Tom Barbash: Stay Up With Me

Now came a few of his old college friends, Seth, and Jordan and Lilia and their whole crowd who tended to stay by themselves at one side of the apartment, in the kitchen usually, rarely branching out to talk with anyone else, though they’d seen these same people here every year. His aunt Eileen arrived then with his cousins, Monique and Andrew. Kisses all around and each time he had to tell them, “She couldn’t get out of it, she’s absolutely miserable about it.”

“She couldn’t get someone else to go?” Eileen asked.

“I guess it doesn’t work that way. Anyhow, Amy said we shouldn’t have too much fun or she’ll be horribly jealous.”

“The hell with that,” said Lilia who’d been listening in. “Let’s make her miserably and inconsolably jealous.”

“How would we do that?” asked Eric.

“Use your imagination,” Lilia said.

A woman Timkin didn’t know was walking about taking drink orders, and then a whole group of people he’d never set eyes on before entered his apartment. This was the chaos of Balloon Night. Everyone in every building on the block that ran along the south side of the Museum of Natural History was having a party, and the guests roamed from floor to floor like fish into diverging streams. The doormen had lists, and beyond that, the cops at the corner crossing blocks had lists to determine whom they’d allow onto the block itself.

Still, with all this security, there were always twenty or so people at Timkin’s party he didn’t know, and often they would be the ones who stayed the longest.

“Come on in,” he said graciously to four strangers, wondering who they knew. “Is Jordan here?” one of them eventually said, and Timkin pointed the way.

Timkin had downed three decent-size scotches by the time Snoopy sprouted limbs. He peered down at the street at the lot of them, Garfield, and some dinosaur he couldn’t name, and Big Bird, and Kermit and two M&M’s and some newer cartoon characters whose names he had yet to learn (some yellow Pokémon thing), illuminated by klieg lights in the dark night. As a child it had looked like an army of giant aliens had taken over his street.

Back inside he started to inventory the guests. There were more of his friends here than hers now, but a few high school and college chums of Amy’s had entered the party without his noticing, and he would have to tell them his story about her being away.

From conversational snippets he could hear things like, “ Poor thing . In an awful hotel at a sales conference.” Or “I heard they cancelled her flight.”

“I haven’t talked to Amy in so long,” said her friend from Middlebury College, Melanie, whom Timkin had always had a thing for. “I can’t believe she’d miss this.”

“She was so heartbroken over it,” Timkin said, and then maybe too quickly switching the subject, “ You look healthy and happy.”

“It’s what joblessness and poverty do to you.”

“What happened?”

“It’s too long a story. Part of that oppressive cloud that’s been hanging over the New York theater world. I’m sleeping on someone’s floor right now. How about you?”

“I’m good,” Timkin said.

“How so?”

He tried to think of an answer.

“Because the world can still produce things like this.” He gestured around the room.

“A bunch of irritatingly bourgeois people holding drinks?”

“The whole thing. I depend on it.”

“It’s good fun if you look at it the right way,” Melanie said. “You know, I never really thought that Amy liked this.”

“Oh, she does,” Timkin said. “It’s her favorite night of the year.”

She looked at him. “If you say so.”

Timkin noticed Melanie’s empty drink glass. As he went to fill her order, someone slapped his back — Malcolm from his Saturday-morning basketball game.

“I love these parties. And you know why ?” Malcolm was looking at Melanie as he pondered this. Timkin didn’t wait for the answer because he saw three older couples walk into his apartment, business associates of his father’s and their wives, all of whom would stay for around forty-five minutes and then leave for another party in the building. Happened every year. They brought expensive wine and spent most of their time talking to Amy, who had a way with the older set.

Malcolm was attempting to corner Melanie who managed to slip away and across the apartment. There were several people leaning their heads and torsos out of the window like kids and yelling at the cartoon characters below.

The Svenvolds were still in their coats, and so Timkin helped remove them and carried them into his bedroom, hers a fitted trench with a plaid inlay, and his, a long, gray cashmere coat that Timkin would love to own.

He liked the style of his parents’ friends, their breadth of experience and flowery elegance; their love of old jazz standards and good stiff drinks. Not infrequently Timkin wished that he’d lived in their day because he didn’t always feel suited to his own. Especially not now after what had happened.

“Here comes the Road Runner,” someone yelled.

“That isn’t the Road Runner, ” Malcolm yelled back. “There’s no fucking Road Runner.”

There were now well-entrenched crowds in the kitchen, the foyer, in the dining room and living room — and in all three bedrooms were smaller circles, friends catching up after years of not seeing one another. The party was on cruise control and Timkin thought — as he did every year at around this point — that he could just up and leave and the party would take care of itself. They wouldn’t even know he’d left.

He held up his hands like a camera lens and looked around. If you wanted a photograph or a movie scene about New Yorkers in the new millennium, you could do worse than to shoot this group, he thought.

“What are you doing?” Mr. Svenvold asked him.

“I’m thinking of my father,” he said, which wasn’t true until he said it. “And that little Instamatic he used to bring out.”

“I miss him,” Mr. Svenvold said. “You know how far we go back.”

Mr. Svenvold’s eyes went glassy just then, and Timkin saw that he wanted to talk about Timkin’s father, which Timkin wasn’t anxious to do. He wondered how his parents would take the news of Amy’s leaving, but even as he wondered this, he kept glancing at the door to see if one of the new faces coming in was Amy’s. The doorman buzzed up.

Timkin listened to the intercom.

“I’ve got a group of young guys here that say they know you.”

“What are their names?”

“Robert, and Jason, and some of their friends.”

They were students of his, whom Timkin had told about the balloon block. He told the doorman to let them up.

“We can only stay a few minutes,” Robert, who was dressed in a thrift shop tuxedo, said as he entered.

“Stay as long as you like,” Timkin said, magnanimously.

Now someone put on Timkin’s favorite John Coltrane CD, and Timkin got pulled into a conversation with three of his friends from an old job, about a colleague who monopolized the one office bathroom. Timkin nodded as someone spoke; he had no opinion on the subject.

Groups of the guests went downstairs to see the balloons up close and Timkin decided to go with them. He put Lilia in charge of the party while he was gone. And then he walked downstairs and out into the crowds.

There must have been five thousand people milling around, wrapped in furs or long overcoats, or ski parkas, or leather jackets, high school and college kids, and heavily champagned sixty-year-olds, linking arms and singing. Timkin thought then of what a good place it would be for a terrorist to strike, how many prosperous lives could go up in flames. Lots of kids and lots of adults acting like kids, calling out to one another and sipping from flasks. Timkin felt almost happy. And somehow because he was doing this he thought something good might happen. He missed Amy and he felt as though he’d figured out their problems. If she came back, he would know how to do it differently — he himself would be different — and it would work.