Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“She’s only an LCSW,” Alex had muttered on the way home from that appointment.

So recently Erin has tried to simply bypass Alex’s brain. She’d wake up before him and put him in her mouth, just like all the women’s magazines instructed. He’d jolt awake— Goddammit, Erin, get off me! — jump up and out of bed and into the bathroom. If she could just get him hard, she thinks, he’ll remember what sex is like, how good it can be, how connective and fun. And he’ll snap out of it, grab her, hold her tight, whisper dirty nothings in her ear. Until this occurs, Erin knows— unless it occurs — there is no hope for them. Because something was inexorably altered, something was lost forever, some capacity for friendship and parity between two people, when one had been known, with breathy, earnest seriousness at the height of passion, to beg the other to “shoot [his] cum inside [her],” and the other wouldn’t so much as make eye contact.

She manages to get his fly unzipped partway, but he’s squirming away from her, trying to keep his foot on the gas as he wriggles to the far edge of the driver’s seat.

“Stop,” he whines. She manages to somehow undo his pants entirely, to twist her hand down past the elastic of his boxer briefs, but then she gets snarled in his copious pubic hair. “Ow!”

He pulls over and puts the car in park just as she’s grabbed hold of his penis. His cock, she’d called it giddily back when they used to fuck. She holds on to it stubbornly, ridiculously, even as he’s trying to pull away, twist his body out of her reach, which, needless to say, is awkward, given the seat belts, the running engine, her grip. Not to mention the empty, terrible car seat.

“What are you doing ? Jesus!”

Erin strains against him, aware only of her heaving bosom in the push-up bra, her own sweet-smelling skin, the way it would feel to be wanted like teamgangbang would want her. Then she lets go.

“What is wrong with you?”

“Jesus, Erin.” He tucks himself back into his pants, pulls serenely back onto the road, hands placed precisely on the wheel. “Don’t yell.” Blood courses through her temples, boom, boom, boom like the slap, slap, slap ping of a good fuck.

She tried to rape me, he’ll tell Goodkiss.

They follow a thumping base line toward the ballroom at the far end of the hotel lobby, and are greeted by a bored coterie of kids standing around the place-card table.

“Par- tay, ” Alex tells them festively. They drift off and away. The thumping base arranges itself all at once as the B-52s. “Love sha-a-ack, that’s where it’s at! Love sha-a-ack, that’s where it’s at!”

Mr. and Mrs. Alex Abrahms, first even among the As, are sitting at Eleanor of Aquitaine. This is preferable to Hillary Clinton, certainly, but a marked step beneath either Golda Meir or Madonna, Erin feels. The ‘Great Women in History’ theme is compromised slightly by a big black-and-white, glittery foam-board approximation of a scene marker by the ballroom entrance. In the space marked “production” is “Dorit’s BM!” In the space marked “scene”: 13. And in the space for “take” is, of course, 18, for chai, the collective lucky number of the Jews. Other than that brief, unavoidable foray into Hollywood (with the unintentional scatological overtone), it’s “Great Women” in full effect. There’s Queen Esther, Eleanor Roosevelt, Princess Di, Marilyn Monroe (perched hugely in cardboard relief above her demarcated table, trying half-assedly to keep that billowing white dress down), Marie Curie, even little Anne Frank. Who, Erin reasons, had indeed experienced the onset of menses, and so did indeed count. Joan of Arc, though, Erin takes issue with. Ditto Scarlett O’Hara, who’s fricking fictional. Plus, Erin’s last name is not Abrahms, goddammit. Dana willfully ignores this, as a rule.

The ballroom is decked out in hysterics of glittering streamers, confetti, pink and white balloons, and looming Great Women. Face to face with a berobed Katharine Hepburn from The Lion in Winter, Erin unofficially gives up on the recollection of her Torah portion, sinks into a chair, and starts picking at the jelly beans scattered atop the table.

Also at Eleanor of Aquitaine are four other couples: all cousins but for Libby Pressman, Dana’s best friend (a single mother of one) and her date. “It took me almost three years to get rid of my baby weight,” she says to Erin by way of greeting.

The DJ, a short middle-aged man wearing hamburger-size earphones, turns on a mike, pumps a fist in the air. “Who’s ready to get down ?” The crowd lets out shrieks and a chorus of Yeah s. Then the lights flash, and a few strobes rotate wildly to the opening bars of “Eye of the Tiger.” “Folks, let’s put our hands together for the woman of the hour, she read from the Torah today, she’s officially taken on the commandments, she’s our very own bat mitzvah wo- man, she’s Dorrrr-Eeet !”

And out she comes, to a standing ovation, her face shellacked with foundation and blush, and, Erin could swear, shadowing down each side of her only-a-matter-of-time nose, grinning madly and waving like Miss America. “Eye of the Tiger” segues into a hora. Alex sprints out onto the now-crowded dance floor and joins three others, grabbing one leg of a chair to hoist Dorit up into the air, her head coming dangerously close to the R of the huge pink D-O-R-I-T suspended from the ceiling. Substantial diamond studs in her ears catch the light spastically with every upward thrust of the chair.

Erin heads directly to the bar and orders a Jack-and-Coke, a throwback, the first drink she’d ever had ordered for her, the first drink she’d ever tasted on its way back up.

“What up, Auntie Erin?” Zac, it occurs to her, despite the parallel colloquial, is too young even for Sarah.

“Hey! Here.” She hands him her Jack-and-Coke and signals to the bartender for another. Zac’s face lights up.

“Cool!”

“L’chaim!” she fairly shouts before taking a hearty swallow.

Zac looks left and right. “Cheers,” he says, leaning in. He knocks the whole thing back. “Thanks.”

“Go dance!” Erin tells him.

He curls a lip. “Riiiight. Why aren’t you dancing?”

She shrugs, smiles coyly, motions for him to finish what’s left of her drink and orders them two more.

In the sparkling handicapped bathroom off the other end of the lobby they’re joined by two girls just growing into their growth spurts. One is a Gertie-fetishizer from earlier. They’re impossibly lovely and improbably unthreatened by the presence of Erin, a bona fide adult, no getting around it. The girls plop down on the floor, not a thought for their dresses. Erin perches on the toilet, giggles nervously. On one level she’s thrilled to have been included in this gathering, that old feeling of having been tapped for the inner sanctum making her feel strong and superior. All the other people, the ones out there, are losers. And on another level, well, it’s hard to ignore the grownup issue.

Zac rolls a joint, licking the paper expertly.

“Nice,” Erin says like an idiot. He passes it to her. Age before beauty, she thinks, sucking on it as he holds up an orange lighter.

“Dorit’s a total dog,” one of the girls comments, holding in smoke.

“Nasty,” the other agrees.

The first exhales. “This party’s la-ame.”

“Totally,” Erin says. “Amen!” These are her people. She takes the joint from Zac again. These people get her.

“The theme is gay.”

“Emily Meltzner did the same thing.” The first girl squints as she blows out a long, graceful stream. They all watch it disappear.