house? I wanted to find Henry, to say something to him, but what would I say? I looked in the mirror, dismayed to see how disheveled I was. I splashed water on my face and ran my fingers through my hair, which was a mess. My earrings were pinching my lobes, so I unclipped them and left them in a clamshell on the back of the toilet.

From the window, I could see people milling around the lawn and hear the strains of “Rock Lobster.” It seemed impossible tome that the party was in full swing, that despite what had happened, what so many people must have witnessed, the festivities continued. I saw Henry, presumably trying to act normal, talking to Malcolm, who had his arms folded against his chest defensively. I hoped he hadn’t just told Henry that he still hadn’t edited his chapters.

I stepped out of the bathroom and looked around the bedroom. It was just as it had been the first time I’d been there. The white sheets, the casually made bed. Candles everywhere. I remembered how I had thought the bedroom had told me all I needed to know about Tillie and Henry’s marriage. Why had I thought that the way things appeared—or even the way people said they were—had any relationship to reality?

On the night table beside the bed was a small silver picture frame. I picked it up. It was a picture of Henry I had never seen before. He looked young and strong, balancing on one leg on a wooden swing that hung from a tree, smiling as though he was in love with whoever was taking the photograph. I would have liked him to look at me that way. When I put the frame down, a small booklet caught my eye. A thin gray journal. The cover readNerves: A Novella. Honors Thesis of Henry C. Grey. Yale University, Spring 1955.I smiled. Henry never told me he’d written fiction. Curious, I opened the booklet.

As I read the first paragraphs, my heart quickened with a sense of déjà vu. The novella began with the description of a girl wandering through a lush garden. Climbing up a wrought-iron fence and peering through its bars toward the sea. The girl, I read, was on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, which was notable for two things: it was shaped like a shark and was home to Kalaupapa, a leper colony.

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