Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Nothing,” he said. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.

“What?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” he said. “Belly trouble.” It was the first excuse that came into his head. He went and sat on the toilet, considering everything else he could have said, and remembering what he had said a few months before: that he wished he could give her brother back to her. He had told her that when she started crying one night the previous year, apparently for no reason at all as they lay cuddling in bed waiting to fall asleep. He had said it almost without thinking about it, the exact right thing, and that night, despite the fact that their brothers were dead and so much else was wrong in the world, everything had felt right between them in exactly the way that everything now suddenly felt wrong.

He went back to Mrs. Perkins as much to stay away from Carolina as for any other reason, considering that it was probably naïve to think there was only one right thing to do for her on the day her brother died, and it might be as right to leave her alone for a little while as it was to hold her while she cried. If he felt like a failure as he made his way up and down the hills on Broadway in his truck, maybe that had more to do with him alone than with him and her together, and maybe a little time spent in the company of pretentious fools was just what he needed to make him appreciate his girlfriend again. It was better, anyway, than going off to drink alone at a bar, something he felt pulled to do as well, and it even seemed better than drinking with a friend, because his friends had all been her friends first, and he was sure it would be very hard for him to explain, and harder for them to understand, how there was something wrong with her, which was actually something wrong with him.

“Follow me,” said the butler at the door. It was the first time Will had rung the front doorbell since he had come to the house; he usually let himself into the garden through a side gate. The butler loped through five different rooms — Will barely keeping himself from aping him even though he hadn’t said “Walk this way”—each of which seemed perfectly serviceable for hosting a salon. They passed through the living room and dining room and library and some sort of parlor full of cat sculptures and finally the kitchen, where the butler held open a door that Will at first thought led to the pantry. The stairs behind the door led both up and down but the butler pointed down. “Thanks,” Will said, but the butler only blinked at him.

Funny place for a salon , Will thought, though he had figured out, after only a few steps, what sort of party it was. With one foot still on the stairs he had a look at what was happening, and looked long enough to take it all in, and yet when he tried to remember what he saw it only came in pieces: a girl in a feathered Indian headdress down on her knees in front of a fat man wearing a Minnie Pearl hat, someone’s hairy butt thrusting against the sort of vaulting horse that the Mary Lou Rettons of the world were always colliding off of, and Mrs. Perkins, naked except for a pair of Groucho Marx glasses, complete with nose and mustache, seated on a wicker throne smoking from a hookah and watching over it all. He walked slowly back up the stairs. It seemed like bad manners to run, and also he didn’t want ridiculous Mrs. Perkins to think he was afraid.

He planned the conversation with Carolina in his head: You won’t believe what I just saw! Yet he never managed actually to have it with her. There was some minor degree of culpability even in having only seen that flash of thrusting buttock and Mrs. Perkins’s droopy breasts, and he felt guilty already for having gone to a party to which she was expressly not invited, even if the party he thought he was going to had turned out not actually to exist. It was a little too complicated to get into at the moment, but it was too good a story not to tell, and so he only delayed the telling, and delayed it again. At breakfast and lunch and at dinner and in bed, he failed again and again to tell her what he had seen, and he told himself that he kept thinking about the salon only so he could better describe it to her. It was vile and silly, he would say: a vile, silly scene. He didn’t admit to himself that he thought it was just plain interesting until it made an at-first unwelcome intrusion into his mind as he was masturbating. He was having a nostalgic whack on the HMS Pussywillow , someplace he didn’t return to that often, though he had been retreating to the bathroom to masturbate more and more in the past month. The Pussywillow was a little degraded from its former glory, or else he just saw it differently now: the curtains on the portholes shared a dingy quality with the petticoat chaps that Carolina wore, and he found himself noticing how dusty everything was, and how dark. It would be better, he thought, to do their fucking up top against a cannon or the ship’s wheel, yet he could not make the exertion of imagination to move them there. Instead, the room got even darker, and rocked less and less, and there was a smell, like cat litter and mothballs and cedarwood, that he recognized from the basement, and the orgy theme from Conan the Barbarian started to play. All of a sudden it was Mrs. Perkins whom he was fucking in her petticoat. He dropped his cock, and let out a little yell, and slipped on the toilet, and waited quietly for Carolina, who was sleeping outside in the bedroom, to say something, but there wasn’t a sound besides his frantic labored breathing.

He crawled into bed with Carolina, who didn’t stir even as he put one arm around her belly and wriggled another awkwardly beneath her shoulder, but when he placed his fingers lightly around her bellybutton and moved them very slightly to and fro, she said, “What are you doing?”

“There’s a jellyfish on your belly,” he said.

“What are you doing ?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” he said, not moving his fingers anymore but not letting her go, either.

It was a Wednesday morning and the anniversary of Sean’s death. He declined to make breakfast, but she didn’t remark on it, quietly pulling cereal from the cupboard, getting an extra bowl for him but not a spoon. He did not fetch the milk, either.

“I think I’ll take the day off,” he said.

“Not me,” she said, holding a hand up high over her head with her wrist flexed to ninety degrees. “Work up to here.”

“We could go for a bike ride. Or a museum.”

“Up to here,” she said, straining higher with her hand.

“A movie?” he said, and she only grunted, dropping her hand and raising her bowl to the lips to drink the gray dregs of milk. He went outside when she went into her studio, and sat for a while underneath the grand, weird tree, pretending to read. The orgy theme kept playing unbidden in his mind, and he found himself thinking at length about Grace Jones, even though she wasn’t in the orgy or even in that particular Conan movie. He thought about the outfit that she wore and the fierceness of her haircut and how at odds it was with the surprising, furry tail that hung down from the straps of her loincloth. “Want to take a break?” he asked Carolina inside, as he opened an uncharacteristic 2 p.m. beer.

“Sorry,” she said, cutting a giant picture of Ryan into confetti-sized pieces. “I think I’m on to something here.”

“Alrighty,” he said. “I’m going to go pedal around for a while.”

“Have fun,” she said, but none of it was really fun, not the laborious bicycle ride over the many tall hills between the Mission and Russian Hill, or the way it felt like he was pedaling his mind around and around on the same circuit of thought — that it was poor taste for her to be concentrating so devotedly on her dead brother on the deathiversary of his — or any part of the silly vile spectacle at Mrs. Perkins’s, the masked girl in the sling or the game that was like Whack-a-Mole with blow jobs or the sixteen-hand massage. He didn’t have fun, though he participated with a focus of attention that felt requisite to enjoyment, and nothing frightened him off, not the bad music or a smear of poop, blithely ignored by her, on Mrs. Perkins’s leg, or even what appeared, in the dim light of the backmost back room, which everyone called the treasure chamber (as in, “Haven’t you visited the treasure chamber yet?” or, hands hefting his cock, “Here’s one for the treasure chamber!”), to be a man (or woman) in a strap-on poodle, nuzzling and shoving at the ass of a man tied to a whipping post.